The Household Spirit (13 page)

T
he Queens Falls General Hospital doors shushed open by themselves. Emily stepped inside, a suitcase in each hand. She'd left one on the sidewalk, where the taxi from the bus station had dropped her off. The hospital air smelled of
clean
in the same way that cherry lollipops taste like actual cherries.

Emily didn't know what she was going to do with the other suitcase on the sidewalk. She could barely carry the ones in her hands and where did she expect to put them anyway? She hadn't slept on the bus. She hadn't slept the previous evening. She should have first gone home to Route 29 but what if there wasn't time for home? Hospital light buzzed like a toothache.

Somewhere in this building was her grandfather.

There were people moving and people waiting: the sick and the dazed, and doctors, nurses, janitors. Emily watched two crying women, both fat, pulling dozens of metallic balloons behind them. The balloons bumped, skidded, and scraped the ceiling.

Emily saw someone she recognized.

That frizzy, anxious shrub of hair, the giant eyes. But it couldn't be. But it was. Winnie—Win Shapiro, her grandfather's last great lady friend. Emily watched her from across the room. She was too old. She wore a hospital gown, slippers; she stood next to a relatively young, relatively tall man in a business suit, whose arms she held as
he said something that sounded like the snapping of an aggrieved towel. He was way too busy for this shit today.

Emily dropped both of her suitcases. Help me. She waved. Please, help me. But neither Winnie, the man, nor anyone saw her. Next to Winnie and the man: a wheeled hat rack on which a small red balloon had apparently been snagged.

—

Some weeks before Emily graduated from high school, she'd spent an afternoon with Winnie Shapiro. This was shortly after Emily learned that she was going to Boston and a month or two before Winnie stopped visiting Peppy.

Emily had been ditching study hall, walking along Aviation Road on her way to grab a coffee at Stewart's. The lime-green Renault 16 hatchback pulled up alongside Emily and honked. “Beep beep,” Winnie said, from the window. “Emily! Darling! Hello! Would you like me to drive you home?” She looked like a turtle inside a turtle.

“I'm actually supposed to be at school?”

“Would you like me to drive you back to school?”

“God no.”

Emily got into the car. Winnie poured about seven white-flavored Tic Tacs into Emily's hand. They looked down at them together. “My mouth tastes like death without these, Emily, I swear,” Winnie said, pinching one from Emily's palm. “Yum!”

Emily put the rest into her mouth. “Thanks, Winnie.”

“It's a gorgeous day. I was just going for a drive.” It was an invitation.

Emily put on her seat belt, tossing her stuff into the backseat. “Sure.”

“Will I get in trouble?”

“What, from Peppy?”

“From the police.”

“Are you going to molest me?”

Winnie laughed. “Two peas in a pod, you two!”

The car sounded like it had swallowed a mouthful of hornets. They drove into the Adirondack Mountains. Cheonderoga Road, Lake Shore Drive, Trout Lake and Bloody Pond, Wapanak Way, Cat Mountain Road, Wall Street, Finkle Road, Mother Bunch Lane. Winnie announcing the names. They passed an abandoned trailer park that looked like the aftermath of a train derailment and up through Tongue Mountain's frothy tunnel of trees, the sun occasionally smashing through and rolling over the Renault 16 like laughter. “God, I love it up here,” Winnie said. “Geologically speaking, neither tongue nor mountain—” Tongue Mountain, Winnie explained, was a range, a series of rolling peaks on the western banks of Lake Jogues.

“I see why my grandfather likes you,” Emily said.

Winnie made a face. “Perhaps you'd do good to remind him sometime,” she said. They went quiet for a moment.

Tongue Mountain was known for timber rattlesnakes. They parked under an out-of-place sugar maple, a tourist among the spruce and firs. There was a picnic area here, and the entrance to a series of New York State Park–approved hiking trails. The sunlight through the forest was spongy and amorphous. Trees were Emily's least favorite plant.

“My son used to love it here when he was little,” Winnie said, distractedly. “Come, come, follow me!”

They went a little ways off a trail to a bright burst of a clearing and then: “Careful now, Emily. If it looks like a rattlesnake, it's probably a rattlesnake. They tan themselves on the rocks around here.”

They were standing atop a cliff jutting from the face of the mountain.

“We used to call this the tip of the tongue, my son and I. Because—well, what can one say? Look for the words, Emily. See if you can find the words.”

Below them, Lake Jogues. Parasails buzzing by, following their boats like giant predatory jellyfish. Green bubbles of islands, dark
blue water. Emily, looking for words, could only say, “Beautiful.” Winnie, disappointed, said, “No.” Birds flew below them. Tiny chirpers spattering like sideways gusts of hail and large evil ones hanging motionless in the air over the water, flying against the wind. Emily imagined sitting up here on the edge of the cliff, fishing for eagles. They sat. They talked. Or Emily listened while Winnie said things like, “I like to ruminate on Indians!” Emily'd laugh, and Winnie would continue: “That was not a joke! Oh,
you
,” but she'd be laughing, too, holding Emily's wrist, elbow, once or twice her knee, always her attention. “Really, you are so like your grandfather! It's more than a little disconcerting.”

Emily thought the same about Winnie.

“Well, I'm just fascinated with the Huron-Iroquois. Mmmm. The Algonquins. Look down there, Emily, and imagine how they saw it. The very same water. We aren't supposed to call them Indians anymore though, are we? No matter. But I'm not entirely sure that we know how to see this lake. Don't laugh. Folks today see so differently, don't you think? The older I get, the more I think that I've been dreaming all this time, and, suddenly, finally, I'm getting closer to waking up. Do you see?”

“I think I know what you're talking about.”

“Sweetheart, I hope not.” Winnie smiled. “I only mean to say that we live up here, we're ostensibly of this place, these mountains, you see. But we're not of them. I do happen to think that even living up here we're still more urban than people who lived in cities, say, only fifty years ago. Certainly one hundred years ago. Can't you feel the distance? How closed off we are to it, especially when we pretend that we're not. Like sitting here. Like hiking, swimming—goodness, if you asked most people what they loved about living up here, they'd say
this
. The lakes. The so-called watersports. Skiing. Have you ever skied? I have never skied. Even if most of the time folks spend outside, and this is a verified truth, Emily, most of the time folks spend actually out of doors is spent pushing or riding a machine that cuts grass. When I first moved here that's all I saw.
Everyone outside mowing lawns. It's militaristic, I thought. It's like giving the earth a GI haircut. Now ask yourself, how would the Indians see this? When I was a young lady I had such interesting ideas.”

“Where were you from?”

“Where am I from? These days, the past mostly!” Shaking her head. “Montreal, actually. But I do think we've turned nature into an almost perfectly safe life-sized painting, one that we can enter and leave at will. It's an idea more than a place, Emily. I don't know where we really are half the time, I really don't. Where do we actually live?”

“Winnie,” Emily asked, “are you stoned?”

The old woman laughed a bird into the air. “But you simply have the most amazing freckles,” she said. “No I am not stoned, young lady! But your
skin
. I'm trying to remember what it was like, you see, being a woman.”

“Is being old so different?”

“Old?” Winnie hooted. She squeezed Emily's arm.

“I'm sorry, I mean—”

“
Slack la poulie!
We try our best, your grandfather and I. To be perfectly honest with you. But you hit the nail on the head. It's playacting at this point. Theater.” Winnie sighed. “I wish we'd brought a picnic, don't you? I love picnics. Well. But maybe it always was playacting? Maybe you can try and remind me, Emily. Because, do you know, I feel the same as I did when I was thirty, even if, physically speaking, I'm now something of an entirely different species. I do feel like an imposter.”

Emily said, “I sometimes feel the same way.”

Winnie nodded seriously. “I should remember that. Thank you. Maybe we always feel this way. Oh, Emily, this costume!” She clapped her little hands. Once, twice, as if trying to wake up. “It's not easy, is it?”

“Wait.” Emily made a face.

“Dear?”

“What are we talking about again?”

Winnie said, “You're an interesting young lady. You're not used to conversations, are you? You're so uncomfortable without your jokery. I can tell. But I'm so glad we're having this time. You haven't been exactly welcoming to me, you know. You haven't exactly been Little Miss Congeniality. Will you get in trouble for missing school?”

Emily said, “Probably not.” And, “Sorry if I haven't been nice to you, Winnie. Did you really meet my grandfather at Price Chopper?”

“Is that what he told you?” Winnie waved that away. “Dear, I've known that fool of yours since before you were born. Back when he used to be the managing editor of the
Queens Falls Post Star
. He gave me my first job, right out of school. I worked a few years here before graduating to a real paper downstate, then a magazine. I wrote for
Time
magazine for twenty years, you know.”

“I didn't know.”

“Of course you didn't. It was your grandfather got me in with his old connections. They begged him to come back to work for them. For years. They wanted him back overseas as a correspondent.” Emily hadn't known that either.

“Well,” Winnie said. Then, “But I tell you, it was like finding a European prince behind the counter of a Long John Silver's. Or maybe just a European? Back when I first worked for your grandfather. It was romantic, I'll be honest, and
mysterious
. What could have driven such a man to such a thing, you understand? To Queens Falls. But that's just bunk, as he would say. In the end it was too disheartening, actually. Worse, it was boring. Someone of his talent wasting away at the
Post Star
.” She made a French noise. She flicked her hand. “Tell me, Emily, do you like high school?”

“What?”

Emily wanted to know more about this long lost Pete Phane, but something in Winnie's tone meant she'd turned a corner. Time for other things.

Winnie said, “Is it really like I see it on TV? I have wondered. The drugs and the shootings?”

“Like, has there been a massacre at Queens Falls High lately?”

“I really am so pleased that we're having this chat, Emily!”

Emily was too. “I've never really talked to one of Peppy's girlfriends like this before.”

“
Coudonc!
” Winnie said. “Oh, please. That's not who I am.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Don't mind me,” Winnie said, finally, taking Emily's hand in both of hers. “Listen, do you know, when I was your age I was so
concerned
with trying to be just like all the other girls. It was vexing. I even read for the wrong reasons. I approached every book as if it were a self-help book, a Bible, and, you know, the books available to me, and remember this was back in the eighteenth century.” Laughing. “These books were not helpful books. It wasn't until I was older that I found reading that reflected anything close to who I was. I was not Laura Ingalls. If I may say, Laura Ingalls, as far as I could make out, did not have a vagina. If only I could have been more like that, you know? What was
wrong
with me?”

“Wait, who is Laura Ingalls?”

“Really? Well, then, apart from the high school massacres, I envy you girls! For you, Emily, a little-known fact: young ladies didn't have vaginas until the late twentieth century. They really didn't come into vogue until the seventies. For six months,
six months
, I believed that mine was the only one that bled. Don't look at me like that! Oh, my poor mother wouldn't dare talk about any of that, you know. Are you kidding me? The other girls, well, what did I know? They
looked
clean.”

“You didn't have any close friends?” Emily almost said
best friends
.

“I had brothers. As you've probably guessed, my mother wasn't what you'd call the most liberated woman. Different times. I was raised to wait on my father and my brothers. The way her mother had raised her, I suppose. She didn't know any better. I felt like I was living in a different century from some of my schoolmates. But
perhaps this is something that I can only see in hindsight. Back then, I just thought it was because I wasn't pretty enough. What rot! My father was Jewish, a
mopette
, as we say, a little weak, but my mother was Québécois Catholic.” Winnie puffed out her cheeks for some reason. Held that pose. Shook her fist. “In their own way, they'd rebelled, just by marrying each other, but then they reverted back to whatever their parents had been,
and with a vengeance
. Try as I might, I couldn't get close to them.” She paused. “I had to leave home before I could find myself and make all those tasty, wonderful mistakes you're just on the verge of making for yourself. No offense, dear. If only I had mistakes left to make, Emily! That's when you really know your life is winding down: the wonderful mistakes available to you start drying up and you're left only with the dreary, flatulent mistakes. God knows I'm still trying to make a mess of things, and not doing such a bad job of it if your grandfather is any judge on the matter…But perhaps that's my own curse. The way my upbringing equated mistakes with freedom. It doesn't have to be that way. My family, they never really understood me, Emily, but they
forgave
me. Oh, now that was something that I simply couldn't abide back then. How dare they forgive me! Thank you but no thank you. How headstrong I once was.
Tsé veut dire
. You know what I mean. Many years went by before I'd meet them halfway.”