The Household Spirit (8 page)

E
mily was six when Peppy first took her to the hospital. Back then, yawning still terrified her. Feeling one coming on, she'd lock up her face, put a hold on her breath. She believed that yawns were how sleep entered you, and if you swallowed too much sleep, yawned too big, too often, you
drowned
. Then they would have you.

There was a barrage—as they say—of tests. Psychological.
She was sane, well-adjusted, intelligent, happy. She sure had an imagination
. Physical.
Tip-top shape
. Secretive, offensively underhanded.
Her grandfather was not abusing her physically, sexually, or emotionally
. Until, finally, she was summoned to the Queens Falls General Hospital sleep lab.

The wires planted into Emily's head connected to a room full of doctors. The doctors attended machines, sinks. You could watch them through a window. The hospital bedroom smelled like a balloon after you rubbed it against your hair and stuck it to the wall, and Emily was not afraid. It was safe to yawn in a hospital. Peppy had prepared her as if she were going to the kind of slumber party that she'd seen on TV—
but with nice doctors
. Plus, new bunny slippers for the occasion. The gunk they used to attach the wires to her scalp was cold at first, and then it tickled, and then it itched. Peppy said it made her look like a dandelion. She fearlessly yawned; she roared. “I'm an
actual
lion, actually, Peppy,” she said. The nurses called her Freckles.

Emily had an incident an hour after falling asleep; one doctor and three nurses were there to help secure her arms and legs, keep her, they said, from injuring herself. But they only kept her from not reaching Peppy, who had to stand back, helpless, as Emily screamed, babbled, and then whimpered like a dog with a crunched-on paw. Sometime before midnight, Peppy insisted on taking her home. Enough was enough.

The next day, they returned.

The doctors noted Emily's pretty purple dress and what was her little stuffed monkey's name? William, Emily told them. “I told you yesterday.” The nurses kept a distance. Queens Falls, apparently, was still the kind of place where a child could unnerve nurses.

The doctors' eyes landed on Peppy like heavy birds. Like owls. They took him to another room. Emily had been given a coloring book and a single number 2 Ticonderoga pencil.

They told Mr. Phane that what his granddaughter had—in all probability—were called night terrors: a common enough condition, they assured him, deepening their hospital voices. Though, ahem, they said. Shifting a little. Certainly, ahem, little Emily's night terrors were on the more terrifying side of the spectrum. This was something that would disappear in time, they insisted. During puberty, usually, at the very latest. The machines said that her brain was otherwise OK.

“Night terrors, huh,” Peppy had said. It had been abundantly clear that his granddaughter was terrified at night.

There was little they could do, but they had pamphlets that they referred to as literature. They cautioned him against any kind of serious medication. Just their two cents, they said. Peppy appreciated this. Had he, however, thought about taking Emily to a therapist? You can never know where these things come from—or what can help.

Back in the car, Emily asked, “Peppy, am I very sick? Do I have to have the medicine now?”

“No,” he said. He pulled the car out of the parking lot. “You just have bad dreams.”

“They're not dreams.” Because she knew, even then. “I already told you, Peppy.”

“I understand that,” he said. He sighed. “Patience. You'll get better, sweetknees. Doctors said so. You're getting better.”

“I'm afraid.”

“The doctors said you're shipshape. Good news. They said don't you worry. They'll go away as you get older. Do you want to stop for doughnuts?”

“How older?”

“Dunkin' Donuts just up ahead.”

“I want to go
home
,” Emily said. Then, “Greg Miller from kindergarten broke his arm on a tree and he got to have a cast on his arm.”

“Not the same thing.”

“Now we're allowed to draw our names on Greg Miller's arm.”

“Emily, nobody is going to put your head in a cast.”

“But maybe just at night, Peppy. But maybe not like a
cast
,” she said. “Like a
helmet
. Or what if we cut my hair all off?”

Peppy swallowed his smile. “Bad hair doesn't cause bad dreams, and, anyway, your hair is not bad.”

“They're not dreams, Peppy.”

“Your hair is outstanding.”

“But maybe with no hair I could look older, like you, like when they're supposed to go away? You said. When I'm older. They'll think I'm old and they'll go away.”

“Who?”

Emily was silent.

“Emily?”

“I don't want to go to sleep without the medicine.”

“There is no medicine.”

“Then I want a haircut.”

“You're fine,” Peppy said. Trying to lighten things, “Cutting off all of your hair is not going to make you look old. It will make you look like a goblin.”

“Good,” Emily said.

“Tell me, how do you think your Peppy got so old? Baldness?”

“Birthdays.”

Peppy laughed. “Who loves you?”

“Peppy loves me.”

“That's right he does.”

—

The night terrors would occur an hour or so after Emily fell asleep. They were not dreams. There was no narrative, no images, and it was the same thing every single time. It was a concentrated wrongness. It couldn't be explained or described and only made sense from a tongue-tied corner of Emily's consciousness. And it was terrible.

Like this: suddenly, inside sleep, the
wrongness
would thicken and grow until it was all that she was, until it finally broke Emily from sleep, from bed, eyes open, dark rushing in, and she was rushing, too, running through the house blindly toward her grandfather. She would turn on lights, all of them, exploding the house awake. The severe way a room filled with things, herself included, all conjured just like that at a flick of a switch. She needed it but couldn't handle it. Light. What was it? What was any of this? The carpeting and dolls and dumb, sinister pieces of furniture, all the senseless shouts of matter, and all Emily's fault for flicking the stupid switch. Turn them off, make them go away.
Make it stop
. Often, Emily would scream.

Sometimes, in school, she'd get intimations of these night terrors when trying to fix her reality within the concept of outer space, the infinite, or the fact that everything was happening on an ostensibly flat surface on a planet that was actually gigantic and round and rolling at abominable speeds through nothing much whatsoever. Surrounded by what? Light-years of more of the same. Later, the
best way Emily found to describe these terrors was that it was like being upside down in her own body.

Peppy would help Emily sip water from a Dixie cup. Guiding her into the bathroom. Here, up up up. Plopping her on the bathroom counter, next to the sink. The homey purr of the tap filling a cup with water. This is how you drink water.

“There, now you, now you, one, two, three…”

She'd turn and look with Peppy. The mirror like a guide, a way for Emily to see how it was done while she was apparently in the process of doing it, and Peppy always counting, usually to three, but sometimes higher, numbers stacking, not exactly calming but making more sense than words. The night terrors felt like they would never end, the gaping panic of them, and she felt like there was no escape and that from now on everything was going to be like this because maybe everything was really always like this, or was like this before she was born and would be like this for Emily when she was finally, genuinely dead. Later, as an adult, she would think that she'd been cursed at too young an age with a sideways peek into the exact opposite of life.

Finally, she would hush. Her sobbing would soften and she'd feel herself fitting back into her body. Then, like that, like nothing had just happened, back into sleep.

Generally, mercifully, in the morning Emily wouldn't remember a thing. Not unless she awoke on the living room sofa or in her grandfather's bed, or unless Peppy told her about it or, later, when she was older and more perceptive, by the tense, internal way he went about preparing breakfast. A sleepless hang to his bulk. Cheeriness, tight as a drum.

Waking on the sofa: “Why am I here?”

“You had a bad dream.”

She'd remember then. Could still feel the wrongness, the terror of not being real, of not fitting. “But no,” she'd say. “No, I didn't. I remember, Peppy. That's not why I'm here.”

Sometimes, during those preteen years, she would pray, which
owing to her lack of religious instruction was basically a guileless, intuitive form of supernatural haggling. I'll do
this
if you stop
that
. It helped. But going to sleep with CBS TV on the radio helped even more, and moving the bed around the room and never sleeping in the same position twice in a row might have helped as well, hard to say. One evening she'd push her bed to the window, the next she'd lay her head where her feet normally went. The next she'd nudge her bed a few feet to the right or left, or sleep on the floor in her sleeping bag, though Peppy never fully approved of that. Too many crooked old drafts in the house.

“Bad night, Peppy,” she'd say.

“Bad night,”
he'd repeat.

The same way you hoped an actress might break a leg, you never wished Emily good night. What for? She never had them. Bad nighting, as invented by Peppy when Emily was eight, was both accurate and homeopathically hopeful. Mostly, though, it made them both smile. Never failed. Even toward the end, when Emily was twenty-two and Peppy could hardly even talk. “Bad night, Peppy,” she'd say, kissing his forehead. His dentureless smile like an attempt to inhale the entire lower half of his face, and a bad night it would be.

But like the doctors predicted, the night terrors gradually lessened as Emily approached puberty, from one a night to one every other night to one a week, then a month, until they ceased altogether around Emily's fifteenth birthday. The damage was done. Sleep had cast its odd, subtle shadow over her life.

Two years of therapy had gone nowhere, or, actually,
everywhere
. Deceased mother this, deceased mother that, and then, of course, the doozy that nobody ever even knew her father. He might be anywhere, anyone, or just as deceased as her deceased mother. Every man was potentially her father. Emily was told that this was how she perceived the world. And those bad dreams that Emily politely insisted weren't dreams?
They were dreams
. She'd have to accept that. She'd have to accept that whenever she saw a man, she
thought: Daddy. Better she realized this now, before she entered into more destructive sexual relationships in the future, right? Her bad dreams were probably PTSD-like attempts by her subconscious to attract the attention of a father, who might be anyone, anywhere, et cetera. Or they were sexual in nature, which is why she couldn't properly describe or account for them, or was too embarrassed to. “Tell me again about being
upside down in your own body
, Emily. Where does that mean your head is? Can you point to where your head is on your body when you're upside down in your own body?” Yuck. Gross. Emily walked out on two of her four therapists because they developed a crush on the idea that Peppy was sexually abusing her in the middle of the night while she was sleeping. “But that's not happening,” Emily told them. “That's not what I'm here for.”

“If I may, isn't it likely that you yourself don't know what you're here for?”

“Like here on earth?”

“Well, you've got a delightful sense of humor. That's established. I appreciate that. For the sake of argument, Emily, let's say that if something like that is happening then you don't know that it is happening. It's not your fault. Only your subconscious knows.”

“My subconscious told you to tell me?”

“Couldn't it be that your so-called night terrors are telling everyone?”

Then there was Route 29's near-total isolation. They never got around to having poor Mr. Jeffries nocturnally raping her, but that, Emily assumed, was only because they'd never seen his face.

“Why do you think this Mr. Jeffries keeps his deceased mother in the attic, Emily? Can you tell me a little about his mother?”

“God, I'm just joking!”

“OK, let me ask you a question. Isn't taking nothing seriously the same thing as taking everything seriously?”

Then there was her grandfather's alleged misanthropy: Did Emily
feel beholden to it? Enslaved or manipulated or cowed by it? Did she have to feel the same way about the world in order to meet his approval? He was, after all, all she had. Did she think that was normal? Did that frighten her? His age? His mortality? Isolation? Irony? His masculinity? Did his occasional lady friends disturb her? Then, finally, there was her love of plants—now here was a metaphorically fertile subject! Tell us about gardening. How does it make you feel? Tomatoes. Soil. Cucumbers. How do tomatoes make you feel, Emily? How does holding a cucumber make you feel? Because, hm, perhaps gardening was nothing less than Emily's own way of mothering herself and the world around her, a gigantic splurge of overcompensating
nurture
of nature to account for a lack of female role models? She was trying to grow a mother, wasn't she? Or maybe, Emily, you're only trying to grow yourself anew?

Right.

No. Her sleep was not co-opted by dead relatives. Peppy wasn't a deviant. Gardening was a
hobby
. She liked being outdoors: the pebbly sound of the Kayaderosseras, the tall pines and squishy grass beneath her toes. Being curious and terribly sad about not knowing who her father was was different from being emotionally crippled or systematically destroyed, night after night, by an unaccountably rapey lack of father. Or mother. Or anything else she didn't actually need, like the dull sexual insinuations, the how about sketching whatever you feel today sessions, the expensive, torturous logic. She needed a good sleep is what she needed. Maybe she needed a best friend. Mostly, wasn't she a thirteen-year-old girl? Did they have pills for that?