The Household Spirit

by Tod Wodicka

  The sun moved messily over the dense pine cover, yellow clouds of light landing here and there across the table, Emily, Howie, everything. But mostly this was a green spot. Bees swung unstable arcs and birds made a highway of the clear strip of sky above the Kayaderosseras, shouting more than singing. Ducks motored aimlessly. It felt like the entire animal kingdom was enjoying a day off, just soaking it in. From where Howie and Emily sat, you couldn’t see either of their houses or Route 29. You heard cars occasionally. Howie could see, up the creek a little, where he’d planned on building his family dock and bench. Frogs plopped into the water whenever Emily laughed, which was so much more often these days. Yesterday, at dusk, they saw a deer on the opposite bank of the creek, carefully crunching through the forest like someone chewing a mouthful of glass. Emily enjoyed insisting that it was an elk. It was just a big old deer. She’d started planting things around their table; Howie didn’t ask what. Things that didn’t need direct sun, he supposed. Moss, probably, maybe mushrooms. She’d moved some shrubs out here too. The rest of the plants, the ones that had survived the smoke and flood, were in his house now. His living room, kitchen. The downstairs bathroom: there was a small potted something on the toilet. Howie sipped his glass of ginger ale. Emily, who disliked ginger ale, now bought Howie ginger ale every time she went shopping. Howie did not have the heart to tell her that he, too, disliked ginger ale. That the ginger ale had been in his refrigerator because once, maybe ten years before, he thought that his daughter said something enthusiastic about ginger ale. It really was a nauseating beverage. Emily sipped milk.

  “Now,” she said. “The hard part. Lesson one, Howie. I would like you to ask me a question.”

  They’d been living in the same house for an entire month before Emily called Mr. Jeffries Howie. That was four days ago. He still hadn’t once said Emily’s name aloud. It was something she was just beginning to notice; thus, this afternoon’s conversation lesson.

  She waited, watching Howie’s face.

  “Come on, Howie. Seriously? There must be a million things you want to ask me.”

  There were not. Howie wanted to ask Emily if he could go back inside and read about fish. He wanted to ask if he could stop talking for a day or two, time off for good behavior. He settled on, “Do you like the Maroon 5?”

  Emily gasped and then cracked up. “Oh my God!” She couldn’t stop laughing.

  Howie really wanted to go inside. “They’re cool,” he said.

  “I cannot believe you just said that!”

  Well, Howie thought, I said it.

  Sometimes Emily thought that his whole life might be a kind of performance art, that he was putting her on. That he’d been rehearsing and inhabiting this role next door for twenty-five years, getting the character right, tweaking it, and all in preparation for Emily and this big performance. She said, “To answer your almost aggressively insane question, I guess I never really liked music. Not like other kids. People my age, I mean. I like music in movies?”

  Howie cast his attention out into the Kayaderosseras.

  “Eye contact,” Emily said.

  Howie pretended Emily’s freckles were eyes and said, “My mother cried every time she heard the national anthem. That’s my first memory of music. Music made my mother unhappy.”

  It was also the opposite of fish.

  “I like Christmas music,” Emily said. Then, “Wait, like tear up patriotically or really, really cry?”

  “Really cry,” Howie said. “It bothered me.” He paused. “My mother also enjoyed Christmas carols.”

  Softly, “What was her name?”

  “Doris.”

  Howie remembered how his wife and he had once joined a popular Christmas choir; this was either a year before or a year after they married. She had been going through a phase and he had been going through the motions, opening his mouth, pretending; his wife noticed during their second rehearsal and she’d started laughing mid–“Jingle Bell Rock.” You, Howard, are the goofiest of balls. Her hand in his. Back then, they had both still believed that his foibles weren’t faults, and that they might always be endearing. He wanted to say something about this to Emily. He said, “And my wife, she…”

  “Name.”

  Howie blinked. “Doris,” he said.

  “Your wife’s name, dummy.”

  “Doris also.” Then: “But everyone calls her Dori,” he said, proudly, as if he were describing someone in the next room. Howie had not said her name aloud or come so close to evoking that next room in years.

  “Well, you probably should call her Dori, too, then. Not wife. You should say people’s names, Howie.” Emily wondered whether she was really making this, of all things, a pet peeve? Why?

  “Ex-wife,” Howie said.

  “That’s what I said. Doesn’t matter. What was Dori like?”

  “She was my wife.”

  “Were you trained by al-Qaeda or something?”

  Howie had the locked-jaw look of a politician suppressing a yawn.

  “I’m sorry,” Emily said. “Why did your mother cry whenever she heard the national anthem?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Really?”

  Howie shook his head. Perceptibly.

  “But that old flag blanket thing. Is that your mom’s, I mean, didn’t she make it? Someone made it.”

  Emily had discovered a box of patriotism in the closet of Harriet’s so-called room. (This room was so sad, like some long-abandoned motel room designed for eight-year-old girls.) Emily had been looking for towels. In this box was a folded uniform, a folded flag, and letters that Emily could not open, certain they contained the sort of doomed, high-pitched human sentiment she wasn’t yet stable enough to absorb; there were cuff links that, on second look, turned out to be used bullets, as careworn as seashells. There was an exotic pinecone wrapped in a red, white, and blue ribbon. Sweet, silly postcards; a tin of shoeshine. Photographs. Two unused tickets to a theater in Troy, New York. Obviously, Howie’s father had been killed during one of the wars.

  “Someone made it, that’s right,” Howie said. “I don’t know. Sure, my mother made it. Doris.”

  Emily backed off a little. “I never knew my mother,” she said.

  “I know.”

  Emily played with her food. Howie had prepared this afternoon’s picnic. Peanut butter on white bread, cashews, apples and yellow cheese and Pringles. Howie settled back into one of his remarkable stillnesses. Emily mushed bread into little balls, lined them up, and then, one by one, dropped them into the stream beneath the table. She watched the bread balls bob off into the Kayaderosseras, where a few ducks had gathered, waiting. She said, “Did you ever meet my mother?”

  “Yes.”

  It was Emily’s turn to say, “OK.”

  She had not expected this. She did not, in fact, want this.

  Howie said, “Nancy.”

  Nor that. Emily thought, Was Howie actually being an asshole? Suddenly with this dickish first name thing? She looked questioningly into his eyes, which might as well have been eyelids, seriously, and, against her better judgment, she said, “What was she like?”

  Howie did not know how to approach his memory of Nancy Phane with Emily at his side. Mostly, of course, Nancy had unnerved him: her disgruntled clothing, tattoos. She had been older than Howie at the time. She had paced. Everything about Nancy Phane had paced. This was not something that he could or should say to Emily. But Nancy had been sweet under all that: Wasn’t that something that Howie’s wife had once said, peeping from behind the curtains? Ex-wife, he meant. Dori. Howie said, “She used to spend a lot of time in the front yard.”

  “What do you mean she used to spend a lot of time in the front yard?”

  Howie told her. He told her about the day that Nancy arrived, and what Nancy had looked like, and Nancy standing on the banks of Route 29, as if waiting for a barge to come and take her away. Rarely the backyard. Rarely the house. The fusses with Emily’s grandmother. Emily aske
d questions, Howie answered simply, solidly. Emily wanted to know what her mother looked like. You mean like overweight, really? Impossible. My mother was not overweight, she was pregnant, doofus—and what kind of tattoos? Biker bitch? Prison? Celtic punk, Chinese? Spring break sluttoos? Come off it! Emily didn’t believe this crap. Her mother sang in Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals. Was Howie certain that they were even tattoos?

  “Yes,” he said. “What else could they have been?”

  “Tights,” Emily said. “Leggings.” Bruises? Vitiligo? Someone else’s limbs entirely?

  “Maybe,” Howie said. He had realized too late that Emily had not known. That Emily didn’t have a single photograph of the Nancy Phane who had given birth to her. “It was a long time ago.”

  “You sound like you’re describing someone else,” Emily said. “Maybe you saw someone else. Did you actually meet her?”

  “No.”

  “But you said—but what are you even talking about?”

  “I saw her,” Howie said. “I didn’t know her.”

  “No, you didn’t know her.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Jesus, please stop already,” Emily said, surprising them both. “What else did you see? Must have seen everything, huh? You enjoy the show? Were we entertaining enough for you?”

  Howie said nothing.

  “Yeah?” Emily continued, as if this was an argument she had to win. She said, for no good reason: “Yeah, and don’t think I haven’t seen how you keep Playboy magazines in your car!”

  Howie stood. He walked to the side of the Kayaderosseras. The ducks squabble-flapped, lifted, revealed wretched little feet, and plopped back down, scooting, resettling, la-de-ducky-da.

  Howie thought about fishing.

  Emily thought about pushing Howie into the fucking creek. “Hey,” she called. She knew she sounded like a brat. More than a brat, actually, sure, but that was on him: Howie’s geological tranquility. Don’t you dare turn your back on me when I’m acting irrational!

  Howie thought about which lake he would go to this weekend, and if he would actually ask Rhoda Prough. This time of year, the best options were:

  Great Sacandaga Lake.

  West Caroga Lake.

  Lewy Lake.

  Cossayuna Lake.

  Or perhaps Schroon Lake? Howie did not necessarily want to go fishing with Rho, but Emily, last night, had told him that he probably had to. Rho had called. Emily had been there, and they watched the phone ring together, as rare as a butterfly flying through the living room. Howie had to answer. Emily overheard. She had been giddy, couldn’t believe it. It was a potential date.

  Fishing, he had assured her, was not dating.

  “My last boyfriend took me on a date to a taekkyeon expo. It’s Korean foot fighting, like really gay karate.”

  Howie did not now want to think about Emily Phane or Rhoda Prough or Harri or his wife, ex-wife, Dori—or the long-dead Nancy Phane who had started this whole mess. He thought, instead, and more seriously, about which rod he would take. Howie would not take his new, and still unused, seven-foot six-inch St. Croix LegendXtreme. He wanted to save that for Lake Jogues, for over by Rogers Rock, even though the fishing there was mediocre to poor. He wanted to show Emily this spot, his spot, reached only by boat. His boat. Next week Howie would purchase a used boat, even if it could not be the 1971 Catalina 27 he had been saving for—because he needed to have the boat before Harri needed any more of his money. Harri could have what she wanted, of course. But only if Howie had it. There had been an e-mail from his daughter with the heading “IMPORTANT INVESTMENT HELP.” Howie had not opened it and, anyway, what was that supposed to mean? Investment? Maybe it was ham. It had taken Howie a few months of internet computering to realize that a lot of the e-mails he got were ham. He would find out later what that e-mail was about, after he had bought the boat that, in his mind, he had already painted into his daughter’s gift. The boat, himself, his new seven-foot six-inch St. Croix LegendXtreme, and Emily Phane floating by Rogers Rock. Though he did not exactly think about it this way, it was a way for all three of them to be together: Howie, Emily, Harri. Howie, with Emily’s help, had hung Lake Jeffries in the living room, over the sofa. Emily thought it looked pretty there. But it would look pretty anywhere. Sometimes, Howie liked having it there, knowing his daughter and his lake were behind him, supportive, while he watched TV with his neighbor, and sometimes Howie hated that the only time he ever really saw the painting was when he was standing looking at it, which was an odd thing to do. Standing in his living room as if he were in a museum. He had never been inside a painting museum, or any kind of museum that didn’t have dinosaurs, but assumed that his daughter’s painting would someday hang in one, maybe the big one in Albany. It was that good. It could have been a photograph. Howie had a plan. He had not told Emily yet because he rarely told her anything that she didn’t drag from him, but maybe tomorrow he would move the sofa to where the TV now was, under the window, and move the TV to where the sofa was, under the painting. This way they could watch the TV and the painting at the same time.

  They, Howie thought.

  Well, he could watch both, anyway. Eventually, Emily might return to her own home. This was not something that they had spoken about.

  Emily, meanwhile, was going absolutely nowhere until Howie turned the fuck around. She’d sit there all day, night, week. That was about the shape of it.

  She wanted to scream. She knew that Howie’s ex-wife had been friends with Peppy, for instance, and she could tell him that, see what he thought about that. She knew that his ex-wife had gone over there a lot toward the end, and that Peppy had helped her make the decision to leave. Howie wasn’t the only one who knew shit.

  But here Emily balked. You evil bitch, she thought. What are you thinking?

  It wasn’t Howie’s fault that he had seen her mother and, anyway, she’d asked for it. Thing was, she implicitly trusted Howie’s version of Nancy. Hadn’t she always known?

  She said that she was sorry.

  She knew that Howie heard her. But whatever. She sat at the picnic table; he stood. She wished she hadn’t said that thing about the Playboys.

  Emily had stopped wearing her mother’s ring around Howie about two weeks ago. She’d begun to notice him looking strangely at it: probably the fact that she wore it on her wedding finger. Emily felt as if she were betraying the only meaningful memory she had of her father by wearing the ring, by potentially exposing the ring to the kind of questions that would destroy the truth of the ring with the truth of the ring. Peppy had known a lot of women. Women wore rings, and complexly married women occasionally took their rings off.

  She said, “Hey, you hear me? I’m sorry. Howie, I’m really sorry. Let’s go inside. Forget it, OK? We friends?”

  Howie calculated the deepest areas of the Kayaderosseras Creek. He moved his mind like a flashlight over the surface of the water; as with Emily’s nightmares, it was hard to explain exactly how he found the deeper pockets of water that the best fish called home. Howie could hold his thoughts like other people held their breaths, and he’d watch, wait, forget it, and suddenly know. Friends.

  —

  The first week that Emily stayed at Howie’s house—or, more accurately, Howie’s sofa—had been strange. Things were strange now, actually, if Emily or Howie cared to reflect on their situation, to compare or contrast it to the rest of the non–Route 29 world, but back then? Really strange. For the first four or five days they hardly spoke.

  Emily had not been well. She was still not well, obviously, but back then she had been worse, and Howie often wondered if he should call an ambulance or a mental hospital or, at least, his ex-wife or Drew or one of the more dependable and discreet colleagues from work. He was in over his head. However, since he had not done any of that the first night, or the second night, then the third, when any responsible and decent adult should have, and since he had not even called the Queens Falls Fire Department when the house ne
xt door to his house had been on fire, Howie felt that he had likely squandered any right to expect outside support. That window had closed. Emily Phane was his responsibility. Plus, what would health care professionals or firemen or his ex-wife think when they’d found out that he had kept an emaciated, unwashed, intermittently deranged, and obviously—to others, not Howie—still rather handsome young woman on his sofa? Howie was shy, not naïve. You know exactly what they will think. No, as every day passed, it became clear that this had to be between them and Route 29. Not a secret, necessarily, but something best not talked about. Emily did not seem to care either way. Howie had to make it all better all by himself, and he hoped that he would manage to do so before the police showed up and the news reports began referring to him as a quiet loner. For both of their sakes, Howie had to make sure that Emily Phane did not die.

  For starters, he called in sick for that entire week. Since in his thirty years of employment at GE they could count all of Jeffries’s sick days on two hands and a toe, various colleagues contacted him, both concerned and, it seemed to Howie, ghoulishly curious. Jeffries out for a full week? You’re shitting me. Must be serious. I hope it’s not serious. Man, I wonder if it’s serious?

  Maybe it actually was serious, Howie thought.

  Well, sure it was.

  He had not been able to settle on a suitable illness. Luckily, a lifetime of studied inarticulation meant he did not need to. But folks called. Drew even texted, and who knew how he’d heard about it—Facebook?