by Tod Wodicka
They—meaning Howie, mostly—were paying for the ACC oil painting class because if Harri was going to spend all her after-school time painting, she could at least do so above ground.
Some years ago Harri’s paintings had been extraordinary. Everyone said so. Harri, before turning on the concept of competition and, seemingly, her own talent, had won a number of contests and awards and even had her work shown for a month in the New York State Children’s Museum in Albany, and then another place up in Plattsburgh.
It hadn’t been until Harriet was four that Howie realized how tiny his daughter was. True, she was smaller than Emily Phane, herself a small girl, but until he saw Harriet up close among the other children on her first day of preschool it hadn’t occurred to him. These others were all at least a head taller. Howie had assumed that all children tended to be the same size until they hit puberty. But then there was Harri, instantly diminished, holding his leg, weeping in that soundless, unobtrusive way she had when strangers were around, not wanting to be left alone among the big boys, the big girls. How could he do a thing like that? Howie told the teacher that there must be some mistake here. Had he misunderstood his wife and taken Harriet to the wrong room or preschool? Must have. These freakishly plus-size kids were six or seven, at least, and his daughter, she wasn’t even five yet. The teacher had laughed, scooping little Harriet into her arms. “They’re all four or five, Mr. Jeffries,” she’d said. “But none of them are as sweet and cute as you,” she told Harriet. Though Harriet continued to cry, she didn’t reach out or appear to expect any deliverance from her father.
That night, when Howie told his wife how tiny their daughter was and asked if she had known this, his wife bristled, like what the fuck are you even talking about? “She’s perfectly normal. What is wrong with you?”
Harriet had been self-contained, morbidly sensitive, occasionally nasty, intermittently enthusiastic and joyful, but mostly all alone. Just her on the floor with her drawings and her storybooks. But until that first day of preschool, she, like Howie, hadn’t known that there was anything physically unusual about her. She really hadn’t known how small she was either. This changed her, almost overnight, and she grew smaller. Internally now, and how could Howie not see himself in this, how over the years he had become how he appeared? To Howie and his wife’s surprise, Harriet began taping her construction paper together, making giant mosaics, needing her art to be bigger than she was now, always, as big as she could make it. Table sized, mommy sized. She’d make drawings the size of the living room floor. They got her giant sheets of white drawing paper. This was something that wouldn’t change. She rarely drew or painted something smaller than her body. It was as if her art had demonstrably grown in importance to her and now had to be big enough to both contain her physical body and be someplace that she could imagine herself walking off into.
Several months after Harriet started preschool and began super-sizing her art, Howie’s wife fell in love with Timmy, or started sleeping with Timmy, anyway, and finally realized how unhealthy her husband and Route 29 were for her and her daughter, how they had been stunting their growth in every way possible.
By the time Harriet was a teenager her giant paintings were lovely. Strange, oddly colored landscapes. Still lifes—toys and household appliances—and self-portraits where she only managed to capture the positive, the unseen magic of whatever was around her, even or especially if it was only a toaster or pink Barbie hair dryer. But by her senior year at Saratoga High, something was missing. She still wanted to show Howie her work back then, trusting his silence in the same way she came to distrust her mother’s cloying, effusive praise or, more lately, her frustrated bafflement. Howie would go down to her basement studio and feel oppressed. It looked like she was purposely draining her paintings of life. Countess Dracula indeed. What was she even painting now? Howie sure didn’t know. Obsessively detailed decay? Mucus? Why would anyone want to look at such hostile, unhappy paintings? Moreover, the idea of little Harriet walking into one of these and disappearing seemed both too horrible and too real.
“What do you think?” she’d ask.
“I like them.”
Howie wanted to destroy them. Painting used to bring her joy, recognition. But this was art that had turned in on itself. It was compulsive: the gabbling demands of a monster.
Howie tried to think back to when he was her age. He and Harri’s mother had spent their time necking, riding bikes, swimming in Lake Jogues, occasionally sneaking boxes of Franzia white zinfandel from Howie’s cousin with the water bed, watching lots of TV and speaking with authority about the future, happy in that animal, anticipatory manner specific to virgins in love. Well, Howie thought, at least his daughter wasn’t going to be crippled by disillusionment! Unlike her mother, Harri seemed to have been spared a sense of direct ownership of the future…
Now, the day they met Emily in the mall, Harri was in a pretty good mood. She had just been told by her ACC art instructor that her latest painting was distressing.
“Distressing?” Howie asked.
“The class is kind of a joke,” Harri said. “Distressing and offensive, she actually said. Them her words. They want me to paint, like, trees and mountains. Bad enough I have to live up here, but paint it, too? Marlene—we have to call her Marlene—she’s always trying to explain to us the difference between her so-called natural world and everything that Marlene hates. Plastic and ringtones and cigarettes, for example. I told her that everything in existence is just as natural as everything else in existence. I’m sorry, but a Taco Bell is just as natural as a waterfall, you know?”
“You used to paint trees and mountains.”
“What?” Harri said. “That’s never what I was actually painting, Dad.”
Well, that’s what they’d looked like to Howie. He asked, “Well, are you learning anything?”
“Doing my best not to,” Harri said. “I don’t know. I guess I like a few of the other students. They’re cool, they get my stuff. It’s better than high school. It’s just Marlene—she’s a marshmallow. The way she talks. Like her mouth is full of marshmallows. She’s totally insane, actually. By painting a lake over and over again she thinks she’ll be able to understand a lake.”
Howie said, “Which lake?”
“You’re incredible. Which lake.”
Lakes were Howie’s favorite thing. Ten or so years ago, Harriet had painted Howie a pond-sized painting of Lake Jogues for his birthday. It took up an entire wall and, without exaggerating, had been among the things on earth that made Howie the most happy. But Harri had recently taken it from his living room wall, telling him it was an embarrassing piece of shit, juvenilia, she’d said, and she seriously couldn’t stomach it up there another single fucking second. Made her want to puke. Howie didn’t complain. He said he understood and helped cut it in two and drive it back to her mother’s house so she could take it to the basement and further desecrate its corpse. He asked Harri for another painting, a replacement, maybe a less juvenile lake? Eventually she brought him a large canvas that looked like rust and spleen.
Howie wasn’t hungry but hoped that Harri was. He liked taking her to dinner, something they hadn’t done in months. In fact, as was typical, they hadn’t seen or spoken to each other in four weeks. “Would you like to get some dinner before I take you home?”
Sometimes Harri was a vegetarian, but usually she wasn’t. It wasn’t that she liked animals, she once told him, it was more that she was sick to fucking death of plants. There were way too many in her opinion. “Could we go to Bellaggio’s?”
“Yes.”
The little things, like his daughter asking him if they could do something and Howie being able to answer in the affirmative. Here, for you, a yes. Bellaggio’s, an apparently authentic downstate Italian place marooned inside an upstate strip mall between the Radio Shack and Feigenbaum Cleaners, was a favorite of theirs. The owner and chef, Roger Bellaggio, was married to the daughter of one of Howie’s co-workers
and always served seventeen-year-old Harri a red plastic Coca-Cola glass a quarter full of their house red wine. “And one Italian soda for the young lady,” he’d say, and wink. Howie liked how Roger Bellaggio, a father of three girls himself, regarded them. Howie always felt more like a real father in that restaurant, like a whole damn family, sitting there, eating sausage pizza or pasta and sharing the Coca-Cola transgression with his wonderful daughter, being recognized by big Roger Bellaggio as the kind of man who both had a wonderful daughter and didn’t balk at breaking laws that infringed upon her happiness. He was that guy. So he let Harri have a little wine with dinner, so what? You got a problem with that? Harri got endless enjoyment from Roger Bellaggio’s dozens of framed photographs of a spry, mustached version of himself on the set of Rocky IV, a movie his brother had done the catering for. She loved that the massive Italian’s name was Roger. Harri would get him to tell different variations of the same tales of Dolph Lundgren and Carl Weathers. Roger Bellaggio never mentioned Sylvester Stallone. Harri invented dark, complex reasons for the omission.
Howie and Harri were on their way out of the mall, passing through the food court when Harri’s walking stiffened.
Emily Phane alone, standing by the door. She spotted them, waved. Harri pretended not to notice, then, embarrassed that she had so obviously pretended not to notice, reciprocated the wave, and then, inhaling, went over, leaving Howie behind, a can of Sears house paint in each of his hands. Brown and slightly less brown.
It looked like Emily, who was at least two heads taller than Harri, was sucking Howie’s daughter into her. The way they stood. Like Emily was one of Harri’s earlier, more beautiful paintings, a fantasy self-portrait she wanted to disappear into. They spoke.
Probably.
But Howie could also imagine them just standing there, silently. Staring.
It was intrusive, meeting Emily here like this. His tiny, aggrieved Harriet poking out from one of her black tents, ripped stockings, hair nearly shaved from her childlike head, and then Emily Phane with the smiling. It was illusory, unpleasant, the two of them together. Like two different species. Their childhood parallel play had continued through their lives: always aware of each other, always watching, but never exactly friends. Harri was too quiet, too antisocial—and, on top of that, the two of them went to different schools, Emily to Queens Falls High and Harri to Saratoga. Emily, though eccentric, was effortless. She dressed normally. Prettily, Howie supposed. Or, you never really noticed how she dressed. Harri, on the other hand, made a great effort to assure that you noticed. Emily was quick to laugh. Harri quick to close in on herself. Howie felt a strong, unfeasible bond with the girl next door, but seeing Emily’s open energy diminish his daughter, he wished that he could just turn Emily down a smidgeon. Please, leave my little girl alone.
Howie imagined his daughter walking straight up into Emily and disappearing, as if that’s where she belonged anyway, who she actually was, or who she could have been if Howie hadn’t failed so spectacularly. Emily and Harriet living next door as one.
—
“God, Dad,” Harri said, returning to him. She lifted her eyebrows. One of them pierced with a metal beetle.
Emily was gone.
“That,” she continued, “was your next-door neighbor. By the way. Maybe you’ve seen her around once or twice in the past seventeen years?”
“I’m sorry,” Howie said. He tried to fix his face.
“Don’t be,” she said. “I love how you don’t even pretend to give a shit. You’re an inspiration. But did you see how wasted Emily looked?”
Howie had seen nothing of the sort. “She has a lot of freckles,” he said.
“Observant,” Harri said. “No, I mean, it looks like she hasn’t slept in years. I feel bad for her. There are all these bitchy rumors now, you know? These slut rumors. I fucking hate high school.”
Harri liked testing her father with new words and concepts. He said, “She was probably up late studying.”
“Probably not, Dad.”
Harri took out her phone, began tapping.
Howie said, “The freckles make her look strange.”
Silence. Had he gone too far, defending Emily? He felt guilty—as if he’d just been caught cheating on his daughter with another daughter. He said, “You’re much prettier.”
“Jesus.” Harri made a face. “What are you even talking about?”
“I’m sure she gets enough sleep,” Howie continued.
“What the hell, Dad.”
“OK.”
“You are so weird. I don’t think she’s ever really liked me. I don’t know,” and Harri turned around, back to where Emily had been standing. She watched that spot.
Moments later, Harri’s phone beeped. “Uh-oh,” she said. “It’s Mom. She says you promised to buy me a new jacket.”
“OK.”
“Not OK. I don’t need a new jacket. I could use some new boots though, actually. Maybe before Bellaggio’s?”
“That sounds nice.”
“Nice?” Harri laughed. “You’re a maniac.”
Howie liked Harri best when they were shopping. She became younger, more possible, and so they went back, deeper back into the Aviation Road mall, Harri pulling him toward a not inexpensive pair of Frankensteins she promised he’d be in a holy shitload of trouble for getting her. “Mom’ll manslaughter you!” How could he resist?
They put the shopping bags and cans of paint into the backseat of Howie’s car. They got in the front. Howie put his seat belt on. Harri, of course, did not. She’d grown unwieldy again.
“Bellaggio’s?” he said.
“I don’t know, maybe just take me home.”
Howie said, “OK.”
He started the car.
“Yeah, take me home.”
“OK.”
“I know it is, Dad.”
They drove in silence. Howie, at a loss, asked a question about Emily, wondered what they’d talked about at the mall, if Emily was applying to any of the same colleges as Harri.
“Seriously?” Harri said.
She didn’t wear seat belts because of the way they fell across her neck: she was just way too small. They left marks. Her skin irritated easily. “The worst thing is, I’m small but I’m not cute,” she once told him. “I’m small the way bugs are small.”
Other children had been cruel to her. Likely they still were. But even she wouldn’t let that take the blame for the inscrutable, constant costume changes of her moods. “Hey,” she said, finally, as they approached her mother’s house. “Hey.” She squeezed Howie’s arm. “I’m sorry, Dad. I love you.”
Pulling his car out of his ex-wife’s driveway, Howie honked three times, something he only ever did with her and only because when his daughter was little she’d absolutely insisted on it. Three honks.
Dad!
Dad!
Dad!
His daughter was still little. She waved good-bye, playful now, happy, a brand-new boot comically gloving each of her hands. She raised them above her head and waggled them, then bent them slowly, back and forth, like the antennae of an insect someone had just stepped on.
4
“Message. One,” said the telephone robot. “Friday. Eleven. Four. Tee. One. P. M.”
BEEEEP!
“Hi, this is Emily Phane from next door. Peter’s granddaughter. Mr. Jeffries, I’m really sorry to bother you, but I’m calling because—no I’m calling him now, I’m actually on the phone right now, I’m [mostly unintelligible]—”
BEEEEP!
“Message. Two. Friday. Eleven. Four. Tee. Four. P.M.”
BEEEEP!
“Sorry. Emily Phane again, from next door. From Boston. I know this is unusual but could you please call me back as soon as you get this? It’s an emergency. I mean, I hope it’s not an emergency, but—here, my number is six one seven, eight three eight, five five six one. Please call. Even the middle of the night, whenever you get this message. That’s area code six one
seven, five five five, five five six one. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks. Bye!”
BEEEEP!
“Message. Three. Friday. Eleven. Four. Tee. Nine. P. M.”
“…”
BEEEEP.
“End. Of. Messages.”
—
Nearly three years ago, on a Friday at 11:58 p.m., Howie stood waiting for his telephone to ring again. He had been sitting down but that began to feel inappropriate. The phone was more likely to cooperate if he was standing.
It would ring on Saturday, he thought. In two minutes. He was in his kitchen and had been all evening, through all nine unanswered phone calls and two messages. In the same way one might obsessively peel back a bandage and poke a wound, Howie wanted badly for the phone to ring again. He knew what he was when the phone was ringing. He was a coward. When it wasn’t, he actually entertained the idea of answering it were it to ring again. Why not? Then it would ring again and he would remember. He was paralyzed. He could not answer, just as he knew that he would never be able to call Emily Phane back, knew it even as he was writing down her number in his address book, circling it in red marker, twice, as if to differentiate it from all the other less important numbers he also was not ever going to call.
EMILY EMERGENCY 617-555-5561.
Or, as she said, perhaps there wasn’t an emergency. What then? Why had she been calling? How did she even have his number? He was confounded.
Message one was the first time that he had ever heard Emily’s voice up close, certainly the first time she had ever been in his house. His kitchen. His kitchen table. Emily, for the most part, sounded like she was supposed to.
Telephones that you expect to ring look markedly different from telephones you do not ever expect to ring. Howie played the messages again. BEEEEP! Then once again.
The unintelligible part on the first message concerned him. There was someone there with Emily, a male someone. Was he the emergency? That did not make sense. If not an emergency, the male was certainly an asshole, possibly even a fucking asshole, this much Howie gathered because he thought that he could hear Emily, her hand momentarily over the receiver, calling him exactly that. Back in Howie’s day, that kind of language certainly would have constituted a low-level emergency, but a call to your next-door neighbor hundreds of miles away? Doubtful.