The Household Spirit

by Tod Wodicka

  “Did you ever speak to her?”

  “Maybe once, twice.”

  But then, why lie about that? Howie did not want to lie or tell the truth, he wanted to stand up. He stood. He wanted to go up to Harri’s room and look for affordable wooden sailboats on the internet computer. He knew there were unopened e-mails waiting for him as well: one IMPORTANT mail from his daughter and, as of this morning, an ominously subjectless e-mail from Rhoda Prough. Emily usually did not ask Howie where he was going, much less what he was doing when he went there. Their mostly unfeigned lack of curiosity in each other’s past or future was one of the things holding them together.

  Meaning, normally, Howie could just get up and go, unremarked upon. Not today. “Hey, wait,” Emily said. “Howie, where are you going?”

  His first name again. Cracks had begun to form.

  “Up,” Howie said.

  “I can see that. Why?”

  Why not? “I’m going to go on to the internet computer.” Then, why not indeed: “I am going to buy a sailboat.”

  Emily’s mouth popped open. “Like right now?”

  “Yes. I’m going to start looking right now, yes.” Howie smiled: another crack in the day. Right in the middle of his face. “Yes.”

  Emily had avoided the computer. There was too much in there that she wasn’t ready to see.

  Howie said, “Do you want to help me find a sailboat?”

  Emily stood, nodded slightly, then eagerly. She turned off the TV with a wizardly zap.

  She said, “I’ve never been in a sailboat before.”

  “Well,” Howie said, “then that would make two of us.”

  Though there wasn’t any precedent, Emily had to assume that this was a joke. She followed him upstairs.

  21

  Howie would no longer throw them back. He wasn’t angry at fish, and he could not prepare them in tasty, respectful ways, but Emily was right. He had been doing things halfway for too long and for reasons that he could no longer defend or even fully recollect the impetus behind. Live and let live? Harriet was not a baby. His daughter was no longer helpless and, anyway, she had never looked much like a fish in the first place. Her face had never been a quiet, thoughtless thing. It occurred to him that Harri might have benefited more from a father who obliterated the heads of longnose gar with a hammer, a man capable of letting whitefish perish slowly in buckets full of air. The world does not remember what mercies you show it. Daughters, apparently, less so.

  It was not a sport, what Howie did. It was not a competition. In six days he would be picking up the fiberglass twenty-eight-foot O’day 1983 from its owner in Bolton Landing. The listed price had been, for some reason, $10,995, but because Howie had $10,000 cash, the owner had agreed to lower the price. They found the boat on the internet computer. The boat’s name was Richard. Its owner’s name was also Richard, but everyone called him Dickie. He’d named the boat after himself because, for two years, twenty-three years ago, Dickie had been dying of cancer.

  “Won’t lie, it was rough. But I didn’t want any coffin or a plot of land, you know? I was forty. I wanted to piss off my wife.”

  Howie had dreamed all of his life of owning an old wooden sailboat. Passing dark mountains and creaking docks and people sleeping in cabins in the middle of the night; peanut-buttering his toast as the sun rose over Tongue Mountain. The wood aspect had been important, but fiberglass would have to do. Richard had a bedroom. You could sleep on Richard. Emily had brokered the deal. It might have been the first time that she had talked on a telephone in years. She had even joked a little, asking Dickie if he might throw in some sailing lessons.

  “For you, doll? Anything.”

  Howie had not been joking. He had never been on a sailboat. But he had read books and thought a good deal about it. He thought: The fish of Lake Jogues will know my twenty-eight-foot O’day. He imagined what it would look like to the fish, the reverse shark fin of Richard’s keel. How the water would tremble. But, admittedly, Howie had been thinking a whole lot of odd things lately.

  He sat by a small pond. His phone buzzed.

  “What’s that?” Rhoda Prough asked. “What the hell? You plan on catching fish with robots?”

  The buzz was coming from Howie’s metal tackle box is why she asked.

  Howie said, “Cell phone.”

  He removed it from the tackle box. There was a text that said, “FISHING OR DATING?” The text was from Howie’s internet computer. Emily.

  “Text,” he told Rho.

  “Sure,” she said. “Important?”

  “No,” Howie said. He wrote, “DATING,” and hit Send.

  Because it certainly wasn’t fishing.

  Emily was on the computer again. She’d finally signed into her e-mail account and, once, for a few minutes, she’d even reactivated her Facebook account; she’d made Howie sit next to her while she did this. “Just, I don’t know, just sit there, OK?”

  “OK.”

  Howie continued to stand.

  “Well?”

  “Sit here?”

  “Where else, Howie? Sit. Please. This won’t take a minute.”

  The internet computer was on Harri’s bed. Even though they’d been co-sleeping for the better part of a month, it was uncomfortable sitting on Harri’s bed next to Emily during the day, awake. It was like Harri could see them. They both had problems thinking about Harriet Jeffries in relation to the direction their lives had taken.

  It took hours. Emily had more than two thousand unopened e-mails. Most were crap, junk, she said, delete delete delete delete. It was like excavation, satisfying even for Howie to watch. “E-mail archeology,” Emily said. “Let’s see what ancient treasures we uncover!” Leaving, unopened, dozens upon dozens of e-mails from old friends, colleagues, professors, Howie didn’t really know and Emily wasn’t ready to explain or dust them off just yet. She made a file, BONES, and put them all in there. To examine later. Most of these e-mails were from Ethan Caldwell, and most of these had blank subject lines. But some didn’t. Some said things like LAST ONE and HELLO FROM NYC or GREETINGS FROM SEOUL. The last one from him was three weeks ago and didn’t have a subject line. He appeared to have written at least one a month for more than two years, some with attachments.

  “My ex-boyfriend,” Emily said.

  “I know.”

  Delete delete delete. Save. Delete.

  “Wait, how do you know?”

  Howie could have shrugged, said that he just figured; it did seem obvious, so many from this guy. But he said, “Facebook.”

  “You’re so sweet with your Facebook, Howie.” Then, “But, wait, you and I weren’t even Facebook friends.”

  “OK.”

  “I know it’s OK, but how did you know about Ethan?”

  “I didn’t,” Howie said. “I don’t. Maybe from Harri.”

  “I wasn’t friends with Harriet either. Howie”—Emily laughed—“holy cow, were you stalking me?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Emily was looking so much better now. She slept through the night, or the day, or whenever Howie slept. He rarely had to wake her from ringings. She insisted that he give Rho a chance.

  “Chance for what?” Howie said. “I fish alone.”

  “He fishes alone,” Emily marveled. “Listen to yourself! Chance for romance, my lone-wolf friend. You want to end up like me? Howard Jeffries, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

  —

  So here Howie was, sitting beside a small pond in Rhoda Prough’s backyard. Rho had tricked him, promising an afternoon of fishing. She’d bring the picnic goodies, she said, imbibements. Howie just had to make sure and bring Howie. It had been like she knew, somehow, that Howie had really wanted to bring Emily Phane.

  He still wasn’t quite certain how any of this had come about. There was that telephone call, of course, then the e-mails that Emily, more girlish than he had ever seen her, had made him reply to. Then a whole bunch of e-mails with increasingly hard t
o dodge questions. Would Howie like to come over on Saturday? Yes or no? Howie had been poked on Facebook. Even Emily didn’t know what that meant.

  Rho’s pond was about the size of a swimming pool. It was toilet blue, deep. Howie knew right away that no fish could live in it; he smelled sulfur. He sat down. “It’s a natural mineral spring,” he said.

  “Bingo.” Rho grinned. “It’s the opening of a cave, actually. Like an underground river. No telling how deep it is or even if deep applies. Maybe it’s just long, know what I mean?”

  “You mean we won’t be fishing.”

  “We won’t be catching anything, anyway.” Rho popped open a bottle of white wine. “Don’t look so glum. How else was I supposed to get you over to my favorite place in the whole wide world?” She looked into Howie’s face. “Is there something different about you?”

  “Can you drink the water?”

  “Well, the coot used to live here sure did. One cup a day. Swore by it. I’d love to say he lived to a hundred and ten, but he didn’t even make it to seventy. Plus”—Rho laughed—“it tastes like ass and eggs if you ask me.”

  They sat on bath towels. Behind them was Rho’s small, late-eighteenth-century stone farmhouse. It looked surly, armored in different sizes and colors of rock. Rho called it the armadillo. Howie heard her ex-husband, Darren Prough, in that and realized that she didn’t know that he’d called her the armadillo. He felt ashamed for ever having been in the same room with that piece of junk. Two giant oaks covered the house in hot green shade. The windows were open. They sat way up on the top of a hill in eastern New York, near Anaquassacook and the Batten Kill River. You could see the river, squirming like a highway off in the distance. It could have been moving in either direction, or it could have been motionless, like an elongated lake. It had taken Howie an hour to drive here.

  He appreciated how the land rolled down from where they sat, and how the sky circled them. It was so different from Route 29. He saw lumps of cow way down there in the yellow haze. Other old farmhouses embedded in little gardens of tree, and a road that only revealed itself as such when a car or truck moved toylike across it. Hawks circled, paused, dived. Far in the distance, the mannered mountains of Vermont.

  “I was in Vermont a few weeks ago,” Howie said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at him.

  He looked at everything.

  “OK.” Rho laughed. “That really all you want to tell me about that one? Babe, you’re a trip, you know that?”

  “I was grocery shopping.”

  Howie tried to change the subject back to silence.

  Rho said, “You know what, when Darren and I were splitting, I used to drive to Vermont for all my shopping and stuff, too. Couldn’t bear running into anyone we knew. But, correct me if I’m wrong, Jeffries, you got divorced, what, thirty years ago?”

  “Twenty,” Howie said. “I like driving.”

  She looked at him. “Seriously though, you sure I’m not missing something here? Like, you change your hair? Different color contacts? You been working out?”

  Howie knew that it was a date because of the candles. Emily had given him a couple of signs to look out for, but they’d been conservative, subtle, and useless in the face of the fact that it was the middle of the afternoon and there was an unlit candelabrum on a bath towel. Obviously, Rho didn’t plan on going anywhere. Or, if she planned on going somewhere, she planned on coming back here, with him, when the sun had set. She also had a CD player. European cheese of the sort that Emily was fond of. She took out a small glass pipe that Howie, at first, assumed was some kind of fancy wine opener.

  She said, “You want?”

  “To hold it?”

  It was pot, she explained.

  “OK.”

  “For smoking?”

  Howie didn’t want. Didn’t know how. He watched Rho carefully, warily, as if she might change color or rip off her clothing, howl, froth; he hadn’t known what. Perhaps she would overdose. He imagined police sirens on the wide, rural wind.

  Rho didn’t seem the least bit affected by her crime. So why, Howie wondered, did she even do it? She smiled, she talked a blue streak, but what else was new?

  Howie felt OK regardless. He sipped wine; it tasted nice. Hint of poultry, chrome, Emily’s almond shampoo. He thought that he was supposed to think about what he tasted when he tasted wine but in this case maybe not: Rho didn’t pry. Howie would have killed a ton of fish given the chance today, and this thought contented him. He wouldn’t have thrown back a single one.

  The afternoon was a bath. Howie did not even mind that Rho had teased him until he removed his shoes, then his brown socks. His toes were OK. He moved them, slowly, and compared them to Rho’s. Hers were pebbles. Rho had lots to say, but she said it so much better now that they were alone. Suddenly, she didn’t seem as bothered by other people, and she did not need Howie to be either. She was a handsome woman. However, having spent the last month or so with Emily, Rho was a thing to get used to. She did not let Howie be Howie like Emily did. She did not coexist. She wanted something different from him, and it took Howie an hour or so to realize what Rho wanted was for Howie to see her. Unlike Emily, she wanted badly to be known by Howie, and she wanted to help adjust the manner in which Howie knew her, seeding his perception. She went about this in ways clumsy, crude, and honest, and Howie found himself responding in kind. Not revealing himself, necessarily, because what was there to reveal, but he stopped holding himself so tight.

  She was nearly twice Emily’s age. She was doubled, in a way: her body, her being, as if two women had joined to create whatever species Rhoda Prough was. Howie liked this species. Had Howie ever heard her giggle before? Not only bark, giggle. Her roundness appeared more bloated here under the sun, but bloated in a good, cheerful way, like a steamy bag of popcorn freshly removed from a microwave. Perhaps she had been right. There was something between them. There certainly wasn’t a prohibitive, daughterly field around Rho, and this made her femininity exciting, her soft, sun-lazed movements. She was tactile, twangy as an orange. She would pick little bits of grass, twisting them between her fingers. She would smell her fingers. Howie was not only allowed but expected to watch her move. That was special. The way she wasn’t wearing a bra; her long, small breasts sleeping on her round belly. Howie could comfortably think about Rho’s breasts in the same way that he thought about her elbows, which is not to say that he didn’t find Rho’s breasts handsome, just not particularly handsome, no more than the rest of Rho, and, if he was honest, they were probably less handsome and beguiling than, for example, Rho’s eyes or smile or her blind, puckered toes.

  Howie had not been with a woman since he was thirty years old. The last woman he had been with had been thirty years old. Thirty-year-old women have distinct parts on them that demanded a sort of distracting, overattentive fealty. Howie thought himself around that. Thirty-year-old breasts were parasites. Braggy things. Howie let himself smell Rho. It was a muggy afternoon. He had not smelled a woman like this since his wife, and even his wife, Dori, well, not so often. She never really went outside and, if she did, she was slathered in deodorant, OFF! insect repellent, purple-smelling perfume, creams. Rho smelled sharply of herself. Howie remembered sex, suddenly, as you might remember a family member’s birthday many months or weeks after it had passed.

  Howie worried about Emily.

  “So, hey, don’t laugh, but I want to play you this music,” Rho said. It was something called “Pachelbel’s Canon.” “It’s from before music had words. It can be about whatever you want it to be about.”

  She showed him the CD cover, shyly opening the case, presenting it to him as if it had the potential to frighten him off. The Pachelbel Canon and Other Baroque Favorites.

  “I don’t really know music,” Howie said.

  “Well, I’ll make an introduction then. Darren, he used to like the hard rock. Winger, White Lion, Ratt, crap like that. Quiet Riot, Judas
Priest. Honey, I used to say, Honey, your parents live in Watervliet. There’s no way they can hear you listening to this Satan rock anymore! Like, you can grow up now, you know? But he loved it. I should have known. You know how he’s going to die, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Darren. My ex-husband is going to die driving drunk, air-drumming to Def Leppard. I’m serious. Me and the girls went to this psychic in Cape Cod a few years back and she gave me all these details. Freaky as shit. She knew him head to foot, like everything, and that’s what she told me would happen. I don’t believe that stuff, normally, but how could I argue? Described him down to his shoes. Told me don’t waste my time, you know? Different paths. Our paths had crossed and no longer, I don’t know, twined? Anyway, we’d gotten what we needed from each other in this life. We’d got all we were able to get from each other and I’m pretty sure I got the bum part of that deal,” Rho said. “How do you think you’ll die?”

  The possibility that Rho also knew how Howie would die momentarily alarmed him. Seemed probable. He said, “On a sailboat.”

  Rho nodded. “I can see that. Yeah.”

  “OK.”

  “I think about death a lot,” Rho said. She finished a glass of wine, poured another. One for Howie too. “I don’t want to die alone. Big fear of mine. I told the psychic this and she told me that I would die alone. She said, Look, dying alone isn’t what you should be worrying about. Dying is nothing. She told me what I should worry about was living alone.”

  “But not drowning,” Howie said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I want to die on a sailboat, but I don’t want to drown.” He said this as if it were a request that he wanted to make sure Rho had accurately registered.

  Rho said, “Rick Allen, the drummer from Def Leppard, only has one arm. They call him the Thunder God. Darren did anyways. So air-drumming behind the wheel should be safer, but what were we talking about again?”

  Rho touched Howie for the first time. His knee. Then the part above that, his pre-knee. “You seem different today, Jeffries. I’m a little stoned, what’s your excuse? Anyway, I had to babysit my niece, Loleeze, this one time, and my sister-in-law, she had this CD she insisted I play before putting Leezy to bed. Bach for Babies: Fun and Games for Budding Brains. Don’t laugh.”