The Household Spirit (10 page)

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 foil. 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.

Emily thinking: Please don't say you're getting married. Then: Don't scowl. Be nice. Smile. She'll be gone in a few months. But please don't you say you're getting married.

Because Emily saw why Peppy liked this Winifred Shapiro, and why she probably liked Winnie too.

Winnie said, “Oh, Peter, goodness gracious, show your granddaughter the letter already!”

Peppy took out an envelope he'd had resting on his lap. “I opened it this morning by mistake,” he said. “Well, partly by mistake. I guess we got it a few days ago and it was hiding with some junk or other. Win saw it, actually.” His eyes trembled. “Well, OK, here you are—” He passed her the envelope, which also trembled. He said, “I am so proud of you, Emily.”

That was how Emily learned that there were people willing to pay her a substantial amount of money to move away from Route 29 and everything she loved. She was officially going to Boston.

—

The old man didn't believe in college and neither, back then, did Emily, but the unspeakable obviousness of his mortality meant it was time. Playing college made more sense than playing widow. Peppy needed her to leave.

Boston because Emily wanted a city—she saw how her behavior and Queens Falls, or any small town, were an awkward fit, and she didn't think that she was ready to retire from the world like her grandfather; eventually, yes, maybe. Probably. But not yet. He'd had years abroad and then many more in New York City before he'd seen enough, right? What had Emily ever seen but the aftereffects of that world? Peter Phane's face wasn't an entirely accurate map.

He agreed. “You'll be wanting to see for yourself. Don't you dare take my word for anything. I'm a malcontent.”

New York City as a first port of call was too daunting,
too Peppy
—Emily would suffer her own disillusionment, thank you very much—and nearby Albany, though far bigger than Queens Falls,
was a city the same way a scooter is a motorcycle. So it was Boston or Philadelphia. (She had to be nearby, that was a given.) Boston University, in the end, gave her more money.

Could you major in gardening? In granddaughtering? Plants? Not exactly, not at all really, so she decided to major in something like plants, in biology
—the environment
. It didn't matter what. In her scale-tipping application essay she wrote persuasively about how being an orphan made her more in tune to the collapse of the world's ecosystem; how her whole life she'd been searching for a parent, a mother, and found none; and how living in the middle of an authentic verdant nowhere, Mother Earth had been her foster parent, and now look what was happening to her poor mother, herself being abandoned by her rapacious ungrateful children, demolished, unregulated,
et cetera
. Peppy helped. He encouraged the whole orphan thing! He mustered some of his mythical journalistic verve and it had them in total stitches. It was the funniest thing that either of them had ever seen. They laid it on so thick. They even shared a bottle of wine. He called it their please-sir-I-want-some-more essay. It was the most fun they'd had in a long time and mostly, Emily thought, because they'd both been so nervous. They knew what this meant. She was preparing to leave Peppy so that he could die. Peppy was kicking her out so that he could die.

The main reason that Emily did not like thinking about the future was because her grandfather did not live in the future.

Right, but
you do
, he didn't say. You
will
. You have to be somewhere, Emily.

“I don't want to be anywhere else but here,” she did say. “I don't want to go.”

“Enough,” he said. “Now pack your bags.”

Thing was, she'd had them packed for weeks.

T
he sixteenth floor of Warren Towers was the highest she'd ever been and it was where Emily
lived
. She rode an elevator home. Her window was a TV that you couldn't unplug, and the nighttime trance of Commonwealth Avenue traffic muted her. Emily had a horizon. It was ticklish, almost too much, and it turned her on: the thousands of other windows out there, switching on, off, all night long. She'd call Peppy when it snowed. Looking down through the swarming, nearly phosphorescent snow, palm pressed against the cold window. Emily never tired of describing this to Peppy, who never tired of telling her that they had snow in Queens Falls, too. Whoop-dee-do. They also had electricity, dentistry, you name it.

“I miss you, Peppy.”

“Yep,” he said.

Infuriating. Like a friend you knew was surfing the internet or watching TV while you told of emotionally intricate insights, though, in fact, he wasn't. He had to turn the radio and TV off to hear Emily properly. “Talking on the phone isn't talking,” he'd say.

“Would be if you
talked
.”

“I love you, my darling,” he said. “Now tell me about snow.”

In Boston, Emily smoked cigarettes, marijuana, the occasional ironic cigarillo; she drank mojitos and discovered food called cuisine.
Cilantro, for example. Falafels and lobster bisque and
negitoro temaki
. She flipped for the plastic Dixie-like cups of melted butter that came with the lobsters that some of the older, parental-charge-card boys she dated bought her from Legal Sea Foods. It became a joke between Emily and one of her first BU friends, Maxine. Emily wondering why they didn't just go and dip everything in plastic cups of melted butter: steak, fingers, cilantro. “See this?” Maxi patting her ass. “
Here's
why.”

Emily befriended those who stayed up late. Kids who lived off campus; kids who weren't even technically kids anymore, transitioning from being students to being un- or underemployed. She gravitated toward people who reminded her of Harriet Jeffries. People that Emily thought Harriet Jeffries would, herself, gravitate toward. Emily didn't form many daytime attachments and she soon fell out of love with the gabby high school hotel that Warren Towers revealed itself to be. Though she never got sick of the elevator commute, the height, the CITGO sign, or the canyon-like gash of the Charles at night.

She hated her roommate. Firstly, in theory, just
having
a roommate. Emily was uncomfortable sleeping in the same room with a stranger she couldn't touch or cleave to as she plummeted to sleep. She no longer had night terrors, so no threat of Emily wigging out in the middle of the night, but what happened to her now was worse and left her feeling more exposed, more nuts. Going to sleep, for Emily, wasn't dissimilar from undressing from her own body. That said, Emily would have disliked this roommate under most circumstances. Her name was Erica Baker.

Erica Baker had a shit ton of sisters. This was a conversation that they had maybe three times that first week. Oh my God, Emmylee, you got no
sisters
? The Chinese aborted sisters. Erica Baker talked about this so often that Emily began to wonder at her implications, as if Emily might somehow be complicit in the traditional Sino hobby of sister aborting. Because Erica Baker had three. Five,
actually, if you counted her sisters-in-law, which Erica Baker did,
on her fingers
, and every time she mentioned her other, better, biological sisters, which was, seriously, like every fucking chance she got. One, two, three. Then Ryder's wife,
Kelly
. (Sigh. Eye roll.) Four. Then Dylan's wife, Kat. (“Urgh, you have no idea!”) Five. A full-fingered hand of sisterhood. It was pathological, if harmless, and Emily would have tried to have figured out which proactively sibling-centric church Erica Baker was involved with but who knew what glassy-eyed planet such a conversation might ultimately crash upon. They weren't pals. Emily would try to nap during the day, which too often collided with Erica Baker's study time or Erica Baker's TV on the laptop time, or her sister time, Erica Baker having nearly identical conversations with each of her sisters, one after another, even (urgh)
Kelly
and Kat, the same mewling litany of Boston's shortcomings. Erica Baker was from Florida and thought, among other things, that the Massachusetts weather was out to get her. Her personally. She was also disapproving and far too inquisitive about the time Emily soon began to spend away from their room at night. She left leaflets on Emily's bed.

The academic side of collegiate life was pretty much exactly what Emily thought it might be, and just as engaging. The professors and the TAs liked Emily, and, mostly, she reciprocated. The cynical, rumpled ones reminded her of Peppy. There were worse ways to spend her time. So for many it was a surprise when the girl who'd appeared so gratifyingly curious and with-it ended up, come evaluation time, right smack in the middle of the giving-a-shit spectrum. Baffled by Emily's exam results or her tentative, weightless essays, professors would, no doubt, think back. The Phane girl hadn't actually asked any piercing questions, had she? She hadn't. Nor had she made any particularly astute points in conversation or, face it, done much at all besides be so heavily present. The absurdist way that Emily looked at things could sometimes be mistaken for a slippery, well-curated intelligence, especially by heterosexual men
who'd eventually have to confront the truth. Emily Phane was a perfectly mediocre student.

—

By the end of her freshman year, she'd moved to a place in Jamaica Plain. She'd happened into a large second-story room—with a porch!—that would have been out of her league if she wasn't room-sitting, more or less, for Tracy de la Cruz, a half Spaniard she'd spent a few nights accidently roaming Somerville with.

Tracy had followed someone to Maine and from there, somehow, to Berlin, Germany, for a week that lasted a month, then more months in Hamburg, if Facebook was to be believed, and just as Emily had stopped paying attention, an e-mail appeared, explaining that she wasn't coming back to Boston for a while and, in fact, had decided to “finally put a restraining order” on the MIT physics dissertation that Emily didn't know anything about since they weren't really even friends. Turned out that the story of Emily's Erica Baker horror had made an impression on Tracy and so she got first refusal on her room in the Jamaica Plain house she shared with four other sex-positive women in their thirties. For a Bostonian version of next to nothing, too. Just watch her shit, you know? Make sure her plants didn't die of loneliness.

From there on, Emily's life centered on Jamaica Plain. Centre Street, she found, was a good thing to walk beside and toss troubles into; she appreciated the trees, hills, the tattoo mothers and the dirty, faded, expensive vegetables. She imagined someday running into Harriet Jeffries here; Harriet seeing Emily and thinking, Whoa, look how cool she turned out! It was possible to get from JP to BU via public transport, but also an amazing pain in the ass and, if anyone asked, it was that which contributed to her low attendance, middling grades, and general ghostliness where BU was concerned. Nobody asked. There was a fine line between doing nothing and waiting. Sometimes she'd sit on her porch, overwhelmed by exile, hating to think of what she was really waiting for. She did enough
to ensure there was some kind of excuse for her to be in Boston, and that her scholarship held. Barely. She carpooled to BU with postgrad friends, lesbians particularly. Lesbians loved driving one another around.

Later on, back in Queens Falls, her Boston years felt hypnagogic. This compounded her problem. The dreamy, teasing, pulled-cotton-ball nature of her memories. She'd think back and not be able to see any of her friends as plural entities or place herself as a solid thing among solid things. They were energy fields she'd join, or didn't join but got caught up in for a bit while on her way elsewhere. Nocturnal acquaintances developing and fading; Emily could slot into groups, ride them for weeks, entertain them, be entertained, and then disappear. Poof. No big deal. She was every clique's auxiliary member. She could hang with the eco-polyamorists as well as she could with the middle-class indie girls and their gay besties. Keep moving. People who came to think they knew her best during those years wondered how she'd possibly lived for so long up at Camp Crystal Lake or wherever it was she was supposed to be from. Hick Falls, New York. Smallville.
Deliverance
. Not their sleepless, roving Emily Phane.

“Were you friends with all the creatures of the forest, Em?”

Emily said that she was. “I did a lot of gardening. I've told you guys. Laugh all you want. My grandfather and I were never bored.”

They loved this. “Here we go!”

“What is she hiding? Has anyone ever seen a photograph of her cabin? This Pappy character?”

Emily said,
“Peppy.”

“Even better.”

“I want to know where the orphan rumor originated. Do orphanages still exist? Has anyone ever seen one?”

Someone passed Emily a joint; she declined. Then, why not, undeclined. Someone got up to go to the kitchen. Someone returned with two Blanchards Wines & Spirits paper bags. “Little
of both. But mostly spirits.” Sitting down. Bottle, bottle, bottle. Gourmet potato chips. Bottle.

“I'd like to address the persistent Mormon rumors.”

Laughter. Something crashing in the kitchen, two girls shouting “Sorry!” in unison.

“Where are the photos? We demand proof. Middle school transcripts at least.”

“I thought the Emily Phane birthers were already debunked?”

“I've always considered myself more of a truther. But seriously, has anyone really seen her sleep?”

“Whoa, good point. Ethan? You wanna weigh in here, buddy?”

“Like any day her sister wives are going to show up and drag her into a black van. Back to the compound, Freckles!”

“Pappy don't believe in cameras.”

“Peppy.”

Emily smiling. “Believe what you want, guys.”

—

During Emily's fourth and final year in Boston, she worked part-time at Les French Flowers in Jamaica Plain. For much of that year she lived there too, sharing a small apartment above the shop with her boyfriend, Ethan Caldwell. Ethan's stepmother, Bo-Ra Caldwell, or Boo, ran Les French. Boo owned the building. Ethan had been five when his father died and he'd never known his biological mother. Boo had raised Ethan as her own. They only spoke Korean at home.

Emily wasn't particularly fond of flowers. To her, Les French was like the vegetable kingdom's version of a charnel house or, better, a kind of whorehouse. Everything just hanging out, all the lurid, stinking, fleshy bits. No romance, no roots, very few leaves. But she liked the work, and Boo became a true friend.

Boo wanted a daughter. It was, perhaps, her defining obsession, and one that Emily came to find endearing. Boo would pine, maternally ogle the little JP babies in fuchsia; the sassy teenagers who
needed to cover up their business; the grown-up professional women who needed to “get husband,” have some
cake
, buy themselves a nice bouquet, just relax, OK? This was all she'd ever really wanted, she'd tell Emily,
the daughter
. Before Ethan came into the picture, it had been clear that, besides running the register, being mothered was an integral part of Emily's job. You be good. Now mop floor.

Ethan was several years older than Emily and had recently graduated from Yale with an MA in Asian languages and civilization. On occasion, Emily'd heard him and Boo Skyping from the back room, the two of them speaking Korean, and Emily had, of course, assumed that he
was
Korean, or at least half Korean. “My son, Ethan,” Boo would say. Never plain old Ethan, and never, ever
step
son. Mysonethan—as if it were one Korean word—mysonethan this, mysonethan that, something she couldn't say without a happy flash of teeth.

He returned on the Wednesday before the Friday when he was scheduled to return. First impression? Ethan looked like a famously handsome actor deep inside the role of a homeless person, like somewhere under his brown homesteader beard and flannel shirt was a noble swell of music and a montage of cinematic redemption: a clean-cut face, dimples, and a standing ovation for the kind of award that remarkably handsome people get in Hollywood movies after they've been bearded and homeless for a little while.

More than that:

There was a certain kind of man that always snagged Emily's gaze. You saw them in supermarkets walking
beside
their shopping carts, never subservient to their shopping. One hand on the cart, just taking the groceries out for a stroll. Sometimes this type even marched ahead, pulling the shopping cart behind them with a single hooked finger. Follow me, food. It was ridiculous and Emily hated that she also found it attractive, if only in the obvious, cave-manly way of motorcycles and push-ups. Anyway, this type, when they bought flowers, wouldn't look at the flowers. They'd march straight into Les French, looking only at Emily. They'd request
something
nice
. Emily'd ask more specific questions and they'd act as if she were speaking fart. I don't know,
nice
. Flowers, you know? Roses. Something rosy.

Emily first took Ethan to be this type. The way he strode in. Except, no. Because he was looking at something, actually. He was looking at the door to Les French's back room.

Big mistake, anthropomorphizing
men
. Lizzy, a friend of Emily's was fond of saying this. But still, didn't this man have the most soulful eyes? Dogs can have eyes like this, and terminally ill toddlers: big and sad without the recriminatory self-consciousness of adult sadness. Emily decided that he must be that other, rarer type of customer: the genuinely bereaved. Funeral homes normally bought their own funeral flowers; they had arrangements. You got the occasional internet orders from less-bereaved, out-of-state family members, but that was it. Rarely did walk-ins buy funeral arrangements, but when they had, they'd looked a little like this. Cuddly, almost.