Haunted Houses

by Lynne Tillman

  Lady was pregnant when they rescued her from the ASPCA, and Ruth said that’s why she was abandoned. Terrible people do things like that to defenseless animal, but they’ll be punished. Every time Grace hurt herself Ruth said that God was punishing her. When she was older she asked Ruth if she believed in God. Ruth told her she was an agnostic, someone who doesn’t know, was the way she put it. She was washing dishes. Then why do you say that God is punishing me, if you’re not sure? Ruth put out her cigarette, which was wet with a rosy stain where she sucked it. If I don’t believe in God it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t or don’t have to. Ruth looked out the window over the sink. I’m an agnostic because an agnostic is a realist. You will be too. Grace considered this a compliment, since they fought most of the time, even during the trouble. She repeated the comment to Celia, who had continued to speak to her, but not at school, where the trouble might at any time happen to her. The two friends didn’t discuss the terms of Celia’s neutrality; it just existed.

  Just as suddenly as the trouble had begun it stopped, and Grace was allowed back into the fold. But this was never, never going to happen to her again. Never. For she had determined that when it was over—the word over had magical properties—when it was over, she would have emerged a new person, a girl much too irresistible and tough for that to happen to ever again.

  The house was never quiet. Ruth and Grace fought about everything. Grace took her dinner in front of the TV or in her room. She hated the way her mother chewed, she hated the sound. Ruth called her names and dumped her dresser drawers, and Grace fought back by ignoring her, or giving her dirty looks. You’re bad, you and your stupid friends, her mother would yell. Grace had been told by her algebra teacher that when she was good, she was very very good, but when she was bad she was better. Now that Grace was a freshman in high school, or a fresh girl, as Ruth put it, when she got to school, home didn’t exist.

  She wanted to be the most popular girl in her class. With the boys or with the girls, Celia asked tartly. Both, Grace said. Are you going to let them feel you up? Maybe, Grace answered, if I feel like it.

  Seeing herself as leading a double life, not unlike Philbrick in I Led Three Lives, she kept to herself at home, smiling very little, staying in her now too small and messy room. She kept the door shut. It didn’t have a lock. Grace could hear her mother outside, moving around, doing things. She talked to her dog, and waited for phone calls, or made some. You talk on the phone too much, Ruth would say angrily. And what happened to that nice girl, Marlene? It’s none of your business, Grace would say, looking for food in the refrigerator, finding only raisins. You never buy anything good to eat, she flung at her mother, returning to her room, closing the door hard behind her. Ruth was gaining weight and wearing housedresses most of the time. Grace followed her diet, and although she was thin, she thought she looked fat.

  Your room’s a mess, Ruth yelled, you can’t leave it like that. Leave me alone, Grace yelled back, slamming the front door, going to meet Celia at the diner. As she walked she pulled herself together, into her other self, the popular girl she was when she wasn’t at home. Celia surprised Grace because other people simply liked her while Grace continued to feel two ways about her all the time. But she was already there, in the diner, waiting, as she had always been in Grace’s life, just there. Grace ordered a bran muffin. Bran muffins were delicate food, the right thing to eat, and not fattening. Celia and she watched who came in and who walked out and drank a lot of coffee, Little Louie’s cautionary dark circles and stature absent even from memory. Grace drank carefully and without sound. My mother tried to hit me again but I held her hand, she reported sarcastically to Celia. Grace’s face hardened. I hate her guts. Just then a cute boy walked in and Celia didn’t have to reply, while Grace’s face recomposed itself into a prettier picture. Celia didn’t know what to say anyway.

  Grace watched Celia’s eyes widen and freeze, then set; she enjoyed shocking people, or scaring them. Her drive for popularity was hindered by a bluntness that bordered on meanness. Celia would tell her that some of the girls didn’t understand that she was just being honest. Girls are so critical, Grace told Celia, meaningfully. She envied Celia’s ease with friends, her girlfriends, and said, I think I like boys better, and watched Celia’s eyelids open and close like a venetian blind. Envy made Grace feel weak and sinful, and she didn’t like not feeling strong. She prided herself on being reckless.

  When Grace got called down to the principal’s office to discuss her grades and her attitude, he told her she was sullen and uncooperative. My aptitude is much higher than my performance, she repeated in the coffee shop, to which one of the guys, a senior, responded, Did you ask him about his performance? Her cool face reddened as she drank in their attention with her coffee; later, the senior asked her out. Why not, she answered, as if she were thinking it over, weighing his performance neutrally. “Did you let him kiss you?” Ruth asked. “Sure,” Grace answered. “Where?” her mother asked. “Where do you think?” and Grace slammed out of the house. A gunshot of fear traveled up her mother’s body from her toes to the top of her head where it settled as wounded anger.

  In high school sex was war, a conventional war about the conventions. There were skirmishes at the breast, the line below the pantie, at the thigh, and finally the assault upon the Maginot Line, the vagina. And for these advances there was the creation of an adolescent military strategy that the boys and the girls developed separately, at separate tables, and then enacted with one another, following or not following the codes of war, at parties, in cars, on their absent parents’ beds.

  Just before Grace was fifteen she met a nineteen-year-old dropout who worked in a boutique not far from the coffee shop. He had full lips and slanted eyes and told risqué jokes. He did crazy things, like putting a two-way mirror in the dressing room, and Grace fell hard. He told her she was cute and gave her a lavender shirt that he stole from the store, her first present from a boyfriend. The first time he stood her up, she waited up all night in her room, not really believing that he was doing this to her, that the phone hadn’t rung, the way it hadn’t when she was in the eighth grade, or if it rang, only to torment her. He called a few days later, and made an excuse which she accepted while seeming to have difficulty remembering what the infraction had been, it had been so slight. When she saw him again Grace kissed him with abandon and an open mouth and he pushed her away. You shouldn’t kiss like that, he warned, you’re supposed to be a nice girl. And he came around less often, and when he did he brought his friends, who acted like guards in a recently neutralized corridor, the battle having ended in a stalemate. Severed slowly over time, the attachment weakened and disappeared. She didn’t want to be a nice girl. Grace liked kissing boys with abandon.

  I made my bed, Grace called out as she left for school, in answer to Ruth’s question. But it was not made and Ruth saw red and dumped her daughter’s drawers once more, dumped them in a single movement, and marched out as if there were something blocking her way. She hated being lied to, by Grace, her husband, her son, anyone. She complained to her husband, Grace could make all our beds in the amount of time it takes her to put on eye makeup. Her husband pulled off his pants. He said she was bad, as if Grace’s behavior were beyond his ken, as if he were describing someone from a tribe in Asia whose customs made him sick. Is that all you can say? Ruth asked, rubbing out her cigarette with dissatisfaction. Her husband glanced at her. Something might explain the intensity of her discontent, but not seeing it he turned over on his stomach and waited to fall asleep.

  On the nights that Grace couldn’t sleep, Lady kept her company. When she took a bath Lady hovered by, upset that Grace was wet, and licked her like a puppy. It occurred to Grace that Lady might lick her there, if she directed her dog the way she had once directed her fantasies and Celia. Lady’s tongue was pink, not that rough, but she didn’t teach her to do it because the idea that she needed a dog was humiliating. She remembered that when reading A Stone for Dan
ny Fisher she used to put her finger in her vagina and rub it until small pieces of her vagina—or what she thought was her vagina—rolled into balls and stuck to her fingers. She learned that men who ran candy stores liked to see a young girl’s breasts pressed against the glass cabinet and that, if the girl did that she could get some candy, or something for free, or for very little.

  Boys learn the value of a dollar by taking girls out on dates, Ruth told her, and girls have to learn the value of a dollar too. Grace was forced to baby-sit for neighborhood families. Usually she took care of older children, but one night she was hired to care for an infant, the son of a young married couple. It was a night job. She turned on the TV and heard the baby crying. She let him cry a while, then went to talk to him, but he didn’t stop. She walked out and turned up the volume. The baby kept crying. She tried to change his diapers but he wriggled out of her grip and screamed as if she were killing him. She saw red. Shut up, she yelled, but the baby yelled louder and her grip got tighter. Grace slapped his little ass very hard, leaving a white handprint. He screamed louder and she left the room. She couldn’t stand the sound. She ate all the junk food in the refrigerator, and decided that babies, like dolls, were for other girls.

  While Grace was determined not to have children, she was equally dead set against remaining a virgin. She had passed through some of the preliminaries described to Celia as no big deal. She didn’t really care that her reputation was shot to hell, like her souvenir target from shooting live bullets at Coney Island. She wasn’t, after all, going to live in Brooklyn her whole life, about that she was certain. She chose an older guy who had graduated from high school, gone early to Vietnam, and returned to the neighborhood, a man, she thought, he’d have to be. He was necessarily different from the other boys and wouldn’t talk about the war, so he, too, had a secret. Her intensity was equal to his, if coming from a place where he had never fought. She was intent upon showing abandon, by ceding herself to the enemy, and very deliberately surrendering, without knowing the terms of the peace. She told Celia that she hadn’t bled.

  Her last winter in high school was as cold a one as she could recall. But even on the coldest days, visiting the zoo in Central Park was a relief, a small vacation from, her crowd and her reputation. It was so cold that the skin on her ankles dried, stretching too tightly across the bone like leather. The skin cracked and bled, something Grace imagined happened only to old people. After a hot chocolate in the cafeteria, Grace walked toward the polar bears lying in the winter sun, their massive coats keeping them warm. As nature intended, Ruth might’ve put it thought Grace, as she pulled her coat closer to her. She walked past them, into the park.

  Everything in the park seemed sharp, crisp, enclosed by the cold blue sky. The landscape was a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces could all break apart if touched. From nowhere fifty or more stray cats moved toward her in a group. They were skinny and sick. She thought they might devour her, and though it was crazy, she ran back to the cafeteria and bought as many frankfurters as she had money for, returning to the cats who were waiting, it seemed, for her. She tore the meat and bread into little pieces and threw the food to them. Tribute, or bribe, or sacrifice, the pieces were gone in no time. Turning to leave, Grace saw an old woman coming down the path. She said she fed them every day, that the park wanted to get rid of them, kill them. I won’t let them, the frail white-haired woman declared. The ASPCA really hates animals, she told Grace. Had Grace been on speaking terms with her mother, she might have told her that.

  Celia applied to college, but Grace’s grades were low, and it looked like she might not get into one. I may become an artist or an actress, she told Celia. I love movies. And circuitously hearing about Grace and the Vietnam vet, her brother had a talk with her in which he warned that giving it away wasn’t going to get her anywhere. “You did it when you were my age,” she said. “I’m a guy,” he said, “it’s different.” “Fuck difference,” she said.

  It was during that same cold winter, in her seventeenth year, that Grace held a kitchen knife in her hand and pointed it at her mother. Undoubtedly this is a scene repeated in many households, or so Grace reasoned, for she decided it wasn’t so strange to want to kill one’s mother. She never leaves me alone. When Grace lifted the knife—she was at the sink—Ruth stopped yelling. The effect on Ruth was immediate and in a way funny. Grace had never seen her mother so much at a loss. The look satisfied Grace and she set the knife down slowly, her eyes fixed as sternly as she could make them on her mother’s startled face. Grace stared hard at Ruth like a gunfighter in a showdown.

  It’s one thing for her to yell fuck you at me, Ruth told her husband, it’s another thing for her to threaten me with a knife. But nothing at all was done to Grace, whose behavior had pushed her in her parents’ eyes, into a territory that transformed her from just bad to perhaps crazy. What punishment could fit the crime of attempted matricide? These weren’t Greek queens and kings whose realms were at stake. These were middle-class white people with problems. Grace felt that she had made a lasting impression.

  CHAPTER 3

  Hilda was Emily’s second piano teacher. How Emily knew Hilda was a lesbian, though she was only eight and not living among sophisticates, is something she’s not sure about even today. How she learned was more mysterious than what she learned.

  Hilda’s partner taught piano also and her name sounded like Mr. Mars when said quickly. She wore grey suits, had short white-grey hair, and her face was round and soft, with a benevolent smile. She drove the old Dodge that waited for Hilda after lessons. To Emily the car and the partner were one.

  Emily loved the two piano teachers, particularly Hilda. She wore delicate blouses and full skirts, whose fabrics, in many different colors and patterns, were often like fields of flowers around her arms and legs. She didn’t seem to try to match things, it was her way of being natural. She was tall with big breasts and given to hugging Emily’s father to her impressive chest where his head would land with embarrassment. He’d blush and she’d say how adorable he was.

  The whole family liked Hilda, who was strange and remarkably white-skinned. The skin on her hands was so pale that her veins showed blue like rivulets. Her nails were cut short and round, and looked as if they never touched anything even though she played the piano every day. Hilda visited only once a week, but she was important to Emily. For one thing she was different from her family.

  Emily’s family were FDR Democrats. Hilda appeared at one lesson wearing a rhinestone pin, made of initials, on her flowered blouse. Emily asked, “What is that?” “I—K—E,” Hilda announced. “I—K—E”? Emily repeated, not putting it together. “Ike, Ike,” Hilda pronounced vigorously. Emily was stunned. Hilda was a Republican. She even wrote songs for Ike. So did her partner with a man’s name when said fast. How could she be for Ike? Ike and not Adlai. Disenchanted, Emily withdrew somewhat from her piano teacher. This heresy, not Hilda’s affection for women, put a first wall between girl and the woman. Emily continued to take piano lessons but began to think that Hilda might not know everything.

  No one had ever mentioned lesbianism to Emily; it didn’t exist as good or bad to her. But Republicans—her family was definitely against the Republicans who, she imagined, must be bad, like the Yankees. Emily had become a Dodger fan when she was three and one of her playmates asked what team she liked. She didn’t have a team yet and asked her father, who said he was for the Dodgers.

  Emily’s best friend Nora also took lessons from Hilda. The best friends met when they were five. It was, in Emily’s memory a formal first meeting. They stood cautiously behind their respective mother’s dresses and said hello. In what seemed like no time they were best friends living, as they did, just around the corner from each other in houses that were almost the same painted in different colors. It’s funny that they met behind their mother’s dresses, for it was then a literal truth that they stood in their mothers’ shadows. The two women were friends for a while and then Emily’s mother
stopped speaking to Nora’s mother because of something she said. Emily never knew what.

  When they were five Nora was not yet homely and Emily did not seem unsure of herself. Though it was Nora who struck people as uncertain and nervous, it was Emily, more often than not who apologized to Nora when they fought. At a young age Emily saw herself as slavish but didn’t know how to keep Nora’s love.

  At six Nora used to hide under the kitchen table, covering her heart with both hands, expecting it to stop at any moment. She feared death early; she was precocious that way. Emily used to stand near the kitchen table, looking down, while Nora huddled under it. She tried to convince her that she wasn’t going to die. Nora’s parents sent her to a doctor. Her mother waited outside his office. After a while Nora stopped hiding under the table and clutching her heart and her parents said she didn’t need to see the doctor anymore.

  Emily and Nora learned to laugh together so that it sounded like they were hee-hawing. When they didn’t go to camp together, they went to the beach with Nora’s mother. Emily’s mother said she didn’t like the beach. It turned out she was afraid of the ocean. At eight Nora was skinny and awkward; Emily was round and blond, becoming beautiful through no effort of her own. It was a difference between them and Emily ignored it. Nora maintained an unwitting power over Emily, who had many fears.

  One of Emily’s fears was the forest. It fronted her house and was behind Nora’s house, a kind of nobody’s land that belonged to the kids. It became the jungle, the bicycle path that dared her to go through it, the hunting ground. Later it was cleared so that a dull family could build a house and live in it. Emily even suffered the indignity of baby-sitting for them. Emily, Nora, and Nora’s brothers used the forest as a location for their first 8mm film, which employed as its main actors a cocker spaniel belonging to a neighbor and themselves appearing and disappearing mysteriously in front of the camera. The camera caught one of Nora’s and Emily’s fights. Years later Emily couldn’t remember what the fight was about, but was surprised to see herself fighting back.