Heiresses of Russ 2012

by Connie Wilkins

  She couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten anything. Last week? She felt a bit hollow. Not weak, but definitely not all there, either, as if with every missed meal a part of her went missing as well.

  “If you’re my replacement,” said Ms. Grackle, looking the woman over, admiring her—when you’re a senior citizen, you can do so without seeming lecherous—“then I am sorry to tell you the office won’t be vacant until summer school.”

  The woman laughed with a handsome resonance that lingered a second too long in the air. “I’m not surprised you’ve forgotten me. A bit hurt though.” She slapped the daily calendar off the desk. “Congratulations for your forty-five years at Marchen Elementary this coming Friday, dear. I’m here to serve as your retirement advisor.”

  “Did the principal send you? The union?”

  “No. I represent a much older, more distinguished group: witches. You’re a member whether you like it or not.”

  Ms. Grackle winced. Now and then, a child might smile at her, but nearly five decades of hearing “Cackle Grackle” sing-songed had left her tender. She often thought children teased the school staff for the same reason a caged canary mocked a cat: resentment for being kept penned for hours for its own good. And didn’t the students only associate her with hurt, stinging antiseptic, and nausea?

  “I’m sorry, Miss—”

  “Hamilton. Remember me yet?” The woman rubbed her hands together. White powder drifted across the speckled linoleum floor. “No? Well, let’s take a ride.”

  “School’s not over, Miss Hamilton.” Though her official day ended at 2:30 p.m., Ms. Grackle often stayed well past 4:00. She’d drive to the library or walk in the park if the weather was nice. Her small apartment felt rather like a jail cell these days.

  “Hamilton. No Miss. Three syllables are enough. And they’re not going to fire you for playing hooky this once.” She pulled a gold foil-wrapped coin the size of a quarter from her own ear and dropped it into the piggy bank.

  “I’d be setting a bad example for the children, being in the car with a total stranger.” Ms. Grackle left unsaid how she didn’t trust Hamilton even though she did seem more familiar by the moment.

  “I can ask nicer.” Hamilton snapped her fingers and a dish of glazed donuts appeared. Ms. Grackle could smell how fresh they were. “Pretty please with sugar on top.” Hamilton’s smile belonged to a wild animal. “Or we can meet for dinner tonight.”

  Dinner with such a woman? Ms. Grackle felt her breath hitch in her lungs as if she were asthmatic. Too many years ago she could have refused with the slightest of smiles, the ones martyrs prided themselves on wearing. Now, she shook her head, as if in a daze. Her fingers reached for her car keys. Dinner with such a woman was more dangerous than an accident on the road.

  •

  Ms. Grackle drove a battered two-door hatchback, so rusty that she’d nicknamed it “Ol’ Tetanus.” Last fall, she had promised herself a brand new sedan with soft seats and air conditioning as her first retirement extravagance. But the newspaper reviews of automobiles she’d cut out as promising had been ignored for the past few months.

  Hamilton guided her through unrecognizable parts of town. And Hamilton’s clothes had, well, changed, when she wasn’t looking. Now, with an almost demure air about her as she sat in the passenger seat, Hamilton wore a starched white nurse’s uniform, one she’d last seen in some Shirley Eaton film on Turner Classic Movies.

  They parked in front of a long building with a slouching roof and dangling shutters on the windows. The sign out front read “The D’Aulnoy Shelter for Subsistence Beldames.” The lawn was brown and dead. A very old woman, winter-twig thin and wearing only a bathrobe and slippers, plodded along the grounds.

  “Is this a nursing home?” Ms. Grackle asked.

  “Of sorts. Though the witches inside would insist it’s more of a health retreat.”

  “She doesn’t look healthy.”

  “No, not at all.” Hamilton left the car. “Come on.”

  Witches cannot exist, Ms. Grackle told herself. Such things were never mentioned at Seton Hall.

  The old woman in the bathrobe muttered, “Dry as a bone inside,” as they passed her.

  As a trained nurse, Ms. Grackle knew that “dry as a bone” was wrong. Large bones had spongy marrow and manufactured blood cells. She thought the air inside the shelter should be compared to something else. Dust maybe. Or brittle newspaper left in the attic for a hundred years. Her skin flaked after a few steps down the hallway. Flour sprinkled down from Hamilton’s fingernails like fine ash.

  The women living at the shelter each looked older than the next. Tired skeletons covered in ivory skin, tufted at the skull with cotton candy-colored hair. Lemon-drop eyes blinked at Ms. Grackle. She saw the old women—not witches, she told herself—turn away from Hamilton.

  “They look starved.” To her amazement, she saw Hamilton was crying.

  “Yes, it’s tragic.”

  Abuse was common at nursing homes. She often worried what would happen to her when she could no longer care for herself. But the school district was quite clear that retirement at her age was mandatory.

  “Shouldn’t we be calling the police?”

  “Do you remember the story of Hansel and Gretel? Witches need to eat children. All that baby fat is so nutritious.” Hamilton wiped her face clean of the tear tracks and the bit of drool slipping from her mouth. “But some are too afraid to nibble. So they shrivel.”

  Ms. Grackle stared at Hamilton. Her face was plump, her skin smooth.

  “You look…well fed.”

  The witch—Ms. Grackle had no doubts now—smacked coral-tinted lips. “I have a thing for Brownies.”

  An aroma, both domestic in its simplicity and decadent in its promise, of baking chocolate drifted from Hamilton like perfume and revived in Ms. Grackle the memory of their first encounter.

  •

  She had yet to choose a major. Her mother had approved Seton Hall’s Catholic education as a first step toward vocation—she should become a teaching nun. Miss Grackle was uncertain. One autumn evening that remembered summer’s warmth, she left the dorm with a sweater held in her fist. It trailed through fallen leaves behind her. And when she breathed in the night air, the scent of warm brownies filled her.

  She had to follow the smell, and wandered to the grounds of the nursing school. She found the second-floor window, open and bright, and the tray cooling on the sill. Then came Juliet.

  No, her name was not really Juliet. But Miss Grackle had just read Shakespeare’s play days before—and had cried over how stupid Juliet had been to waste her life—and the sight of a wistful girl coming to the window, resting her elbows beside the baking pan to sigh into the night, filled the young Miss Grackle to the brim with ache. And maybe, just maybe, she whispered up, “That I might touch that cheek.”

  The not-Juliet looked down then and smiled and made her feel like the heir to the Montague fortune.

  “Stargazing?” Not-Juliet asked.

  Miss Grackle nodded and smiled ever-so-small at the joke the girl could not understand.

  “I baked brownies.” Not-Juliet lifted one side of the pan and the rich smell actually doubled. “I was pricked too often today.”

  “Pricked?” Miss Grackle felt her face grow warm. Warmer than the pan, she suspected.

  Not-Juliet grinned. “Be a good girl.” She stretched out an arm. “In class. We take turns giving needles. No matter how you try to make it a game, it hurts.”

  One of the saints—her mother was always quoting them—had said, “This fire of Purgatory will be more severe than any pain that can be felt, seen or conceived in this world.” Miss Grackle had always thought that a bit of hyperbole; wasn’t Hell true torture?

  But now she understood what the saint meant—nothing seemed so uncomfortable, so restrictive as standing ten feet below such a pretty girl while the air was warm and sweet. She could stand on her toes, lift her arms high, and still not-Juliet w
ould be out of reach. And she wanted nothing more than to brush her fingers against what promised to be the softest cheek in the world.

  “I might share.” Not-Juliet reached into the pan and pulled loose a hunk of brownie. She held it over Miss Grackle’s head. “Would you like that?”

  Feeling like a hound eager to please her mistress, Miss Grackle nodded fast. “Ever so much.”

  Then not-Juliet brought the brownie to her lips and took a bite. Crumbs fell. “Go to the door. I will let you in.”

  •

  Ms. Grackle’s legs trembled. She found a comfy chair. Across from her, another old woman wearing bland pajamas stared at wallpaper decorated with rows of vegetables. A tray across her lap held a plastic bowl of colorless mush and a matching teacup of steaming water that looked sad without a tea bag.

  “You finally remember me.”

  Ms. Grackle nodded. “But you look—”

  “You are what you eat. A retirement benefit, if you will.” Hamilton reached out but stopped just shy of Ms. Grackle’s stiff , gray curls. “After the school bell rings at 2:30 this Friday, you could be like me.”

  “I…I…I want to say ‘nonsense.’”

  “Time to grow up. We’re not born this way. Long ago, spinster aunts became the witches. Now it’s school nurses and lunch ladies.” Hamilton squatted beside the chair. “Don’t you want revenge for years of tears and whining, picking lice and wiping vomit?”

  Was that why the school board hadn’t bought her a gold watch? Did they know? “If I don’t eat children…”

  Hamilton sighed. “I’ll have to bring you here. And they’ll feed you slop.”

  Ms. Grackle didn’t want to eat children. Besides seeming wrong, it seemed so unpractical. Maybe all the beldames needed were vitamins and more fiber. She plucked at a tattered strip of the wallpaper hanging from the plaster. A piece of a radish tore free.

  The smell of boiled vegetables sickened her. “And the candy?”

  “Conjured for the children. We can’t stomach sweets.”

  At least she wouldn’t get diabetes. Shaken, she rose from the chair. Without another word to Hamilton—she could not even process the thought of her looking so…so desirable after all these years—she headed back to the shelter’s front door. She passed a parchment-skinned woman in a wheelchair reading a coloring book of the alphabet. Cartoon children smiled and danced around gigantic letters. The woman had the pages close to her face. Ms. Grackle heard murmuring and stopped. She brought her ear close to the woman’s dry mouth and heard: “D is for delicious.”

  •

  Her car stalled on the drive back home. While she struggled to start the engine, a pack of kids on rollerblades chased one another on the sidewalk. Ms. Grackle frowned at their lack of helmets. She watched as one boy hit a crack and toppled onto the pavement. She winced, but the boy picked himself up, wiped the grit from scraped palms, and followed the others.

  If I had fallen, she thought, I’d have broken my wrists. Maybe a hip. Why were only children permitted to play, to waste afternoons and weekends without care?

  She tried to have a normal evening at home. Sitting on the sofa, her plate on her lap, she watched a cable show on anorexia surgery while poking the microwave dinner (a deflated burrito) but never taking a bite. One young lady’s arms had become excessively hairy, the stressed body’s attempt to keep itself warm. Even her eyes held a trapped-in-the-cage wariness. Ms. Grackle wondered how many women became monsters. She pushed the plate from her lap. It slipped and landed on the floor, the plate cracking, the burrito leaking refried, reheated bean paste onto the thinning carpet. As she went on her hands and knees to clean the mess, she was struck with the thought that monsters in those awful movies always chased after women.

  Would it finally be socially acceptable for her to do the same?

  •

  At school Thursday, Johnny Meir came to have a splinter removed. He devoured two snicker doodles from a new tin on her desk before she could stop him. “I can stuff five of these in my mouth,” he mumbled around a mouthful. “An’ I once ate a hot dog squirted with thirteen packets of mustard. Holly Riggenbach dared me.” He reached for another cookie. “So I had’a.” Johnny would come into her office twice a week complaining of stomach aches.

  Though she had the tweezers in hand, Ms. Grackle used her dentures to remove the sliver of wood in the fleshy part of his finger. A single drop of blood met the tip of her tongue. In all of her life she had never tasted anything so scrumptious, so delicious. As if sunshine had masqueraded as syrup in his veins. She stood there, still tightly holding his hand, leaning so close she could almost breath him in, guilty over what she had done, but tempted to take just another teensy taste, maybe a nibble.

  Johnny stared at her, wide-eyed. She dropped his hand. “You bit me,” he half-whispered, half-whined, before running off .

  Ms. Grackle locked the door to her office. The poster on the back offered a brightly colored pyramid teaching what foods should be eaten. She stabbed at the purple triangle that represented five ounces of meat a day. Go lean on protein. Children weren’t part of a healthy diet.

  •

  Despite feeling hollow, she chose to walk home. Early June seemed far too eager to herald summer, and her old car would have been an oven. The dry heat rising from the pavement made her feet ache, though, and reminded her that she was old, that every step forward was a step closer to finality.

  Unless she chose to sample children.

  Death had kept her from ever acting on her attractions. A stroke felled her father sophomore year, and Miss Grackle had moved back home, where for years, her mother’s Catholic shadow reared all three heads—Guilt.

  Prudence. Shame. She had not been with another girl, let alone woman, since Hamilton.

  And when she finally found herself free of parental demands and guilt, she was middle-aged, bogged down by the familiar routine of the school day, fearful that if she ever did come out she’d lose her job. By the time New Jersey offered to shelter her attractions, she was so close to retirement that the idea of coming out seemed ridiculous. And who would want a fossil like her, anyway?

  Then, just weeks ago, while watching Julia & Julie, Ms. Grackle had felt a stirring in her gut, an almost forgotten sensation of heat and ache that she worried was more loneliness than hunger. She now imagined Hamilton, wearing a gingham dress covered with a spotless apron, and that stirring returned.

  At the intersection, a crowd of boys and girls—what was the collective noun, a recess of children?—surrounded an ice cream truck, their hands either clawing at the air or clutching dripping cones and popsicles. She frowned at the display of such quick and ready consumption. Certain children deserved a nip or two. That Johnny Meir, or Richie Cowles who faked a nosebleed last month to get out of a quiz. But not every student at Marchen should be fricasseed, especially not the poor, shy girls that boys forced into silence. One did not have to be a gourmand.

  Life at the shelter couldn’t be any more the lonesome Purgatory than what she’d been living.

  The truck’s jingle echoed inside her. She wondered if witches were all hollow. The way she felt right now.

  •

  At 2:30 the final bell rang. Ms. Grackle’s mouth and hands felt raw and hot. Her dentures popped out like novelty teeth. She gnashed new teeth. Aromatic flour drifted down from her fingers. Other scents came to her but mostly she breathed in the stink of children, a thousand times worse than pig or chicken. And she knew the only way to make a grubby boy or disheveled girl less fetid required cooking. Drool spilled from her lips. She was so hungry that the little blond girl brushing her teeth on one hygiene poster looked appetizing, as if she had a mouthful of whipped cream instead of toothpaste.

  “Happy birthday.” Hamilton sat on the padded bench. She wore a suit in light pink and white and a matching pillbox hat. Pearls, so large they could have been jawbreakers, were strung around her neck. “I’d bake you a cake, but now you could conjure one yourself
by waving your hands.”

  Grackle thought about the slices of homemade carrot cake with creamcheese icing that she had stolen bites of as a kid at the Snack Shack. Her fingers itched and then she held a thick slice on a paper plate. But she thought the cake looked as worthless as she felt; what good did all the sweets in the world serve if there wasn’t a child enjoying them, growing fat and toothsome?

  “Not bad.” Hamilton clapped. “So, have you decided on a diet? I don’t mean to rush but there’s more to magic than creating sweets. There’s no sense in training you if you plan on not devouring kids.”

  Grackle thought back to the old women in the shelter. “And my decision is final?”

  “Well, yes. Traditionally—”

  “Habits, especially bad habits, are meant to be broken.”

  “So you’d rather starve?”

  Grackle went over to her supply closet and gave it one last good tug open. She looked at all the tubes of ointment and packages of gauze and splints. So many injuries so often caused by reckless children. Maybe she could eat one or two a week, but there’d still be enough to fill the halls with mayhem. Enough to feed a horde of witches. Since last night she’d been plotting.

  “Magic makes the gingerbread houses, right?”

  Her old friend nodded. “A skilled witch can conjure nearly any object.”

  “Delicious,” Grackle said as she stroked Hamilton’s cheek. She cackled and hoped that some child passed close enough to hear the sound and shiver.

  “Here’s my thought…”

  •

  A gleaming white ice cream truck that would never need gas or a tune-up arrived outside a neighborhood soccer field. The vanilla icing over panels of graham cracker gleamed like fresh paint. A mob of children surrounded the truck and screamed for treats. Behind the steering wheel, Hamilton hummed a melody and the speakers atop the truck chimed. Grackle, young and lovely in a matching, bone-colored uniform, stepped outside and began handing out free ice cream cones and sandwiches. A trip to the beach yesterday to test their conjured truck had been a delight and provided her first good meal in weeks.