It began with the drapes.
One day, while dusting the living room, Suzanne Spencer noticed a small thread escaping from the weave of the fabric. She pulled at it until it broke free. Instead of rolling it up between her thumb and finger, she took the thread, lifted it to her mouth, and swallowed it. Then, she continued the dusting, pausing to check on the third tray of brownies she was baking for the elementary school’s bake sale.
At least that was how Janet Pruett imagined it later, after the Spencer house was sold. But before the “For Sale” was taken down, and even before it was put up in the first place, Janet watched every day from across the street as Suzanne Spencer followed Lou to his car, her hair neatly styled, her face glowing with a casual layer of makeup—her dress perfectly pressed and fitted—with her little flat shoes polished so they shined in the sunlight. Suzanne would hand her husband his briefcase and a paper bag with his lunch, throw her arms around his neck and kiss him tenderly on his proffered cheek then waved as he drove away.
Standing in the driveway, she watched until Lou’s car disappeared before turning to wave good morning to Janet, Suzanne’s white teeth caught between a grin and grimace, before walking back up her driveway, disappearing behind her door.
Sometimes Janet saw her bend down, pick up a leaf, a piece of grass, or pluck a flowering weed from the edge of the footpath before Suzanne lifted it to her face.
Actually, it was a while before Janet or the neighbors noticed anything peculiar. First, the drapes were gone from the windows of the house. Then the welcome mat outside the front door disappeared. Everyone assumed the Spencers were redecorating and waited, eagerly, for a delivery truck to arrive. Anticipation increased as the flowers disappeared from the lawn and the bushes beneath the bare windows lost their leaves, spreading nothing but diminishing branches, twigs entangling as they rustled.
No new furniture arrived. The landscaping became increasingly spare.
Some neighbors wondered if any laborers would appear to return things back to normal.
When one of the other wives in the neighborhood came over to Janet’s house, their eyes would gravitate to the Spencer house across the street.
“Do you think Lou notices how strange the house looks from the outside?”
“No,” Janet muttered into her coffee cup. “Do husbands ever notice anything?”
The topic of conversation ended there, abbreviated with a thrill of laughter and shared stories of mutual suffering, complaining about the apathy of their spouses, the myriad ways their children neglected them.
One spring day, Suzanne walked out of the garage dragging a ladder. She extended it before she propped it against the side of the house and climbed onto the roof. She did not wear jeans or even overalls. Instead, she was wearing the same simple dress she favored, an apron tied at the waist, and her polished flats.
Once on the roof, she sidled crablike up the slant of the roof then sat down, legs folded beneath the skirt of her dress puffed up by layers of crinoline, as her hands seemed to dig around in her lap for something.
It was unusual, of course, to see anyone sitting on a roof. Janet was compelled to maneuver her housework around the windows so she could peer at whatever it was that was happening across the street. Janet noticed the neighbors who lived on either side of the Spencer house spending more time maintaining their lawns, unnecessarily trimming a bush, trimming the edges of the lawn, or simply walking up and down the block, pushing a stroller, casually lingering as they observed what was happening above.
Now Suzanne had something in her hands. From a distance, Janet could not tell what it was; she leaned forward as though the few inches would help make everything make sense. Whatever the object was, Suzanne twisted and reached down, until Janet guessed she was prying up a tile from the roof, a suspicion confirmed when Suzanne dropped it in her lap. The tool was then used to tear the shingle apart. With each tear, piece by piece, Suzanne ate the tile. Then another, tile by tile, as she denuded a small section of her roof.
After over an hour, Suzanne stood, cautiously stepped back to the ladder, and descended, flashing white underthings when the hem of her dress got tangled in a run. Janet, from her bedroom, knew that the women below were doing what she was doing. They watched Suzanne walk back into the garage with the ladder before she disappeared into the haven of her house.
The next day, the wives who had watched Suzanne stripping the roof were back at their windows, excitedly waiting to see if she would return. Word spread throughout the neighborhood. Women who heard about but had not witnessed anything for themselves invited themselves over to the houses closest to the Spencers’. Janet had three neighbors sitting in the living room, the window drapes pulled aside as they sipped coffee and waited, chatting about children and such to fill the time with inconsequential small talk.
When Suzanne emerged from the garage once again dragging the ladder, there was a communal sigh of released anticipation.
None of the wives could believe the perversion to which they were now witnesses, not even the ones who had watched the day before. Soon Suzanne was sitting just to the side of where she had left off the day before and she began prying up a tile, tearing it into bite-sized pieces, before eating them.
By the end of the week, women from other streets had taken to scheduling their lives around the strange events, joining their friends and neighbors as they stood, elbow-to-elbow, silent and watching. Janet’s home afforded the best view and soon became the primary gathering place for the ladies, who came bearing snacks and bags of ground coffee, to watch in awe until Suzanne eventually finished for the day and disappeared, leaving them to discuss and debate the cause and effect of what was happening.
Janet made it clear her bedroom was off-limits to everyone. She alone would watch from her bedroom window, relishing the solitude as she watched the mysterious actions of her neighbor, escaping the carnival tension downstairs.
As soon as Suzanne was done and the garage door closed with a tomb-like thud, the
debates would begin before the conversation inevitably devolved to complaints about children and husbands, until they left to return to their own houses.
Noticing the crooked Home Sweet Home cross-stitch her mother-in-law had made for them when they moved into the house, Janet adjusted it and smoothed down her apron before returning to her routine.
That weekend, a tarpaulin was spread out and tacked down to the roof, the first and only sign that Lou was aware of something. Suzanne no longer climbed up to the roof, although she continued to walk to the car with her husband every morning, passing his briefcase and bagged lunch to him before disappearing back into the house.
After several days, as if by unspoken agreement, many of the wives approached their own husbands, animatedly describing the peculiar actions of Suzanne Spencer. When the men came home from work, the women greeted them at the door or from the kitchen as they prepared dinner, jabbering about their day, some even following their husbands from room to room. The men listened patiently but said nothing, barely glancing up from their dinner or whatever distraction they used to tune out their wives.
The unbearable curiosity became too much for Janet Pruett, who was the only one to go to Suzanne—and only when she saw Suzanne sitting on the roof of the garage, once again stripping tiles. Standing on the lawn, she shouted up to her neighbor. Up and down the street, windows were opened by nosey neighbors.
“Suzanne, what are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
From where she stood, Janet could barely see more than Suzanne’s head above the cave of the immaculate garage. “I think you should come down.”
“No, thank you.”
There was the distinct, unmistakable sound of Suzanne ripping up another tile. Janet moved toward the ladder and stopped, feeling exposed, knowing that all around her the other wives were watching from their windows, squeezed close but out of sight so they could catch every word.
Does she even know she’s making a spectacle of herself? Janet wondered. Does she even care? “Suzanne, please come down.”
“I can’t right now. I’m busy.”
Janet struggled to think of something to say. Eventually, Suzanne hollered from the roof. “There are some cookies on the kitchen counter. Please help yourself. The door’s not locked.”
“Suzanne?”
There was no reply but Janet, having watched Suzanne’s peculiar ritual, could picture her neighbor reaching down for another piece of tile which she would then eat. She called Suzanne’s name a few more times, each shout becoming a little feebler, until she surrendered.
Curiosity taking precedence over propriety, Janet walked through the garage and into the kitchen to accept Suzanne’s offer of a few cookies. After all, everyone knew that Suzanne was the best baker in the neighborhood; her baked goods always sold out before anyone else’s at every bake sale.
When Janet returned to her house, the phone was ringing. As soon as she hung up, it rang again. And then again, each of the neighborhood women calling, demanding information. Protective of her neighbor, Janet initially said very little, but the taste of fame wore her down and she soon explained what she had seen, elaborating and embellishing with each answered call.
“There are no curtains in the kitchen. The towels and potholders are gone. And the throw pillows on the living room sofa. The carpeting and linoleum are disappearing, too.” At first, Janet’s voice sounded horrified, even frightened, but her tone shifted to enthusiastic gossip as she became more comfortable with the retelling of what she had seen. “You don’t think she’s eating everything inside the house, too, do you?”
Everyone asked her this question, or some variation of it. What did she think, standing in the kitchen, creeping into the dining room where an empty centerpiece bowl sat on the dining room table, the drapes here also gone, just as they were in the living room where Janet was appalled to discover the missing pillows, noticing that the crochet doilies, too, were gone.
That evening, the husbands were bombarded with the stories of Suzanne’s escapades.
A tarpaulin was spread over the garage and roof. Suzanne once again disappeared into her home. With the garage door now permanently closed to curious eyes, everyone slipped back into their routines. Suzanne Spencer was intentionally forgotten except by Janet Pruett, who was surprised when Suzanne showed up on her doorstep the morning of the church bake sale. Unable to meet Suzanne’s eyes, Janet took the proffered cake in a sealed cake carrier and watched as the woman reached down to lift up a box in which there were several batches of cookies and layers of aluminum trays of brownies, already cut, some frosted and others with nuts. They smelled delicious.
Janet didn’t know what to say to her. “Thank you. I’ll be sure to get your dishes back to you.”
“You’re welcome, Jan.”
“Suzanne,” she cleared her throat. “Are you okay?”
She looked at Suzanne’s face for the first time in months, scrutinizing it for any signs of something different or wrong, but she looked like herself, a smile dimpling her cheeks, her makeup and hair both perfect and perfectly normal.
“I am wonderful,” she said, turning away. “Bye.” Suzanne slid back up the walkway and crossed the street.
I should have asked her in for a cup of coffee.
That is what she would have done before, but she didn’t feel she could pretend that things were still normal, no matter how Suzanne appeared, because nothing, absolutely nothing, about Suzanne had changed.
Was the carpet in the living room completely gone yet?
What about the rug in the dining room?
What would she start eating next?
Would she ever get sick?
Would she die?
What did Lou think about all of this?
In late summer, Suzanne walked onto her lawn and sat down, much as she had done on her still tarpaulin-covered roof, plucked a blade of grass from the soil, turning it between her fingers, and then ate it.
It took only one woman walking by with her child in a stroller to alert the other women because she hastened back home and started making phone calls.
The show had taken a twist. Act Two was about to begin, and the women once again gathered at the windows, although Janet no longer welcomed anyone into her home, reminding herself that she did not appreciate the intrusion on her life even as she adjusted the perfectly straight cross-stitch hanging on the wall.
It took Suzanne less time to eat the grass and flowers from the lawn than it had for her to eat the tiles. After only a couple of weeks, the front of the house looked autumnal, the bushes empty of leaves, the grass altogether gone.
Finally, the husbands began to listen to their hysterical wives who were once again greeting them, now at the door as they walked through, with increasingly outrageous reports about what was happening in their neighborhood while the men were blissfully at work.
Bill Pruett, at Janet’s urging, approached Lou one Saturday afternoon. Afterward, he refused to discuss it with Janet and, since none of the neighbors witnessed the conversation, speculation suggested that someone must have also confronted Lou outside of the neighborhood, perhaps at a downtown bar or the golf course.
Shortly after the conversation, Lou moved out of the house.
Nobody was surprised.
Not by Lou’s decision to leave, anyway.
Suzanne continued to surprise everyone who had assumed she would now stop her craziness. The wives anticipated that she would do whatever she could to salvage her marriage and anticipated she would soon change her ways, and everything would return to normal.
The paint in the front of the house seemed to be chipping away faster than normal weather wear would cause. The bushes, relieved of all their green, were now shrinking in size as the twigs and branches were slowly trimmed off.
Suzanne had not stopped. She had merely stopped her madness in broad daylight, presumably because she no longer had to get up every morning and take care of her now-gone husband. Because Suzanne had no reason to see her husband off each morning, the women in the neighborhood saw her less than ever before. Still, whenever she came outside to collect the mail or walk to the market for food, she was always impeccably dressed, looking as lovely and healthy as ever, even as she continued to violate the perimeters of her property with her consumption.
When news of the Spencer divorce reached the community, there was a collective relief with everyone thinking at last things would return to normal, followed by a collective confusion. The expectation had been that Lou would keep the house, and she would simply disappear. Even Janet hoped this would be the way things happened. And while everyone saw the sense in Lou finally divorcing Suzanne, nobody understood the rationale for her keeping the house. After all, there were no children in the household. Not even a pet cat or dog. But she kept the house.
How could the divorce judgment allow her to keep the house when Suzanne not only could not maintain the property but was actively, if oh-so gradually, destroying it?
County ordinances, official documents, and subpoenas delivered to the Spencer house were ignored by its sole occupant, so far as anyone could tell. And when a long holiday weekend left no mail delivery for three days, Suzanne ate the mailbox. Eventually, county officials reached out to Lou, whose name remained on the mortgage. And with the house’s debt belonging to him, of course, a decision was finally made.
When Bill Pruett told his wife that her “crazy friend” was going to be taken care of “any day now,” Janet became sick with worry, too ill to do more than get the children ready for school in the morning, forcing Bill to make the family bag lunches and dinners himself, which only convinced him that Lou was doing the right thing. The sooner Suzanne was removed from the neighborhood, the better.
The day the hospital van pulled up, word had already spread that the day had finally come. Every woman stayed home, expecting Suzanne to cause a scene. They expected to discuss it or hear all about it later.
Janet watched from her bedroom window.
Two men and one woman climbed out of the vehicle and approached the Spencers’ front door. Janet held her breath.
Suzanne opened the door smiling, holding out a pyramid of biscuits on a plate. A conversation followed but nobody could hear what was said.
Janet was disappointed as she watched Suzanne nod, still smiling, as she allowed the woman in the white nurse’s uniform to escort her to the van. The nurse closed the Spencers’ front door and took the plate from Suzanne to allow her to climb in unencumbered. From the backseat, the nurse took a biscuit before passing the plate to one of the men who climbed into the front of the medical vehicle.
Janet smiled, imagining the plate being passed around until it was returned to Suzanne, who would be sitting there with the half-empty plate on her lap, occasionally insisting they should have another.
It took Lou Spencer nine months, nearly forty weeks, to undo the damage to the property Suzanne had caused. The day after the last of the repair crew left the property, a “For Sale” sign was placed on the lawn near the new mailbox. It sold quickly, in spite of the slow market. It was a good neighborhood to live in, after all, near good schools and close driving distance to the best shopping in the county.
When the new neighbors arrived, Janet watched from her living room window, pretending to clean the sill, the frame, and then the glass, occasionally slowing down to idly watch, assessing the furnishings as they were unloaded, counting the number of mattresses to guess at the size of the new family.
I suppose I should bring over a plate of cookies or cupcakes or something to welcome our new neighbors. What’s this?
As she ran her finger along the drapes she’d pulled back to let light into the room, Janet felt an errant thread. It wasn’t very long. With a practiced pinch, she lifted her other hand and snapped the thread away without pulling further at the fabric or thread. She was rolling the thread between her fingers, wondering what Suzanne would have baked for the new arrivals, wishing her tomatoes or cucumbers were ready to pick and share, or that she knew if the couple drank wine, because then she could just go to the store and let the clerk choose for her.
Anything, she thought, mindlessly putting the tiny ball of her drapery thread on the top of her tongue before swallowing it. Absolutely anything, except hours of baking for strangers.
In the kitchen, she pulled down the cookbook her mother-in-law gave her when she and Bill announced their engagement. Janet flipped it open to the cookies chapter and began to search for a recipe that looked easy and not overly time-consuming.
Satia Renée is a retired editor. Her poetry and flash fiction have appeared in Share magazine, a Kennesaw State University publication, and essays and reviews have been published on various websites as well as in the Wellness and Writing Connections newsletter where she volunteered as a contributing editor. She shares her life and home with a spouse and two Siberian huskies