Practical Magic

by Alice Hoffman

  One Saturday, when Sally was buying vitamin C, the drugstore girl slipped her a piece of white paper along with her change. Help me, she had written, in perfect script. But Sally could not even help herself. She couldn’t help her children or her husband or the way the world had spun out of control. From then on Sally would not shop at the drugstore. Instead, she had everything they needed delivered by a high school boy, who left their order on the bluestone path—rain, sleet, or snow—refusing to come to their door, even if that meant forfeiting his tip.

  During that year, Sally let the aunts take care of Antonia and Kylie. She let bees nest in the rafters in July and allowed snow to pile up along the walkway in January so that the postman, who had always feared that he’d break his neck one way or the other delivering mail to the Owenses, would not venture past their gate. She didn’t bother about healthy dinners and mealtimes; she waited until she was starving, then ate canned peas out of the tin as she stood near the sink. Her hair became permanently knotted; there were holes in her socks and her gloves. She rarely went outside now, and when she did, people made sure to avoid her. Children were afraid of the blank look in her eyes. Neighbors who used to invite Sally over for coffee now crossed the street if they saw her coming and quickly murmured a prayer; they preferred to look straight into the sun and be temporarily blinded, rather than see what had happened to her.

  Gillian phoned once a week, always on Tuesday nights, at ten o’clock, the only schedule she had kept to in years. Sally would hold the receiver to her ear and she’d listen, but she still wouldn’t talk. “You can’t fall apart,” Gillian would insist in her rich, urgent voice. “That’s my job,” she’d say.

  All the same, it was Sally who wouldn’t bathe or eat or play pattycake with her baby. Sally was the one who cried so many tears there were mornings when she couldn’t open her eyes. Each evening she searched the dining room for the deathwatch beetle who’d been said to have caused all this grief. Of course she never found it and so she didn’t believe in it. But such things hide, in the folds of a widow’s black skirts and beneath the white sheets where one person sleeps, restlessly dreaming of everything she’ll never have. In time, Sally stopped believing in anything at all, and then the whole world went gray. She could not see orange or red, and certain shades of green—her favorite sweater and the leaves of new daffodils—were completely and utterly lost.

  “Wake up,” Gillian would say when she called on her appointed night. “What do I have to do to snap you out of it?”

  Really, there was nothing Gillian could say, although Sally kept on listening when her sister called. She thought over her sister’s words of advice because lately Gillian’s voice was the only sound she wanted to hear; it brought a comfort nothing else could, and Sally found herself positioned by the phone on Tuesdays, awaiting her sister’s call.

  “Life is for the living,” Gillian told her. “Life is what you make of it. Come on. Just listen to what I’m saying. Please.”

  Sally thought long and hard each time she hung up the phone. She thought about the girl in the drugstore and the sound of Antonia’s footsteps on the stairs when she went up to bed without a good-night hug. She thought about Michael’s life and his death, and about every second they had spent together. She considered each one of his kisses and all the words he had ever said to her. Everything was still gray—the paintings Antonia brought home from school and slipped beneath her door, the flannel pajamas Kylie wore on chilly mornings, the velvet curtains that kept the world at bay. But now Sally began to order things in her mind—grief and joy, dollars and cents, a baby’s cry and the look on her face when you blew her a kiss on a windy afternoon. Such things might be worth something, a glance, a peek, a deeper look.

  And when a year had passed, to the very day, since the moment when Michael had stepped off the curb, Sally saw green leaves outside her window. It was a delicate vine that had always wound its way up the drainpipe, but on this day Sally noticed how tender each leaf was, how absolutely new, so that the green was nearly yellow, and the yellow rich as butter. Sally spent a good portion of her days in bed, and it was already afternoon. She saw the golden light filtering through the curtains, and the way it spread out in bars across her wall. Quickly, she got out of bed and brushed her long black hair. She put on a dress she hadn’t worn since the previous spring, took her coat from the hook by the back door, and went out for a walk.

  Again it was spring, and the sky was so blue it could take your breath away. It was blue and she could see it, the color of his eyes, the color of veins beneath the skin, and of hope and of shirts pinned to a laundry line. Sally could make out nearly every shade and hue that had been missing all year, although she still could not see orange, which was too close to the color of the faded stop sign the teenagers never saw on the day Michael was killed, and she never would again. But orange was never a great favorite of Sally’s, a small loss, considering all the others.

  She walked on, through the center of town, wearing her old wool coat and her high black boots. It was a warm and breezy day, too warm for Sally’s heavy clothes, so she draped her coat over her arm. The sun went through the fabric of her dress, a hot hand across flesh and bones. Sally felt as though she’d been dead and now that she was back she was particularly sensitive to the world of the living: the touch of the wind against her skin, the gnats in the air, the scent of mud and new leaves, the sweetness of blues and greens. For the first time in ages, Sally thought how pleasant it would be to speak again, to read bedtime stories to her daughters and recite a poem and name all the flowers that bloomed early in the season, lily of the valley and jack-in-the-pulpit and purple hyacinth. She was thinking about flowers, those white ones shaped like bells, when, for no particular reason, she turned left on Endicott Street and headed for the park.

  In this park there was a pond, where a couple of horrid swans ruled, a playground with a slide and swing, and a green field where the older boys held serious soccer matches and baseball games that went on past dusk. Sally could hear the voices of children playing, and she walked into the park eagerly. Her cheeks were pink and her long black hair flew out behind her like a ribbon; amazingly enough, she had discovered that she was still young. Sally planned to take the path down to the pond, but she stopped when she saw the wrought-iron bench. Sitting there, as they did every day, were the aunts. Sally had never thought to ask what they did with the children all day while she stayed in bed, unable to drag herself from beneath the covers until the long afternoon shadows fell across her pillowcase.

  On this day’s outing, the aunts had brought their knitting along. They were working on a throw for Kylie’s crib, made out of the finest black wool, a coverlet so soft that whenever Kylie would sleep beneath it she’d dream of little black lambs and fields of grass. Antonia was beside the aunts, her legs neatly crossed. Kylie had been plopped down on the grass, where she sat motionless. All of them wore black woolen coats, and their complexions seemed sallow in the afternoon light. Antonia’s red hair looked especially brilliant, a color so deep and startling it appeared quite unnatural in the sun. The aunts did not speak to each other, and the girls certainly did not play. The aunts saw no point in jumping rope or tossing a ball back and forth. In their opinion, such things were a silly waste of time. Better to observe the world around you. Better to watch the swans, and the blue sky, and the other children, who shouted and laughed during wild games of kickball and tag. Learn to be as quiet as a mouse. Concentrate until you are as silent as the spider in the grass.

  A ball was being walloped around by a bunch of unruly boys, and finally it was booted too hard. It flew into the bright blue air, then rolled along the grass, past a quince in bloom. Antonia had been imagining that she was a blue jay, free among the branches of a weeping birch. Now she happily jumped off the bench and scooped up the ball, then ran toward a boy who’d been sent to retrieve it. The boy wasn’t more than ten, but he was still as death, pale as paste, when Antonia approached. She held the ball ou
t to him.

  “Here you go,” Antonia said.

  By then all the children in the park had stopped their playing. The swans flapped their big, beautiful wings. More than ten years later, Sally still dreams about those swans, a male and a female who guarded the pond ferociously, as though they were Dobermans. She dreams about the way the aunts clucked their tongues, sadly, since they knew what was about to happen.

  Poor Antonia looked at the boy, who had not moved and did not even appear to be breathing. She tilted her head, as though trying to figure whether he was stupid or merely polite.

  “Don’t you want the ball?” she asked him.

  The swans took flight slowly as the boy ran to Antonia, grabbed the ball, then pushed her down. Her black coat flared out behind her; her black shoes flew right off her feet.

  “Stop it!” Sally called out. Her first words in a year.

  The children on the playground all heard her. They took off running together, as far away as possible from Antonia Owens, who might hex you if you did her wrong, and from her aunts, who might boil up garden toads and slip them into your stew, and from her mother, who was so angry and protective she might just freeze you in time, ensuring that you were forever trapped on the green grass at the age of ten or eleven.

  Sally packed their clothes that same night. She loved the aunts and knew they meant well, but what she wanted for her girls was something the aunts could never provide. She wanted a town where no one pointed when her daughters walked down the street. She wanted her own house, where birthday parties could be held in the living room, with streamers and a hired clown and a cake, and a neighborhood where every house was the same and not a single one had a slate roof where squirrels nested, or bats in the garden, or woodwork that never needed polishing.

  In the morning, Sally phoned a real-estate broker in New York, then lugged her suitcases out to the porch. The aunts insisted that, no matter what, the past would follow Sally around. She’d wind up like Gillian, a sorry soul that only grew heavier in each new town. She couldn’t run away, that’s what they told her, but in Sally’s opinion, there was no proof of that. No one had driven the old station wagon for over a year, but it started right up and was sputtering like a kettle as Sally got her girls settled into the backseat. The aunts vowed she’d be miserable and they shook their fingers at her. But as soon as Sally took off, the aunts began to shrink, until they were like little black toadstools waving good-bye at the far end of the street where Sally and Gillian used to play hopscotch on hot August days, when they had only each other for company and the asphalt all around them was melting into black pools.

  Sally got onto Route 95 and went south, and she didn’t stop until Kylie woke, sweaty and confused and extremely overheated beneath the black woolen blanket that smelled of lavender, the scent that always clung to the aunts’ clothes. Kylie had been dreaming that she was being chased by a flock of sheep; she called out “Baa, baa” in a panicky voice, then climbed over the seat to be closer to her mother. Sally soothed her with a hug and the promise of ice cream, but it was not so easy to deal with Antonia.

  Antonia, who loved the aunts and had always been their favorite, refused to be consoled. She was wearing one of the black dresses they’d sewn for her at the dressmaker’s on Peabody, and her red hair stuck out from her head in angry wisps. She gave off a sour, lemony odor, which was a mixture of equal parts rage and despair.

  “I despise you,” she informed Sally as they sat in the cabin of the ferry that took them across Long Island Sound. It was one of those odd and surprising spring days that suddenly turn nearly as hot as summer. Sally and her children had been eating sticky slices of tangerine and drinking the Cokes they’d bought at the snack bar, but now that the waves had grown wilder, their stomachs were lurching. Sally had just finished a postcard she planned to send to Gillian, although she wasn’t certain whether her sister was still at her last address. Have finally done it, she’d scrawled in handwriting that was looser than anyone would have expected from someone so orderly. Have tied the sheets together and jumped!

  “I will hate you for the rest of my life,” Antonia went on, and her little hands formed into fists.

  “That’s your prerogative,” Sally said brightly, though deep down she was hurt. She waved the postcard in front of her face in order to cool off. Antonia could really get to her, but this time Sally wasn’t going to let that happen. “I do think you’ll change your mind.”

  “No,” Antonia said. “I won’t. I’ll never forgive you.”

  The aunts had adored Antonia because she was beautiful and nasty. They encouraged her to be bossy and self-centered, and during that year when Sally had been too sad and broken to speak to her children, or even take an interest in them, Antonia had been allowed to stay up past midnight and order adults around. She ate Butterfingers for dinner and smacked her baby sister with a rolled-up newspaper for fun. She had been doing just as she pleased for some time, and she was smart enough to know all that had changed as of this very day. She threw her tangerine down on the deck and squashed it beneath her foot, and when that didn’t work she cried and pleaded to be taken home.

  “Please,” she begged her mother. “I want the aunts. Take me back there. I’ll be good,” she vowed.

  By then, Sally was crying too. When she was a girl, the aunts had been the ones to sit up with her all night whenever she’d had an ear infection or the flu; they’d told her stories and fixed her broth and hot tea. They were the ones who’d rocked Gillian when she couldn’t fall asleep, especially at the start, when the girls first came to live at the house on Magnolia Street, and Gillian couldn’t sleep a wink.

  There had been a rainstorm the night that Sally and Gillian were told their parents weren’t coming back, and it was their bad fortune that another storm struck when they were in the plane on their way to Massachusetts. Sally was four, but she remembers the lightning they flew through; she can close her eyes and conjure it with no trouble at all. They were right up in the sky alongside those fierce white lines, with no place to hide. Gillian had vomited several times, and when the plane began to land she started to scream. Sally had to hold her hand over her sister’s mouth and promise her gumballs and licorice sticks if she’d only be quiet for a few minutes more.

  Sally had picked out their best party dresses to wear for the trip. Gillian’s was a pale violet, Sally’s pink trimmed with ivory lace. They were holding hands as they walked through the airport terminal, listening to the funny sound their crinolines made every time they took a step, when they saw the aunts waiting for them. The aunts stood on tiptoe, the better to see over the barricades; they had balloons tied to their sleeves, so that the children would recognize them. After they hugged the girls and collected their small leather suitcases, the aunts bundled Sally and Gillian into two black wool coats, then reached into their purses and brought out gumballs and red licorice, as if they knew exactly what little girls needed, or, at any rate, exactly what they might want.

  Sally was grateful for all the aunts had done, really she was. Still, she had made up her mind. She would get the key at the realtor’s for the house she would later buy, then get hold of some furniture. She would have to find a job eventually, but she had a little money from Michael’s insurance policy, and frankly she wasn’t going to think about the past or the future. She was thinking about the highway in front of her. She was thinking about road signs and right turns, and she just couldn’t afford to listen when Antonia started to howl, which set Kylie off as well. Instead, she switched on the radio and sang along and told herself that sometimes the right thing felt all wrong until it was over and done with.

  By the time they turned into the driveway of their new house, it was already late in the day. A band of children was playing kickball in the street, and when Sally got out of the car she waved and the children waved back, each and every one of them. A robin was on the front lawn, pulling at the grass and the weeds, and all up and down the street, lights were being turned on
and tables were set for dinner. The scent of pot roast and chicken paprikash and lasagna drifted through the mild air. Sally’s girls had both fallen asleep in the backseat, their faces streaked with dirt and tears. Sally had bought them ice cream cones and lollipops; she’d told stories for hours and stopped at two toy stores. Still, it would take years before they forgave her. They laughed at the little white fence Sally put up at the edge of their lawn. Antonia asked to paint her bedroom walls black and Kylie begged for a black kittycat. Both of these wishes were denied. Antonia’s room was painted yellow, and Kylie was given a goldfish named Sunshine, but that didn’t mean the girls had forgotten where they came from or that they didn’t long for it still.

  Every summer, in August, they would visit the aunts. They would draw in their breath as soon as they turned the corner onto Magnolia and could spy the big old house with its black fence and green-tinted windows. The aunts always made a tipsy chocolate cake and gave Antonia and Kylie far too many presents. There were no bedtimes, of course, and no well-balanced meals. No rules were put forth about drawing on the wallpaper or filling the bathtub so high that bubbles and tepid water sloshed over the sides and dripped down through the ceiling of the parlor. Every year the girls were taller when they arrived for their visit—they knew this because the aunts were seeming smaller all the time—and every year they went wild: they danced through the herb garden and played softball on the front lawn and stayed up past midnight. Sometimes they ate nothing but Snickers and Milky Ways for nearly the whole week, until their stomachs began to ache and they finally called for a salad or a glass of milk.

  During their August vacations, Sally insisted on getting the girls out of the house, at least in the afternoons. She took them on day trips, to the beach at Plum Island, to the swan boats in Boston, out into the blue bay in Gloucester on rented sailboats. But the girls always begged to return to the aunts’ house. They pouted and made Sally’s life miserable, until she gave in. It wasn’t the girls’ bad temper that convinced Sally to turn back for the house, it was that they were united in something. This was so unusual and so delightful to see that Sally just couldn’t say no.