The Uses of Enchantment

by Heidi Julavits

  Inside her mother’s walk-in closet her smell redoubled, and redoubled yet again as Mary flipped through the hangers, searching for an inoffensive shirt and pair of pants. Her mother’s style had been trending toward all-purpose golf for years, but she’d never realized how thoroughly this transition had been made—white and khaki and black the predominating colors, everything collared and pleated. Mary pulled all of her mother’s clothes off their hangers and sweaters off their shelves in an attempt to find something—what exactly? She couldn’t say. Soon the shelves and hangers were empty, the clothing piled in an awkward heap of arms and legs on the closet floor. Dutifully, her hangover gathering its ill forces, she loaded the clothes into the waiting cardboard boxes. She stripped the bedsheets, hid the pill bottles in the drawer, covered the water stains with a lace doily, bussed the water glasses to the bathroom sink. She held her breath as she carried the sheets down the hall to the laundry room, then muscled them into the washing machine, added a long pour of soap, turned the machine’s knob to the most intensive setting.

  Back in her parents’ bathroom she washed her face and stripped her clothes, dressing in a pair of her father’s old jeans and his WORCESTER TECH sweatshirt. She removed the shopping bag from her coat pocket and tucked it into the jeans’ oversized waistband. On the way downstairs with the dirty water glasses, she dumped her slush-spattered outfit, which additionally smelled of vodka, on top of the washing machine.

  Now her headache had begun a cyclical attack, the nauseaous spiral inside her head interrupting its orbit once each dizzying turn to smack the inside of her left temple. She had about thirty more functional minutes before she’d have to lie down in whatever room was vacant and sleep off the rest of the day. From the living-room doorway she could see her sisters hovering around the fireplace in their matching nightgowns, each wielding a poker and appearing to her, in her glazed state, like two elderly forest sprites trying to prod a reluctant animal out of a smoldering cave. On the floor beside them lay the remnants of a large wood frame.

  “You’re just in time,” Regina said.

  Mary’s brain scrambled to patch together the disparate elements into a cohesive scenario.

  “We’re having our own ash-scattering ceremony,” Regina said. “But first we need some ashes.”

  She gestured toward the scroll of canvas beside the hearth, its edges hacked away, presumably by the serrated bread knife that lay, as though Abigail Lake were being framed for a crime against herself, over her own lumpily rendered hands.

  “Who wants to do the honors?” Regina said.

  “I’ll flip you,” said Gaby. “Got a quarter?”

  “Check inside the piano bench,” Regina suggested.

  Gaby shook down the piano bench while Regina, with the jerky nervousness of a first-time firemaker, tossed the remaining frame splinters into the flames, retracting her hands fearfully from the sparks. Abigail Lake withstood her impending injustice stoically. Her face appeared sadder and more elongated than usual—like the countenance of a fancy, spook-eyed hound. Mary had never seen herself in Abigail Lake before, but now the resemblance was so startlingly obvious, she couldn’t believe she’d ever been able to convince herself otherwise.

  “This is a bad idea,” Mary said, still too stunned to appropriately respond. Take Umbrage!

  “I told you she’d be a killjoy,” Gaby said. “Mimsy can only disrespect Mum when it’s her idea.”

  “We’re not disrespecting Mum,” Regina said. “We’re pissed off and we’re expressing that we’re pissed off.”

  “To whom?” Mary asked, trying to keep the quaver from her voice. Why did she care what happened to Abigail Lake? Why did she fucking care? “To whom are you expressing yourself? Mum is dead.”

  “Would it have been so hard to leave us each a brooch?” Regina said.

  “And you would have liked that better,” Mary said, “being a big fan of brooches.”

  “I don’t mind the occasional brooch,” Gaby said.

  “I hate brooches. That’s not the point,” Regina said.

  “What is the point?” Mary said acidly.

  “The point isn’t that Mum left us something she knew we’d hate.”

  “Mimsy’s trying to stall,” Gaby said. “She’s stalling until the reinforcements wake up.”

  Mary bit her index finger between the two lowest knuckles, the skin rolling away from the bone and leathering between her teeth.

  “Maybe Mum hated Abigail Lake as much as we did,” she said finally.

  “Which excuses the fact that she gave her to us,” Regina said. “Come on, Mimsy. We’ve been waiting for the joke to end. Gaby and I, we’ve been waiting for Dad to give us the check, or the pearls, some meaningless symbol that she loved us or wanted us to have, even a stupid fucking brooch to remember her by.”

  Mary’s brain, her poor stupid brain, struggled to action. She’d been so fixated on her own solitary quest, the search for the book, that she’d failed to consider how her sisters felt after that disappointing afternoon in Buzz Stanworth’s office. It wasn’t just her—they’d been left out, too. And yet there had to be a reason for this, she thought. A reason that her mother, not a cruel woman, had behaved in a manner so seemingly cruel toward all her daughters. There had to be a reason. Mary’s nausea intensified as she forced her brain to accelerate and search for this reason. If she was good at one activity, she thought, it was this: creating a plausible story out of disparate details; it seemed only fitting that she would, after all these years of selfishly applying her talent, finally discover a way to put it toward more philanthropic use. Yes indeed, she thought, with a surge of purpose that overrode her queasy lethargy, she could help people make sense of the senseless; as in the game of props, she could take these seemingly unrelated objects or details and weave them into a convincing story that would alter a depressing landscape into one slightly more saturated with hope.

  “Maybe,” Mary said, thinking aloud, “maybe she knew we’d burn Abigail Lake.”

  “Mum?” Regina said.

  “Maybe that was the plan all along,” Mary said.

  “All along,” mocked Gaby.

  “She knew you both dislike me,” Mary said.

  “Not true,” said Regina.

  “Moderately true,” said Gaby.

  “Moderately true to true,” said Regina. “But not for any good reason. I mean not any recent good reason. Anyway. Fine. I dislike you.”

  “It’s fun to dislike you,” said Gaby. “It’s sporty.”

  “Mum gave us Abigail Lake for a reason,” Mary said. “She gave us Abigail Lake so we would have someone to hate.”

  “Abigail Lake?” Regina said.

  “No, Mum. We’d hate Mum,” Gaby explained.

  “By burning Abigail Lake we’re expressing our anger toward Mum,” Mary said. “This would be cathartic for us. We’d also, on a secondary level, be destroying the symbol of me as the unpardoned family member.”

  Regina nodded. “OK,” she said. “And then what. We’re supposed to forgive Mum for being a whimsical bitch?”

  Abigail Lake appeared, in her usual eerie way, to be eavesdropping. Mary swore, in her half-hallucinating state, that Abigail Lake started to smile.

  “She’s dead,” Mary said quietly. “Why do we need to forgive her?”

  Gaby and Regina eyed each other. Mary’s forehead buzzed and she could feel a crying jag start its electric descent from the top of her head. Her sisters, too, were about to cry, she could sense it in the room like her elbow could sense a rainstorm.

  She waited for the sobbing to erupt. Regina and Gaby, she thought, were both holding their breath.

  Mary staved off her dissolve; she didn’t want to be the first.

  Cry now, she silently urged her sisters. Cry now.

  Gaby snorted.

  “That’s some corny therapy talk,” she said.

  “Really a stretch,” Regina agreed. “But a nice try.”

  “You always were a lousy
liar, Mimsy,” Gaby said. “Regina, heads or tails?”

  Regina chose heads. Gaby flicked the quarter and failed to catch it. It landed soundlessly on the carpet.

  “I am the oldest,” Regina said, taking Abigail Lake by her sawed-off ends and stuffing her, awkwardly, into the fireplace.

  The three of them watched. They waited. But the canvas didn’t catch. Abigail Lake seemed impervious to extinction.

  Finally, the painted surface turned slick and bubbly.

  “There,” Gaby said.

  “Fuck you, Mum,” Regina said.

  “Adieu, symbolic portrait of Mimsy in a bonnet,” said Gaby.

  Abigail Lake’s hands curled up into themselves like actual witch’s feet receding beneath a house foundation. Exhausted, hungover, weirdly tweaked by Abigail Lake’s imminent forever disappearance, Mary started to cry. Quietly, so that no one would notice. Was she sad? Relieved? Just really unbearably tired? She couldn’t say.

  Regina pulled off her ski hat; her hair crackled audibly with static. She reached around Mary’s ears and pulled the hat over her head.

  “This doesn’t make me like you,” Regina said to Mary as Abigail Lake burned. “Or you either,” to Gaby.

  “I definitely don’t like either one of you,” Gaby said, handing Mary a scrap of newspaper with which she was presumably meant to blow her nose.

  Mary watched as Abigail Lake’s eyes and cheeks slid and muddied, the fire’s serrated edges sawing through the canvas edges and exploding into green-tinted flames. She should listen to her own advice: Mum was dead. Why did she need to forgive Mum, and vice-versa? What mattered were the people who weren’t dead yet—her sisters, her father. What mattered was that she was being given a chance to rectify things, as Roz had pointed out, and she didn’t want to fuck it up.

  Mary reached into the waistband of her father’s jeans and withdrew the bag, pulling Miriam from its interior. Symbols of forgiveness were worth what, anyway? When I say what she would have wanted I am saying: this is what I want.

  Mary didn’t wait for the book to catch. Her final vision of Miriam was a black silhouette quivering between states of matter, that stunned moment when a flammable object can seem stubbornly immune to flame.

  “Take Umbrage!” she announced. She so desperately wanted her sisters to cry, or show some kind of vulnerability, but she knew better than to expect the impossible. Expressing indignation, or sarcasm, or anger was the only way of exhibiting love in her family, and really what was so wrong with that?

  “Take Umbrage!” she repeated.

  Her sisters didn’t respond, or if they did, Mary didn’t hear them as she climbed the front stairs and entered her parents’ bedroom, shutting the door softly so as not to wake Aunt Helen. She stretched out on her mother’s side of the bed, taking no umbrage herself while thinking of the time she’d found her mother asleep in her own bed once, that confusing and glorious time, thinking of the time—just this morning, in fact—when she’d gazed up at the insomniac man, snoring in his armchair, the girl from his past serene and asleep at his feet.

  Notes

  APRIL 15, 1986

  Mary did not show up for what became our final appointment. Later, I would admit to my own analyst to feeling a powerful sense of relief when she failed to materialize in the waiting room at 10 a.m., 10:10, 10:30. At 10:35, I decided to go for a walk, to buy a coffee and sit on a bench in the Commons. It was the first warm day of the year and my office, for many reasons, had become small and oppressive to me.

  The Commons teemed with airily dressed mothers and unjacketed businessmen, the emotional gloom of a winter-bound populace exposed by the sun to be as seasonally fragile as ice. To say that I was drawn to one particular end of the duck pond over another would be to attribute too much power to my subconscious; but I was drawn to the southern end of the pond where the sun was most vicious on the brown water and the glare so intense that I couldn’t discern people, only black scurrying shapes.

  I sat on a bench. I dumped two sugars into my coffee. I shaded my eyes against the sun with my paper bag. I watched the silhouette of a pair of boaters, a father and a daughter from the looks of their outlines, glide past me in a rental skiff.

  I guess I’m late, she said.

  I turned to my bench mate. She wore sunglasses and a weathered canvas beach hat, as though she were a celebrity striving, in an extremely conspicuous way, to achieve invisibility.

  I tried to remain unsurprised.

  Forty minutes late, I said. If sitting at a duck pond counts as showing up at all.

  What makes an appointment, she asked. The doctor or the office?

  It’s a nice day, I said, ignoring her pithiness. Better that we’re outside anyway.

  She didn’t respond.

  What a tacky way to meet for our last time, she said.

  Is this our last time? I said. When did you decide this?

  A fortnight ago. I think we’ve reached the end, she said. I think we’ve used each other up.

  Have we been using each other? I said.

  This was a topic she’d circled in the past—the notion that we were exploiting each other, or, as she’d stated it, that we were helping each other further our careers. At the time I’d dismissed this preoccupation of hers as another of her false leads, but now saw it as incredibly prescient, almost as though she’d known, from the beginning, that she was bound to be my muse. We had not helped each other out—no, no, to her mind we had used each other. But still.

  I used you, I said. Is that what you think?

  She pushed her sunglasses—too big for her face, not her sunglasses—up the bridge of her nose.

  Wouldn’t you rather be used than unused? Personally I would rather have a use.

  You’ll have a use, I said.

  You promise? she said.

  I promise, I said.

  We lapsed into silence.

  I’ve seen this in movies, she said. Girls and old men on park benches. They have meaningful exchanges. When the conversation stalls they feign interest in ducks. When they depart each will be eternally touched by the other—the old man by the girl’s wise innocence, the girl by the old man’s innocent wisdom.

  You’ve never been touched by my innocent wisdom, I said. Any reason you plan to start today?

  She didn’t respond.

  We sat in silence. We feigned interest in ducks.

  He took me rowing here, she said.

  Who? I said.

  K, she said.

  Kurt, I said.

  Whoever, she said.

  But K is Kurt, isn’t he? I said. He was Kurt, symbolically castrated for your imaginary purposes.

  Everyone should have a purpose, she said.

  And so he did. You symbolically castrated him because he kissed you when you were younger. You symbolically castrated him because, despite what you’ve wanted me to believe, your imagination does not permit the inclusion of genitalia.

  Don’t say genitalia so loudly, she said loudly.

  K was Kurt, I insisted.

  Whatever, she said. You can call him what you like. It’s your story now.

  My story, I said. Am I the patient? Are we switching roles again?

  She tossed me an irritated look. Or was it a knowing look? What did she know? Did she know I’d already taken her story as my own, did she know, hyper radiant that she was, a girl able to intuit, with her stealthy imagination, that I’d begun to type up my notes and that her name was already Miriam?

  You know what you’re doing, she said, standing to leave.

  She smiled at me, and I sensed in her smile a knowing sadness, a woundedness, a palpable regret and uncertainty of the sort she’d never revealed to me during our sessions together. It occurred to me then, as it had briefly when her aunt visited my office, that Mary’s fantasies weren’t fantasies at all. But this suspicion didn’t disturb me. This suspicion did not, as it had over lunch with Hoppin, initiate pangs of guilt. I recalled what Helen said at the library fund-rais
er—the tragic lives of the untragic. Mary had been a useless girl, and I was putting her to use with her permission. Subsequently, we had long since passed the point when the truth was of any consequence between us. As I watched her disappear into the intensifying glare radiating off the pond, her small black figure swallowed by the sun, I understood that it did not matter to me anymore what was true and what was not, because while Miriam remained with me, the girl who had inspired her was gone from my life for good.

  Acknowledgments

  Since the city of Boston inarguably exists for some people, I have tried to do geographic justice to its portrayal (though there is not, to my knowledge, a two-block concentration of mental-health professionals located on a small street northwest of the Commons). The towns of West Salem and Chadwick do not exist for anybody, and thus all street names, schools, train stations, hockey rinks, stone walls, minimalls, and other landmarks will hopefully be granted the immunity of fictional places. Abigail Lake is a fabrication and not one of the accused witches executed in Salem in 1692, despite the claims of this book. There was an Alice Lake executed around 1650–1651, but while her last name has been nicked, she is otherwise not to be considered a historical inspiration for this character.

  A debt of inspiration is owed to the following writers and books: Janet Malcolm (everything she’s ever written but particularly Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession and In the Freud Archives); Adam Philips; Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (The Assault on Truth and Against Therapy); Leslie Farber; Alice Miller; Remembering Trauma by Richard J. McNally; Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber; You and Psychiatry by William C. Menninger, M.D., and Munro Leaf. Dr. Hammer and his theory of hyper radiance owe a great conceptual debt to historian Mary Beth Norton and her book In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. Bruno Bettelheim, from beyond the grave, kindly did not forbid the second-hand use of his title.