CRAFT ESSAY #14 -- Wuthering Heights

Description

Think of Wuthering Heights and what comes to mind? Craggy, fog-shrouded moors, most likely, plus shadowy estates and chilly sitting rooms heated by coal stoves. One would think that the novel was loaded with Updike-like description, page after page of atmosphere interrupted by the occasional scene and a few lines of dialogue. And yet Emily Bronte’s use of description in Wuthering Heights is remarkably economical, painted in quick, thick brush strokes that provide a vivid backdrop—both environmental and emotional—for the story of Heathcliff and Catherine’s doomed love.

The titular dwelling is described by the novel’s main narrator, Mr. Lockwood, in a few short paragraphs on page 5 (Signet Classic edition). It is this brief portrait that we mentally return to each time Lockwood or his co-narrator Nelly Dean approaches the estate. We see “the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house”; the “range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving the alms of the sun”; “the narrow windows…deeply set in the wall, and the corners defended with their large jutting stones.” There are “grotesque carvings lavished over the front,” including “crumbling griffins and shameless little boys.” Inside, in the kitchen, where so much action takes place (as in most homes), we see above the chimney

sundry villainous old guns, and a couple of horse-pistols: and, by way of ornament, three gaudily painted canisters disposed along its ledge. The floor was of smooth, white stone; the chairs high-backed, primitive structures, painted green; one or two heavy black ones lurking in the shade. In an arch under the dresser reposed a huge, liver-coloured bitch pointer, surrounded by a swarm of squealing puppies; and other dogs haunted other recesses.

This is an adjectival goldmine: excessive, stunted, gaunt, narrow, jutting, grotesque, crumbling, shameless, villainous, primitive, haunted. The dark toxicity is so unforgettable that Bronte need not mention more than the minutest additional detail in subsequent scenes.

In addition to its brutal setting, Wuthering Heights of course brings to mind the brooding, primitive hero, Heathcliff, and the willful, beautiful Catherine. Again, Bronte employs maximally evocative description of these characters in minimal time. Upon first meeting him, Mr. Lockwood sketches Heathcliff as “a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman…rather slovenly, perhaps, yet not looking amiss with his negligence, because he has an erect and handsome figure; and rather morose” (pp. 5-6). Here we have the contradictory nature of the man: dark-skinned gypsy/gentleman, erect and handsome/slovenly and morose. This is the mature Heathcliff, the bitter man haunted by his lost love. But here is the young Heathcliff as introduced by the maid, Nelly Dean, on page 35:

A dirty, ragged, black-haired child, big enough both to walk and talk; indeed its face looked older than Catherine’s; yet, when it was set on its feet, it only stared round and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand.

Note the word “it,” as if the boy were a dog, indicating both Heathcliff’s “otherness” and the cruel attitude of even the most charitable around him. Contrast this with Nelly’s take on Catherine:

Her spirits were always at high-water mark, her tongue always going—singing, laughing, and plaguing everybody who would not do the same. A wild, wicked slip she was—but she had the bonniest eye, and sweetest smile, and lightest foot in the parish. (p. 40)

After Catherine’s five-week stay at Thrushcross Grange, during which the wild lass has been tamed by the civilizing influence of the Linton family, Nelly describes her as “a very dignified person, with brown ringlets falling from the cover of a feathered beaver, and a long cloth habit, which she was obliged to hold up with both hands that she might sail in” (p. 50). Heathcliff, on the other hand, has spent those five weeks toiling at Wuthering Heights and pining for Catherine: “his thick, uncombed hair, the surface of his face and hands…dismally beclouded” (p. 50).

Lesser characters are just as vividly portrayed. Here is Catherine’s cruel, widowed brother, Hindley, described by Heathcliff’s wife, Isabella, in a letter to Nelly:

A tall, gaunt man, without a neckerchief, and otherwise extremely slovenly; his features were lost in masses of shaggy hair that hung on his shoulders; and his eyes, too, were like a ghostly Catherine’s, with all their beauty annihilated. (p. 133).

The comparison of Hindley’s eyes to his sister’s is especially heartbreaking, and brings humanity to an otherwise unlikable character.

These precise, psychologically astute descriptions of character and setting, while brief, are just as integral as action and dialogue to the power of Wuthering Heights.

CRAFT ESSAY #13 -- A Map of the World

Dread

When describing Jane Hamilton’s A Map of the World, one is likely to say that it begins with the accidental drowning of a child. In fact, the drowning does not arrive until page 19. The retrospective impression that two-year-old Lizzy Collins dies on page one is due, at least in part, to Hamilton’s skill at building a sense of dread right from the opening sentence: “I used to think if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error, or else an unfortunate accident” (p. 3). The narrator, Alice Goodwin, amps up the foreboding even more in paragraph two: “I opened my eyes on a Monday morning in June last summer and I heard, somewhere far off, a siren belting out calamity.” A siren is never a good sign, particularly when it is paired with a word like “calamity.”

On the next page the author continues the use of ominous language to prepare us for the tragedy to come:

The sun had a white cast, as if shade and shadow, any flicker of nuance, had been burned out by its own fierce center. There would be no late afternoon gold, no pale early morning yellow, no flaming orange at sunset. If the plants had vocal cords they would sing their holy dirges like slaves. (p. 4)

Notice the words: burned out, fierce, dirges, slaves, and the repetition of no. This is immediately followed by a description of “the jewel of the Goodwin property,” the pond where poor little Lizzy will soon drown. We don’t know yet that something awful will happen there, but the narrator’s palpable sense of irony about the pond (“I often had the fanciful thought that the pond would save us”) and its supposed innocuous qualities (“There were no leeches, no film or scum or snapping turtles, no monstrous vestiges from the Cretaceous Age lurking in the depths”) lends the pond a dark power.

Not content with building a sense of dread through description, Hamilton fashions characters and dialogue that ooze portent. On page 5, Alice’s three-year-old daughter, Claire, “banged her spoon on the table and announced, ‘I’m going to die when you do.’” (This declaration also serves to misdirect the reader, since it’s not Claire who drowns but her friend, Lizzy.) The tension escalates even more as Claire’s five-year-old sister, Emma, acts up at breakfast, testing Alice’s patience. In this scene, we get our first inkling that Alice is, at the very least, overwhelmed by the challenges of motherhood, and at most, too unstable to withstand the trauma we sense is on the way. When she notes that “Outside, the air smelled as if it had been cooked, as if it had been altered by the heat and was no longer life sustaining” (p. 8), we begin to understand that all the dread she is establishing has as much to do with her fragile state of mind as it does with the awful events to come. (Howard, her husband, later points out Alice’s tendency to exaggerate, a harmless habit that suddenly seems much less benign given the bizarre accusations leveled at her.)

After a several-page section of exposition, during which Alice skillfully paints an unflattering portrait of the townspeople who will eventually turn on her, she returns to that fateful Monday morning. First, Lizzy and her sister, Audrey, are dropped off by their mother, Theresa, who is Alice’s only friend (that Alice has only one real pal further hints at her unsettling “otherness”). Alice then lays out her plan for the morning, an idyllic jaunt to the pond with the four girls, composed in the conditional tense. “I would walk down the lane,” she begins, and then proceeds to pollute the whole tranquil enterprise with one simple, sarcastic sentence that screams DOOM: “The simplest thing in the world” (p. 16).

Next, Alice puts the milk away and retrieves some butter from the freezer, perfunctory details that, in this context, nevertheless carry portent. While searching for her bathing suit, she’s distracted by the map of the world she made as a kid, which she finds buried in a drawer. While she rhapsodizes about the map and her active childhood imagination, we’re thinking, “Uh-oh—what’s going on with the four very young children on their own downstairs?” Sure enough, once Alice finally puts the map away and locates her swimsuit, she comes down to find only three of the kids in the living room. Still, it’s several more paragraphs before she wonders, “Where’s Lizzy?” and even then she pauses to pull a hanging thread from her shorts (“It was tickling my calf” p. 18). Her cluelessness, combined with the carefully constructed suspense, creates even more tension in the reader. Finally, Alice searches for Lizzy and, seeing the wide open screen door, her feet feel “like two flabby erasers” (p. 19). At last! So she runs outside “like a blind person, stumbling over my own heavy limbs,” until she comes to the pond:

When I came to the clearing I couldn’t see past the single glaring point of sunlight, dancing on the water. I put my hand on my forehead, to make a visor, and still it took me a minute to find the pink seersucker bottom just beneath the surface, about fifteen feet from the beach.

This odd description of a drowned child—just a “pink seersucker bottom”—is startling in its emotional distance. Alice then takes a step even further back, framing her subsequent actions (running into the pond, attempting resuscitation) with this introduction: “When I am forced to see those ten minutes as they actually were…”

Why this distancing? Throughout the novel, Alice and Howard regularly speak of these events having occurred “last summer,” which places their current vantage point somewhere in the following year. Past-tense novels do not typically specify how long ago the action took place, so Hamilton does this for a reason. Perhaps concretizing the time difference allows her narrators, especially Alice—and especially Alice at this traumatic juncture—the specific distance necessary for tolerating the powerful emotions involved. And yet the emotions shine through, as does the dread that permeates those first 18 pages, so that the reader, looking back, sees the drowning as inevitable.

49 LOVE LANE -- Section 9

Chapter 15: The Finger

That evening, perhaps weakened by my hangover, I set out to tell Abby everything—that I’d been fired, that I’d been lying, that I had no prospects for another job. That I was a loser, basically.

I decided on this course of action while in the basement attempting to open that damn pentagram box. I poked it with a screwdriver, trying to find a hinge. I banged it with a hammer. I tossed it onto the cement floor and stomped on it. If I’d had a saw, I’d have cut it in half. I resolved to buy one next time I went into town.

Meanwhile, Abby remained upstairs with Daisy, playing games and reading books. Earlier, while the baby slept, and fed up with the woodpecker, she’d gone out into the yard.

“What’re you doing?” I asked.

“Taking care of that damn bird,” she said as she twisted the outdoor spigot.

“Frannie said to use tin foil.”

“Screw that.” She dragged the green hose around the corner of the house and took aim. She pressed the handle on the hose gun and water splashed against the clapboards. The woodpecker squawked and flew into the upper reaches of a tall maple.

“He’ll be back,” Abby said. “We just need to keep spraying him till he gets the message.” Then she turned off the hose and marched back into the house.

As I banged once more on the pentagram box in the basement I still didn’t know what to make of her claim that she’d never seen the box before. I supposed Monica could have left it under the crib, but she’d half convinced me about the doll and I couldn’t come up with any logical reason why she’d leave these things in our home. Which meant that either Abby was lying or someone else had gotten into the house without our knowledge.

I set the box down and held onto the edge of the workbench. All afternoon I’d been suffering from dizzy spells—part hangover, part lack of food. I had no appetite and the thought of water still sickened me. The sweat on my face felt sooty in the dark basement.

Perhaps it would be best, I thought, if I just left. Abby could keep the house, find a job at a local law firm. I’d rent an apartment nearby, work at a bookstore. Everyone would be better off.

I went upstairs, resolved to tell her the truth. She sat on the sofa with Daisy, reading.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said, closing the book.

“What do you mean?” For some reason I thought she wanted to sell the house, leave town. I was ready to say, Yes!

“Let’s go for a walk or something,” she said. “I’m going stir crazy.”

By the time she fed Daisy and got her settled into the stroller, with her doll nestled in her arms, the sun had descended to just above the far hills. At some point along this walk, I told myself, I would spill the beans. Perhaps it would be better this way—outdoors, in semi-public, where she couldn’t throw a lamp at my head.

We walked down the hill toward the lake. The sun seemed to be melting, like molten steel, across the top of the hills. Directly overhead one dark cloud swam slowly across the sky like a whale.

“The weather’s nice, anyway,” Abby said.

What did that mean—“anyway”? Was everything else about the day a disaster? Just wait, I wanted to say. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

We turned right at the bottom of the hill. The algae sat thick and greenish brown on top of the lake water. Abby tisked, as usual. I waited for the complaint, the curse directed at the realtor—or at me, for bringing her up here. But she said nothing. I had to skip to keep up with her, she was moving so quickly. The wheels on the stroller squeaked.

We walked like this for a while, with me hustling to stay abreast, Abby silent, Daisy gurgling in her stroller. By the time we reached the other side of the lake, the sky had purpled, and lights were switching on inside houses along the road.

Music blared from Charlie’s place. Lights flashed through drawn curtains, and cars jammed the driveway and lined the road.. Abby slowed as we passed, as if tempted to stop and go inside. I smiled, thinking of it: Abby chatting away with Charlie, the two of them sharing a bong. I considered telling her that Arnie’s pot dealer lived here, but I didn’t want to antagonize her—not when I was poised to reveal something that would really make her angry. So I said nothing, and we continued on.

We came to an especially murky stretch of road, flanked on one side by a field of huge, old maples that blocked out the sky, and on the other side an expansive lawn leading up to a dark, empty house. I rehearsed, in my mind, what I planned to say: Abby, there’s something I have to tell you. This would stop her in her tracks. She’d expect another confession of infidelity. I’d have to move on from there quickly. It’s about my job, I’d say, and she would be relieved that this was not about another woman.

As we approached the bend in the road—a sharp left beneath the canopy of trees—I could hear the rapid approach of a vehicle, its stereo turned up loud. Headlights pierced the trees. It looked like a pick-up, moving fast. Abby pushed the stroller to the side of the narrow road, which was lined by a three-foot high stone wall.

I coughed, like I always do when I’m preparing to say something, my throat tightening.

“Abby,” I said, just as the truck roared around the bend, nearly running us over. In the split second during which the truck passed by, a mere foot or two away, I saw into the cab, where two young men flanked a pretty girl with red hair. There was something especially infuriating about this trio, above and beyond their carelessness and lousy driving, and before I could think about what I was doing, I lifted my middle finger. Even within that crowded fraction of a second, I could tell that my gesture had registered. Then the truck was past us.

“Jesus!” Abby cried, leaning on the stone wall. The stroller had nearly tipped over. Inside, Daisy wailed.

I took hold of Abby’s arm. “Are you okay?”

“They could’ve killed us!”

She righted the stroller and dusted herself off. “It’s okay, sweetie,” she said, leaning into the stroller and stroking the baby’s hair.

I looked back to see the pick-up slow to a crawl, then stop, about fifty yards behind us. The stereo had been turned off.

“Idiots,” Abby said as she pushed the stroller around the bend. She didn’t seem to notice that the truck had stopped. I glanced back again. The brake lights glowed red in the darkness. What if the driver backed up, or turned around? They were probably headed to Charlie’s house. Maybe they were drunk and looking for a fight. They might even have a gun in that truck.

Daisy was still crying. “Shhh,” Abby said, rocking the stroller as she pushed. I could still hear the growl of the idling truck. I considered telling Abby that we may be in some danger, but then I’d have to tell her about my obscene gesture, and she would berate me for being so immature.

“So, what were you going to say?” she asked as we rounded the bend.

“Hmm?”

The truck rumbled, but it seemed quieter. Had they moved on, or was it just that there was now more distance between us?

“Before that asshole drove by,” she said. “You were about to say something.”

What little courage I’d possessed earlier had left me. All I could think about was the truck. I could still hear the engine. I decided they had not moved on.

“Carl?”

“Did you hear that?” I asked.

“Hear what?”

She stopped and cocked her head. “I hear a car.”

What were they doing back there in the truck? Were they debating their course of action—one boy wanting to go back and kick some ass, the other anxious to get to the party, with the girl torn between the two?

The engine roared.

“Must be another truck,” Abby said.

“Quiet!” I held up the palm of my hand. The truck, still back behind the bend, was moving toward us. The headlights shone through the trees.

“Carl? What is it?”

In the dark I could make out a long driveway stretching toward a house in the woods.

“Go up that driveway there,” I said.

“What? Why?”

“Just do it, Abby.”

The truck came around the bend in the road. In a second or two the headlights would shine in our eyes.

“Please,” I said. “Just go up there and wait.”

She could see the truck now. From her eyes I could tell she’d made the connection.

“What about you?” she asked.

“Just go. Now!”

As if propelled by the force of my voice, Abby pushed the stroller up the driveway. Within a few seconds they were swallowed by the darkness.

The truck had reached the straightaway now, its bright beams illuminating the space between us. It was too late now to follow Abby.

I stood by the side of the road, shading my eyes against the headlights. All the effects of my hangover were now gone. The truck slowed, then braked to a stop ten yards away. The driver turned off the engine, leaving the lights on. The night sounds fell into place as if into perfectly carved slots: crickets, rustling leaves, the far-off barking of a dog.

I could not see inside the truck. The occupants remained perfectly quiet. The tip of a cigarette glowed.

From behind me came the sound of Daisy crying. Could the kids in the truck hear her? Shut up, I muttered under my breath. Shut up. It sounded so loud, the baby’s howls and gulps of air ricocheting off the trees. Tell her to stop, I wanted to yell at Abby. Put your fucking hand over her mouth.

Then, silence.

I’ve read stories by people who have been in dangerous situations—mountain climbers, police officers, combat veterans—and they speak of a sharp clarity that came to them in the midst of crisis. Their lives came into focus, their priorities re-arranged themselves logically, they were suddenly wiser. But for me, while that truck sat there, its headlights blinding me, my thoughts scrambled so that I hardly knew which way was up. I did not think of my job, my house, my family. My future did not lay itself out for me like a clearly marked road. My mind went blank, as if whited out by the glare of the headlights. I thought of nothing.

After a while—a minute? An hour?—the girl in the truck giggled. Then a male voice said, “I’m bored.”

The engine bellowed to life, gears screeched as the truck rolled backwards. The driver angled it sideways, then turned around. Still blinded by the glare, I could barely make out the three passengers. A beer bottle shattered at my feet. The girl laughed again and the truck tore off, blue exhaust clouding the retreating red taillights.

Abby appeared beside me. “Are you alright?”

I watched the truck’s tail lights round the bend and fade into the woods, the engine now a far-off purr.

“What were they doing?” Abby asked. “Why did they come back like that?”

“I don’t know.”

She grabbed my arm. “Well, why would they do that? They must have had a reason.”

“I don’t know, Abby.”

“I mean, who does that?”

“They were probably drunk.”

The night was quiet again. She moved closer and put an arm around me. I could barely see her.

“You should’ve hidden, too. They could’ve hurt you.”

She was right, of course. I suddenly felt very stupid for standing there like that, an easy target. They might have tried to run me down. Or shoot me.

“Let’s go home,” I said.

*

Later, lying in bed alone while Abby brushed her hair in the bathroom, I still considered telling her about my job. Maybe if I told her now, I reasoned, she would put the news into a larger context—what was losing a job, after all, compared to the possibility of getting killed or maimed by some drunk redneck punks?

Then she flounced into the room wearing nothing but panties and crawled across the bed.

“Hey,” she said, pausing in front of me, on hands and knees.

“Hello.”

“You like?”

Her breasts, plump with milk, dangled between her arms. I remembered how I used to enjoy touching them, kissing them, rolling my tongue across the tough little nipples. Since Daisy’s birth, however, they had transformed from erotic stimulants to a pair of practical glands designed for the dispensation of nutrients to our infant.

“I like.”

A cool breeze blew in through the windows, fluffing the thin cotton sheet. Abby reached underneath and rubbed the front of my boxers.

“You were very brave tonight,” she said, peeling off her panties with her other hand.

So much for confessing my bad news to her tonight.

“Shut out the light,” I said, nodding toward the lamp on her bedside table.

“Uh-uh.”

“Abby.”

“I want to see everything.”

I glanced over at the window. We still had not bought shades, one of many purchases we’d decided to put off until the paychecks started arriving. The night was black, but I knew that anyone who happened to be out in the yard next door—Frannie, Arnie, Monica, Ellis—could easily see into the lit bedroom.

“Let them watch if they want to,” Abby said, leaning in to nibble on my ear. She pushed her hand under the elastic of my shorts. “Mmmm. The dragon wakes from its slumber.”

She yanked the sheet off and straddled me. All I could think about was how Monica Johnston, perhaps out in her darkened yard to smoke an illicit cigarette, could now be watching my wife’s bony ass as she ground her crotch against me.

With this image in mind, I pulled Abby’s face down to meet mine. “C’mere,” I said.

I let her do all the work that night. I just lay back and watched her ride me—frontways, backwards, even sideways—as her face grew more pink and sweaty, listening to her soft moans intensify into sharp grunts, culminating with her new favorite: loud, authoritative cries of “Oh God!” And all through this my mind flashed from Monica Johnston to Okay Peterson to Frannie and back again—everyone but my wife.

Afterward, she collapsed on top of me, her skin wet and clammy, her breasts hard against my chest, and fell asleep. I lay there for a long time, staring at the wall. The bloodstain was back, dark red, almost black, seeping from behind the portrait of Abby’s parents. Maybe it’s a shadow, I thought, but shadows don’t grow like that. I resisted the impulse to shut my eyes. If the stain was to disappear, I wanted to see it disappear. I didn’t even blink. I remembered what Harper had told me, how the original blood stain had been small. This was not small. It was like the house itself was bleeding. Maybe the woodpecker had penetrated the clapboards, and the wood was now leaking sap through the hole.

Daisy cried from her crib. Had she been crying this whole time, while Abby and I were having sex? Abby’s weight, as thin as she was, pressed down on me. Keeping my eye on the stain, I said, “Wake up.” I nudged her. She groaned. “It’s Daisy,” I said. “She’s crying.”

I pushed Abby off of me, feeling my half-erect cock flop out of her. She groaned again and rolled onto her side. I stood and looked closely at the wall. The blood was real—wet, reflecting the lamp light. I wanted to touch it, but—

Daisy cried. I backed out of the room, still eyeing the stain. One thin line broke off and rolled down the wall.

By the time I was half way through the living room, the crying had ceased. In Daisy’s bedroom I stood beside the crib in the dark. I heard her calm, steady breathing. She hadn’t been crying at all.

The room was cold. I shut the window. Outside, the grass blades twinkled in the moonlight. At the edge of the lawn a large buck stood gazing back at me with red eyes. I waited several minutes for it to turn away, but it just kept watching me. Finally, I walked back to the bedroom. The bloodstain was gone.

16. Star

“Carl!”

I woke up from a thick, vivid dream. I’d been running down the lake road, chased by a truck. In the cab sat Monica Johnston and Okay Peterson, neither of them wearing any clothes. The trees, their limbs just inches above my head, dripped blood. From down the road, just beyond the sulfurous reach of the truck’s headlights, I could hear Daisy crying.

“Carl!”

Abby’s voice sounded strained, slightly panicked. Imagining that something was wrong with Daisy, I bolted from bed and ran into the living room. The baby, perfectly healthy, sat on the floor playing with wooden blocks. Abby stood with her back to me, facing the fireplace.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“How long has that been there?” She pointed to the stone masonry above the fireplace mantel.

The old stone fireplace had been one of the house’s more charming features. The rough, gray-brown stones rose from the floor, framing the fireplace opening, up to the vaulted ceiling. Ever since we moved in we’d discussed what would look best hanging above the varnished wood mantelpiece, something bright and cheerful to contrast with the stone.

“What’re you talking about?” I asked.

“I knew I smelled something rotten. Didn’t I tell you I smelled something rotten?”

I stood beside her and stared at the stones. “I don’t know what you mean.”

She stepped right up to the fireplace and pointed to a spot above the mantel, a little bulge in the stone. “There.”

“What is it?”

“Come closer.”

As I got nearer I could make out a small, grayish brown oval that blended with the stones but, once noticed, stood out. From one end of this oval extended a three-inch long tail.

I jumped back. “What the fuck?”

On the stones, as if glued there, was a dead, half-decomposed mouse.

“Isn’t that gross?” Abby said. “I bet it crawled behind a picture that was hanging there.”

I tried to remember what had been hanging over the mantel when we first looked at the house. The furniture had been sparse, half of it gone already.

“I think there was some sort of bad art hanging there,” Abby said.

I vaguely recalled a lake scene, with bright, unnatural colors.

Abby stepped closer to the dead mouse. “Get me a paper towel.”

Relieved that she was willing to handle this, I got a towel from the kitchen. She took it and reached up for the dead thing. I turned away. Daisy stacked her blocks, red on top of green on top of blue. Abby grunted and I heard a slight tearing sound. I imagined how it felt to pull the mouse’s stiff body from the stone, the tug, the bits of fur and hide.

“There,” Abby said, holding the paper towel in her palm, the mouse lying on its side, its tiny teeth bared, as if it had died angry, or in pain. “It must have eaten some poison and crawled behind the painting to die.”

“It’s been there this whole time?”

She held it up near the stone wall. “Look how well it blends in.”

I turned away, shivering in the heat.

“Watch Daisy while I throw this away,” she said. “Unless you want to.” She held the paper towel up toward my face.

“No, thanks.”

“I didn’t think so.”

I sat on the sofa and looked around the room. The house seemed unsafe to me. Dead mice, woodpeckers, walls that appeared to bleed. Daisy looked up at me with her big eyes, oblivious to the danger.

The pentagram box sat on the coffee table. I picked it up and hefted it. Whatever lay inside slid back and forth as I turned the box this way and that. I was looking for some sort of opening, a button or a spring.

Abby came back in and sat across from me.

“What’d you do with it?” I asked.

“I dug a hole.”

“That was decent of you.”

“I didn’t want to just toss him in the bushes.”

“That’s what I would have done.”

“Of course,” she sighed.

She moved to the floor next to Daisy, who had constructed a tall, wobbly tower of blocks. “We’ll have to get some traps,” Abby said.

I looked at the walls, imagining mice—dozens of them, hundreds—scrabbling around in there.

Daisy took up another block, red and shiny, to set on top of her tower, but she couldn’t quite reach.

“Can mommy do?” Abby asked.

Daisy pulled the block close and screwed up her face into an obvious No. She grabbed the edge of the coffee table and pulled herself to her feet. The tower swayed but did not topple. Daisy tenderly lay the red block on top and pulled her hand away. The tower tipped toward her, then in the other direction. She put out her free hand—the other one still clutched the coffee table—and appeared to will the tower to stand. It continued to wobble, as if held together by an interior wire, but did not fall. Daisy smiled, the triumphant builder.

Then, after looking first to mommy, then daddy, as if to say Look what I did, she reached out and, quickly, decisively, pushed the tower over, sending the red, blue, green blocks bouncing and rolling in all directions. She watched this happen with a look of great satisfaction, and laughed.

*

As I approached Main Street Hardware—one of those old-fashioned mom-and-pop stores that you hardly ever see anymore, with its charming neon OPEN sign in the window and a partial shingled roof over the entrance—a man wearing meticulously clean jeans came out of the store carrying a rake. He nodded as he passed by, as if he knew me. His wavy brown hair looked solid, all one piece, until a gust of wind picked up a few strands and, as if choreographed for a TV commercial, dropped them across one eye. I stood and watched him climb into a luxury SUV.

He rolled down his tinted driver’s side window. “The Pfister School.”

“Excuse me?”

He smiled, amused by my cluelessness. “Mr. Berk’s office.”

What was he talking about? How did he know about all that? He waved, and rolled the window back up. His face disappeared behind the dark glass. He pulled out of the parking space and drove down Main Street.

A bell tinkled when I opened the hardware store door. The cashier, an older lady with curly gray hair, turned and looked me over, perhaps checking for a tool belt or some other sign that I belonged. Apparently I didn’t, for she turned away with a grimace.

The wooden floor creaked beneath my shoes as I searched the aisles for handsaws and other cutting tools. I passed paints and brushes, nuts and bolts, doorknobs and light switch plates. Finally, in the far aisle, I found the saws. Pretending I knew what I was looking for, I picked up a 26-inch contractor-grade short cut handsaw, then a 15-inch saw with a molded grip, and then a tri-fold handsaw. I wondered if I should opt for a carbon steel blade or the three-sided tooth design.

I set the sharp-tooth saw against the edge of the pentagram box, and as I imagined cutting through the hard wood I heard a familiar voice from the next aisle.

“So when will that 150-pound seeder be in, Tom?”

He continued talking in a deep voice, the voice of a big man, but I couldn’t match it with a face or a name. I set down the saw and moved to the end of the aisle. There stood Anders Lehigh talking to a clerk with a red apron. Lehigh looked over and, not recognizing me, continued talking. The clerk—“Tom” was stitched over the chest of his apron—nodded at me, then took in the box in my hands. His eyes widened.

“You got one of them things, too?” he asked.

Lehigh stared at my face and I saw a spark of recognition. Then he noticed the box, too.

“Oh my Lord.”

“Do you know what this is?” I asked.

Lehigh moved toward me so fast I had to back up, afraid he might be about to strike me.

“Can I look at that?”

Before I could even hold it out to him he reached down and grabbed the box from my hand.

“Well, I’ll be.”

“What is it?” Tom asked.

“I made this thing.”

“You?” I said.

“Me and my friend Billy.” He looked at my face. “You live in that house, don’t you? That’s where I know you from.”

“We found it,” I said.

He held it up to the light. “I haven’t thought about this thing in ages.” He turned to Tom. “Billy and I made this in my old man’s workshop. Then we buried it in his yard.”

“Why’d you bury it?” Tom asked.

“It’s a coffin,” Lehigh said. “For Billy’s pet mouse.”

“Mouse?” I asked.

“Yeah. ‘Star.’ That’s why we carved the star here.” He held the box so that the star was right side up.

I didn’t know what to say.

“Hey, can I have this?” he asked. “I know you found it in your yard and all, but it kind of means a lot to me, Mister…uh…”

“Hammond.”

“Right. I mean, you don’t really have any use for it, do you?”

“I guess not.”

“Not unless he wants an old dead mouse,” Tom laughed.

“It would sure mean a lot to me.”

“Sure,” I said. “You can have it, I guess.”

“Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

He shook the box. Star’s bones rattled inside.

“I was trying to figure out how to open it,” I said.

“Oh, we glued it shut. We didn’t want any dogs or cats getting at Star.”

“That explains it,” Tom said.

“Have you seen this box before?” I asked the old man.

“A young woman brought it in not long ago. Or else one just like it.”

Lehigh laughed. “This is the only one of these suckers. Take it from me.”

“What did she look like?” I asked Tom. “Was she young? Blond?” I was thinking of Monica Johnston.

“No. More like 35, dark hair, slender. Had a little girl with her.”

Lehigh turned to me. “Sounds like your wife.”

“Yeah.” I must have looked as confused as I felt because the two of them became self-conscious, coughing and looking away toward the shovels and axes.

“Well, see ya, Tom,” Lehigh said. “And thanks again, Mr. Hammel.”

“Sure.”

Lehigh turned and headed for the exit.

“Anything I can help you find?” Tom asked.

Why did she lie about the box?

“That I can’t help you with,” Tom said.

Had I said it out loud?

“No,” I said. “Thank you.”

He nodded and shuffled toward the rear of the store.

Then I remembered who the man with the rake was: he’d been in Berk’s office when I got fired. He was my replacement at the Pfister School.

CRAFT ESSAY - Scary Stuff

Craft Essay #12

The Haunting of Hill House

vs.

The Shining

Scary Stuff

What makes a novel scary? Is it simply a matter of putting people in a remote house and letting loose the ghosts? Or does it require a delicate balance of language, character development and plotting? This essay will examine two classics of the horror genre—Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Stephen King’s The Shining—with a focus on their differences and similarities.

The Haunting of Hill House opens with one of the creepiest first paragraphs ever

written:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. (p. 3)

Here the narrator is immediately established as scientifically knowledgeable (with phrases such as “live organism”) and distantly authoritative (the house is “not sane”). The brief description of Hill House, like the descriptions of characters to come, does not so much paint a visual picture as a psychological one: the house “stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within.” In fact, throughout the novel the house is treated as a character, with feelings and motivations (when Eleanor first sees the house, on page 25, it appears to be “looking down over her”; on page 41, the house “steadied and located” its four occupants). Finally, there is that spine-tingling last sentence that sets the stage for the thrills to come.

Contrast this with the brief opening paragraph of The Shining:

“Jack Torrance thought: officious little prick.”

The omniscient third-person narrator, here closely aligned with Jack, goes on to describe Mr. Ullman, the manager of the demon-infested Overlook Hotel. While there are plenty of chills in the chapters that follow, this scene could take place at any office between a new employee and his self-important boss. Unlike Jackson, King is in no hurry to introduce us to the malevolent spirits of the Overlook (the Torrance family doesn’t even arrive there until page 72), though he does allow Ullman to relate the grisly tale of Grady, the caretaker who murdered his family there (pp. 9-10). Grady’s bloody spree is blamed on alcoholism and cabin fever, but we know better: horror story convention dictates that Jack, himself a recovering alcoholic, will also give in to violent impulses when his inner demons (already hinted at by his hostile attitude toward Ullman) meet the supernatural forces of the Overlook Hotel.

Both novels feature a limited cast of characters. In The Shining, there is very little visual description of Jack, his wife, Wendy, and their son, Danny. Their characters emerge via the omniscient narrator, who relates their thoughts, actions and dialogue—e.g., Wendy’s scene with Danny on page 13, which establishes her sense of dread about Jack and his new job, and also flashes back to Jack’s checkered past as a father. The Haunting of Hill House follows a similar pattern, though the third-person narrator in this case is limited to one character, Eleanor, whose neuroses, like Jack’s, will arouse the ill-will of the local spirits. Physical descriptions are even more sparse. As with the house, the narrator instead zeroes in on the psychological:

Eleanor Vance was thirty-two years old when she came to Hill House. The only other person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister…She could not remember ever being truly happy in her life; her years with her mother had been built up devotedly around small guilts and small reproaches, constant weariness, and unending despair. (p. 3)

We need not know what Eleanor looks like, perhaps because Hill House doesn’t really care; it only cares about the weakness at her emotional core.

Perhaps the most noticeable difference between the two novels—other than their lengths (The Haunting clocks in at less than 200 pages, vs. The Shining’s 500-plus)—is the use of language. Jackson lards her descriptions with details designed to invoke anxiety. On page 19 alone, while Eleanor drives her “little car” from Boston to Hill House, she encounters “unattractive hills,” “thick, oppressive trees,” a “vicious rock,” and an “ominous scraping.” And when she finally arrives, she is met by a “tall and ominous and heavy gate.”

The journey to the Overlook Hotel in The Shining is also anxiety-ridden, but this is established in a different way. The narrator, aligned here with Danny, is limited to the five-year-old’s point of view. Thus, the descriptions are simple and display a sense of wonder: “On the tallest of [the mountains] you could see a fine dusting of snow, which Daddy said was there year-round” (p. 67). Initially, the dread of this scene is communicated solely through the mother’s fear that their old VW Beetle will not make it up the mountain, and Jack’s irritation at her fretting. The subtext of this domestic squabble is that this journey will bring violence and death. At one point, perhaps to fit in a poetic sense of doom that Danny’s point of view can’t handle, the narrator shifts from Danny’s limited perspective to Wendy’s more sophisticated one: “She saw a waterfall spilling over…the early afternoon sun sparkling in it like a golden fish snared in a blue net” (p. 68). But then the chapter ends with Danny recognizing the hotel as the place he’s seen in his visions: “the dark and booming place where some hideously familiar figure sought him down long corridors…It was here. It was here…” (p. 71).

The authors’ different styles are also evident in the more frightening scenes. On Eleanor’s second night at Hill House, she and Theodora wake up terrified by sounds coming from the hallway just outside the bedroom door (p. 93-99). Moving back and forth from simple, expository dialogue (“Something is knocking on the doors,” Theodora says) to Eleanor’s thoughts and feelings (“Is this what they mean by cold chills going up and down your back?” she asks herself), the narrator skillfully builds the terror. The two women try to convince themselves that something rational is happening even as the pounding arrives at their door and “the sickening, degrading cold came in waves from whatever was outside.” From there, Jackson ratchets it up: “Little pattings came from around the doorframe, small seeking sounds, feeling the edges of the door, trying to sneak a way in.” Even when these awful noises stop, and we are relieved (if wrung out), the author throws in another spooky element: while Eleanor and Theodora were being terrorized in their room, the two male occupants of the house, ostensibly the strong, sensible ones, were outside chasing what they thought was a dog. “Doesn’t it begin to seem,” one of them says, “that the intention is, somehow, to separate us?”

In The Shining, when Danny enters room 217, which he’s been warned against doing by the hotel’s clairvoyant cook, the terrifying scene unfolds through the boy’s eyes (pp. 241-3). Entering the bathroom, he finds the shower curtain closed, and hopes that behind it “he would perhaps see something nice…something Daddy had forgotten or Mommy had lost, something that would make them both happy—

So he pulled the curtain back.

The woman in the tub had been dead for a long time. She was bloated and purple, her gas-filled belly rising out of the cold, ice-rimmed water like some fleshy island. Her eyes were fixed on Danny’s, glassy and huge, like marbles. She was grinning, her purple lips pulled back in a grimace. Her breasts lolled. Her pubic hair floated. Her hands were frozen on the knurled porcelain sides of the tub like crab claws.

This scene derives its power from visual description—those glassy eyes, that bloated belly—and an identification with Danny painstakingly constructed over the previous 242 pages. For my money, however, Jackson’s scene, while also descriptive (if aurally, rather than visually) and built upon a firm psychological foundation, is more terrifying. Her language is sharp, even hard, compared with King’s rather plain (and sometimes passive) language. In Jackson’s scene, the cold is “degrading,” the ghosts at the door make “small seeking sounds.” The author also uses poetic repetition in a weirdly threatening way: Eleanor hears what sounds like the house giggling “in a breath of air through the room, a little mad rising laugh, the smallest whisper of a laugh, and Eleanor heard it all up and down her back, a little gloating laugh moving past them around the house…” (pp. 96-7) This language seems a little mad itself, and penetrates more deeply than King’s admittedly scary, but more superficial and pulpy, descriptions of the corpse in the bathtub.

Both The Haunting of Hill House and The Shining trap their flawed, depressed protagonists in claustrophobic situations. Both use character development as much as (or more than) horror conventions to create suspense. Both build toward intense climaxes in which their main characters succumb to the powerful supernatural attractions of their surroundings. The difference is mainly that Jackson’s psychologically piercing descriptions and jaggedly poetic language push deeper into the fears of the reader than King’s more old-fashioned, sometimes pedestrian sentences.

49 LOVE LANE - Section 8

I felt tired, nauseous. For the past thirty seconds I’d been possessed, and now my real self was slowly coming back.

“I don’t know what came over me,” I said.

“Don’t sweat it, Carl. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve throttled my kids.” He smiled. “I try not to do it in public, though.”

I took a voluminous swig of beer, but it tasted bitter, metallic.

“I’d better go find them,” I said, but before I could escape, Arnie grabbed my elbow.

“Abby’s got it under control.”

I kept looking over at the sliding glass door, as if she would appear there, spectral, Daisy in her arms. Was she inside waiting for me to follow?

“Let it be,” Arnie said. “Plus I’ve got that thing I want to show you.”

He led me to the side of the house and a cement stairway that led down to a door.

“We’re going to the basement?” I asked.

“You’ll see.”

He opened the door and I followed him into a faux wood-paneled mudroom.

“Shoes off,” he said.

I slipped off my shoes and stood in socked feet on the slick linoleum floor. Arnie opened another door into a dark inner room. He flipped a wall switch and several table lamps lit up, their shades draped with red scarves. An L-shaped sofa padded with large, elaborate pillows dominated the room. On a glass-topped coffee table sat a small, black metal-encased machine resembling a stereo component.

“What is that?”

Arnie’s eyebrows danced a little jig as he sat on the sofa. “This is a vaporizer.”

He pressed a button on the machine and small red digital numbers blinked. Then he picked up a clear plastic tube connected to the side.

“This is where you inhale.”

From his shirt pocket he removed the little pill bottle in which he kept his pot. He scooped a wad of the stuff between his thumb and forefinger and inserted it into a small opening in the vaporizer.

“Sit, Carl, sit.”

“I can’t stay long.”

I was thinking about Abby and Daisy. Had they gone home? I could still feel the baby in my hands as I shook her. What had I been thinking?

“Here,” Arnie said, offering the hose.

“I don’t know, Arn.”

“Come on, Carl. You need this.”

I inserted the hose between my lips. It tasted rubbery and cold. Arnie turned a knob and cooled vapor rolled into my mouth.

“Thattaboy.”

I handed the hose back to Arnie and held the vapor in my lungs. As it seeped into my blood stream I sank deeper into the sofa cushions. The world went soft all around me. I felt the earth’s rotation slow to a crawl. After what seemed like days I pushed the remaining vapor out of my nose in two invisible streams.

Arnie said, “You look better already,” then took the hose and inhaled. Holding his breath, he handed the hose back.

I sucked in another lungful and became very aware of my feet. My socks felt thick and hot. I pulled them off and set my soles on the cool, linoleum.

“This thing is designed for medicinal purposes,” Arnie said, laughing. “No burn.”

“That’s good medicine,” I said.

The red scarves on the lamps made the room look like a wood-paneled submarine. On the walls hung framed posters of 70s bands: Foghat, Blue Oyster Cult, Foreigner.

“More?” Arnie asked, offering the tube. As I inhaled, the door swung open and Mark Patek ambled in.

“I knew it!”

“I thought Carl could use a little pick-me-up.”

“Pick me up and slam me down,” I said through a jaw-aching rictus.

“Let me have a toke.” Mark grabbed the hose and inhaled, then held it in until his face turned red.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a door paneled to match the walls.

“Oh, that’s the sauna,” Mark said as he exhaled.

“You have a sauna?”

“Hell yeah. When your kids grow up and move away you do all kinds of crazy

shit. Saunas, hot tubs, cruises.” His eyes turned glassy. “None of it works, though.”

“Hey now, big fella,” Arnie said.

“It’s true, man. You’ll see, too, when your kids are gone.”

Arnie turned to me. “Mark’s one of those oddballs who gets morose when he smokes weed.”

“Nothing can fill the void,” Mark said.

“Personally, I can’t wait till those little vampires are out of my house,” Arnie said.

“You say that now—“

“And I’ll say it then. I’m counting the days.” Arnie turned to me again. It looked like he’d applied blood-red eyeliner. “You’ve got a ways to go, Carl.”

“She’s a beauty, your Daisy,” Mark said. He put his thick slab of a hand on my shoulder. “Love her right, dude.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

He shrugged, the way someone does when they’re not saying what they really mean.

“You think I don’t love my daughter?” I said.

“Of course you do, Carl.”

“Then what did you mean—‘love her right’?”

Arnie clapped his hands. “Okay, let’s get back before the ladies send out a search party.”

“I didn’t mean anything by it, Carl,” Mark said.

I saw all those people in the yard watching me as Daisy wailed in my hands.

“Come on, man,” Arnie said. “Let’s go eat.”

“Yeah, I’m so hungry I could eat a pig’s ass,” Mark said as he opened the door.

I fumbled with my socks and shoes and followed them out into the bright yard. The sky seemed farther away while the trees had moved closer, their thick green leaves pulsing just overhead. The smell of meat and charcoal singed my nostrils.

The Pierces sat with the Millers and Mrs. Schwinn at a picnic table, little Leo apparently recovered now and gnawing at a buttery ear of corn. Gloria Patek sat with Frannie Johnston in matching folding canvas chairs, complete with built-in cup holders. They eyed their husbands warily, gauging their levels of intoxication. Arnie and Mark grabbed plastic plates and started piling food onto them. Monica sat on the grass with Ellis, her dress riding high on her tan thighs.

I went straight into the house, looking for Abby and Daisy. I walked through the kitchen into the front room, then the dining room—all empty. Maybe Abby took the baby upstairs, I thought, to calm her down. I climbed the carpeted stairs to the second floor landing. I scratched at my dry eyeballs, wishing I could take them out and soak them in water. I peeked into two open doorways, both small bedrooms that appeared to be unused. A third door was shut. I turned the knob and peered into the large master bedroom. Against the side wall stood a king size bed. Another wall was entirely mirrored. From an open window came the sound of laughter. I walked across the room and looked down on the back yard.

From her place on the grass Monica looked up and waved. Then, as she leaned forward to grab a brownie from her plate I could see down her low-cut dress. I became acutely aware of two things: my heart thumping against my ribcage, and my penis growing heavy between my legs. I had to get out of here.

Turning to go, I noticed a fat leather wallet lying on a tall oak chest of drawers. Several bills stuck out, pale green. One of them, I could see, was a twenty. Glancing back out the window, I made sure that both Mark and Gloria were still outside.

I opened the wallet. Credit cards jammed the pockets and billfold. I spread the fold and counted at least three hundred dollars in twenties and tens. I took out my own wallet. Three ones and a five. Two maxed-out credit cards. A folded photo of Daisy in soft pink onesies, age six months—my child, my charge, dependent on me. One large box of diapers cost forty bucks. My ears throbbed with the echo of my heartbeat and the sound of Mark Patek saying Love her right, dude.

I grabbed two twenties and ran from the bedroom.

Frannie Johnston waited at the bottom of the stairs.

“There you are!”

“I think I should go home,” I said, my hand still thrust into my pocket where I’d jammed the cash.

“Balderdash!”

“But Abby—”

“She’s fine. She told me to tell you: you can stay if you want.”

“No. She really wants me to come home. She’s just saying that to test me.”

“Don’t be an ass, Carl. She said she’d come back if Daisy calms down. Now let’s go and have another drink and one of those indecent sausages.”

She took my hand and pulled me through the kitchen and out onto the patio. Her hand was warm and surprisingly small, and as she tugged she squeezed mine in an intimate way that, I admit, raised goose bumps on my skin. Once outside she moved that small, warm hand onto my arm, leaned in and whispered, “Has my husband been corrupting you?”

“What?” Had she somehow seen me steal the money?

“Don’t give me that clueless look, Carl. I’m not blind, you know.”

“That’s just my usual expression,” I told her, casting about for an explanation for my thievery.

She laughed. “I don’t mind if you get high, really. Boys will be boys—forever. Plus you look like you could use a little corrupting, if you don’t mind my saying it.”

Relieved, I let out a long exhalation.

“Go on, now,” she said. “Eat. And drink.”

She pushed me toward the food table, where, responding to the empty ache in my belly, I piled two sausages, two ears of corn, and a lump of potato salad onto my plate.

The Millers and Pierces and Mrs. Schwinn still occupied the picnic table. Arnie and Mark sat on the grass near the Johnston kids. Gloria Patek waved me over to Frannie’s now empty canvas chair. I grabbed another beer and joined her. The chair was even less comfortable than it looked. I felt like I was on the verge of toppling over.

“I’m very sorry about the outburst,” I said, unable to look her in the eye. I felt sure that if she saw my eyes she’d immediately know I’d been in her bedroom and had stolen her husband’s money.

She waved a cup of wine around. “Oh, forget about it. We all have our days.”

“Sometimes I have a hard time staying as patient as I should.”

“I remember how it can be,” she said. “Sometimes you want to drown them in a bag.”

Gloria was apparently a little more cold-eyed about her kids than Mark was.

I carved a sausage into bite size pieces with a plastic knife and fork. “How long have you lived here, Gloria?”

“Oh Lord, I can’t even remember. Decades.”

“So you were around when the little girl was murdered in our house?”

She didn’t bat an eye. “Just barely, yes. I think we moved in just a week or so before. My goodness, what a welcome to the neighborhood.”

I inserted a hunk of sausage into my mouth. The heat and spices and texture combined into a kind of taste explosion.

“Delicious, aren’t they?” Gloria said. “Mark is very proud of his sausage skills.”

I poured some beer down my vibrating throat, then asked, “Do you remember anything? About the murder, I mean.”

She shook her head no. “We were so young, and we didn’t know anyone yet.”

“So you didn’t know the man? Arliss Taylor?”

“I saw him once or twice, around the neighborhood, but we never spoke.”

“And the woman? Annette Bingham?”

“Her I did speak to. Just one time.”

“What was she like?”

As Gloria thought back, I tried to picture her thirty years ago, chatting with Annette Bingham, her red hair more organically vibrant, maybe falling down her back. I took another bite of sausage. Ka-boom.

“She was,” Gloria said, “…afraid.”

“Afraid of Taylor?”

“She seemed afraid of everything. Very jittery. I got the sense she might explode right in front of me.”

I paused before taking another bite of sausage. “Did you ever hear stories about strange things going on over there?”

Gloria slurped at her wine. “You mean the sex orgies?”

My eyebrows jumped.

“I have a hard time believing that stuff,” she said. “That gal was a mouse.”

“So how did those rumors get started?”

She leaned in and, keeping her eyes on the picnic table crowd, said, “Old Mr. Schwinn was always creating rumors out of nothing. He once accused Mark of pushing drugs, and virtually everyone in the neighborhood was guilty of incest, according to him.”

“Incest?”

“Oh, sure. You ask me, he was just envious. They had no kids, you see, and everyone was having a better time than him.” She set her hand on my arm. “That girl, Annette—she may have been a little wild when she got drinking, but I just can’t see her in a roomful of naked people.”

“Maybe she went along with it to please Taylor.”

“Anything’s possible, I suppose.” Gloria reached down and retrieved a gallon jug of white wine. Beaded water rolled across the green glass as she filled her cup.

“How’s that sausage, Carl?” Mark called out from his spot on the grass.

I waved a hunk of the meat. “Delicious!” Meanwhile, his money felt like porcupine quills in my pocket.

“You’re going to have to pardon me,” Gloria said, climbing unsteadily to her feet. “I need to visit the powder room.”

No sooner had she staggered off then Frannie, clutching her own cup of wine, plopped down in the seat.

“Were you grilling Gloria about that murder?”

“I’m interested,” I shrugged.

Frannie glanced over at Arnie, then the picnic table occupants—and leaned toward me. “There’s a good reason I don’t want you to bring that business up with Arnie.”

Her words, already made elastic by her accent, were now even more stretched out by the wine. I leaned sideways until our heads were nearly touching. I could smell Chardonnay and a fruity perfume.

“Talk to me, Frannie.”

“We’re pals, right, Carl?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“I mean, you’re a teacher. You’re used to having students take you into their confidence.”

My face went all warm at the thought of the secrets I’d held as a teacher. “Uh-huh.”

“Okay, here’s the thing.” She did another scan, then took a deep breath. “I had a little thing with Arliss.”

My head snapped back as if her admission had tapped me on the nose. “Arliss Taylor?”

Words started tumbling from her mouth: “I know. I was a bad girl. It was just one of those things. I think I was rebelling against the idea of monogamy. I was young.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. It was crazy. Insane. But he was a good guy. I fell for him.”

“Arliss Taylor was a good guy?” I pictured him swinging little Jane Bingham through the air. I shook the image out of my head before impact.

“Oh, I know what they say about him, but there’s more to it than that.”

“More to what? The guy killed a baby.”

Again, she glanced over at Arnie, who looked up and nodded. His face had grown serious. Maybe he didn’t like Frannie talking to men who lived at 49 Love Lane.

“Does Arnie know?” I asked.

“Hell, everyone knows. But it was a long time ago, so don’t go blabbing it around. Some people may have forgotten.”

Arnie continued to stare at us. He could tell we were discussing a sensitive topic—the tilted heads, the low volume. Still, I had to pursue this.

“How long did it last?”

“Oh, now you want details?”

“I’m just—”

“Next you’ll want photos.”

“You took pictures?”

She wrinkled her nose and sighed. “It didn’t last long, Carl.”

“What about those orgies Mr. Schwinn talked about?”

“Hey, I may have been young and stupid, and I may have a wild side, but I draw the line there, mister.”

“So Taylor never tried to get you to—”

“Listen to Columbo over here. All I know is we did our thing the old-fashioned way, just the two of us, and not even in our homes—out of respect for our spouses.”

Arnie climbed to his feet. I had to hurry.

“Where’d you go—a motel?”

Arnie headed our way, his plate piled high with crumpled napkins and plastic cutlery. He appeared nonchalant but I detected some purpose in his taut face. Frannie, taken aback by my interrogation, did not notice his impending arrival.

“We did it in the yard,” she said, her eyes twinkling with mischief.

“What kind of dirt is my wife spreading around over here?” Arnie asked, towering over us.

“Frannie’s just giving me some much-needed parenting advice.”

“I’d take that advice with a grain of salt if I were you, Carl,” he said.

Frannie reared up. “Bite your tongue, Arnold Johnston. Our kids turned out pretty good, if I say so myself, and without a whole lot of help from you, either.”

“Maybe I’d better get myself another beer,” I said, starting to rise from the chair.

“Look,” Frannie said. “You embarrassed Carl.”

“Carl’s fine.”

By now I’d gotten to my feet. Those canvas chairs are hard to escape from. As I walked off Arnie started complaining about Monica.

“That girl’s got ants in her pants,” he said, and as much as I wanted to hear about that, I kept on going.

I reached into the cooler and grabbed another beer.

“Don’t you already have one of those?”

Monica stood behind me, pointing to the half-full beer I already held.

“Oh. Yeah.” I considered concocting an explanation—I was getting a beer for Arnie?—but I knew she wouldn’t believe me.

She smiled and pulled her blonde hair behind a perfect seashell ear. One spaghetti strap remained fallen, so that the right side of her dress drooped a little. Freckles dotted her tan upper chest. I wanted to take a pen and connect them, creating bears and hunters among the constellations. She noticed how I looked at her and pulled the strap up and shifted her weight. She knew I was high, and she thought I was old and ridiculous, in my khaki shorts and polo shirt, my white athletic socks and bland sneakers. My too-hairy legs.

“What were you up to in the bedroom up there?” she asked.

“Just looking for my wife and daughter.”

“Really?”

Then I remembered what I’d wanted to talk to her about.

“Daisy loves that doll you gave her.”

She squinted at me so that her pale eyebrows contracted. “What doll?”

“That old doll. Didn’t you give it to her the night you babysat?”

“I didn’t give Daisy any doll. Why would I give her a doll?”

As a teacher I had seen teenagers lie. Nine out of ten times my inner polygraph went crazy, but there was that tenth lie, usually told by an expert, someone like Okay Peterson, that registered as a straight line. This, I was sure, was one of those lies, but Monica lied so skillfully and, yes, seductively, that I had no real evidence: no trembly lip, no sweaty brow, no wobbly eye contact, no twitch or stutter or hesitation.

It was my turn to say, “Really?”

“No,” she said. “I’m lying. I always give away creepy old dolls to little kids.”

“So you think it’s creepy too?”

“Very. I wouldn’t give that doll to a kid.”

My certainty had gone all flabby. I found myself staring into Monica’s brown eyes as if looking for a flaw in her retina.

“Well,” I said, “It’s a mystery.”

“Her mom didn’t give it to her?”

“Of course not.”

She gave me a skeptical look.

“She would have told me,” I said.

Monica shrugged as if to say, Who knows what people are capable of?

I decided to let the topic go and pursue a different line of questioning.

“Hey, did you ever babysit for the people before us?”

“The Princes? Yeah.”

“What were they like?”

“Pretty dysfunctional, if you ask me. The boy—”

“Graydon?”

“Grayson. He was a handful. He was always, like, biting and tantruming.”

“He bit you?”

“Kids do that, but he was out of control. And no wonder. His mom and dad were always going at it.”

“Fighting?”

“Yeah, or fucking.”

That word—it sounded so natural coming from this girl’s mouth, I almost didn’t catch it.

“And they weren’t shy about it, either,” she added.

I felt my face heat up, remembering how Abby had shouted during sex, with Monica and Arnie right outside the window. I could tell from Monica’s expression that she remembered it, too.

“What about the people before the Princes?”

“That was a single guy. Michael Something. I think he was gay.” She quickly added, “Which was cool.”

“And before that?”

“Uh, that’s going back aways. I was pretty young.”

“Did they have kids?”

“Yeah. A girl. She was my age. We hung out.”

“Any dysfunction there?”

She laughed. “You’re awfully nosey, aren’t you?”

“I just like to know the history, that’s all.”

She sighed and looked up at the trees, remembering. “There was this one time I was over there with Carla—that was her name—and we were playing with her dolls or something, and her dad said it was time for a bath, and he said I could take one too, so I said okay, and we got undressed and hopped into the tub, and we played with, like, some water toys and stuff, and…”

“How old were you?”

“Six. Maybe seven.”

“What happened?”

“Well, he wanted to, like, wash us, you know—down there.” She gestured vaguely toward her groin. “And, I don’t know, it’s not like my dad and mom didn’t scrub me down there, but this felt, I don’t know…different.”

“He was inappropriate?”

“I guess so. But I can’t say why, exactly. I just felt funny about it.”

“Did you tell your parents?”

“God, no. They’d have lynched the guy. It’s not like he hurt me or anything.”

“But he was out of line, Monica.”

“I guess so. I just never took a bath over there again.”

I felt queasy. Every story I heard about 49 Love Lane seemed to include some violence.

“What happened to them?
“I think they broke up, like everyone else. I overheard my parents talking about it once. I think the guy was screwing around. What else is new?”

A shadow played over her face. I looked up to see a hawk gliding high overhead, probably eyeing a small bird or a chipmunk.

“He was a teacher, I think,” Monica added. “Just like you, Carl.”

*

Dear Daisy,

Finally you are asleep, after one long hour of wailing and thrashing. I, too, am exhausted, but also determined to stay awake. When your father comes home I have some wailing to do myself. I can’t imagine what he’s still doing over there, probably getting sloshed and making an ass of himself in front of all our neighbors. Honestly, I don’t know how I’m going to be able to show my face around here after that sorry display—from the both of you. Perhaps I shouldn’t hold your behavior against you, but if people judge parents by their children’s behavior then I am to be considered petulant, crude and violent. Hearing that foul word on your lips I felt as if, at one, you were already slipping away from me. And scratching that poor, sweet Leo—Daisy, what came over you? Between that and then biting me and the hour or so of hysteria I felt ready to call an ambulance: Help! My daughter has lost her mind! Even now, asleep, you hiccup and grunt, trying to catch your breath after so much sobbing. Your face, normally so composed, glows red, your hands clench and unclench. You resemble your father—the way he looked at you today, as if he could snap you in two. I’ve never seen that in him before. Where does all this anger come from, I wonder as I look out at the darkening yard, the green slowly going black, the air filling with the soot of night. Every so often through the open window I hear a peal of laughter, Frannie or Gloria, drunk and happy beneath the thick maple trees and emerging stars. When I was a girl not much older than you, Daisy, my parents put glow-in-the-dark stars on my bedroom ceiling and I would lie in bed staring up as if they were real, counting them as some count sheep until slowly swallowed by sleep. But if I woke up in the middle of the night the stars would have lost their luminosity, and I felt absolutely alone in the blackness, adrift in space with no stars. Sometimes I’d lie there until the first thin tentacle of dawn slithered in from behind the blinds to paint outlines on the door, the dresser, the corner where the walls met the ceiling. Only then could I find my way back to sleep. I hope you don’t have nights like those. I hope you don’t wake in the dark feeling lost. Tonight I will stay with you, just in case.

14. Losing It

When I arrived home that night I found all the lights had been turned off, as if Abby did not expect me to return. Drunk and still a little high, I felt my way along the wall to our bedroom first, and could immediately tell it was empty. There is a sound that comes from an empty room that always makes me think of death. From there I stumbled through the living room, kicking toys and books that had been left on the floor, cursing as I slipped on a stack of flash cards. The house was becoming a pig sty. In Daisy’s room I heard the twin breathing of mother and daughter, deep and synchronous. I stood wobbling for a long moment, my pupils sowly opening to let in the faint illumination from a outdoor light two houses down. Abby slept in the rocking chair, her chin resting against a shoulder, her hair covering half her face. Her hands held a book. Daisy lay sideways in the crib, on her back, a nightshirt bunched up around her waist, legs bulging from her diaper.

The room started to move, so I grabbed the crib and closed my eyes, but the room shook even more. I tried to breathe. I couldn’t understand how the girls could sleep while the house vibrated like this. The air tasted of smoke and beer. My tongue lay like a dusty blanket in my mouth. Tiny ball bearings floated before my eyes. “Oh God,” I said, and my ears hurt from the sound of my own voice. I staggered out of the room and again slipped on the slick cards. My knee slammed onto the floor and I hardly felt it. I climbed to my feet and hobbled into the bathroom. For a moment I thought I was in our old apartment and was surprised to find the sink on my left and the tub on my right. Remembering now, I moved farther in to kneel at the toilet. The taste of Mark Patek’s spicy, flame-crusted sausage burned itself up my throat and into my nose. Behind that rolled a toxic wave of warm beer. I flipped up the toilet seat and braced myself.

*

I woke up in bed, unsure of how I got there, fully clothed, including shoes, my head full of glass shards, my gut scraped out like a Halloween pumpkin. Light shot through the window and pierced my one open eye. I groaned from deep inside.

“Abby?”

I knew the house was empty. All sounds moved from outside in: screeching crows, a clattering lawnmower, a jet clawing the ozone. Somewhere nearby a hammer pounded a nail. I lay as still as possible, praying for sleep, but my hands trembled, and alcohol sugar percolated in my spleen.

I needed water the way a cactus needs it in a drought, and yet the idea made my stomach turn. Get up, I told myself. The message traveled from my brain to my legs but nothing happened. So this is what it’s like to be a paraplegic, I thought. Maybe I had fallen down and snapped my spinal cord.

Random images came at me like holograms: the Pateks’ faux wood-paneled basement, thick green maple leaves, the freckles on Monica Johnston’s chest. Defying all sense, my penis stirred. From Monica my thoughts roamed back to nights on stage with Okay Peterson and her smooth wet thighs. Her hands looked so small on my erect penis, a memory that led me back to Frannie’s small, warm hand last night, a hand that had once held the cock of Arliss Taylor thirty years ago as they dallied in the back yard. What was it like to have fucked a killer, to have come at his hands, to have lost yourself in that electric moment? I rubbed my crotch against the mattress. I felt my blood move from aching skull down to between my legs. One time I had the flu, my fever topping out at 103.5, and all I could think about was sex. Must be the procreative instinct, I thought as I rubbed faster.

More images floated before my eyes: a hawk, Abby asleep in the rocking chair, a wallet on a tall oak dresser. The blood rolled away from my penis and back to my skull, where an ice pick proceeded to poke my forehead in time with the relentless hammering outside. Had I really stolen money from Mark Patek? With some effort I ran my fingers over my pocket and felt the thin ridge of folded bills. I relived my search through the Pateks’ house and the long, drawn-out moment of thievery. Then, as if I’d witnessed it, God-like, from the bedroom window, I watched Daisy’s assault on little Leo and Abby, followed by my overwrought reaction.

I lifted my boulder of a head and turned as if to look away from the sight of me shaking my daughter’s limp body. There, on the wall, beneath the portrait of my in-laws: a splotch of blood—red, glistening, fresh. Adrenaline rushed through me and I shot up onto my knees. The wall was dry. A sliver of a laugh fell from my mouth.

I was losing it.

I sat at the foot of the bed staring out the window at the Johnston’s empty back yard: the blue swing set, the folding lounge chair where Monica liked to sunbathe, the steps leading up to the deck. Beyond stood the Pateks’ tall wooden fence. This was where Frannie and Arliss Taylor did their dirty business. I remembered the night Abby and I watched Monica having sex out there, and wondered if perhaps we had watched something entirely different, something out of the deep past.

Maybe I should run away, I thought.

Feeling the pull of my bladder I limped to the bathroom, my knee throbbing. From there I went to the living room where toys and stuffed animals remained scattered across the floor, and then into Daisy’s bedroom. Following me came the rhythmic hammering that I now realized did not originate down the street but inside my own head. I squinted out the window and saw the car still parked in the driveway. They must have gone for a walk, I thought. I hoped they would not come back for a long time—hours, at least, maybe days. How lovely, I thought—and then felt guilty about it—if they never came back at all.

I padded back to the bedroom and peeled off my clothes, slowly, like a burn victim. Then I stood under the shower, listening for the creak of the kitchen door but hearing nothing but the water and the unstopping hammer in my brain. Thinking of Monica, I made a sad attempt at tugging at myself, but there was no response as my mind kept skipping to the various awful facts of my life: I had no job, I was a thief and child abuser, and now I was imagining blood on the walls.

I shut off the water and the pounding grew even louder.

“Stop,” I croaked, my mouth still parched. I patted myself with a towel and returned to the bedroom. That pounding sound—it came from the wall. I really am losing it, I thought. Maybe a rest sure was in order. I pictured a hospital room painted in muted colors, people dressed in white, a fistful of pills designed to dull everything down to a nub.

Still naked, I approached the wall. The noise was definitely louder here. I removed the screen from the window and leaned out. There, on the clapboard siding, checkered black and white, leaning back on its tail feathers for support, perched a woodpecker. It turned to look at me. On the back of its head gleamed a bright red patch.

“Shoo,” I said, waving. “Shoo!”

The woodpecker squeaked at me in a shrill voice, shook its head, fluffed its feathers, and continued to peck at the siding.

I walked back to the wall and slammed my fist against the plaster. The pounding stopped for a moment, then resumed. I banged some more, and the same thing happened. I returned to the window.

“Get out of here, you bastard!”

The bird chirped back at me as if laughing.

“Hiya, Carl.”

I turned to see Frannie Johnston in her yard. She wore shorts and a sleeveless blouse. She smiled in a curious way.

“Do you ever get woodpeckers?” I asked.

She laughed.

“What’s so funny?” I said.

Following her line of sight, I realized I was naked and half hanging out the window. I leaped back and pulled a blanket around my waist.

“Sorry!” I called out, still standing back and to the side of the window.

“No worries,” she said with a giggle.

I sat on the bed, wondering what else could go awry.

“Try tin foil,” I heard Frannie say.

“What?”

“They don’t like shiny things. Put some foil here and there on the side of the house.”

“Great. Thanks.”

I sat there for a long time, away from the window, the blanket on my lap, waiting for her to walk away, and listening to the tap-tap-tap of the woodpecker.

*

An hour later the girls had still not returned. Dressed and feeling hollow I wandered from room to room, picking up toys and stuffed animals and cans of Diet Pepsi left out by Abby over the past few days. The woodpecker continued his jackhammering, off and on, but mostly on. I didn’t have the energy to attempt Frannie’s remedy. Instead, I poured myself a bowl of cereal and ate only a bite or two before my stomach seized up on me.

Continuing my cleanup project I picked up Daisy’s discarded clothes—last night’s nightie, yesterday’s dress and socks—from her bedroom floor. A sodden, lumpy diaper lay next to the crib. As I bent to retrieve it I remembered the wooden box. I pulled the basket from beneath the crib. The box lay under the sweaters, as before, but was now positioned so that the carved star showed upside down. The image looked familiar; I had seen it recently. I picked up the box and felt my stomach drop—the upside down star was a symbol of satanic worship. I remembered the inverted pentagram showing up repeatedly on the websites I’d researched.

Where the hell did this thing come from? How did it get into the basket?

It was heavier than I remembered. I shook it and whatever was inside rattled. I ran a finger along the five lines that had been carved into the wood. I pictured Arliss Taylor with some sort of ceremonial knife, perhaps the same knife he used to disembowel animals and children. Dirt caked the grooves here and there, the carved wood dark with age and—blood?

“What’re you doing?”

Abby stood in the doorway, Daisy asleep in her arms.

“Where did this come from?” I asked, holding up the box.

“How the hell should I know?”

She carried the baby to the crib and lay her on the mattress.

“You’ve never seen this before?” I asked.

“What is it?”

“Some kind of box.”

“I can see that.”

“I found it in the basket under the crib.”

“How’d it get there?”

I watched her closely for the tell-tale signs—the twitch, the downcast eyes. If she was lying about this, she could have lied about the doll, too. But she showed no signs of it.

“I don’t have any idea,” I said.