The Uses of Enchantment

by Heidi Julavits

  “Don’t flatter yourself. You’re just retarded when it comes to very basic activities.”

  Regina waved frantically at the eaves. The light clicked on.

  “See?” she said.

  The side door opened.

  “What are you doing?” said Gaby.

  “Mimsy can’t find the car keys,” Regina said.

  “You lost the car keys?” Gaby said to Mary.

  “I’m looking for the car keys,” Mary said. “Which does not mean that I lost them.”

  “We’ll find them in the morning,” Regina said, and then added somewhat ominously: “Nobody’s going anywhere tonight.”

  “Dad got a hole in one,” Gaby said.

  Mary pushed past her younger sister, looking falsely innocent in her raggedy Semmering field hockey team sweats. She wore the cuffs like a pair of gloves, her thumbs extruding from two large holes, the sleeves stretched long and covering her fingers. Mary felt far more betrayed by Gaby than by Regina, but then, she reasoned, what right did she have to feel betrayed? One sisterly weekend with Gaby in three years did not count as knowing someone. She had no one to blame but herself if she was feeling emotionally swindled by a person who was, in essence, a stranger to her.

  Aunt Helen sprawled in the breakfast nook, one scrawny leg snaked around the other scrawny leg, bobbling a large scotch in her two palms. The overhead fluorescents rendered Aunt Helen even more skeletal and translucent than her usual skeletal translucence. When drinking, her veins became prominent and she resembled the giant diagrams of the human vascular system that used to hang on the wall of the Semmering biology lab.

  Weegee appeared from the mud room wearing a red dog sweater, the phrase CA VA? knit into the pattern with white yarn. He burrowed his muzzle into Mary’s crotch.

  “Weegee was so worried about you,” Aunt Helen observed.

  “It’s nice to be missed,” Mary said.

  “Mary went to Boston to have Abigail Lake appraised,” Regina said. She stared meaningfully at Gaby.

  “Did you,” said Aunt Helen.

  “Apparently I did,” said Mary, no longer caring what anyone thought.

  “Thinking of selling the painting,” Aunt Helen said, eyebrow raised. “Of your own ancestor.”

  “It’s a painting of Mimsy in a bonnet,” said Gaby. “Regardons. Weegee has a hard-on.”

  “Can I refresh your drink?” Mary asked Aunt Helen as a way to further agitate Regina.

  “Well!” Aunt Helen said, handing Mary her glass without actually looking at her. “I’m glad I came over. I had plans to eat at the club but I thought no way should you girls be alone tonight. People will make some poor decisions after a funeral.”

  “Did Dad go to bed?” Mary asked.

  Aunt Helen nodded. “It’s all been a bit too-too for Clyde. He’s not a coper, your father. Your mother was fine with that, of course. She preferred to be the one in control. Weegee! Don’t be so aggressive!”

  “It’s OK,” Mary said. “My crotch isn’t seeing a lot of action this week.”

  “Grief will kill the libido,” Aunt Helen said. “Look at me.”

  “But don’t look at Weegee,” Gaby said. “Ca va?”

  “I’m still grieving over my divorce,” said Aunt Helen.

  “Tom left you twelve years ago,” Regina said. “Do you want any pizza? You should probably have some pizza.”

  “I don’t eat pizza, Regina. And twelve years is not such a long time when your husband was sleeping with the golf pro.”

  “I didn’t know Tom was gay,” Regina said.

  “The golf pro was a young woman from Saugus,” Aunt Helen said. “What a sexist assumption. And speaking of gay, how’s your divorce from Bill going? You know your mother thought he was a homosexual. I’m sure she was very relieved to hear you were getting divorced a third time.”

  “He was my third fiancé,” Regina corrected. “I’ve never been married.”

  “Not that I expected to be invited to the wedding,” Aunt Helen said. “You’ve made it quite clear how you feel about me.”

  “I’m eating in the living room,” Gaby said.

  “Your mother hated it when you ate in the living room,” Aunt Helen said.

  “Which is why I’ll enjoy doing it,” Gaby said.

  Mary and Regina followed Gaby into the living room. They sat quietly on the couch and ate with plates on their knees. Gaby balanced her pizza on her thumbs and knuckles. With her fingernail Regina pried the mushrooms from the cold cheese, ignoring the rest of her slice. Weegee wedged himself under the coffee table and whined for a handout. Mary couldn’t eat. Minutes later, Aunt Helen joined them with a freshened drink and no plate. Regina was right: Aunt Helen was drinking her way toward becoming an obligatory houseguest.

  “So!” said Aunt Helen. “When would you girls like me to pick up my painting?”

  “What painting?” Regina said.

  “What painting! The painting of Abigail Lake.”

  “Abigail Lake belongs to us,” Regina said.

  “Did you read the will’s fine print?” asked Aunt Helen.

  “There was no fine print,” Regina said. “Mum left the painting to us.”

  “She left you the painting so long as you didn’t sell it. The fine print states that if you decide to sell it, the painting’s ownership would revert to me. Probably because I have a graduate degree in fine arts and can appreciate Abigail Lake as valuable in terms not involving cash.”

  “But Mr. Stanworth read us the will,” Regina said. “There was nothing about ownership reverting or whatever you just said.”

  “He was ordered not to read that subsection. Your mother wanted to see whether or not you were sentimentally attached to the only thing she left you.”

  “She was testing us?” Regina said.

  “You could interpret it that way,” Aunt Helen said. “I certainly would.”

  Gaby laughed.

  “You find this funny?” Aunt Helen said.

  “Mum is dead,” Gaby said. “Whatever we decide to do with the painting, it’s none of her fucking business.”

  Aunt Helen’s already scotched face blushed a shade darker.

  “Ca va! ” Gaby yelled at her.

  Aunt Helen jumped.

  Gaby widened her eyes psychotically.

  “You’re such a quietly angry girl, Gabrielle,” Aunt Helen said. “You’ve always been angry. It killed your mother to see you so angry. And to what end? Where has rage ever gotten you?”

  “I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who killed Mum,” Mary said.

  “I was speaking figuratively, Mimsy,” Aunt Helen said.

  “Not everybody’s been speaking figuratively,” Mary said. “Gaby thinks that I’m the reason that Mum got cancer and died, don’t you Gaby?”

  Gaby looked at Regina, dumbstruck.

  “That’s a terrible thing to say!” Aunt Helen said.

  “I’m just repeating what I heard,” Mary said.

  “It’s what you think, even if you’ve never articulated it,” Regina said defensively.

  “I didn’t have to articulate it,” Gaby said. “You articulated it.”

  Aunt Helen appeared stricken. “You girls are so cruel,” she said. “What is it about sisters that makes them behave so hideously toward one another? Your mother was an expert at hideous behavior. Do you remember when she went to that doctor of yours, Mimsy—what was his name?”

  “Dr. Hammer,” Mary said.

  “She went to Dr. Hammer and pretended to be me so she could wheedle information about you. What a lark! What an absolute riot! Weegee knew what a bitch she could be, didn’t you Weegee? She hated Weegee.”

  “Spare us the victim monologue,” Gaby said.

  “Can I get anyone another slice of pizza?” asked Mary.

  “I’m not the one with the rage problem,” Aunt Helen said. “Where does rage initiate from, Gabrielle, but from a sense that one is a perpetual victim? Hmmm? You think about that. But a
bout the painting. Of course I understand why you’d want to sell it, especially you, Regina. You’ve always been jealous of your sister. She proved to be the most imaginative one in the family, didn’t she? And of course Mimsy wants to sell the painting because it reminds her of how much her own misdeeds wounded—perhaps mortally wounded—your mother. Paula was so wounded by her own daughter that she wasted her adult life trying to exonerate a long-dead lice-ridden chambermaid. Talk about poorly redirected energies. Which couldn’t have helped her cancer any. I’m not saying it was the cause.”

  “Abigail Lake was not a chambermaid,” Mary said numbly.

  “Darling, they were all chambermaids. And those were the classy ones.”

  Weegee, previously dozing under the coffee table, let out a high-pitched yelp. He skittered, tail tucked, into the front hall and up the stairs.

  “Weegee!” She looked accusingly at Gaby. “What did you do to him?”

  “He caught his pecker in a rug loop.”

  “You’re disgusting,” Aunt Helen said. She stood unsteadily, bony hand propped against the door molding for balance.

  “Maybe you should go home, Aunt Helen,” Mary said.

  “Home! You’re trying to get rid of me? When I’m too weakened by grief to carry the painting that lawfully belongs to me?”

  “We’ve all had a very long day,” Mary said.

  “I’m sure you have. Nobody’s asked me what kind of day I had.”

  Nobody spoke.

  Aunt Helen raised her voice. “Nobody’s wondered what it’s been like for me to lose my older sister.”

  Aunt Helen started to cry.

  Mary put a hand on her elbow. “We know you’re suffering in a highly unique way,” she said.

  “I am suffering. My older sister is gone. Who shall death come for next, but me?”

  She turned her eyes toward the space on the wall where Abigail Lake used to hang. Then she lurched into the hall.

  “Where are you going?” Mary called after her.

  “I need to find Weegee,” she said. “He’s hurt and he’s scared. You girls are beasts. You’ve always been hideous little beasts. And ugly, too. Why do you think no one will marry you? You ugly, ugly girls.”

  Aunt Helen bobbled precariously up the plush stairs.

  “Go follow her!” Regina hissed.

  “Me?” Mary said.

  “She might end up in Dad’s room! Dad will blow his stack if she wakes him up.”

  “Dad took sleeping pills and he’s never blown his stack in his life.” Gaby cocked her wrists and made motions with her fingers in the air as though she were snapping a pair of castanets. “Ca va! ” she yelled at Regina.

  “Be quiet!” Regina yelled back. “But thank god she can still drive home. The only thing worse than Aunt Helen drunk is Aunt Helen hungover.”

  “I’ll clean up the kitchen,” Mary said.

  “No, we’ll clean up the kitchen,” said Regina. “You go get Aunt Helen. She needs to start driving before they set up the police roadblock.”

  “What police roadblock?” Mary said.

  “To catch drunk drivers,” Regina said. “She’d never pass a Breathalyzer. But she’s fine to drive. She’s an old pro.”

  Old pro or not, Mary worried that Aunt Helen had exceeded the point of functional drunk and would land her station wagon in the living room of one of the faux-colonial elderly apartments built stupidly close to her exit ramp. But she kept her worry to herself, in part because she didn’t want to spark another disagreement, in part because she too wanted Aunt Helen gone. Aunt Helen’s presence wasn’t merely an annoyance, it was unsettling, not to mention heart-wrenching, to catch glimpses of Mum in Aunt Helen’s face as it shifted gears between distinctly Aunt Helen–like expressions; during these split-second moments of slack repose, Mum’s face became fleetingly visible—her denatured, uninhabited, glum, dead face. Because of this Mary was willing to pretend, like her sisters, that Aunt Helen was perfectly fine to drive.

  The upstairs was creepily quiet and dark—perhaps Aunt Helen had found her way into their father’s room. She opened her father’s door and heard the weighty, underwater sounds of his drugged sleep. No sign of Aunt Helen, no sign of Weegee. Nor was Aunt Helen in the guest room, study-cum-second-guest-room, or the bathroom. Which left only one possibility.

  In the pyramid splash of hallway light she could see Aunt Helen’s sweater set and pants folded on her desk chair along with Weegee’s dog sweater. Aunt Helen’s shiny-beige bra straps curved over her shoulders, emerging from the top of Mary’s duvet. Weegee had made a bed of Mary’s bathrobe and towel, wadded into a nest at the foot of her bed. His head was tucked under his flank and he, as well as Aunt Helen, was snoring.

  Mary might have been angry if the scene, slapstick and pathetic as it was, didn’t tweak her in a deeply familiar way. If she squinted to the point of practically closing her eyes she could almost fool herself into thinking the woman in her bed was Mum—a deeply ironic misidentification given that Mum, on several occasions, had succeeded as Helen more readily than Helen might have done. In the summer of 1960, if Mum’s version was to be believed, Aunt Helen found a job as an intern at the Lesley College Archaeology Department, but awoke her first morning of work with chicken pox. Mum, a Wellesley student on grade probation, drove to the department to fill in for her sister so that Helen wouldn’t lose the job. Surrounded by canoe-length mandibles and children’s skulls the size of teacups, her mother decided that a job at the Archaeology Department was a far preferable way to pass the summer than selling fudge and tulips to cranky matrons at a clapboarded roadside stand in Concord. Within a week she’d worked her way from filing department-meeting minutes in a windowless file closet to replacing the department head’s assistant, away on a temple dig in Sri Lanka. Aunt Helen, once she learned that her sister had stolen her job, insisted that she confess. Mum did; the department head, remarkably, didn’t care. Aunt Helen took her rightful place as a filing intern in the windowless closet while her sister enjoyed her own office with a view of the quad.

  There were other incidents as well; her mother, already married, had gone on a blind date as a “placeholder” for Aunt Helen, stuck in the Philadelphia airport due to a blizzard. Before she could properly identify herself to the architect as his blind date’s sister, he kissed her on the cheek and addressed her as “Helen.” She remained Helen for the evening. The architect wrote letters to Aunt Helen when, humiliated, she refused to return his calls. The architect grew increasingly besotted. What could Aunt Helen do? Her potential husband had fallen in love with the wrong Helen. To show her face now would be to spend another metaphorical summer in the file closet.

  Which was not to say that her mother was a malicious or even deceitful person. Mary interpreted her mother’s admittedly questionable behavior this way: she was unable to disappoint strangers. She flexibly transformed herself into a file clerk, an assistant, a potential wife. Or, to dig more deeply into the thicket of her mother’s psyche, maybe some chronic dissatisfaction made slipping into another’s person skin and body and life a welcome diversion. Given the chance, her identity was prone to wander.

  Mary relaxed her eyes and her mother disappeared from her bed. She noticed that Aunt Helen had placed her car keys on the bedside table. This struck Mary as a fair exchange—her bed for Aunt Helen’s station wagon. Besides, given the slip of paper in her pocket, there was no way she was sleeping tonight.

  Notes

  APRIL 1, 1986

  Before my next meeting with Mary, I received a phone call from her mother’s sister, Helen, informing me of a discovery made in Mary’s bedroom. On principle, I do not allow family members to intrude upon my therapeutic dyad with a patient unless convinced that the discovery concerns a life-or-death matter. I explained this policy to Mary’s aunt over the phone; she insisted nonetheless that I meet with her, while refusing to reveal the nature of her discovery. She would only say it was of “extraordinary significance.” I doubted very
much the extraordinary significance of her discovery; it was possible, even likely, that Mary’s aunt and mother suffered from a hysterical condition or similar cluster B personality disorder, these things being hereditary.

  I agreed to the meeting.

  Helen, an extremely thin woman with short blond hair and lively dark eyes, arrived late to our scheduled appointment. We spent the first few minutes determining what sort of rate I’d charge for the visit, since her older sister’s insurance didn’t pay for second-party consultations. I asked her if money was an issue for her sister, and if so we could negotiate a rate that would be agreeable to all. Her hands clenched and unclenched in her lap. She said that no, money wasn’t the issue, it was a matter of her sister’s insurance policy and what it would and would not cover. I told her that if money wasn’t an issue, than neither was the insurance policy. She became flustered by logical attempts to solve her concern, unable to mount an articulate defense of her fixation while remaining stubbornly fixated.

  Eventually, she let the matter drop and produced, from her purse, a dented silver cigarette case engraved on its front with the letter K.

  The engraving glinted beneath my office lights like a mangled rebuke. My scalp began to sweat; my peripheral vision darkened and constricted until I was staring down what seemed like a virtual optical nerve at that single letter. Only one conclusion could be drawn from it: K existed. I experienced what my own analyst calls the Rosenthal effect kickback—and I realized, as Helen and I stared unspeakingly at the cigarette case in her lap, that I had decided absolutely, without consciously acknowledging the absoluteness of this decision, that Mary had fabricated the story of her abduction, just as Bettina had fabricated her story. I had begun unquestioningly to see them as parallel cases, and planned to do with Mary all that I had failed to do with Bettina, thereby rectifying my past mistakes and, additionally, restoring my own faith in myself as a therapist. The cigarette case, thus, served not only to undermine this certainty—it called into question my own therapeutic methods, and suggested that either my methods were faulty or my relationship with my past remained so unresolved that I was unable to objectively assess situations with my new patients. I had, in classic Rosenthal effect fashion, conflated Mary and Bettina—for understandably circumstantial reasons. But my deeper analytic self had cut itself off from nuance—not to mention the possibility that Mary, after all, had been telling the truth.