“I see I have a rival,” Ben said. “I may have to cook him.”
Gillian scooped the rabbit into her arms. All the while Ben had been sleeping, she’d been dissecting her past. Now, she was through with it. She was not going to let that little girl sitting on the dusty back steps of the aunts’ kitchen control her. She was not going to let that idiot who’d gotten herself entangled with Jimmy rule her life. “Buddy is probably the most intelligent bunny in the entire country. He’s so smart that he’ll probably ask me over for dinner tomorrow night.”
It was clear to Ben that he owed the rabbit a debt of gratitude. If not for Buddy, perhaps Gillian would have left without saying good-bye; instead she stayed, and wept, and reconsidered. And so, in honor of Buddy, Ben fixed carrot soup the next evening, a salad of leaf lettuce, and a pot of Welsh rabbit, which Gillian was extremely relieved to hear was nothing more than melted cheese served with bread. A plate of salad and a small bowl of soup had been placed on the floor for Buddy. The rabbit was petted and thanked, but after dinner he was taken to his carrying crate for the night. They didn’t want him scratching at the bedroom door; they didn’t want to be disturbed, not by Buddy or anyone else.
Since then, they have been together every night. Just about the time when Gillian gets off from work, Buddy heads for the front door, and he paces, agitated, until Gillian arrives, smelling of french fries and herbal soap. The teenage boys from the Hamburger Shack follow her halfway down the Turnpike, but they stop when she turns onto Ben’s street. In the fall, these boys will sign up for Ben Frye’s biology course, even the lazy and stupid ones who have always failed science before. They figure that Mr. Frye knows something, and that they’d better learn whatever it is, and learn fast. But these boys can study all semester, they can be on time for every single lab, they still won’t learn what Ben knows until they fall head over heels in love. When they don’t care if they make fools of themselves, when taking a risk seems the safest thing to do, and walking a tightrope or throwing themselves into white-water rapids feels like child’s play compared with a single kiss, then they’ll understand.
But for now, these boys don’t know the first thing about love, and they sure don’t know women. They would never have imagined that the reason Gillian has been dropping steaming cups of hot coffee while she’s waiting on people at the Hamburger Shack is that she can’t stop thinking about the things Ben does to her when they’re in his bed. She gets lost driving home whenever she thinks about the way he whispers to her; she’s as hot and confused as a teenager.
Gillian has always considered herself an outsider, so it’s been a big relief to discover that Ben is not as normal as she originally thought. He can easily spend three hours at the Owl Café on a Sunday morning, ordering plates of pancakes and eggs; most of the waitresses there have dated him and they get all dreamy when he comes in for breakfast, bringing him free coffee and ignoring whoever his companion might be. He keeps late hours; he is amazingly quick because of all his practice with cards and scarves, and can catch a sparrow or a chickadee in midflight just by reaching into the air.
The unexpected facets of Ben’s personality have truly surprised Gillian, who never would have imagined that a high school biology teacher would be such a fanatic about knots, and that he would want to tie her to the bed or that after her previous experience, she would consider, then agree, and finally find herself begging for it. Whenever Gillian sees a package of shoelaces or a ball of string in the hardware store, she gets totally excited. She has to run home to Sally’s so she can scoop some ice cubes out of the freezer and run them along her arms and inside her thighs just to chill her desire.
After she found several pairs of handcuffs in Ben’s closet—which he often uses in his magic act—ice cubes weren’t enough. Gillian had to go into the yard, turn on the hose, and run a shower of water over her head. She was burning up at the thought of what Ben could do with those handcuffs. She wishes she could have seen his smile when he walked into the room to discover that she’d left them out on his bureau, but he took the hint. That night he made certain the key was far enough away so that neither of them could reach it from the bed. He made love to her for so long that she ached, and still she wouldn’t have thought of asking him to stop.
She wants him never to stop, that’s the thing, that’s what’s making her nervous, since it was always the other way around. Even with Jimmy—it was the man who wanted her, and that’s the way she liked it. When you want someone you’re in his power. Feeling the way she does, Gillian has actually gone over to the high school, where Ben has been setting up his classroom for the fall, to ask him to make love to her. She can’t wait for him to come home, she can’t wait for night to fall, for bedrooms and closed doors. She comes to put her arms around him and then she tells him she wants it right now. It’s not like Jimmy; she really means it. She means it so much that she can’t even remember saying these same words to anyone else. As far as she’s concerned, she never did.
Everyone in the school district knows about Ben and Gillian; the news has gone through the neighborhood like a grass fire. Even the janitor has congratulated Ben on his good fortune. They’re the couple watched by neighbors and discussed at the hardware store and at the bar of Bruno’s Tavern. Dogs follow them when they go out for a walk; cats congregate in Ben’s backyard at midnight. Each time Gillian sits on a rock at the reservoir with a stopwatch to time Ben as he runs, the toads climb out of the mud to sing their deep, bloodless song, and by the time Ben has finished with his run he has to step over a mass of damp gray-green bodies in order to help Gillian down from her rock.
If they’re out together and Ben accidentally meets one of his students, he gets serious and starts to talk about last year’s final exam or the new equipment he’ll be setting up in the lab or the countywide science fair in October. The girls who have been in his classes become wide-eyed and mute in his presence; the boys are so busy staring at Gillian they don’t pay attention to a word he says. But Gillian listens to him. She loves to hear Ben talk about science. It makes her stomach flip over with desire when he starts to discuss cells. If he mentions the pancreas or the liver, it’s all she can do to keep her hands off him. He’s so smart, but that’s not the only thing that gets to Gillian—he acts like she is, too. He assumes she can understand what the hell he’s talking about, and just like a miracle, she does. For the first time she grasps the difference between a vein and an artery. She knows all the major organs, and what’s more, she can actually recite the function of each, not to mention its placement in the human body.
One day, Gillian completely surprises herself by driving to the community college and signing up for two classes that start in the fall. She doesn’t even know whether she’ll be here in September, but if she should happen to stay on, she’ll be studying earth science and biology. At night, when she comes home from being with Ben, Gillian goes to Antonia’s room and borrows her Biology I textbook. She reads about blood and bones. She traces the digestive system with the tip of her finger. When she gets to the chapter on genetics she stays up all night. The notion that there is a progression and a sequence of possibilities when dealing with who a human can and will be is thrilling. The portrait of Maria Owens above Kylie’s bed now seems as certain and as clear as a mathematical equation; on some nights Gillian finds herself staring at it and she has the feeling she’s looking into a mirror. Of course, she always thinks then. Math plus desire equals who you are. For the first time she has begun to appreciate her own gray eyes.
Now when she sees Kylie, who looks enough like her that strangers assume they’re mother and daughter, Gillian senses the connection in her blood. What she feels for Kylie is equal parts science and affection; she would do anything for her niece. She’d step in front of a truck and trade away several years of her life to ensure Kylie’s happiness. And yet Gillian is so busy with Ben Frye, she doesn’t notice that Kylie is barely speaking to her in spite of all this affection. She’d never guess that Kyl
ie has been feeling used and cast aside ever since Ben entered the picture, which is especially painful for her, since she took her aunt’s side against her mother in the birthday debacle. Even though Gillian took her side, too, and is the only one on earth to treat Kylie like a grownup rather than a baby, Kylie has felt betrayed.
Secretly, Kylie has done mean things, nasty tricks worthy of Antonia’s malice. She put ashes in Gillian’s shoes, so her aunt’s toes would be dirty and smudged, and even added some glue for good measure. She poured a can of tunafish down the bathtub drain, and Gillian wound up bathing in oily water that had such a strong scent four stray cats jumped in through the open window.
“Is something wrong?” Gillian asked one day when she turned to see Kylie glaring at her.
“Wrong?” Kylie blinked. She knew how innocent she could seem if she wanted to. She could be an extremely good girl, just the way she used to be. “What would make you ask that?”
The very same night Kylie had five anchovy pizzas delivered to Ben Frye’s house. Being resentful was an awful feeling; she wanted to be happy for Gillian, really she did, but she just couldn’t seem to manage it until one day she happened to see Gillian and Ben walking together by the high school. Kylie was on her way to the town pool, with a towel draped over her shoulder, but she stopped where she was, on the sidewalk outside Mrs. Jerouche’s house, even though Mrs. Jerouche was known to come after you with a hose if you walked across her lawn, and she had an evil cocker spaniel, a prize bitch named Mary Ann, who ate sparrows and drooled and bit little boys on the ankles and knees.
A circle of pale yellow light seemed to hover around Ben and Gillian; the light rose higher, then fanned out, across the street and above the rooftops. The air itself had turned lemony, and when Kylie closed her eyes she felt she was in the aunts’ garden. If you sat there in the shade during the heat of August, and rubbed the lemon thyme between your fingers, the air turned so yellow you’d swear a swarm of bees had gathered above you, even on days when it had done nothing but rain. In that garden, on hot, still days, it was easy to think about possibilities that had never crossed your mind before. It was as if hope had appeared out of nowhere, to settle beside you, and it wasn’t going anywhere, it wasn’t going to desert you now.
On the afternoon when Kylie stood in front of Mrs. Jerouche’s house, she wasn’t the only one to sense something unusual in the air. A group of boys playing kickball all stopped, stunned by the sweet scent wafting down from the rooftops, and they rubbed at their noses. The youngest turned and ran home and begged his mother for lemon pound cake, heated, and spread with honey. Women came to their windows, leaned their elbows on the sills, and breathed more deeply than they had in years. They didn’t even believe in hope anymore, but here it was, in the treetops and the chimneys. When these women looked down at the street and saw Gillian and Ben, arms looped around each other, something inside them started to ache, and their throats got so dry only lemonade could quench their thirst, and even after a whole pitcherful, they still wanted more.
It was hard to be angry with Gillian after that, it was impossible to resent her or even feel slighted. Gillian was so intense when it came to Ben Frye that the butter in Sally’s house kept melting, the way it does whenever love is under a roof. Even the sticks of butter in the refrigerator would melt, and anyone who wanted some would have to pour it on a piece of toast or measure it out with a tablespoon.
On nights when Gillian lies in bed and reads biology, Kylie stretches out on her own bed and leafs through magazines, but really she’s watching Gillian. She’s feeling lucky to be learning about love from someone like her aunt. She’s heard people talking; even the ones who feel the need to point out that Gillian is trash seem envious of her somehow. Gillian may be a waitress at the Hamburger Shack, she may have little lines around her eyes and mouth from all that Arizona sun, but she’s the one Ben Frye’s in love with. She’s the one who has that smile on her face, night and day.
“Guess what the largest organ in the human body is,” Gillian asks Kylie one evening when they’re both in bed reading.
“Skin,” Kylie says.
“Wise guy,” Gillian tells her. “Know-it-all.”
“Everybody’s jealous that you got Mr. Frye,” Kylie says.
Gillian goes on reading her Bio I book, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t listening. She has the ability to talk about one thing and concentrate on another. She learned it from all that time she spent with Jimmy.
“That makes him sound like he was something I picked up in a store. Like he was a grapefruit, or something on sale, and I got him half-price.” Gillian wrinkles her nose. “Anyway, it wasn’t luck.”
Kylie rolls onto her stomach so she can study her aunt’s dreamy face. “Then what was it?”
“Destiny.” Gillian closes her biology textbook. She has the best smile in the world, Kylie will certainly grant her that. “Fate.”
Kylie thinks about destiny all night long. She thinks about her father, whom she remembers only from a single photograph. She thinks about Gideon Barnes, because she could fall in love with him if she let herself, and she knows he could fall in love with her, too. But Kylie’s not so certain that’s what she wants. She’s not sure if she’s ready yet, or if she’ll ever be. Lately, she’s so sensitive and tuned in she can pick up Gillian’s dreams as she sleeps in the next bed, dreams so scandalous and hot that Kylie wakes up aroused, and then she’s more embarrassed and confused than ever.
Being thirteen is not what she hoped it would be. It’s lonely and not any fun whatsoever. Sometimes she feels she’s stumbled onto a whole secret world she doesn’t understand. When she stares at herself in the mirror she just can’t decide who she is. If she ever does figure it out, she’ll know whether she should dye her hair blond or brown, but for now, she’s in the middle. She’s in the middle about everything. She misses Gideon; she goes to the basement and takes out her chessboard, which always reminds her of him, but she can’t bring herself to call him. When she runs into any of the girls she goes to school with and they invite her to go swimming or to the mall, Kylie isn’t interested. It’s not that she dislikes them; it’s just that she doesn’t want them to see who she really is, when she herself doesn’t know.
What she does know is that awful things can happen if you don’t watch out. The man in the garden has taught her this, and it’s a lesson she won’t soon forget. Grief is all around; it’s just invisible to most people. Most people will figure out a way to stop themselves from being aware of agony—they’ll have a good stiff drink, or swim a hundred laps, or not eat anything all day, except for a small polished apple and a head of lettuce—but Kylie isn’t like that. She’s too sensitive, and her ability to feel others’ pain is getting stronger. If she passes a baby in his stroller, and he’s wailing until he’s bright red with frustration and neglect, Kylie herself is grumpy for the rest of the day. If a dog limps by with a stone embedded in its paw, or a woman buying fruit in the supermarket closes her eyes and stops to recall a boy who drowned fifteen years ago, the one she loved so much, Kylie starts to feel as if she’s going to pass out.
Sally watches her daughter and worries. She knows what happens when you bottle up your sorrow, she knows what she’s done to herself, the walls she’s built, the tower she’s made, stone by stone. But they’re walls of grief, and the tower is drenched in a thousand tears, and that’s no protection; it will all fall to the ground with one touch. When she sees Kylie climb the stairs to her bedroom Sally senses another tower being built, a single stone perhaps, yet it’s enough to chill her. She tries to talk to Kylie, but each time she approaches her, Kylie runs from the room, slamming the door behind her.
“Can’t I have any privacy?” is what Kylie answers to almost any question Sally asks. “Can’t you just leave me alone?”
The mothers of other thirteen-year-old girls assure Sally such behavior is normal. Linda Bennett, next door, insists this adolescent gloom is temporary, even though her daughter, Jes
sie—whom Kylie has always avoided, describing her as a loser and a nerd—recently changed her name to Isabella and has pierced her navel and her nose. But Sally hasn’t expected to go through this with Kylie, who’s always been so open and good-natured. Thirteen with Antonia was no great shock, since she’d always been selfish and rude. Even Gillian didn’t go wild until high school, when the boys realized how beautiful she was, and Sally never gave herself permission to be moody and disrespectful. She didn’t think she had the luxury to talk back; as far as she knew, nothing was legal. The aunts didn’t have to keep her. They had every right to cast her out, and she wasn’t about to give them a reason to do so. At thirteen, Sally cooked dinner and washed the clothes and went to bed on time. She never thought about whether or not she had privacy or happiness or anything else. She never dared to.
Now, with Kylie, Sally holds herself back, but it isn’t easy to do. She keeps her mouth closed, and all her opinions and good advice to herself. She flinches when Kylie slams doors; she weeps to see her pain. Sometimes Sally listens outside her daughter’s bedroom, but Kylie no longer bothers to confide in Gillian. Even that would be a relief, but Kylie has pulled away from everyone. The most Sally can do is watch as Kylie’s isolation becomes a circle: the lonelier you are, the more you pull away, until humans seem an alien race, with customs and a language you can’t begin to understand. This Sally knows better than most. She knows it late at night, when Gillian is at Ben Frye’s, and the moths tap against the window screens, and she feels so separated from the summer night that those screens might as well be stones.
Practical Magic Page 15