Worse: Harriet’s father was always right, even when he was wrong. Everything was a test of wills. Though he was quite inflexible in his opinions, he loved to argue; and even in good moods (settled back in his chair with a cocktail, half-watching the television) he liked to needle Harriet, and tease her, just to show her who was boss. “Smart girls aren’t popular,” he’d say. Or: “No point of educating you when you’re just going to grow up and get married.” And because Harriet was incensed by this sort of talk—which he considered the plain, good-natured truth—and refused to take it, there was trouble. Sometimes he whipped Harriet with a belt—for talking back—while Allison looked on glassy-eyed and their mother cowered in the bedroom. Other times, as punishment, he assigned Harriet tremendous, un-doable chores (mowing the yard with the push mower, cleaning the whole attic by herself) which Harriet simply planted her feet and refused to do. “Go on!” Ida Rhew would say, poking her head through the attic door with a worried look, after her father had stormed downstairs. “You better get going or he going to tear you up some more when he gets back!”
But Harriet—glowering amidst stacks of papers and old magazines—would not budge. He could whip her all he wanted; never mind. It was the principle of the thing. And often Ida was so worried for Harriet that she would abandon her own work, and go upstairs and do the thing herself.
Because her father was so quarrelsome and disruptive, and so dissatisfied with everything, it seemed right to Harriet that he did not live at home. Never had she been struck by the strangeness of the arrangement, or realized that people thought it odd, until one afternoon in fourth grade when her school bus broke down on a country road. Harriet was seated next to a talkative younger girl named Christy Dooley, who had big front teeth and wore a white crochet poncho to school every day. She was the daughter of a policeman, though nothing in her white-mouse appearance or twitchy manner suggested this. Between sips of leftover vegetable soup from her Thermos bottle, she chattered without encouragement, repeating various secrets (about teachers, about other people’s parents) that she had heard at home. Harriet stared bleakly out the window, waiting for somebody to come and fix the bus, until she became aware, with a jolt, that Christy was talking about her own mother and father.
Harriet turned to stare. Oh, everybody knew, Christy whispered, huddling close under her poncho (she always wanted to sit closer than was comfortable). Didn’t Harriet wonder why her dad lived out of town?
“He works there,” said Harriet. Never before had this explanation struck her as inadequate, but Christy gave a satisfied and very adult little sigh, and then told Harriet the real story. The gist of it was this: Harriet’s father wanted to move after Robin died—to a new town, someplace he could “start over.” Christy’s eyes widened with a confidential spookiness. “But she wouldn’t go.” It was as if Christy was talking not about Harriet’s own mother but some woman in a ghost story. “She said she was going to stay forever.”
Harriet—who was annoyed to be sitting by Christy in the first place—slid away from her on the seat and looked out the window.
“Are you mad?” said Christy slyly.
“No.”
“What’s wrong then?”
“Your breath smells like soup.”
In the years since, Harriet had heard other remarks, from both children and adults, to the effect that there was something “creepy” about her household but these struck Harriet as ridiculous. Her family’s living arrangements were practical—even ingenious. Her father’s job in Nashville paid the bills, but no one enjoyed his holiday visits; he did not love Edie and the aunts; and everybody was disturbed by the hard, infuriating way he badgered Harriet’s mother. Last year he had nagged her to go with him to some Christmas party until at last (rubbing her shoulders through the thin sleeves of her night-gown) she blinked and said Fine. But when it was time to get ready, she sat at her dressing table in her bathrobe and stared at her reflection without putting on lipstick or taking the pins out of her hair. When Allison tiptoed upstairs to check on her, she said she had a migraine. Then she locked herself in the bathroom and ran the taps until Harriet’s father (red in the face, trembling) pounded on the door with his fists. It had been a miserable Christmas Eve, Harriet and Allison sitting rigidly in the living room by the tree, as the Christmas carols (alternately sonorous and jubilant) swelled powerfully from the stereo, not quite powerful enough to cover the shouting upstairs. It was a relief when Harriet’s father clumped out to his car with his suitcase and his shopping bag of presents early on Christmas afternoon and drove away again, up to Tennessee, and the household settled back with a sigh into its own forgetful doze.
Harriet’s house was a sleepy house—for everybody but Harriet, who was wakeful and alert by nature. When she was the only person awake in the dark, silent house, as she often was, the boredoms that settled over her were so dense, so glassy and confused, that sometimes she was unable to do anything but gape at a window or a wall, as if doped. Her mother stayed in her bedroom pretty much all the time; and after Allison went to bed—early, most nights, around nine—Harriet was on her own: drinking milk straight out of the carton, wandering through the house in her stocking feet, through the stacks of newspaper which were piled high in nearly every room. Harriet’s mother, since Robin’s death, had developed an odd inability to throw anything away and the junk which packed the attic and cellar had now begun to creep into the rest of the house.
Sometimes Harriet enjoyed being up by herself. She switched on lights, turned on the television or the record player, called Dial-a-Prayer or made prank calls to the neighbors. She ate what she wanted out of the refrigerator; she clambered up on high shelves, and poked through cabinets she wasn’t supposed to open; she jumped on the sofa till the springs squealed, and pulled the cushions on the ground and built forts and life rafts on the floor. Sometimes she pulled her mother’s old college clothes out of the closet (pastel sweaters with moth holes, elbow gloves in every color, an aqua prom dress that—on Harriet—dragged a foot upon the ground). This was dangerous; Harriet’s mother was quite particular about the clothes, though she never wore them; but Harriet was careful about putting everything back the way she’d found it and if her mother ever noticed anything amiss, she never mentioned it.
None of the guns were loaded. The only ammunition in the case was a box of twelve-gauge shells. Harriet, who had only the haziest idea of the difference between a rifle and a shotgun, shook the shells out of the box and arranged them in starburst patterns on the carpet. One of the big guns had a bayonet attachment, which was interesting, but her favorite was the Winchester with the telescopic scope. She switched off the overhead light and propped the barrel on the sill of the living-room window and looked down the scope with narrowed eyes—at parked cars, pavement sparkling under the high lamps and sprinklers hissing on lush empty lawns. The fort was under attack; she was guarding her post and all their lives depended on it.
Wind chimes tinkled on Mrs. Fountain’s front porch. Across the overgrown lawn, along the oily barrel of the gun, she could see the tree her brother had died in. A breeze whispered in the glossy leaves, jingling the liquid shadows on the grass.
Sometimes, when Harriet was prowling the gloomy house late at night, she felt her dead brother draw close to her side, his silence friendly, confidential. She heard his footfall in the creakings of the floorboards, sensed him in the playing of a blown curtain or the arc of a door that swung open by itself. Occasionally, he was mischievous—hiding her book or her candy bar, replacing it on the seat of her chair when she wasn’t looking. Harriet enjoyed his company. Somehow she imagined that wherever he lived it was always night, and that when she wasn’t there, he was all by himself: fidgeting, lonely, swinging his legs, in a waiting room with ticking clocks.