The Uses of Enchantment Page 3

  She snuffed her cigarette into Ye Olde Bastard’s tight-napped grass. Across the street, heels clicked along the sidewalk and up her family’s driveway. The automatic garage light snapped on, illuminating a familiarly fuzzy-haired woman knocking with familiar impatience on the kitchen door. The woman huffed and checked her watch. Mary heard the kitchen screen yo-yo shut, she saw the woman struggle to fish a set of car keys from her canvas bag.

  Mary ducked behind the rear fender of the nearest parked car.

  What the hell is she doing here, she thought. But her bewilderment was insincere. Though a psychologist, Roz Biedelman had never been one to register the fact that a person hated her guts, even a person of her mother’s calculated lack of subtlety. Mary crouched lower. It had snowed two days ago, and then it had rained, and then the temperature had dropped below freezing, but the curb was still lined with a sooty, filigreed crust that crunched noisily under her weight. Worse than Roz Biedelman spotting her was Roz Biedelman spotting her crouched idiotically behind a car. But Roz remained on the opposite side of the street and unlocked the door to a green sedan parked in front of the Trevelyans’ house. She started the engine. She drove away.

  Once Roz turned the corner, Mary sprinted for the house (noting, curiously, that the automatic garage light failed to respond when she crossed beneath it). She locked the door and flicked off the kitchen overhead, just in case Roz circled back (all paranoia was justified where Roz was concerned). She removed her shoes and padded up the back staircase. From down the hall she could hear Gaby and Regina in Regina’s old bedroom, now a guest room, as Regina regaled Gaby with details about her impending breakup from her third financé, Bill, the two of them chortling in a ragged, sloppy way that indicated they were drunk.

  Mary paused in the hallway. She needed to say good night to her sisters. She needed to engage in a polite post-funeral debrief. She wanted to confer with them about the unexplained appearance of Roz Biedelman. She decided to put it off.

  Mary assumed that her father had gone to bed and so was surprised to spot him, as she passed the half-open door to the study-cum-second-guest-room, standing in the skinny triangle of light thrown downward by the desk lamp, reading a letter. The corners of his mouth spasmed as though his lips were being electrocuted toward a smile. From the doorway, she could see the letter’s handwriting—her mother’s—and she permitted herself a dopey surge of hope. Of course. Her mother had given a letter to her father, with instructions that he give it to Mary on the day of the funeral. The fact of this letter—the way her father held it, as if it were his but not his—relieved her for two reasons. The obvious reason involved her mother. The less obvious reason involved him, because the letter meant she could forgive her father his irritating and, yes, hurtful passivity. This trait of his she’d accepted without much resentment until his most recent failure to intercede on her behalf, acting as her mother’s neutral spokesperson on the hospital phone and refusing, as he’d always refused, to go against his wife. Since Mum’s death, her acceptance of his long suffering assumed a more spikey, wrathful tinge, at least until she arrived at the house full of pent-up angry words and he, numb-faced and too small for his own skin, showed her the photos of the charmless golf condo he’d bought, and tried, with a palpable neediness, to rally her enthusiasm for a life that sounded to her like just this side of death.

  She stood quietly in the doorway to the study-cum-second-guest-room. Her father looked up from the letter long enough to register her own desperation, and to allow it to make him uncomfortable.

  He turned back to the desk.

  “Just catching up on some bills,” her father said, folding up the letter and sliding it into his pants pocket. “Your mother left us quite a mess here.”

  He gestured toward a crisscrossed pile of envelopes.

  “Quite a mess,” he repeated.

  He put his hands on his hips. He stared at the pile, as though willing it to ignite.

  “I read an article about estate planning on the airplane,” Mary said, after an awkward silence.

  “We don’t really own what you’d call an estate,” her father said.

  “It listed the top ten things people would do with their time if they knew they only had a week to live,” she said.

  “Ah,” her father said, not listening.

  “My point is that bill paying was pretty low on the list,” she said.

  Her father, she noticed, had taken the framed photographs down from the wall. This bothered her. Not that he had begun to strip the house of the few belongings he planned to take with him to the golf condo. She was bothered that she couldn’t remember which picture had once hung above the couch bed.

  “So is making lasagna noodles from scratch,” she said. Was it the photo of their 1973 family waiting to board the Woods Hole ferry? “So is putting an old pet to sleep.” Was it the photo of her parents straddling a tiny moped on their Bermuda honeymoon?

  No, she thought. It was the framed letter from Governor Edward J. King in sympathetic reference to Abigail Lake. Or it was the photo of one long-ago Halloween, Regina dressed as a queen, Mary as a hand-me-down witch, and Gaby as a table.

  “So is making amends with estranged family members,” she said.

  Her father didn’t respond.

  “Most people just want to get a manicure and go skydiving,” she said.

  Her father ground his teeth, producing a squeaky Styrofoam sound that meant he’d had quite enough of something.

  “How’s the boyfriend?” her father asked. “The one who makes shelves?”

  As opposed to the one who makes recycled packaging out of old newspapers, she wanted to say. The one who makes deck chairs from a composite of unendangered hardwood pulp and natural glue. Her string of boyfriends were crafts-oriented people with a solid liking for the outdoors, an environmental business aesthetic, and a full head of hair; she’d met them all at the vegan bakery where she ate lunch every afternoon. She ate at the vegan bakery because it was the only place to eat within walking distance of the Grove School. They traveled distances to eat there aggressively on purpose, which partly explained why each of these relationships had failed, and maybe why her adult life, to this point, possessed a temporary feel. After a childhood spent plotting and attempting to assert control over the uncontrollable, she’d downsized her ambitions to practically nothing. Her attachments now, like her life in general, were a composite of pure, pure accidents.

  But in fact she didn’t know how the current boyfriend was. She hadn’t called him once since she’d left. Nobody in her family knew his name (it was Dan), and thinking of him as the boyfriend had made it very easy not to call him. Her life—and it was a not bad life, not while she was in it—was suddenly reduced to a series of nouns to which she felt a very slim connection. The boyfriend. The job. The West.

  “He’s fine,” she said. “I guess.”

  “Will he be coming to visit you while you’re here?” her father said.

  Implicit in this question was the fact that he assumed she was not staying. And she wasn’t staying, not after the house sold. Was she? Still, she felt hurt by the fact that he didn’t appear to care one way or the other.

  “I’m not sure, Dad,” she said. “I really barely know the guy, to be honest. He’s more like—my buddy.”

  Her father nodded. “Buddies are good,” he said. “Nothing wrong with a buddy.”

  “I guess not…”

  “Your mum and I were never buddies. Not that I wanted her to be my buddy. That’s what the golf course is for.”

  “Come on, Dad, Mum was your buddy,” Mary said, not knowing what else to say. Other than Father and whimsy, no two words less belonged in the same sentence than Mum and buddy.

  Her father seemed to appreciate the lie. He looked at her, really looked at her for the first time since she’d arrived five days ago. She took this opportunity to breach the unspoken contract.

  “Did she know she was dying?” she said. “I mean I know she knew
she was dying, but did she know she was dying?”

  “We’re going to have a dickens of a time straightening out things with the insurance,” he said, returning his attention to the envelope pile. “We switched HMOs last spring and now there’s some stickiness surrounding the preexisting condition.”

  “Because if she didn’t know, as in accept that she was dying, that might explain why—”

  “Your mother was not a stupid woman,” her father said sharply.

  “I was only wondering…”

  “She was not a stupid woman,” he repeated, more gently this time.

  With a slap of his knees her father announced he was going to bed. He gave Mary a fraught-free peck on the cheek as though nothing out of the ordinary had transpired that week, that afternoon, that minute. He crossed the hall and shut his bedroom door; she heard the bedsprings creak as, presumably, he settled on the edge to untie his shoes, remove his socks, invert them into a ball as her mother had taught them to do before throwing them in the hamper.

  Mary retired to her own bedroom, stung but then berating herself for feeling stung. She retreated again into the safety of nouns. The man’s wife just died, she told herself. Give the man a break. She removed her dress and pulled on her high school–era robe, still hanging where it had always hung on the inside of her closet door. She took the back staircase to the kitchen to make some grief tea. They’d left the cleaning to the caterers, the two waspy widowed women Mum used for all her historical society events. The waspy widowed women had left a note on rose-dotted stationery leaning against a plate of leftover meringues. It read: We are so sorry for you!!

  Mary read and reread the note as she fingered the tangle of Healthy Acceptance tea bags in the tin. Grief tea, assuming it made a person not feel grief, was a beverage she might best avoid. Grief tea ran through her veins. She’d been raised on a diet of grief tea.

  We are so sorry for you!!

  She crumpled the note and put it in her robe pocket.

  The kettle boiled.

  Opening the silverware drawer to fetch a spoon, she noticed the plastic baggie—it was an actual plastic baggie with a ziplock top—containing her mother’s ashes, folded neatly atop the knives. Her throat closed, her body fighting off a nausea that felt oddly divorced from the physical. My mother is inside this baggie, Mary thought, stunned by the queasy disconnect. Her sister hid her in the silverware drawer. In her mother’s opinion open caskets were hideous, they were plain barbaric, and, yes, Mary understood her reasoning, but as a constipated mourner with intensely unmendable closure issues she sort of missed the open casket, she missed a concrete representation of death that was so mercilessly to the point.

  You must be very, very angry with her.

  Mary replaced the baggie atop the knives and shut the drawer, but not all the way. Air, she was thinking irrationally. It seemed insensitive to leave the kitchen in total darkness, so she flicked on the over-the-stove light. The light made a comforting humming sound.

  She took the front stairs this time so that she would pass Regina’s door and be forced to say good night to her drunk sisters. The pair of them sat side by side in Regina’s skinny single bed, the duvet pulled up to their waists, the pillows mashed vertically against the headboard. Each held a water glass in their laps filled with something clear—vodka, gin, rum, evidently they’d stashed a bottle before the reception. They wore their old Lanz nightgowns, girlish be-flowered and be-hearted flannel things with eyelet lace at the collars and cuffs that made them look disturbingly older than their respective ages of thirty-one and twenty-eight. Regina in particular looked preternaturally ruined due to a combination of the lighting—the Itty Bitty Book Light clamped to the headboard exposed the hollows under her eyes and the rumples around her mouth—her resolute underweight-ness, and the physical toll exacted by her crashingly doomed love life. In high school, Regina had been the only functional Veal beauty, which did not mean that she’d been beautiful. Since she exuded the composure and the sense of entitlement that typically accompanied beauty, many were charitably willing to concede her the privileges. Mary, who was neither pretty nor its opposite, learned at an early age that what beauty she might lay claim to was directly related to the occasional moods that possessed her as a child and as an adolescent, and which now rarely did; a sense that her body did not matter and her face did not matter, that when people looked at her they were struck by a light that radiated from inside of her and was so entrancing as to make her physical self irrelevant. But really it was Gaby who, despite her alternately irate and affectless manner and her asexual-to-lesbian leanings, had the most lovely moon face of the three, hidden behind a perpetual scrim of baby-fine, brown hair. Part of her allure could be attributed to the fact that people felt self-congratulatory when they discovered it, as though this said something special about them and their unique powers of perception.

  Her sisters stopped talking when they saw Mary standing in the doorway. They did not invite her into the room. Detached conversation ensued. The kitchen was clean yes the waspy women were sweet yes and even Aunt Helen was on her best behavior amazing how is Dad Dad is fine Dad is Dad glad it’s over now just glad it’s over.

  Silence.

  Mary said good night. She did not try to kiss them or appear to need to be kissed and they were clearly relieved about this.

  “Yes, well, good night,” she repeated.

  Mary shut her bedroom door, surrounded now by the cabbage-rose wallpaper she’d chosen as a ten-year-old, jail bars of pink-and-red flowers. Regina’s and Gaby’s rooms had been stripped and repainted into the guest room and the study-cum-second-guest-room respectively, while her room—for possibly no more significant reason than that it was the smallest and the darkest—had been left intact, right down to the elementary-school swim-team ribbons pinned to the bulletin board and the robe in the closet. She sat on the edge of her dotty-coverleted bed and roughly worked her temples with her thumb and index finger, trying to poke away the effects of the day. She took a healthy gulp of Healthy Acceptance grief tea to maximize her attempts at relaxation.

  Fuck.

  She spat the scalding mouthful back into the mug. Her hand jiggled, spilling more tea and forcing her to drop the mug awkwardly on the bedside table. The mug overturned and grief tea splashed on the spines of the books in the nearby bookshelf and over the off-white carpet.

  Fuck fuck.

  She pulled the books from the shelf and one by one blotted them dry with her bathrobe sleeve. The worst hit, coincidentally, was her signed copy of Trampled Ivy: How Abusive Marriages Happen to Smart Women by Dr. Rosemary Biedelman. Mary removed the book’s sheeny dust jacket (a crepuscular orangey-pink backdrop foregrounding a menacing silhouette of ivy) to swipe at the water droplets beneath it. The spine, stiff from never having been read, was nonetheless practiced at opening to this one page.

  For Dora: We await your true story.

  Beneath the ballpointed inscription was a scribble that might have read Roz Biedelman but had always looked more to Mary like Skuz Bod.

  Her formerly treasured edition of The Abduction and Captivity of Dorcas Hobbs by the Malygnant Savages of the Kenebek, she noticed, though located on a shelf above the spill’s Biedelman epicenter, had also been victim of the spray. She removed it gingerly and patted at the mildew-stained spine that might have been royal blue at one time, but was now a leeched-out violet with a tiny gold tomahawk glimmering in the center. The book’s pages were compressed like a dense cake. Mary opened the front cover to read the full title of the book, which she’d once known by heart. The Abduction and Captivity of Dorcas Hobbs by the Malygnant Savages of the Kenebek, A Compendium of Helish Tortores and Dreadfull Temtations and How an Innocent Young Girl Tastd Sine and Dancd with the Devill, Yet Was Still Savd by God and Returned to the People of York by the Corageous Mircy of Pastor Moses Vibber, Who Was Then Burned Under Suspicion for Committing Diabolical Acts of Wickedness and Wichcraft.

  As Mum used to joke: “One need h
ardly read the book.”

  Neighboring Dorcas Hobbs was Mary’s 1986–87 Semmering Academy yearbook, also vaguely splattered with grief tea. She wiped the spine and flipped through the foamy hair and atomized acne, the page after page after page of grinning girls in Fair Isle sweaters and easily decoded references to lost virginities (“D, platform tennis shack, 12/3/84”). There was no encrypted text under Mary’s photo—for in fact there was no photo, just a uniform gray rectangle (IMAGE UNAVAILABLE) rising like a dead tooth between the countenances of Polly Vansykle and French exchange student Rosa Villeneuve. Mary hadn’t attended school her senior year, she had missed the photo session and the deadlines for copy submission, she had ignored the pleas from yearbook editor Pansy Bittman who sent notes home with Gaby that grew increasingly threatening (Pansy took her job very, very seriously), and so it was partially to spite Pansy and her idiotic sense of self-importance that Mary refused to submit any copy. Beneath her gray rectangle, thus, was a listing of her meager Semmering accomplishments, compiled by one of Pansy’s lower-school minions:

  Field Hockey I & II (JV). Tennis I, II ( JV). Local History Book Club II.

  But what about junior and senior year? The observant person might ask. What did Mary “Mimsy” Veal do with herself? The observant person might think: Something happened to her. For that observant person, Mary had hidden three meticulously excised newspaper headlines in the back of her yearbook. LOCAL GIRL ABDUCTED AT FIELD HOCKEY MATCH. SEMMERING JUNIOR DISAPPEARS FROM FIELD HOUSE. NO LEADS ON VANISHED TEEN. She hadn’t saved the articles, nor the dates that would have indicated these headlines were exactly fourteen years old. Let the observant person who finds this yearbook in a thrift store in seventy years wonder and deduce. Let them scrutinize the airbrushed expressions and speculate which smile disguised a slightly more sinister past, which girl was hiding more than a clove-cigarette habit or a penchant for stealing birth control pills from her friend’s mother’s bedside table drawer. Let them glide past the gray tombstone above her name (IMAGE UNAVAILABLE), more fascinated by the potential darkness obscured behind the happy faces that were available for scrutiny.