The Household Spirit (4 page)

Howie and Peter began to nod more meaningfully at each other once Howie's wife and daughter left, but that was about it. They never spoke. Sometimes, in the winter, after returning from a night shift at GE, Howie would clear the Phanes' driveway of snow before they awoke. He generally mowed their lawn after he finished his. The community was comfortable within itself.

—

Sometime after Emily received her Mazda, Howie and Harri ran into her at the Aviation Road mall.

Howie had been called in last minute for a quick shift of quality time. His ex-wife had to work late grading standardized tests and needed him to pick their daughter up from an after-school advanced oil painting class she was taking at Adirondack Community College.
Though still a senior in high school, due to her past achievements, Harri had more than qualified for the class and would even be earning transferrable credits. He was proud of her.

They were at the mall because she needed some art supplies. For Harri, this meant cheap, spangled “Bingo Night” clothing from Sears, kitten-festooned junk from the Dollar Store (“you know, to
melt
”), and even some actual paint—though this was house paint, Sears again, not oil or acrylic. Well, OK. Howie thought that maybe she'd want some new clothing for herself, too, maybe something less black? She did not. Countess Dracula, his ex-wife had begun calling the talented young woman she still refused to call Harri.

Since Harri rarely came up to Route 29 and since she professed—maybe too strongly—a distaste for motherfucking nature, your so-called natural world, most of the time that Howie and his daughter spent together over the last few years had been walking around this mall or at the movies. They showed old foreign films at the Queens Falls Library most Thursdays and Harri liked having her father take her to these.

“I can't watch films with Mom,” Harri once told him. “She makes, like, Mom noises. She's got to be present in whatever's going on, you know, letting the characters know whether she agrees or disagrees with their decisions. I think she's scared of the dark, actually. Scared of letting go. But you disappear, Dad. Disappearing is the whole point. You get it.”

Howie rarely got it. Those movies. He was just good at being quiet, at watching, waiting, fishing, that's all—and he was happy to spend any amount of time sitting next to his daughter. Sometimes, afterward, they'd go out to dinner—“creepy date night,” Harri called it—and she'd talk about the film, never
movie
, with a glimmering, awed openness that she never showed him on any other subject. Howie came to know his daughter best through the Swedish or Soviet movies she enthused about.

Lately, Howie's ex-wife felt Harriet had been spending too much
time painting in the basement. Her weight had been fluctuating. She was smoking, probably. Her grades were high but she'd stopped listening to the angry music that Howie's ex-wife had disliked but understood and started playing old, creakingly sad-sounding stuff that just made no sense whatsoever. Gothic music, apparently, like moaning, low-hanging clouds, or slow, endless single-note piano songs. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Suicidal doorbell music, she called it. Hearing it come up from the basement at all hours was unnerving. “Your daughter's turning the house into Transyl-freaking-vania, Howard. Talk to her.”

They—meaning Howie, mostly—were paying for the ACC oil painting class because if Harri was going to spend all her after-school time painting, she could at least do so above ground.

Some years ago Harri's paintings had been extraordinary. Everyone said so. Harri, before turning on the concept of competition and, seemingly, her own talent, had won a number of contests and awards and even had her work shown for a month in the New York State Children's Museum in Albany, and then another place up in Plattsburgh.

It hadn't been until Harriet was four that Howie realized how tiny his daughter was. True, she was smaller than Emily Phane, herself a small girl, but until he saw Harriet up close among the other children on her first day of preschool it hadn't occurred to him. These others were all at least a head taller. Howie had assumed that all children tended to be the same size until they hit puberty. But then there was Harri, instantly diminished, holding his leg, weeping in that soundless, unobtrusive way she had when strangers were around, not wanting to be left alone among the big boys, the big girls. How could he do a thing like that? Howie told the teacher that there must be some mistake here. Had he misunderstood his wife and taken Harriet to the wrong room or preschool? Must have. These freakishly plus-size kids were six or seven, at least, and his daughter, she wasn't even five yet. The teacher had laughed, scooping
little Harriet into her arms. “They're all four or five, Mr. Jeffries,” she'd said. “But none of them are as sweet and cute as
you
,” she told Harriet. Though Harriet continued to cry, she didn't reach out or appear to expect any deliverance from her father.

That night, when Howie told his wife how tiny their daughter was and asked if she had known this, his wife bristled, like what the fuck are you even talking about? “She's perfectly normal. What is wrong with you?”

Harriet had been self-contained, morbidly sensitive, occasionally nasty, intermittently enthusiastic and joyful, but mostly all alone. Just her on the floor with her drawings and her storybooks. But until that first day of preschool, she, like Howie, hadn't known that there was anything physically unusual about her. She really hadn't known how small she was either. This changed her, almost overnight, and she grew smaller. Internally now, and how could Howie not see himself in this, how over the years he had become how he appeared? To Howie and his wife's surprise, Harriet began taping her construction paper together, making giant mosaics, needing her art to be bigger than she was now, always, as big as she could make it. Table sized, mommy sized. She'd make drawings the size of the living room floor. They got her giant sheets of white drawing paper. This was something that wouldn't change. She rarely drew or painted something smaller than her body. It was as if her art had demonstrably grown in importance to her and now had to be big enough to both contain her physical body and be someplace that she could imagine herself walking off into.

Several months after Harriet started preschool and began super-sizing her art, Howie's wife fell in love with Timmy, or started sleeping with Timmy, anyway, and finally realized how unhealthy her husband and Route 29 were for her and her daughter, how they had been stunting their growth in every way possible.

By the time Harriet was a teenager her giant paintings were lovely. Strange, oddly colored landscapes. Still lifes—toys and household
appliances—and self-portraits where she only managed to capture the positive, the unseen magic of whatever was around her, even or especially if it was only a toaster or pink Barbie hair dryer. But by her senior year at Saratoga High, something was missing. She still wanted to show Howie her work back then, trusting his silence in the same way she came to distrust her mother's cloying, effusive praise or, more lately, her frustrated bafflement. Howie would go down to her basement studio and feel oppressed. It looked like she was purposely draining her paintings of life. Countess Dracula indeed. What was she even painting now? Howie sure didn't know. Obsessively detailed decay? Mucus? Why would anyone want to look at such hostile, unhappy paintings? Moreover, the idea of little Harriet walking into one of these and disappearing seemed both too horrible and too real.

“What do you think?” she'd ask.

“I like them.”

Howie wanted to destroy them. Painting used to bring her joy, recognition. But this was art that had turned in on itself. It was compulsive: the gabbling demands of a monster.

Howie tried to think back to when he was her age. He and Harri's mother had spent their time necking, riding bikes, swimming in Lake Jogues, occasionally sneaking boxes of Franzia white zinfandel from Howie's cousin with the water bed, watching lots of TV and speaking with authority about the future, happy in that animal, anticipatory manner specific to virgins in love. Well, Howie thought, at least his daughter wasn't going to be crippled by disillusionment! Unlike her mother, Harri seemed to have been spared a sense of direct ownership of the future…

Now, the day they met Emily in the mall, Harri was in a pretty good mood. She had just been told by her ACC art instructor that her latest painting was distressing.

“Distressing?” Howie asked.

“The class is kind of a joke,” Harri said. “Distressing and offensive, she actually said. Them her words. They want me to paint,
like, trees and mountains. Bad enough I have to live up here, but paint it, too? Marlene—we have to call her Marlene—she's always trying to explain to us the difference between her so-called natural world and everything that Marlene hates. Plastic and ringtones and cigarettes, for example. I told her that everything in existence is just as natural as everything else in existence. I'm sorry, but a Taco Bell is
just
as natural as a waterfall, you know?”

“You used to paint trees and mountains.”

“What?” Harri said. “That's never what I was actually painting, Dad.”

Well, that's what they'd looked like to Howie. He asked, “Well, are you learning anything?”

“Doing my best not to,” Harri said. “I don't know. I guess I like a few of the other students. They're cool, they get my stuff. It's better than high school. It's just Marlene—she's a marshmallow. The way she talks. Like her mouth is full of marshmallows. She's totally insane, actually. By painting a lake over and over again she thinks she'll be able to understand a lake.”

Howie said, “Which lake?”

“You're incredible.
Which lake
.”

Lakes were Howie's favorite thing. Ten or so years ago, Harriet had painted Howie a pond-sized painting of Lake Jogues for his birthday. It took up an entire wall and, without exaggerating, had been among the things on earth that made Howie the most happy. But Harri had recently taken it from his living room wall, telling him it was an embarrassing piece of shit, juvenilia, she'd said, and she seriously couldn't stomach it up there another single fucking second. Made her want to puke. Howie didn't complain. He said he understood and helped cut it in two and drive it back to her mother's house so she could take it to the basement and further desecrate its corpse. He asked Harri for another painting, a replacement, maybe a less juvenile lake? Eventually she brought him a large canvas that looked like rust and spleen.

Howie wasn't hungry but hoped that Harri was. He liked taking
her to dinner, something they hadn't done in months. In fact, as was typical, they hadn't seen or spoken to each other in four weeks. “Would you like to get some dinner before I take you home?”

Sometimes Harri was a vegetarian, but usually she wasn't. It wasn't that she liked animals, she once told him, it was more that she was sick to fucking death of plants. There were way too many in her opinion. “Could we go to Bellaggio's?”

“Yes.”

The little things, like his daughter asking him if they could do something and Howie being able to answer in the affirmative. Here, for you, a
yes
. Bellaggio's, an apparently authentic downstate Italian place marooned inside an upstate strip mall between the Radio Shack and Feigenbaum Cleaners, was a favorite of theirs. The owner and chef, Roger Bellaggio, was married to the daughter of one of Howie's co-workers and always served seventeen-year-old Harri a red plastic Coca-Cola glass a quarter full of their house red wine. “And one Italian soda for the young lady,” he'd say, and wink. Howie liked how Roger Bellaggio, a father of three girls himself, regarded them. Howie always felt more like a real father in that restaurant, like a whole damn family, sitting there, eating sausage pizza or pasta and sharing the Coca-Cola transgression with his wonderful daughter, being recognized by big Roger Bellaggio as the kind of man who both had a wonderful daughter and didn't balk at breaking laws that infringed upon her happiness. He was
that
guy. So he let Harri have a little wine with dinner, so what? You got a problem with that? Harri got endless enjoyment from Roger Bellaggio's dozens of framed photographs of a spry, mustached version of himself on the set of
Rocky IV
, a movie his brother had done the catering for. She loved that the massive Italian's name was
Roger
. Harri would get him to tell different variations of the same tales of Dolph Lundgren and Carl Weathers. Roger Bellaggio never mentioned Sylvester Stallone. Harri invented dark, complex reasons for the omission.

Howie and Harri were on their way out of the mall, passing through the food court when Harri's walking stiffened.

Emily Phane alone, standing by the door. She spotted them, waved. Harri pretended not to notice, then, embarrassed that she had so obviously pretended not to notice, reciprocated the wave, and then, inhaling, went over, leaving Howie behind, a can of Sears house paint in each of his hands. Brown and slightly less brown.

It looked like Emily, who was at least two heads taller than Harri, was sucking Howie's daughter into her. The way they stood. Like Emily was one of Harri's earlier, more beautiful paintings, a fantasy self-portrait she wanted to disappear into. They spoke.

Probably.

But Howie could also imagine them just standing there, silently. Staring.

It was intrusive, meeting Emily here like this. His tiny, aggrieved Harriet poking out from one of her black tents, ripped stockings, hair nearly shaved from her childlike head, and then Emily Phane with the smiling. It was illusory, unpleasant, the two of them together. Like two different species. Their childhood parallel play had continued through their lives: always aware of each other, always watching, but never exactly friends. Harri was too quiet, too antisocial—and, on top of that, the two of them went to different schools, Emily to Queens Falls High and Harri to Saratoga. Emily, though eccentric, was effortless. She dressed normally. Prettily, Howie supposed. Or, you never really noticed how she dressed. Harri, on the other hand, made a great effort to assure that you noticed. Emily was quick to laugh. Harri quick to close in on herself. Howie felt a strong, unfeasible bond with the girl next door, but seeing Emily's open energy diminish his daughter, he wished that he could just turn Emily down a smidgeon. Please, leave my little girl alone.