The Uses of Enchantment

by Heidi Julavits

Apparently, she repeated, her lips over his, I am.

  West Salem

  NOVEMBER 10, 1999

  She took the Mercedes because the keys were in the ignition, parked on a side driveway that skirted an orchard of apple trees besieged by silhouetted vines; the predawn sky pushed through the diamond-shaped gaps and created a menacing landscape of points and tangles. The Mercedes was salt-scarred to the point of looking frostbitten in places, the baseboards were filigreed with rust, and the heat, when she cued it, stank of charred mice nests.

  Sleepy still, drunk still, hovering on the bruised edge of a hangover, her brain was strangely suited to the task of driving. She passed through the gate without incurring further damage to either cars or the wall. Driving down Water Street and toward the empty town, however, her hands started to shake, her stomach yawning acidly as the vodka dregs were suctioned up by her capillaries and distributed to the only parts of her not already saturated with alcohol. Her body was in shock, not yet ready to register the damage she’d done to herself last night as she revisited, again and again, the bottom of her glass.

  Though she’d gotten less than two hours of sleep, she was giddy—practically manic. This was the starry limbo period that followed a shock; she allowed her as-yet-unprocessed night with the man to stun her into this strange, dreamy happiness. She fiddled with the radio dial and found a newscast that pinged off her eardrums but grounded her to the predawn day outside her windshield, a grounding that was challenged by her distorted take on her surroundings. To her right she saw a woman in a white bathrobe walking a dog in a white bathrobe, a tiny dog in a tiny white bathrobe—how ludicrous!—a dog in a tiny white bathrobe that transformed, as she passed closer and the woman entered the dimming circle of a streetlight, into a normal Pomeranian, just fur and eyes and little black feet. Normal Pomeranian is an oxymoron, hah hah hah, she thought, but still she repeated it in her head, normal Pomeranian, normal Pomeranian, and this repetition anchored her to a day that seemed determined to feel unreal.

  Given her failure with shortcuts, she stuck to the main roads and spent the drive concentrating on the salt- and snow-scummed yellow line while mentally deliberating over what she would tell Aunt Helen. The truth was out of the question, so she tried to conjure a plausible reason to explain why she’d needed Aunt Helen’s car in the middle of the night, why she’d failed to return with the car, why the car was unreturnable for the foreseeable future. Usually she excelled at this sort of challenge but bending her head around what might have happened, rather than what actually happened, felt as ridiculously impossible as animal shape-shifting; she could sooner transform herself into a normal Pomeranian, so entrenched in her own queasy self did she feel.

  Two miles from her house she saw, driving toward her, her father’s car. As he passed her she caught the mercury flash of his face through the streetlight-reflecting windshield, neither tired nor sad nor relieved. He looked blandly dead to her, void of the pinch and scowl of everyday humanness.

  She slowed the Mercedes and turned into the next available driveway, thinking she would follow him. Not to spy on him but to make sure that he hadn’t died behind the wheel, or died last night, or died earlier in the week without his daughters noticing. She owed him this much; the man needed some reminding that he was, at least technically, alive. Or maybe it was she who needed the reminding.

  Her father drove under the speed limit and so she caught up with him quickly, just as he began his counterclockwise trip around the West Salem rotary. Three-quarters of the way around he pulled into the diner lot. She pulled in after him, parking near the Dumpster.

  She waited in the Mercedes until he’d gone inside. She watched him order a cup of coffee and make a joke that the waitress laughed at out of politeness. She walked quickly to the diner’s door, passing just outside her father’s seat.

  She saw him notice her through the window. She saw him pretending that he hadn’t.

  When she slid into the booth opposite him, he was busy reading the menu.

  He didn’t glance up.

  “You’re out late,” he said.

  “You’re up early,” Mary said.

  The waitress appeared. Mary ordered a coffee. Her father ordered eggs and bacon and toast.

  “I’m not hungry,” Mary said.

  “Make it two,” he said to the waitress.

  They sat in silence; sizzling noises exploded from the kitchen.

  Her father was dressed for the outside, wool pants and a chamois shirt, a down vest, a wool hat. He reached into the pocket of his down vest and placed the plastic baggie filled with ashes on the table.

  The baggie, Mary noted distastefully, had become creased from multiple handlings and transfers; the plastic had turned cloudy and begun to look like trash.

  “And here I thought you were dining alone,” Mary said.

  Her father tore open a sugar packet, added it to his mug, failed to stir it.

  “You don’t think much of me, do you?” her father said.

  “What?” Mary said.

  “You heard me,” he said.

  Mary reddened.

  “I was just making a joke,” she said. “I’m sorry. It was inappropriate.”

  Her father didn’t reply. She’d clearly upset him.

  “Interpret it as the strangled sign of affection it’s meant to convey,” she persisted. “OK?”

  She smiled beseechingly.

  “No need to tell me how to interpret strangled signs of affection,” her father said. “I’ve been doing it for thirty-seven years.”

  Her father turned his attention to the large plate-glass window to their right, to the mostly empty parking lot and the mostly quiet West Salem rotary. Frost veined the perimeter of the glass; rather than signaling the death knell of autumn, the tendrils looked to Mary like the hopeful beginnings of something, a crystalline root system surviving against all odds.

  “Fine,” Mary said. She gestured toward the baggie. “So then. What are you two getting up to after breakfast?”

  Her father scrunched his face ruefully at the window.

  “Golf course,” he said.

  “The country club?” Mary said.

  “No,” he said. “The public course.”

  Mary nodded. The coffee had begun to infiltrate her system, failing to awaken anything but her awareness that she’d recently, like two minutes ago, been drunk.

  “Mum hated that club,” she said.

  He shrugged. “Could be,” he said. “Could be she just liked to pretend that she hated it.”

  “Keeping up appearances,” Mary said, her mind flashing to the book, wrapped in a plastic shopping bag and sitting on the passenger seat of the Mercedes.

  “It wasn’t easy,” he said.

  “I doubt it was,” Mary said.

  “What I mean is,” her father said, “it cost her.”

  Mary nodded knowingly, though she had no idea what her father was talking about. Did he mean it gave her mother cancer? It made him love her mother less?

  “We never told you girls,” her father said, “but your mother and I talked about separating. More than once.”

  “You were married for a long time,” Mary said, not at all surprised to hear this. She’d received the occasional guilt-inducing letter from Regina detailing the tension in the house, so much more thick and stagnant now that the three sisters, and their erratic energies, weren’t around to destabilize the air.

  “When I thought we’d reached the end of our marriage, I’d go golfing. I’d go to the place she pretended most to hate. When I got home I’d feel better.”

  He stared at her searchingly, as though wanting confirmation that he’d done a brave and unusual thing. Mary didn’t know how to respond. Her father’s meager form of rebellion was touching, but also sadly pathetic.

  “So,” her father said, changing the subject, “I won’t ask what you’ve been up to.”

  “You don’t have to ask,” she said. “I’ll tell you.”

  �
��Your mother used to disappear on me,” he said, ignoring her offer. “Those last few weeks. When she could still drive. I never asked her where she went.”

  “Maybe she wanted you to ask,” Mary said, considering for the first time the emotional hardships her mother must have suffered in this marriage—a happy enough marriage that was, like all permanent arrangements, an occasional prison for both parties. Her mother was obviously the more difficult personality, yes; but her father had made it easy for her to be difficult. He’d made it easy for her to be strangled by her own worst tendencies.

  Her father stared at her balefully. “You think you know what she wanted,” he said.

  He was still angry with her, she thought. But then she more correctly read his expression: he was sincerely curious.

  “I like to think so,” she said. “But it’s hard to distinguish what she wanted from what I want her to want. To say she would have wanted this is really to say I want this.”

  The waitress arrived with their food. Her father replaced the baggie in his vest pocket to make room for the plates.

  “So then,” her father said, salting up his eggs, “how about you come with me to the course.”

  Mary played with her eggs. They wobbled unappetizingly at the touch of a fork tine.

  “What about the whale watch?” she said.

  Her father shrugged. “That’s just a lot of silliness, don’t you think?”

  Mary smiled.

  “It is pretty silly,” she said.

  “Your mum’s ashes won’t know the difference between a whale sighting and a swamp view, and we won’t have to get seasick.”

  “Fair point,” Mary said.

  “So what do you say,” her father said. “Eat up and we’ll go to the course together.”

  Her father stared at her with his rumpled bulldog eyes. Whatever she wanted from him, she realized, he wanted so much more from her. They had reached that parent-child turning point where she knew, or so she believed, what was better for him than he did. This realization flat-out broke her heart. Equally heartbreaking was the realization that she didn’t want, or rather need, to scatter her mother’s ashes. She had the book.

  “I think,” she said, putting a hand on his hand, “I think Mum would have wanted you to go alone.”

  As she pulled onto Rumney Marsh, she was greeted by the calming sight of Ye Olde Bastard walking his schnauzer, his wool coat over his pajamas, cuffs bunched inside the emerging fleece linings of his boots. He stared at her as she drove past, his face absent his usual extra helping of scorn. Maybe he was more friendly in the morning, she thought. Maybe he suddenly saw her as a colleague of the dawn. She waved to him—it seemed only polite—and his expression shifted from neutral to mystified, mystified to dubious, dubious to skeptical. She averted her eyes before his skepticism reverted back to scorn, because she wanted to locate a meaningful sign in Ye Olde Bastard’s comparatively affable reception; she was different today, she’d sunk back to her common-denominator self and it took a man of gourmet derision like Ye Olde Bastard to detect it.

  She parked the Mercedes where Aunt Helen’s station wagon had been parked last night. She snuffed the engine and closed her eyes, inhaling the mildewed skank of floor mats. As she stepped into the street, a car slalomed past her, bulleting her face, her jacket, her pants with a gritty gray slush.

  She yelped involuntarily. Ye Olde Bastard glowered at her from beneath his tam-o’-shanter.

  The jerk, she thought. The crabby, controlling, heartless old jerk.

  “Take Umbrage!” she yelled at him.

  Ye Olde Bastard’s schnauzer squatted to take a dump.

  “Take Umbrage!” she repeated.

  Ye Olde Bastard stooped awkwardly, his hand clad in a white surgical glove.

  Her outrage stunned her awake more bracingly than the corrosive diner coffee, and she entered the kitchen feeling giddily refreshed. The kettle on the stove released a leisurely thread of steam through its snout. She heard, from the living room, the crumple of paper. Somebody was packing. Or somebody was unpacking. Maybe, she thought with a jolt of hopefulness, her father—since he was embracing his rebellious side—had decided not to sell the house. Maybe in a fit of predawn regret he’d enlisted Regina to unpack all the items meant for donation to the historical society, because he’d realized, from the gloom of his sleeping-pill coma, that total erasure of a person did not achieve total erasure of a person.

  She heard a thumping noise and a high-pitched screech. Seconds later, a tail-tucked Weegee appeared, his nails skitching across the linoleum as he ran for the bathroom-cum-storage-closet. Mops and broomsticks toppled as he tried to mash himself into an invisible ball behind the toilet. She waited for the avenging form of Aunt Helen to appear, too corpse-colored for this hour, but nobody came to Weegee’s rescue, a fate he’d obviously intuited by the fact that he’d lapsed into total silence in hopes that his enemy, whoever it was, might not discover him.

  In the living room, Regina, still in her nightgown, kneeled before a pyramid of knotted newspaper balanced on the center of the shiny fireplace grate.

  “There you are,” Regina said. “I was worried.”

  “You were?” Mary said, out of breath, her mind’s needle stuck in a manic groove. Take Umbrage! Take Umbrage!

  “You’ve been gone for hours,” she said. “Of course I was worried.”

  Mary, a tingle spreading under her chest, was just tired enough, just susceptible enough to be touched. Regina, she thought, was worried about her. This was the upside to losing your mother. Sisters rallied behind other sisters they once hated in new and supportive ways. Families, freed from the inevitable string of bad chemical reactions, were forced to regroup in formerly untenable molecular clusters.

  “About me?” she said.

  “Yes about you,” Regina said.

  “That’s so sweet,” Mary said.

  Regina regarded her scornfully. “If you were dead I was going to have to deal with Aunt Helen myself.”

  “Oh,” Mary said stupidly. Take Umbrage! “Is she awake?”

  “God no,” said Regina. “Pass me the sports section.”

  Mary passed Regina the sports section. She found herself wanting to tell her sister about her night with the man. She wanted to show her the book. She wanted to ask her: What does it mean? What do you think it means? She wanted to force her sister to entertain a question to which she’d already decided the answer.

  “I drove Aunt Helen’s car into a stone wall,” Mary said.

  “Did you total it?” Regina said.

  “It found a higher calling,” Mary said.

  “Who found a higher calling?” Gaby asked from the hallway.

  She appeared in the living-room archway, her nightgown streaked with rust and grease, her hair tucked into Regina’s long-lost ski cap with the blue-and-red pompon.

  What have we all been up to, Mary thought.

  “Aunt Helen’s car,” Regina said.

  “I couldn’t find the ax,” Gaby said. “Do you think it’s in the attic?”

  “Why would it be in the attic,” Regina said.

  “Because it’s not in the garage,” Gaby said.

  “Why do you need the ax?” Mary asked.

  “We don’t have any kindling,” Regina replied. “Did you see?” She pointed to the hat on Gaby’s head.

  “Congratulations,” Mary said.

  “I found it in Mum’s old suitcase along with a pair of ice skates. I didn’t find your book.”

  “Thanks for remembering to look,” Mary said, slipping her hand inside her coat pocket to feel the chill sheathing of the plastic bag.

  “Don’t you think we should have one fire in the new fireplace before we sell the house?” Regina asked, snatching the hat off of Gaby’s head and pulling it onto her own. “Especially since Dad is off scattering Mum’s ashes without us?”

  Regina stared at Mary challengingly, as though she’d had a hand in their father’s decision.

 
“I…no,” Mary said.

  “And you don’t care,” Regina said. Her pompon bounced as she talked.

  “She was his wife,” Mary said.

  “I mean about the fire,” Regina said. “You don’t object.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Should I?”

  “Not in my opinion,” said Regina. “But I can never predict with you. Can you help look for the ax?”

  “Can you wait five minutes?” Mary said.

  Neither Regina or Gaby responded.

  “Great,” Mary said. “I need to change.” She gestured at her mud-spattered pants.

  “Don’t wake up Aunt Helen,” Regina warned.

  “I won’t,” Mary promised.

  “I mean it,” said Regina.

  “She’s not going to like what she sees,” said Gaby.

  “She won’t see it,” Mary said.

  “That’s the plan,” said Gaby.

  “It’s stuck in the wall,” said Mary.

  “What?” said Gaby.

  “The car,” said Regina.

  Still wearing her coat, Mary ascended the front hall staircase. The darkened second floor had a vacant and depressing feel, it bleated the way hotels bleat with a squalid loneliness after the guests have left but before the maids have arrived, each door opening onto a room with furniture and a messy bed and no other sign of committed human inhabitation. Mary could scarcely believe this was her house, the house she’d grown up in—and it wasn’t. The people made the house, and when the people were gone, well, the house was just a shelter in the crudest sense. What had she been thinking, offering to live here? Before long she’d have moved to the attic, spread out the remaining rugs, stocked the wardrobe with vodka, occupied her days reading Famous Canadian Shipwrecks. She realized that she’d be flying back to the West Coast, probably the day after tomorrow. She was done here.

  Through the gap of her bedroom door she could hear her aunt’s slow, regular breathing, like an intubated patient on a hospital respirator. Aunt Helen was dead out. Still, Mary didn’t want to risk waking her. She’d have to find a change of clothing elsewhere. Regina’s clothes were off-limits; she didn’t want to bother with the politics of wearing Regina’s clothes. Gaby’s clothes were always funkily unwashed, dotted here and there with stains and smelling like old juice. Which left whatever wearable items she could drum up in her parents’ bedroom. She still thought of it as “her parents’ bedroom” even though the room had already suffered the effects of her mother’s absence. Empty cardboard boxes near the closet, bills on the bedside table, multiple glasses of water on the bedside table, multiple water rings from multiple glasses of water scarring the bedside table, the bed unmade for so long that the fitted sheet had come undone on her mother’s side of the bed, exposing the askew mattress pad and, beneath that, the actual mattress. Her mother’s smell—grapefruit leather sawdust—lingered among the blankets.