Magic for Beginners: Stories (11 page)

“Tell me about yours,” Catherine said.

“You know,” Henry said. “Those clients are assholes. But they
don’t know they’re assholes, so it’s almost okay. You just have to
feel sorry for them. They don’t get it. You have to explain how to
have fun, and then they get anxious, so they drink a lot and so you
have to drink too. Even The Crocodile got drunk. She did this weird
wriggly dance to a Pete Seeger song. So what’s their place
like?”

“It’s nice,” Catherine said. “You know, really nice.”

“So you had a good weekend? Carleton and Tilly had a good
time?”

“It was really nice,” Catherine said. “No, really, it was great.
I had a fucking great time. So you’re sure you can make it home for
dinner on Thursday.”

It wasn’t a question.

“Carleton looks like he might be coming down with something,”
Henry said. “Here. Do you think I feel hot? Or is it cold in
here?”

Catherine said, “You’re fine. It’s going to be Liz and Marcus
and some of the women from the book group and their husbands, and
what’s her name, the real estate agent. I invited her too. Did you
know she’s written a book? I was going to do that! I’m getting the
new dishwasher tomorrow. No more paper plates. And the lawn care
specialist is coming on Monday to take care of the rabbits. I
thought I’d drop off King Spanky at the vet, take Tilly and
Carleton back to the city, stay with Lucy for two or three days—did
you know she tried to find this place and got lost? She’s supposed
to come up for dinner too—just in case the poison doesn’t go away
right away, you know, or in case we end up with piles of dead
rabbits on the lawn. Your job is to make sure there are no dead
rabbits when I bring Tilly and Carleton back.”

“I guess I can do that,” Henry said.

“You’d better,” Catherine said. She stood up with some
difficulty, came and leaned over his chair. Her stomach bumped into
his shoulder. Her breath was hot. Her hands were full of strips of
color. “Sometimes I wish that instead of working for The Crocodile,
you were having an affair with her. I mean, that way you’d come
home when you’re supposed to. You wouldn’t want me to be
suspicious.”

“I don’t have any time to have affairs,” Henry said. He sounded
put out. Maybe he was thinking about Leonard Felter. Or maybe he
was picturing The Crocodile naked. The Crocodile wearing stretchy
red rubber sex gear. Catherine imagined telling Henry the truth
about Leonard Felter. I didn’t have an affair. Did not. I made it
up. Is that a problem?

“That’s exactly what I mean,” Catherine said. “You’d better be
here for dinner. You live here, Henry. You’re my husband. I want
you to meet our friends. I want you to be here when I have this
baby. I want you to fix what’s wrong with the downstairs bathroom.
I want you to talk to Tilly. She’s having a rough time. She won’t
talk to me about it.”

“Tilly’s fine,” Henry said. “We had a long talk tonight. She
said she’s sorry she broke all of Carleton’s night-lights. I like
the trees, by the way. You’re not going to paint over them, are
you?”

“I had all this leftover paint,” Catherine said. “I was getting
tired of just slapping paint on with the rollers. I wanted to do
something fancier.”

“You could paint some trees in my office, when you paint my
office.”

“Maybe,” Catherine said. “Ooof, this baby won’t stop kicking
me.” She lay down on the floor in front of Henry, and lifted her
feet into his lap. “Rub my feet. I’ve still got so much fucking
paint. But once your office is done, I’m done with the painting.
Tilly told me to stop it or else. She keeps hiding my gas mask.
Will you be here for dinner?”

“I’ll be here for dinner,” Henry said, rubbing her feet. He
really meant it. He was thinking about the exterminator, about
rabbit corpses scattered all across the lawn, like a war zone. Poor
rabbits. What a mess.

After they went to see the therapist, after they went to
Yosemite and came home again, Henry said to Catherine, “I don’t
want to talk about it anymore. I don’t want to talk about it ever
again. Can we not talk about it?”

“Talk about what?” Catherine said. But she had almost been
sorry. It had been so much work. She’d had to invent so many
details that eventually it began to seem as if she hadn’t made it
up after all. It was too strange, too confusing, to pretend it had
never happened, when, after all, it
had
never
happened.

Catherine is dressing for dinner. When she looks in the mirror,
she’s as big as a cruise ship. A water tower. She doesn’t look like
herself at all. The baby kicks her right under the ribs.

“Stop that,” she says. She’s sure the baby is going to be a
girl. Tilly won’t be pleased. Tilly has been extra good all day.
She helped make the salad. She set the table. She put on a nice
dress.

Tilly is hiding from Carleton under a table in the foyer. If
Carleton finds her, Tilly will scream. Carleton is haunted, and
nobody has noticed. Nobody cares except Tilly. Tilly says names for
the baby, under her breath. Dollop. Shampool. Custard. Knock,
knock. The rabbits are out on the lawn, and King Spanky has gotten
into the bed again, and he won’t come out, not for a million
haunted alarm clocks.

Her mother has painted trees all along the wall under the
staircase. They don’t look like real trees. They aren’t real
colors. It doesn’t look like Central Park at all. In among the
trees, her mother has painted a little door. It isn’t a real door,
except that when Tilly goes over to look at it, it is real. There’s
a doorknob, and when Tilly turns it, the door opens. Underneath the
stairs, there’s another set of stairs, little dirt stairs, going
down. On the third stair, there’s a rabbit sitting there, looking
up at Tilly. It hops down, one step, and then another. Then
another.

“Rumpled Stiltskin!” Tilly says to the rabbit. “Lipstick!”

Catherine goes to the closet to get out Henry’s pink shirt.
What’s the name of that real estate agent? Why can’t she ever
remember? She lays the shirt on the bed and then stands there for a
moment, stunned. It’s too much. The pink shirt is haunted. She
pulls out all of Henry’s suits, his shirts, his ties. All haunted.
Every fucking thing is haunted. Even the fucking shoes. When she
pulls out the drawers, socks, underwear, handkerchiefs, everything,
it’s all spoiled. All haunted. Henry doesn’t have a thing to wear.
She goes downstairs, gets trash bags, and goes back upstairs again.
She begins to dump clothes into the trash bags.

She can see Carleton framed in the bedroom window. He’s chasing
the rabbits with a stick. She hoists open the window, leans out,
yells, “Stay away from those fucking rabbits, Carleton! Do you hear
me?”

She doesn’t recognize her own voice.

Tilly is running around downstairs somewhere. She’s yelling too,
but her voice gets farther and farther away, fainter and fainter.
She’s yelling, “Hairbrush! Zeppelin! Torpedo! Marmalade!”

The doorbell rings.

The Crocodile started laughing. “Okay, Henry. Calm down.”

He fired off another rubber band. “I mean it,” he said. “I’m
late. I’ll be late. She’s going to kill me.”

“Tell her it’s my fault,” The Crocodile said. “So they started
dinner without you. Big deal.”

“I tried calling,” Henry said. “Nobody answered.” He had an idea
that the phone was haunted now. That’s why Catherine wasn’t
answering. They’d have to get a new phone. Maybe the lawn
specialist would know a house specialist. Maybe somebody could do
something about this. “I should go home,” he said. “I should go
home right now.” But he didn’t get up. “I think we’ve gotten
ourselves into a mess, me and Catherine. I don’t think things are
good right now.”

“Tell someone who cares,” The Crocodile suggested. She wiped at
her eyes. “Get out of here. Go catch your train. Have a great
weekend. See you on Monday.”

So Henry goes home, he has to go home, but of course he’s late,
it’s too late. The train is haunted. The closer they get to his
station, the more haunted the train gets. None of the other
passengers seem to notice. And of course, his bike turns out to be
haunted, too. He leaves it at the station and he walks home in the
dark, down the bike path. Something follows him home. Maybe it’s
King Spanky.

Here’s the yard, and here’s his house. He loves his house, how
it’s all lit up. You can see right through the windows, you can see
the living room, which Catherine has painted Ghost Crab. The trim
is Rat Fink. Catherine has worked so hard. The driveway is full of
cars, and inside, people are eating dinner. They’re admiring
Catherine’s trees. They haven’t waited for him, and that’s fine.
His neighbors: he loves his neighbors. He’s going to love them as
soon as he meets them. His wife is going to have a baby any day
now. His daughter will stop walking in her sleep. His son isn’t
haunted. The moon shines down and paints the world a color he’s
never seen before. Oh, Catherine, wait till you see this. Shining
lawn, shining rabbits, shining world. The rabbits are out on the
lawn. They’ve been waiting for him, all this time, they’ve been
waiting. Here’s his rabbit, his very own rabbit. Who needs a bike?
He sits on his rabbit, legs pressed against the warm, silky,
shining flanks, one hand holding on to the rabbit’s fur, the
knotted string around its neck. He has something in his other hand,
and when he looks, he sees it’s a spear. All around him, the others
are sitting on their rabbits, waiting patiently, quietly. They’ve
been waiting for a long time, but the waiting is almost over. In a
little while, the dinner party will be over and the war will
begin.

Cats went in and out of the witch's house all day long. The
windows stayed open, and the doors, and there were other doors,
cat-sized and private, in the walls and up in the attic. The cats
were large and sleek and silent. No one knew their names, or even
if they had names, except for the witch.

Some of the cats were cream-colored and some were brindled. Some
were black as beetles. They were about the witch’s business. Some
came into the witch’s bedroom with live things in their mouths.
When they came out again, their mouths were empty.

The cats trotted and slunk and leapt and crouched. They were
busy. Their movements were catlike, or perhaps clockwork. Their
tails twitched like hairy pendulums. They paid no attention to the
witch’s children.

The witch had three living children at this time, although at
one time she had had dozens, maybe more. No one, certainly not the
witch, had ever bothered to tally them up. But at one time the
house had bulged with cats and babies.

Now, since witches cannot have children in the usual way—their
wombs are full of straw or bricks or stones, and when they give
birth, they give birth to rabbits, kittens, tadpoles, houses, silk
dresses, and yet even witches must have heirs, even witches wish to
be mothers—the witch had acquired her children by other means: she
had stolen or bought them.

She’d had a passion for children with a certain color of red
hair. Twins she had never been able to abide (they were the wrong
kind of magic), although she’d sometimes attempted to match up sets
of children, as though she had been putting together a chess set,
and not a family. If you were to say
a witch’s chess set
,
instead of
a witch’s family
, there would be some truth in
that. Perhaps this is true of other families as well.

One girl she had grown like a cyst, upon her thigh. Other
children she had made out of things in her garden, or bits of trash
that the cats brought her: aluminum foil with strings of chicken
fat still crusted to it, broken television sets, cardboard boxes
that the neighbors had thrown out. She had always been a thrifty
witch.

Some of these children had run away and others had died. Some of
them she had simply misplaced, or accidentally left behind on
buses. It is to be hoped that these children were later adopted
into good homes, or reunited with their natural parents. If you are
looking for a happy ending in this story, then perhaps you should
stop reading here and picture these children, these parents, their
reunions.

Are you still reading? The witch, up in her bedroom, was dying.
She had been poisoned by an enemy, a witch, a man named Lack. The
child Finn, who had been her food taster, was dead already and so
were three cats who’d licked her dish clean. The witch knew who had
killed her and she snatched pieces of time, here and there, from
the business of dying, to make her revenge. Once the question of
this revenge had been settled to her satisfaction, the shape of it
like a black ball of twine in her head, she began to divide up her
estate between her three remaining children.

Flecks of vomit stuck to the corners of her mouth, and there was
a basin beside the foot of the bed, which was full of black liquid.
The room smelled like cats’ piss and wet matches. The witch panted
as if she were giving birth to her own death.

“Flora shall have my automobile,” she said, “and also my purse,
which will never be empty, so long as you always leave a coin at
the bottom, my darling, my spendthrift, my profligate, my drop of
poison, my pretty, pretty Flora. And when I am dead, take the road
outside the house and go west. There’s one last piece of
advice.”

Flora, who was the oldest of the witch’s living children, was
redheaded and stylish. She had been waiting for the witch’s death
for a long time now, although she had been patient. She kissed the
witch’s cheek and said, “Thank you, Mother.”

The witch looked up at her, panting. She could see Flora’s life,
already laid out, flat as a map. Perhaps all mothers can see as
far.

“Jack, my love, my birdsnest, my bite, my scrap of porridge,”
the witch said, “you shall have my books. I won’t have any need of
books where I am going. And when you leave my house, strike out in
an an easterly direction and you won’t be any sorrier than you are
now.”

Jack, who had once been a little bundle of feathers and twigs
and eggshell all tied up with a tatty piece of string, was a sturdy
lad, almost full grown. If he knew how to read, only the cats knew
it. But he nodded and kissed his mother’s gray lips.

“And what shall I leave to my boy Small?” the witch said,
convulsing. She threw up again in the basin. Cats came running,
leaning on the lip of the basin to inspect her vomitus. The witch’s
hand dug into Small’s leg.

“Oh it is hard, hard, so very hard, for a mother to leave her
children (though I have done harder things). Children need a
mother, even such a mother as I have been.” She wiped at her eyes,
and yet it is a fact that witches cannot cry.

Small, who still slept in the witch’s bed, was the youngest of
the witch’s children. (Perhaps not as young as you think.) He sat
upon the bed, and although he didn’t cry, it was only because
witch’s children have no one to teach them the use of crying. His
heart was breaking.

Small could juggle and sing and every morning he brushed and
plaited the witch’s long, silky hair. Surely every mother must wish
for a boy like Small, a curly-headed, sweet-breathed, tenderhearted
boy like Small, who can cook a fine omelet, and who has a good
strong singing voice as well as a gentle hand with a hairbrush.

“Mother,” he said, “if you must die, then you must die. And if I
can’t come along with you, then I’ll do my best to live and make
you proud. Give me your hairbrush to remember you by, and I’ll go
make my own way in the world.”

“You shall have my hairbrush, then,” said the witch to Small,
looking, and panting, panting. “And I love you best of all. You
shall have my tinderbox and my matches, and also my revenge, and
you will make me proud, or I don’t know my own children.”

“What shall we do with the house, Mother?” said Jack. He said it
as if he didn’t care.

“When I am dead,” the witch said, “this house will be of no use
to anyone. I gave birth to it—that was a very long time ago—and
raised it from just a dollhouse. Oh, it was the most dear, most
darling dollhouse ever. It had eight rooms and a tin roof, and a
staircase that went nowhere at all. But I nursed it and rocked it
to sleep in a cradle, and it grew up to be a real house, and see
how it has taken care of me, its parent, how it knows a child’s
duty to its mother. And perhaps you can see how it is now, how it
pines, how it grows sick to see me dying like this. Leave it to the
cats. They’ll know what to do with it.”

All this time the cats have been running in and out of the room,
bringing things and taking things away. It seems as if they will
never slow down, never come to rest, never nap, never have the time
to sleep, or to die, or even to mourn. They have a certain
proprietary look about them, as if the house is already theirs.

The witch vomits up mud, fur, glass buttons, tin soldiers,
trowels, hat pins, thumbtacks, love letters (mislabeled or sent
without the appropriate amount of postage and never read), and a
dozen regiments of red ants, each ant as long and wide as a kidney
bean. The ants swim across the perilous stinking basin, clamber up
the sides of the basin, and go marching across the floor in a shiny
ribbon. They are carrying pieces of Time in their mandibles. Time
is heavy, even in such small pieces, but the ants have strong jaws,
strong legs. Across the floor they go, and up the wall, and out the
window. The cats watch, but don’t interfere. The witch gasps and
coughs and then lies still. Her hands beat against the bed once and
then are still. Still the children wait, to make sure that she is
dead, and that she has nothing else to say.

In the witch’s house, the dead are sometimes quite
talkative.

But the witch has nothing else to say at this time.

The house groans and all the cats begin to mew piteously,
trotting in and out of the room as if they have dropped something
and must go and hunt for it—they will never find it—and the
children, at last, find they know how to cry, but the witch is
perfectly still and quiet. There is a tiny smile on her face, as if
everything has happened exactly to her satisfaction. Or maybe she
is looking forward to the next part of the story.

The children buried the witch in one of her half-grown
dollhouses. They crammed her into the downstairs parlor, and
knocked out the inner walls so that her head rested on the kitchen
table in the breakfast nook, and her ankles threaded through a
bedroom door. Small brushed out her hair, and, because he wasn’t
sure what she should wear now that she was dead, he put all her
dresses on her, one over the other over the other, until he could
hardly see her white limbs at all beneath the stack of petticoats
and coats and dresses. It didn’t matter: once they’d nailed the
dollhouse shut again, all they could see was the red crown of her
head in the kitchen window, and the worn-down heels of her dancing
shoes knocking against the shutters of the bedroom window.

Jack, who was handy, rigged a set of wheels for the dollhouse,
and a harness so that it could be pulled. They put the harness on
Small, and Small pulled and Flora pushed, and Jack talked and
coaxed the house along, over the hill, down to the cemetery, and
the cats ran along beside them.

δ

The cats are beginning to look a bit shabby, as if they are
molting. Their mouths look very empty. The ants have marched away,
through the woods, and down into town, and they have built a nest
on your yard, out of the bits of Time. And if you hold a magnifying
glass over their nest, to see the ants dance and burn, Time will
catch fire and you will be sorry.

Outside the cemetery gates, the cats had been digging a grave
for the witch. The children tipped the dollhouse into the grave,
kitchen window first. But then they saw that the grave wasn’t deep
enough, and the house sat there on its end, looking uncomfortable.
Small began to cry (now that he’d learned how, it seemed he would
spend all his time practicing), thinking how horrible it would be
to spend one’s death, all of eternity, upside down and not even
properly buried, not even able to feel the rain when it beat down
on the exposed shingles of the house, and seeped down into the
house and filled your mouth and drowned you, so that you had to die
all over again, every time it rained.

The dollhouse chimney had broken off and fallen on the ground.
One of the cats picked it up and carried it away, like a souvenir.
That cat carried the chimney into the woods and ate it, a mouthful
at a time, and passed out of this story and into another one. It’s
no concern of ours.

The other cats began to carry up mouthfuls of dirt, dropping it
and mounding it around the house with their paws. The children
helped, and when they’d finished, they’d managed to bury the witch
properly, so that only the bedroom window was visible, a little
pane of glass like an eye at the top of a small dirt hill.

On the way home, Flora began to flirt with Jack. Perhaps she
liked the way he looked in his funeral black. They talked about
what they planned to be, now that they were grown up. Flora wanted
to find her parents. She was a pretty girl: someone would want to
look after her. Jack said he would like to marry someone rich. They
began to make plans.

Small walked a little behind, slippery cats twining around his
ankles. He had the witch’s hairbrush in his pocket, and his fingers
slipped around the figured horn handle for comfort.

The house, when they reached it, had a dangerous, grief-stricken
look to it, as if it was beginning to pull away from itself. Flora
and Jack wouldn’t go back inside. They squeezed Small lovingly, and
asked if he wouldn’t want to come along with them. He would have
liked to, but who would have looked after the witch’s cats, the
witch’s revenge? So he watched as they drove off together. They
went north. What child has ever heeded a mother’s advice?

Jack hasn’t even bothered to bring along the witch’s library: he
says there isn’t space in the trunk for everything. He’ll rely on
Flora and her magic purse.

Small sat in the garden, and ate stalks of grass when he was
hungry, and pretended that the grass was bread and milk and
chocolate cake. He drank out of the garden hose. When it began to
grow dark, he was lonelier than he had ever been in his life. The
witch’s cats were not good company. He said nothing to them and
they had nothing to tell him, about the house, or the future, or
the witch’s revenge, or about where he was supposed to sleep. He
had never slept anywhere except in the witch’s bed, so at last he
went back over the hill and down to the cemetery.

Some of the cats were still going up and down the grave,
covering the base of the mound with leaves and grass and feathers,
their own loose fur. It was a soft sort of nest to lie down on. The
cats were still busy when Small fell asleep—cats are always
busy—cheek pressed against the cool glass of the bedroom window,
hand curled in his pocket around the hairbrush, but in the middle
of the night, when he woke up, he was swaddled, head to foot, in
warm, grass-scented cat bodies.

A tail is curled around his chin like a rope, and all the bodies
are soughing breath in and out, whiskers and paws twitching, silky
bellies rising and falling. All the cats are sleeping a frantic,
exhausted, busy sleep, except for one, a white cat who sits near
his head, looking down at him. Small has never seen this cat
before, and yet he knows her, the way that you know the people who
visit you in dreams: she’s white everywhere, except for reddish
tufts and frills at her ears and tail and paws, as if someone has
embroidered her with fire around the edges.