“I got something for you,” Liz says. She’s got Tilly’s armadillo purse. It’s full of paint strips. Catherine’s mouth fills with water.
* * *
Henry dreams he has an appointment with the exterminator. “You’ve got to take care of this,” he says. “We have two small children. These things could be rabid. They might carry plague.”
“See what I can do,” the exterminator says, sounding glum. He stands next to Henry. He’s an odd-looking, twitchy guy. He has big ears. They contemplate the skyscrapers that poke out of the grass like obelisks. The lawn is teeming with skyscrapers. “Never seen anything like this before. Never wanted to see anything like this. But if you want my opinion, it’s the house that’s the real problem—”
“Never mind about my wife,” Henry says. He squats down beside a knee-high art deco skyscraper and peers into a window. A little man looks back at him and shakes his fists, screaming something obscene. Henry flicks a finger at the window, almost hard enough to break it. He feels hot all over. He’s never felt this angry before in his life, not even when Catherine told him that she’d accidentally slept with Leonard Felter. The little bastard is going to regret what he just said, whatever it was. He lifts his foot.
The exterminator says, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you. You have to dig them up, get the roots. Otherwise, they just grow back. Like your house. Which is really just the tip of the iceberg lettuce, so to speak. You’ve probably got seventy, eighty stories underground. You gone down on the elevator yet? Talked to the people living down there? It’s your house, and you’re just going to let them live there rent-free? Mess with your things like that?”
“What?” Henry says, and then he hears helicopters, fighter planes the size of hummingbirds. “Is this really necessary?” he says to the exterminator.
The exterminator nods. “You have to catch them off guard.”
“Maybe we’re being hasty,” Henry says. He has to yell to be heard above the noise of the tiny, tinny, furious planes. “Maybe we can settle this peacefully.”
“Hemree,” the interrogator says, shaking his head. “You called me in because I’m the expert, and you knew you needed help.”
Henry wants to say, “You’re saying my name wrong.” But he doesn’t want to hurt the undertaker’s feelings.
The alligator keeps on talking. “Listen up, Hemreeee, and shut up about negotiations and such, because if we don’t take care of this right away, it may be too late. This isn’t about home ownership, or lawn care, Hemreeeeee, this is war. The lives of your children are at stake. The happiness of your family. Be brave. Be strong. Just hang on to your rabbit and fire when you see delight in their eyes.”
* * *
He woke up. “Catherine,” he whispered. “Are you awake? I was having this dream.”
Catherine laughed. “That’s the phone, Liz,” she said. “It’s probably Henry, saying he’ll be late.”
“Catherine,” Henry said. “Who are you talking to?”
“Are you mad at me, Henry?” Catherine said. “Is that why you won’t come home?”
“I’m right here,” Henry said.
“You take your rabbits and your crocodiles and get out of here,” Catherine said. “And then come straight home again.”
She sat up in bed and pointed her finger. “I am sick and tired of being spied on by rabbits!”
When Henry looked, something stood beside the bed, rocking back and forth on its heels. He fumbled for the light, got it on, and saw Tilly, her mouth open, her eyes closed. She looked larger than she ever did when she was awake. “It’s just Tilly,” he said to Catherine, but Catherine lay back down again. She put her pillow over her head. When he picked Tilly up, to carry her back to bed, she was warm and sweaty, her heart racing as if she had been running through all the rooms of the house.
He walked through the house. He rapped on walls, testing. He put his ear against the floor. No elevator. No secret rooms, no hidden passageways.
There wasn’t even a basement.
* * *
Tilly has divided the yard in half. Carleton is not allowed in her half, unless she gives permission.
From the bottom of her half of the yard, where the trees run beside the driveway, Tilly can barely see the house. She’s decided to name the yard Matilda’s Rabbit Kingdom. Tilly loves naming things. When the new baby is born, her mother has promised that she can help pick out the real names, although there will only be two real names, a first one and a middle. Tilly doesn’t understand why there can only be two. Oishii means delicious in Japanese. That would make a good name, either for the baby or for the yard, because of the grass. She knows the yard isn’t as big as Central Park, but it’s just as good, even if there aren’t any pagodas or castles or carriages or people on roller skates. There’s plenty of grass. There are hundreds of rabbits. They live in an enormous underground city, maybe a city just like New York. Maybe her dad can stop working in New York and come work under the lawn instead. She could help him, go to work with him. She could be a biologist, like Jane Goodall, and go and live underground with the rabbits. Last year her ambition had been to go and live secretly in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but someone has already done that, even if it’s only in a book. Tilly feels sorry for Carleton. Everything he ever does, she’ll have already been there. She’ll already have done that.
* * *
Tilly has left her armadillo purse sticking out of a rabbit hole. First she made the hole bigger, then she packed the dirt back in around the armadillo so that only the shiny, peeled snout poked out. Carleton digs it out again with his stick. Maybe Tilly meant him to find it. Maybe it was a present for the rabbits, except what is it doing here, in his half of the yard? When he lived in the apartment, he was afraid of the armadillo purse, but there are better things to be afraid of out here. But be careful, Carleton. Might as well be careful. The armadillo purse says don’t touch me. So he doesn’t. He uses his stick to pry open the snap mouth, dumps out Tilly’s most valuable things, and with his stick pushes them one by one down the hole. Then he puts his ear to the rabbit hole so that he can hear the rabbits say thank you. Saying thank you is polite. But the rabbits say nothing. They’re holding their breath, waiting for him to go away. Carleton waits, too. Tilly’s armadillo, empty and smelly and haunted, makes his eyes water.
Someone comes up and stands behind him. “I didn’t do it,” he says. “They fell.”
But when he turns around, it’s the girl who lives next door. Alison. The sun is behind her and makes her shine. He squints. “You can come over to my house if you want to,” she says. “Your mom says. She’s going to pay me fifteen bucks an hour, which is way too much. Are your parents really rich or something? What’s that?”
“It’s Tilly’s,” he says. “But I don’t think she wants it anymore.”
She picks up Tilly’s armadillo. “Pretty cool,” she says. “Maybe I’ll keep it for her.”
Deep underground, the rabbits stamp their feet in rage.
* * *
Catherine loves the house. She loves her new life. She’s never understood people who get stuck, become unhappy, can’t change, adapt. So she’s out of a job. So what? She’ll find something else to do. So Henry can’t leave his job yet, won’t leave his job yet. So the house is haunted. That’s okay. They’ll work through it. She buys some books on gardening. She plants a rosebush and a climbing vine in a pot. Tilly helps. The rabbits eat off all the leaves. They bite through the vine.
“Shit,” Catherine says, when she sees what they’ve done. She shakes her fists at the rabbits on the lawn. The rabbits flick their ears at her. They’re laughing, she knows it. She’s too big to chase after them.
* * *
“Henry, wake up. Wake up.”
“I’m awake,” he said, and then he was. Catherine was crying. Noisy, wet, ugly sobs. He put his hand out and touched her face. Her nose was running.
“Stop crying,” he said. “I’m awake. Why are you crying?”<
br />
“Because you weren’t here,” she said. “And then I woke up and you were here, but when I wake up tomorrow morning you’ll be gone again. I miss you. Don’t you miss me?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I’m not here. I’m here now. Come here.”
“No,” she said. She stopped crying, but her nose still leaked. “And now the dishwasher is haunted. We have to get a new dishwasher before I have this baby. You can’t have a baby and not have a dishwasher. And you have to live here with us. Because I’m going to need some help this time. Remember Carleton, how fucking hard that was.”
“He was one cranky baby,” Henry said. When Carleton was three months old, Henry had realized that they’d misunderstood something. Babies weren’t babies—they were land mines, bear traps, wasp nests. They were a noise, which was sometimes even not a noise but merely a listening for a noise; they were a damp, chalky smell; they were the heaving, jerky, sticky manifestation of not-sleep. Once Henry had stood and watched Carleton in his crib, sleeping peacefully. He had not done what he wanted to do. He had not bent over and yelled in Carleton’s ear. Henry still hadn’t forgiven Carleton, not yet, not entirely, not for making him feel that way.
“Why do you have to love your job so much?” Catherine said.
“I don’t know,” Henry said. “I don’t love it.”
“Don’t lie to me,” Catherine said.
“I love you better,” Henry said. He does, he does, he does love Catherine better. He’s already made that decision. But she isn’t even listening.
“Remember when Carleton was little and you would get up in the morning and go to work and leave me all alone with them?” Catherine poked him in the side. “I used to hate you. You’d come home with takeout, and I’d forget I hated you, but then I’d remember again, and I’d hate you even more because it was so easy for you to trick me, to make things okay again, just because for an hour I could sit in the bathtub and eat Chinese food and wash my hair.”
“You used to carry an extra shirt with you, when you went out,” Henry said. He put his hand down inside her T-shirt on her fat, full breast. “In case you leaked.”
“You can’t touch that breast,” Catherine said. “It’s haunted.” She blew her nose on the sheets.
* * *
Catherine’s friend Lucy owns an online boutique, Nice Clothes for Fat People. There’s a woman in Tarrytown who knits stretchy, sexy argyle sweaters exclusively for NCFP, and Lucy has an appointment with her. She wants to stop off and see Catherine afterward, before she has to drive back to the city again. Catherine gives her directions and then begins to clean house, feeling out of sorts. She’s not sure she wants to see Lucy right now. Carleton has always been afraid of Lucy, which is embarrassing. And Catherine doesn’t want to talk about Henry. She doesn’t want to explain about the downstairs bathroom. She had planned to spend the day painting the wood trim in the dining room, but now she’ll have to wait.
The doorbell rings, but when Catherine goes to answer it, no one is there. Later on, after Tilly and Carleton have come home, it rings again, but no one is there. It rings and rings, as if Lucy is standing outside, pressing the bell over and over again. Finally Catherine pulls out the wire. She tries calling Lucy’s cell phone but can’t get through. Then Henry calls. He says that he’s going to be late.
Liz opens the front door, yells, “Hello, anyone home?! You’ve got to see your rabbits, there must be thousands of them. Catherine, is something wrong with your doorbell?”
* * *
Henry’s bike, so far, was okay. He wondered what they’d do if the Toyota suddenly became haunted. Would Catherine want to sell it? Would resale value be affected? The car and Catherine and the kids were gone when he got home, so he put on a pair of work gloves and went through the house with a cardboard box, collecting all the things that felt haunted. A hairbrush in Tilly’s room, an old pair of Catherine’s tennis shoes. A pair of Catherine’s underwear that he found at the foot of the bed. When he picked them up he felt a sudden shock of longing for Catherine, like he’d been hit by some kind of spooky lightning. It hit him in the pit of the stomach, like a cramp. He dropped the underwear in the box.
The silk kimono from Takashimaya. Two of Carleton’s night-lights. He opened the door to his office, put the box inside. All the hair on his arms stood up. He closed the door.
Then he went downstairs and cleaned paintbrushes. If the paintbrushes were becoming haunted, if Catherine was throwing them out and buying new ones, she wasn’t saying. Maybe he should check the Visa bill. How much were they spending on paint anyway?
Catherine came into the kitchen and gave him a hug. “I’m glad you’re home,” she said. He pressed his nose into her neck and inhaled. “I left the car running—I’ve got to pee. Would you go pick up the kids for me?”
“Where are they?” Henry said.
“They’re over at Liz’s. Alison is babysitting them. Do you have money on you?”
“You mean I’ll meet some neighbors?”
“Wow, sure,” Catherine said. “If you think you’re ready. Are you ready? Do you know where they live?”
“They’re our neighbors, right?”
“Take a left out of the driveway, go about a quarter of a mile, and they’re the red house with all the trees in front.”
But when he drove up to the red house and went and rang the doorbell, no one answered. He heard a child come running down a flight of stairs and then stop and stand in front of the door. “Carleton? Alison?” he said. “Excuse me, this is Catherine’s husband, Henry. Carleton and Tilly’s dad.” The whispering stopped. He waited for a bit. When he crouched down and lifted the flap of the mail slot, he thought he saw someone’s feet, the hem of a coat, something furry? A dog? Someone standing very still, just to the right of the door? Carleton, playing games. “I see you,” he said, and wiggled his fingers through the mail slot. Then he thought maybe it wasn’t Carleton after all. He got up quickly and went back to the car. He drove into town and bought more soap.
Tilly was standing in the driveway when he got home, her hands on her hips. “Hi, Dad,” she said. “I’m looking for King Spanky. He got outside. Look what Alison found.”
She held out a tiny toy bow strung with what looked like dental floss, an arrow the size of a needle.
“Be careful with that,” Henry said. “It looks sharp. Archery Barbie, right? So did you guys have a good time with Alison?”
“Alison’s okay,” Tilly said. She belched. “’Scuse me. I don’t feel very good.”
“What’s wrong?” Henry said.
“My stomach is funny,” Tilly said. She looked up at him, frowned, and then vomited all over his shirt, his pants.
“Tilly!” he said. He yanked off his shirt, used a sleeve to wipe her mouth. The vomit was foamy and green.
“It tastes horrible,” she said. She sounded surprised. “Why does it always taste so bad when you throw up?”
“So that you won’t go around doing it for fun,” he said. “Are you going to do it again?”
“I don’t think so,” she said, making a face.
“Then I’m going to go wash up and change clothes. What were you eating, anyway?”
“Grass,” Tilly said.
“Well, no wonder,” Henry said. “I thought you were smarter than that, Tilly. Don’t do that anymore.”
“I wasn’t planning to,” Tilly said. She spit in the grass.
When Henry opened the front door, he could hear Catherine talking in the kitchen. “The funny thing is,” she said, “none of it was true. It was just made up, just like something Carleton would do. Just to get attention.”
“Dad,” Carleton said. He was jumping up and down on one foot. “Want to hear a song?”
“I was looking for you,” Henry said. “Did Alison bring you home? Do you need to go to the bathroom?”
“Why aren’t you wearing any clothes?” Carleton said.
Someone in the kitchen laughed, as if they h
ad heard this.
“I had an accident,” Henry said, whispering. “But you’re right, Carleton, I should go change.” He took a shower, rinsed and wrung out his shirt, put on clean clothes, but by the time he got downstairs, Catherine and Carleton and Tilly were eating Cheerios for dinner. They were using paper bowls, plastic spoons, as if it were a picnic. “Liz was here, and Alison, but they were going to a movie,” Catherine said. “They said they’d meet you some other day. It was awful—when they came in the door, King Spanky went rushing outside. He’s been watching the rabbits all day. If he catches one, Tilly is going to be so upset.”
“Tilly’s been eating grass,” Henry said.
Tilly rolled her eyes. As if.
“Not again!” Catherine said. “Tilly, real people don’t eat grass. Oh, look, fantastic, there’s King Spanky. Who let him in? What’s he got in his mouth?”
King Spanky sits with his back to them. He coughs and something drops to the floor, maybe a frog, or a baby rabbit. It goes scrabbling across the floor, half-leaping, dragging one leg. King Spanky just sits there, watching as it disappears under the sofa. Carleton freaks out. Tilly is shouting, “Bad King Spanky! Bad cat!” When Henry and Catherine push the sofa back, it’s too late, there’s just King Spanky and a little blob of sticky blood on the floor.
* * *
Catherine would like to write a novel. She’d like to write a novel with no children in it. The problem with novels with children in them is that bad things will happen either to the children or else to the parents. She wants to write something funny, something romantic.
It isn’t very comfortable to sit down now that she’s so big. She’s started writing on the walls. She writes in pencil. She names her characters after paint colors. She imagines them leading beautiful, happy, useful lives. No haunted toasters. No mothers no children no crocodiles no photocopy machines no Leonard Felters. She writes for two or three hours, and then she paints the walls again before anyone gets home. That’s always the best part.
The Uncanny Reader Page 41