The Uses of Enchantment

by Heidi Julavits

  Mary? I said.

  My end-of-session alarm beeped.

  Mary closed her compact and returned it to her coat pocket. She rose from my desk chair and pulled on her gloves. I followed her to the door, opened it, waited for her to pass through into the waiting room. She paused at the threshold.

  I would like to be asked if I enjoyed myself, she said.

  What Might Have Happened

  The man was a decent man. The girl could tell by the way he cautiously steered his Mercedes through the rainy streets of her town, as though she were endangered and required safeguarding against harm. He paused at a green light to allow a pedestrian, huddled under a tartan umbrella on the curb, to cross. He didn’t speak to her except to ask directions.

  Left here, the girl said. Now a right. Another right.

  The man stopped across the street from a white colonial, its shutters appearing black in the rain. A station wagon was parked in the cobbled drive, the lawn neatly raked of leaves.

  His car idled, the wipers tick-tocking across the windshield in which, the girl noticed, there was a very small starburst crack at eye level. When cars passed them in the opposite direction, their headlights struck the crack and it seemed to her that the intense brilliance alone might shatter the glass.

  You have a crack in your windshield, the girl said, pressing a forefinger to it.

  I know, he said. Apparently I’ve been meaning to fix it.

  The girl inspected her house, looking for signs of people. With the exception the front-door light, which her father had put on a timer, the house was dark.

  I had good intentions to fix it, the man said.

  Another car passed them. The man’s forehead gleamed sweaty in the headlights.

  But I forgot to do it, the man said. I plumb forgot.

  The girl saw, or thought she saw, a figure walking through her kitchen.

  I plumb forgot, he repeated.

  You forgot, she said distractedly. She was wondering if her sister was home, and if so, if she’d noted the car parked across from the house.

  Yes yes it’s embarrassing, he said.

  Why is it embarrassing? she asked.

  Excuse me?

  Why is it embarrassing? Do you have amnesia or something? the girl said.

  The man rotated the cartilege of his nose rapidly with the pad of his little finger.

  Hello? I asked you if you had amnesia. Or have you already forgotten, she joked.

  He cleared his throat and pulled a cigarette case from the inside pocket of his trench coat. The case was silver, it was tarnished, it was collapsed in the center and vaguely boat-shaped, as though it had been stomped upon.

  Mint? he said, offering her the case. In the light of a passing car, she could see it was monogrammed with the single letter K.

  She accepted a mint. It smelled of tobacco.

  You don’t smoke, the girl observed. Or did you used to? I mean before you got amnesia?

  Smoking almost killed me, the man said.

  You had lung cancer, the girl said.

  Yes, the man said. I mean no.

  You poor man, the girl said. Who are you?

  The man stared through the windshield. From the side his naturally bulging eyes appeared fishlike, stupid.

  I was trying to light a cigarette while crossing the street, he said slowly. It was a windy day.

  Because it was windy, smoking almost killed you?

  Because it was windy, I had my head down, I was cupping the match with my hands. I didn’t see the car. So, yes. Because it was windy, smoking almost killed me.

  How awful, the girl said.

  Yes, the man said distantly. I suppose it was awful.

  You don’t remember the accident? the girl said.

  I don’t, he said. Apparently I’m not the same man I was.

  According to whom?

  According to whom. My grammarian ex-wife would be very impressed, the man said. According to the doctors. According to my ex-wife, who was my ex-wife before the accident. She claims I used to be taciturn and self-defeating, I used to be a trial lawyer who lacked animation, I used to be an uninspired dinner-party guest. I used to be a heavy sleeper. I used to detest shrimp.

  Wow, the girl said. Do you miss yourself?

  The man laughed bitterly.

  It’s hard to miss a man who married a woman I cannot imagine anyone finding attractive, he said.

  The rain increased its intensity. The girl watched as a van pulled into her driveway; her older sister emerged from the passenger side, her school blazer pup-tented over her head. She ran for the side door and fumbled beneath an empty clay planter for the house key.

  Her sister vanished inside the house.

  It’s getting late, the man said.

  The girl reached down to grab her backpack, then remembered she’d left it in her locker.

  I wonder, said the girl, if not knowing who you are—I mean, were—feels exciting or frightening.

  Must it be one or the other? the man asked.

  But you could be anybody now, the girl said. You might be a champion chess player or a famous artist. You might be a criminal.

  The man gripped the steering wheel with his gloved hands. He wore black gloves, the sort of gloves, shiny and tight-fitting, that TV stranglers wear.

  Exciting and frightening, the man said. Both, I’d say.

  I’m hungry, the girl said. You?

  The man didn’t respond.

  I’m in the mood for shrimp, the girl said.

  One by one all the windows of her house ignited. Her sister was a nervous person, terrified of robbers, kidnappers, all-purpose intruders. She had yet to realize that the way to surmount your fears was to stalk them and invite them to dinner.

  The man didn’t say yes, he didn’t say no. He put the car in drive and pulled away from the curb just as the girl’s sister appeared in the living-room window, her body a silhouette framed by the curtains.

  The man had a good sense of direction, or at least his new self did; he didn’t ask the girl left here? or right? The rain had submerged the roads and driving the Mercedes appeared to be like steering an unwieldy scow; each slight turn of the man’s wrist resulted in a delayed, and disproportionately large, directional shift. He slalomed out of the girl’s neighborhood, a canopied tangle of poorly drained roads lined with very old houses close to the curb and very new houses built to look like very old houses set farther back in the woods. The girl’s mother hated these new-old houses, these sentimental facsimiles with their suburban willow trees and their diagonal property sitings and their perfectly round ponds. Her mother volunteered at the historical society and the landmarks commission; she was in charge of maintaining the dignity of dead things.

  The man turned south on Harbor Road. It was completely dark now, though only 5:46 p.m., according to the car clock. The girl did not ask where are we going? Possibly a restaurant. Possibly his house, where he now kept a freezerful of shrimp at his ready disposal. Possibly to his boat (if he had a boat), where he would offer her a beer and they would sit in the damp cabin and the sex, if they had it, would be the chafing kind that would leave friction burns in places he hadn’t even touched her. Possibly to the woods, where he would rape and dismember her and promptly forget he’d even met her, because his short-term memory, too, might be compromised. She allowed these blacker possibilities to slide in and out of her consciousness without paying them any more attention than the blander ones; she did not want to seem nervous or immature to the man, because she knew his willingness to be seduced by her depended upon this.

  The road got darker, the houses fewer and farther between. The girl shivered. Her sweatpants and her ski jacket were still damp, and the damp had transferred to her skin, then to the muscle layer beneath. The man, noticing, turned on the heat. The air from the vents smelled of many-times-burned things.

  They passed a gas station, a marina sign, a reclining-chair store advertising a fire sale. Commerce began picking up, and th
e girl relaxed; at least she would be dismembered and raped in a neighborhood. Dying, even in the proximity of clueless strangers, seemed less terrifying than dying alone in the woods. They passed a dry cleaners, a plumbing supply store, the infamous day-care center run by two old women, now jailed and awaiting trial. These old women had been accused of doing unspeakable things involving toddlers and their own wrinkled bodies. They had been accused of riding broomsticks around the room. It was so unbelievable that it was totally and completely believable, at least to some people. But the girl needed only to glimpse the newspaper pictures of the two women—with their iron-colored hair, their drugstore reading glasses, their lumpy bodies in lumpy cardigans, their tiny gold crucifixes—to know there was nothing perverse or witchlike about these old ladies; the only potential crime they’d committed was to live their entire lives in an unimaginative way.

  Eventually the man turned into the lot of a diner.

  Tick-tock-tick-tock went the wipers.

  Do they serve shrimp here? the girl asked.

  The man squinted at the diner windows, trying to read the giant menu slanting from the ceiling.

  I have no idea, he said. But I hear the food is good.

  From whom? the girl said.

  From whom, he said. From my ex-wife. According to her, this is where we came on our first date.

  The girl tucked her chin into her ski coat collar. Rain splattered noisily on the car hood, the drops widely spaced and as heavy as nickels. The man exited the car, walked to her side, opened her door. He’d forgotten to put on a hat. His hair recoiled boyishly in the wet, encircling the lobes of his ears.

  Perhaps we should be introduced, he said, holding out a hand.

  OK, said the girl, palm pressed against his strangler’s glove. I’m Ida. Who would you like to be?

  West Salem

  NOVEMBER 9, 1999

  Mary awoke at 9 a.m. to the zippery sounds of packing tape and the hollow thumping of cardboard boxes. Downstairs she found Regina picking up cork coasters and ashtrays and other seemingly non-auctionable items that had nonetheless been tagged with green ribbon, huffing to herself of all the tacky nerve. Gaby, presumably in the process of sorting through the books on the shelves that flanked the fireplace, had become sidetracked by a paperback entitled Famous Canadian Shipwrecks; she’d since given up all pretenses of assisting Regina and was reclining on the sofa, reading. Their father appeared to have respected the well-meaning eviction notice issued to him by his daughters, who wished to spare him the packing ordeal. According to Gaby he gone to the diner for breakfast, after which he had plans to meet a friend at the golf course to spend the day chipping balls around the half-frozen scruff.

  Regina emerged from the downstairs bathroom holding a beribboned, warped box of Kotex.

  “They want an antique box of tampons?” she said.

  The kitchen pantry items, Mary discovered as she searched for the jar of instant coffee, were similarly tagged.

  Mary wandered back into the living room. Outside, it appeared to be sleeting.

  “It’s for the time capsule,” Gaby called from the couch. Clearly she’d been sorting through her closet and thus, in a fit of nostalgia, had chosen to revisit the bizarrely layered uniform she’d favored during grades seven through twelve—a whale-patterned turtleneck covered by a pink Oxford button-down covered by a green Fair Isle sweater covered by a napless navy chamois shirt. On her feet she wore mukluks furred with an even coating of purply gray closet lint.

  “The what?” Regina said.

  “The Greene mausoleum got raided by a vagrant,” Gaby said.

  Regina tossed Mary a perplexedly irritated look.

  “A vagrant,” Gaby repeated.

  “And the vagrant wants…I’m sorry. What does the vagrant want?” Regina said.

  “Didn’t you read the Semmering Alumnae Bulletin?” Gaby asked.

  “It seems not as closely as you did,” Regina said.

  Gaby scuffled under the couch. She retrieved a newletter, ringleted with mug stains.

  “Miss Pym plans, with the help of the West Salem Historical Society to ‘bury the past for the sake of the future,’ ” she read.

  “An apt motto for Miss Pym,” Mary said, yawning. She was still emerging from her blunt night of sleep. Her sisters hurt her brain.

  “Miss Pym convinced the Greenes to donate their mausoleum to the sixth graders to use as a receptacle for their yearlong cultural history study. ‘Where once was death, there will now be life.’ ”

  “Where once there were dead people, there will now be our trash,” Mary said. “Is there any coffee?”

  “There’s no shortage of grief tea,” Gaby said.

  Regina glared at Mary.

  “So it was you,” she said accusingly.

  “What,” Mary said. “What was me.”

  “You told them they could have our tampons,” Regina said.

  Mary winced; without a few more minutes of awakeness under her belt, she hadn’t had a chance to fortify herself against random Regina assaults. Mary didn’t bother countering Regina’s accusation with the obvious—that, due to her recent exile, she’d had zero involvement with the auction arrangements, or the real estate agent, or the funeral specifics. This defense, while true, would only introduce new areas for venomous critique.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I forgot you’d probably want them.”

  Gaby laughed from behind her paperback. Mary, for a quasi-instant, considered that Gaby, even while appearing to be a Regina disciple, might be a neutral party. Gaby had been to visit her in Beaverton last spring, just after Mum was officially diagnosed, and they’d spent the weekend smoking pot and eating the same re-microwaved tureen of chowder. She and Gaby, she’d believed, had a sibling closeness based on the unspoken agreement that they would never be close; this shared understanding of the limits of their relationship made it the easiest relationship Mary shared with anyone in her family.

  Regina’s eyes flared. Mary could see her teetering between states of increased or decreased or differently aimed rage.

  “Well,” she sniffed, her ire deflating into morbundity. “It’s not like Mum left us anything else.”

  “Poor you,” Gaby chided.

  Regina checked her watch and ordered Gaby off the couch. They hurried into rubber boots and two of Mum’s wool coats, hanging in the foyer.

  “So it would be great if you could clean out Mum’s study while we’re gone,” Regina said, consulting the to-do list on the credenza.

  “Where are you going?” Mary asked.

  “The auction truck’s coming tomorrow,” Regina said.

  “Yes but we’re not donating her personal files to the historical society…”

  “Do you want to fight me on this?” Regina said. “Or do you want to help?”

  It was too fucking early for this.

  “Fine,” Mary said. “Anything else you need? Should I repaper the hall? Do some stencil touch-ups?”

  Regina put a line through an item on the list. She pointed the pencil at Mary.

  “I did that while you were sleeping.”

  “And you’re going where?” Mary asked a second time, trying to appear only passingly to care about the answer. But her disinterest masked her growing nervousness. When faced with the prospect she realized: she did not want to be left in the house alone.

  “We have an appointment with Mr. Bolt,” Regina replied, as though this explained anything.

  “Who’s Mr. Bolt,” Mary said.

  “Mr. Bolt? The art appraiser?” Regina feigned impatience. She knew damned well that Mary had no idea about any Mr. Bolt.

  A familiar dullness descended over Mary. Though a presumably full-grown adult, she was still able to inhabit, quite instantly and quite viscerally and with quite a hefty dash of self-pity, the childhood terror of being left out of something.

  “It’s for the tax write-off,” Regina said. “I can’t stand here and explain it to you. We’re late.”

&
nbsp; “What tax write-off?” said Mary.

  Regina glanced toward the conspicuously blank space on the living-room wall where Abigail Lake used to hang.

  “You’re selling her?” Mary said, dumbfounded.

  “We’re getting her appraised. For the tax write-off.”

  “But how can we justify a tax write-off if…”

  Mary noticed Gaby absently tweedling the green ribbon hanging from her coat’s buttonhole.

  “I’ve already spoken to Mrs. Bigelow,” Regina said. “Abigail Lake belongs at the historical society.”

  “But the painting’s only ten years old,” Mary said.

  “Last I checked, 1989 was still a part of history,” Regina said. “At least in the reality I inhabit.”

  Her sisters departed. Mary returned to the box-strewn living room, nerves ignited. She sat on the couch in her pajamas, trying not to brood over the situation nor further freak herself out, even though the house creaked and rustled around her and she couldn’t snuff out the irrational suspicion that she was somehow endangered.

  To calm herself she stared at the space on the wall where Abigail Lake had once hung; the previously shaded portion of wall was paler than the wall around it and appeared, in this light, as a fossil-like depression in the plaster. The punted andirons, she noticed, had been stored safely inside the coal hod, which had been tucked inside the fireplace. After twenty-five years of out-of-service drafty space consumption, the fireplace’s “working order” had finally been restored last month, its chimney a justifiable household expense only now that Dad was selling the house. Mary would have found this detail touchingly indicative of her family’s penchant for parsimony where warmth, both literal and figurative, was concerned; but given the uncomfortably close parallel this act shared with her own last-minute attempts to restore working order, as it were, to her relationship with Mum, she viewed the new fireplace as further rebuke of her family’s—of her own—self-defeating ways.

  She returned her attention to the blank space on the wall. Poor Abigail Lake, she thought. Yes, she too was disappointed that her mother had left her nothing more meaningful than a painting she despised and was furthermore meant to share with her sisters, none of whom lived in the same town. But to take this disappointment out on Abigail Lake—to donate her along with the throw rugs and the andirons—struck Mary in that tender place she reserved for the outsize pity she experienced on behalf of inanimate objects. Easier to be ruined by the sight of a child’s abandoned stuffed duck on the sidewalk. Easier to be ruined by the rejection suffered by a well-intentioned if misguided birthday gift—an ugly purple scarf. Easier to be ruined by “the pain” experienced by an ugly and unwanted purple scarf than the death, say, of one’s own mother.