The Household Spirit

by Tod Wodicka

  He clicked the lamp back on.

  But you take care of your own. You got to. What are you if you can’t take care of your own? Howie opened his book and turned the pages, kept turning, turning, and not for the first time wished himself beneath the surface with all the wise, thoughtless fish.

  2

  In the beginning, Howie’s wife liked to pretend that Peter and Gillian Phane were cute. Living next door to them was going to be like having their very own pet grandparents.

  “They don’t want to know us,” Howie said. “Take my word.”

  “They don’t want to know us, Howard, because they don’t know us yet.”

  Gillian, in particular, made Howie uneasy. She resembled a bat without looking anything like an actual bat. He watched her toil daily in a garden from which she never picked a single vegetable.

  “She’s just a little old lady, Howard. C’mon, get.” Howie’s wife shooed him away from the window. “And since when exactly are you this expert on vegetables?”

  Toil was exactly the word you’d use to describe it, too. Gillian sacrificing herself and her vegetables to some higher good that was supposed to feel bad. He decided that she was growing them vindictively, raising them for the pleasure of getting to watch them rot. She had a way of stabbing dirt.

  If Howie waved, she waved back. Might even smile. But he thought that she made a point of waving or smiling far to the left or right of where he was actually standing, as if that’s where he ought to be, way over there engaged in something more productive, like digging a hole to die in. Gillian’s husband, Peter, was retired but it was impossible to guess from what. From everything. Howie thought that he understood the man’s reticence.

  “I don’t care, Howard, I’m going to bring them brownies.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  Exactly. His wife wouldn’t have wanted to either if Howie hadn’t been so vocal about leaving well enough alone. This was twenty-seven years ago, that first summer on Route 29. Howie began to worry that her efforts weren’t directed at the Phanes so much as they were a sideways assault on her new husband, that baked inside his wife’s campaign of cookies and casseroles and unaccepted luncheon invitations was a slowly congealing reproach and rejection of his nature. Howie’s shy, comfortable disengagement. It was like they were living next door to a premonition. She had to prove to herself that the Phanes were all right so that someday she and Howie would be all right, too.

  The Jeffrieses had moved to Route 29, a fifteen-minute drive from the relative civilization of Queens Falls, New York, because it was the biggest house they could afford. It was never meant to be permanent; it was a first home, a starter, which they hoped to move at a profit, what with the renovations Howie had begun and the fact that it really was a gorgeous old heap. It had character, as they say. Howie had saved up from his first few years at GE, and his wife had just graduated from SUNY Albany and taken a position teaching earth science at Queens Falls Middle School. They’d been sweethearts since Mr. Roske’s seventh-grade homeroom in that very same school, only two rooms over from her very own classroom. That was part of it, probably. It felt to his wife as if she’d both never left school and already retired.

  It wasn’t a street or a road, she’d complain. It was a route. Normal people didn’t live on routes, they drove through them on their way to normal streets named after people or places or trees, to neighborhoods with normal neighbors who, unlike her husband and these Phanes, appreciated small talk and luncheons and, like, basic human decency? For freaking starters. The Phanes were pets like mongooses are pets, like ghosts or ferrets or bacteria are pets.

  Some friends of theirs hadn’t even finished college yet and here they were, Howie and his wife, already in their dotage, living way up the ass end of nowhere watching a horror-movie version of their future unfold next door. What had happened and why had it happened so quickly?

  The closest she got to winning over the Phanes was a typewritten note that Peter Phane affixed to the Jeffrieses’ front screen door.

  Thank you for the thoughtful pastries, it began.

  The note went on to explain that Mrs. Phane hadn’t been able to enjoy them because of a preexisting condition. They would not be requiring any more. It didn’t exactly welcome the Jeffrieses to the neighborhood because Route 29 wasn’t exactly a neighborhood, but it was enough for Howie’s wife. The victory all the more sweet for being both comical—from then on, Rice Krispies Treats were thoughtful pastries—and for not in any way leading to further interaction with the starchy, unbearable pair next door. Clearly, the Phanes weren’t like them at all. One of them had a condition.

  —

  Peter and Gillian Phane had probably always been too old to have kids. Their house just didn’t seem to be one that had ever bent itself to anything so base as the noise or needs of child rearing. It was too dry. Nothing was missing, nothing had ever escaped. Condition or no, it was difficult to imagine either of them preexisting.

  They never had visitors, mistaken or otherwise. NO SOLICITORS was written larger than PHANE on their utilitarian tin mailbox. NO FRIENDS OR FAMILY, it should have read. NO HOPE. NO POINT WHATSOEVER.

  However, Howie’s wife learned from QF Middle School records that they’d had one child, a daughter, Nancy, apparently a talented singer who hadn’t been seen in decades. Rumor was she’d gone out west, possibly New Mexico.

  Nancy returned to Route 29 a month before Howie’s daughter, Harriet, was born. Howie and his wife knew it was her, their lost Phane, almost as soon as Nancy pulled her small, heavily bumper-stickered Oldsmobile into the driveway. It wasn’t only the New Mexican plates. The woman was a mess. They’d long since decided that if Nancy Phane still existed, she would have to be a total mess.

  “There’s just no way,” Howie had said, watching from the window.

  His wife agreed. “Impossible!”

  But they knew and they were thrilled. Nancy was heavily set, probably in her early forties. She matched her car’s tantrum of bumper stickers with her own tattoos. The skin on her arms looked as if it had been wrapped in the pages of a comic book. Her boots were black, her hair was black. Everything on her face was pierced, punctuated by metallic commas, periods, quotation marks: a wordless, jumbled grammar of egregious self-expression that Howie didn’t like one bit. But she was pretty. Howie’s wife thought so, anyway. Sassy. Cute under all that. Howie, who feared extroverts, wasn’t so sure.

  “That’s their kid?” Howie’s wife rubbed her unborn belly. That can happen to someone’s kid?

  There was something mysterious and proprietary in the way Nancy waited, smoking, standing next to her car and staring down the old house. It was as if the house had finally come to her. Big whoop, you found me. Here I am. So fucking what?

  Gillian Phane emerged. Howie thought that the old woman was laughing. She was not laughing. Three months later they would both be dead, mother and daughter, but at the time it was refreshing, almost silly, watching Gillian swatting at the air, trying to hoot her daughter back into the car or the woods, the Kayaderosseras, New Mexico, however far the momentum of her displeasure would extend. Everything made more complex by the revelation that Nancy wasn’t merely overweight.

  “Howard, oh my God. She’s not.” Gasp. “She is.”

  The way she held her middle while trying to calm her mother. Gillian saw it, too. And promptly marched herself back inside.

  Minutes later, Peter Phane appeared on the driveway with a glass of milk. His daughter laughed at it, or him, and then he laughed too. But she accepted the milk, slowly drank, and in handing the empty glass back to her father, began to sob. Peter placed the glass on the roof of the car and helped his daughter up the driveway, into their house.

  —

  The glass would stay atop the Oldsmobile for four days. “It’s still there,” Howie’s wife said. “Howie, I’m serious, do you think I should go over and say something?”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t like it.”


  “OK.”

  “No, it is not OK!”

  Then, on the evening of the fourth day, Howie’s wife got up in the middle of Johnny Carson, went upstairs, took a shower, and returned fully dressed. Howie’s heart flinched; he was instantly standing, grinning. The baby was officially due in a few weeks, but they were told to be ready for anything. “It’s time?”

  “No, Howard,” she said. She laughed. Then her face closed. It was nearly midnight. “I’m going for a walk,” she said.

  Howie’s wife had never once gone for a walk during the day.

  But first she went to the window. The lights were off at the Phane house. “Honey?” Howie said.

  “It’s none of your business,” she snapped. She exited through the front door.

  Howie watched her stroll down their driveway—she was strolling, even with her pregnancy—turn left on Route 29, then another left directly up Peter and Gillian Phane’s driveway. She removed the empty glass from the top of Nancy’s car. She carried it to the Phanes’ front porch, left it there, paused, and turned back the way she came. Driveway, Route 29, driveway. There was something in the fact that she hadn’t simply walked across the lawn.

  Though his instinct was to sit this one out in the kitchen, Howie waited for her at the door. She entered, oddly startled to see her husband.

  “There,” she said.

  “It’s OK,” Howie told her. “You’re just tired.”

  “You’re tired,” she said.

  —

  Six days after becoming parents again, Peter and Gillian Phane were grandparents. Howie rarely saw Nancy with her baby. Mostly, he saw her alone, sitting in a lawn chair on the driveway, never on the lawn, right next to her getaway car, that Oldsmobile, smoking and reading magazines. She rarely went into the backyard. The backyard was Gillianland. From Howie’s house, from the upstairs bathroom window, you could watch the goings on in the Phanes’ back- and front yards simultaneously. Sometimes their movements would mimic each other: when one sat, the other sat. If Gillian began a spat of furious gardening, Nancy would become agitated and start pacing, absently plucking at shrubbery, bark, the heads of flowers. It was uncanny. If Gillian went to the corner of their property where a sharp slice of the Kayaderosseras Creek nearly elbowed through the forest and onto their lawn, Nancy would be standing right up against the shore of Route 29, staring down into it.

  Their obituaries, some three months later, left few clues. Not to what Gillian and Nancy’s problems had been, or who the infant’s father was. There was a twenty-year hole in Nancy’s life. She had a degree in music and theater from a college in Philadelphia. She had been promising. The obituary said she had lived most of her adult life in California, despite the New Mexican Oldsmobile that killed her. She had been loved, survived by a father, Peter, and a daughter, Emily Margaret Phane. This is the way in which Howie and his wife learned the child’s name.

  The accompanying photograph of Nancy was from the Queens Falls High yearbook, the car crash enabling her to revert to who she was before she became what she would be, returning the promising Nancy back from wherever the troubled, tattooed woman had stashed her away. The only new information in Gillian’s obituary was that she had grown up in New York City, in Queens, and that her maiden name had been Wolf.

  —

  Harriet was born a week and a day after Howie’s wife removed the empty glass from Nancy’s Oldsmobile.

  —

  Fatherhood was confounding. It felt like Howie had been debunked. Found out. The preexisting him, that old condition of Howie Jeffries he’d worked out for himself? Gone. He understood happiness, he thought, suddenly, and this left him exposed and giddy in a way that ashamed him. Was this normal? Didn’t feel normal. But it felt good, trying and failing to subsume the swooning fear he’d get while holding his little Harri. (“Howard, stop calling her that this instant!” Laughing. “I’m warning you!”) Her impossible toes. Her eyes were just about the cleanest things that he had ever seen.

  In the beginning, Howie would rather have his daughter screaming than unconscious. He didn’t trust sleep. “Let’s wake her up,” he’d suggest.

  “Shhhh.” The slow, mammal weirdness of motherhood. Whispering: “Silly, silly. You have got to be kidding me. Your silly daddy has simply got to be kidding me.”

  “But it’s the middle of the afternoon.”

  “Howard, she’s a baby.” A finger to Howie’s lips. “Shhhh.”

  Mostly, his wife seemed tired, and she hardened. It soon became important for her to pretend that it was no big deal and that nothing had changed, but this stance required a lot of energy and changed her. She became flippant, almost blowzy. She snorted instead of laughed; she swore more, abstracting objects as shit and swapping freaking for fucking in a way that turned Howie’s stomach. She began playing the Top 40 at all hours and drinking through dinners she stopped apologizing for the meagerness of. Meatloaf again? Meatloaf forever. Howie sometimes caught her looking at Harriet in the same way she looked at the ingredients of a meal she’d laid out but suddenly didn’t feel like preparing.

  But there was contentment, too. In islands that Howie learned to appreciate and maneuver, hopping from one to another, trying not to think about how small they were getting, and rare, or how choppy the sea that surrounded them had become. Tuesday was good, the following Wednesday OK, then what about the way he awoke the following Friday to find his wife’s hand on his penis, her lips at his neck? In such a manner did Howie start stringing together the narrative of his new, archipelagoed life. His wife suddenly present again, coming to him naked with their daughter, curling into him on the sofa, removing the television remote from his hand and killing Wheel of Fortune. In that silence, breathing. Beings being tired together. Shush. The invigorations of a washing machine through a wall. Their arms holding each other, so many arms—are these all for us?—and Howie would experience that happiness again, the kind that troubled him.

  They saw little of Peter and Gillian’s granddaughter in the months before the accident. Howie’s wife, in a flurry of postnatal superstition, decided that “that shit” next door was contagious, and, for a time, they stopped discussing the Phanes. They didn’t stop watching.

  It should have been strange that the two new mothers hadn’t once visited, communicated, or acknowledged their common providence. Nary a nod or a tray of thoughtful pastries passed between them. It did not feel strange. This was, after all, a route, not a neighborhood. Meanwhile, the Phane household continued to purge itself daily. The old woman out back, the younger one out front. And would you look at that: both smoking now. When Howie did see the baby, she was with her grandfather. The tall old man contained such stillness, never rocking the baby, only looking off into the forest while he whispered or quietly sang. Catching Peter Phane lullaby Emily alone in the backyard was similar to the way time stopped when, as a teenager, alone in the mountains, he would realize that within some ordinary patch of forest he had been watching there had been, all that time, a deer, stone still, watching him back. Then, like that, another deer. And another. The real world gone otherworldly. Howie imagined one day stepping out of time, joining Peter, the two of them holding their babies, singing.

  —

  Howie had been in his backyard the September afternoon that Emily’s mother and grandmother were killed in a head-on collision with a car that Howie always imagined as a Saab.

  Howie’s wife had taken the baby shopping. Then they’d be stopping by her parents’ house for dinner and, if he knew his mother-in-law, a few hours of the sloppy, gin-garbled mayhem she considered advice. Howie had decided on a headache, and he took the opportunity to clear a path through the woods to the Kayaderosseras Creek. Someday he would build a small dock and a bench for his family here. He loved the creek’s cold hum. He loved the Indian summer smell of the forest bed, the Halloween mess of pine needles and orange and yellow and red leaves. The buggy shafts of light hanging from the treetops. Foxes quiet as fish. The se
miotic squabble of deer prints in the mud by the bank of the creek. Chipmunks, wasps, squirrels, birds. This is my spot. This is where I make our home. He would fish here someday, sitting on his dock, and when Harriet was old enough he’d build her a boat, asking what color she wanted Daddy to paint it. Every color, she would say, all of them. But let’s paint it together.

  His wife, of course, still bristled at any project that implied permanence. Let her. Because someday they would sit out here and sip iced tea, maybe even wine, the pink kind she liked, watching the water move the dusk into evening. Howie would get candles; she’d like that. Candles that smell like purple or apple pie. Put some there maybe, fix them to that tree. He would get a dog, a kindly one that ate snakes.

  Thing was, you had to be delicate. His wife didn’t enjoy watching him labor intensively on anything suggesting that their world couldn’t change tomorrow at the drop of a hat. It was probably a phase but boy was he getting sick of explaining the differences between the construction of a prison and a family. Couldn’t she at least try and be happy?

  Exiting the woods that day, Howie turned to the Phane house. Peter stood facing him.

  Their eyes met.

  Peter was by the back screen door and he was holding Harri.

  Howie’s first thought: He’s kidnapped my baby. His second thought as well, and his third, as if Harriet, his little Harri, were the only one of her kind. Not a human infant, a species unto herself.

  The sudden realization that his happiness was ordinary, shared, and based on a common enough prop, that all of it amounted to nothing much at all. That from a short distance, yards, mere yards, he couldn’t even tell the difference between the thing he loved the most in the world and something he didn’t yet know the name or gender of…

  Peter Phane’s face mimicked the way he wore his pants high up over his belly. Chin and bottom lip up: preposterous, formidable. Handsome as an old barn, or at least Howie’s wife had once said so.