The Household Spirit (9 page)

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 matter. 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.

How could he not?

Q
ueens 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.