The Household Spirit

by Tod Wodicka

  How could he not?

  8

  Queens Falls High School did not suck. Like a kitten or a full moon, Emily became effortlessly, inarguably attractive. Particularly during her junior and senior years when she started to make up for all that lost best-friend time with boyfriends.

  But it was her absent, troubled next-door neighbor, Harriet Jeffries, whom Emily came to most associate with those high school years, though in a way more akin to a spirit animal than an actual friend. Harriet was a buzzy, cool, evil little hummingbird of a thing. She was something that Emily had always admired from afar, ever since Harriet was little and wouldn’t leave her house no matter how much you waved, how many flowers, special pebbles, or dazed toads you left on the front porch for her. Harriet fascinated and thwarted Emily. Since they attended different schools, they rarely saw each other, maybe only once every month, but Harriet loomed large in Emily’s conception of herself. Emily was particularly transfixed with the way Harriet’s moods sparked and darted. Over the years, they’d had friends of friends in common. They’d even been to the same lame interschool event once or twice, though Harriet never stayed too long. Emily read about Harriet’s artistic awards and achievements. But more often, later, Emily would see Harriet walking alone down the side of the road in Queens Falls or Saratoga Springs, or at the dying shopping mall, where they both worked that one summer, giving Emily a chance to stalk Harriet from a distance on a daily basis, or, in the final year before Harriet moved to New York City and Emily moved to Boston, the spate of Harriet sightings in the combination Taco Bell and Long John Silver’s parking lot. Her massive canvas, itty-bitty Harriet sitting, legs crossed, on top of her car, painting with what looked like soil. Emily’d spot her there at night, too, furiously slashing at the canvas through the dark. Candles set up all over the hood of her car. Harriet painting outside Walmart, gas stations, the intersection. People honking, giving her the finger. Starbucks coffee cups tossed at her. Harriet Jeffries painting the DMV at dawn. Emily almost never saw Harriet next door.

  Emily had always wanted to know what Harriet was up to, feeling connected, like a distant relation, a fantasy BFF. Eventually this grew into something far more private, odd, lightly consuming. Emily thought she recognized Harriet Jeffries. It wasn’t only Route 29. For some reason Emily was certain that Harriet, of all people, would understand what Emily suffered through, night after night. Perhaps the compulsion behind Harriet’s awful paintings spoke to something that Emily wished she didn’t understand. They’d speak, sometimes, if they ran into each other, but it never seemed like Harriet wanted to, so Emily wouldn’t push it. Instead, she’d ask people about Harriet. Hairless Jeffries? That girl is scary. PMS personified. School massacre waiting to happen. Dyke. Insect weasel bitch. Oh my God, she seriously has the most annoying voice.

  But Emily knew different, or thought she did.

  For Emily, watching Harriet, even from a distance, was like watching lightning. Harriet berated motorists. This actually appeared to be an important part of her art. Fussing at folks while standing on the roof of her car in the mall parking lot at dusk. She rained curses on the jocks and the phony, insecure bitches. Emily came to believe that Harriet was angry and alive in a way that few people in high school were capable of being. Super intimidating, too, like she alone knew not only why she was so angry but why everyone else wasn’t, but totally fucking should be. Emily wished she could be angry instead of frightened, ironic, disengaged. Harriet was more awake than anyone Emily had ever seen. She was right there. Even her pouting was loud. Her paintings, of course, were huge. Like her body, Harriet’s discontent was small, sharp, dazzling.

  In high school, and even later on, Emily daydreamed Harriet Jeffries. True, she didn’t even know her, and Emily knew she must have been partially conjuring a Harriet who didn’t exist. But still. Harriet, as Emily’s spirit animal, appeared to ride her own bucking emotional truths, even wildly contradictory ones. Harriet wasn’t strong like a man. Her strength wasn’t solid, predictable, dependable—nothing of the sort. She was fierce. Emily thought so, anyway. Harriet could change, she could whip herself in any direction she wanted at any time she wanted and have that direction be entirely hers and, most important, the correct direction. Men, Emily would learn, could not be free spirits. Guys just clunked and lumbered, the sharp elbows of their ideas, beliefs, and egos smashing into everything and often only for the sake of the smash. Call it sport. Not Harriet. Harriet was fooled, sure, because everyone was, but Emily imagined that she also had a level of personal integrity that was off the hook. Her emotional self seemed untethered and therefore true. Five hundred years ago, she’d have been burned as a witch. Two thousand years ago she’d probably have been hailed as a prophet. Then set ablaze.

  But who knows.

  Emily didn’t know anything except that she’d always thought that Harriet Jeffries was cool, especially when she did things like shave off all of her hair or dress like a Glad bag. Ultimately, Emily wished that she could have cared enough about her own identity and presence on earth to go bald or wear emotional clothing.

  With boys it was different. Though Emily didn’t properly lose her virginity until she was almost out of high school, she developed a reputation. Probably because there was a new guy every month or two and Queens Falls was small. Girls turned on her and boys, amazed, kept trying their luck. Emily was both easy and impossible. She knew how to laugh. Boys gathered around her like villagers around a stone with a sword stuck in it. The fact that Emily never really got crushed out on a boy and that, in spite of that (or maybe because of that), she really did have her pick of them—this infuriated the girls. It ate them alive. She didn’t even care! Who the hell was she to not even care? They cared. They’d show her how much they cared. They called Emily a slut. Freak. Fine. Let them be jealous and annoyed. They stopped laughing at her comments in class, frowning, rolling their eyes, sighing and looking away, looking at one another—give me a break—whenever Emily said something witty, which was often. She stopped hanging out with girls altogether and she pretended that this did not bother her and that her serial dating was not also a little about revenge.

  Boys were a temporary, intoxicating salve. But she just couldn’t be consumed. Emily had never felt tortured or ecstatic, anyway, though she had felt rejected and deliciously tongue-tied. Turned on—sure. Emily had fun. But she couldn’t feel serious. She’d get soooo close, be genuinely into this or that boy, and then: nothing. She’d wake up and feel more alone than ever. She had to keep moving. If she stopped moving she’d see the yawning hole in herself and she’d fall in there and drown.

  Later, of course, in Boston, she’d boyfriend up just so she didn’t have to sleep alone. This was rarely sordid. Emily could not sleep alone, that was the important thing, and the sex, when it was good, was, as they said, a benefit. Transgression was not attractive to Emily Phane. Mostly she laughed the boys into bed; she had a way of making seduction seem like an accident, a goof. She was in control, always, until she decided, as she occasionally would, that it was safe and OK to be a little out of control, then grrrrr. Watch out.

  She needed someone there when she was shaken awake at night—human ears to hear her, hands to remind her that there’s this too: other hands. You, me, the whole wide waking world. Normal things obeying normal rules. Proof of a denser reality beyond the one that had begun to leak into her head. Not that she ever told anyone this. What could she say? She said she had nightmares sometimes, that’s all. Bad dreams. Now, please, just hold me back to sleep.

  Peppy had encouraged her dating. Made him happy, seeing his granddaughter moving forward. He made names for her high school boyfriends, whom he tended to like. They liked him too. Poor Tobin Anderson was the Phase. Isaac Gilmore before him had been, for whatever reason, the Squirm. Pete Harmon was Baby Peacock. Michael Sokol simply Michelle.

  He once mentioned, or seemed to mention, that her grandmother had been hard on her mother, Nancy.

  “Hard like
how?”

  “Just hard.”

  “Like with boyfriends?”

  “Your grandmother meant well.”

  Peppy didn’t make the same mistake. “I’m too old to kick their cabooses, anyhow.” But it wasn’t only that. Emily’s inability to properly, seriously bond with anyone, male or female, was probably the only way that she had ever failed her grandfather. He wasn’t going to live forever, he knew, and she knew that it frightened him. Emily being left all alone. Frightened her too.

  —

  As for Peppy, for much of Emily’s childhood, he entertained remarriage, he said, in the same way a Shakespeare troupe might entertain a class of toddlers. His occasional lady friends were nice, often intelligent, but, ultimately, they never made more than a lick of sense.

  First they came from Peter Phane’s past. Gussied up and hungry to mourn, to collaborate. Ready to jump in the time machine his tragedy offered—possible remotherhood!—and a chance to be the useful and appreciated women they could never be with him all those years ago. (Or so Emily assumed when Peppy told her about those days.) They began happening “to be in the neighborhood” shortly after Gillian’s funeral, one by one, as if there were a Fresh Local Widower visitation schedule up at the Olive Garden or YMCA (he said). They just knew. They rarely overlapped. The infant orphan as excuse. They brought with them Tupperwared food, piles of clothing and accessories, Christmas cheer, toys, and a smattering of things they hoped old Pete would file under A Woman’s Indispensable Touch. Flowers, Valium, baskets of artificially wood-scented wood shavings, boxes of white zinfandel, VHS tapes, baby-blue bath salts. Ironing. Sweet’N Low. Things got unseemly.

  There was Min Sherwood, for example, weeping over episodes of Quantum Leap, holding Peppy’s hand too hard, so hard he’d feel violent and then alarmed and then simply used, like the safety bar of a roller coaster. He’d joke about this when Emily was older, those early days of widowerhood. The women and their neediness and unnecessary baking, the parenting advice, the parenting magazines—Mothering; Pregnancy & Newborn; Parents—the decaffeinated tea. They’d brew pot after pot of the stuff, then forget to drink it. They wouldn’t even bother pouring it. Peppy assumed that they felt existentially adrift without something to do in the kitchen every twenty minutes. They enjoyed making cold things hot. “I think sometimes that being a woman warps the brain, Emily.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Sure can be.”

  Peppy said, and may have believed, that he could have genuinely loved one if they’d merely been old. If just one had figured out how to do old with any degree of dignity, he said, or goddamn charm. Their clownish abuse of cosmetics. It was as if the primacy of their early feminine physicality, their looks, had been so forcibly imprinted on these widows and divorcées that they were now, for all intents and purposes, either batshit with despair or batshittier with delusion. Take your pick, old man. Peppy told Emily that he didn’t have the wherewithal. Not at his age he didn’t, not after Gillian.

  Emily didn’t know much about her grandfather’s marriage, or her grandmother. Peppy was respectful but unengaged with Gillian’s memory. She was a city girl, a rough cookie. That’s what he’d say. Here, a photograph. Platitudes like locked doors. Once or twice, Peppy would open up. Emily might catch him after a few glasses of Scotch, and she’d learn that Gillian had thought that Peppy had abandoned her and the marriage when he had abandoned those parts of himself that she’d most adored. The ambitious parts, apparently. The small-town kid making it in New York City parts, the so-called brilliant parts that she didn’t have enough of either and so where the hell did that leave the two of them? Here? Route 29? Gillian had wanted to see the world with Peter Phane the go-getter. She’d wanted out of Queens, New York. Hadn’t they been going somewhere?

  Peppy had once written newspaper and magazine articles. He’d traveled. Then he’d stopped, more or less. He’d moved back upstate with a modest inheritance, took an editorial position at the local paper, and settled into his uncle’s old hermitage on Route 29, taking his city girl with him because what else was he supposed to do with her? She’d been pregnant with Nancy and intent on dutifully riding out this asinine gentleman farmer phase of his. “I think she started to garden, actually, in order to show me how pointless gardening was.” Her ambition played the long game and lost. But he’d been upfront with his wife, he said. He told Gillian. Told her that there was nowhere he cared to go. She simply chose not to believe him because, she’d said, she knew him. Peppy said he wished he could have been this person that Gillian knew, the man she thought she’d married, or that, later, she hadn’t been so damn intent on punishing the both of them and, eventually, their daughter, and for what? Her own inability to leave? But maybe that was his fault, too.

  “I can’t imagine you being unhappy.”

  “Don’t suppose I ever was.”

  He almost certainly had women other than Emily’s grandmother throughout the marriage. Emily was not sure how this made her feel. Peppy was so charming, forthright.

  He was also all she knew. Growing up, she identified with him, adored him, wanted to be exactly like him, and the truth is, she would probably forgive the incorrigible charismatic anything. She knew that he was good. He never lied to her or attempted to disguise his nature; if Emily asked about one of his women, he would tell her, in detail. But only if she asked, and so she almost never asked. Peppy was discreet. Sometimes, secretly, Emily would even try hating her grandmother like she imagined Peppy possibly did, or had once. Those curdled photographs of Gillian. She saw her like she imagined Peppy saw her. Sour woman. Nag. But Emily was not comfortable with this, and so she didn’t ever think too much about Gillian Phane. She did not want to feel complicit.

  The gold-rush days of Peter’s suitors ended when Emily was about three years old, though there continued to be relapses right up until the end of his life. Every year or two someone would show up, trying to crack the old nut. Winnie Shapiro, whom Peppy was spending time with when Emily was eighteen, wasn’t the batshittiest, but close enough. Peppy met her at Price Chopper. If you believed him, which maybe you shouldn’t, he insisted that Winnie had followed him home from the supermarket in order to check out his new microwave. “I told her, frankly, that it’s not new. You’re going to be disappointed, I said.”

  Winnie was a cheery, minuscule woman in her seventies. She had springy grey hair. She emitted heartbreakingly obscene noises in bed. The first time Emily heard it through the wall she thought that Peppy was punching a cat.

  Win, as Peppy called her, had the loudest face you’d ever seen. It was her eyes. Her glasses made it seem as if everything she saw was an unalloyed shock. The TV she watched: shocking! The eggplant parm, the peas, this frosty glass of milk. Shocking! Shocking! Shocking! Emily coming home from school. Winnie Shapiro was shocked. You never exactly got used to it. She also read ceaselessly, like she was cramming for a test, and, of course, the words on the page shocked her too. The old woman curled kittenishly up on the sofa for entire Sunday afternoons, her two gigantic, stunned eyes pinging back and forth behind Memoirs of a Geisha. The Poisonwood Bible. Snow Falling on Cedars. Peppy, meanwhile, might listen to the game. Cook. Straighten up. He’d tap Winnie’s head as he walked by her and, without looking up, she’d make a kiss-kiss noise. Emily had witnessed a number of Peppy’s girlfriends, but nothing like this.

  “Emily,” Peppy said. “Good morning. Win and I would like to speak with you about something.”

  That morning, Peppy and Winnie had moved their chairs closer together in a way that Emily found distracting. They were eating fruit with spoons. This shouldn’t have rankled Emily.

  “You want to speak with me?” Emily said. “Since when do we announce we want to speak with each other?”

  “Manners,” Peppy said.

  “Emily,” Winnie chirped. “We’re going to have a baby!”

  Peppy laughed; Winnie too. Ha ha ha. Jerks. Winnie had taken over in the house as Peppy’s new comic f
oil. Her laughter yapped. His: like a sonorous, African-American Santa Claus. It was often said that Peppy—Pete to everyone else—resembled a white version of the actor Morgan Freeman.

  He was smiling. “Sit yourself down, Em.”

  Women were particularly susceptible to that voice. Emily used to joke that she could imagine him narrating really slow footage of geologic wonders. Coaxing a wonder along with his voice alone. Peppy, tell me again about limestone. Peppy, make it erode.

  Emily sat. “You’re eating sliced banana with a spoon,” she said. “Both of you. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

  “Strawberries in there too,” Winnie said. Her eyes peered comically into the bowl before them. They were sharing a bowl of fruit. One bowl, two spoons. She continued, “Blueberries, raspberries, apple. Oh, there, well what do you know? Some melon. Pear. Let’s see. Grapes. Pineapple—did I already say pineapple?”

  “Lemon,” Peppy said.

  “Kiwi,” Winnie said. “Beef.”

  The obscene cataclysm of two very old people laughing like children.