The Witch

by Jean Thompson

  “Like they were in some kind of sitcom,” Richard said, surprising himself at having arrived, almost by accident, at what he really felt. His friend’s display of marital happiness made him want to grind his teeth. It was as if he’d never known his friend, as if they had not passed through all their wild-ass years together, as if getting married made you a stranger to yourself and everybody else.

  “A hilarious sitcom about young married life,” she agreed. Once more stretching herself out in her seat, dangling her legs in a way she no doubt intended to be kittenish, provocative. “But how do you tell the difference? I mean, if people are really happy, or just trying to sell you on the idea? What do they do to convince you?”

  “Nothing. You don’t have to act genuine if you are genuine.”

  “Goodness, why are you in such a bad mood?”

  “I’m not,” Richard said heavily, because once again she was too eager to ascribe meaning and motive, cause and effect, to everything. But of course, he was now actually in a bad mood, and he disliked having to answer questions.

  “Could have fooled me.” She turned to look out her window in pointed silence. Thank God, a stop to the rattling noise of conversation.

  He focused on his driving, powering past the slower traffic with the sudden acceleration that he knew alarmed her. She braced herself against the dashboard and recrossed her legs. Her skirt was short and it rode up farther on her thighs when she sat. She was wearing stockings that gave her legs a glossy, impermeable look. As if she wore them to taunt and frustrate him, along with all the other obstacles between right now and any hope of ending up in bed together naked. Because he was going to have to climb out of his surly temper (which she had in part provoked!), say the right solicitous things, humble himself, cater to her, make harmless, cooing noises. And this was what he had chosen for himself, everything that awaited, married life, a blind road leading over a cliff.

  “Rich! Jesus!”

  He had almost ridden up the bumper of a slower car. He braked, cut into the next lane, downshifted to reduce his speed. Someone behind them laid on their horn, then the sound flattened, left behind in their wake. Richard looked over at her. “Sorry.”

  “What are you doing, are you drunk?”

  “I spaced out. I said I’m sorry.”

  “God!” She had been scared and now she was angry, and she wasn’t going to let it go. “You get in a pissy mood for no reason, and you act out with reckless driving? What are you, a teenager?”

  He didn’t answer, didn’t rise to it, and she sighed and tried coming at him from another direction. “I thought you liked Ed and Charmaine. I thought you were looking forward to seeing them.”

  He did. He had been. He could not account for his irritation, anger, and beyond that, the wave of desolation crashing over him. How did anyone ever know the first thing about themselves? What they wanted, what they ought to want. How to go about inhabiting any place of calm or satisfaction, so that at the end of your life you could look back and say, yes, well done. Or maybe the whole idea of worthy goals was chafing at him, the notion that all of life was a duty, a test, a series of chores to be undertaken with discipline and fortitude. What if, at the last possible moment, a clamoring voice rose up in you and asked, Why didn’t you seek out joy?

  His girlfriend reached over and touched his arm and it made him jump, although he was careful to keep the steering wheel steady. She said, “I’m not your mother. I’m not going anywhere. I won’t abandon you.”

  No, she would not. He would have to find some other way of getting rid of her.

  —

  Gabe, the second brother, understood his mother’s absence from the family in terms of freedom, and freedom was a good thing, sure. His dad was probably a big part of her leaving, since his dad could be a real bastard when he put his back into it. But maybe there had been more to it, things his mother hadn’t been able to do because she’d been tied down by the whole housewife deal. Plenty of his friends’ mothers seemed to feel that way. Now that their kids were grown they had begun taking pottery classes and yoga classes and Italian classes. Why couldn’t his mother have stayed here and done the same? How far away from them did she have to go?

  None of them knew what her life was like in her new city. Gabe tried to imagine her walking on a beach and picking up shells. But that didn’t work, unless he changed other things about her, let her hair turn messy, the wind lifting and tangling it. She’d be wearing different clothes from her usual knit pants and sweaters, some kind of loose, flapping cotton. Was she a hippie now, hanging out with a bunch of other old, comical hippies? Did she burn homemade candles, live in a commune? That was the kind of thing somebody his mother’s age might do if they were trying to be cool. Did his mother have any notion of coolness? Something completely unsuspected? Had she gotten tired of being just another mom-lady, had they, okay had he, not paid her enough attention, had she told herself nobody would even notice she was gone? The whole effort of thinking about her made him sad, because he didn’t want to believe that he had never bothered to know her at all.

  Gabe shared a downtown apartment with two friends, and with their occasional girlfriends. The three of them and a couple of other guys were in a band called the Fractions. They played at parties and clubs and were working on their first CD. Gabe was the lead singer and he wrote all of their songs. He stood at the front of the stage, the amplified instruments thundering around him, the lights bleared and blinding, and sang:

  “Babe, I got nowhere to go

  No more cards to show

  If you put that big old hurt on me

  If you say it’s not to be

  Oh you bring me down down down so low”

  He was good-looking, in a blond, reedy fashion, and his voice could hit notes that were nearly liquid with yearning, and at every set there were girls who knew they would treat him a whole lot better than the girl in the song, if only they were given the chance.

  Of course all the band members had other jobs, real jobs. There weren’t any big paydays in music unless or until you got to some higher level. Meanwhile, they worked as bartenders and couriers, waiters and temp clerks, killing time until their big break. Maybe there would be a big break, or maybe there would just be the next band. The Fractions was only the latest in the series of bands Gabe had been a part of since high school, because musicians came and went, came and went.

  Gabe waited tables at a Greek restaurant, where his good humor and attentiveness made him a favorite. A restaurant was also like a band in that people came and went, customers and employees too, all except for Nikos, the owner, and his chief cook, the ancient and blasphemous Sam. These two had spent the last thirty years, and most of their waking hours, working together and arguing and sending the same plates out full of food and taking them back again empty. Nikos ran the front of the house while Sam presided over the tiny, smelly kitchen, the repertoire of souvlaki and pastitsio and moussaka, cooking up lamb and fried cheese and swordfish with fennel and tomatoes. It was a neighborhood place that was losing its neighborhood. Nor was the restaurant hip enough or good enough to be a favorite of the young, adventurous dining crowd. It had settled into a slow, comfortable decline that seemed likely to last for a while.

  Then Sam started losing it. He mixed up orders, or he let them burn while he went out into the alley for a smoke. Gabe apologized to customers and lost more and more tips. Nikos shouted at Sam in Greek and Sam swore back and that at least had not changed. Sam grew more and more confused, more and more furious. He stood and puzzled over raw chickens while the soup pots boiled over. He charged into the restaurant with a push broom, telling people eating to move their goddamn feet. Nikos had the prep cook fill in, until an enraged Sam went after the man with a ten-pound brick of frozen cuttlefish.

  The prep cook quit, as did the dishwasher. The waitresses turned indolent and stole drinks from the bar. Nikos took over m
ore and more of the kitchen work himself, a towel wrapped around his waist for an apron, mopping at the sweat on his forehead so it wouldn’t land in the food. “Why don’t you let the guy go? Get a new cook?” Gabe ventured to ask, but Nikos shook his head.

  “The poor bastard got noplace else. Nobody else. He stay here where we can keep an eye on him.” He nodded at Sam, who was guarding the walk-in cooler with a corkscrew.

  Clearly it was time for Gabe to move on. He was neglecting his music while he stayed here, working more and more hours for less and less money. He was an artist, after all, even if he was a fitful and struggling one, with ambitions that went beyond the daily, grubby toil of putting one coin next to another and then another. Everything in the restaurant spoke of age and defeat: the row of booths whose seats and backs showed patches of silver tape, the red-lit, shrine-like bar, the cartoonish mural of a Greek fishing village with its foreshortened boats and houses and twin blue smears of sea and sky.

  Gabe cashed in his tips, took off his clip-on tie and brocade vest and laid them on the cashier’s stand. He was free to go. And he was glad for that, although he was coming to believe that in freedom there was also a good portion of selfishness, a refusal to be bound up in another’s life.

  “Psst! Buddy!” And here was Sam, cowering next to the coatrack, reaching out to Gabe with clawlike, scrabbling hands. “Buddy! You got to get me out of here!”

  —

  Tim missed his mother. She had been a good mother, calm and constant, nursing them through illness and injury, refereeing their tantrums, dispensing justice. She sang them nursery songs and read to them from the big storybook with the gilt-edged pages, stories about talking trees and magic lanterns and journeys to far places, stories with happy endings. She had been the sweet to the father’s sour, interceding during his worst spells, talking him down from whatever high ledge he proclaimed himself ready to jump from. When you thought about it, the only surprise was that she’d put up with things as long as she had. But then, they could not bear to really think about it.

  Tim was the baby of the family, he’d grown up constantly hearing it, and had absorbed all the teasing and humiliations involved. Being the baby implied that there was something favored about his position, that allowances were made for him, special treatment given, but also that he was weak and unworthy. So maybe it was a weakness to miss her, and he didn’t say anything to the others.

  Tim was the only one to see her the night she left. He’d been asleep, he was the kid who had slept through the tree falling on the roof—another one of the family jokes—but on this night, something woke him.

  He opened his eyes to darkness. He still slept upstairs then, and from the kitchen he heard small, snicking sounds, as of someone trying to be careful about opening and closing drawers.

  Tim got up and went to the head of the stairs. A dim fluorescent light was turned on, the light over the kitchen sink. The furtive sounds continued. It would not have alarmed him if there had been more light, more noise, one of his brothers or his father pawing through the refrigerator, as they did often enough.

  He eased himself down, stair by stair, his heart beating fast, the roof of his mouth dry, wondering if he should have grabbed a bat or golf club or something, wondering if he’d really be able to do that, take a swing at somebody. At the bottom of the stairs he angled himself to get a better view of the room, then stepped inside. “Mom? What are you doing?”

  His mother turned and gave him a weird, almost hostile look, then she tried to rearrange her face into its usual Mom-like exasperation. “Nothing. Go back to bed.”

  “What are you doing?” Tim repeated. The clock over the stove read two a.m. She was dressed to go out, including shoes and her puffy jacket. “Are you going somewhere?”

  “I can’t find . . .” She kept her voice at a whisper. “There used to be a flashlight here someplace.”

  “Why do you need a flashlight?”

  “Shhh. I just thought it would be . . . a good thing to have.” She opened a drawer, closed it, then gave up and stood in the center of the room, waiting for Tim to either go away, or—what? What was he supposed to do?

  “Should I go get Dad?” he asked, but his mother raised both hands, shaking her head, and in one hand were her car keys, and next to the garage door he saw the suitcase, which had been there all along. “Mom, what the hell?”

  “Oh, sweetie.” She came toward him, hugged him. The puffy coat enveloped him and, somewhere beneath it he felt her small, unquiet arms. “I am so sorry. I didn’t want to have to tell any of you, I know that’s cowardly, but it was the only way I could do it. I’m sorry.”

  “Do what?” he said, although by now it was beginning to form, even as he did not yet believe it. “Where are you going?”

  She stepped back from him, sagged and shrank into herself. “I don’t know. I haven’t thought that much about it.”

  They were still whispering. “Did you and Dad . . .” He didn’t believe he was asking these things. “. . . have a fight or something?”

  “Not really. He didn’t do anything, I mean, anything different.” His mother looked down at her suitcase, as if waiting for it to take part in the conversation.

  “So . . .” It was all too confounding. “When are you coming back?”

  She didn’t answer. She did not mean to come back. His heart hardened.

  She said, “You could come with me. Sure you could. I’ll wait for you to get dressed, go get dressed and pack some clean clothes. I’d feel so much better if you came too. I thought I wanted to be alone but I don’t, really. I just don’t want to be here in the middle of everything. Everybody. Please come.”

  “Mom, this is so crazy.”

  “Maybe it is.” She tried laughing, but bit off the end of it. “We can go wherever you want. We’ll get maps. See the big wide world. We’ll live like pirates, you always liked those pirate movies, didn’t you?”

  He didn’t like the way she was talking, rushed and fake. She didn’t sound like herself. “No, Mom.”

  “You could drive. I’ll show you how.”

  He was only fourteen. The idea of going somewhere, anywhere, was nothing he was prepared for. What was she asking of him? He could not do it. He was too young and unready. Fear made him harsh. “Yeah, and if I hadn’t shown up you would have left. Or if somebody else came downstairs you’d say the same to them.”

  “No.”

  “Sure you would. It’s all bullshit.”

  “No, baby. It’s really, really hard.”

  “Because you don’t care about any of us. You’re mad at Dad so you decide to take off, the hell with anybody else. Did you even leave him a note, huh?”

  He was talking louder now, he watched her register this, watched her visibly droop and despair, knowing he could keep her here if he chose, either by raising the alarm or by simple guilt. Instead, from some confusion of hurt and spite and sympathy, he picked up her suitcase and opened the garage door. “Come on.”

  His mother followed without objecting, and that was how Tim knew she truly wanted to leave. He put the suitcase in the trunk and opened the driver’s door for her. He let her hug him again, giving nothing back, and watched her face through the car windshield as she mouthed Goodbye, Sorry, Love You. Then she looked over her shoulder to back the car out, and when she was clear of the garage he put the door down again.

  Once it was established that she was gone, they didn’t much talk about her among themselves. The father’s official attitude was, If that’s what she wants, screw her, and it was difficult to tell if that was the extent of his feelings. In time, Richard and Gabe moved out and only came around when they needed to retrieve some of the things they’d stored in the garage or the attic. Every so often, the father assembled them in restaurants to mark occasions like birthdays and the unavoidable holidays. The wifeless house resisted celebrations.

&nb
sp; For Tim’s graduation from high school last spring, they ate Mexican food at a chain restaurant and his brothers passed him a number of slurpy strawberry margaritas. He drank them down and let them do their thing. He wasn’t accustomed to being the center of anyone’s attention, and he was glad when the reason for the gathering seemed to recede from view. The father held the menu close up, then at arm’s length, as if trying to decipher a secret message. “What the hell are flautas?”

  “Just get nachos, Dad, you’ll be happier,” Richard said. He wasn’t drinking anything but water. He’d put on some weight since his days of playing team sports and he was trying to work it off.

  “They’re these fried tortilla things with stuff inside them,” Gabe said. “I know, they sound like they have something to do with farts.” He liked to keep the jokes going when he was around the rest of them.

  Tim sniggered. “Fartas, huh.”

  “I’d like mine with beans, please.”

  The two of them laughed like fools. “Another intellectual evening,” Richard remarked. He was glad he hadn’t brought his girlfriend along, although everyone might have behaved better if she’d come.

  The father put his menu down. “What I really want is a steak, they have steak here? Whose idea was it to come to this place anyway?”

  “Mine,” Tim said. “I bet they have steak, Dad. We can ask the waitress. Or you could get steak fajitas.”

  “Ah, never mind. I can get steak some other time.” The father was making an effort. He ordered the combo platter and looked around at the walls, which were decorated with sombreros and paper flowers and some gloomy, icon-like pieces of painted tin. “This is nice. A little atmosphere. I don’t guess it’s authentic or anything.”

  “It’s authentic Mexican restaurant,” Gabe offered. Tim thought this was funny too. He was buzzed. He was hoping nobody asked him, for the hundredth time, what he was going to do after graduation, and so far they hadn’t. He was relieved to be done with school. He’d only promised to sign up for the community college courses to get everybody off his back. They weren’t anything you had to keep doing.