FSF, October-November 2006

by Spilogale, Inc

  Angie leaned in the doorway, entranced and alarmed at the same time. Marvyn had to throw the dice for both Milady and himself, and the old cat was too riddled with arthritis to handle the pastel Monopoly money easily. But she waited her turn, and moved her piece—she had the silver top hat—very carefully, as though considering possible options. And she already had a hotel on Park Place.

  Marvyn jumped up and slammed the door as soon as he noticed his sister watching the game, and Angie went on to liberate a larger-than-planned remnant of sorbet. Somewhere near the bottom of the container she finally managed to stuff what she'd just glimpsed deep in the part of her mind she called her “forgettery.” As she'd once said to her friend Melissa, “There's such a thing as too much information, and it is not going to get me. I am never going to know more than I want to know about stuff. Look at the President."

  For the next week or so Marvyn made a point of staying out of Angie's way, which was all by itself enough to put her mildly on edge. If she knew one thing about her brother, it was that the time to worry was when you didn't see him. All the same, on the surface things were peaceful enough, and continued so until the evening when Marvyn went dancing with the garbage.

  The next day being pickup day, Mrs. Luke had handed him two big green plastic bags of trash for the rolling bins down the driveway. Marvyn had made enough of a fuss about the task that Angie stayed by the open front window to make sure that he didn't simply drop the bags in the grass, and vanish into one of his mysterious hideouts. Mrs. Luke was back in the living room with the news on, but Angie was still at the window when Marvyn looked around quickly, mumbled a few words she couldn't catch, and then did a thing with his left hand, so fast she saw no more than a blurry twitch. And the two garbage bags went dancing.

  Angie's buckling knees dropped her to the couch under the window, though she never noticed it. Marvyn let go of the bags altogether, and they rocked alongside him—backwards, forwards, sideways, in perfect timing, with perfect steps, turning with him as though he were the star and they his backup singers. To Angie's astonishment, he was snapping his fingers and moonwalking, as she had never imagined he could do—and the bags were pushing out green arms and legs as the three of them danced down the driveway. When they reached the cans, Marvyn's partners promptly went limp and were nothing but plastic garbage bags again. Marvyn plopped them in, dusted his hands, and turned to walk back to the house.

  When he saw Angie watching, neither of them spoke. Angie beckoned. They met at the door and stared at each other. Angie said only, “My room."

  Marvyn dragged in behind her, looking everywhere and nowhere at once, and definitely not at his sister. Angie sat down on the bed and studied him: chubby and messy-looking, with an unmanageable sprawl of rusty-brown hair and an eyepatch meant to tame a wandering left eye. She said, “Talk to me."

  "About what?” Marvyn had a deep, foggy voice for eight and a half—Mr. Luke always insisted that it had changed before Marvyn was born. “I didn't break your CD case."

  "Yes, you did,” Angie said. “But forget that. Let's talk about garbage bags. Let's talk about Monopoly."

  Marvyn was utterly businesslike about lies: in a crisis he always told the truth, until he thought of something better. He said, “I'm warning you right now, you won't believe me."

  "I never do. Make it a good one."

  "Okay,” Marvyn said. “I'm a witch."

  When Angie could speak, she said the first thing that came into her head, which embarrassed her forever after. “You can't be a witch. You're a wizard, or a warlock or something.” Like we're having a sane conversation, she thought.

  Marvyn shook his head so hard that his eyepatch almost came loose. “Uh-uh! That's all books and movies and stuff. You're a man witch or you're a woman witch, that's it. I'm a man witch."

  "You'll be a dead witch if you don't quit shitting me,” Angie told him. But her brother knew he had her, and he grinned like a pirate (at home he often tied a bandanna around his head, and he was constantly after Mrs. Luke to buy him a parrot). He said, “You can ask Lidia. She was the one who knew."

  Lidia del Carmen de Madero y Gomez had been the Lukes’ housekeeper since well before Angie's birth. She was from Ciego de vila in Cuba, and claimed to have changed Fidel Castro's diapers as a girl working for his family. For all her years—no one seemed to know her age; certainly not the Lukes—Lidia's eyes remained as clear as a child's, and Angie had on occasion nearly wept with envy of her beautiful wrinkled deep-dark skin. For her part, Lidia got on well with Angie, spoke Spanish with her mother, and was teaching Mr. Luke to cook Cuban food. But Marvyn had been hers since his infancy, beyond question or interference. They went to Spanish-language movies on Saturdays, and shopped together in the Bowen Street barrio.

  "The one who knew,” Angie said. “Knew what? Is Lidia a witch too?"

  Marvyn's look suggested that he was wondering where their parents had actually found their daughter. “No, of course she's not a witch. She's a santera."

  Angie stared. She knew as much about Santeria as anyone growing up in a big city with a growing population of Africans and South Americans—which wasn't much. Newspaper articles and television specials had informed her that santeros sacrificed chickens and goats and did ... things with the blood. She tried to imagine Marvyn with a chicken, doing things, and couldn't. Not even Marvyn.

  "So Lidia got you into it?” she finally asked. “Now you're a santero too?"

  "Nah, I'm a witch, I told you.” Marvyn's disgusted impatience was approaching critical mass.

  Angie said, “Wicca? You're into the Goddess thing? There's a girl in my home room, Devlin Margulies, and she's a Wiccan, and that's all she talks about. Sabbats and esbats, and drawing down the moon, and the rest of it. She's got skin like a cheese-grater."

  Marvyn blinked at her. “What's a Wiccan?” He sprawled suddenly on her bed, grabbing Milady as she hobbled in and pooting loudly on her furry stomach. “I already knew I could sort of mess with things—you remember the rubber duck, and that time at the baseball game?” Angie remembered. Especially the rubber duck. “Anyway, Lidia took me to meet this real old lady, in the farmers’ market, she's even older than her, her name's Yemaya, something like that, she smokes this funny little pipe all the time. Anyway, she took hold of me, my face, and she looked in my eyes, and then she closed her eyes, and she just sat like that for so long!” He giggled. “I thought she'd fallen asleep, and I started to pull away, but Lidia wouldn't let me. So she sat like that, and she sat, and then she opened her eyes and she told me I was a witch, a brujo. And Lidia bought me a two-scoop ice-cream cone. Coffee and chocolate, with M&Ms."

  "You won't have a tooth in your head by the time you're fifteen.” Angie didn't know what to say, what questions to ask. “So that's it? The old lady, she gives you witch lessons or something?"

  "Nah—I told you, she's a big santera, that's different. I only saw her that one time. She kept telling Lidia that I had el regalo—I think that means the gift, she said that a lot—and I should keep practicing. Like you with the clarinet."

  Angie winced. Her hands were small and stubby-fingered, and music slipped through them like rain. Her parents, sympathizing, had offered to cancel the clarinet lessons, but Angie refused. As she confessed to her friend Melissa, she had no skill at accepting defeat.

  Now she asked, “So how do you practice? Boogying with garbage bags?"

  Marvyn shook his head. “That's getting old—so's playing board games with Milady. I was thinking maybe I could make the dishes wash themselves, like in Beauty and the Beast. I bet I could do that."

  "You could enchant my homework,” Angie suggested. “My algebra, for starters."

  Her brother snorted. “Hey, I'm just a kid, I've got my limits! I mean, your homework?"

  "Right,” Angie said. “Right. Look, what about laying a major spell on Tim Hubley, the next time he's over here with Melissa? Like making his feet go flat so he can't play basketball—that's the only r
eason she likes him, anyway. Or—” her voice became slower and more hesitant—"what about getting Jake Petrakis to fall madly, wildly, totally in love with me? That'd be ... funny."

  Marvyn was occupied with Milady. “Girl stuff, who cares about all that? I want to be so good at soccer everybody'll want to be on my team—I want fat Josh Wilson to have patches over both eyes, so he'll leave me alone. I want Mom to order thin-crust pepperoni pizza every night, and I want Dad to—"

  "No spells on Mom and Dad, not ever!” Angie was on her feet, leaning menacingly over him. “You got that, Ex-Lax? You mess with them even once, believe me, you'd better be one hella witch to keep me from strangling you. Understood?"

  Marvyn nodded. Angie said, “Okay, I tell you what. How about practicing on Aunt Caroline when she comes next weekend?"

  Marvyn's pudgy pirate face lit up at the suggestion. Aunt Caroline was their mother's older sister, celebrated in the Luke family for knowing everything about everything. A pleasant, perfectly decent person, her perpetual air of placid expertise would have turned a saint into a serial killer. Name a country, and Aunt Caroline had spent enough time there to know more about the place than a native; bring up a newspaper story, and without fail Aunt Caroline could tell you something about it that hadn't been in the paper; catch a cold, and Aunt Caroline could recite the maiden name of the top medical researcher in rhinoviruses’ mother. (Mr. Luke said often that Aunt Caroline's motto was, “Say something, and I'll bet you're wrong.")

  "Nothing dangerous,” Angie commanded, “nothing scary. And nothing embarrassing or anything."

  Marvyn looked sulky. “It's not going to be any fun that way."

  "If it's too gross, they'll know you did it,” his sister pointed out. “I would.” Marvyn, who loved secrets and hidden identities, yielded.

  During the week before Aunt Caroline's arrival, Marvyn kept so quietly to himself that Mrs. Luke worried about his health. Angie kept as close an eye on him as possible, but couldn't be at all sure what he might be planning—no more than he, she suspected. Once she caught him changing the TV channels without the remote; and once, left alone in the kitchen to peel potatoes and carrots for a stew, he had the peeler do it while he read the Sunday funnies. The apparent smallness of his ambitions relieved Angie's vague unease, lulling her into complacency about the big family dinner that was traditional on the first night of a visit from Aunt Caroline.

  Aunt Caroline was, among other things, the sort of woman incapable of going anywhere without attempting to buy it. Her own house was jammed to the attic with sightseer souvenirs from all over the world: children's toys from Slovenia, sculptures from Afghanistan, napkin rings from Kenya shaped like lions and giraffes, legions of brass bangles, boxes and statues of gods from India, and so many Russian matryoshka dolls fitting inside each other that she gave them away as stocking-stuffers every Christmas. She never came to the table at the Lukes without bringing some new acquisition for approval; so dinner with Aunt Caroline, in Mr. Luke's words, was always Show and Tell time.

  Her most recent hegira had brought her back to West Africa for the third or fourth time, and provided her with the most evil-looking doll Angie had ever seen. Standing beside Aunt Caroline's plate, it was about two feet high, with bat ears, too many fingers, and eyes like bright green marbles streaked with scarlet threads. Aunt Caroline explained rapturously that it was a fertility doll unique to a single Benin tribe, which Angie found impossible to credit. “No way!” she announced loudly. “Not for one minute am I even thinking about having babies with that thing staring at me! It doesn't even look pregnant, the way they do. No way in the world!"

  Aunt Caroline had already had two of Mr. Luke's margaritas, and was working on a third. She replied with some heat that not all fertility figures came equipped with cannonball breasts, globular bellies and callipygous rumps—"Some of them are remarkably slender, even by Western standards!” Aunt Caroline herself, by anyone's standards, was built along the general lines of a chopstick.

  Angie was drawing breath for a response when she heard her father say behind her, “Well, Jesus Harrison Christ,” and then her mother's soft gasp, “Caroline.” But Aunt Caroline was busy explaining to her niece that she knew absolutely nothing about fertility. Mrs. Luke said, considerably louder, “Caroline, shut up, your doll!"

  Aunt Caroline said, “What, what?” and then turned, along with Angie. They both screamed.

  The doll was growing all the things Aunt Caroline had been insisting it didn't need to qualify as a fertility figure. It was carved from ebony, or from something even harder, but it was pushing out breasts and belly and hips much as Marvyn's two garbage bags had suddenly developed arms and legs. Even its expression had changed, from hungry slyness to a downright silly grin, as though it were about to kiss someone, anyone. It took a few shaky steps forward on the table and put its foot in the salsa.

  Then the babies started coming.

  They came pattering down on the dinner table, fast and hard, like wooden rain, one after another, after another, after another ... perfect little copies, miniatures, of the madly smiling doll-thing, plopping out of it—just like Milady used to drop kittens in my lap, Angie thought absurdly. One of them fell into her plate, and one bounced into the soup, and a couple rolled into Mr. Luke's lap, making him knock his chair over trying to get out of the way. Mrs. Luke was trying to grab them all up at once, which wasn't possible, and Aunt Caroline sat where she was and shrieked. And the doll kept grinning and having babies.

  Marvyn was standing against the wall, looking both as terrified as Aunt Caroline and as stupidly pleased as the doll-thing. Angie caught his eye and made a fierce signal, enough, quit, turn it off, but either her brother was having too good a time, or else had no idea how to undo whatever spell he had raised. One of the miniatures hit her in the head, and she had a vision of her whole family being drowned in wooden doll-babies, everyone gurgling and reaching up pathetically toward the surface before they all went under for the third time. Another baby caromed off the soup tureen into her left ear, one sharp ebony fingertip drawing blood.

  It stopped, finally—Angie never learned how Marvyn regained control—and things almost quieted down, except for Aunt Caroline. The fertility doll got the look of glazed joy off its face and went back to being a skinny, ugly, duty-free airport souvenir, while the doll-babies seemed to melt away exactly as though they had been made of ice instead of wood. Angie was quick enough to see one of them actually dissolving into nothingness directly in front of Aunt Caroline, who at this point stopped screaming and began hiccoughing and beating the table with her palms. Mr. Luke pounded her on the back, and Angie volunteered to practice her Heimlich maneuver, but was overruled. Aunt Caroline went to bed early.

  Later, in Marvyn's room, he kept his own bed between himself and Angie, indignantly demanding, “What? You said not scary—what's scary about a doll having babies? I thought it was cute."

  "Cute,” Angie said. “Uh-huh.” She was wondering, in a distant sort of way, how much prison time she might get if she actually murdered her brother. Ten years? Five, with good behavior and a lot of psychiatrists? I could manage it. “And what did I tell you about not embarrassing Aunt Caroline?"

  "How did I embarrass her?” Marvyn's visible eye was wide with outraged innocence. “She shouldn't drink so much, that's her problem. She embarrassed me."

  "They're going to figure it out, you know,” Angie warned him. “Maybe not Aunt Caroline, but Mom for sure. She's a witch herself that way. Your cover is blown, buddy."

  But to her own astonishment, not a word was ever said about the episode, the next day or any other—not by her observant mother, not by her dryly perceptive father, nor even by Aunt Caroline, who might reasonably have been expected at least to comment at breakfast. A baffled Angie remarked to Milady, drowsing on her pillow, “I guess if a thing's weird enough, somehow nobody saw it.” This explanation didn't satisfy her, not by a long shot, but lacking anything better she was stuck with it. The
old cat blinked in squeezy-eyed agreement, wriggled herself into a more comfortable position, and fell asleep still purring.

  Angie kept Marvyn more closely under her eye after that than she had done since he was quite small, and first showing a penchant for playing in traffic. Whether this observation was the cause or not, he did remain more or less on his best behavior, barring the time he turned the air in the bicycle tires of a boy who had stolen his superhero comic book to cement. There was also the affair of the enchanted soccer ball, which kept rolling back to him as though it couldn't bear to be with anyone else. And Angie learned to be extremely careful when making herself a sandwich, because if she lost track of her brother for too long, the sandwich was liable to acquire an extra ingredient. Paprika was one, tabasco another; and Scotch Bonnet peppers were a special favorite. But there were others less hot and even more objectionable. As she snarled to a sympathetic Melissa Feldman, who had two brothers of her own, “They ought to be able to jail kids just for being eight and a half."

  Then there was the matter of Marvyn's attitude toward Angie's attitude about Jake Petrakis.

  Jake Petrakis was a year ahead of Angie at school. He was half-Greek and half-Irish, and his blue eyes and thick poppy-colored hair contrasted so richly with his olive skin that she had not been able to look directly at him since the fourth grade. He was on the swim team, and he was the president of the Chess Club, and he went with Ashleigh Sutton, queen of the junior class, rechristened “Ghastly Ashleigh” by the loyal Melissa. But he spoke kindly and cheerfully to Angie without fail, always saying Hey, Angie, and How's it going, Angie?, and See you in the fall, Angie, have a good summer. She clutched such things to herself, every one of them, and at the same time could not bear them.