Practical Magic

by Alice Hoffman

  “No way,” Gillian says. “It took years of practice.”

  Just then the aunts both tilt their heads at the very same time and make a very little noise low in their throats, a kind of click so close to silence that anyone who wasn’t listening carefully might mistake it for the faint call of a cricket or the sigh of a mouse beneath the floorboards.

  “It’s time,” Aunt Frances says.

  “We have family business to discuss,” Jet tells Ben as she leads him to the door.

  Aunt Jet’s voice is always sweet, yet the tone isn’t one someone would dare to disobey. Ben grabs his rain slicker and waves to Gillian.

  “I’ll call you in the morning,” he declares. “I’ll come over for breakfast.”

  “Don’t screw this one up,” Aunt Jet tells Gillian after she’s closed the door behind Ben.

  “I won’t,” Gillian assures her as well. She goes to the window and takes a look at the backyard. “It’s awful tonight.”

  The wind is tearing shingles from the roofs, and every cat in the neighborhood has demanded to be let in or has taken refuge in a window well, to shiver and yowl.

  “Maybe we should wait,” Sally ventures.

  “Bring the pot around back,” Aunt Jet tells Kylie and Antonia.

  The candle in the center of the table casts a circle of wavery light. Aunt Jet takes Gillian’s hand in her own. “We have to see to this now. You don’t put off dealing with a ghost.”

  “What do you mean, a ghost?” Gillian says. “We want to make certain the body stays buried.”

  “Fine,” Aunt Frances says. “If that’s how you want to look at it.”

  Gillian wishes she’d had a gin and bitters herself when the aunts did. Instead, she finishes the last of her cold coffee, which has been sitting in a cup on the counter since late afternoon. By tomorrow morning the creek behind the high school will be deep as a river; toads will have to scramble for higher ground; children won’t think twice about diving into the warm, murky water, even if they’re dressed in their Sunday clothes and wearing their best pair of shoes.

  “Okay,” Gillian says. She knows her aunts are talking about more than a body; it’s the spirit of the man, that’s what’s haunting them. “Fine,” she tells the aunts, and she swings open the back door.

  Antonia and Kylie carry the pot out to the yard. The rain is quite near; they can taste it in the air. The aunts have already had the girls bring their suitcase over to the hedge of thorns. They stand close together, and when the wind rustles their skirts the fabric makes a moaning sound.

  “This dissolves what once was flesh,” Aunt Frances says.

  She signals to Gillian.

  “Me?” Gillian takes a step backward, but there’s no place to go. Sally is right behind her.

  “Go on,” Sally tells her.

  Antonia and Kylie are holding on to the heavy pot; the wind is so strong that the hedge of thorns whips out, as if trying to cut them. The wasps’ nests sway back and forth. It is definitely time.

  “Oh, brother,” Gillian whispers to Sally. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

  Antonia’s fingers are turning white with the effort she needs not to drop the pot. “This is really heavy,” she says in a shaky voice.

  “Believe me,” Sally tells Gillian. “You can.”

  If there’s one thing Sally is now certain of, it’s how you can amaze yourself by the things you’re willing to do. Those are her daughters, the girls she wanted to lead normal lives, and she’s allowing them to stand over a pile of bones with a spaghetti pot filled mostly with lye. What has happened to her? What has snapped? Where is that logical woman, the one people could depend on, day after day? She can’t stop thinking about Gary, no matter how hard she tries. She actually called the Hide-A-Way to ask if he’d checked out, and he has. He’s gone, and here she is, thinking about him. Last night, she dreamed of the desert. She dreamed the aunts had sent her a cutting from an apple tree in their yard and that it bloomed without water. And in her dream the horses that ate apples from that tree ran faster than all the others, and any man who took a bite from a pie Sally fixed with these apples was bound to be hers, for life.

  Sally and Gillian take the pot from the girls, although Gillian keeps her eyes closed as they turn it over and pour out the lye. The damp earth sizzles and is hot; as the mixture seeps deeper into the ground, a mist appears. It’s the color of regret, it’s the color of heartbreak, the gray of doves and early morning.

  “Step back,” the aunts tell them, for the earth has begun to bubble. The roots of the thornbushes are being dissolved by the mixture, as are stones and beetles, leather and bones. They can’t move away fast enough, but still something is happening beneath Kylie’s feet.

  “Damn it,” Sally cries.

  Right under Kylie’s feet the earth is shifting, falling in on itself, like a landslide, going down. Kylie feels it, she knows it, yet she freezes. She’s falling into a hole, she’s falling fast, but Antonia reaches to grab the back of her shirt and then pulls. She wrenches Kylie back so hard and so fast that Antonia can hear her own elbow pop.

  The girls stand there, out of breath and terrified. Without realizing it, Gillian has latched on to Sally’s arm; she’s holding on so tight that Sally will have the marks of her sister’s fingers on her skin for days afterward. Now they all step back. They do it quickly. They do it without having to be told. A thread of blood-red vapor is rising from the place where Jimmy’s heart would have been, a small tornado of spite that disappears as it meets the air.

  “That was him,” Kylie says of the red vapor, and sure enough, they can smell beer and boot polish, they can feel the air grow as hot as embers in an ashtray. And then nothing. Nothing at all. Gillian can’t be sure if she’s crying, or if the rain has begun. “He’s really gone,” Kylie tells her.

  But the aunts are taking no chances. They’ve carried along twenty blue stones inside their largest suitcase, stones Maria Owens had brought to the house on Magnolia Street more than two hundred years ago. Stones such as these form the path in the aunts’ garden, but there were extras stored beside the potting shed, enough to fashion a small patio in the spot where the lilacs once grew. Now that the hedge of thorns is nothing but ashes, it’s easy for the Owens women to put down a circle of stones. The patio won’t be fancy, but it will be wide enough for a small wrought-iron table and four chairs. Some of the little girls in the neighborhood will beg to have tea parties out here, and when their mothers laugh and ask why this patio is better than their own, the little girls will insist the blue stones are lucky.

  There’s no such thing as luck, their mothers will tell them. Drink your orange juice, have your cakes, keep your party in your own backyard. And yet, every time their mothers’ backs are turned, the little girls will drag their dolls and teddy bears and china tea sets over to the Owens patio. “Good luck,” they’ll whisper as they clink their cups together in a toast. “Good luck,” they’ll say as the stars rise above them in the sky.

  Some people believe that every question has a logical answer; there’s an order to everything, which is neat and based purely on empirical evidence. But really, what could it be but luck that the rain doesn’t begin in earnest until their work is done. The Owens women have mud under their fingernails, and their arms ache from carting those heavy stones. Antonia and Kylie will sleep well tonight, as will the aunts, who have been plagued by insomnia from time to time. They will sleep the whole night through, even though lightning will strike in twelve separate places on Long Island before the storm is over. A house in East Meadow will be burned to the ground. A surfer in Long Beach who always longed for hurricanes and big waves will be fried. A maple tree that has grown in the Y field for three hundred years will be split in two and will have to be taken down with chain saws to make certain it won’t collapse on top of the Little League team.

  Only Sally and Gillian are awake to watch when the worst of the storm arrives. They’re not worried by weather reports. Tomorrow
there will be branches strewn across the lawn, and the trashcans will roll down the street, but the air will be fragrant and mild. They can have their breakfast and coffee outside, if they wish. They can listen for the song of sparrows who’ve come to beg for crumbs.

  “The aunts didn’t seem as disappointed as I thought they’d be,” Gillian says. “In me.”

  The rain is coming down hard; it’s washing those blue stones out in the yard clean as new.

  “They’d be stupid if they were disappointed,” Sally says. She loops her arm through her sister’s. She thinks she may actually mean what she’s just said. “And the aunts are definitely not stupid.”

  Tonight Sally and Gillian will concentrate on the rain, and tomorrow on the blue sky. They will do the best they can, but they will always be the girls they once were, dressed in their black coats, walking home through the fallen leaves to a house where no one could see into the windows, and no one could see out. At twilight they will always think of those women who would do anything for love. And in spite of everything, they will discover that this, above all others, is their favorite time of day. It’s the hour when they remember everything the aunts taught them. It’s the hour they’re most grateful for.

  ON the outskirts of the city the fields have turned red and the trees are all twisted and black. There is frost covering the meadows and smoke rising from the chimneys. In the park, in the very center of town, the swans rest their heads beneath their wings for comfort and warmth. The gardens have been put to bed, except for the one in the Owens yard. Cabbages are growing there, although some of them will be plucked from the rows this morning, and cooked with bouillon. Potatoes have already been dug up, boiled, and mashed, and are currently being flavored with salt, pepper, and sprigs from the rosemary that grows beside the gate. The willowware serving bowl has been rinsed clean and is drying on the rack.

  “You’re using too much pepper,” Gillian tells her sister.

  “I think I can manage to make mashed potatoes.” Sally has fixed them at every Thanksgiving dinner she’s cooked since she first left the aunts’ house. She is completely sure of what she’s doing, even though the kitchen utensils are old-fashioned and a bit rusty. But of course, since Gillian is such a changed woman she gives advice freely, even when she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

  “I know about pepper,” Gillian insists. “That’s too much.”

  “Well, I know potatoes,” Sally says, and as far as she’s concerned, that had better be that, especially if they want to serve dinner at three.

  They arrived late last night; Ben and Gillian are staying in the attic, Kylie and Antonia are sharing what used to be a sitting room, and Sally is in the chilly little alcove up near the back stairs on a fold-out cot. The heat’s on the fritz, so they’ve dragged out all the old feather quilts and built a fire in every fireplace, and they’ve called the boiler man, Mr. Jenkins, to come repair whatever’s wrong. Even though it’s Thanksgiving morning and Mr. Jenkins doesn’t want to leave the comfort of his easy chair, when Frances got on the phone with him they all knew he’d be there by noon.

  The aunts keep complaining that too much fuss is being made, but they smile when Kylie and Antonia grab them and kiss their cheeks and tell them how much they love them and insist they always will. The aunts are advised that they mustn’t be concerned that Scott Morrison is taking the bus up from Cambridge, since he’ll bring a sleeping bag and will camp out on the living room floor; they’ll barely even be aware of his presence, and that goes for the two roommates he’s bringing along as well.

  The only cat left is Magpie, who is so ancient he gets up only in order to get to his food bowl. The rest of the time he’s curled onto a special silk cushion on a kitchen chair. One of Magpie’s eyes doesn’t open at all anymore, but his good eye is fixed on the turkey, which is cooling on an earthenware platter in the center of the wooden table. Buddy is being kept in the attic—Ben is there with him, feeding him the last of the carrots from the aunts’ garden—since Magpie has been known to catch baby bunnies who cower between the rows of cabbage. He’s been known to eat them whole.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Gillian tells the cat when she sees him eyeing the turkey, but as soon as her back is turned, Sally takes a bit of white meat, which she herself would never eat, and feeds old Magpie by hand.

  The aunts usually have a broiled chicken delivered from the market on Thanksgiving Day. One year they made do with frozen turkey dinners, and another year they said to hell with the whole silly holiday and had a nice pot roast. They were thinking of doing up another roast this year when the girls all insisted on coming to visit for the holiday.

  “Oh, let them cook,” Jet tells her sister, who can’t stand the clinking and clanking of pots and pans. “They’re having fun.”

  Sally stands at the sink, rinsing off the potato masher, the very same one she used as a child when she insisted on making nutritious suppers. She can see through the window to the yard, where Antonia and Kylie are running back and forth, chasing away the squirrels. Antonia wears one of Scott Morrison’s old sweaters, which she has dyed black, and it’s so big that when she waves her arms at the squirrels she looks as if she had long woolen hands. Kylie is laughing so hard she has to sit down on the ground. She points to one squirrel who refuses to move, a mean granddaddy who’s screaming at Antonia, since he considers this to be his garden; the cabbages they’ve been gathering he’s been watching all summer and fall.

  “Those girls are pretty cute,” Gillian says when she comes to stand beside Sally. She meant to argue some more about the pepper, but she drops the subject when she sees the look on her sister’s face.

  “They’re all grown up,” Sally says in her matter-of-fact voice.

  “Yeah, right,” Gillian sputters. The girls are chasing the granddaddy squirrel around in a circle. They shriek and throw their arms around each other when he suddenly jumps onto the garden gate and glares down at them. “They look real mature.”

  In the beginning of October, Gillian finally received word from the attorney general’s office in Tucson. For more than two months the sisters had been waiting to see what Gary would do with the information Sally had given him; they’d been moody and distant from everyone except each other. Then, at last, a letter came, registered mail, from someone named Arno Williams. James Hawkins, he wrote, was dead. The body had been found out in the desert, where he must have been holed up for months, and in some kind of drunken stupor he’d rolled into his campfire and been burned beyond recognition. The only way they’d been able to identify him after he’d been brought down to the morgue was through his silver ring, which had melted somewhat and which was now being sent to Gillian, along with a certified check for eight hundred dollars from the sale of the Oldsmobile they’d impounded, since Jimmy had listed her as his only next of kin down at the Department of Motor Vehicles, which, in a way, was more or less the truth.

  “Gary Hallet,” Gillian said right away. “He slipped that ring to some dead guy who couldn’t be identified. You know what this means, don’t you?”

  “He just wanted to see that justice was done, and it has been.”

  “He’s completely hooked.” Gillian couldn’t seem to let this go. “And so are you.”

  “Will you please shut up?” Sally had said.

  She refused to think about Gary. She really did. She rubbed at the center of her chest with two fingers, then grabbed her left wrist between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand to check her pulse rate. She didn’t care what Gillian said; something was definitely wrong with her. Her heart did actual flip-flops; it beat too fast and then too slow, and if that didn’t mean she had some sort of condition, she didn’t know what did.

  Gillian shook her head and groaned; that’s how pathetic Sally had looked. “You really don’t know. That heart-attack thing you’ve been having? It’s love,” she crowed. “That’s what it feels like.”

  “You’re nuts,” Sally had said. “Don’t think y
ou know everything, because let me tell you, you don’t.”

  But there was one thing Gillian did know for sure, and that was why, the very next Saturday, she and Ben Frye got married. It was a small ceremony at the town hall, and they didn’t exchange wedding rings, but they kissed for so long at the counter in the hall of records that they were asked to leave. Being married feels different this time to Gillian.

  “Fourth time’s the charm,” she says to people who ask her what the secret of a happy marriage is, but that’s not the way she feels about it. She knows now that when you don’t lose yourself in the bargain, you find you have double the love you started with, and that’s one recipe that can’t be tampered with.

  Sally goes to the refrigerator for some milk to add to the mashed potatoes, although she’s sure Gillian will tell her to add water instead, since she’s such a know-it-all lately. Sally has to push several covered dishes around and as she does a lid falls off a shallow pot.

  “Look here,” she calls to Gillian. “They’re still at it.”

  In the pot is the heart of a dove, pierced by seven pins.

  Gillian comes to stand beside her sister. “Somebody’s getting spelled, that’s for sure.”

  Sally carefully puts the lid back in place. “I wonder what ever happened to her.”

  Gillian knows she’s talking about the drugstore girl. “I used to think about her whenever things went wrong,” Gillian admits. “I wanted to write to her, to let her know I was sorry I said all those things to her that day.”

  “She probably jumped out a window,” Sally guesses. “Or she drowned herself in the bathtub.”

  “Let’s go find out,” Gillian says. She puts the turkey on top of the refrigerator, where Magpie can’t reach it, and quickly shoves the mashed potatoes in the oven to keep them warm, along with a pan of chestnut stuffing.

  “No,” Sally says, “we’re too old to snoop.” But she lets herself be pulled along, first to the coat closet, where they each grab an old parka, and then out the front door.