Haunted Houses (5 page)

Hilda preferred Emily to Nora, who rarely practiced and came late to lessons. But Paul was her favorite because he was noticeably tortured. At the age of fourteen he couldn’t throw a ball, moved slowly, and was far from lanky. Paul’s father had, over the years, taken this son to the ballpark, thrown a few balls to him, and realized it was hopeless, like a dog that can’t be trained. This hopelessness communicated itself to Paul, who was a mensch and adored by Hilda. She’d exclaim to Emily, “I adore Paul.” Emily watched their relationship and was jealous of its intimacy. She was sure they talked on the piano bench about subjects she couldn’t broach with the piano teacher.

When Nora’s nose developed an adult bump, accentuating her small eyes, she was at last truly homely. She didn’t seem to care and Emily and she didn’t discuss looks. The two girls read lots of books and wrote the best compositions in class. Nora’s were better than Emily up until the eighth grade, or so Emily thought. They were as close as two girls could be.

Emily was positive, by now, that Hilda talked to Paul about love and sex. She was sure that Hilda revealed herself to Paul in a way she never had with Emily. Then suddenly, Paul and Hilda weren’t close anymore. Something had happened and Emily didn’t know what. Paul still took his lessons, like medicine, but there was no more conspiring. Emily figured that one of them must have said or discovered something really bad about the other, the way her mother must’ve about Nora’s mother. Something awful happens and people stop liking each other. Emily worried that Nora would turn from her for no reason, or for reasons she couldn’t fathom and no one talked about. Her mother said, “There’s nothing to fear but fear itself.”

Nora and Emily read as much as they could because they wanted to be writers when they grew up. Girls with promise, their teachers said. Nora read adventure stories and books about early American patriots like Nathan Hale. Emily took out every biography of a woman that she could find in the school library. There weren’t that many and the women were all of a kind, good women who had served well. Emily liked Abigail Adams best because she was something of a troublemaker. Like Nora’s mother who had gone back to college to become a lawyer. Emily spent a lot of time in Nora’s house, sometimes eating her breakfast there before school. She told her mother there were better cereals at Nora’s. Nora rarely finished what was on her plate or in her bowl and her mother would say, “That’s why your blouses fall out of your skirts.” Hilda didn’t approve of the way Nora came to her lessons—she was sloppy—but Nora didn’t care what Hilda thought. She was obstinate in a sullen way and quit her lessons when Hilda became too demanding.

Emily wondered what Nora’s mother thought of her; Nora didn’t like her mother or Emily’s mother. They were in the eighth grade now, and in separate classes for the first time. They still took the same yellow school bus driven by fat Freddie, who always waited for Nora, who was habitually late. Nora and Emily vowed that being in different classes wouldn’t change anything.

Hilda chose Emily to accompany her at the annual piano recital. She had to learn “I Could Have Danced All Night.” Emily knew she was supposed to feel honored at having been chosen but she felt embarrassed. She hated the song and having to appear in public. Hilda tried to reassure her, but Emily was miserable. She didn’t appreciate Hilda as much as she once had, especially since Nora had quit. She had been taking her lessons seriously for five years. One Tuesday she announced to Hilda, in the angular and uncompromising way that youthful decisions are both made and delivered, that she wanted to stop. Emily made some excuses about being a freshman and having homework and both knew she was lying. Hilda argued with restraint but didn’t wring her hands. There’s not much a piano teacher can do. After the last lesson her partner picked her up, as she always did, in the old Dodge, and off they went out of Emily’s young life. It didn’t occur to Emily that she might not see Hilda again.

Nora’s brothers were both away at college and Nora was glad. Her new high school friends had less money than her family, but they dressed tough and smoked grass and danced better than anyone she knew. Emily and she still talked on the phone but they didn’t see each other as much. Nora fell in love with a black guy called Eddie who was strong and handsome and older, and who didn’t seem to notice that she wasn’t beautiful. She wore her skirts shorter than the other fourteen-year-old white girls and walked as if she were dancing. When Nora phoned Emily to tell her of her love for Eddie, black and from the wrong part of town, Emily was surprised that Nora had to tell her, shocked that she didn’t know it before the way she knew everything about Nora. Nora was a part of her life, like an arm or a leg. Maybe they weren’t best friends anymore. Emily feared for Nora’s life in high school, where even walking through the halls to the next class caused Emily humiliation. One time she asked an older boy if he had the time and he said if you’ve got the place. But she admired Nora’s visible passion.

When Nora broke up with Eddie he broke into her house, the house he had never been allowed to visit. Nora called Emily and told her, saying now her parents knew everything. They sent her to another psychiatrist. Emily had heard about approved psychiatrists who told parents everything, the way one had done to her friend Beth. Beth had been made love to by a boy who called her Baby and wrote her letters from military academy. Then the letters stopped. Beth gained and lost weight, started sleeping with many boys, and covered her round and pink baby face with rouge and makeup. Beth’s shrink told her parents that she wasn’t a virgin and they watched her like hawks. Emily thought that Beth would never recover and it was a caution to her. She read about love and listened—Emily was a good listener—and gave her friends advice that she gleaned from books and a cautious spirit.

* * *

Nora had a nose job when she was sixteen, the bump she had seemed not to care about was gone. She told Emily, when they met, that she wasn’t going to be a writer. They were standing on the corner in front of the house that had replaced the forest. Peter walked by them. Back then he had been Emily’s boyfriend, a slight dark boy with big, meaningful eyes. His features, as he grew older and bigger, enlarged, leaving traces of someone once vulnerable, but Emily had to squint her eyes to see him like that. His older sister was rumored to be wild, but when they were children she used to dress Nora and Emily in costumes of her own design. They’d do that on rainy afternoons, while Peter sat in a corner; everyone said his older sister was the creative one. Emily spent part of fourth and fifth grades playing kissing games in Peter’s closet. They also passed afternoons climbing into houses that were under construction along with Harvey, an overweight boy with a reading problem. Harvey fell through an unfinished attic floor, and they ran away. The contractor gathered together all the kids on the block and demanded to know who’d done it. There was an uncomfortable silence until Peter stepped forward and said his mother had taught him never to lie and that Harvey had done it. That ended climbing in houses and Emily was forced to look at Peter with new eyes and juggle, like an acrobat, the contradictory values of truth and friendship. Their kissing games halted when Peter’s mother made slighting remarks about Emily’s character to her mother, overheard by Emily, who experienced deep humiliation. Peter walked past Emily and Nora as if this history had never existed between them. He waved his hand brusquely, as befitted an upperclassman. Emily waved back and turned from the sight of him, and the memory, to Nora, who looked so different with her new nose.

Her mother had taken a part-time job and wasn’t at home when Emily got there and walked past the piano that no longer was played. We should sell it, her mother would say. I may play it again, was the answer. Emily mother was working in the local community house, the only interracial center in town. Emily turned on the television and opened her book. One eye watched the movie, the other, her paperback on the American Revolution. Revolution or evolution, her young male history teacher had asked. The question plagued Emily, who could find no easy answer for it, yes or no, and it seemed to be both. But was that an answer? The movie was
Duel in the Sun
and Emily was distracted from the American Revolution. Gregory Peck, who she thought looked a little like her father, and Jennifer Jones, madly in love, dying, crawling toward each other for one last embrace, after they’d shot each other. They loved each other but they had to destroy each other. That was as big a problem as the American Revolution and exciting, in a different way, from thinking, for instance, that it’s impossible to know anything for sure.

Emily’s mother complained about having to work, but she had a lot more to talk about since she started the job. And Emily had the house to herself for several hours every day, which made her feel almost grown-up. Her mother now knew all the black leaders of the community and gave a few parties that were really integrated. She’s probably the talk of the town, Emily thought. Her mother seemed oblivious and it made Emily proud. Her mother never mentioned civil rights. It was as if she was doing what she was doing just because she was who she was and no one was going to tell her who to be friends with. Indeed her mother sometimes seemed oblivious to anyone’s rights but her own. Still, Emily thought that on the face of it it made her mother more like a person than a mother.

She had figured out that the American Revolution was best called a rotation. It combined both aspects that she so desperately wanted to mesh. She wrote ten handwritten pages and gave them to her teacher, becoming her history teacher’s favorite student, not because she did everything right, but because she argued ferociously about issues most kids understood as academic. “It’s life or death to her,” the teacher told his wife. “Very peculiar girl. Maybe she’s in love with me.” “Maybe,” his wife said. “It could be a schoolgirl crush, or it could be something else.”

Her parents thought she stayed in too much, and Nora’s thought she went out too much, but since the ex-best friends’ mothers still weren’t talking to each other, and Emily still didn’t know why, they didn’t compare notes, but complained in the privacy of their bedrooms that the other teenager was better adjusted.

Nora’s remodeled nose gave her the feeling that now she was like everybody else, and so she went to more and more parties, where she met more and more boys. Emily went to a few parties, to keep up appearances, but preferred to read about them in books. She’s not normal, her father would say. Oh, she’s probably normal enough, her mother would say, but not to Emily. To Emily her parents presented a united front. Why can’t you be more normal? The one thing Emily wanted less and less was to be more normal.

Emily found herself thinking about Hilda. The piano had been sold, over her protests, and she mourned its passing as if it had been alive. Hilda had been different. Now the living room had a big hole in it. It has no heart anymore, Emily felt, no heart. She started to dream about Hilda and wished off and on to find her, as if by finding her she could always be a child. But she didn’t even open the telephone book to call her. It was more like a novel that was living in her head and at the end of it there Hilda would be and everything would be all right again.

They were now seniors and both girls were supposed to apply to college. Nora got into a not very good one that she’d drop out of, she told herself, as soon as she met someone. Emily, as much as she said she wanted go to college, applied late everywhere, and ended up at a city university. She’d have to live at home in the city. She discovered that she didn’t care; she didn’t want to go away to school. She told her friends that she’d much rather go to a school that didn’t look like a school. “She’s too much of a homebody,” her father complained. “It’s not normal.” “She’ll be all right,” her mother said. “Once she’s in college. She won’t be so out of place there.”

In Nora’s first year she met someone who was a senior and going to be an accountant. Emily was introduced to him during intercession. In the room where she had once hidden under the table saying her heart was going to stop, Nora announced: “I love him and I’m dropping out. We’re getting married.” Emily regarded the object of Nora’s quest as a curiosity. This is what she’d been waiting for. He seemed nice enough, but looked like he’d aged very quickly for his years. She wondered what Nora’s mother, who had finally gotten her law degree, thought of him. For some reason or other, Emily didn’t go to the wedding.

Emily wasn’t sure why she wasn’t living at home anymore with her parents. At the same time, she was convinced that in her day and age it would be completely wrong not to leave home. She moved out almost automatically to live in another woman’s apartment.

She was lying in bed and didn’t want to get up and leave her room. She was remembering things. She lived in a small room that had once been for the maid. The woman who rented her the room was a widow whose husband had died eight years before Emily moved in. But, for a while, Emily thought he had just died because the widow, Edith, talked about him every day as if he’d just slipped away. Edith had two grown daughters who hardly ever wanted to spend any time with her. It was odd to see the other side of it. Considering how much they didn’t want to see her, Edith did all right. She thought about her husband, saw friends, went to work, concerts, and plays, and watched television. She didn’t want to remarry. Emily’s mother would tell her that people who didn’t remarry showed that they didn’t like being married the first time, otherwise, she’d sum up, They’d do it again, wouldn’t they? Emily gave Edith the benefit of the doubt. Maybe no one could fill the dead man’s shoes, if he were so wonderful, the way she said, for more than a night or two.

Emily ventured into herself with time on her hands. She plucked her eyebrows and wore a red flannel nightgown. The telephone was under her skinny bed. She was missing her classes. She had a pile of books on her bed and turned from one to the other, fixing on the life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti with pictures. Then went back to her eyebrows, wanting to remove them all. When they met in the kitchen Edith asked Emily what she’d done to her eyebrows and what was she doing in bed all day? Edith kept busy. The phone under the bed rang and Emily was allowed to disappear, back into her room, back to bed. I think I’ve started the back-to-bed movement and I may never get up, she said to Christine, her best friend. Christine tweezed her hairline to make her brow higher. There were short black stubbles along the edge of her scalp that she pulled out as fast as she could get hold of them with tweezers. Emily was short, Christine tall, and when they went for walks they’d point out other best friends who looked roughly the way they did. They’d see themselves in all kinds of people. Christine found it hard to get Emily out of her room.