Magic for Beginners: Stories (6 page)

“Where’s King Spanky?” Henry said.

“Under our bed,” Catherine said. “He’s up in the box frame.”

“Have we unpacked the alarm clock?” Henry said.

“Poor King Spanky,” Catherine said. “Nobody to love except an
alarm clock. Come upstairs and let’s see if we can shake him out of
the bed. I’ve got a present for you.”

The present was in a U-Haul box exactly like all the other boxes
in the bedroom, except that Catherine had written henry’s present
on it instead of large front bedroom. Inside the box were Styrofoam
peanuts and then a smaller box from Takashimaya. The Takashimaya
box was fastened with a silver ribbon. The tissue paper inside was
dull gold, and inside the tissue paper was a green silk robe with
orange sleeves and heraldic animals in orange and gold thread.
“Lions,” Henry said.

“Rabbits,” Catherine said.

“I didn’t get you anything,” Henry said.

Catherine smiled nobly. She liked giving presents better than
getting presents. She’d never told Henry, because it seemed to her
that it must be selfish in some way she’d never bothered to figure
out. Catherine was grateful to be married to Henry, who accepted
all presents as his due; who looked good in the clothes that she
bought him; who was vain, in an easygoing way, about his good
looks. Buying clothes for Henry was especially satisfying now,
while she was pregnant and couldn’t buy them for herself.

She said, “If you don’t like it, then I’ll keep it. Look at you,
look at those sleeves. You look like the emperor of Japan.”

They had already colonized the bedroom, making it full of things
that belonged to them. There was Catherine’s mirror on the wall,
and their mahogany wardrobe, their first real piece of furniture, a
wedding present from Catherine’s great-aunt. There was their
serviceable, queen-sized bed with King Spanky lodged up inside it,
and there was Henry, spinning his arms in the wide orange sleeves,
like an embroidered windmill. Henry could see all of these things
in the mirror, and behind him, their lawn and Tilly and Carleton,
stapling grass into their notebook. He saw all of these things and
he found them good. But he couldn’t see Catherine. When he turned
around, she stood in the doorway, frowning at him. She had the
alarm clock in her hand.

“Look at you,” she said again. It worried her, the way
something, someone,
Henry
, could suddenly look like a
place she’d never been before. The alarm began to ring and King
Spanky came out from under the bed, trotting over to Catherine. She
bent over, awkwardly—ungraceful, ungainly, so clumsy, so fucking
awkward, being pregnant was like wearing a fucking suitcase
strapped across your middle—put the alarm clock down on the ground,
and King Spanky hunkered down in front of it, his nose against the
ringing glass face.

And that made her laugh again. Henry loved Catherine’s laugh.
Downstairs, their children slammed a door open, ran through the
house, carrying scissors, both Catherine and Henry knew, and
slammed another door open and were outside again, leaving behind
the smell of grass. There was a store in New York where you could
buy a perfume that smelled like that.

Catherine and Carleton and Tilly came back from the grocery
store with a tire, a rope to hang it from, and a box of pancake mix
for dinner. Henry was online, looking at a jpeg of a rubber band
ball. There was a message too. The Crocodile needed him to come
into the office. It would be just a few days. Someone was setting
fires and there was no one smart enough to see how to put them out
except for him. They were his accounts. He had to come in and save
them. She knew Catherine and Henry’s apartment hadn’t sold; she’d
checked with their listing agent. So surely it wouldn’t be
impossible, not impossible, only inconvenient.

He went downstairs to tell Catherine. “That
witch
,” she
said, and then bit her lip. “She called the listing agent? I’m
sorry. We talked about this. Never mind. Just give me a
moment.”

Catherine inhaled. Exhaled. Inhaled. If she were Carleton, she
would hold her breath until her face turned red and Henry agreed to
stay home, but then again, it never worked for Carleton. “We ran
into our new neighbors in the grocery store. She’s about the same
age as me. Liz and Marcus. One kid, older, a girl, um, I think her
name was Alison, maybe from a first marriage—potential babysitter,
which is really good news. Liz is a lawyer. Gorgeous. Reads Oprah
books. He likes to cook.”

“So do I,” Henry said.

“You’re better looking,” Catherine said. “So do you have to go
back tonight, or can you take the train in the morning?”

“The morning is fine,” Henry said, wanting to seem
agreeable.

Carleton appeared in the kitchen, his arms pinned around King
Spanky’s middle. The cat’s front legs stuck straight out, as if
Carleton were dowsing. King Spanky’s eyes were closed. His whiskers
twitched Morse code. “What are you wearing?” Carleton said.

“My new uniform,” Henry said. “I wear it to work.”

“Where do you work?” Carleton said, testing.

“I work at home,” Henry said. Catherine snorted.

“He looks like the king of rabbits, doesn’t he? The
plenipotentiary of Rabbitaly,” she said, no longer sounding
particularly pleased about this.

“He looks like a princess,” Carleton said, now pointing King
Spanky at Henry like a gun.

“Where’s your grass collection?” Henry said. “Can I see it?”

“No,” Carleton said. He put King Spanky on the floor, and the
cat slunk out of the kitchen, heading for the staircase, the
bedroom, the safety of the bedsprings, the beloved alarm clock, the
beloved. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed and given to
evil habits, or else it can be a man in his late forties who works
too much, or it can be an alarm clock.

“After dinner,” Henry said, trying again, “we could go out and
find a tree for your tire swing.”

“No,” Carleton said, regretfully. He lingered in the kitchen,
hoping to be asked a question to which he could say yes.

“Where’s your sister?” Henry said.

“Watching television,” Carleton said. “I don’t like the
television here.”

“It’s too big,” Henry said, but Catherine didn’t laugh.

Henry dreams he is the king of the real estate agents. Henry
loves his job. He tries to sell a house to a young couple with
twitchy noses and big dark eyes. Why does he always dream that he’s
trying to sell things?

The couple stare at him nervously. He leans towards them as if
he’s going to whisper something in their silly, expectant ears.
It’s a secret he’s never told anyone before. It’s a secret he
didn’t even know that he knew. “Let’s stop fooling,” he says. “You
can’t afford to buy this house. You don’t have any money. You’re
rabbits.”

“Where do you work?” Carleton said, in the morning, when Henry
called from Grand Central.

“I work at home,” Henry said. “Home where we live now, where you
are. Eventually. Just not today. Are you getting ready for
school?”

Carleton put the phone down. Henry could hear him saying
something to Catherine. “He says he’s not nervous about school,”
she said. “He’s a brave kid.”

“I kissed you this morning,” Henry said, “but you didn’t wake
up. There were all these rabbits on the lawn. They were huge. King
Spanky–sized. They were just sitting there like they were waiting
for the sun to come up. It was funny, like some kind of art
installation. But it was kind of creepy too. Think they’d been
there all night?”

“Rabbits? Can they have rabies? I saw them this morning when I
got up,” Catherine said. “Carleton didn’t want to brush his teeth
this morning. He says something’s wrong with his toothbrush.”

“Maybe he dropped it in the toilet, and he doesn’t want to tell
you,” Henry said.

“Maybe you could buy a new toothbrush and bring it home,”
Catherine said. “He doesn’t want one from the drugstore here. He
wants one from New York.”

“Where’s Tilly?” Henry said.

“She says she’s trying to figure out what’s wrong with
Carleton’s toothbrush. She’s still in the bathroom.” Catherine
said.

“Can I talk to her for a second?” Henry said.

“Tell her she needs to get dressed and eat her Cheerios,”
Catherine said. “After I drive them to school, Liz is coming over
for coffee. Then we’re going to go out for lunch. I’m not unpacking
another box until you get home. Here’s Tilly.”

“Hi,” Tilly said. She sounded as if she were asking a
question.

Tilly never liked talking to people on the telephone. How were
you supposed to know if they were really who they said they were?
And even if they were who they claimed to be, they didn’t know
whether you were who you said you were. You could be someone else.
They might give away information about you, and not even know it.
There were no protocols. No precautions.

She said, “Did you brush your teeth this morning?”

“Good morning, Tilly,” her father (if it was her father) said.
“My toothbrush was fine. Perfectly normal.”

“That’s good,” Tilly said. “I let Carleton use mine.”

“That was very generous,” Henry said.

“No problem,” Tilly said. Sharing things with Carleton wasn’t
like having to share things with other people. It wasn’t really
like sharing things at all. Carleton belonged to her, like the
toothbrush. “Mom says that when we get home today, we can draw on
the walls in our rooms if we want to, while we decide what color we
want to paint them.”

“Sounds like fun,” Henry said. “Can I draw on them too?”

“Maybe,” Tilly said. She had already said too much. “Gotta go.
Gotta eat breakfast.”

“Don’t be worried about school,” Henry said.

“I’m not worried about school,” Tilly said.

“I love you,” Henry said.

“I’m real concerned about this toothbrush,” Tilly said.

He closed his eyes only for a minute. Just for a minute. When he
woke up, it was dark and he didn’t know where he was. He stood up
and went over to the door, almost tripping over something. It
sailed away from him in an exuberant, rollicking sweep. According
to the clock on his desk, it was 4 a.m. Why was it always 4 a.m.?
There were four messages on his cell phone, all from Catherine.

He checked train schedules online. Then he sent Catherine a fast
email.

Fell asleep @ midnight? Mssed trains. Awake now, going to keep
on working. Pttng out fires. Take the train home early afternoon?
Still lv me?

Before he went back to work, he kicked the rubber band ball back
down the hall towards The Crocodile’s door.

Catherine called him at 8:45.

“I’m sorry,” Henry said.

“I bet you are,” Catherine said.

“I can’t find my razor. I think The Crocodile had some kind of
tantrum and tossed my stuff.”

“Carleton will love that,” Catherine said. “Maybe you should
sneak in the house and shave before dinner. He had a hard day at
school yesterday.”

“Maybe I should grow a beard,” Henry said. “He can’t be afraid
of everything, all the time. Tell me about the first day of
school.”

“We’ll talk about it later,” Catherine said. “Liz just drove up.
I’m going to be her guest at the gym. Just make it home for
dinner.”

At 6 a.m. Henry emailed Catherine again. “Srry. Accidentally
startd avalanche while puttng out fires. Wait up for me? How ws 2nd
day of school?” She didn’t write him back. He called and no one
picked up the phone. She didn’t call.

He took the last train home. By the time it reached the station,
he was the only one left in his car. He unchained his bicycle and
rode it home in the dark. Rabbits pelted across the footpath in
front of his bike. There were rabbits foraging on his lawn. They
froze as he dismounted and pushed the bicycle across the grass. The
lawn was rumpled; the bike went up and down over invisible
depressions that he supposed were rabbit holes. There were two
short fat men standing in the dark on either side of the front
door, waiting for him, but when he came closer, he remembered that
they were stone rabbits. “Knock, knock,” he said.

The real rabbits on the lawn tipped their ears at him. The stone
rabbits waited for the punch line, but they were just stone
rabbits. They had nothing better to do.

The front door wasn’t locked. He walked through the downstairs
rooms, putting his hands on the backs and tops of furniture. In the
kitchen, cut-down boxes leaned in stacks against the wall, waiting
to be recycled or remade into cardboard houses and spaceships and
tunnels for Carleton and Tilly.

Catherine had unpacked Carleton’s room. Night-lights in the
shape of bears and geese and cats were plugged into every floor
outlet. There were little low-watt table lamps as well—hippo,
robot, gorilla, pirate ship. Everything was soaked in a tender,
peaceable light, translating Carleton’s room into something more
than a bedroom: something luminous, numinous, Carleton’s cartoony
Midnight Church of Sleep.

Tilly was sleeping in the other bed.

Tilly would never admit that she sleepwalked, the same way that
she would never admit that she sometimes still wet the bed. But she
refused to make friends. Making friends would have meant spending
the night in strange houses. Tomorrow morning she would insist that
Henry or Catherine must have carried her from her room, put her to
bed in Carleton’s room for reasons of their own.

Henry knelt down between the two beds and kissed Carleton on the
forehead. He kissed Tilly, smoothed her hair. How could he not love
Tilly better? He’d known her longer. She was so brave, so
angry.

On the walls of Carleton’s bedroom, Henry’s children had drawn a
house. A cat nearly as big as the house. There was a crown on the
cat’s head. Trees or flowers with pairs of leaves that pointed
straight up, still bigger, and a stick figure on a stick bicycle,
riding past the trees. When he looked closer, he thought that maybe
the trees were actually rabbits. The wall smelled like Fruit Loops.
Someone had written
Henry Is A Rat Fink! Ha Ha!
He
recognized his wife’s handwriting.