Salter grabbed the book and held it up to the girls. “See this,” she said, tapping the cover, “those who came before us.”
They peered with a reverence Salter felt appropriate. Helene reached out a trembling hand and caressed the cover. Together, they opened it, and Morrow read aloud, “The Lives of Witches.”
“History,” Almond moaned, falling onto her back and sprawling her hands. “That’s boring.”
“Shut your mouth,” Salter said. “They’ve got a bit here on the Bloody one.”
Almond sat up and reached for another loosie. “Go on, then,” she said.
Salter told them how girls in the days of frilly skirts and long nightgowns used to play all sorts of games with one another to tell the future. They’d wait until it was pitch dark and light a candle. Then, in their nightclothes, they would walk up their stairs backwards without pause or fear, because you had to walk evenly for the game to work.
“That’s how they all died,” Morrow said. “Tripped over their own feet.”
When they reached the top of the stairs, they could then turn around and walk into their bedrooms. With a floor-length mirror, and it had to be floor-length so they could see their whole bodies, they would hold their candles to their faces and whisper her name three times: Bloody, Bloody, Bloody. If they were lucky, if they did the chant right and Bloody was awake, she would appear to them as a young and beautiful woman and show them the face of the one they were meant to marry: those kind faces of boys who would treat them right and let them spend money on new dresses for Sunday, and who would spring for steak once a month if the factory was producing. But if Bloody was in a bad mood, or thought the girl was not taking it as seriously as she should take prophesy, they’d see her in her moment before her death with her skin stripped off her bone and empty holes for eyes. She’d open her mouth and show you exactly what happened to you after you died, the whole of emptiness down her throat, and you’d go bleak, stark mad.
Helene smiled and puckered her lips at Salter.
“You two are gross,” Almond said, dodging the lipstick Salter threw at her.
“We should try it,” Morrow said. “Summon her, or whatever.”
“We’d have to prepare,” Helene said. “Do it right.”
Salter, all-knowing as she had read the passages an hour ago, told them they’d need to find a sacrifice to give to the Bloody Mother. All the girls who saw death messed it up because they hadn’t offered anything in return.
“All we got are mosquitos,” Almond said, flicking one off of her ankle.
When they left, each of them began the process of hiding their stash, pulling up the floorboards and burying the good stuff: lipsticks and blush and eye shadow and knives and half-full handles of liquor. They wrapped the pillows in their blankets and covered those with crunched leaves. They redrew a line of chalk at the door and windows to keep out the ants. They blew out their candles and buried them.
Salter hooked her arm with Helene. “Saw new meat at the library. Young thing.”
“Saw her first,” Helene said. “Moved in next to me. El Ay girl. Her name is Mary. Cute.”
Salter roiled her stomach until it cramped against the cold chicken salad she’d swiped from the supermarket and scarfed for lunch hours ago. “But not as cute as me, yeah?”
“No one’s as cute as you.”
* * *
As a child, Salter learned to associate the word Daddy with the following: fat, fuck, fight. Daddy-Fat. Daddy-Fuck. Daddy-Fight. Though the family had an extra bedroom in their little house, he placed boxes from floor to ceiling, which he had whimsically called his paperwork. Salter was forced to sleep in the large bed with him and her mother, because mattresses were expensive and it was even more expensive to heat a whole other room, and anyway, he gargled at her, the family who sleeps together stays together. There was always a burlesque performance before bed, the way he would peel his dirty clothes away from his dirty body and place them atop an ever growing pile in the corner of the room, which only diminished when her mother saved up enough coins to haul them to the pay laundry. Then he would watch Salter and her mother undress, before Salter caught onto his game and made a point to use the bathroom half an hour before and slip under the covers, closing her eyes and practicing breathing evenly. No matter how hard she willed it, she could not evenly breathe away his body next to hers, the unbearable heat of his flesh, and the cold, small body of her mother, who always kept her face to the wall, as close to the edge as she could be without falling off. Salter had to make her body small between them, sweating and freezing, the dark stink of Daddy’s breath shifting her hair. Above her, the half-naked and beaten body of the Christ hung loose, a small rivulet of red paint dribbling out from his side. It was a long time before she learned to sleep under him, always imagining that blood would fall as soon as she closed her eyes and he would drown her.
Once, when Daddy was at work, she looked into his boxes of paperwork and found rocks. She stayed up all night and clenched her fingers, wondering if she was strong enough to strangle him.
* * *
Every morning, Salter followed the same procedure before she went to school. Her daddy, perpetual over-sleeper, would have to be bypassed as quietly as possible. Rolling out of the bed, she had long learned how to dim the lights enough to see what she was going to wear that day, and how slowly to open the closet so that it didn’t squeak. She’d grab handfuls of clothes and change in the bathroom, then slip back into the bedroom and exchange the book in her bag for the hidden one in the back of the closet. No foul if daddy found it while she was at school. He might accuse her of being unclean, but he couldn’t object to her reading choice.
* * *
Math was her most difficult subject, but Salter appreciated numbers, even if they made no sense to her. She liked that she could divide and multiply them together in strings a hundred long and still come to something nice and neat by the end calculation. Her teacher, unshaven and paunch-bellied, was her favorite because he paid the least attention to her.
“Class,” he said, “we have a new student, all the way from Los Angeles.”
Salter looked up and saw the girl from the library, seemingly embarrassed, red-cheeked, staring at the floor. She felt a momentary smidge of sympathy for the girl, having to stand in front of all of them like a new show dog.
“This is Mary Hallowell. What brings you to our small corner of the world, Mary?”
“My dad got a new job? At the glass factory?” Mary said.
“Seems a long way to travel just to work the floor. Economy must be bad everywhere.” Her teacher said, frowning. “No positions out West?”
“No? He’s a lawyer.”
Mary’s new shoes spoke the truth of what it meant to have a lawyer for a father: a man who so loved his baby girl that he bought her white shoes and knew she wouldn’t ruin them, who gave her a backpack that had only recently had a price tag on it, not something discovered with dust in the back of a church rummage sale, who may have even paid to have her hair permed, not some botched job done at home with the money carefully collected off the streets and saved in a glass jar in the corner of a closet.
“Welcome, all the same. Now, I like to have my students seated alphabetically, so let’s move everyone down a bit. Come on now, on your feet, stop that bellyaching. Moving helps your brain focus. Mary, take your seat over here.”
Mary sat next to Helene. Helene wiggled her fingers and smacked her gum.
“Hey, neighbor. Got a pencil I can borrow?” Helene whispered.
Mary dug into her backpack and handed her a number two, unsharpened, yellow, and free of teeth marks. Their fingers brushed and lingered in the exchange. Helene twisted her long hair into a bun and jammed the pencil in the middle to hold. “Thanks, doll.”
Salter scratched in the edges of her book. Bitch.
* * *
Lunch was
the only time when the girls could gather without being watched by the adults, where they did not need to be accounted for in a seat. They met at different places each day, palming notes to one another in the hallways with the number of an unused classroom, or outside in the alley between the school and a few rundown homes where the kids who wore black sold overpriced loosies and weed. Morrow was on the rag, and she did not suffer bleeding alone, so her note demanded that they meet in a far, cramped bathroom away from the cafeteria.
“Fucking hell,” she said, slamming her fist on the side of the tampon dispenser on the wall. “It ate my nickel!”
Salter sat on a dry sink and dug around in her pockets. “If I had one I’d give it to you. Just make a plug.” She gestured toward the cheap toilet paper in the open stall.
“Want me to send some under?” Almond said from the occupied stall.
Morrow groaned. “Too scratchy. Maybe I’ll fake butt cancer and go home for the day.”
Salter shrugged and put a half-used roll in her bag. Occasionally her mother forgot to replace the empties at home, and so she had taken to stashing emergency supplies under the sink, behind the cleaning supplies that must have been purchased on a whim, because they had never been used.
Helene poked her head in the door. “This the right place? I can barely read Morrow’s scratch.”
“Obviously,” Salter said, grinning.
She walked in, scrunching her long brown hair with one hand as she did. After her trailed a mousy, nervous looking girl, holding her purse strap in front of her with both hands. Salter felt sick for a brief moment, and wondered if she too might be getting her period.
“Everyone,” Helene said, “This is the new girl, Mary.”
Morrow slammed her hand against the dispenser again. “Hey.”
“You’re in my biology class!” said Almond, followed by a low splash. “Ugh, finally.”
Salter almost told Mary to get the fuck out, but Helene skipped over and placed a kiss on her cheek. Salter smiled, even though she was still angry, and didn’t quite know why she felt that way.
“Either of you got a dime?” Morrow asked.
Helene shook her head. Mary dug around in her purse, her hand trembling. “I have a dollar?” she held it up.
“Machine only takes coins,” Morrow said, but she snatched the dollar and folded it into her pocket.
Mary glanced back and forth between all the girls, and Salter wondered exactly how young she was. Maybe she was one of those smarty-pants girls who skipped a few grades when she was a kid because her parents were pushy folk who believed the sun rose and set each day in blessing that they had managed to fuck and get a baby out of it. She’d known a boy like that before he transferred to a private school. Always raised his hand, even when the teacher didn’t ask for answers. Always asked more questions than anyone cared to know about the subject. She’d pushed him against the lockers once and stared at him until he lowered his eyes, and he was smart enough to know what she meant. He stopped raising his hand in classes with her.
“God dammit,” Morrow said, punching the dispenser.
“What’s wrong?” Mary asked, then seemed surprised that she had said anything, and shifted her weight back and forth. “Is it stuck? Let me try something.”
Mary handed Helene her purse and bent under the dispenser, peering up. She stuck her hand up the machine, scrunched her face, hit the side of it. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and then pulled her hand out, holding two tampons.
“Well, fuck me sideways. You’re handy. Literally.” Morrow snatched a tampon and went into the other stall.
“What happened?” Almond asked.
“I have small hands,” Mary said. “At my old school, the machine jammed all the time. Anyone want the extra?”
Salter snatched it when she saw Helene making a move. “Thanks,” she said.
Helene was practically preening. “Ain’t she cool? Her parents still have a place in California. Mary said if they go out there I might go with them. Maybe I’ll see a real movie star. Wonder if they’re so shiny in real life.”
* * *
Salter clutched the tampon in her fist the rest of the school day, almost snapping it in half when Helene gave her a quick lip-kiss, saying that Mary’s parents were picking her and Mary up and taking them to dinner. Mary extended an invitation to Salter, saying there was more than enough room in her parents’ minivan, but Salter shrugged her off with an excuse that her parents were expecting her. In truth, she had no desire for Mary and her clean shoes to see Daddy’s overgrown lawn and the paint-chipped sidings, the gutters choked with leaves, or his fat-fuck body sitting on the porch, as he sometimes did, his belly hanging out, swigging from a flask and reading the Bible.
Her mother was home when Salter arrived, which meant she either did not go to work or she left early. Her father dozed on the couch while her mother stirred a pot of boiling water, upturning pasta into it. Ketchup and butter noodles and hot dogs. When she was younger, sometimes her mother would cut the hot dogs into octopuses, or arrange them in a smiley face over the noodles, but she had not done that in years. Now, her mother dropped the dog on top, when they had dogs.
Without saying hello, Salter kneeled in the closet in the bedroom, replacing the Lives of the Witches with The Lives of the Saints, the latter she hid behind her father’s muddied work shoes in case her father rifled through her bag. She went outside and sat on the back porch and tossed the tampon from one hand to the other, amazed at herself for hating such a small, meaningless thing.
Maybe Helene and Mary were eating steak together, and mashed potatoes and something green. Helene was endlessly charming, and she could talk to whomever she wanted and make them feel like she understood them, that they were special. When Salter first met Helene, she tried to imitate her, tried to walk like her and make the same eye contact and smile, but people didn’t react to her the way they did Helene. Instead, when she smiled and stared, her mouth would hurt and her eyes would water, not knowing when to look away or blink, and people reacted suspiciously, asking her what she had done, responding in halting sentences, not answering her questions until she just dropped the act and stopped making the attempt. But Helene never stopped talking to her, said she liked her dirty clothes, liked the way her skin tasted, like salt and dirt and all sorts of real earthy things. What if Helene tasted Mary and liked how she tasted better? Mary, who probably tasted like expensive soaps and some kind of fruit, sweet and airy. Impossible, expensive things.
Salter pulled a lighter out of her back pocket and flicked it on. She lit the end of the tampon and watched it smolder then catch and fire up. The plastic and cotton burned and smelled awful, but Salter breathed it all in. She thought of all those women who were burned to death by angry mobs who didn’t understand them, who thought they were evil, and maybe they were evil and deserved what they got, but who really could say. At the end, they may have cried out for some dark force to save them, to make them greater than they were and burn those who would burn them.
“Dinner,” her mother said listlessly from the porch. Salter stamped the tampon out, covered it with dirt, and went inside.
* * *
Morning, Daddy awake and staring at her. At first, she thought he was just so drunk he forgot to close his eyes, but dark little pupils followed her around the room while she fisted underwear, a shirt, and a bra. He smiled at her, a great big grin, and she saw the black where his teeth met his gums, like dirty glue holding everything together. Salter stared back, waiting for him to lower his eyes, praying the Bloody Mother would rip them out and eat them, but he matched her eye for eye. If she waited longer with him, she would miss the bus and have to walk, and if she was late for class there would be a telephone call home, and that would give the fat fuck an excuse, so she clenched her fingers around her clothes, grabbed a pair of jeans, and went into the bathroom. She heard him laughing
, even as she walked out the door.
* * *
The girls met at the Witches Castle and spilled their goods: Morrow’s loosies, the crayons Helene snatched from the art room, and a hair tie Almond un-wove from her hair and dropped on the pile.
“Slow day,” she said defensively, when the girls looked at her.
Salter sat her backpack on the ground and went to her knees next to Helene. “Have a good time with the new thing?” she asked.
Helene raised her arms above her head and fell onto Salter. “Jealous,” she said affectionately, trying to poke Salter on the nose. “Aw, come on, she’s not so bad.” Helene reached for two cigarettes, lit them, and placed one between Salter’s lips. “Where’s your contribution?”
Salter wished she hadn’t buried that tampon, wished she’d stuck it in her bag and brought it with her to put on the pile. She could call it art or any such thing, and then Helene would know what she felt, all that ugly inside of her, and she wouldn’t have to try to put it into words. Instead, she grunted that she had brought the book. She upended her backpack and ignored the laughter of the others when The Lives of the Saints fell out. Salter swore loudly.
It was easy enough to convince them to do the ritual of the Bloody Mother, mostly because they had no idea what it might entail, and neither did she. Every book she had read on the subject had been frustratingly vague in its description, only mentioning that the women had done spells and tricks and rituals, but absolutely no detail was given, except slim descriptions that may have included dancing or sacrificing a small animal, but no indication if, it was dancing, how their feet ought to move and, if it was sacrifice, what sort of knife to use and where to cut.
“We’ve got plenty of knives,” Morrow said, indicating Almond’s neat pile of sharp blades, her shirt riding up to her shoulder as she lifted her arm. A large hand of bruised fingertips at the top of her pale arm, brown and blue and yellowed at the edges, roughed and marring her skin. The girls all noticed, and Morrow matched their stares. They said nothing to one another, did not have to, for each of them had, at one point, brought bruises or scars on their bodies into the Witches Castle, and they knew better than to voice it aloud. It was their place of power, and any indication that they might be weak was to be taken off when they entered and put back on when they left. Inside, they could pretend, and it was glorious to pretend. Helene pushed extra cigarettes over to Morrow, and that was all that had to be done.
Magic for Unlucky Girls Page 14