Magic for Beginners: Stories (18 page)

Everyone at school followed Popsicle around. Even the girls had
crushes on Popsicle. People gave her things. Sometimes at recess
there was an ice-cream truck parked across the street. Somebody
bought Popsicle a cherry popsicle. Paul came back with six ice
creams—a screwball, a popsicle, two creamsicles, a fudge pop, an
ice-cream sandwich. He spent all his lunch money. His hands were
full of ice cream. He went and stood in front of Popsicle. She said
something like, I can’t eat all those.

Paul said, “I’ll eat them for you. To prove how much I love
you.” As if they’d been arguing about it. Nobody even knew if he’d
ever said anything to Popsicle before.

All the other kids stood around and watched. Those who weren’t
there, who weren’t watching, were pretty sure later on that they
had been there: they’d heard the story so many times. Callahan
thought he’d been there, although really he hadn’t. When he fell in
love for the first time, he remembered Paul’s hands, Popsicle’s
polite, confused smile.

Later on, everybody watched Paul eat stuff, except for Popsicle,
who hid in the girl’s bathroom every single time. Nobody had
crushes on her after a while. Nobody else loved her as much as
Paul.

In his locker, Callahan had kept a list of everything Paul ate.
It was a love poem, a grocery list, secret evidence: Paul loves
Popsicle. Paul ate a few ants. He drank someone’s milk, which had
gone off. Everyone smelled it. Paul ate a little glue booger that
someone brought him. He ate dead leaves, and a ball of hair that
someone took from Popsicle’s comb. He ate a piece of raw meat a
girl stole from her mother’s refrigerator. He ate other things, all
year long. The teachers never saw what was going on.

The next year Paul didn’t come back. Neither did Popsicle.
Someone made a joke about it. Perhaps Paul had eaten Popsicle.

Callahan didn’t know what had happened to Paul or to Popsicle.
Fred, on the other hand, knew what happens to everyone eventually.
He could see the map that Paul and Popsicle had left on Callahan’s
face, just like Callahan’s wife could see it now that she was dead.
The dead can afford to see more than the living. Fred said, “She
says you didn’t really love her. And that she’s better off without
you. She hopes you grow old and die alone.”

Callahan said, “I’m paying you so you can say these things to
me? This is bullshit! And how do I even know if she’s really here?
Why should I believe what some guy says? Why would she talk to you
and not to me?”

Fred said, “Remember you’re talking to a medium. Not a
therapist.” (He tried to sound reasonable; detached rather than
snappish. He knew as he said it that he sounded like Callahan’s
therapist.) “Laura says you have more money than you know how to
spend, and she says she hopes you spend it all on charlatans and
quacks. Don’t get angry at me. I’m just saying this because you
want me to tell you what she’s saying.”

Callahan said, “Laura, if you’re here, talk to me—why are you
talking to him, and not to me?” Like Fred, he was trying his best
to talk reasonably. Soon he’d be throwing furniture around. “Don’t
you know how much I love you?”

She knew. Even Fred knew. But what did how much matter to a dead
woman?

Fred said, “She says you ought to take better care of yourself.
Your refrigerator is empty. She wants you to go out and buy some
groceries. She doesn’t want you to starve to death. She doesn’t
want to see you anytime soon. She’s got her own afterlife to live,
her own things to deal with. This is an important time for her. She
has things to do.”

“So is that it?” Callahan said. “Is that all you can do for
me?”

Fred shrugged. “Do you want me to produce some ectoplasm? A
souvenir of the spirit world? Would you like to talk to somebody
famous? Marilyn Monroe?”

“You are one real son of a bitch,” Callahan said. “So how do you
like the way this asshole talks to me, Laura? You approve?”

Fred said nothing. Laura said nothing, either. She indicated,
however, that she’d like to write something down.

The table where they were sitting was solid oak. Round. No sharp
edges. It was good to have a nice heavy piece of furniture to sit
behind. Both the living and the dead liked to throw stuff around,
as if it proved something. Fred kept a pad of paper and a ballpoint
pen on the table. He picked the pen up so that Laura could write
down exactly what she wanted to say. He didn’t watch as Laura
wrote. It was uncomfortable, watching someone else use your hand.
The fingers always looked too wriggly. Stretched. Laura dragged the
pen across the page as if Fred’s fingers were bags of dirt.

Callahan kept on talking to Laura. He had this feeling that
Laura was hiding somewhere in the room, maybe under the medium’s
floppy toupee, or under the oak table. Laura had never been good at
keeping still. She liked to swim laps until she could barely climb
out of the pool. He couldn’t help it. He said, “Do they have
swimming pools? For dead people? Does Laura still swim every
day?”

Fred tried to keep a straight face. Swimming pools? He couldn’t
wait to tell that one to Sarah. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “They have
swimming pools. Laura’s learning to play bridge. And she’s thinking
about getting a dog. You know, for companionship.”

Callahan thought about that. He could learn how to play bridge,
if that was what Laura wanted. He was sure he could feel Laura
moving around the room, brushing her fingers against the walls,
sliding behind the curtains at the window, touching the backs of
the chair where he sat, but Laura never touched him. What if she
touched him and he couldn’t feel anything? How was all this
supposed to work, if they tried to make it work? They’d been
married for almost thirty years.

Fred read what Laura had written. Terrible handwriting, even for
a dead person. “So she wants you to throw a dinner party. But she
doesn’t want you to invite anyone else. This is the menu she’s
giving me. She says, you want to prove you love her, then prove it.
Make her dinner.”

Callahan said, “I used to make dinner for her all the time.”

Fred said, “You’ll notice I haven’t asked you why she’s so mad
at you. I’m not going to ask you, either. I don’t like to pry.” He
looked down at the list Laura was making, and then back up at
Callahan. “But yeah, she’s pretty pissed. This is one weird-ass
menu. She says ants, a piece of churt—sorry, chalk, her handwriting
is execrable—old milk, vinegar, popsicles, erasers, grass, sawdust,
sand, dirt. She says if you really love her, you’ll show her how
much you love her.”

“So what did he do?” Sarah Parminter said, after a while. “Is he
going to do it?”

“I don’t know,” Fred said. “I just thought it was kind of funny.
He wrote me a check and it bounced. And she said he had lots of
money too, so maybe it wasn’t really his wife, even. Maybe it was
just somebody who wanted to fuck with him. I wouldn’t eat grass
just for a dead girl. Not unless she was paying me.”

“You haven’t mentioned your mother yet,” Sarah Parminter said to
Alan Robley.

“Why?” Alan said. “Is she here? Does she want to talk to
me?”

“She’s over there with the kids,” Sarah said. “They’re teasing a
Goofy.”

“She’s good with the kids,” Alan said. But he didn’t look over
to where a crowd was gathering around the Goofy. He wasn’t going to
tell his kids to leave the Goofy alone. Living parents had a hard
time disciplining dead children. You had to indulge them, even when
their fun got a little vicious. You had to pretend that they didn’t
belong to you. “I mean, even when she was alive, she was good with
them. She was so excited to have grandchildren. She read to them
all the time.”

“She didn’t like Lavvie much,” Sarah said.

“No,” Alan said. “They didn’t get along.”

“Your mother still doesn’t approve,” Sarah said. “She still
thinks Lavvie’s too old for you.”

Lavvie said something.

“Lavvie says your mother is a real, ah, bitch.”

“Fuck Lavvie,” Alan said, but he didn’t really mean it. And now
he was watching the Goofy stumble around, and he was feeling an odd
jealousy. Here he was, all dressed up in red, and the kids still
preferred a guy in a fur suit to their own father. Dead people had
favorite characters at Disneyland. Goofy, for example. The costume
was so baggy. That silly hat. You could poke him in the ass, really
jab him good, and he never moved fast enough. Minnie Mouses were
also popular with dead people. They liked hiding her pocketbook. Or
putting things in it.

The Goofy was shouting obscenities now. Living children were
crying. Dead ones were laughing. Alan said, “She never made any
effort. She always made fun of my mother, the way she put on
lipstick, and why are the dead so obsessed with makeup, anyway? The
way my mother cut up her food real small.”

Lavvie said something else.

“Lavvie wants to know if you ever loved her,” Sarah said. It
delighted her, how the line for Space Mountain never got any
shorter, no matter how long you sat and watched. She’d never
waited, herself. It was enough to watch the tourists shuffle into
line, disappear and come back out again, and wander over to join
the line once again.

“Could I talk to my mom?” Alan said.

Sarah tried waving Alan’s mother over, but Mrs. Robley only gave
her a black, murderous glare. Her lips were pressed together so
tightly that her entire mouth had disappeared. One hand was clamped
around the Goofy’s long ear. The other hand was burrowing into the
Goofy’s costume, as if she were going to disembowel him right
through the fake fur. Lavvie was still sitting weightlessly in
Alan’s lap. The little slut. She gave Mrs. Robley the finger when
the kids weren’t looking.

“She’s, ah, she’s busy,” Sarah said. “And our time’s up, Alan. I
have another appointment at four. But Lavvie has one last thing to
say to you.”

Lavvie didn’t really have anything to say to Alan, but Sarah
knew she wouldn’t mind that Sarah was making something up. The
stranger the better: it would only amuse her. All of it was true,
after all. I love you. I don’t love you. Don’t leave me. Fuck off.
I fuck the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt with a dildo all day long
while you’re at work.

If Alan divorced Lavvie, he’d still need Sarah. There would be
issues of child custody. And there was Mrs. Robley, too. There
would be things Alan needed to ask his mother about his
childhood.

A divorce would mean more trips to amusement parks for the kids
and for Sarah. She could always say the kids wanted to go to Six
Flags next week. There were always good lines for the Psyclone.

Alan was still waiting, his hands in his lap. Let him wait a
minute longer. It was strange, the way his arms just disappeared
right through Lavvie’s body. And it was unkind of Lavvie, Sarah
thought, to sit like that. It was indecent and unkind. Someday she
might write an etiquette book for the dead, although it would be
the living that ended up reading it, no doubt, and one ought to
draw a veil over certain things. Or at least not pull the veil back
too far. Sarah had talked to a historian once—had he been a living
man or had he already been dead? He was certainly dead now—about
the past. The past was, of course, a different country. A different
amusement park and the lines were much longer. The dead didn’t know
the way back any better than the living did.

Sarah’s historian said that one way you went about figuring out
what the past had been like was to read contemporary books of
etiquette. When one of these etiquette books suggested that it was
not well-bred behavior to pick up a human turd from the gutter to
remark upon its color or size, you knew then that people had needed
to be told not to do such things because they’d once done such
things. Sarah hadn’t batted an eye when he’d said that. Better not
to let on about the habits of the dead, she knew. Sarah knew this,
and Lavvie Tyler and the Robley-Tyler children and Mrs. Robley know
this, and me, I know, too. Even as I’ve been telling you this
story, I haven’t described things exactly as they went on. I
haven’t been honest about the dead people in this story, about how
the dead carry on.

There were living people waiting in line at Disneyland, and
there was a dead woman sitting on the park bench with Sarah
Parminter and Alan Robley and there were lots of other dead people,
too, hundreds of them, and what they got up to isn’t any of your
business. It’s just as well that only people like Sarah Parminter
and her cousin Fred ever see what the dead are really like. But the
dead, of course, see everything that you do. Next time you and your
new wife take your kids to Disneyland and you’re waiting in line,
you think about me. You think about that.

`There once was a man whose wife was dead. She was dead when he
fell in love with her, and she was dead for the twelve years they
lived together, during which time she bore him three children, all
of them dead as well, and at the time of which I am speaking, the
time during which her husband began to suspect that she was having
an affair, she was still dead.

It has been only in the last two decades that the living have
been in the habit of marrying the dead, and it is still not common
practice. Divorcing the dead is still less common. More usual is
that the living husband—or wife—who regrets a marriage no longer
acknowledges the admittedly tenuous presence of his spouse. Bigamy
is easily accomplished when one’s first wife is dead. It may not
even be bigamy. And yet, where there are children concerned, the
dissolution of a mixed marriage becomes stickier. Thirteen years
after they first met at a cocktail party in the home of a
celebrated medium and matchmaker who had been both profiled in
The New Yorker
and picketed by conservative religious
groups, it was clear to both Alan Robley (living) and Lavvie Tyler
(deceased), that there were worse fates than death. Their marriage
was as dead as a doorknob.