Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  For a long while after we came back from Michigan, we really were just friends, albeit several times over: I was friends with Penny, and Aunt Sam was friends with Maledicta; Adam was friends—poker buddies—with Malefica; and Jake, strangest of all, was friends with Loins, who had an unexpected soft spot for The Little Mermaid and other Disney videos. We discovered other affinities between our households as well, though there weren’t enough hours in the day to cultivate them all.

  After Julie left Autumn Creek and Penny moved into her apartment, our friendship(s) naturally intensified. Penny was already driving me to and from work every day. Now we started having breakfast together too (sometimes she’d come over to Mrs. Winslow’s, sometimes we’d go out to the Harvest Moon Diner), and spending a lot of our evenings and weekends together, I mean even more than we had before.

  At first I thought it would feel strange, hanging out with Penny in Julie’s old apartment. But Penny completely redecorated: she threw out all the furniture Julie had left behind, repainted the rooms, and got the landlord’s permission to put new tile on the bathroom floor and new linoleum in the kitchen; she strung lights in the outside staircase, and finally replaced the knob on the downstairs door. By the time she was done, it looked like a whole new place, and though I still experienced occasional flashes of déjà vu—most often going up or down the stairs—it wasn’t anything like what I’d been expecting.

  It wasn’t just the new paint job and furnishings that made the difference, of course; it was Penny herself. Although our friendship had its rough spots, Penny never mystified me the way Julie had. If there was something about her behavior that I didn’t understand, I could ask her to explain it to me, and her explanations made sense. If she got mad at me it was usually for a good reason; an apology meant that a fight was over, rather than signaling a new phase of discord. Most of all, I never had the feeling, so common with Julie, that I was dealing with someone whose perspective on reality was bent ninety degrees from my own. Penny and I might reach different conclusions sometimes, but we saw the same things. We got each other.

  “This is too easy,” Adam complained one time after Penny and I had, without rancor, agreed to disagree about something. “Where’s the passive-aggressive behavior? Where are the mixed signals and the hidden messages? Where’s the pain?”

  “You can keep all that,” I told him. “I like this.”

  Penny seemed to like it too, and so I guess it’s not all that surprising, given how close we became, that we would eventually explore the possibility of moving beyond friendship. It started one night in February of 1999, when in honor of my birthday we went into the city to attend a Lyle Lovett concert. It was snowing when the show let out, and Penny and I decided to go for a ride on the Seattle monorail and watch the snow fall. Somehow during the ride we ended up kissing. That’s all we did that night, kiss, but from then on things were different between us, and later—not very much later—we did other stuff.

  We did stuff, and it was fun, but it also caused problems with the other souls in our households, some of whom weren’t happy with this new development. More crucially, a couple of the more intimate things we did dredged up memories about Penny’s mother, very dark memories that Penny had, until then, been successfully avoiding. In March she started having blackouts again, her first in more than a year. In April she disappeared for three whole days, and woke up in the basement of the Charter Hotel in Spokane. After that incident, we decided to go back to being just friends, at least until Penny worked through a few issues.

  She began going to therapy two and then three times a week. I saw less of her, which was hard; but when I did see her, I could still ask questions, so I always knew where we stood. And she was getting better: as though a last barrier had been knocked down, her therapy progressed with great rapidity, until by midsummer she was talking about a final resolution.

  But before she could conclude her treatment, Penny had a decision to make; and her choice, when it came, left me stunned.

  “Reintegration?” I said, not sure I’d heard right. “Penny, that’s…”

  “…a shock, I know,” she said.

  Crazy, I was going to say; like opting for a lobotomy. I tried for a more tactful phrasing: “Reintegration doesn’t work, Penny. It doesn’t work, and if it did, it’d be like dying. You wouldn’t be you anymore.”

  She bit her lip, unhappy that I was reacting this way. “Dr. Eddington thinks it could work,” she told me. “He thinks—”

  “He’s wrong,” I interrupted her. “If Dr. Grey were here—”

  “Dr. Grey never said reintegration couldn’t work, Andrew. I’ve read her book: she said reintegration was optional, not impossible.”

  “It’s a bad option,” I insisted. “What about the others? They can’t all agree to this.”

  “They do,” said Penny. “At least, none of them disagrees. And anyway it’s my decision. I don’t want to go on living my life as a time-share; I want to be one person. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  I could understand it. I just couldn’t accept it. I continued to argue against the idea, and the next time I saw Dr. Eddington, I really lit into him.

  “You know I can’t discuss Penny’s therapy with you, Andrew,” he said. “If you feel this raises a question with regard to your own treatment…”

  “My treatment? It’s got nothing to do with me. I’m never going to reintegrate.”

  “Which I believe is the right decision—for you. But you aren’t Penny.” He sighed. “Look, Andrew…I know you think you and Penny have a lot in common, but there are some important differences between your two cases. With Penny, the basic personality split, as profound as it seems, just isn’t as severe: the original Penny Driver still exists, and still wants to exist. Now”—he held up a hand—“that doesn’t guarantee that reintegration will work, but it means there’s a chance. And since this is what Penny wants, I would hope that you, as her friend, would choose to be supportive.”

  I did try to be supportive, but Penny and I still argued regularly about her decision to reintegrate. My father, usually a good peacemaker, was no help either—he was even more opposed to Penny’s decision than I was. But nothing we said or did could get her to reconsider.

  In August, Penny left for a monthlong retreat at The Orpheus Center in Port Townsend, a sort of multiples’ halfway house that specialized in reintegration. She went without saying good-bye (we’d fought the night before), though she did leave a note and the key to her apartment. For the next four weeks, I dutifully collected her mail, all the while wondering if the person I was collecting it for would still exist when September rolled around.

  The day she came back, I was in Fremont for my own weekly therapy session; when our fifty minutes were up, Dr. Eddington asked if I’d like to go say hi to an old friend. Penny was waiting for us at a café a few blocks from the doctor’s office. She was sitting at an outside table, and I was relieved to see I could still recognize her without help. Her hair was longer—she’d been growing it out all summer, and now it had finally reached her shoulders—but other than that she looked like the same Penny.

  Her body language confused me, though. As we approached, she was smoking a cigarette, ordinarily a sign that Maledicta had control. But when she looked up and saw us coming, her reaction—the look on her face, the slightly tentative way she waved hello—said “Penny” to me…and then, without changing expression, she took a last draw on the cigarette and stubbed it out with an impatient gesture that was pure Maledicta.

  I spent the first few minutes of our reunion imitating a fencepost. I think I did manage to say hi, but after that, Dr. Eddington had to handle the opening round of small talk on his own. He didn’t stay long; after getting me settled in a chair and verifying that I wasn’t actually catatonic, he excused himself, saying that he’d be in his office for a while yet if either of us needed him.

  In the silence that followed his departure, Penny reached for the pack of Winstons on th
e table in front of her. I watched her knock out a cigarette and light it, her hand gestures once again suggesting Maledicta. But after taking her first puff, she exhaled over her shoulder rather than directly at me, and when the smoke started to drift back over the table, she waved it away.

  “I’m sorry,” I said finally, lowering my eyes. “I don’t mean to stare…”

  “No, it’s OK,” said Penny. Her voice seemed fuller, or at least louder; and also—but this had to be my imagination working overtime—I thought I detected a trace of harmony. “I know this must be weird for you. It is for me too, still, and I’ve had some time to get used to it.”

  “What’s it like?” I asked.

  “Hard to describe.” She laughed, a laugh I associated with Loins. “Like this…”—she held up her cigarette—“I don’t actually enjoy smoking, but at the same time, I really do. I mean, I want to quit, but I don’t.”

  “Maledicta and the others,” I said. “Are they…?”

  “Still alive?” Penny nodded. “It isn’t like I thought it would be—they, we, we’re all still here, just, less separate than we used to be. We don’t have to occupy the body one at a time now; we coexist in it.”

  “Coexist? So you’re still multiple?”

  “Yes and no.” She laughed again. “This is the hardest part to put into words. It’s like, right now, I’m looking at you, and I’m seeing you, feeling about you, the way Penny does, and at the same time, I’m seeing you and feeling about you the way Maledicta does. And I can sort out, if I want to, the Penny-feelings from the Maledicta-feelings, but I can also just let them flow together…”

  “And the others, too? All of them?”

  “Everybody at once is hard. I can bring them all up at the same time, but it gets confusing.”

  “And that’s…this is better, you think, than the way things used to be?”

  “Yes.” Having finished her cigarette, Penny started to draw another from the pack, then shook her head and shoved it back. “Yes, it’s better—most of the time. The doctors at Orpheus, they said it would get easier with practice, that as we shared more experiences we’d start to mesh better. I’m not sure if that’s really true, though, or if the doctors just thought it ought to be true. I guess I’ll find out.”

  “Well,” I said. “As long as you’re happy…”

  “We’re…content,” said Penny. “I’m sorry if I don’t explain it very well. But that reminds me: I have something for you.” She brought out a small gift-wrapped package. “I meant to give you this before I went to Orpheus, but, well…”

  I was suddenly uneasy, for no reason I could put my finger on, but I took the package from her and opened it. Inside was a gold-colored CD with “Thread.doc” written on it in Magic Marker.

  “It’s a copy of my Thread diaries,” Penny said.

  “What are you giving it to me for?”

  “To read…if you want. It’s to help you understand why I felt I had to do this. And also—”

  “Oh, Penny,” I said, “you don’t owe me any explanations. I’m sorry if I—”

  “No, Andrew, I want you to understand. And there’s more: there are things in there about you, from when we first met…well, it’s not all flattering, but I wanted you to know, to have a record, of how important you’ve been to me.”

  I got it then, what was troubling me: this was a going-away present. “Penny,” I said. “You are coming back to Autumn Creek, right?”

  She bit her lip. “For a while,” she said.

  “A while,” I said. “And then what? You’re moving away? This…this isn’t because of the way I was acting, is it? You’re not—”

  “No! No, Andrew, this is something I have to do for me, kind of the last step in my therapy: starting over in a new place, as a new me.”

  “What new place?”

  “California,” she said. “I’m not sure what city yet, but…maybe San Diego. One of the other residents at Orpheus had some really good things to say about it.”

  San Diego: southernmost California, over a thousand miles from Seattle. I felt hollow. “When would you go?”

  “I was thinking after Thanksgiving.”

  “Three months.” My voice got husky, and my eyelids started blinking. “Wow…wow.”

  “Andrew?” Penny said. “You are going to be OK, aren’t you?”

  I wanted to say no, but after all the grief I’d given her over the reintegration, I thought I’d pretty much used up my selfishness quota for the year. “It’ll be…hard,” I told her. “But if this is what you need to do…”

  She reached out and took my hand, and that gesture, the feel of her small palm in mine, was all Penny. “It’s still three months,” she said. “We’ll spend lots of time together until then. And I will come back to visit.”

  “Good,” I said, tears tracking down both cheeks now. “OK, that’s good…”

  Penny drove me back to Autumn Creek that night, and from then on until she left, we spent pretty much every free moment we had together—but of course, it wasn’t enough. To make three months go by faster, you’d have to lose time.

  It was long enough for me to get a better sense of how Penny’s reintegration had changed her, although in trying to describe it I find myself drawn to the same contradictory locutions that she used: Penny was different, but she also wasn’t. I eventually got used to the “new” Penny, the one who exhibited characteristics of as many as half a dozen souls simultaneously, but she wasn’t always like that: there were times, most often in moments of stress or great emotion, but occasionally in calmer moments too, when a single soul seemed to predominate, so that I would have sworn I was in the presence of Maledicta—the “old” Maledicta—or Loins, or Duncan. Or Mouse. I said nothing about this—if they were content, I wasn’t going to spoil it for them—but I did take comfort in the thought that reintegration wasn’t so scary after all. My best friend, all of her, still existed.

  And then it was the end of November. We said good-bye in the parking lot of the Harvest Moon Diner, following a last breakfast together. It was a drawn-out farewell, with pretty much everyone insisting on coming out to wish Penny a safe trip, and I got worried she wouldn’t have anything left for me. But she did. We hugged each other a very long time, and then Penny got in the car.

  “You’d better write,” I told her, hanging on the driver’s door. “And call.”

  “I will,” Penny promised. She drew my head down and kissed me on the lips. “Sweet thing,” she said, and winked. “Don’t take any shit from anybody.” Then, with one hand on the steering wheel and the other reaching over to thumb the button on the cigarette lighter, she drove away.

  A month later, I stayed up with Mrs. Winslow to welcome in the year 2000. We moved my TV out to the kitchen so we could watch the fireworks in color, and when midnight came we opened a bottle of nonalcoholic sparkling grape juice. I was happier than I’d been for a long while, but my happiness was still tinged with a melancholy I couldn’t conceal.

  “You miss her, don’t you?” Mrs. Winslow said.

  “Every day.” Then, not wanting to spoil the evening: “It’s OK, though. I still have you.”

  “Well…it’s funny you should mention that…”

  “Why funny?” I said. “You’re not…oh my God, Mrs. Winslow! You’re not dying, are you?”

  She laughed. “No, not dying. Just the opposite, I hope. I don’t suppose you’ve noticed, but lately I haven’t been waiting on the mail as much.”

  I had noticed, actually—or Adam had. For the past several weeks, after seeing me off on my way to work in the morning, Mrs. Winslow had been going back inside the Victorian instead of taking up sentry on the porch. “But I thought, I don’t know, maybe you were just cold…”

  “My creaky old bones not able to handle the winter anymore?” She smiled. “I’m not that old yet—but I will be. This spring will be fifteen years since Jacob and the boys died; almost a decade since the last note came. It’s time I moved on.”
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  Oh no, I thought, not you too. “That’s great!” I said. “That’s wonderful!”

  “You’re a lousy liar, Andrew,” Mrs. Winslow said, not unkindly. “I know this is going to be hard for you, and if I thought it was more than you could handle…but it isn’t. You’ve had some difficult times this past year, but you’ve held up well. I think you’re ready to go on without me.”

  “Sure,” I said, not sure at all.

  “Good. Because I’m going to need your help.”

  “Sure,” I said, more certainly. “Anything. What do you need me to do?”

  “I should probably make a clean break with the past, but I don’t think I’m strong enough to do that—not all at once. So if I do leave this house, I’m going to want somebody I can trust to stay behind and keep an eye on the mailbox for me. Just in case. It wouldn’t be forever. A year at most—if I didn’t come back—and then I’ll be ready to let it go for good.”

  “I can do that. I mean, it’ll save me having to look for a new apartment, so that works fine.”

  “You’d have the run of the whole house, too,” Mrs. Winslow said. “And of course I wouldn’t charge you rent anymore.”

  “Oh no, Mrs. Winslow, you don’t have to do that.”

  “It’s all right, Andrew. I’d prefer you put the money into savings, and start thinking about what you want to do next. As I say, this won’t be forever—in a year, maybe two, I’ll want to sell this house.”

  “All right then,” I said. “I’ll keep it for you until you’re ready to get rid of it.”

  Like Julie, Mrs. Winslow also left me her car, but it was a true gift and not just a temporary loan. She insisted I get a license, too, so when she left town on the first day in May, I was able to drive her to the airport. She was headed to Galveston, Texas; she had people there, old college friends who’d been trying to get her to move down for years. “Mostly it’s to get me moving somewhere,” Mrs. Winslow said. “If I don’t like Texas, there are other places.”