Practical Magic

by Alice Hoffman

  “Maybe it’s nothing,” Gillian says, not wanting Sally to worry. “Maybe they’re just growing up.”

  “What?” Sally says. Just the suggestion makes her feel skittish and upsets her in a way pregnancies and cults simply can’t. This is the possibility she’s avoided considering. She cannot believe Gillian’s talent for always saying the exact wrong thing. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? They’re kids.”

  “They’ve got to grow up, eventually,” Gillian says, stumbling in deeper. “Before you know it, they’ll be out of here.”

  “Well, thanks for your expert parenting advice.”

  Gillian doesn’t catch the sarcasm; now that she’s begun, she has another recommendation for her sister. “You need to stop focusing so much on being just a mom, before you shrivel into dust and we have to sweep you up with a broom. You should start to date. What’s holding you back? Your kids are going out—why not you?”

  “Any more words of wisdom?” Sally is such pure ice even Gillian can’t fail to notice she’s getting frozen out.

  “Not one.” Gillian backs off now. “Not a syllable.”

  Gillian has the urge for a cigarette, then realizes she hasn’t had one in nearly two weeks. The funny thing is, she’s stopped trying to quit. It’s looking at all those illustrations of the human body. It’s seeing those drawings of lungs.

  “My girls are babies,” Sally says. “For your information.”

  She sounds a little hysterical. For the past sixteen years—except for the one year when Michael died and she went so inside herself she couldn’t find her way out—she has been thinking about her children. Occasionally she has thought about snowstorms and the cost of heat and electricity and the fact that she often gets hives when September closes in and she knows she has to go back to work. But mostly she’s been preoccupied with Antonia and Kylie, with fevers and cramps, with new shoes to buy every six months and making sure everyone gets well-balanced meals and at least eight hours of sleep every night. Without such thoughts, she’s not certain she will continue to exist. Without them, what exactly is she left with?

  That night Sally goes to bed and sleeps like a stone, and she doesn’t get up in the morning.

  “The flu,” Gillian guesses.

  From beneath her quilt, Sally can hear Gillian making coffee. She can hear Antonia talking to Scott on the phone, and Kylie running the shower. All that day, Sally stays where she is. She’s waiting for someone to need her, she’s waiting for an accident or an emergency, but it never happens. At night, she gets up to use the toilet and wash her face with cold water, and the following morning she goes on sleeping, and she’s still sleeping at noon, when Kylie brings her some lunch on a wooden tray.

  “A stomach virus,” Gillian suggests when she comes home from work and is informed that Sally will not touch her chicken noodle soup or her tea and has asked for the curtains in her room to be drawn.

  Sally can hear them still; she can hear them right now. How they whisper and cook dinner, laughing and cutting up carrots and celery with sharp knives. How they wash all the laundry and hang the sheets out to dry on the line in the yard. How they comb their hair and brush their teeth and go on with their lives.

  On her third day in bed, Sally stops opening her eyes. She will not consider toast with grape jelly, or Tylenol and water, or extra pillows. Her black hair is tangled; her skin pale as paper. Antonia and Kylie are frightened; they stand in the doorway and watch their mother sleep. They’re afraid any chatter will disturb her, so the house grows quieter and quieter still. The girls blame themselves, for not being well behaved when they should have been, for all those years of arguing and acting like selfish, spoiled brats. Antonia phones the doctor, but he doesn’t make house calls and Sally refuses to get dressed and go to his office.

  It is nearly two a.m. when Gillian gets home from Ben’s house. It’s the last night of the month, and the moon is thin and silvery; the air is turning to mist. Gillian always comes back to Sally’s place; it’s like a safety net. But tonight Ben told her he was tired of the way she always left as soon as they were finished in bed. He wanted her to move in with him.

  Gillian thought he was kidding, she really did. She laughed and said, “I’ll bet you say that to all the girls, after you’ve fucked them twenty or thirty times.”

  “No,” Ben said. He wasn’t smiling. “I’ve never said it before.”

  All day long Ben had had the feeling that he was about to either lose or win, and he couldn’t tell which it would be. He put on a show at the hospital this morning, and one of the children, a boy of eight, wept when Ben made Buddy disappear into a large wooden box.

  “He’ll be back,” Ben assured this most distraught member of his audience.

  But the boy was convinced that Buddy’s reemergence was impossible. Once someone was gone, he told Ben, that was the end of him. And in the case of this boy, the theory was irrefutable. He’d been in the hospital for half his life, and this time he would not be going home. Already, he was leaving his body; Ben could see it just by looking at him. He was disappearing by inches.

  And so Ben did what a magician almost never does: he took the boy aside and revealed how Buddy sat quietly and snugly within a false bottom of the disappearing box. But the boy refused to be consoled. Perhaps this wasn’t even the same rabbit ; there was no proof, after all. A white rabbit was an everyday thing, you could buy a dozen at a pet store. And so the boy continued to cry, and Ben might have wept right along with this child had he not been lucky enough to possess the tricks of his trade. Quickly, he reached to pull a silver dollar from behind the boy’s ear.

  “See.” Ben grinned. “Presto,” he announced.

  The boy stopped crying all at once; he was startled out of his tears. When Ben told him the silver dollar was his to keep, this boy looked, for a brief instant, the way he might have if awful things had not happened to him. At noon, Ben left the hospital and went to the Owl Café, where he had three cups of black coffee. He didn’t have lunch; he didn’t order the hash and eggs that he liked, or the bacon, lettuce, and tomato on whole wheat. The waitresses watched him carefully, hoping he’d soon be up to his old tricks, setting the salt shakers on end, starting fires in the ashtrays with a snap of his fingers, snatching tablecloths from beneath their place settings, but Ben just went on drinking coffee. After he’d paid and left a large tip, he drove around for hours. He kept thinking about the life span of a mayfly, and all the time he had wasted, and frankly he wasn’t willing to waste any more.

  Ben has spent his whole life afraid that whoever he loves will disappear, and there’ll be no finding her: not behind the veils, not in the false bottom of the largest wooden box, the red lacquer one he keeps in the basement but cannot bring himself to use, even though he’s been assured he can drive swords through the wood without causing a single wound. Well, that had changed. He wanted an answer, right then, before Gillian got dressed and ran back to the safety of her sister’s house.

  “It’s very simple,” he said. “Yes or no?”

  “This isn’t a yes-or-no kind of thing,” Gillian hedged.

  “Oh, yes,” Ben said with absolute certainty. “It is.”

  “No,” Gillian insisted. Looking at his solemn face, she wished then that she’d known him forever. She wished that he had been the first one to kiss her, and the first to make love to her. She wished she could say yes. “It’s more of a thinking-it-over kind of thing.”

  Gillian knew where this argument would lead. Start living with someone, and before you knew it you were married, and that was a human condition Gillian planned to avoid repeating. In that arena, she was something of a jinx. As soon as she said “I do,” she always realized that she didn’t at all, and that she never had, and she’d better get out fast.

  “Don’t you understand?” Gillian told Ben. “If I didn’t love you I’d move in today. I wouldn’t think twice.”

  Actually, she’s been thinking about it ever since she left him, and she�
�ll keep right on thinking about it, whether she wants to or not. Ben doesn’t understand how dangerous love can be, but Gillian certainly does. She’s lost at this too many times to sit back and relax. She has to stay on her toes, and she has to stay single. What she really needs is a hot bath and some peace and quiet, but when she sneaks in the back door she finds Antonia and Kylie waiting up for her. They’re frantic and ready to call for an ambulance. They’re beside themselves with worry. Something has happened to their mother, and they don’t know what.

  The bedroom is so dark that it takes Gillian a while to realize that the lump beneath the blankets is indeed a human life form. If there’s anything Gillian knows, it’s self-pity and despair. She can make that particular diagnosis in two seconds flat, since she’s been there herself about a thousand times, and she knows what the cure is, too. She ignores the girls’ protests and sends them to bed, then she goes to the kitchen and fixes a pitcher of margaritas. She takes the pitcher, along with two glasses dipped in coarse salt, out to the backyard and leaves it all beside the two lawn chairs set up near the little garden where the cucumbers are doing their best to grow.

  This time when she goes to stand in Sally’s doorway, the jumble of blankets doesn’t fool her. There’s a person hiding in there.

  “Get out of bed,” Gillian says.

  Sally keeps her eyes shut. She’s drifting somewhere quiet and white. She wishes she could shut her ears as well, because she can hear Gillian approaching. Gillian pulls down the sheet and grabs Sally’s arm.

  “Out,” she says.

  Sally falls off the bed. She opens her eyes and blinks.

  “Go away,” she tells her sister. “Don’t bother me.”

  Gillian helps Sally to her feet and guides her out of the room and down the stairs. Leading Sally is like dragging a bundle of sticks; she doesn’t resist, but she’s dead weight. Gillian pushes the back door open, and once they’re outside, the rush of moist air slaps Sally in the face.

  “Oh,” she says.

  She really does feel weak and is relieved to sink into a lawn chair. She leans her head back and is about to close her eyes, but then she notices how many stars are visible tonight. A long time ago, they used to go up to the roof of the aunts’ house on summer nights. You could get out through the attic window, if you weren’t afraid of heights or easily scared by the little brown bats who came to feast on the clouds of mosquitoes drifting through the air. They both always made certain to wish on the first star, always the same wish, which of course they could never tell.

  “Don’t worry,” Gillian says. “They’ll still need you after they’re all grown up.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I still need you.”

  Sally looks at her sister, who’s pouring them both margaritas. “For what?”

  “If you hadn’t been here for me when all that happened with Jimmy, I’d be in jail right now. I just wanted you to know that I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “That’s because he was heavy,” Sally says. “If you’d had a wheelbarrow, you wouldn’t have needed me.”

  “I mean it,” Gillian insists. “I owe you forever.”

  Gillian raises her glass in the direction of Jimmy’s grave. “Adios, baby,” Gillian says. She shivers and takes a sip of her drink.

  “Good-bye and good riddance,” Sally tells the damp, humid air.

  After being cooped up for so long, it’s good to be outside. It’s good to be here together on the lawn at this hour, when the crickets have begun their slow, late-summer call.

  Gillian has salt on her fingers from her margarita. She has that beautiful smile on her face, and she seems younger tonight. Maybe the New York humidity is good for her skin, or maybe it’s the moonlight, but something about her seems brand new. “I never even believed in happiness. I didn’t think it existed. Now look at me. I’m ready to believe in just about anything.”

  Sally wishes she could reach out and touch the moon and see whether it feels as cool as it looks. Lately, she’s been wondering if perhaps when the living become the dead they leave an empty space behind, a hollow that no one else can fill. She was lucky once, for a very brief time. Maybe she should just be grateful for that.

  “Ben asked me to move in with him,” Gillian says. “I pretty much told him no.”

  “Do it,” Sally tells her.

  “Just like that?” Gillian says.

  Sally nods with certainty.

  “I might consider it,” Gillian admits. “For a while. As long as there are no commitments.”

  “You’ll move in with him,” Sally assures her.

  “You’re probably just saying all this because you want to get rid of me.”

  “I wouldn’t be getting rid of you. You’d be three blocks away. If I wanted to get rid of you, I’d tell you to go back to Arizona.”

  A circle of white moths has gathered around the porch light. Their wings are so heavy and damp the moths seem to be flying in slow motion. They’re as white as the moon, and when they fly off, suddenly, they leave a powdery white trail in the air.

  “East of the Mississippi.” Gillian runs her hand through her hair. “Yikes.”

  Sally stretches out flat in the lawn chair and looks into the sky. “Actually,” she says, “I’m glad you’re here.”

  They both always wished for the same thing when they were sitting on the roof of the aunts’ house on those hot, lonely nights. Sometime in the future, when they were both all grown up, they wanted to look up at the stars and not be afraid. This is the night they had wished for. This is that future, right now. And they can stay out as long as they want to, they can remain on the lawn until every star has faded, and still be there to watch the perfect blue sky at noon.

  LEVITATION

  ALWAYS keep mint on your windowsill in August, to ensure that buzzing flies will stay outside, where they belong. Don’t think the summer is over, even when roses droop and turn brown and the stars shift position in the sky. Never presume August is a safe or reliable time of the year. It is the season of reversals, when the birds no longer sing in the morning and the evenings are made up of equal parts golden light and black clouds. The rock-solid and the tenuous can easily exchange places until everything you know can be questioned and put into doubt.

  On especially hot days, when you’d like to murder whoever crosses you, or at least give him a good slap, drink lemonade instead. Go out and buy a first-rate ceiling fan. Make certain never to step on one of the crickets that may have taken refuge in a dark corner of your living room, or your luck will change for the worse. Avoid men who call you Baby, and women who have no friends, and dogs that scratch at their bellies and refuse to lie down at your feet. Wear dark glasses; bathe with lavender oil and cool, fresh water. Seek shelter from the sun at noon.

  It is Gideon Barnes’s intention to ignore August completely and sleep for four weeks, refusing to wake up until September, when life is settled and school has already begun. But less than a week into this difficult month, his mother informs him that she’s getting married, to some guy Gideon has been only dimly aware of.

  They’ll be moving several miles down the Turnpike, which means that Gideon will be going to a new school, along with the three new siblings he’ll meet at a dinner his mother is giving next weekend. Afraid of what her son’s reaction might be, Jeannie Barnes has put this announcement off for some time, but now that she’s told him, Gideon only nods. He thinks it over while his mother nervously waits for a response, and finally he says, “Great, Mom. I’m happy for you.”

  Jeannie Barnes can’t believe she’s heard correctly, but she doesn’t have time to ask Gideon to repeat himself, because he ducks into his room and thirty seconds later he’s gone. He’s out of there, pronto, just as he’s going to be in five years, only then it will be for real. Then he’ll be at Berkeley or UCLA, instead of racing down the Turnpike, desperate to be gone. He’s driven by instinct; there’s no need to think, because inside he knows where he wants to be
. He arrives at Kylie’s house less than ten minutes later, drenched with sweat, and finds her sitting on an old Indian bedspread under the crab apple tree, drinking a glass of iced tea. They haven’t seen each other since Kylie’s birthday, yet when Gideon looks at her she is unbelievably familiar. The arch of her neck, her shoulders, her lips, the shape of her hands, Gideon sees all this and his throat goes dry. He must be an idiot to feel this way, but there’s nothing he can do. He doesn’t even know if he can manage to speak.

  It is so hot the birds aren’t flying, so humid not a single bee can rise into the air. Kylie is startled to see Gideon; the ice cube she’s been crunching on drops out of her mouth and slides down her knee. She pays no attention to it. She doesn’t notice the plane flying above, or the caterpillar making its way across the bedspread, or the fact that her skin feels even hotter than it did a minute ago.

  “Let’s see how fast I can put you in check,” Gideon says. He has his chessboard with him, the old wooden one his father gave him on his eighth birthday.

  Kylie bites down on her lip, considering. “Ten bucks to the winner,” she says.

  “Sure.” Gideon grins. He has shaved his head again, and his scalp is as smooth as a stone. “I could use the cash.”

  Gideon flops down on the grass beside Kylie, but he can’t quite bring himself to look at her. She may think this is just a game they’re about to play, but it’s much more. If Kylie doesn’t go for the jugular, if she doesn’t pull out all her best moves, he’ll know they’re not friends anymore. He doesn’t want it to be that way, but if they can’t be their true selves with each other, they might as well walk away now.

  This sort of test can make a person nervous, and it’s not until Kylie is considering her third move that Gideon has the guts to look at her. Her hair isn’t as blond as it was. Maybe she dyed it, or maybe the blond stuff washed out; it’s a pretty color now, like honey.

  “Looking at something?” Kylie says when she catches him staring.