The Household Spirit

by Tod Wodicka

  Their eyes held.

  Howie’s face stiffened, then snapped shut. He felt it happen. Couldn’t help it. Maybe if he’d been holding Harri it would have been better, but Howie held nothing.

  Peter Phane grinned. It was as intimate and unexpected as if he’d actually dropped his trousers. Then he held his grandchild up in the air, actually lifted her over his head for Howie to see. Would you look at this? Such a smile.

  Howie shook his head no.

  He didn’t realize what he was doing; then he’d done it. No. Shaking his head as if to say, Shame on you, old man. Why, you oughta be ashamed.

  Peter Phane nodded plainly, and, pulling the infant down to his chest, he walked back into his house.

  Thirty minutes later the police arrived with the news of Nancy’s and Gillian’s deaths. They arrived at Howie’s house first, dreamlike, mistaken, two uniformed men hand-delivering their blue hats.

  3

  Marty, a colleague from work, had given him the internet computer, an old one, apparently, though all computers looked inherently new to Howie. He frequented websites and forums dedicated to fish. He enjoyed photographs of boats. For over twenty years, ever since his wife and daughter left Route 29, Howie had been saving up to purchase a sailboat. Nobody knew this. He had not meant for this to become a secret, but the opportunity to inform someone had never presented itself and now, Howie felt, it was too late and probably too weird to suddenly tell someone, his daughter, for example, that, oh by the way, for twenty-some years I’ve been stashing away money for a giant wooden boat that I will someday live on. His dream was a 1971 Catalina 27. In good condition, one might put him back anywhere from twenty to thirty thousand dollars. Depending on how much more he had to subsidize Harri in New York City—she was out of work again—he hoped to be able to purchase this two-bedroom sailboat by the time he was retired in ten years. (Two bedrooms had always been the plan, just in case Harri ever wanted to visit him—and though she never visited him now, he did not want to assume that this would always be the case, especially if he had a boat. Even though she hated boats.) Howie knew a fellow, a hushed old coot, Earl Stolaroff, who might even let him dock the boat at his summer cottage on Lake Jogues. Once, while ice fishing, they’d talked around the issue. Stolaroff took snapshots of Lake Jogues and posted them for people to see on Facebook. Howie liked these immensely.

  He had initially misunderstood the internet computer. Harri insisted that he sign on to the Facebook, and so he did and became, once again, her Father, officially listed now, Howard V. Jeffries, right there above Mother, his grainy face grimacing from an old photograph that Daughter had e-mailed him while helping register his account. Being Family on the computer meant that they didn’t need to talk on the telephone so much anymore.

  He had started by writing Harri letters on her wall. “Dear Harriet,” these would begin. Minutes later, they’d be gone. This happened over a dozen times. Perhaps he’d misclicked? He consulted the Facebook troubleshoot, Howard V. Jeffries troubleshot, but still couldn’t quite figure it. Well, huh. Concerned, finally, he posted a final letter on Harri’s wall asking why none of his previous letters had been delivered. This too disappeared.

  Shortly after, he received a private e-mail.

  love you to death dad but please enough with the graffiti? :)

  He’d thought that was the point, why she’d asked him to join, but OK. He apologized.

  : (

  Howie was friends with his ex-wife now, on and off the internet computer. (There was no official Ex-husband status on Facebook.) In fact, months after joining he had forty-three friends. Pressing the Confirm button had not been easy. It was as bad as a doorbell—an announcement of engagement, presence. They now know exactly where I am. They know I am here. Howie was someone who knocked, always, and the obtrusive clicking, pinging sounds by which the computer marked his movement through its world embarrassed him. Shhhhh. Most of these friends were unrecognizably aged men and women whom he may have known from high school, and after Howie’s initial confirmation of friendship no other communication was ever forthcoming or apparently deemed necessary. Often they hid their years behind profile photographs of their grandchildren or pets. He was friends with GE employees, past and present, and some of their spouses who remembered him fondly from picnics, Secret Santa, potluck Super Bowl fiascos. He was friends with Ken Tapper’s wife’s dog. But it was not helpful, almost an affront, having different shifts of his life coexist at the same time inside the internet computer. The machine made it harder to punch out or move forward cleanly.

  Harri had 453 friends. Howie would sometimes look through them, vacillating between pride and incredulity. In high school, Harri hadn’t had more than 3 friends that Howie knew of. His ex-wife had 249 friends now, and his ex-wife’s latest husband, Drew Sullivan, had even more. Deservedly, Howie thought. He’d met Drew on numerous occasions and genuinely liked the man and his relaxed, attractive intelligence. He was older than Howie, a retired high school English teacher from downstate, and he sometimes called wanting to know whether Howie’d like to go out with him for a brew, he’d say, maybe catch the game at Sandy’s Clam Bar. Howie never accepted but often wished that he had. Drew posted poems and links to articles about how Republicans were berserk onto Harri’s wall. She would often comment on these—OMFG! LOL! NSFW!—and her stepfather would comment back, others also chiming in, Liking, and Howie enjoyed keeping up with their easy, winking repartee. Last May, Drew had been the only one to call Howie on his fiftieth birthday. Everyone, meanwhile, remembered on Facebook.

  : )

  Emily Margaret Phane was not Howard Jeffries’s Facebook friend. Still, he’d spent a fair amount of time monitoring her profile. That is, until it disappeared shortly after she returned from Boston to nurse her dying grandfather.

  Before that, Howie had been able to keep track of her at Boston University. She made 72 new friends. She was even “in a relationship with” what appeared to be an Oriental young man. In photographs she appeared happy, if overworked. Howie sometimes lingered over the doorbell of her Add Friend button, swirling his arrow, thinking, Why not?

  Thinking: Because you are a ridiculous man.

  His intentions, he knew, were chaste. Protective but not prohibitive. His interest in his neighbor no more inappropriate than that of an elderly female relative who cared from afar: Howie desired nothing more from Emily than the knowledge that she was doing OK. Even though she was closer now, no longer in Boston, right next door in fact, yards away, snug inside her house doing God knew what, Emily felt farther away than she ever had. She had deleted herself. He would plug her name into the internet computer search: emily phane. But there was no longer any active emily phane, or EMILY PHANE or Emily M. Phane or emily margaret phane, or any of the variations Howie tried. None of them was now doing OK.

  —

  If most adults are failed children, as Howie vaguely assumed, then Emily had been a rare success. She was first-rate. Year by year she didn’t grow out of or actively debase her girlhood but grew gracefully into the peculiar child that she had been. That was his take, anyway. Her presence next door enlightened him—made his days and thoughts lighter—especially after his own daughter had begun to become something he adored but could no longer entirely comprehend.

  Emily never smiled while waving hello to Howie. She got him. She did not smile so that he would not have to smile back. Because she sure smiled at everything else. She was made of nimbler stuff, maybe, more refined matter than the everyday heaviness Howie pushed through. Like everything was absurd, a joke, and watching her you felt in on that joke, aligned with the bright, mocking interrogatory light she shone on everything. Some people, no matter what, when they start laughing, you can’t help but laugh along, even if you have absolutely no idea what’s so funny. Even if it’s abundantly clear that nothing ever really is. Not that Howie ever actually joined in laughing, alone, at his house, at his window. Because that would have been nuts.

  Her
face was round but not chubby, not quite. Her hair was black, shoulder length, with bangs that drew a line above her dark eyebrows and grey eyes. Then her freckles. Rare on someone with her coloring, they looked as if they’d been painted on her high, wide cheeks—a light brown, almost tribal smear of them. If Howie had to guess, he would say that the girl’s father might have been an Eskimo. Though, from a distance—a next-door neighbor’s upstairs bathroom window, say—it looked like her father might just as well have been a panda bear. She had looked that way since she was five.

  The first years after the death of her mother and grandmother, Emily didn’t lack for feminine care. Old women abounded. Five or six of them took turns stopping by, badly parking their cars—sometimes in Howie’s driveway by mistake—bringing Tupperwared meals, pink baby supplies, cardboard boxes of used toys. One of the women stayed overnight occasionally, and Howie’s wife claimed to have seen this one holding hands with Peter out in the backyard, smoothing his eyebrows. Peter was to have many such friends in the years that followed, but never for longer than a few months. Howie couldn’t figure out where they came from, or why they left. He assumed they’d known Peter from before, must have, and that they’d long been kept at bay. Tellingly, the NO SOLICITORS sign disappeared a month after Gillian’s death. Later, when Emily began to walk, the old women came less and less, though they never entirely stopped. One theory is that they’d begun dying off. More likely is that they were unnerved.

  Howie’s wife called her the Little Biddy. Emily adopted the old man’s walk, even the manner in which he puckered his pockets with his hands, and the part ministerial, part astonished way his head tilted when he spoke. Little Emily chugging around the lawn, wearing grown-up sweaters and blouses as dresses. Gillian’s clothes, most likely. Howie would watch the two of them tending the garden, or sitting together in the backyard, conversing—the six-year-old girl, her hand on her chin, hmmmming and nodding in time with her grandfather. Yes, yes, but of course. Timeless old friends comfy inside a total lack of necessity. Harriet wouldn’t ever sit still and talk to Howie, not like that. He tried. His wife said that this was because Harriet was healthy and not a freaking freak, actually, and, Jesus, what the hell did Howie think that they were supposed to talk about, anyway? Fishing?

  For starters, Howie thought. Sure, maybe fishing.

  Harriet and Emily parallel played. Together, yards away. Tiny Harriet in their living room with her books and remarkable drawings, her paintings; Emily in her backyard and garden. Howie’s wife and Harriet shared and magnified each other’s suspicion of everything outside their house—meaning everything Howie most loved and wanted to share with them. He’d try to get his daughter to come outside with him, let’s go see the baby ducks at the creek, let’s name them, feed them bread, but the girl would look at her mother and begin to cry. Mommy, don’t make me. Route 29 and its psycho trucks were too close to their house. Drowning in the Kayaderosseras was too close to their house. Rabies was too close. Bees and skunks. Peter Phane and his unnerving granddaughter were far, far too close. There were clouds that spat lightning and giant trees that dropped branches the size of small trees and deer carrying ticks carrying Lyme disease and God knows what kind of other crap. Bears. Everything was too close to their house that was far away from everything. Harriet was in agreement with her mother: they were surrounded.

  The toddler spent most of her days “with other children” at day care, or at her grandmother’s house or one of Harri’s new, honorary aunts’ houses.

  But Howie knew that Harri watched Emily, sometimes, particularly when her mother wasn’t around. Once he caught his four-year-old daughter at the living room window, watching Emily and Peter in their backyard. Harri was whispering, giggling, as if talking along with them. Emily saw Harri, waved. Peter waved, too. Harri made a thump of a sound, quickly turned, saw Howie watching her, and burst into tears.

  Howie’s wife had been trying the best she could. She loved him, she said, and every so often he knew that this was true. But it wasn’t enough, not for either of them. They had reached adulthood at different times, he with her, before they even married, whereas she was struggling into hers before his eyes. She was helpless inside herself. She felt smothered and afraid of her feral discontentment and the direction she could not stop growing in. He figured this out later. She did not want to hurt anyone, Howie especially, him most of all, but she could not remain as she had been or where she was. She no longer fit. She wore herself badly. It made Howie love her more, and sometimes the pain she felt at not being able to reciprocate her husband’s love, or the life he tried so hard to create, actually made her love him more, too. But this was a love that fed on self-hate, on the guilt for a wrongness she couldn’t help throwing around her in destructive desperation.

  Peter and Emily Phane vexed her. Their garden particularly. Whereas Gillian’s garden had had all the regulation and rot of a vegetable concentration camp, after Emily and Peter’s liberation, it grew effusive, ramshackle, and right out onto their lawn and toward their home. Its fecundity spoke of something unwholesome, depraved. Those two, that house.

  “It’s not normal,” Howie’s wife would say. “Do not even tell me that that is a normal thing!”

  —

  The years passed, his family departed, and Howie was left with Emily and old man Phane. He knew her shifts as well as his own. He knew when she was home sick from school, and at night he could follow her from room to room in her house, and through that make guesses at what she was doing—when she did her homework, ate her supper, watched the TV, when she was talking on the telephone upstairs while Peter thought she was doing her homework. He didn’t stare or obsess; Howie would just glance from a window now and again, unthinkingly, as one checks a clock for the time or the sky for weather.

  Unlike Harri, Emily appeared to have a lot of friends. Boyfriends, too. Howie followed her academic achievements in the local paper—a solid student, Emily M. Phane always made the honor roll, and once or twice the principal’s list—and then what characters she played in the Adirondack Children’s Troupe productions that it didn’t feel proper to attend, though he wanted to, and even waited up after the first night of Free to Be…You and Me, trying to gauge by her expression how it had gone. It went great! Likewise her roles in A Light in the Attic and Charlotte’s Web. To earn money for college, she worked for a few years as a waitress at Davidson Brothers. Howie never visited during her shifts. He did, however, go when he knew she wasn’t working, and he’d imagine the honorable manner in which she served people who couldn’t possibly have appreciated her. He felt bittersweet on her seventeenth birthday when Peter bought her the used Mazda.

  Howie and Peter began to nod more meaningfully at each other once Howie’s wife and daughter left, but that was about it. They never spoke. Sometimes, in the winter, after returning from a night shift at GE, Howie would clear the Phanes’ driveway of snow before they awoke. He generally mowed their lawn after he finished his. The community was comfortable within itself.

  —

  Sometime after Emily received her Mazda, Howie and Harri ran into her at the Aviation Road mall.

  Howie had been called in last minute for a quick shift of quality time. His ex-wife had to work late grading standardized tests and needed him to pick their daughter up from an after-school advanced oil painting class she was taking at Adirondack Community College. Though still a senior in high school, due to her past achievements, Harri had more than qualified for the class and would even be earning transferrable credits. He was proud of her.

  They were at the mall because she needed some art supplies. For Harri, this meant cheap, spangled “Bingo Night” clothing from Sears, kitten-festooned junk from the Dollar Store (“you know, to melt”), and even some actual paint—though this was house paint, Sears again, not oil or acrylic. Well, OK. Howie thought that maybe she’d want some new clothing for herself, too, maybe something less black? She did not. Countess Dracula, his ex-wife had begun calling t
he talented young woman she still refused to call Harri.

  Since Harri rarely came up to Route 29 and since she professed—maybe too strongly—a distaste for motherfucking nature, your so-called natural world, most of the time that Howie and his daughter spent together over the last few years had been walking around this mall or at the movies. They showed old foreign films at the Queens Falls Library most Thursdays and Harri liked having her father take her to these.

  “I can’t watch films with Mom,” Harri once told him. “She makes, like, Mom noises. She’s got to be present in whatever’s going on, you know, letting the characters know whether she agrees or disagrees with their decisions. I think she’s scared of the dark, actually. Scared of letting go. But you disappear, Dad. Disappearing is the whole point. You get it.”

  Howie rarely got it. Those movies. He was just good at being quiet, at watching, waiting, fishing, that’s all—and he was happy to spend any amount of time sitting next to his daughter. Sometimes, afterward, they’d go out to dinner—“creepy date night,” Harri called it—and she’d talk about the film, never movie, with a glimmering, awed openness that she never showed him on any other subject. Howie came to know his daughter best through the Swedish or Soviet movies she enthused about.

  Lately, Howie’s ex-wife felt Harriet had been spending too much time painting in the basement. Her weight had been fluctuating. She was smoking, probably. Her grades were high but she’d stopped listening to the angry music that Howie’s ex-wife had disliked but understood and started playing old, creakingly sad-sounding stuff that just made no sense whatsoever. Gothic music, apparently, like moaning, low-hanging clouds, or slow, endless single-note piano songs. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Suicidal doorbell music, she called it. Hearing it come up from the basement at all hours was unnerving. “Your daughter’s turning the house into Transyl-freaking-vania, Howard. Talk to her.”