Magic for Beginners: Stories (8 page)

The exterminator says, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you. You
have to dig them up, get the roots. Otherwise, they just grow back.
Like your house. Which is really just the tip of the iceberg
lettuce, so to speak. You’ve probably got seventy, eighty stories
underground. You gone down on the elevator yet? Talked to the
people living down there? It’s your house, and you’re just going to
let them live there rent-free? Mess with your things like
that?”

“What?” Henry says, and then he hears helicopters, fighter
planes the size of hummingbirds. “Is this really necessary?” he
says to the exterminator.

The exterminator nods. “You have to catch them off guard.”

“Maybe we’re being hasty,” Henry says. He has to yell to be
heard above the noise of the tiny, tinny, furious planes. “Maybe we
can settle this peacefully.”

“Hemree,” the interrogator says, shaking his head. “You called
me in, because I’m the expert, and you knew you needed help.”

Henry wants to say “You’re saying my name wrong.” But he doesn’t
want to hurt the undertaker’s feelings.

The alligator keeps on talking. “Listen up, Hemreeee, and shut
up about negotiations and such, because if we don’t take care of
this right away, it may be too late. This isn’t about
homeownership, or lawn care, Hemreeeeee, this is war. The lives of
your children are at stake. The happiness of your family. Be brave.
Be strong. Just hang on to your rabbit and fire when you see
delight in their eyes.”

He woke up. “Catherine,” he whispered. “Are you awake? I was
having this dream.”

Catherine laughed. “That’s the phone, Liz,” she said. “It’s
probably Henry, saying he’ll be late.”

“Catherine,” Henry said. “Who are you talking to?”

“Are you mad at me, Henry?” Catherine said. “Is that why you
won’t come home?”

“I’m right here,” Henry said.

“You take your rabbits and your crocodiles and get out of here,”
Catherine said. “And then come straight home again.”

She sat up in bed and pointed her finger. “I am sick and tired
of being spied on by rabbits!”

When Henry looked, something stood beside the bed, rocking back
and forth on its heels. He fumbled for the light, got it on, and
saw Tilly, her mouth open, her eyes closed. She looked larger than
she ever did when she was awake. “It’s just Tilly,” he said to
Catherine, but Catherine lay back down again. She put her pillow
over her head. When he picked Tilly up, to carry her back to bed,
she was warm and sweaty, her heart racing as if she had been
running through all the rooms of the house.

He walked through the house. He rapped on walls, testing. He put
his ear against the floor. No elevator. No secret rooms, no hidden
passageways.

There isn’t even a basement.

Tilly has divided the yard in half. Carleton is not allowed in
her half, unless she gives permission.

From the bottom of her half of the yard, where the trees run
beside the driveway, Tilly can barely see the house. She’s decided
to name the yard Matilda’s Rabbit Kingdom. Tilly loves naming
things. When the new baby is born, her mother has promised that she
can help pick out the real names, although there will only be two
real names, a first one and a middle. Tilly doesn’t understand why
there can only be two.
Oishi
means “delicious” in
Japanese. That would make a good name, either for the baby or for
the yard, because of the grass. She knows the yard isn’t as big as
Central Park, but it’s just as good, even if there aren’t any
pagodas or castles or carriages or people on roller skates. There’s
plenty of grass. There are hundreds of rabbits. They live in an
enormous underground city, maybe a city just like New York. Maybe
her dad can stop working in New York, and come work under the lawn
instead. She could help him, go to work with him. She could be a
biologist, like Jane Goodall, and go and live underground with the
rabbits. Last year her ambition had been to go and live secretly in
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but someone has already done that,
even if it’s only in a book. Tilly feels sorry for Carleton.
Everything he ever does, she’ll have already been there. She’ll
already have done that.

Tilly has left her armadillo purse sticking out of a rabbit
hole. First she made the hole bigger; then she packed the dirt back
in around the armadillo so that only the shiny, peeled snout poked
out. Carleton digs it out again with his stick. Maybe Tilly meant
him to find it. Maybe it was a present for the rabbits, except what
is it doing here, in his half of the yard? When he lived in the
apartment, he was afraid of the armadillo purse, but there are
better things to be afraid of out here. But be careful, Carleton.
Might as well be careful. The armadillo purse says Don’t touch me.
So he doesn’t. He uses his stick to pry open the snap-mouth, dumps
out Tilly’s most valuable things, and with his stick pushes them
one by one down the hole. Then he puts his ear to the rabbit hole
so that he can hear the rabbits say thank you. Saying thank you is
polite. But the rabbits say nothing. They’re holding their breath,
waiting for him to go away. Carleton waits too. Tilly’s armadillo,
empty and smelly and haunted, makes his eyes water.

Someone comes up and stands behind him. “I didn’t do it,” he
says. “They fell.”

But when he turns around, it’s the girl who lives next door.
Alison. The sun is behind her and makes her shine. He squints. “You
can come over to my house if you want to,” she says. “Your mom
says. She’s going to pay me fifteen bucks an hour, which is way too
much. Are your parents really rich or something? What’s that?”

“It’s Tilly’s,” he says. “But I don’t think she wants it
anymore.”

She picks up Tilly’s armadillo. “Pretty cool,” she says. “Maybe
I’ll keep it for her.”

Deep underground, the rabbits stamp their feet in rage.

Catherine loves the house. She loves her new life. She’s never
understood people who get stuck, become unhappy, can’t change,
can’t adapt. So she’s out of a job. So what? She’ll find something
else to do. So Henry can’t leave his job yet, won’t leave his job
yet. So the house is haunted. That’s okay. They’ll work through it.
She buys some books on gardening. She plants a rosebush and a
climbing vine in a pot. Tilly helps. The rabbits eat off all the
leaves. They bite through the vine.

“Shit,” Catherine says when she sees what they’ve done. She
shakes her fists at the rabbits on the lawn. The rabbits flick
their ears at her. They’re laughing, she knows it. She’s too big to
chase after them.

“Henry, wake up. Wake up.”

“I’m awake,” he said, and then he was. Catherine was crying:
noisy, wet, ugly sobs. He put his hand out and touched her face.
Her nose was running.

“Stop crying,” he said. “I’m awake. Why are you crying?”

“Because you weren’t here,” she said. “And then I woke up and
you were here, but when I wake up tomorrow morning you’ll be gone
again. I miss you. Don’t you miss me?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I’m not here. I’m here now.
Come here.”

“No,” she said. She stopped crying, but her nose still leaked.
“And now the dishwasher is haunted. We have to get a new dishwasher
before I have this baby. You can’t have a baby and not have a
dishwasher. And you have to live here with us. Because I’m going to
need some help this time. Remember Carleton, how fucking hard that
was.”

“He was one cranky baby,” Henry said. When Carleton was three
months old, Henry had realized that they’d misunderstood something.
Babies weren’t babies—they were land mines; bear traps; wasp nests.
They were a noise, which was sometimes even not a noise, but merely
a listening for a noise; they were a damp, chalky smell; they were
the heaving, jerky, sticky manifestation of not-sleep. Once Henry
had stood and watched Carleton in his crib, sleeping peacefully. He
had not done what he wanted to do. He had not bent over and yelled
in Carleton’s ear. Henry still hadn’t forgiven Carleton, not yet,
not entirely, not for making him feel that way.

“Why do you have to love your job so much?” Catherine said.

“I don’t know,” Henry said. “I don’t love it.”

“Don’t lie to me,” Catherine said.

“I love you better,” Henry said. He does, he does, he does loves
Catherine better. He’s already made that decision. But she isn’t
even listening.

“Remember when Carleton was little and you would get up in the
morning and go to work and leave me all alone with them?” Catherine
poked him in the side. “I used to hate you. You’d come home with
takeout, and I’d forget I hated you, but then I’d remember again,
and I’d hate you even more because it was so easy for you to trick
me, to make things okay again, just because for an hour I could sit
in the bathtub and eat Chinese food and wash my hair.”

“You used to carry an extra shirt with you, when you went out,”
Henry said. He put his hand down inside her T-shirt, on her fat,
full breast. “In case you leaked.”

“You can’t touch that breast,” Catherine said. “It’s haunted.”
She blew her nose on the sheets.

Catherine’s friend Lucy owns an online boutique, Nice Clothes
for Fat People. There’s a woman in Tarrytown who knits stretchy,
sexy Argyle sweaters exclusively for NCFP, and Lucy has an
appointment with her. She wants to stop off and see Catherine
afterwards, before she has to drive back to the city again.
Catherine gives her directions, and then begins to clean house,
feeling out of sorts. She’s not sure she wants to see Lucy right
now. Carleton has always been afraid of Lucy, which is
embarrassing. And Catherine doesn’t want to talk about Henry. She
doesn’t want to explain about the downstairs bathroom. She had
planned to spend the day painting the wood trim in the dining room,
but now she’ll have to wait.

The doorbell rings, but when Catherine goes to answer it, no one
is there. Later on, after Tilly and Carleton have come home, it
rings again, but no one is there. It rings and rings, as if Lucy is
standing outside, pressing the bell over and over again. Finally
Catherine pulls out the wire. She tries calling Lucy’s cell phone,
but can’t get through. Then Henry calls. He says that he’s going to
be late.

Liz opens the front door, yells, “Hello, anyone home! You’ve got
to see your rabbits, there must be thousands of them. Catherine, is
something wrong with your doorbell?”

Henry’s bike, so far, was okay. He wondered what they’d do if
the Toyota suddenly became haunted. Would Catherine want to sell
it? Would resale value be affected? The car and Catherine and the
kids were gone when he got home, so he put on a pair of work gloves
and went through the house with a cardboard box, collecting all the
things that felt haunted. A hairbrush in Tilly’s room, an old pair
of Catherine’s tennis shoes. A pair of Catherine’s underwear that
he finds at the foot of the bed. When he picked them up he felt a
sudden shock of longing for Catherine, like he’d been hit by some
kind of spooky lightning. It hit him in the pit of the stomach,
like a cramp. He dropped them in the box.

The silk kimono from Takashimaya. Two of Carleton’s
night-lights. He opened the door to his office, put the box inside.
All the hair on his arms stood up. He closed the door.

Then he went downstairs and cleaned paintbrushes. If the
paintbrushes were becoming haunted, if Catherine was throwing them
out and buying new ones, she wasn’t saying. Maybe he should check
the Visa bill. How much were they spending on paint, anyway?

Catherine came into the kitchen and gave him a hug. “I’m glad
you’re home,” she said. He pressed his nose into her neck and
inhaled. “I left the car running—I’ve got to pee. Would you go pick
up the kids for me?”

“Where are they?” Henry said.

“They’re over at Liz’s. Alison is babysitting them. Do you have
money on you?”

“You mean I’ll meet some neighbors?”

“Wow, sure,” Catherine said. “If you think you’re ready. Are you
ready? Do you know where they live?”

“They’re our neighbors, right?”

“Take a left out of the driveway, go about a quarter of a mile,
and they’re the red house with all the trees in front.”

But when he drove up to the red house and went and rang the
doorbell, no one answered. He heard a child come running down a
flight of stairs and then stop and stand in front of the door.
“Carleton? Alison?” he said. “Excuse me, this is Catherine’s
husband, Henry. Carleton and Tilly’s dad.” The whispering stopped.
He waited for a bit. When he crouched down and lifted the mail
slot, he thought he saw someone’s feet, the hem of a coat,
something furry? A dog? Someone standing very still, just to the
right of the door? Carleton, playing games. “I see you,” he said,
and wiggled his fingers through the mail slot. Then he thought
maybe it wasn’t Carleton after all. He got up quickly and went back
to the car. He drove into town and bought more soap.

Tilly was standing in the driveway when he got home, her hands
on her hips. “Hi, Dad,” she said. “I’m looking for King Spanky. He
got outside. Look what Alison found.”

She held out a tiny toy bow strung with what looked like dental
floss, an arrow as small as a needle.

“Be careful with that,” Henry said. “It looks sharp. Archery
Barbie, right? So did you guys have a good time with Alison?”

“Alison’s okay,” Tilly said. She belched. “’Scuse me. I don’t
feel very good.”

“What’s wrong?” Henry said.

“My stomach is funny,” Tilly said. She looked up at him,
frowned, and then vomited all over his shirt, his pants.

“Tilly!” he said. He yanked off his shirt, used a sleeve to wipe
her mouth. The vomit was foamy and green.

“It tastes horrible,” she said. She sounded surprised. “Why does
it always taste so bad when you throw up?”