The Household Spirit

by Tod Wodicka

  Compared to the plant-choked living room, the kitchen was a sky. Four uncovered windows. Everything washed out by a hundred years of direct sunlight: pale wooden cupboards, a steel marshmallow of a fridge, a microwave and a toaster and ostensibly brown wallpaper that had long since camouflaged itself into the exact color of the light that struck it. The linoleum was permanently clammy and nice underfoot.

  In the kitchen there were doors. Laundry room door. Door to the backyard. Door to Peppy’s office.

  It was past midnight.

  Emily refilled the yellow ceramic jug at the sink. Then back to the living room to water the plants.

  They thickened and hushed expectantly. Stupid things. Stupid me. Emily’s eyes wanted to sleep, but her head, she knew, was no mattress. Who said that? Sometimes she’d close only one eye, as if this would be enough, tricking herself, giving half her head relief. Keep busier than time and time goes away. That was also a trick. Because it wouldn’t be past midnight forever; soon, once again, it’d be before midnight. Meaning what? Meaning Emily didn’t know, just do something before you fucking fall asleep. Not fall, she thought. Plummet.

  She watered a particularly sullen tree. Its tilt and sag worried her. Then a shrub, a matriarch, Emily decided, with a sudden gust of goodwill toward her own peculiarities. You’re a good old girl, aren’t you? Look at you. You’re a grandmamma.

  Then on to the spider-eyed berry thing. Then the one with the pointy clown wings. She watered a palm that reminded her of a blind hunting dog.

  Emily’s old professor reprimanding her again: enough with the animism, Ms. Phane!

  Was that all she was doing?

  Back before all this, at Boston University, she’d made motions toward a study of botany, plant biology, environmental science. That kind of thing. In the end, she’d felt too drowsily bemused to adapt herself to another view of reality. Science seemed fussy, insincere. Biometrics had made her sad. She had, however, become loosely interested in the more esoteric end of so-called plant neurobiology, specifically in long-dismissed studies of CIA agents who’d hooked up houseplants to galvanometers. It made sense to her that lie detector machines could pick up the electrical stress of plants when you thought about eating them or setting them ablaze. Emily couldn’t quite believe in the line that separated plants from animals, or, for that matter, sleep from the waking world. Plants dominated the world. That was a fact. They ate light and invented aspirin and talked to one another via chemical signaling. They learned. They gossiped with one another over great distances. In a sense, they were time machines. Plants existed in a different, slower dimension.

  They were kind of terrifying, actually.

  Look at one under a microscope and try not to freak out.

  Start small. Baby steps. Snap out of it. Emily could still maybe go back to before all this, couldn’t she? She could! She wasn’t one of those women who later found themselves half eaten by cats, or mummified in a room wallpapered in aluminum foil. No way. She’d always been the cutup, the class clown. This was like that. This was quirky. Seriously, what could be funnier than a room full of sentient, stolen plants?

  Tomorrow she could jump in her Mazda and drive down to the Aviation Road mall. Buy a new smartphone. Clothes, shoes: new things for a brand-new you. She could even hit up Burger King and buy back some of the weight she’d lost.

  The mouth of the fireplace was fanged with cacti. Urgh. You guys. Emily did not like them one bit. She poured water over their heads.

  You’re quirky, all right, she thought.

  She laughed.

  Quirky as a crippling bone disease.

  They were zombies, these cacti. Part here, part irretrievably elsewhere. They reminded Emily of Peppy’s last months on the sofa. The hospice nurses in their Honda Civics coming by to water him. The way his beard continued to grow, eyes bald and calked over. How inappropriate TV was, but how terrified Emily’d been to click it off. The glaucoma of TV light further draining her grandfather’s face of color, as if he were entering a horrific version of one of those Turner Classic Movies he so loved. Caterpillar whorls of hair growing from his ears, and oh my God did that mean he’d always trimmed his ear hair before? Should Emily have? How? With what? She wished she could have joked with him about that too, about all that fuzziness filling up his ear—Can you hear it growing, Peppy? There’s more hair inside your ear now than on the top of your head! The two of them laughing instead of sitting there watching those plastic tubes pump him full of absence.

  She’d plugged the cacti into the fireplace partly as a warning and partly as proof that her sense of humor was intact. Best of both worlds. She’d gotten to threaten houseplants with fiery death, safe in the knowledge that threatening houseplants was also, obviously, kind of hilarious. Oh it was satisfying. The only question being, at what point does having a sense of humor about your own eccentricities cross over into the lane with the people who wander around laughing at everything for no apparent reason? Because maybe insane laughing people are only laughing in order to prove to themselves that they are self-aware and not, in fact, insane. They get it; they’re totally in on the joke. They’re still fucking insane.

  6

  She was everybody’s second-best friend. Growing up, Emily wasn’t lonely or necessarily unpopular, but something was missing.

  She’d watch other girls being best friends. She’d fixate, zone in on it, couldn’t help it. She measured best friends against her own limper friendships, sometimes jealously, always inquisitively. Studying how they’d entangle their laughter, perfumes, ringtones, slang, blouses (the word itself, blouse, was, to Emily, a best friend word, a mom word, something Emily wanted to discuss, what do you think of this blouse, but didn’t know how or with whom). The way they did their hair, seemingly shared their hair; best friends applying cosmetics together, using each other as mirrors, finishing their eyes with the precision of synchronized swimmers. Their high-pitched hallway hugs and the giggly, locker-side huddles. The way best friends rode through hallways as if they were in the back of invisible taxis, discussing what and who they saw from the windows as if nobody could see or hear them, nobody important, anyway. Nobody that mattered. Emily had wanted to have that too, to feel like she was in the back of a cab with another girl, awesome and mattering. Instead, she’d begun to feel as if her very girlhood was unrequited.

  You saw them everywhere. Texting each other. Confiding. Best buds bitching on TV, solving crimes, sharing rapturous advice about home equity insurance and butter substitutes. Best friends talking about boys—freaking dwelling on the retarded conversational minutia of boys, as if what happened when Tucker e-mailed Caite was some kind of a Buddhist koan. Even in the pages of Emily’s Spanish exercise book. Repeat after me: “Eres una amiga maravillosa…” It was a conspiracy! Like something from a new Richard Scarry children’s book. Best Friends Come in All Shapes and Sizes. Because they did! But not in Emily’s shape, or size, and she didn’t want to feel sorry for herself but at that age, at twelve, thirteen, fourteen, whatever, sometimes feeling sorry for yourself can be indistinguishable from feeling anything at all.

  Did they sense her neediness? Was need always the same thing as desperation? Can there be something so wrong with you that people pick up on it on some other level, a level they don’t even consciously know they’re picking up on? Because even weirdos, as far as Emily could tell, found best friends. Even jerks. There was this shy girl, also named Emily, Emily Hecker, and she didn’t seem to have any friends, like, ever, and seemed as if she couldn’t even raise her voice to normal talking levels. Kids called her Meep. Then, one day, Meep had a best friend too. Two of them meeping obliviously down the hall. How? Were Meep’s parents loaded? Was it because Emily Hecker had parents? Emily Phane couldn’t talk to her grandfather about this. Peppy was the best but not at being a girl; if she tried then he would probably only wonder why she cared so much about pleasing idiots anyway and then she’d have to talk herself blue explaining that she didn’t and that
they weren’t. Don’t worry, he’d say. You work yourself up, he’d say. Can’t force that kind of thing.

  Fine.

  Probably he was right, she’d concede. Though, of course, the conversation hadn’t even actually happened, so who was right? Concede to whom? Emily would, for a time, try to stop pleasing the idiots, pleasing anyone, but then she’d realize that in doing this she was only trying to please Peppy, and, worse, she was trying to please a Peppy that she’d made up in her head! Her grandfather hadn’t said a word about not forcing something or Annie Sweeney being an idiot, though he was right, Annie Sweeney totally was.

  Emily’d suss out a room for potential best friend material; it was second nature. She did this scan. Like, who was unattached? Were there weak links, current best friendships on the waver, going stale? She looked for small, potentially exploitable stylistic divergences that maybe portended some kind of greater rift on the horizon—a girl experimenting with Hot Topic goth, suddenly, and directly in the confused face of her Old Navy BFF…Emily knew best friend-hood was coming, must be, like losing her virginity, graduating from high school, learning to drive. Have a little faith. Everyone gets a best friend. Emily wasn’t shy. People liked her. Her wavy anti-seriousness drew people in, but it was becoming clear that Emily was attractive to other girls in the same way that the poisonous, toothy things are the most attractive things at an aquarium or zoo. It was like they knew what happened to her at night, like she was contagious. Knew without knowing. Press your palms to the glass, get close, but not best friend forever close. You best-friend one of those fish, girl, and you’re done for.

  It was different with the guys. The skaters, burgeoning potheads, and the sarcastic, unhappy brainiacs. Emily didn’t like the jocks as much, but even some of them, the cute ones, whatever, they could be fun to hang with too. They had a bovine niceness that could be hypnotizing. But boys didn’t count. That kind of buddyhood was way too easy: all braying loud surfaces, body humor, dude. Dude, check this out. Emily needed someone to hold on to through the storm of puberty—though, of course, that wasn’t at all how she thought about it back then.

  Basically, middle school sucked. That’s when the second-best-friend thing started. That sobriquet, as Peppy would say. Seven girls over a period of three, four years. Oh, it was like they knew. Like they wanted to rub her face in it. Because, seriously, second-best friend? Who said that?

  Jess Yarsevich for starters.

  They’d met during the Adirondack Children’s Troupe rehearsals for Free to Be…You and Me. Jess Yarsevich was fourteen, two years older than Emily. She had recently moved from Tucson with a mother and a prematurely balding older brother, Jared, whom Emily had once mistaken for Jess’s father. “Naw, Dad’s back in New Mexico. I’m gonna spend the summer with him.” Her words twanged. She complained about not having enough winter clothes, though obviously she liked wearing the crap out of her revealing southwestern skirts and tops under the puff of her new upstate New York jacket, always asking if you’d heard of things that she knew you couldn’t possibly have ever heard of. Cool Tucson things, people and websites for bands her older brother knew of before they were lame. Jess was membership only. In her club, you were either in or out and you knew immediately, before you’d even had a chance to apply. Most of the kids in the troupe were out. Free to Be…You and Me? Kind of dorky. But Jess liked Emily; right off the bat they’d made not-too-needy eyeball contact, an eyebrow up, a thing with their lips, and: membership considered. Their eyebrows fit. What are you doing here? Their smiles fit. Then their laughter. Membership accepted!

  It was magic.

  They’d make demonstrably tortured faces across the room at each other during “It’s All Right to Cry.” They snuck out to get coffee at the nearby Stewart’s gas station. Jess insisted that girls at the University of Arizona in Tucson drank coffee. So they did too and they’d talk about how awesome Tucson was.

  Once, afterward, Emily told Jess about her and Peppy’s garden. The garden was her favorite thing. The furry, green wholeness of her Route 29 backyard was like a pet or a family member: the flowers waking up in the morning, vines all done up in vegetable ornaments, the berries and the roots, the kind, useless plants that didn’t produce food or beauty but existed all the same, and the scent of soil, mulch, and how insects, if you listened right, sang better than birds. They weeded because they had to, to save the others from being strangled to death, but they also had a patch—at Emily’s seven-year-old insistence—that they left specifically for weeds, a sanctuary out near the creek. Emily and Peppy working together silently, the only time they were really entirely serious with each other, hour after hour and not a single slip into irony. That was their sacred space, and these were things that she hadn’t mentioned to anyone at school—ever. Why? Because plants and grandfathers were uncool? Partly, sure. But were they really that uncool? More uncool than time-share Disney World vacations and Jesus? No, it was something else: something like, if she told a girl about her garden, then, naturally, she’d have to tell her all about her grandfather too, about their perfectly contained world and—and then she’d be too close to what happened to her at night. Her sleep problems. And then what would they think? Well, they’d think something like: you are obviously not right in the head, Emily Phane, and you are therefore unworthy of being a friend, best or otherwise. Because, actually, what was Emily even supposed to think? The worlds didn’t fit. Emily had to keep things separate, uncontaminated. Later, she’d recognize that some of her let’s call them social problems stemmed from this, maybe a lot of them. But on that day, Jess set something off simply by telling Emily how much cooler the trees in Arizona were. The trees in Arizona, she said, were cacti. She said they even grew giant flowers. She said how her brother would go out into the desert with his friends and their uncle’s rifle and shoot the shit out of them. To Emily, this was a little burst of light. It was what she’d been waiting for and she couldn’t resist, needed to know more, not about massacring cacti necessarily but about how you took care of plants in Arizona, the desert soil—or sand?—and she wanted to know all about the garden that Jess never once mentioned having in Tucson but surely had, secretly had, just like Emily. Emily felt it. Jess loved to garden.

  “Garden?” Jess said.

  “Mine’s amazing,” Emily whispered.

  They were outside waiting to be picked up after troupe rehearsals. It was January, dark, windy; a bone-dry snow hissed around their feet, weightless in the freezing halogen light of the Queens Falls Middle School parking lot.

  Jess laughed. “You’re hilarious, Emily Phane! Oh my God, I love your sense of humor. I know, right? Who gardens?”

  Emily balked, recovered, said, “Old people garden.” She laughed. “Me and really old people. Obviously.”

  The ability to crack Jess Yarsevich up overrode any sense of betrayal. Gardens, Jess repeated, wondering why such things existed. Before they moved to Queens Falls, she’d given her brother’s friend, Quint Ferris, a blow job, she said, suddenly. “Speaking of gardens—”

  Emily felt as if she’d been thrown into a pool. She had never heard anything like this before. She couldn’t help staring at Jess’s mouth. The same mouth that had just been singing “Parents Are People” and “Don’t Dress Your Cat in an Apron.” Jess told her how to give Quint Ferris a killer blow job.

  “Did it hurt?”

  Jess said, “What, why would it hurt?”

  Emily thought that it was supposed to hurt a little.

  Fourteen wasn’t an approaching age so much as a whole new freaking planet, and one that Emily wanted to immigrate to ASAP. Couldn’t she just skip thirteen altogether? Maybe, she decided, and maybe this secondhand blow-jobbing was her visa. Because there could only be one thing going on here, don’t miss your chance.

  “Jess,” she blurted. “You’re my best friend!”

  Sharpened silence, wind. It was like a nightmare where you suddenly can’t find your legs. You look and look and: no legs. No nothing
. The moment was false. Emily knew it. Jess probably knew it. Best friend? Best crap. It was like the snow around them had suddenly become confetti, had always been confetti, the mountains in the distance nothing but flat Adirondack Children’s Troupe scenery. Pretty soon the trees would start singing about gender equality. The moon hoisted up with ropes. It was so wrong. Emily was so wrong.

  “Aw, Em,” Jess said in her Free to Be…You and Me voice. “That is so sweet of you to say. You’re like my best friend, too.”

  Emily hated Jess Yarsevich. “Whatever,” she said. Then, “I’m just fucking with you.”

  Emily had never cussed like that, not once. That wasn’t—where did that even come from?

  Jess said, “Oh.”

  Maybe Jess was her best friend? Or would be, could be? Maybe Emily had jumped the gun and, wait, could it be that Jess’s factious Free to Be voice was her true voice? I mean, she was here, wasn’t she? She was a terrific singer. She never flaked on a rehearsal or gave less than 110 percent. Emily said, “Well, I mean, I’m sorry, you’re like one of my best friends.”

  They paused, adjusted. They looked at each other and tried to figure out just who they were now, or should be. What had happened and how had it happened so quickly?

  “Good, kid, because I was gonna say.” Jess pretended to laugh.

  Emily pretended to laugh.

  Kid?

  Jess stopped laughing, finally, and offered, “I guess you’re my second-best friend.” Pause. “In Queens Falls.”

  They were hardly even tenth or twentieth best friends after that. Maybe Jess had begun feeling best friend inclinations and Emily had messed it up. Maybe Jess felt she’d gone too far, that blow-jobbing the twenty-year-old Quint Ferris didn’t sit nearly as well with Jess Yarsevich as she’d claimed it had. Jess soon left the Adirondack Children’s Troupe—she joined another, bigger theater group in Saratoga. They stopped hanging out. On the rare occasion that they’d run into each other at school they’d mime happiness, say that they’d see each other soon, joke about the old troupe maybe, say they’d call, text, whatever, and then, many call-less and text-less months down the line, stop acknowledging the other altogether. And maybe Jess didn’t see Emily. But Emily did see Jess: for a whole year she was acutely aware of Jess’s movements through Queens Falls Middle School, where her locker was, her homeroom, what period she had lunch and who she sat with, which friends, at which table. Seeing Jess made Emily feel disgusting—yes, that was really the word—because it reminded her that she was always looking, in a sense, for Jess Yarsevich.