“Why are you always running?” Elyse asked, trying to keep up and to catch her breath.
“Why not?” Lizzie responded, undoing her hair from its ponytail and letting it stream out behind her. It was even blonder than Elyse remembered from previous summers.
“Well then, at least tell me where we’re going,” she said, settling into a pace that allowed her to talk and race. They ran out of the parking garage and instead of waiting for the walk sign to show up indicating it was safe to cross, they sprinted across four lanes of traffic, trying to beat the cars honking at them for jaywalking.
“Away. I couldn’t take them anymore. Any of them,” Lizzie said. “Did you see my mother? Why has she got to be so ridiculous?”
Elyse couldn’t hide the surprise on her face. She’d felt the whole visit that Lizzie had gotten a life better than a fairy tale. Instead of an evil stepmother, she’d gotten Uncle Jim, who as far as stepfathers went, was pretty awesome. They had enough money and everyone was beautiful. Elyse still had enough fat on her stomach and arms to be pinchable. Her cousin was tall and looked nearly insect-like in the way you could see how the muscle attached to her bones.
Lizzie must have thought she meant the trouble with her sister. “Not Daphne. She’s fine. A brave little girl and I love your family. It’s my mother,” Lizzie screamed as if it would take too much from her to explain the whole of the situation.
“I get it,” Elyse said, thinking how much her own mother irritated her.
Lizzie stopped running and put her hand to her side. “A stitch.”
They walked, turning down several streets and then once again without warning, Lizzie sprinted away, leaving Elyse to do her best to catch up. Finally, as she closed the distance between them and was on the verge of passing her cousin, Lizzie slowed. I’m winning, I’m winning, Elyse thought before stopping short at the strange sight of Spite House.
“That can’t be real,” Elyse said, taking in the thin columns and odd windows that fronted the house. Back then it had been painted canary yellow and in the late afternoon light it appeared to glow.
“That’s Grandma Mellie’s house,” Lizzie said, smiling and racing up the steep stairs for one last sprint.
The house hadn’t yet settled into neglect and the yard looked well tended, although shaded by the office complex on one side. An atypical mailbox fronted the property. It looked like a replica of the house itself, or as if a dollhouse had been put on a post with a red flag stuck on the side of it. There was a sign, the kind where the letters were burned into the wood, that read “Spite House” hanging down from the top of the porch.
“Does your grandmother know we’re coming over?” Elyse asked as Lizzie bounded up the steps toward the front door.
“She’s never surprised by company—it’s sort of her thing, you’ll see. She’ll have cookies and lemonade and—”
The door opened before Lizzie could finish her sentence. “Girls,” said an old woman whose back hunched in such a way that her chin rested on her shoulder so that she looked up at them sideways—as if her neck muscles had ceased to work.
Elyse averted her eyes and tried to not think the word that had instantly sprang into her head: hunchback.
Lizzie bent down and wrapped her grandmother in a sideways hug. She appeared to be almost twice as tall as her grandmother. “I’ve got cousin Elyse with me,” she said.
“They didn’t tell you I was crookback, did they?” Grandma Mellie asked, as if she were commenting on the weather. Her voice was high and sweet, like a cardinal. Elyse followed her cousin’s lead and offered a hug, pressing her cheek to the old woman’s. She was so much older than either of Elyse’s grandmothers.
Walking down the dim hallway, she followed the sound of Lizzie’s footsteps toward a beaded curtain in the back of the house. She sucked in her breath as the walls narrowed around her and threw up her arms against the unexpected light from the floor-to-ceiling windows. She blinked, trying to erase the bursts of yellow and orange in her vision and find Lizzie.
“I told you treats,” Lizzie said, holding up the largest chocolate chip cookie Elyse had ever seen.
“I’ve got lemonade too,” Grandma Mellie said as she entered the kitchen.
“You’re the best,” Lizzie said, halfway through the enormous cookie.
“Had enough of your mother for today, did you?” she asked, settling into a rocking chair in the corner of the kitchen.
“Always,” Lizzie said, glancing at Elyse to see whether or not she could be trusted.
“I raised her, but I’ll be the first to tell you how impossible she is.”
The deformity of her spine was less noticeable in the chair. Elyse remembered her manners. “Thank you,” she said and then because they were in the South, she added, “Ma’am.”
“Oh no, none of that,” Grandma Mellie said. “I don’t go in for that sort of business anymore. My father made sure I used the word ‘sir’ after every sentence. The day I left his home is the day I stopped all of that nonsense.”
Lizzie started eating a second cookie. “Mom still makes me call her ‘ma’am,’ at least in public.”
“Your mother didn’t used to have such ideas about what was proper, but then she had you and I suppose she’s still bending over backward trying to make up for the impropriety of that.” Grandma Mellie turned away from the girls and whistled a bit of song and what sounded like bird calls to Elyse.
“Oh,” Elyse said.
“She speaks her mind,” Lizzie said, nodding toward Grandma Mellie and holding back the sort of smile Elyse had only ever seen on grown-ups.
“She belongs in this house,” Elyse said. From the moment they’d stepped into this strange world, Elyse had been captivated by the house. The oddness of its shape and the peculiarity of Mellie made it instantly a bastion of myth and legend and, if Elyse had to guess, romance.
“My mom hates this house,” Lizzie said. “I’m going to live in it someday just to spite her.”
From the corner of the kitchen, Grandma Mellie let out a chattering sound, like the engine of a car trying to turn over, which Elyse soon realized was laughter. Lizzie joined in and Elyse felt like an outsider. She excused herself to find a bathroom and left the two of them wiping away tears of laughter and telling each other stories about Lizzie’s mother.
She left the bathroom and felt herself pulled farther upstairs—toward the roof. Along the walls, the framed photographs alternated between pictures of Lizzie and photos of Lizzie’s mother. They appeared to be placed so that a portrait of Lizzie at age two appeared next to one of her mother at the same age. The line of smiling girls who looked nothing alike was bookended by wedding-day pictures of what must have been Grandma Mellie and her husband.
Sound traveled in strange ways in the house. She reached the top floor and opened the door that allowed access to the one large room that took up much of the third story. All of the furniture had been pushed to walls, and a pair of roller skates sat in the center of the room. Elyse crossed to them, wishing she’d learned how to skate. She’d only ever been to one rink—for a friend’s birthday when she was six or seven, and she hadn’t been brave enough to let go of the rails and try to skate. The floor of this upper room with its wide planks and dark stain looked exactly like that rink. She picked up the skates, thinking she’d take them to Lizzie, who might know a trick or two for moving around on eight wheels. She was about to leave the room when the sound of Lizzie’s voice—more childlike than it had been all day—carried up through a vent. She picked up the skates and walked to the opening.
“You have to talk to her. It’s not fair. None of it is and now with the new babies, it’s all gotten so much worse. You should see the way they fawn over each other. Happily ever after.”
Elyse froze and although she knew she shouldn’t, she moved closer to the vent, and her heart fluttered at the thought that the wavering in her cousin’s voice meant that her life wasn’t as perfect as it seemed. She couldn’t hear Gr
andma Mellie’s response. What she understood from the tone of the response was that Lizzie wasn’t being coddled.
“I won’t do it. I won’t join their stupid church. Just because Mom found God and tricked Jim into believing it doesn’t mean I have to have anything to do with them. I’m still a good person.” Lizzie sniffled.
“God loves you,” Grandma Mellie said. Elyse guessed from the other noises in the room that she’d left the rocking chair and moved closer to Lizzie. “I probably should have taken your mother to church, given her the traditions and ceremony she’s craved her whole life, but after your grandfather died, all of it seemed pointless—an exercise for those who needed other people to see their faith.”
“It’s all so silly. They got baptized. Dunked under the water and everything and when Mom came out of the water, she smiled at Jim and all I could look at was her dumb pregnant belly.”
“You’re too emotional over this to get any answers,” Grandma Mellie said. “Try some leverage.”
“Leverage?”
Elyse pressed her ear to the vent and plugged her other one, concentrating on their voices.
“Tell her you’ll give in on the church stuff if she’ll tell you about your father.”
Elyse gasped and dropped the roller skates. She’d never heard an adult speak this way—with malice and also to give such direction to a kid. Elyse could have spent all day dreaming up ways to get back at her mother and her sister and never come up with such a tactic. She felt ill and at the same time reckless. She bent to retrieve the skates. How hard could it be anyway, she thought and instead of slinging them over her shoulder and going downstairs, she loosened the laces.
They were too big for her. She looked around the room, took two small balls of yarn from a basket and placed them in the toes of the shoes. Lacing the boots as tight as she could and using the wall, she got unsteadily to her feet. Holding her arms wide out to the side, she shuffled her feet, surprised that the motion propelled her forward. She made a tentative lap around the room before trying to get more momentum by pushing down and out with her feet. “Oh,” she cried, comforted by the sound of her voice. She started to coach herself through it, using familiar phrases, like “you can do this,” and “just a little bit faster.” Pretty soon, she was moving at a decent clip and the conversation with herself had become like the chatter of an audience at a baseball game. She didn’t even notice when Lizzie opened the door.
Her cousin stepped into her path, and shouted, “Boo.”
Elyse looked up when she heard the noise, but she was moving too fast to stop and wasn’t skilled enough yet on the skates to avoid a collision. She screamed and threw up her arms as if she were crashing into a solid object. Lizzie, laughing, flung her arm out and Elyse went over and around it in a perfect front flip landing safely on her feet, or rather on her wheels, with her cousin’s steadying hand on her back.
Lizzie didn’t confide her secrets and insecurities to Elyse. Instead they spent the afternoon trading turns with the skates. The competitiveness she’d felt earlier in the visit melted away, and she found herself worrying that Lizzie was pushing herself too hard and putting too many eggs in the idea that her escape would come through soccer. By the time the sun started to set and the cicadas took up their dusky song, Elyse had learned how to skate forward and backward and could even do small jumps over a footstool they’d placed in the middle of the floor.
Her parents drove twenty-two hours straight on the return to Boston—with her father driving the entire leg telling Elyse’s mother to stay awake and keep him company. Daphne, with an ice pack on her ankle, slept from sunset to sunrise. Elyse pretended to sleep. She listened to her parents talk about their jobs—they both taught at the same middle school Elyse would graduate from that year—their summer plans, bills that needed paying, items around the house that needed fixing, and their children.
Her preferences were for other people’s problems and while her parents were too steady to have their own problems, she’d discovered by listening that they shared Elyse’s preference. Like her, they listened for the telling change in other adults’ tones that indicated conflict. Some of the adults yelled, while others dropped their voices, but the words, no matter the volume, all sounded to Elyse as if they were being strangled. Overhearing these disagreements, these secret accusations, sent a thrill of delight down her spine. Years later, the few times she got high, she’d experienced a similar rapture.
On that drive home, she didn’t learn anything she hadn’t heard one of the dozen other times she’d eavesdropped on her parents, but finally close to two in the morning her father had shaken her mother awake again, wanting to talk about Uncle Jim.
He didn’t understand his brother’s sudden conversion, and he talked about their religion with contempt, calling it a Ponzi scheme. “Adult baptism. I’ve never heard of anything so stupid. We’ve already been baptized, christened like good Catholics when we were infants. I don’t know what sins he’s trying to wash away. Becoming Mormon of all things—it’s practically like joining a cult.”
“I like that Lizzie,” her mother said, clearly trying to change the subject. “She’s a good child, and I wish that Elyse could be more like her.”
“Lizzie’s the only one with enough sense not to get involved in it, and she’s just a child.”
Elyse’s ears burned listening to her parents discuss her so candidly. “Don’t be too hard on our Elyse. She’s not showy. She’s like an iceberg—keeps most of herself hidden.”
“I’m afraid she’s too selfish. Look at what happened with Daphne.”
“Nothing happened. She fell. Children fall.”
“She pushed her.”
“Don’t make her into a villain.” Elyse loved her father fiercely for standing up for her. Maybe she had pushed her sister, but she hadn’t meant to.
“I guess. But afterward, it was Lizzie who tried to make it better and it should have been Elyse.”
“Lizzie was there,” her father said, changing lanes.
They didn’t speak for several minutes and then in a voice that sounded as if it were coming from far away, her mother asked her father if he knew who Lizzie’s father was.
Her father grunted. “I have my suspicions,” he said. “Jim tells me it’s none of his business.”
“I’ll bet he doesn’t even know. Tell me. Would you marry someone who kept that sort of information from you? Would you?” her mother had said, fiddling with the radio.
“Lower your voice,” her father said.
“If I were her, I’d be more concerned about marrying a man who was so much younger than me. I’d be afraid my husband would leave me. At least they were able to get fertility treatments to have that last set of kids.”
“I’ll never leave you,” her father said.
“No one’s going to take well to this new religion. Did you see her? The way she knelt down and prayed over that little fall Daphne took?”
Her father grunted. “I don’t think we should criticize prayer, it feels dangerous.”
“Fine,” her mother said, settling on a radio station playing Billy Joel.
The two of them were silent for a while, and then the chorus of the song started and they sang along. Elyse fell asleep, wishing her parents had kept talking about Uncle Jim and Aunt Annie.
June 2012: Memphis
The court date had been set for the last day of June in the late afternoon. Elyse didn’t go to the hearing to find out whether or not they’d have to move out of Spite House. What could she possibly contribute? She spent the day looking for more of Grandma Mellie’s recipe cards. For almost a week now, she’d been trying to find the woman’s recipe for chocolate chip cookies. How had she made hers crunchy on the outside but chewy on the inside? Over the last few months, she’d found cards slid into cookbooks, taped to the underside of pans, and on the inside of cupboards. Lizzie had found one or two in the pile of note cards that were her mother’s diary—copied in her own mother’s handwrit
ing from some lost source.
What surprised her most about Lizzie’s relationship with her family was how she failed to see how romantic it was. Thinking about being the sort of woman who kept secrets from her family gave Elyse chills. When she was alone in Spite House, she often pretended it was her house, making up elaborate backstories about how she’d come to live in such an extraordinary place. She had one reccurring fantasy of being a Cinderella sort of character who becomes caretaker to her overly large stepmother and stepsister. Her revenge comes when the sister gets stuck trying to wedge herself through the impossibly small front door of Spite House.
She looked at the clock every twenty minutes, surprised to find herself waiting for them to come home or to text her the news about the hearing. She hadn’t realized before that she’d come to care so much about the outcome. As dinnertime neared, she poured herself a glass of wine and texted the cousins. Looking around the kitchen, her eyes fell on the pile of cards Lizzie had been trying to sort. Why Aunt Annie had put her diary together like this puzzled Elyse. Most people kept a diary knowing full well someone else would eventually read it. Why else write anything down? The cards were spread across the table and stacked in various piles. Some of the papers were smudged and beginning to look dirty from being handled so often, while others were as white and crisp as hotel sheets.
She thumbed through the stacks. The one that had been handled the most contained cards having to do with Aunt Annie’s pregnancy. Most of that year was in order, and flipping through the cards was like watching a time-lapse video of pregnancy. Test positive. Feel great. Threw up. Still throwing up. Morning sickness lasts all day. Pants don’t fit. Skirts don’t fit. Underwear doesn’t fit. Lots of energy. Baby kicked. Baby has hiccups. A small part of her began to think about what her life could be like in the next year if everything worked out. Maybe she’d be having a baby before thirty after all. Maybe not. But maybe. If Landon didn’t work out, then she could always have a baby on her own, throw caution and other people’s idea of what she should do with her life to the wind.
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