Magic for Beginners: Stories (23 page)

“Oh goody,” the cheerleader says. Her eyes shine at him out of
the dark. Her pompoms slide across the floor of the closet. He
moves his flashlight so he can see her hands.

“So here’s your story,” the cheerleader says. She’s a girl who
can think on her feet. “It’s not really a scary story. I don’t
really get scary.”

“Weren’t you listening?” the Devil says. He taps the flashlight
against his big front teeth. “Never mind, it’s okay, never mind. Go
on.”

“This probably isn’t a true story,” the cheerleader says, “and
it doesn’t go backwards like we do. I probably won’t get all the
way to the end, and I’m not going to start at the beginning,
either. There isn’t enough time.”

“That’s fine,” the Devil says. “I’m all ears.” (He is.)

The cheerleader says, “So who’s going to tell this story,
anyway? Be quiet and listen. We’re running out of time.”

She says, “A man comes home from a sales conference. He and his
wife have been separated for a while, but they’ve decided to try
living together again. They’ve sold the house that they used to
live in. Now they live just outside of town, in an old house in an
orchard.

The man comes home from this business conference, and his wife
is sitting in the kitchen and she’s talking to another woman, an
older woman. They’re sitting on the chairs that used to go around
the kitchen table, but the table is gone. So is the microwave, and
the rack where Susan’s copper-bottomed pots hang. The pots are
gone, too.

The husband doesn’t notice any of this. He’s busy looking at the
other woman. Her skin has a greenish tinge. He has this feeling
that he knows her. She and the wife both look at the husband, and
he suddenly knows what it is. It’s his wife. It’s his wife, two of
her, only one is maybe twenty years older. Otherwise, except that
this one’s green, they’re identical: same eyes, same mouth, same
little mole at the corner of her mouth.

“How am I doing so far?”

“So-so,” the Devil says. The truth (the truth makes the Devil
itchy) is, he only likes stories about himself. Like the story
about the Devil’s wedding cake. Now that’s a story.

The cheerleader says, “It gets better.”

It Gets Better

The man’s name is Ed. It isn’t his real name. I made it up. Ed
and Susan have been married for ten years, separated for five
months, back together again for three months. They’ve been sleeping
in the same bed for three months, but they don’t have sex. Susan
cries whenever Ed kisses her. They don’t have any kids. Susan used
to have a younger brother. Ed is thinking about getting a dog.

While Ed’s been at his conference, Susan has been doing some
housework. She’s done some work up in the attic which we won’t talk
about. Not yet. Down in the spare bathroom in the basement, she’s
set up this machine, which we get around to later, and this machine
makes Susans. What Susan was hoping for was a machine that would
bring back Andrew. (Her brother. But you knew that.) Only it turns
out that getting Andrew back requires a different machine, a bigger
machine. Susan needs help making that machine, and so the new
Susans are going to come in handy after all. Over the course of the
next few days, the Susans explain all this to Ed.

Susan doesn’t expect Ed will be very helpful.

“Hi, Ed,” the older, greenish Susan says. She gets up from her
chair and gives him a big hug. Her skin is warm, tacky. She smells
yeasty. The original Susan—the Susan Ed thinks is original, and I
have no idea if he’s right about this, and, later on, he isn’t so
sure, either—sits in her chair and watches them.

Big green Susan: am I making her sound like Godzilla? She
doesn’t look like Godzilla, and yet there’s something about her
that reminds Ed of Godzilla, the way she stomps across the kitchen
floor—leads Ed over to a chair and makes him sit down. Now he
realizes that the kitchen table is gone. He still hasn’t managed to
say a word. Susan, both of them, is used to this.

“First of all,” Susan says, “the attic is off-limits. There are
some people working up there. (I don’t mean Susans. I’ll explain
Susans in a minute.) Some visitors. They’re helping me with a
project. About the other Susans, there are five of me at the
moment—you’ll meet the other three later. They’re down in the
basement. You’re allowed in the basement. You can help down there,
if you want.”

Godzilla Susan says, “You don’t have to worry about who is who,
although none of us are exactly alike. You can call us all Susan.
We’re discovering that some of us may be more temporary than
others, or fatter, or younger, or greener. It seems to depend on
the batch.”

“Are you Susan?” Ed says. He corrects himself. “I mean, are you
my wife? The real Susan?”

“We’re all your wife,” the younger Susan says. She puts her hand
on his leg and pats him like a dog.

“Where did the kitchen table go?” Ed says.

“I put it in the attic,” Susan says. “You really don’t have to
worry about that now. How was your conference?”

Another Susan comes into the kitchen. She’s young and the color
of green apples or new grass. Even the whites of her eyes are
grassy. She’s maybe nineteen, and the color of her skin makes Ed
think of a snake. “Ed!” she says, “How was the conference?”

“They’re keen on the new game,” Ed says. “It tests real
well.”

“Want a beer?” Susan says. (It doesn’t matter which Susan says
this.) She picks up a pitcher of green foamy stuff, and pours it
into a glass.

“This is beer?” Ed says.

“It’s Susan beer,” Susan says, and all the Susans laugh.

The beautiful, snake-colored nineteen-year-old Susan takes Ed on
a tour of the house. Mostly Ed just looks at Susan, but he sees
that the television is gone, and so are all of his games. All his
notebooks. The living room sofa is still there, but all the seat
cushions are missing. Later on, Susan will disassemble the sofa
with an ax.

Susan has covered up all the downstairs windows with what looks
like sheets of aluminum foil. She shows him the bathtub downstairs
where one of the Susans is brewing the Susan beer. Other Susans are
hanging long, mossy clots of the Susan beer on laundry racks. Dry,
these clots can be shaped into bedding, nests for the new Susans.
They are also edible.

Ed is still holding the glass of Susan beer. “Go on,” Susan
says. “You like beer.”

“I don’t like green beer,” Ed says.

“You like Susan, though,” Susan says. She’s wearing one of his
T-shirts, and a pair of Susan’s underwear. No bra. She puts Ed’s
hand on her breast.

Susan stops stirring the beer. She’s taller than Ed, and only a
little bit green. “You know Susan loves you,” she says.

“Who’s up in the attic?” Ed says. “Is it Andrew?”

His hand is still on Susan’s breast. He can feel her heart
beating. Susan says, “You can’t tell Susan I told you. She doesn’t
think you’re ready. It’s the aliens.”

They both stare at him. “She finally got them on the phone. This
is going to be huge, Ed. This is going to change the world.”

Ed could leave the house. He could leave Susan. He could refuse
to drink the beer.

The Susan beer doesn’t make him drunk. It isn’t really beer. You
knew that, right?

There are Susans everywhere. Some of them want to talk to Ed
about their marriage, or about the aliens, or sometimes they want
to talk about Andrew. Some of them are busy working. The Susans are
always dragging Ed off to empty rooms, to talk or kiss or make love
or gossip about the other Susans. Or they’re ignoring him. There’s
one very young Susan. She looks like she might be six or seven
years old. She goes up and down the upstairs hallway, drawing on
the walls with a marker. Ed isn’t sure whether this is childish
vandalism or important Susan work. He feels awkward asking.

Every once in a while, he thinks he sees the real Susan. He
wishes he could sit down and talk with her, but she always looks so
busy.

By the end of the week, there aren’t any mirrors left in the
house, and the windows are all covered up. The Susans have hung
sheets of the Susan beer over all the light fixtures, so everything
is green. Ed isn’t sure, but he thinks he might be turning
green.

Susan tastes green. She always does.

Once Ed hears someone knocking on the front door. “Ignore that,”
Susan says as she walks past him. She’s carrying the stacked blades
of an old ceiling fan, and a string of Christmas lights. “It isn’t
important.”

Ed pulls the plug of aluminum foil out of the eyehole, and peeks
out. Stan is standing there, looking patient. They stand there, Ed
on one side of the door, and Stan on the other. Ed doesn’t open the
door, and eventually Stan goes away. All the peacocks are kicking
up a fuss.

Ed tries teaching some of the Susans to play poker. It doesn’t
work so well, because it turns out that Susan always knows what
cards the other Susans are holding. So Ed makes up a game where
that doesn’t matter so much, but in the end, it makes him feel too
lonely. There aren’t any other Eds.

They decide to play spin the bottle instead. Instead of a
bottle, they use a hammer, and it never ends up pointing at Ed.
After a while, it gets too strange watching Susan kiss Susans, and
he wanders off to look for a Susan who will kiss him.

Up in the second-story bedroom, there are always lots of Susans.
This is where they go to wait when they start to get ripe. The
Susans loll, curled in their nests, getting riper, arguing about
the end of some old story. None of them remember it the same way.
Some of them don’t seem to know anything about it, but they all
have opinions.

Ed climbs into a nest and leans back. Susan swings her legs over
to make room for him. This Susan is small and round. She tickles
the soft part of his arm, and then tucks her face into his
side.

Susan passes him a glass of Susan beer.

“That’s not it,” Susan says, “It turns out that he overdosed.
Maybe even did it on purpose. We couldn’t talk about it. There
weren’t enough of us. We were trying to carry all that sadness all
by ourself. You can’t do something like that! And then the wife
tries to kill him. I tried to kill him. She kicks the fuck out of
him. He can’t leave the house for a week, won’t even come to the
door when his friends come over.”

“If you can call them friends,” Susan says.

“No, there was a gun,” Susan says. “And she has an affair.
Because she can’t get over it. Neither of them can.”

“She humiliates him at a dinner party,” Susan says. “They both
drink too much. Everybody goes home, and she breaks all the dishes
instead of washing them. There are plate shards all over the
kitchen floor. Someone’s going to get hurt; they don’t have a time
machine. They can’t go back and unbreak those plates. We know that
they still loved each other, but that doesn’t matter anymore. Then
the police showed up.”

“Well, that’s not the way I remember it,” Susan says. “But I
guess it could have happened that way.”

Ed and Susan used to buy books all the time. They had so many
books they used to joke about wanting to be quarantined, or snowed
in. Maybe then they’d manage to read all the books. But the books
have all gone up to the attic, along with the lamps and the coffee
tables, and their bicycles, and all Susan’s paintings. Ed has
watched the Susans carry up paperback books, silverware, old board
games, and holey underwear. Even a kazoo. The Encyclopædia
Britannica. The goldfish and the goldfish bowl and the little
canister of goldfish food.

The Susans have gone through the house, taken everything they
could. After all the books were gone, they dismantled the
bookshelves. Now they’re tearing off the wallpaper in long strips.
The aliens seem to like books. They like everything, especially
Susan. Eventually when the Susans are ripe, they go up in the attic
too.

The aliens swap things, the books and the Susans and the coffee
mugs for other things: machines that the Susans are assembling. Ed
would like to get his hand on one of those devices, but Susan says
no. He isn’t even allowed to help, except with the Susan beer.

The thing the Susans are building takes up most of the living
room, Ed’s office, the kitchen, the laundry room—

The Susans don’t bother with laundry. The washer and the dryer
are both gone and the Susans have given up wearing clothes
altogether. Ed has managed to keep a pair of shorts and a pair of
jeans. He’s wearing the shorts right now, and he folds the jeans up
into a pillow, and rests his head on top of them so that Susan
can’t steal them. All his other clothes have been carried up to the
attic

—and it’s creeping up the stairs, spilling over into the second
story. The house is shiny with alien machines.

Teams of naked Susans are hard at work, all day long, testing
instruments, hammering and stitching their machine together,
polishing and dusting and stacking alien things on top of each
other. If you’re wondering what the machine looks like, picture a
science fair project involving a lot of aluminum foil, improvised,
homely, makeshift, and just a little dangerous-looking. None of the
Susans is quite sure what the machine will eventually do. Right now
it grows Susan beer.

When the beer is stirred, left alone, stirred some more, it
clots and makes more Susans. Ed likes watching this part. The house
is more and more full of shy, loud, quiet, talkative, angry, happy,
greenish Susans of all sizes, all ages, who work at disassembling
the house, piece by piece, and, piece by piece, assembling the
machine.

It might be a time machine, or a machine to raise the dead, or
maybe the house is becoming a spaceship, slowly, one room at a
time. Susan says the aliens don’t make these kinds of distinctions.
It may be an invasion factory, Ed says, or a doomsday machine.
Susan says that they aren’t that kind of aliens.