Freedom: An Ohio Gothic
IT STARTED WITH WASPS. At the end of our first year in the house, they ate through the walls. I would find, first, the dusty piles of plaster by the baseboards, the strange detritus materializing like unlikely anthills on the ugly green carpet. Only later would I recognize these for what they were: evidence of invasion. At last, I saw the wasps themselves, clinging to the sheer white curtains and crawling along the windowpanes, or else strewn lifelessly across the floor and sills, their bodies transmuted into brittle husks.
For the living, I enacted well-meaning rituals of rehabilitation, trapping each intruder inside a plastic cup and conveying it staidly downstairs and out the back door. As they multiplied, this manual method was soon forfeited for the more practical affordances of the Dustbuster, which allowed me to suction up five or six at a time, releasing them reeling and dizzy into the ambient air outside. I attempted, with little result, to remedy the breach by the baseboards with electrical tape, then, more successfully it seemed, with wall caulk. Satisfied, I declared the matter solved.
Months later, they began appearing by the dozen in my husband’s office. We sprayed, sealed, suctioned; they kept coming. We never could discern from where.
In a famous scene from the 1979 film The Amityville Horror, Father Delaney is beset by a swarm of flies when he arrives to bless the ill-fated Lutz residence. At first, we see only a pair of them on the inside of the second-story windowpane that separates Delaney from the Lutzes, who are outside frolicking with their dog in a scene of suburban bliss. The door slams unexpectedly. Delaney looks toward it, agitated, and mops his brow. By the time he turns back around, a multitude of flies have appeared. We observe them from outside first, peering in at the priest beginning his blessing. We float beside the camera, invisible voyeurs. The crescendo of buzzing swells alongside the tremulous Lalo Schifrin score.
The flies leave the window, alighting on Delaney’s face and shoulders. He coughs and sputters, hunches over. Outside, the family blithely roars off in a motorboat, oblivious. The shot cuts to an extreme close-up of the flies: the bulbous swell of their compound eyes, the frenetic movements of their legs, the twitching of tiny tarsi. The camera alternates between Delaney and the window, both increasingly enveloped by insects, both equally immobile.
The door opens. Delaney’s eyes open. The scene cedes to silence. Then we hear it—a whisper at first, slight and inconspicuous; then again, shrill and unmistakable: Get out!
This is the problem with: we stay in haunted houses, like idiots. We don’t heed the warnings; we don’t read the signs. In pursuit of the American dream of homeownership—the middle-class domestic ideal, the manicured lawn, the thirty-year mortgage and its promise of equity and upward mobility—we colonize spaces, nominally vacant and hauntingly occupied, as if we belong there. As if it is our right.
