The Household Spirit

by Tod Wodicka

  “Night terrors, huh,” Peppy had said. It had been abundantly clear that his granddaughter was terrified at night.

  There was little they could do, but they had pamphlets that they referred to as literature. They cautioned him against any kind of serious medication. Just their two cents, they said. Peppy appreciated this. Had he, however, thought about taking Emily to a therapist? You can never know where these things come from—or what can help.

  Back in the car, Emily asked, “Peppy, am I very sick? Do I have to have the medicine now?”

  “No,” he said. He pulled the car out of the parking lot. “You just have bad dreams.”

  “They’re not dreams.” Because she knew, even then. “I already told you, Peppy.”

  “I understand that,” he said. He sighed. “Patience. You’ll get better, sweetknees. Doctors said so. You’re getting better.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “The doctors said you’re shipshape. Good news. They said don’t you worry. They’ll go away as you get older. Do you want to stop for doughnuts?”

  “How older?”

  “Dunkin’ Donuts just up ahead.”

  “I want to go home,” Emily said. Then, “Greg Miller from kindergarten broke his arm on a tree and he got to have a cast on his arm.”

  “Not the same thing.”

  “Now we’re allowed to draw our names on Greg Miller’s arm.”

  “Emily, nobody is going to put your head in a cast.”

  “But maybe just at night, Peppy. But maybe not like a cast,” she said. “Like a helmet. Or what if we cut my hair all off?”

  Peppy swallowed his smile. “Bad hair doesn’t cause bad dreams, and, anyway, your hair is not bad.”

  “They’re not dreams, Peppy.”

  “Your hair is outstanding.”

  “But maybe with no hair I could look older, like you, like when they’re supposed to go away? You said. When I’m older. They’ll think I’m old and they’ll go away.”

  “Who?”

  Emily was silent.

  “Emily?”

  “I don’t want to go to sleep without the medicine.”

  “There is no medicine.”

  “Then I want a haircut.”

  “You’re fine,” Peppy said. Trying to lighten things, “Cutting off all of your hair is not going to make you look old. It will make you look like a goblin.”

  “Good,” Emily said.

  “Tell me, how do you think your Peppy got so old? Baldness?”

  “Birthdays.”

  Peppy laughed. “Who loves you?”

  “Peppy loves me.”

  “That’s right he does.”

  —

  The night terrors would occur an hour or so after Emily fell asleep. They were not dreams. There was no narrative, no images, and it was the same thing every single time. It was a concentrated wrongness. It couldn’t be explained or described and only made sense from a tongue-tied corner of Emily’s consciousness. And it was terrible.

  Like this: suddenly, inside sleep, the wrongness would thicken and grow until it was all that she was, until it finally broke Emily from sleep, from bed, eyes open, dark rushing in, and she was rushing, too, running through the house blindly toward her grandfather. She would turn on lights, all of them, exploding the house awake. The severe way a room filled with things, herself included, all conjured just like that at a flick of a switch. She needed it but couldn’t handle it. Light. What was it? What was any of this? The carpeting and dolls and dumb, sinister pieces of furniture, all the senseless shouts of matter, and all Emily’s fault for flicking the stupid switch. Turn them off, make them go away. Make it stop. Often, Emily would scream.

  Sometimes, in school, she’d get intimations of these night terrors when trying to fix her reality within the concept of outer space, the infinite, or the fact that everything was happening on an ostensibly flat surface on a planet that was actually gigantic and round and rolling at abominable speeds through nothing much whatsoever. Surrounded by what? Light-years of more of the same. Later, the best way Emily found to describe these terrors was that it was like being upside down in her own body.

  Peppy would help Emily sip water from a Dixie cup. Guiding her into the bathroom. Here, up up up. Plopping her on the bathroom counter, next to the sink. The homey purr of the tap filling a cup with water. This is how you drink water.

  “There, now you, now you, one, two, three…”

  She’d turn and look with Peppy. The mirror like a guide, a way for Emily to see how it was done while she was apparently in the process of doing it, and Peppy always counting, usually to three, but sometimes higher, numbers stacking, not exactly calming but making more sense than words. The night terrors felt like they would never end, the gaping panic of them, and she felt like there was no escape and that from now on everything was going to be like this because maybe everything was really always like this, or was like this before she was born and would be like this for Emily when she was finally, genuinely dead. Later, as an adult, she would think that she’d been cursed at too young an age with a sideways peek into the exact opposite of life.

  Finally, she would hush. Her sobbing would soften and she’d feel herself fitting back into her body. Then, like that, like nothing had just happened, back into sleep.

  Generally, mercifully, in the morning Emily wouldn’t remember a thing. Not unless she awoke on the living room sofa or in her grandfather’s bed, or unless Peppy told her about it or, later, when she was older and more perceptive, by the tense, internal way he went about preparing breakfast. A sleepless hang to his bulk. Cheeriness, tight as a drum.

  Waking on the sofa: “Why am I here?”

  “You had a bad dream.”

  She’d remember then. Could still feel the wrongness, the terror of not being real, of not fitting. “But no,” she’d say. “No, I didn’t. I remember, Peppy. That’s not why I’m here.”

  Sometimes, during those preteen years, she would pray, which owing to her lack of religious instruction was basically a guileless, intuitive form of supernatural haggling. I’ll do this if you stop that. It helped. But going to sleep with CBS TV on the radio helped even more, and moving the bed around the room and never sleeping in the same position twice in a row might have helped as well, hard to say. One evening she’d push her bed to the window, the next she’d lay her head where her feet normally went. The next she’d nudge her bed a few feet to the right or left, or sleep on the floor in her sleeping bag, though Peppy never fully approved of that. Too many crooked old drafts in the house.

  “Bad night, Peppy,” she’d say.

  “Bad night,” he’d repeat.

  The same way you hoped an actress might break a leg, you never wished Emily good night. What for? She never had them. Bad nighting, as invented by Peppy when Emily was eight, was both accurate and homeopathically hopeful. Mostly, though, it made them both smile. Never failed. Even toward the end, when Emily was twenty-two and Peppy could hardly even talk. “Bad night, Peppy,” she’d say, kissing his forehead. His dentureless smile like an attempt to inhale the entire lower half of his face, and a bad night it would be.

  But like the doctors predicted, the night terrors gradually lessened as Emily approached puberty, from one a night to one every other night to one a week, then a month, until they ceased altogether around Emily’s fifteenth birthday. The damage was done. Sleep had cast its odd, subtle shadow over her life.

  Two years of therapy had gone nowhere, or, actually, everywhere. Deceased mother this, deceased mother that, and then, of course, the doozy that nobody ever even knew her father. He might be anywhere, anyone, or just as deceased as her deceased mother. Every man was potentially her father. Emily was told that this was how she perceived the world. And those bad dreams that Emily politely insisted weren’t dreams? They were dreams. She’d have to accept that. She’d have to accept that whenever she saw a man, she thought: Daddy. Better she realized this now, before she entered into more destructive sexu
al relationships in the future, right? Her bad dreams were probably PTSD-like attempts by her subconscious to attract the attention of a father, who might be anyone, anywhere, et cetera. Or they were sexual in nature, which is why she couldn’t properly describe or account for them, or was too embarrassed to. “Tell me again about being upside down in your own body, Emily. Where does that mean your head is? Can you point to where your head is on your body when you’re upside down in your own body?” Yuck. Gross. Emily walked out on two of her four therapists because they developed a crush on the idea that Peppy was sexually abusing her in the middle of the night while she was sleeping. “But that’s not happening,” Emily told them. “That’s not what I’m here for.”

  “If I may, isn’t it likely that you yourself don’t know what you’re here for?”

  “Like here on earth?”

  “Well, you’ve got a delightful sense of humor. That’s established. I appreciate that. For the sake of argument, Emily, let’s say that if something like that is happening then you don’t know that it is happening. It’s not your fault. Only your subconscious knows.”

  “My subconscious told you to tell me?”

  “Couldn’t it be that your so-called night terrors are telling everyone?”

  Then there was Route 29’s near-total isolation. They never got around to having poor Mr. Jeffries nocturnally raping her, but that, Emily assumed, was only because they’d never seen his face.

  “Why do you think this Mr. Jeffries keeps his deceased mother in the attic, Emily? Can you tell me a little about his mother?”

  “God, I’m just joking!”

  “OK, let me ask you a question. Isn’t taking nothing seriously the same thing as taking everything seriously?”

  Then there was her grandfather’s alleged misanthropy: Did Emily feel beholden to it? Enslaved or manipulated or cowed by it? Did she have to feel the same way about the world in order to meet his approval? He was, after all, all she had. Did she think that was normal? Did that frighten her? His age? His mortality? Isolation? Irony? His masculinity? Did his occasional lady friends disturb her? Then, finally, there was her love of plants—now here was a metaphorically fertile subject! Tell us about gardening. How does it make you feel? Tomatoes. Soil. Cucumbers. How do tomatoes make you feel, Emily? How does holding a cucumber make you feel? Because, hm, perhaps gardening was nothing less than Emily’s own way of mothering herself and the world around her, a gigantic splurge of overcompensating nurture of nature to account for a lack of female role models? She was trying to grow a mother, wasn’t she? Or maybe, Emily, you’re only trying to grow yourself anew?

  Right.

  No. Her sleep was not co-opted by dead relatives. Peppy wasn’t a deviant. Gardening was a hobby. She liked being outdoors: the pebbly sound of the Kayaderosseras, the tall pines and squishy grass beneath her toes. Being curious and terribly sad about not knowing who her father was was different from being emotionally crippled or systematically destroyed, night after night, by an unaccountably rapey lack of father. Or mother. Or anything else she didn’t actually need, like the dull sexual insinuations, the how about sketching whatever you feel today sessions, the expensive, torturous logic. She needed a good sleep is what she needed. Maybe she needed a best friend. Mostly, wasn’t she a thirteen-year-old girl? Did they have pills for that?

  Finally, she said, “They just make me feel smarter than them, Peppy. That’s all. I walk in feeling strange and nervous, thinking maybe this time they might help me, and I walk out feeling like they’re morons.”

  Peppy sighed.

  “I’m sorry,” Emily said. “Dr. Branca’s not so bad. It’s just annoying.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” he said. “I’ve got to tell you, Emily, I’m extremely frustrated myself.”

  If she’d only found one adult person besides her grandfather who could see that the sleep problems were the cause, not a symptom. Therapy only convinced Emily that she couldn’t open up about these things, her nighttime things, without being misunderstood, manipulated. In trying to cobble together a path toward healing, they’d made her feel more insane, isolated, exasperated. This meant that later, in her teens, when things got unimaginably worse, besides Peppy, there was nobody she could or would talk to about it. If they hadn’t believed the night terrors, they’d never believe what came next. Never. Because if the night terrors seemed to exist in an altered place, a wrong and inarticulate region just to the left of sleeping, then what came after the night terrors was like an invasion of that place into Emily’s waking, conscious world. It was like as a little girl Emily had crossed over and whatever was there had finally found a way to follow her back.

  —

  To make matters worse, at fourteen, Emily crashed into womanhood, alone. Suddenly it was clear that she needed more than the training bra she never had, that her boobs had somehow, over a period of six or seven months, managed to train themselves.

  Peppy couldn’t know. She worried him enough. She’d have to purchase one herself, like the maxi pads she’d gotten at the Stewart’s gas station mini-mart across from school. But since they didn’t sell bras at the mini-mart, Emily had begun hiding herself away behind these huge, incontinent sweaters that had once belonged to her grandmother Gillian. One girl asked her why she was wearing a jellyfish to school, but that was about it. Under the sweaters, Emily wore prohibitively tight T-shirts from years ago.

  The afternoon she realized it was too late was the first day of spring, though, technically, it was still winter. The sun was white. Everything was melting, dripping, pooling on the pavement. Emily had, without thinking, taken off that day’s sea monster sweater and her winter jacket. She stood in the Queens Falls Middle School parking lot, happily watching the birds, waiting for Peppy’s car. Her little T-shirt was yellow.

  Peppy generally took her to and from school every day.

  He said, “Would you look at this afternoon, Em?”

  Emily got in the front seat, slammed the door, tossing her bag, jacket, and rolled-up sweater into the backseat. She realized instantly. She might as well be naked. She fastened her seat belt. This made them perk up even more.

  “Let’s go pick up some food,” Peppy said.

  Biting her lip, “Sure.”

  They practiced subsistence shopping. They rarely did big trips, just little sorties he called them, every two, three days. This didn’t seem weird or counterintuitive to Emily until later, and then, well, not extraordinarily weird, or no less weird than the massive twenty-four-hour Price Chopper itself. She understood why Peppy didn’t want to pilot a shopping cart under those fluorescent lights for any extended period of time, quick in, quick out, like Price Chopper had a limited supply of oxygen.

  They pulled into the shallow snow-melt lake of the Price Chopper parking lot. “I’ll stay in the car,” Emily said.

  “What? Just a little piddle puddle. Come off it. You got your boots on.”

  “But.”

  “Come on,” he continued. “Going to need your moral support, Em.”

  Maybe he didn’t notice. Maybe if she did like normal he wouldn’t notice. Grabbing the sweater from the backseat would only draw attention, be weird; it was way too warm for a sweater.

  Emily followed him inside, resigned, looking down into the endless parking lot puddle, stepping on the treacherous sun, kicking it a bit, watching it shatter, reform, bobble, follow them regardless. Idiot.

  Peppy had wanted rib-eye steaks and Emily, inside Price Chopper and feeling suddenly contrary, amorphously annoyed, embarrassed, as if the boobs were his fault, had demanded pizza. She would eat only frozen pizza. She hated steak, actually, she said, thinking that maybe if she argued ridiculously about dinner, he wouldn’t notice the untrained breasts. This went on for a while and it was never entirely clear, probably to either of them, how much of a comedic routine the argument was. They got that way sometimes. Finally, Peppy gave in. Emily, recognizing that she’d been being a brat, told him that, OK, no, it didn’t really matt
er. She wanted steak after all. It felt good to be conciliatory. She loved her grandfather and, in a sunny, springtime rush of that, she took hold of his hand. They often held hands in public. Peppy’s hand was just where Emily’s hand naturally went. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  She sensed it immediately. Peppy looked to the right, as if he saw someone annoying there, and he yanked his hand from hers. His eyes caught on her yellow T-shirt.

  Confusion, hurt, something else: a game. It was a game. Emily snatched her grandfather’s hand back. She pulled it back toward her, exaggerating her little-girlhood, squeezing the hand, mine.

  “Hey now,” Peppy’s voice rose. They were standing by the ice cream. Swatting her away. “Young lady. Enough. More than enough.”

  With that, he went looking for food: tall, withery, hunched over the empty wheeled cage of the shopping cart, leaving his granddaughter among the freezers, on the verge of tears. It was colder here than it was outside. Emily’s breasts tightened. She saw her reflection in the window of the frozen food door, a bright yellow woman: pointy, painful, braless nipples. She crossed her arms. She walked out of the Price Chopper, head down, glass doors whooshing open before her—ta-da!—thinking: How stupid. How gross. Oh my God I am gross. She got into the backseat, put on her sweater, then her jacket. Then her seat belt. It was so hot. She was sweating, not crying. That’ll show him. She took out a schoolbook. Ten minutes later Peppy returned with frozen pizza.

  “You moping?” he said. “Don’t mope.”

  Emily would not lift her head from the book. “Homework,” she said.

  “Good.”

  Plus moping.

  She never held his hand again, not like that and not until he was too ill to object. You can’t be his little girl forever. It wasn’t a rejection, more like an animal reaction to an animal development, and it was probably hard for him as well—the obliging of a process that time and her body had already begun. This beginning of that end. But still! If only he’d known how to express his feelings a little better—it didn’t have to be such a big deal, the following weeks of thinking Peppy found her body as embarrassing and alien as she did. Was she a second-best granddaughter now? Was there something perverted with her that she still wanted to hold her grandfather’s hand? The boobs were obvious, but did she disgust him with the—with her time of the month as well? Sick, illogical, and indulgent thoughts followed sick, illogical, and indulgent thoughts. Could he smell her? Horses could. Becky said so. Or was it where Emily found herself putting her hands that her grandfather couldn’t deal with? Did he know where she sometimes put her hands, her fingers? How could he, she thought.