The Household Spirit by Tod Wodicka Page A

like the dull sexual insinuations, the how about sketching whatever you feel today sessions, the expensive, torturous logic. She needed a good sleep is what she needed. Maybe she needed a best friend. Mostly, wasn’t she a thirteen-year-old girl? Did they have pills for that?
    Finally, she said, “They just make me feel smarter than them, Peppy. That’s all. I walk in feeling strange and nervous, thinking maybe this time they might help me, and I walk out feeling like they’re morons.”
    Peppy sighed.
    “I’m sorry,” Emily said. “Dr. Branca’s not so bad. It’s just annoying.”
    “I’m sorry, too,” he said. “I’ve got to tell you, Emily, I’m extremely frustrated myself.”
    If she’d only found one adult person besides her grandfather who could see that the sleep problems were the
cause
, not a symptom. Therapy only convinced Emily that she couldn’t open up about these things, her nighttime things, without being misunderstood, manipulated. In trying to cobble together a path toward healing, they’d made her feel more insane, isolated, exasperated. This meant that later, in her teens, when things got unimaginably worse, besides Peppy, there was nobody she could or would talk to about it. If they hadn’t believed the night terrors, they’d never believe what came next. Never. Because if the night terrors seemed to exist in an altered place, a wrong and inarticulate region just to the left of sleeping, then what came after the night terrors was like an invasion of that place into Emily’s waking, conscious world. It was like as a little girl Emily had crossed over and whatever was there had finally found a way to follow her back.
    —
    To make matters worse, at fourteen, Emily crashed into womanhood, alone. Suddenly it was clear that she needed more than the training bra she never had, that her boobs had somehow, over a period of six or seven months, managed to train themselves.
    Peppy couldn’t know. She worried him enough. She’d have to purchase one herself, like the maxi pads she’d gotten at the Stewart’s gas station mini-mart across from school. But since they didn’t sell bras at the mini-mart, Emily had begun hiding herself away behind these huge, incontinent sweaters that had once belonged to her grandmother Gillian. One girl asked her why she was wearing a jellyfish to school, but that was about it. Under the sweaters, Emily wore prohibitively tight T-shirts from years ago.
    The afternoon she realized it was too late was the first day of spring, though, technically, it was still winter. The sun was white. Everything was melting, dripping, pooling on the pavement. Emily had, without thinking, taken off that day’s sea monster sweater andher winter jacket. She stood in the Queens Falls Middle School parking lot, happily watching the birds, waiting for Peppy’s car. Her little T-shirt was yellow.
    Peppy generally took her to and from school every day.
    He said, “Would you look at this afternoon, Em?”
    Emily got in the front seat, slammed the door, tossing her bag, jacket, and rolled-up sweater into the backseat. She realized instantly. She might as well be naked. She fastened her seat belt. This made them perk up even more.
    “Let’s go pick up some food,” Peppy said.
    Biting her lip, “Sure.”
    They practiced subsistence shopping. They rarely did big trips, just little sorties he called them, every two, three days. This didn’t seem weird or counterintuitive to Emily until later, and then, well, not extraordinarily weird, or no less weird than the massive twenty-four-hour Price Chopper itself. She understood why Peppy didn’t want to pilot a shopping cart under those fluorescent lights for any extended period of time, quick in, quick out, like Price Chopper had a limited supply of oxygen.
    They pulled into the shallow snow-melt lake of the Price Chopper parking lot. “I’ll stay in the car,” Emily said.
    “What? Just a little piddle puddle. Come off it. You got your