Enid Strange

by Meghan Rose Allen

  “Quiet,” I said to Amber.

  “You don’t have to say ‘Quiet’ to someone who’s not talking, Enid.”

  “Shhh,” I shushed in response. No matter how much I wanted to ask Amber how she could not see the faerie that was right in front of her own eyes, I didn’t want to draw any more of the faerie’s attention to us. I stood, brushing imaginary crumbs from my lap, and stretched, taking what looked like a few steps in the direction of the lobby doors, before dashing the other way, around the other side of the tank. Amber would hardly be able to disbelieve me after I had caught a faerie in front of her.

  “Aha!” I yelled, grabbing where the faerie had to be.

  “Aha what? You’re not hiding. I can still see you through the fish tank,” said Amber.

  I gently moved my thumbs aside to peer into my cupped palms.

  Nothing.

  “You’re so weird, Enid,” Amber said.

  “Actually,” I replied, “I prefer to be called Strange.”

  She pressed her lips together to try to hide a smile.

  “The Strange Sisters!” I bellowed.

  The hint of a smile faded. “No,” Amber said. “Never. Don’t ever say that again, Enid. Ever.”

  Then she stalked away, darting out the automatic doors as if being chased by a tiger.

  “I guess she’s right,” I said to the fish. “She’s not a Strange. She’s a Holden-Sivaloganathan. I’m a Holden-Strange. The Holden Sisters,” I whispered. “Doesn’t have the same ring to it, though.”

  Then I sat, with my back to the wall so no faeries could sneak up on me, and started to plan.

  r. Holden made cauliflower cheese for an early dinner. It tasted better than it should have, all warm and bubbly. My mother’s contribution: a sickly and cold wild rice salad. Me, I made orange juice from a can I’d found in the back of the freezer (it must have been the previous tenants’ since we never bought juice in a can, or juice in a carton, or, actually, ever juice). After adding water and mixing, it still tasted like waxed cardboard; I added a cup of brown sugar to disguise the fact.

  “Our first dinner as a family,” Dr. Holden said. “Cheers.” He held up his plastic cup of saccharine, reconstituted orange juice. We all knocked glasses. “Now to business: Enid, we should discuss what you’d like to call me.”

  “Not dad,” I said quickly.

  Dr. Holden laughed. “No. Not even my own kids —” He stopped and looked at my mother. I busied myself with a crunchable ice cube. “That is to say, my other children have always called me by my first name.”

  My mother clicked her tongue then used it to try and push out an errant piece of rice stuck between her back teeth.

  “So, why don’t we do that,” Dr. Holden said.

  “I don’t know your first name.”

  “Thomas.”

  “Thomas.” I ran the two syllables around in my mouth. “Not Tom?”

  “Tom is fine, too.”

  “And I guess I’ll be calling you Margery now?” I asked my mother.

  “Good gracious no,” she said. “Mother is fine. Names should establish relationships.”

  “Even with Tom? You’re going to call him your boyfriend? How about your husband?”

  Dr. Holden smiled. “I wouldn’t mind that.”

  “Is there a reason everything must revolve around you, Enid?” my mother snapped. “We are eating dinner.”

  “He brought it up.”

  At which Dr. Holden jumped up, the side of his pants dancing.

  “Phone,” he explained, fishing it from his pocket. “I’ve got to take this,” he said to the screen on his phone. “It’s Sivi.”

  “Sivi?” I asked, but Dr. Holden had gone outside to answer his call.

  “Dr. Sivaloganathan,” my mother explained.

  “Her first name is Sivi?”

  “No. It’s a nickname from Sivaloganathan.”

  “So, his children call him by his first name, he calls his wife by her last name. What does he call you?”

  “Nurse Strange, mainly.” The creases on my mother’s forehead came out. “I guess Margery, too.”

  “Maybe he’ll figure out something sweet to call you based on your last name.”

  “It’s hard to make Strange into something cute.” My mother grabbed a toothpick to keep working at the stuck grain of rice. “Since you’re now one of Dr. Holden’s acknowledged offspring, things will get easier. Perhaps we’ll go to Europe in a few years. Not this summer.”

  “Is this what all this is about? Money for holidays?”

  “I know you think that I’m your adversary, Enid, but I am trying my best.”

  I doubted that.

  My mother cleared her throat and stared at me expectantly. Right: dinner and banter, my mother expecting me to perform my half of the dance.

  “I want to discuss you reading my notebook,” I said.

  “I won’t read your notebook again without written permission in triplicate.”

  “Actually, let’s discuss some of your comments.” This I would segue into her defacement of my notebook. “On the phone, we were discussing the nature of truth and causation.”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “Specifically, that if I wrote stuff down, it would come true.”

  “Now, that —”

  “So I can make the faeries do things, although I tried yesterday without success. Is there some trick or wait time before my commands are enacted? Or does it only work in specific magical, or non-magical, areas?” Might as well see if there was any information I could get out of mother to use against the faerie that had allowed Dr. Holden in here.

  My mother sighed; the brush of air rippled through my eyelashes. “You’ve misunderstood, as usual, what I was trying to tell you.”

  “Well, whose fault is —”

  “I will give you an example, since, clearly, abstracts give you fits of imagination. I once overheard a teacher say that I was bad at math.”

  “But you’re amazing at math.”

  “Yes, but for a long time I thought I wasn’t because I couldn’t believe that something someone else noticed about me could be untrue. Thus, a truth was constructed, yes?”

  “Yes?” I repeated haltingly.

  “What I was trying to impart to you is that your book will become truthful if those reading it believe it to be truthful.”

  I thought about this. “I don’t think that’s any different than what I said.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Now I just need to write that I am their god, and when the faeries read it, they’ll do everything I command.” I flung my arms out triumphantly, still holding on to my fork. Cauliflower splattered the wall. “Yes, I know.” I stood up. “I’ll clean it. And speaking of someone making messes in someone else’s property —”

  “Done.” Dr. Holden popped back into the dining room. “I’ve done it. I’ve told Sivi that it is conclusively over between us.”

  “You broke up with your wife —” my mother began.

  “Over the telephone?” I finished. “And I was talking with my mother when you cut me —”

  “That’s extraordinarily crass,” my mother interrupted. “Even for you.”

  “There’s hardly a non-crass way to tell your wife of thirty-one years her doctor husband is leaving her for a nurse like we’re all characters on a soap opera.” Dr. Holden thunked himself back in his chair and picked up his fork.

  “Even so.” My mother put her head in her hands. “I’d have thought we would do everything in person.”

  “The cauliflower was good,” I said, wiping some more from the wall. “Cleans up good.”

  My mother winced at the grammar, but kept quiet.

  “Enid,” Dr. Holden said. “Perhaps there is someplace you can go so your mother and I can talk pri
vately.”

  “Not really. It’s my house too, you know. You can’t just make me leave.”

  “You rent this house, so it isn’t yours. It belongs to the landlord.” Dr. Holden poked a finger to his chest. “Me. And I’m asking you to leave.”

  “What? How?” I burbled. “You own this house? When did he buy this house?” I asked my mother. “Recently?”

  “I’ve owned it for about six years now, as an investment, not that this past year I’ve been making much return on it. My tenants,” Dr. Holden said, gazing adoringly at my mother, “aren’t always prompt with the rent.”

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” I told Dr. Holden. “And here’s more you never bothered to tell me,” I said to my mother.

  “Enid, please,” sighed my mother. “You are not the only person for whom this adjustment is difficult.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Dr. Holden asked.

  “Well, I’m sure this isn’t particularly pleasant for Dr. Sivaloganathan,” I suggested.

  “Enough, Enid,” Dr. Holden shouted. I’d never seen him rattled before. His cartoony cheeks puffed in and out as he stood, hands on hips.

  “So, that’s where you get that from,” my mother said.

  “I don’t look like that when I’m angry,” I told her.

  “Eh.” My mother wiggled her palm in a so-so gesture.

  “Maybe the hands part,” I conceded.

  “Stop it, both of you. Enid, out,” Dr. Holden said.

  “I’m still eating.”

  “Fine, you stay. Margery, we’ll talk in the yard.”

  Never in a million years would my mother agree to have a private conversation out where just anyone, including faeries, could hear it.

  But she was taking her plate into the kitchen, rinsing it off in the sink.

  Putting on her sensible shoes.

  Grabbing a sweater in case it got chilly.

  “Eat your dinner, Enid. I’ll be back soon.”

  Between mouthfuls, I made sure to seethe.

  Direct conversation with faeries is unlikely. I assume time passes differently for faeries, creating an insurmountable barrier to spoken communication. I suppose you could record your voice and speed up/slow down the recording, depending on whether time goes faster or slower for faeries relative to us. However, since recording oneself is a relatively recent phenomenon, there is little to say whether faeries would react favorably to a recording. They may be frightened, insulted, amused, or all at such an attempt. For best results, you should probably stick with written communiqués, especially when asking (or telling) faeries to do something. However, in my experience, unless it’s something the faeries want to do anyway, they probably won’t do it.

  It felt good to have my notebook back.

  “Any mail for me?” I called out when they returned. I’d seen them out the window at the community mailbox.

  “No, Enid, there was not.”

  “Why are you still getting an electric bill from your old house?” Dr. Holden whispered to my mother in the hallway. “You don’t live there anymore. That’s like throwing your money away.”

  “It’s shut off at the breaker switch. We don’t pay anything.”

  “Still —”

  “And if the realtor shows the house, she can flip the switch and then show prospective buyers around with the lights on, rather than off.”

  Into the front room they came.

  “We’ve been talking,” Dr. Holden began.

  “We would like to include you,” my mother added.

  “But we all need a cooling-off period,” Dr. Holden interjected.

  My mother frowned. “That’s not —”

  “Margery, this is my fifth time through raising a child. I think you should defer to my judgment in this matter.”

  “And at least his second time leaving his wife,” I mumbled.

  From the glimmer of amusement on my mother’s face, I was pretty sure she’d heard me. Dr. Holden, not so much.

  “Tonight, as your mother and I have so many details to discuss, I suggest you spend the night at Mrs. Delavecchio’s again.”

  “I’m not sure excluding Enid —”

  “No. This is an adult matter —”

  “Enid can be very mature for her age —”

  “It’s all right,” I jumped in. “I don’t mind. In fact, I think I’d prefer to go to Mrs. Delavecchio’s house.”

  “Really?” my mother asked. Her frown deepened.

  “Really.” Not really, but their conversation about the farmhouse electric bill had given me an idea.

  hey let me pack a suitcase before leaving.

  “Honestly, Enid,” my mother said. “You spend half of your life at Mrs. Delavecchio’s. What else could you possibly need?”

  “Toothbrush,” I answered.

  “Good dental hygiene is vital,” said Dr. Holden.

  “Vital to what?” asked my mother.

  Their bickering blocked my bedroom door.

  “Excuse me,” I said, grabbing the handle of my rolling suitcase and dragging it behind me.

  “Lift it, please,” said Dr. Holden. “You’ll scratch the hardwood.”

  “I won’t.” I wheeled the suitcase back and forth a few times. “See. Not a — oops.” I looked down. “Sorry.” The wheels had indeed left white marks behind on the floor.

  “Those aren’t scratches,” my mother told us. Bending over and licking her thumb, she rubbed them gone. “Dirt from the wheels has simply been ground into the floor.”

  “She still should have lifted the suitcase.”

  “Why?” we asked.

  “Because I told her to.”

  “That may be —” My mother and Dr. Holden resumed their bickering. I stood, shifting my weight from foot to foot. Defying Dr. Holden was only half the reason I’d rolled the suitcase along. The other half was that my suitcase and its contents weighed roughly the same as Jupiter, and I couldn’t physically lift it off the ground. Not knowing how long I’d be gone for, I’d had to pack pretty much everything I owned.

  “Now that Dr. Holden is here,” I interjected during a pause wherein my mother and Dr. Holden were eying each other warily in the aftermath of discovering that they each preferred a different brand of toothpaste, “you can show our landlord —” I made sure to make that sound as obsequious as possible “— the corner of the ceiling that has water damage.”

  “Water damage?” Dr. Holden looked panicked.

  “It’s by the crawl space to the attic in the master bedroom.” My mother pointed him towards the far end of the hall. “A house this age is sure to have a few harmless peculiarities of the sort.”

  “After the disaster your house became, I think I should take a gander and decide how ‘harmless’ this damage is myself.”

  My mother glowered at Dr. Holden, but led him down the hallway to her room anyway. I waited until their spat flared up again offstage, then sneakily wheeled my suitcase down the hall, down the carpet runner on the stairs (to make sure it didn’t thump too loudly), and onto the ground floor. My zip into the kitchen to grab a snack was a success, but then my getaway was almost foiled by the metal strip that separated the tiles of the entryway from the hardwood of the hall: without an incline on the metal, the wheels banged loudly against the strip.

  “What was that?” my mother called down.

  “I stubbed my toe,” I improvised.

  “Clumsiness is never becoming.”

  Coaxing one wheel at a time over the metal strip, I shouted back, “Your concern, as always, warms my heart.”

  “I am concerned, Enid. I wouldn’t want this to be a sign of a stroke.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Well then, have a pleasant mini-break at Mrs. Delavecchio’s.”

  “I will.” Only o
ne wheel left.

  “Make sure to look for your notebook while there.”

  “What?” The edge of my notebook peeked out from the suitcase’s front pocket.

  “We ascertained that your notebook was most likely at Mrs. Delavecchio’s house.”

  Right. I hadn’t told my mother about getting it back from Amber Holden. I hadn’t told her about the faerie in the house. I hadn’t told her (obviously) that I was plotting against her. All this when I usually told her everything, in detail, often in triplicate. None of this was right. We were supposed to be a team, just the two of us, not this new pair that Dr. Holden was intent on them becoming.

  “I’ve got to go,” I shouted, hoping the wobble in my voice wasn’t apparent.

  “For goodness’ sake, Enid, stop dilly-dallying and just go already,” Dr. Holden yelled.

  “Sure thing, Dr. Holden,” I called back. “You interfering interloper,” I whispered under my breath. I let the door slam hard behind me on the way out, knowing how much our landlord hated that. Then, to add to my symphony of frustration, I banged my suitcase down the front steps, which were cheap poured concrete, brittle and ill-prepared for my suitcase’s weight. A loosed chunk of step wedged its way into one of the suitcase’s wheel casings. Roll-roll-roll-kthunk it sounded as I went along. Roll-roll-roll-kthunk. The rhythm was kind of hypnotizing. The faerie that had been tailing me the past few days must have thought so too, since it shimmered in my periphery.

  “Oh, don’t you worry,” I said to it. “We’ll be talking soon.”

  I winked.

  It vanished.

  Now, as for setting my plan in motion. I had a few days before my mother wandered over to Mrs. Delavecchio’s house and discovered that not only was I not there, I had not been there. So that gave me a timeline for action. And my mother and Dr. Holden’s wrangling over its electric bill had provided me a location: the farmhouse, the house where we’d lived before moving into town, the house my mother had been trying to sell for the past year. Uninhabited, dilapidated, and remote, it was the perfect plan-enacting location. I just needed a few more supplies for faerie trapping and I’d be fully set to get Dr. Holden out of my life.