The Spell Book Of Listen Taylor

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  “But not everybody loves peanut butter,” somebody pointed out wisely.

  Listen was quiet, thinking about how much work it was to hide from the eyes of the girls in her year, and the teachers, and her dad. She had to hide, because if they saw her alone, they saw this: a girl with no friends. Once they had seen her in that way, they could never see her any other way. She couldn’t change it. She couldn’t make it stop.

  “I don’t think it’s worth it,” she said, without even putting up her hand. “You’d forget how to be yourself.”

  “Yeah,” said Angela. “But Nikolai chose to be a movie star.”

  “That’s just one choice,” said Listen. “After that, the world decided he and Rebekka were perfect people, and they wouldn’t let them change. They were like a king and queen, because that’s what everybody wanted. Then they had three sons so that’s a fairy tale. So now they’re a fairy-story family, and there’s nothing they can do to make it stop.”

  Everyone was quiet and surprised. Listen Taylor rarely spoke in class.

  “Huh,” said Mr. Bel Castro, “sorry, I don’t know anybody’s name—you are…?”

  “Her name’s Listen Taylor,” said Angela.

  “Her name’s not actually Listen,” said Donna.

  “It’s Alissa,” Caro added. “She just calls herself Listen.”

  Mr. Bel Castro looked from Angela to Donna to Caro, and then back to Listen. “She just calls herself Listen?” he said. “I like that.” He smiled at Listen, and nodded his approval.

  One night, watching Law & Order: Criminal Intent, the aeronautical engineer laughed at something Marbie had just said, and murmured, “Maribelle, you are a riot!”

  “Who’s Maribelle?” said Marbie from the floor, where she liked to watch TV.

  He continued to watch the screen, leaning back on the couch. After a moment he said, “Isn’t Maribelle your name?”

  “No, Maribelle is not my name.”

  “Well, what else could Marbie be short for?”

  “What else?! And you call yourself a visionary. It’s short for Marbleweed.”

  “Marbleweed!” He laughed so much that he had to mute the TV. “Why would your name be Marbleweed?”

  Marbie explained about her mother—how she had wanted to give them gifts with their names. She gave Fancy the gift of imagination, and Marbie the gift of good luck.

  “Good luck!” cried the aeronautical engineer. “With a name like Marbleweed?”

  Marbie explained that “marble” was, in fact, excellent luck, according to a book on witchcraft that her mother once owned. If marble grew like weeds, her mother thought, you’d end up with a surfeit of good luck.

  “And,” Marbie added, “it worked. I’ve had excellent luck all my life.” Then she frowned for a moment, considering this, and cleared her throat.

  “Marbleweed,” he whispered, shaking his head at her. Then he giggled, and began singing the name, over and over, humorously.

  A few days later, the aeronautical engineer fell asleep, lying flat along the couch, while Marbie watched Survivor: Cook Islands from the floor. When it finished, she tried to wake him to tell him that the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with Regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data did not apply to the Zing family. It was irrelevant.

  And even if it technically applied, she thought, exasperated, what did the law or legal documents have to do with her family and its meetings in the shed? The Zing Family Secret was a family matter, far too complex, emotional, private, fragile, and delicate for the application of rules.

  “Hey,” she said. “Hey. Wake up.”

  He gasped in his sleep, said, “Huh? What? Huh?” and turned on his side. A cushion fell off the couch.

  She found this display extremely affected.

  “Oh, forget it,” she said, and went home.

  One night, after dinner at Fancy’s place, Marbie asked her sister when Nathaniel would return. “You said he’d come back,” she accused.

  “Well,” said Fancy, cheerfully. “Has he had an affair with someone else yet?”

  Marbie gasped.

  “Because,” Fancy explained, “he won’t come back until he’s had an affair of his own.”

  “But I only slept with the A.E. once!” cried Marbie.

  “And you’re not seeing him anymore, are you?”

  “No!” she lied.

  “Still, that’s just a technicality. As soon as you slept with your aeronautical engineer, you gave Nathaniel the right to sleep with someone else. It’s a rule.”

  Although Marbie begged Fancy to change her mind, she refused.

  “He has to,” she said gently. “Otherwise it’s not balanced. Didn’t you realize?”

  “I would die if Nathaniel even touched someone else.”

  “You should have thought of that before.”

  “Stop it, Fancy, it’s not funny. I don’t want him to have an affair. Come on, please?”

  “It’s not up to me. Revenge is his right.”

  Oh, God! thought Marbie, breathless with panic. Nathaniel’s hands on another woman’s hands, Nathaniel’s thighs against another woman’s thighs! Nathaniel playing the astronaut game and moonwalking across another woman’s bed! Why had she not thought of this before?

  If he had to get revenge—and Marbie supposed that he did, because Fancy was generally wise—if he had to get revenge, then couldn’t the revenge be something else?

  The next day, Marbie slept with the A.E. again.

  For weeks he had seemed perfectly content to ask her, now and then, if she would like to “give it a whirl again.” Each time he asked, she would pretend to consider, politely, and then say, “No. Thanks, though.” But on this day she arrived to find him wearing nothing but boxer shorts and a bow tie. He was carrying a bottle of champagne.

  “Marbie,” he said, as she walked in the door and raised her eyebrows at him, “Marbie, this cannot go on.”

  “Can’t it?” she said.

  “No, my beautiful, it cannot. You cannot sleep with me once and then not again. You cannot use those pouting lips to tell me your delicious family scandal and then keep your lips away from mine. You cannot come over, night after night, with those sexy legs and that husky voice, and not sleep with me again.”

  She gazed at him for a few moments. “All right,” she said. “But not on the living room floor.”

  For the next few days, Marbie stayed at home. She explained to the A.E. that she had to do one hundred and forty-seven Business Activity Statements for the various Zing Family Secret corporations. (This happened to be true; She had an excellent mind for corporate structures and formalities.) She phoned Nathaniel and offered to do the Banana Bar BAS, as usual, but he said he had found an accountant.

  The next time she saw the aeronautical engineer, it was in the Night Owl Pub, after her work friends had gone. He did not even sit down. He whispered in her ear, “Have a drink on me,” and placed a schooner of beer in front of her. Then he took out a curl of paper, tied with a pink ribbon, and added, “One of my new visions,” before he slipped away. Marbie opened the vision and read it. It left her somewhat cold.

  The Visions of an Aeronautical Engineer

  Vision # 1,562

  Trapped within the cobwebs of my counterintuitive chin,

  I see this, I see this, I see this.

  I see, with startled clarity, for just a whispered moment:

  Bidirectional Evolutionary Structural Optimization.

  The following Thursday was a difficult day for Marbie. Things such as this kept happening: She made a call to get somebody’s number, scribbled the number on a Post-it note, and then lost the Post-it note. She ordered a salad sandwich for lunch and when the girl behind the counter said, “Salt and pepper?” she replied, “Just pepper, please,” and the girl gave a glazed and rueful nod, meaning, That’s what everybody says. She bit the inside of her cheek, by accident, and then kept biting the same spot. Also, her nose and her eyes were itchy, and
she was always on the verge of a sneeze.

  She was almost relieved when the A.E. phoned in the afternoon and asked her to slip out of work to meet him at a nearby café.

  In order to change the nature of the day, she ordered a piece of chocolate cake.

  “Whoa,” said the aeronautical engineer, when the chocolate cake arrived. The waitress smiled, as if it were a compliment. “You gonna eat all that by yourself?” He himself had only ordered an espresso.

  “You can share it if you like,” said Marbie politely.

  “Heeeee-uge,” whistled the aeronautical engineer between his teeth, and then shook his head: “No thanks.”

  Marbie adjusted her chair slightly, and took up her spoon.

  “It’s not that big,” she said after a moment, at which he chuckled slightly and said, “You’d better get stuck in. I mean, we don’t have all day here; sure, if you wanted to share it with a starving nation, you might just—”

  She touched his thigh lightly to make him stop.

  “Ho ho!” he said, looking at her hand on his thigh with a grin. “Ho ho!”

  When she returned to work, the day continued exactly as before. Worse even: One of her toenails seemed to have developed a sharp edge and was cutting into the next toe along whenever she walked to the photocopier.

  Later that night, she drove to the A.E.’s place to watch TV.

  “I’m hungry,” she said, during an ad break.

  “After that piece of chocolate cake!”

  “That was hours ago,” Marbie pointed out.

  He raised his eyebrows. “I’m not hungry,” he declared.

  “I assume you realize,” said Marbie spitefully, “that your not being hungry doesn’t make you a better person than me?”

  He chuckled and leaned back on the couch, stretching out an arm as if to parallel park. Marbie stood up. She stared at him.

  He gave her a little oops grimace. “What’s up? Feeling fragile today?”

  Formally, she announced: “I’m leaving. Sorry, but we have to end it now.”

  “Come on,” he smiled wryly. “You’re ending it because of a piece of chocolate cake?”

  “Because of a piece of chocolate cake,” she agreed, and she gathered up her handbag and her shoes.

  PART 12

  The Story of Madame Blanchard

  Once upon a time there was a man named Monsieur Blanchard, who fell in love with hot-air balloons. By lucky chance, he also fell in love with a woman (Madame Blanchard) who herself was enamored of balloons. Together, they cast their ballooning spells, performing sky shows all over France.

  Madame Blanchard was a sensitive soul who could not stand the clamor of noise. Often, of an evening, she took her balloon into the sky, and remained there, with the moon, until dawn.

  Sadly, Madame Blanchard died in a balloon crash. It was during a fireworks display over the Tivoli Gardens in Paris. From the basket of her balloon, Madame Blanchard sent gold! and silver! in cascading stars to the delight of the crowd below, and then she sent a great burst of fire. The crowd cheered happily, not understanding that this burst of fire was an error, and signified disaster: In fact, the balloon was on fire.

  She crashed onto the roof of a house in the rue de Provence, and broke her neck.

  Maude Sausalito, now older, and married (and in fact not Maude Sausalito anymore), wore her hair long and flat like a shawl. She was telling her husband about the Blanchards, the legends of ballooning, while he polished his shoes. She herself was icing cupcakes on the one clear corner of the kitchen table; he had spread newspaper across the remainder and was nodding as he dipped a brush in polish. He had just been promoted to Assistant-Manager-in-Training at the menswear store where he worked, which is why shiny shoes were important.

  When Maude told how Madame Blanchard took to the sky of a night, her husband, David, chuckled to himself, and said, “Not a bad idea!”

  They both glanced down at their first child, Fancy, who was sleeping in the pram that Maude had found abandoned on the street (David had refurbished it completely). Lately, Fancy had been teething, so that their nights had become precarious affairs: They did not sleep so much as teeter in suspense. The baby’s cries were so sharp, they both felt the cut of the tooth.

  Maude and David had married two years before, and honeymooned in a tent in the Hunter Valley. Maude had secretly arranged a dawn balloon ride for the second day of the honeymoon, but, during the wedding reception, David’s brother made several jokes about his vertigo.

  “What’s vertigo?” Maude whispered.

  “A fear of heights,” David whispered back.

  He had never told her! Secretly, she canceled the balloon ride.

  They never mentioned his vertigo, but both acknowledged it silently—for example, when Maude’s kite got caught on the chimney, she herself climbed up to retrieve it, while David watched, trembling and pale.

  Generally, David was happy to hear her balloon stories, but when Maude finished the story of the Blanchards, he said sternly, “She died in a balloon crash? That’s not a nice story, Maude. Why tell me that story?”

  “Okay, here’s a nicer story,” said Maude at once. “About Monsieur Blanchard. The husband. About how he crossed the English Channel in a balloon! Just rock the pram with your foot, would you? We’ll trick her into going back to sleep.”

  As she told the story of Monsieur Blanchard, Maude daydreamed about the journey they would take in a hot-air balloon, once David was cured of his vertigo. (If she told enough balloon stories, then surely…?)

  The pilot would have long curling hair, almost to his shoulders. In the creaking basket of the balloon, one night, he would point out a powerful owl. “Is that actually a bird?” David would say. “Isn’t it just a bit of dust?” But the pilot, his muscular arm reaching up to tug a rope, checking the wind with a private little nod, would steer them closer to the dust, which would turn into a powerful owl. He would glance at her reaction, shy for a moment, but then he would grin, mischievously, and turn to the care of his balloon.

  Blushing, she would look down at the slice of lime, perched on the side of her martini.

  PART 13

  The Story of the Trip to Ireland

  One

  When Fancy Zing was eleven years old, her father went to Ireland for a year. The day that he was due to return she sat at the kitchen table to write a poem:

  Today! Today! My Daddy’s Coming Home!

  At last! At last! Fetch the Cheese and Honeycomb!

  The thick black lead of the HB pencil slipped when the table wobbled, and the “Cheese” spilled its “s” across “Coming.”

  Fancy examined the table. It was cracked, and scribbled with words such as MARBIE ZING and cow! She laid her hands flat and rocked the table to pinpoint the wobble, tore a corner from her poem paper, and crouched next to the table leg. As she crouched, she stopped and swirled her skirt, making it touch the floor in a parachute circle. It was a brand-new secondhand skirt, to Welcome Daddy Home.

  Her mother had said, “New jeans?”

  And Fancy had said, “I think I’d like a skirt.”

  “A skirt!” cried Mummy. “Aren’t we growing up!”

  Then she took most of the money from the St. Vincent de Paul box on top of the fridge, took Fancy’s little sister, Marbie, by the hand, and all three walked to the bus stop. Only, Mummy realized she didn’t have exact change for the bus fare, so they walked into Castle Hill.

  At Pre-Loved Fashion, Fancy’s mother bought herself a pale green scarf, which floated in the air when she tossed it about, making up her mind whether to buy it (and she leaned toward Fancy and explained, “A little pink lipstick and a pale green scarf, and you’ll find you win any man’s heart!” “Will you?” said Fancy, surprised.) They also bought a purple T-shirt for Marbie, and for Fancy, a skirt in the colors of a rainbow lorikeet.

  Now Fancy stood up from the floor, graceful, a flamingo, and felt the skirt rest against her legs.

  The wobble was
gone when she sat back down, and she took up her pencil again. But here was the problem. She could not write the poem too fast, because she had to be there, writing it, when her father arrived. She had to be sitting at the table, her pencil chatting poetry, frowning as she worked on the last few words.

  He would walk through the door and say, “Fancy! Hi! Doing homework?”

  And she would say, “Writing a poem to welcome you home.”

  She would stand, her skirt would fall against her legs in a great spray of color, and he would say, “You’re all grown up!”

  And she would say, gracefully, “Welcome home, Daddy.” And present him with the poem.

  So she sat at the table and drew tiny flowers in the space between the lines of her poem. Then she wrote the heading WELCOME DADDY in bubble letters, and made a 3-D effect by shading around the edges.

  The telephone rang, and Mummy shouted from the laundry, “Get that, would you, Fancy?” But Marbie came skidding through the back door, and grabbed it from just beneath her fingers. “Hello?”

  Fancy whispered sternly, “Good afternoon, Marbie Zing speaking.”

  Marbie shivered her muddy face and turned toward the wall. “Yes,” she said to the receiver. Then, “Ye-e-e-s! Of course!” Then, “Uh-huh, uh-huh. Okay. Bye.”

  Fancy said, “You’re all muddy, Marbie. Who was that?”

  “Nobody.” Marbie squirmed past and ran down the hallway.

  “It can’t have been nobody,” Fancy murmured to herself. She followed Marbie at a more stately pace.

  “Who was it?” Mummy asked.

  “Guess.”

  Mummy stood up slowly from the laundry basket, carrying a pair of Marbie’s shorts. She put her hands in both shorts pockets, one at a time, and took out crumpled tissues and dirty handkerchiefs. “Look at you, Marbie,” she said, shaking her head. “Look at your lovely new T-shirt.”

  Marbie looked down and said “Oops!” seeing the purple T-shirt splattered with mud specks.