by Alice Bolin
It took me two buses and almost two hours to get to Boyle Heights, the East Los Angeles neighborhood where Evergreen Memorial Park and Crematory is nestled. Established in 1877, it is the oldest graveyard in Los Angeles and one of the largest, housing 300,000 graves in its sixty-seven acres. Its Garden of the Pines is a monument to Japanese pioneers, and rows of beautiful Japanese graves lace through the rest of the park like veins. It is different from other Los Angeles cemeteries. It feels less preened, more chaotic. Its grass grows sometimes green, sometimes yellow, straggling in dehydrated patches or failing altogether, revealing expanses of bare dirt. Amid the Japanese graves are monuments to L.A.’s early patriarchs, or as Ehrenreich puts it in “The End,” a “stratum of dead whites with streets named after them.” This includes John Edward Hollenbeck, who sold the city the land that would become Exposition Park, and Theodore Rimpau, whose massive Rancho Las Cienegas became much of West Los Angeles. Isaac Lankershim and Isaac Newton Van Nuys are also buried there, Otis Chandler’s collaborators in the Los Angeles Suburban Homes Company and the scheme to develop the San Fernando Valley. There are layers of irony here: the graves of men who went to great lengths to keep Los Angeles evergreen grow up amid yellow grass in a cemetery called Evergreen. When I was there, I saw a family gathered around a grave, somehow watering it with a hose.
Evergreen illustrates why its men with streets named after them had to dream up Los Angeles so completely, lending the city the same artificiality that Waugh disdained in Forest Lawn. Los Angeles is not a city that could ever have existed naturally—that is, given its natural resources—in its current form. In “Half in Love with Easeful Death,” Waugh makes a confident prediction about the end of Los Angeles. “It will be destroyed by drought,” he writes. “Bones will whiten along the Santa Fe Trail as the great recession struggles Eastwards. Nature will re-assert herself and the seasons gently obliterate the vast, deserted suburb.” It was obvious to him that Los Angeles’s hyperdevelopment was no match for indifferent nature.
Los Angeles’s enormous cemeteries are emblems of the city’s excessive nature, its belief in relationships of space and growth that exist only in the physics of dreams. But they also embody Los Angeles’s relationship with destruction. Engineered to be a tropical paradise, a verdant ocean city enjoying everlasting youth, its citizens carry on in spite of the imminence of many natural emergencies, including droughts, fires, mudslides, and earthquakes. Its giant cemeteries are both an attempt to control death and evidence of the city’s strange comfort with it. As Didion writes in her essay “Los Angeles Days,” “Something in the human spirit rejects planning on a daily basis for catastrophe.”
Moving to Los Angeles from a small town in Montana, I marvel at how quickly I got used to budgeting driving time, adding hours to my day where I was doing essentially nothing; to two-hour cross-city bus rides; to the smog and the white sun and their attending migraines. I realized from other people’s Internet posts that I didn’t feel an earthquake because I was on an already shaking bus riding down Third Street in Mid-City; instead of fear, I felt light disappointment, and kept scrolling on Twitter. California’s drought scared me because I had already gotten used to it, as I had the rest of my new city’s inconveniences. It wasn’t invisible to me, and adjusting to small miseries did not mean I was not miserable.
I do not think of Los Angeles with my fellow transplant Waugh’s same disgust. I love it in its striving and its failing. But like Waugh, I looked to the city’s cemeteries for what is both its signature and its fatal flaw: a dream so ironclad it endeavors to reject even the Big Buzzkill. On the plaque in Hollywood Forever, the Los Angeles Times finally wishes farewell to its “martyred men”: “Forever green be the turf which California, through all her perennial summertimes, will graciously spread above their cherished graves!” It’s the poetry of denial: the people of Los Angeles know their weather is not an eternal summer, but the heat of a desert waiting to reclaim it. The grass is not forever. Neither are the graves.
Part 3
Weird Sisters
A Teen Witch’s Guide to Staying Alive
My first formal dalliance with witchcraft was in fourth grade, though my suspicions that I was magic came much earlier. As a small child, I would tighten my concentration on objects, thinking I might move them with my mind. I engaged in experiments in mind reading, which, if you don’t let your subject in on it, is easy to tell yourself you are doing successfully. At the same time I also engaged in schoolyard charlatanism, shoving the planchette around when we played with the Ouija board and convincing a gullible friend that I communicated with leprechauns, a ruse that went off so well I had to continue it for years. The imagination as the source of childhood “magic” is the cliché that drives basically all youth entertainment. In that case, magic means nothing more than control.
My best friend in fourth grade was a new girl in school who was pale as paper, with butt-length red hair. Her dad was a giant in a leather jacket who listened to Led Zeppelin, like my big brother; her stepmom had a strange fantasy-novel name derived from Greek mythology. They were Wiccans, she told me, but warned me to tell no one at our small Idaho school. “I’m a witch in training,” she wrote in tiny handwriting in my diary.
I can’t cast spells yet. I’m not a full witch. No one can know what I tell Alice. When I’m completely trained I get the following: a magic sword, altar, a lead mini of Diana, the moon goddess, and everything that goes on an altar.
The idea of witchcraft as a religious practice was news to me, and it seemed like a fantastic work-around to the necessity of inborn supernatural gifts. The drama of secrecy and potential ostracization made Wicca all the more appealing.
My friend lent me the 1990s occult classic Teen Witch by Silver RavenWolf, which I hid self-importantly under my bed. The book taught me to jerry-rig a Wiccan altar from household items. I found a yellow clipboard and placed on it a statue of the Virgin Mary (to represent the goddess) and a candle shaped like a recycling bin that I found in the bargain section at Claire’s. In my first act as witch in training, I cast a circle of power, a sovereign region of happiness in my bedroom. I walked in a circle, focusing so intensely on the magic flowing from my index finger to the floor that I could almost see it.
I bought a used copy of Teen Witch on Amazon recently, careful to get one that preserved its iconic first-edition cover. It’s a painting of five witchy teens in the greatest hits of nineties fashion: backward baseball caps, velour, thigh-highs, mom jeans, crop tops, overalls, a yin-yang chain belt. It has served as a great coffee table book, but I reread it with much more seriousness than I approached it with when I was nine. Just as RavenWolf begs her readers, I did not jump around or skip straight to the spells she includes, but solemnly read her baby’s guide to witchcraft cover to cover.
RavenWolf brags that she is “one of the most famous witches in the United States today,” and she has written more than a dozen magic how-to books. Reading her homely, mom-ish prose, I feel sure that RavenWolf had little to do with the marketing of this book. The edgy styling of the kids on its cover seems to contradict her efforts to dissuade nineties teens from thinking witchcraft is another Goth fashion accessory. She explains that Wicca is a source of positivity, that the only legitimate magic helps others and connects a person to the greater Spirit. It is, in other words, just another religion, and one that RavenWolf suggests is best practiced quietly.
Many of the spells she includes are nothing more than faintly cloaked practical advice. In her “Glamour Spell,” she tells her readers, “If someone is making fun of you because you smell, maybe you do. Keep your gym clothes clean. Use a spray in your sneakers.” Many of her spells would be embarrassing to be caught performing. A spell to treat cuts and scrapes involves holding a hand over the hurt area and repeating, “Owie-fix, owie-fix / You’re the fairy that I pick. Bring the healing / Come right quick!” Her “Turn Back Poverty Spell” is just writing “I banish poverty” on seven pieces of toilet paper and fl
ushing them down the toilet.
A lot of RavenWolf’s folk magic instructions feel like the compulsions anxious children take part in anyway: obsessive praying, carrying lucky objects, hiding things. Her “My Castle Spells” are several ideas for magical protections for the Teen Witch’s house, including chanting and making the sign of the pentacle over every window and door in the house every night. This legitimizes the restless avenues anxiety takes, the rituals of vigilance and control children are prone to.
I’m reminded of Merricat, the teenage witch who narrates Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as she describes her own protective magic: “Always on Wednesday mornings I went around the fence. It was necessary for me to check constantly to be sure that the wires were not broken and the gates were securely locked.” I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle twice the same fall I revisited Teen Witch, in my house in the San Bernardino National Forest, high in the gloomy mountains above Southern California’s Inland Empire, having exchanged smog for fog. I was working as the poet in residence at a boarding school there, and I leaned into the enigmatic eccentricity I felt was expected of my new role. I engaged in all kinds of casual divination, having my students wander the woods looking for sticks shaped like letters and attempt to communicate with Gertrude Stein’s ghost on a homemade Ouija board. And I was alone in my cabin in the woods and scared of ghosts, animals, and murderers: I was unable to read Jackson’s ghost story The Haunting of Hill House at night in my bed because, I realized with a shiver, I was also living in an isolated house on a hill. In short, I returned to the magic and magical thinking of my youth, for reasons both whimsical and less so. In Jackson’s strange New England fairy tale, Merricat’s is a neurotic magic, as she catalogs the objects she’s buried in the acres of wilderness that her family owns: “my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.”
She wants to protect herself and what’s left of her family—her older sister, Constance, and her feeble uncle, Julian—from the ignorant townspeople in the hostile village beyond their land. Merricat is one in a long line of literary tomboys, taking her place beside Scout Finch, Harriet the Spy, and Jo March. But Jackson twists this archetype, imbuing her tomboy with a sinister mixture of alchemy and fear. When Merricat’s routine is threatened early in the book, she immediately reacts by smashing a milk pitcher, as smashing things into glittering shards is one source of her power. Her feral girl magic is far from RavenWolf’s benign Teen Witches. We learn that someone poisoned her father, mother, younger brother, and aunt years earlier, and Merricat is the reader’s only suspect. This is Jackson’s uneasy feat in the book: readers’ sympathetic intimacy with our strange and murderous teenage narrator.
One thing that endears Merricat to us is her loyalty to her angelic older sister, Constance, an avatar of purity and nurturing domesticity. Constance does nothing but cook, clean, and garden, and she is perfectly attuned to the cycles of nature and the harvest. Jackson is leading us to wonder whether Constance is partaking in her own kind of magic. Observing Constance’s rows and rows of preserved fruits and vegetables in their cellar, Merricat tells her, “You bury food the way I bury treasure.” Both witchcraft and food preservation are traditionally feminine arts and safeguards, ways of staying alive. After cleaning their house, Merricat describes herself and Constance as “carrying our dustcloths and the broom and dustpan and mop like a pair of witches walking home.” It is easy to forget that the accouterments of witchcraft—the broomstick, the cauldron—are traditionally found around the hearth, the woman’s domain.
Merricat and Constance enact their food fetish at the dinner table and in the garden and in their magic. Jackson and so many other writers rely on food and feeding as a particularly overt, if poignant, metaphor. In Beloved, Toni Morrison also writes about two agoraphobic women haunted by a murder in their family, shut out by their community, bound together by guilt and need. When Morrison’s protagonist, Sethe, who has run away from slavery, is reunited with her children, she has “milk enough for all” in her still-lactating breasts, embodying the first imperative of motherhood. Throughout Beloved, eating metaphors are both loud and quiet. Sethe is consumed with grief, actually saying, “I’m going to eat myself.” When the ghost of her dead daughter comes back, the girl is ravenous for everything she can get from Sethe: her food, her attention, her men, her body. But when it comes to women’s relationships to eating, the significance is not just metaphorical. Merricat dislikes eating in front of other people at all. In this refusal, she resembles many teenage girls. I guess we are talking about magic again (or do I mean compulsion?) when we talk about food as a domain of feminine control.
In Elissa Washuta’s 2015 book Starvation Mode, which she calls “A Memoir of Food, Consumption, and Control,” she describes how her lifelong food obsession was connected to her untamable emotions. “Only cry if you are hurt or scared,” a rule remembered from her childhood, caused nothing but confusion. “While I knew how to count to three,” she writes, “I did not know the boundaries of pain and fear.” Her food compulsions—from tasting a salt lick she found in the forest as a child to the bingeing, restriction, and obsessive dieting she vacillated between for years—all had the same appeal: “to beckon toward the impossible dream of making my own microscopic and mysterious cells change according to my will.”
Washuta’s book is revelatory on women’s disordered relationships with food, a subject that would seem to have been covered. She describes how her first “diet,” a dangerous 600-calorie-a-day restriction, made her feel empowered and safe, “like good St. Catherine in her iron girdle.” Eating disorders are a kind of penance and a kind of fortification and a kind of disguise. It is a paradox of womanhood that women have been so long associated with the private sphere, the home and the family, while our bodies are considered public property. In the climax of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Merricat sets fire to her house to oust her hateful cousin, Charles, from her space, ironically opening the house to the citizens of the village, who invade it first to put out the fire and second to ransack it, smashing and destroying all of the sisters’ belongings. “It seemed that all the wealth and hidden treasure of our house had been found out and torn and soiled,” Merricat says. What was private is made public.
In its most disordered form, Washuta’s dieting in Starvation Mode is transformed from an enforcement of the male gaze to a kind of purifying fire, reducing her body to what cannot be consumed or destroyed. “I wanted a body that was a plywood box,” she writes, “one that, even if it were broken open, might be full of nothing fragile.” In the same way, the fire has diminished Merricat and Constance’s house to its necessary parts, the areas that revolve around food: the kitchen, the cellar, and the garden. Like in the hunger-addled body, they have achieved a unity of fortification and vulnerability, a perfect isolation, as their house becomes “a castle, turreted and open to the sky.” Washuta’s and Jackson’s are both disturbing solutions to an embattled female existence. It is upsetting, to say the least, to confront Jackson’s vision of the essence of human life as eking comfort from constant hostility, attrition, and ruin. Jackson’s work consistently explores the dark mysteries of scale one can discover in the descent into agoraphobia: that a house can be a world, and a body can be a house.
As I read Starvation Mode in my cabin’s fluorescent-lit kitchen, on flimsy Walmart furniture the boarding school provided for me, eating six dried apricots cut in quarters and mixed with a half cup of plain yogurt, the food obsession in the witch books I had been reading dawned on me uncomfortably. I had also been reading Helen Oyeyemi’s Shirley Jackson homage White Is for Witching, which follows a teenage girl named Miranda whose eating disorder will allow her to eat chalk and little else. In this way she seems to eat the famous White Cliffs of her hometown of Dover, making her an earth witch if there ever was one. Miranda is unsure whether
she embodies a witch in a fairy tale, monstrously hungry, feeding on souls and children. She seems more like Alice in Wonderland, eating but only growing smaller. Although White Is for Witching would appear to be a compassionate lens on a kind of girlish madness, here, too, an eating disorder spins out wildly into metaphor. The novel is an exploration of British imperialism’s hunger for resources and for people, as Miranda and her foremothers, all of whom shared her compulsion to eat dirt, sticks, and rocks, are literally hungry for land. The book is not subtle: one of Miranda’s grandmothers is shown wearing white, dressed as the personified Britannia. And Oyeyemi riffs on the ironic layers of meaning loaded in the color white, showing it as a color that consumes, that contains and assimilates all other colors: “White is for witching, a colour to be worn so that all other colours can enter you, so that you may use them.” This is an elegant description of the white hand of the British Empire as it moved greedily across the globe.
This is another story of a girl trapped in a house, but Miranda is not agoraphobic. Her parents open a bed-and-breakfast in the house that has been in her mother’s family for generations, and it is haunted by her female ancestors, all of whom are either cursed by or conspiring with the evil spirit of the house itself. The house is the narrator of much of the book, recounting how it tortures and controls Miranda and seeks in its racist mission to eject all nonwhite people from itself. It’s like a hyperactive explosion of the Gothic, where the house is the ultimate symbol. The Gothic as a literary aesthetic is completely entwined with the sins of colonialism and the unwelcome and uncanny ways they manifested themselves in Europe. The chaotic forces in the Brontës’ haunted-house stories are albatrosses of the colonial world, like the Caribbean madwoman Bertha Rochester and the dark changeling Heathcliff, whom other characters surmise could be Indian or American. In White Is for Witching, after the Kosovar immigrants who work for her father are driven out by her house’s tormenting, Miranda realizes that they “lived in a different house from her when she thought they were all living in the same house.” The house transparently stands in for British society, where the experience of those who have it hard is invisible to those who have it easy.