Magic for Beginners: Stories (22 page)

Then there were errands, people to talk to. She was busy.

She hugged her aunt and uncle good-bye and moved into the house
where she would live for the rest of her life. She unpacked all her
boxes, and the Salvation Army brought her parents’ clothes and
furniture and pots and pans, and other people, her parents’
friends, helped her hang her mother’s clothes in her mother’s
closet. (Not this closet.) She bunched her mother’s clothes up in
her hand and sniffed, curious and hungry and afraid.

She suspects, remembering the smell of her mother’s monogrammed
sweaters, that they’ll have fights about things. Boys, music,
clothes. The cheerleader will learn to let all of these things
go.

If her kids were still around, they would say I told you so.
What they did say was, Just wait until you have parents of your
own. You’ll see.

The cheerleader rubs her stomach. Are you in there?

She moved the unfamiliar, worn-down furniture around so that it
matched up old grooves in the floor. Here was the shape of
someone’s buttocks, printed onto a seat cushion. Maybe it would be
her father’s favorite chair.

She looked through her father’s records. There was a record
playing on the phonograph, it wasn’t anything she had ever heard
before, and she took it off, laid it back in its empty white
sleeve. She studied the death certificates. She tried to think what
to tell her parents about their grandchildren, what they’d want to
know.

Her favorite song had just been on the radio for the very last
time. Years and years ago, she’d danced to that song at her
wedding. Now it was gone, except for the feeling she’d had when she
listened to it. Sometimes she still felt that way, but there wasn’t
a word for it anymore.

Tonight, in a few hours, there will be a car wreck and then her
parents will be coming home. By then, all her friends will have
left, taking away six-packs and boyfriends and newly applied coats
of hair spray and lipstick.

She thinks she looks a bit like her mother.

Before everyone showed up, while everything was still a wreck
downstairs, before the police had arrived to say what they had to
say, she was standing in her parents’ bathroom. She was looking in
the mirror.

She picked a lipstick out of the trash can, an orangey red that
will be a favorite because there’s just a little half-moon left.
But when she looked at herself in the mirror, it didn’t fit. It
didn’t belong to her. She put her hand on her breastbone, pressed
hard, felt her heart beating faster and faster. She couldn’t wear
her mother’s lipstick while her mother lay on a gurney somewhere in
a morgue: waiting to be sewn up; to have her clothes sewn back on;
to breathe; to wake up; to see the car on the other side of the
median, sliding away; to see her husband, the man that she’s going
to marry someday; to come home to meet her daughter.

The recently dead are always exhausted. There’s so much to
absorb, so many things that need to be undone. They have their
whole lives ahead of them.

The cheerleader’s best friend winks at her. The Devil’s got a
flashlight with two dead batteries. Somebody closes the door after
them.

Soon, very soon, already now, the batteries in the Devil’s
flashlight are old and tired and there’s just a thin line of light
under the closet door. It’s cramped in the closet and it smells
like shoes, paint, wool, cigarettes, tennis rackets, ghosts of
perfume and sweat. Outside the closet, the world is getting
younger, but in here is where they keep all the old things. The
cheerleader put them all in here last week.

She’s felt queasy for most of her life. She’s a bad time
traveler. She gets time-sick. It’s as if she’s always just a little
bit pregnant, are you in there? and it’s worse in here, with all
these old things that don’t belong to her, even worse because the
Devil is always fooling around with time.

The Devil feels right at home. He and the cheerleader make a
nest of coats and sit down on them, facing each other. The Devil
turns the bright, constant beam of the flashlight on the
cheerleader. She’s wearing a little flippy skirt. Her knees are up,
making a tent out of her skirt. The tent is full of shadows—so is
the closet. The Devil conjures up another Devil, another
cheerleader, mouse-sized, both of them, sitting under the
cheerleader’s skirt. The closet is full of Devils and
cheerleaders.

“I just need to hold something,” the cheerleader says. If she
holds something, maybe she won’t throw up.

“Please,” the Devil says. “It tickles. I’m ticklish.”

The cheerleader is leaning forward. She’s got the Devil by the
tail. Then she’s touching the Devil’s tail with her pompoms. He
quivers.

“Please don’t,” he says. He giggles.

The Devil’s tail is tucked up under his legs. It isn’t hot, but
the Devil is sweating. He feels sad. He’s not good at being sad. He
flicks the flashlight on and off. Here’s a knee. Here’s a mouth.
Here’s a sleeve hanging down, all empty. Someone knocks on the
closet door.

“Go away,” the cheerleader says. “It hasn’t been five minutes
yet. Not even.”

The Devil can feel her smile at him, like they’re old friends.
“Your tail. Can I touch it?” the cheerleader says.

“Touch what?” the Devil says. He feels a little excited, a
little nervous. Old enough to know better, brand-new enough, here
in the closet, to be jumpy. He’s taking a chance here.
Girls—women—aren’t really domestic animals at the moment, although
they’re getting tamer, more used to living in houses. Less likely
to bite.

“Can I touch your tail now?” the cheerleader says.

“No!” the Devil says.

“I’m shy,” he says. “Maybe you could stroke my tail with your
pompom, in a little bit.”

“We could make out,” the cheerleader says. “That’s what we’re
supposed to do, right? I need to be distracted because I think I’m
about to have this thought. It’s going to make me really sad. I’m
getting younger, you know? I’m going to keep on getting younger. It
isn’t fair.”

She puts her feet against the closet door. She kicks once, like
a mule.

She says, “I mean, you’re the Devil. You don’t have to worry
about this stuff. In a few thousand years, you’ll be back at the
beginning again and you’ll be in good with God again, right?”

The Devil shrugs. Everybody knows the end of that story.

The cheerleader says, “Everyone knows that old story. You’re
famous. You’re like John Wilkes Booth. You’re historical—you’re
going to be really important. You’ll be Mr. Bringer-of-Light and
you’ll get good tables at all the trendy restaurants, choruses of
angels and maître d’s, et cetera, la, la, la, they’ll all be
singing hallelujahs forever, please pass the vichyssoise, and then
God unmakes the world and he’ll put all the bits away in a closet
like this.”

The Devil smirks. He shrugs. It isn’t a bad life, hanging around
in closets with cheerleaders. And it gets better.

The cheerleader says, “It isn’t fair. I’d tell him so, if he
were here. He’ll unhang the stars and pull Leviathan right back out
of the deep end of the vasty bathwater, and you’ll be having
Leviathan tartare for dinner. Where will I be, then? You’ll be
around. You’re always around. But me, I’ll get younger and younger
and in a handful of years I won’t be me at all, and my parents will
get younger and so on and so on, whoosh! We’ll be gone like a flash
of light, and you won’t even remember me. Nobody will remember me!
Everything that I was, that I did, all the funny things that I
said, and the things that my friends said back to me, that will all
be gone. But you go all the way backwards. You go backwards and
forwards. It isn’t fair. You could always remember me. What could I
do so that you would remember me?”

“As long as we’re in this closet,” the Devil says, he’s
magnanimous, “I’ll remember you.”

“But in a few minutes,” the cheerleader says, “we’ll go back out
of the closet and the bottle will spin, and then the party will be
over, and my parents will come home, and nobody will ever remember
me.”

“Then tell me a story,” the Devil says. He puts his sharp, furry
paw on her leg. “Tell me a story so that I’ll remember you.”

“What kind of story?” says the cheerleader.

“Tell me a scary story,” the Devil says. “A funny, scary, sad,
happy story. I want everything.” He can feel his tail wagging as he
says this.

“You can’t have everything,” the cheerleader says, and she picks
up his paw and puts it back on the floor of the closet. “Not even
in a story. You can’t have all the stories you want.”

“I know,” the Devil says. He whines. “But I still want it. I
want things. That’s my job. I even want the things that I already
have. I want everything you have. I want the things that don’t
exist. That’s why I’m the Devil.” He leers and it’s a shame because
she can’t see him in the dark. He feels silly.

“Well, what’s the scariest thing?” says the cheerleader. “You’re
the expert, right? Give me a little help here.”

“The scariest thing,” the Devil says. “Okay, I’ll give you two
things. Three things. No, just two. The third one is a secret.”

The Devil’s voice changes. Later on, one day the cheerleader
will be listening to a preschool teacher say back the alphabet,
with the sun moving across the window, nothing ever stays still,
and she’ll be reminded of the Devil and the closet and the line of
light under the door, the peaceful little circle of light the
flashlight makes against the closet door.

The Devil says, “I’m not complaining,” (but he is) “but here’s
the way things used to work. They don’t work this way anymore. I
don’t know if you remember. Your parents are dead and they’re
coming home in just a few hours. Used to be, that was scary. Not
anymore. But try to imagine: finding something that shouldn’t be
there.”

“Like what?” the cheerleader says.

The Devil shrugs. “A child’s toy. A ball, or a night-light. Some
cheap bit of trash, but it’s heavier than it looks, or else light.
It shines with a greasy sort of light or else it eats light. When
you touch it, it yields unpleasantly. You feel as if you might fall
into it. You feel light-headed. It might be inscribed in a language
which no one can decipher.”

“Okay,” the cheerleader says. She seems somewhat cheered up. “So
what’s the next thing?”

The Devil shines the flashlight in her eyes, flicks it on and
off. “Someone disappears. Gone, just like that. They’re standing
behind you in a line at an amusement park—or they wander away
during the intermission of a play—perhaps they go downstairs to get
the mail—or to make tea—”

“That’s scary?” the cheerleader says.

“Used to be,” the Devil says. “It used to be that the worst
thing that could happen was, if you had kids, and one of them died
or disappeared. Disappeared was the worst. Anything might have
happened to them.”

“Things are better now,” the cheerleader says.

“Yes, well.” The Devil says, “Things just get better and better
nowadays. But—try to remember how it was. The person who
disappeared, only they didn’t. You’d see them from time to time,
peeking in at you through windows, or down low through the mail
slot in your front door. Keyholes. You might see them in the
grocery store. Sitting in the backseat of your car, down low,
slouching in your rearview mirror. They might pinch your leg or
pull your hair when you’re asleep. When you talk on the phone, they
listen in, you hear them listening.

The cheerleader says, “Like, with my parents—”

“Exactly,” says the Devil. “You’ve had nightmares about them,
right?”

“Not really,” the cheerleader says. “Everyone says they were
probably nice people. I mean, look at this house! But, sometimes, I
have this dream that I’m at the mall, and I see my husband. And
he’s just the same, he’s a grown-up, and he doesn’t recognize me.
It turns out that I’m the only one who’s going backwards. And then
he does recognize me and he wants to know what I’ve done with the
kids.”

The last time she’d seen her husband, he was trying to grow a
beard. He couldn’t even do that right. He hadn’t had much to say,
but they’d looked at each other for a long time.

“What about your children?” the Devil says. “Do you wonder where
they went when the doctor pushed them back up inside you? Do you
have dreams about them?”

“Yes,” the cheerleader says. “Everything gets smaller. I’m
afraid of that.”

“Think how men feel!” the Devil says. “It’s no wonder men are
afraid of women. No wonder sex is so hard on them.”

The cheerleader misses sex, that feeling afterwards, that
blissful, unsatisfied itch.

“The first time around, things were better,” the Devil says. “I
don’t know if you remember. People died, and no one was sure what
happened next. There were all sorts of possibilities. Now everyone
knows everything. What’s the fun in that?”

Someone is trying to push open the closet door, but the
cheerleader puts her feet against it, leaning against the back of
the closet. “Oh, I remember!” she says, “I remember when I was
dead! There was so much I was looking forward to. I had no
idea!”

The Devil shivers. He’s never liked dead people much.

“So, okay, what about monsters?” the cheerleader says.
“Vampires? Serial killers? People from outer space? Those old
movies?”

The Devil shrugs. “Yeah, sure. Boogeymen. Formaldehyde babies in
Mason jars. Someday someone is going to have to take them out of
the jar, unpickle them. Women with teeth down there. Zombies.
Killer robots, killer bees, serial killers, cold spots, werewolves.
The dream where you know that you’re asleep but you can’t wake up.
You can hear someone walking around the bedroom picking up your
things and putting them down again and you still can’t wake up. The
end of the world. Spiders.
No one was with her when she
died.
Carnivorous plants.”