She got up from the recliner and moved over to the couch, taking the corner that Janet usually occupied.
Carl took the remote from the coffee table beside him, aimed it at the TV, and switched to channel 4, where Roseanne had just got started.
“You don’t ask, you just take?” Di wanted to know.
“It’s Roseanne. I always see Roseanne if I’m home on Thursday night. If you really want to watch the Pavarotti thing, you can tape it on the VCR.”
“Thanks.”
“There’s a blank tape beside the VCR that you can use. You know how to do it? It’s tricky with the cable. Sometimes you think you’re taping, and when you’re done there’s nothing on the tape. Want me to do it for you?”
“No, don’t bother. I’ll watch Roseanne.”
“Suit yourself.”
Carl tilted the chair back and watched the show in a lazy way. Most of the time he didn’t bother trying to follow the story on the shows he saw. He just looked at the people come and go, listened to them mouth off, in the same state of alert drift as when he pulled duty on the yard. Often enough, even though he wasn’t keeping track of the plot, he knew how things would wind up, sometimes from just the first five minutes. On Sundays, when he was home for Murder, She Wrote, he could usually tell way ahead of time who the killer was, just by looking at his face. It amazed Janet, who was faked out by even the most simpleminded mystery.
At the first break, Carl took a quick trip into the bathroom and then returned with a beer from the icebox and a clean ashtray from the top of the cupboard. Once the show had started back up, he unpeeled the cellophane from a Dutch Masters and lighted it. He could feel the pressure of Di’s disapproval, but she had the good sense not to say anything while the show was on. Carl drank his beer and smoked his stogey and watched Roseanne, knowing all the while that he was staking out his territory as much as any dog marking a tree trunk with his piss. Di had been doing just the same thing, and just as consciously, when she’d settled down in his recliner. It was Goldilocks and the three bears all over again, except that Mama Bear was missing and Goldilocks had come for the duration.
“Well,” she said when the program was over, “I liked that more than I expected to. I can understand why the woman is so popular. There’s something there.”
“Oh, yeah, a whole lot of something. Now, if you want to switch it back to the other great fatso, that’s okay with me.”
Diana smiled one of her less priggish smiles. “We’re none of us as thin as we used to be, Carl.”
He liked the way she included herself in the observation, as though to say, I may be a pot myself, but you certainly are a black kettle.
“Ain’t it the truth,” he agreed equably. He took a puff on his Dutch Masters and released a slow, thoughtful plume of smoke. Her eyes focused on the plume of smoke, interpreting it, as she was meant to, as another territorial claim.
“You do know, don’t you, about secondhand smoke?”
“Yeah, it’s getting to be a big issue, even at the joint. Which is a laugh, when you consider that cigarettes are the main currency there. Which gives the guys who don’t smoke a weird kind of edge. But even so, there’s some of them who are making a stink about having to be locked up with smokers.”
“Stink is the operative word.”
Carl removed the cigar from his mouth and contemplated the ashy tip. “Pricey cigars do smell better, I’ll give you that. If I was a rich man, as the saying goes, I’d smoke a classier kind of cigar. Though maybe I wouldn’t. I’ve sampled some of them, and they tend to pack more of a wallop than I really care for. It’s like beer and wine. Beer is blue-collar, but if I had the money, would I really rather drink wines that cost twenty bucks a bottle, and some a lot more than that? I don’t think so. Wine wipes me out. I get sleepy. Beer, on the other hand, just gets me mellow.”
“All that is neither here nor there,” Di said with an impatient wave of her hand at an encroaching streamer of smoke. “The point is that secondhand smoke is harmful to those who have to breathe the same polluted air as the smoker. Including, especially, children.”
“That’s true, I’ve read that. I’ve even pointed it out to Janet, who’s the cigarette smoker in the house. My daily smoke output couldn’t compare to hers.”
“Even if that were so, she’s not here now.”
“That’s a silver lining I hadn’t thought of before. But I know that’s not what you’re driving at. You’re trying to tell me I should stop smoking. And that’s true. And I shouldn’t eat so much either. And neither should you—we’re both sinners there. But I’m not about to start dieting, or give up the stogeys. Or the beer, if that was the next thing you had in mind, though I don’t suppose it is, because from what I’ve observed you are not exactly a teetotaler yourself. My philosophy is live and let live. Have you got another?”
“You always were a good debater, Carl. I’ll give you that.”
“And you’ve always had the idea, because I’ve got the job I do, and because you’re a schoolteacher, that I should be some kind of Archie Bunker, lowbrow asshole. The fact is, Diana, that I was in college nearly as long as you. And I got better grades. And I’m moving up through the ranks faster than you did, if you’re moving up at all. I mean, all these years as a sub can’t look that good on your C.V., whatever your reasons—or your excuses—are. None of which is any of my business, I agree. But how I choose to live in my own house is my business. And if you don’t approve, then you’ve got two choices. Lump it or leave it, simple as that. I didn’t invite you here, but for Kelly’s sake I’m willing to make an effort to get along. But getting along doesn’t mean you’re in charge.”
“Because it’s your house?”
“I guess that’s what it comes down to. And the fact that I’m Kelly’s dad.”
“I grew up in this house.”
“So you did. And you left it. And your mother sold it to me. And now it’s mine.”
“For a pittance.”
“I understand that’s been a grievance for you. But that’s a bone you’ve got to pick with your mother, not with me. I paid good money when she needed it to start up her Navaho House. And I’m supporting her daughter and bringing up her grandkid, with possibly others on the way. So it shouldn’t be surprising if she wanted to help us out.”
“Oh, you’re so reasonable,” she said, as though reasonable were a sin.
“I try to be. Why don’t you?”
To which Diana just glared. Then, when her glare didn’t accomplish anything, she reached for the remote and switched on Pavarotti.
Carl sat and watched the program right to the end, partly to spite his sister-in-law and partly because he genuinely enjoyed hearing the big fat fool sing his beautiful heart out. “Nessun dorma.” Or “No One Can Sleep.” Not while he was singing, that’s for sure. Then a great duet with a black soprano as fat as he was. Unbeatable. Then the all-time favorite, “La donna e mobile,” which the announcer explained meant that women are fickle, but which also meant, according to one of the other C.O.’s that Carl worked with, “Women are furniture.” And the guy was an Italian, so he should know.
Halfway through the aria, the particular piece of furniture Carl had to deal with tonight levered herself up from the couch and said, “I’ll see you in the morning.”
He’d won.
For the present.
10
For the first few weeks as a substitute mother, Diana felt like a twentieth-century resident of the Little House on the Prairie. Bustle, bustle, bustle. But without the drudgery. She’d always envied the lives of ordinary housewives. The laundry was a breeze when you didn’t have to drive miles away to a Laundromat and wait in line fora dryer. No more teaching, no more books, no more children with dirty looks.
Her main responsibility was the cooking, and that was a genuine pleasure, especially now, having fallen from grace and being able to enjoy, in moderation, the pleasures of protein. Even such a simple pleasure as a tuna noodle ca
sserole. She explored her sister’s paperback edition of Fannie Farmer’s cookbook (which was in pristine condition; Janet must never have used it) with the enthusiasm of a newlywed bride. Chicken pot pie. Pineapple upside-down cake. Cole slaw, from scratch. And sundry other culinary wonders as the whim took her.
Having depended so long on takeout from salad bars and microwaved Lean Cuisine (there had been no restaurants within striking distance of Willowville), this was culinary heaven. And she knew she wasn’t the only one to appreciate her efforts. Carl, who never before had had a kind word to say for her, was almost lavish with his compliments. Once, after a second helping of the chicken pot pie, he actually said, “That was delicious.” Clearly, he was not used to much more in the way of home cooking than meat and potatoes, and the potatoes probably came from a box.
Kelly was less happy with the new dispensation. From the evidence of the pantry when Diana had arrived, Kelly had been subsisting on a diet of sugar-coated cereals, Noodle-O’s, and whatever other ersatz gluey starches lazy mothers know how to fob off on guileless toddlers. It was no easy task weaning her from such bad habits. She would not eat oatmeal. She would not eat salads or fresh vegetables. She would not eat any bread that wasn’t snow-white and pumped full of air. She would not eat fish or rice or drink orange juice that didn’t come out of a Tropicana carton. The one time Diana had taken her along to the supermarket in Leech Lake, the child had thrown a fit when Diana had refused to load the cart with Little Debbie snacks and cereals and other nutrition-free commodities. Four years old and already the perfect mindless American consumer.
But hunger, as the proverb has it, is the best sauce, even for finicky four-year-olds, and Kelly reluctantly yielded to the new regime. She had no choice, for her father, the few times Kelly had pleaded her case to him, had taken Diana’s side when she’d shown him how much she was saving on the grocery bills. Then, too, Diana knew how to entice as well as punish. She would not buy Oreos, but she would bake up a batch of oatmeal-raisin cookies from scratch, with Kelly helping at every step. And then the cookies would be meted out as rewards for good behavior. Children are all, at Kelly’s age, as easy to train as Skinner’s pigeons. The carrot and the stick would do the trick.
Beyond that it was simply a matter of putting the house in order. Janet, who had always rebelled against the idea of cleanliness, order, or even beauty (there wasn’t one potted plant in the house, not a picture on the walls that hadn’t been inherited), had been the most perfunctory housekeeper, not to say a slob. There were cobwebs anywhere you wouldn’t directly walk into them. The carpets were crusted with dirt. You could write your name with your fingertip on the windows.
January was not the ideal time to cope with such problems, but Diana went ahead and did a spring cleaning in the dead of winter. She shampooed the carpets, washed the windows and the curtains, and scoured what looked like a decade of grime from the bathtub and the sinks.
Carl was not unaware of the transformations she wrought, and he would regularly, in a polite way, take note of her improvements and proffer a figurative pat on the head. He never (she’d noticed) touched her; he had that much good sense. But he avoided spending time at home. He would show up for meals, and would spend some time with Kelly, and then he’d disappear. Probably to a local bar. Diana had no way of knowing where he’d gone. He didn’t bother to tell her, and she wouldn’t demean herself by asking.
She would hear him vroom up the driveway at eleven or twelve o’clock, and then he’d head straight to his bedroom. If Diana was still up watching the TV, he might ask, “Everything okay?” before he clomped up the stairs. Otherwise she would listen, tensely, in the dark, in her narrow bed, while he opened the door to Kelly’s room, and then, too long later, go into the bathroom and draw a bath.
Everything was not okay. Something, in fact, was very wrong, but it was not something she could speak of to Carl. Or to anyone else, unless it were Brenda Zweig, but Brenda had gone off on a long vacation, to San Miguel de Allende, in Mexico, and wasn’t responding to her answering machine, despite Diana’s messages that Brenda could phone her collect. Is that what friends were for?
Everything was far from okay. Oh, the days were fine, with all the bustle. While the sun was shining and there were tasks to tend to and Kelly to look after, there were no problems. But after dinner, after Kelly had been put to bed, and Carl had driven off wherever he went to, and she was alone in the house, it was another matter. Then, as the darkness gathered, despite all that every lamp and lightbulb in the house could do, she would begin to feel… something wrong.
A hunger. But not her own hunger, strong as that could be sometimes. A hunger outside the house. As though, as in the fairy tale of the three little pigs, there were a wolf huffing and puffing at the back door. Something that wanted to come inside.
She would hear the noises that came at night, all the knockings and tappings and moanings that you wondered about, and she would ask herself: Is it the furnace? The icebox? Mice? What could it be?
A hunger that was (though she did not want to think so) sexual.
One night, when the fear, with all its irrational urgency, had become too much to bear, she thought she must confront it head-on by going outdoors to feel the humbling reality of the January cold. If this was just some fancy kind of anxiety, the cold would do away with it.
It was below zero. The winter had settled in to stay. She put on her down parka and zipped it up to her chin and slipped snow boots on over the moccasins she wore around the house. But she didn’t pull the parka’s hood over her head, because she wanted to feel the cold. She wanted the cold to tell her she was being foolish.
But the moment she stepped outside the house, her fear intensified. She knew, as it touched her skin, that the cold and the fear were one and that they were just the wind of what was behind them, the unseen force whose source she could sense above her, on the hill, where the moon shone on it.
The smokehouse.
No, she told herself, I will not go there. But already her rubber soles were squeaking on the afternoon’s inch-thick increment of snow. No, I do not believe there is anything there. It is all in the past, and I reject what happened then. He has no power over me. He’s dead.
But he was not dead.
He had, undead, felt her presence these many numberless hours within the house, bustling about, ordering things as she saw fit, and, when she slept, calling to him, incessantly, incestuously, insisting that he answer.
He had as little choice in this as she. He hated her, as only those who have been murdered hate those who have murdered them, but he had to answer her longing.
The longing, strangely, strengthened him. Quickened what had been, so long, mere latency. Before this moment he had drawn, or repelled, the meat that moved through the woods. Bats, wasps, owls—whatever could tremble within the range of his elsewise impotent fury. But she was now within that range; she could tremble. She could be, because he desired her, because of the lie she had told, his, at last and again.
She fell to her knees before the door of the smokehouse and pressed her face against the snow, first one cheek, then the other. She licked the snow. She spoke his name.
“Daddy,” she said, remembering, at last, the moment that had united them so terribly, “I hate you. I hate you. I want you to die.”
“You’re mine,” he whispered, without words, “and now I will destroy you.”
11
Just as certain configurations of electric power lines produce powerful magnetic fields that, over the course of time, cause a variety of malignant tumors in tissues that have long been irradiated by those invisible and malign energies, so in the spiritual realm there can be conjunctions of moral events that act to spawn and to nurture those malignancies of the spirit that are lumped together under the heading of supernatural or psychic phenomena—hauntings, premonitions, the sudden flaring up of grotesque impulses, or the gradual wasting away of vital energies. Usually the confluence of forces that allow
such things to be is so brief that we are able to write off the result—the stab of irrational grief, the sudden suicidal impulse, or the hand’s reflexive grasp of the haft of an axe—as no more than the mental equivalent of a muscular spasm. No sooner do we see the apparition than it has vanished into the hallway’s darkness.
But there are some apparitions that linger, and reappear, and become strong, and develop powers of speech. If we are so unwise as to enter into communication with these spirits, they can infuse us with strengths and powers that are like their own, but, because our physical selves are the conduits of these energies, the power we can exert—call it witchcraft—is exponentially greater than the power the unmediated spirits might command. In doing this we become, in a sense, the tools of these entities. We suppose we have been given powers, but in fact we have been given to them.
Most of the rites and rituals connected with witchcraft—the abracadabras, candles, and incense—are simply a form of theater, which the medium uses to put her soul into a state of entranced receptivity. In the age of alchemy, weeks might be spent elaborating such pomps. In our own time, a cigarette and the right music on the stereo can accomplish the same essential purpose with a fraction of the effort. Because the essential thing is not the physical ambiance—the runes and chanting and such—but a certain harmony between the moral environment and the soul of the would-be sorcerer; an equivalence of evils, so that the larger and pervading evil of the age finds in the soul of the witch a perfect embodiment, a mirroring of microcosm and macrocosm across whose quicksilver surface energies may flow.
In the soul of Diana Turney that balance had been refined to exquisite parity at the moment, not yet a month gone by, when she had confided to Brenda Zweig how she had been sexually abused by her father at the age of twelve. As they’d talked at Brenda’s kitchen table, within the cone of incandescent brightness defined by the Tiffany lamp, as the sordid details emerged from the gloom of the past, Diana had felt a strange kind of empowerment. Strange, because shouldn’t it have been just the other way around? Shouldn’t such memories reawaken the shame and fear of that first occasion? Instead, Diana’s pulse quickened, and her whole frame was atingle with that adrenaline charge you feel in the first moments after leaving a sauna or a hot tub. If she had been a man and accustomed to such things, she would have been ready to spar with a boxing partner for the pure physical pleasure of trading blows.
THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft Page 6