Practical Magic (4 page)

“Oh,” Gillian said when she realized what had happened to her sister. A blood-red mark was forming on Sally’s cheek, but Gillian was the one who started to cry. “You horrible thing,” she said to the drugstore girl. “You’re just horrible!”

“Didn’t you hear me? Get me your aunts!” Or at least that was what the drugstore girl tried to say, but no one heard a word. Nothing came out of her mouth. Not a shout or a scream and certainly not an apology. She put her hand to her throat, as though someone were strangling her, but really she was choking on all that love she thought she’d needed so badly.

Sally watched the girl, whose face had already grown white with fear. As it turned out, the girl from the drugstore never spoke again, although sometimes she made little cooing noises, like the call of a pigeon or a dove, or, when she was truly furious, a harsh shrieking that was not unlike the panicked sound chickens make when they’re chased and then caught for basting and broiling. Her friends in the choir wept at the loss of her beautiful voice, but in time they began to avoid her. Her back had become arched, like the spine of a cat who has stepped onto a burning hot coal. She could not hear a kind word without covering her ears with her hands and stamping her foot like a spoiled child.

For the rest of her life she’d be followed around by a man who loved her too much, and she wouldn’t even be able to tell him to go away. Sally knew the aunts would never open the door for this client of theirs, not if she came back a thousand times. This girl had no right to demand anything more. What had she thought, that love was a toy, something easy and sweet, just to play with? Real love was dangerous, it got you from inside and held on tight, and if you didn’t let go fast enough you might be willing to do anything for its sake. If the girl from the drugstore had been smart, she would have asked for an antidote, not a charm, in the first place. In the end, she had gotten what she’d wanted, and if she still hadn’t learned a lesson from it, there was one person in this garden who had. There was one girl who knew enough to go inside and lock the door three times, and not shed a single tear as she cut up the onions that were so bitter they would have made anyone else cry all night long.

 

ONCE a year, on midsummer’s eve, a sparrow would find its way into the Owens house. No matter how anyone tried to prevent it, the bird always managed to get inside. They could set out saucers of salt on the windowsills and hire a handyman to fix the gutters and the roof, and still the bird would appear. It would enter the house at twilight, the hour of sorrow, and it always came in silence, yet with a strange resolve, which defied both salt and bricks, as though the poor thing had no choice but to perch on the drapes and the dusty chandelier, from which glass drops spilled down like tears.

The aunts kept their brooms ready, in order to chase the bird out the window, but the sparrow flew too high to be trapped. As it circled the dining room, the sisters counted, for they knew that three times around signified trouble, and three times around it always was. Trouble, of course, was nothing new to the Owens sisters, especially as they grew up. The instant the girls began high school, the boys who had avoided them for all those years suddenly couldn’t keep away from Gillian. She could go to the market for a can of split pea soup and come back going steady with the boy who stocked the frozen food case. The older she got, the worse it became. Maybe it was the black soap she washed with that made her skin seem illuminated; whatever the reason, she was hot to the touch and impossible to ignore. Boys looked at her and got so dizzy they had to be rushed to the emergency room for a hit of oxygen or a pint of new blood. Men who’d been happily married, and were old enough to be her father, suddenly took it into their heads to propose and offer her the world, or at least their version of it.

When Gillian wore short skirts she caused car accidents on Endicott Street. When she passed by, dogs tied to kennels with thick metal chains forgot to snarl and bite. One blistering Memorial Day, Gillian cut off most of her hair, so that it was as short as a boy’s, and nearly every girl in town copied her. But none of them could stop traffic by revealing her pretty neck. Not one of them could use her brilliant smile in order to pass biology and social studies without taking a single exam or ever doing a night’s homework. During the summer when Gillian was sixteen, the entire varsity football team spent every single Saturday in the aunts’ garden. There they could be found, all in a row, hulking and silent and madly in love, pulling weeds between the rows of nightshade and verbena, careful to avoid the scallions, which were so scorchingly potent they burned the skin right off any boy’s fingers if he wasn’t paying attention.

Gillian broke hearts the way other people broke kindling for firewood. By the time she was a senior in high school, she was so fast and expert at it that some boys didn’t even know what was happening until they were left in one big emotional heap. If you took all the trouble most girls got into as teenagers and boiled it down for twenty-four hours, you’d wind up with something the size of a Snickers candy bar. But if you melted down all the trouble Gillian Owens got herself into, not to mention all the grief she caused, you’d have yourself a sticky mess as tall as the statehouse in Boston.

The aunts didn’t worry in the least about Gillian’s reputation. They never once thought to give her a curfew or a good talking to. When Sally got her license she used the station wagon to pick up groceries and haul trash to the dump, but as soon as Gillian could drive she took the car every Saturday night and she didn’t come home until dawn. The aunts heard Gillian sneak in the front door; they found beer bottles hidden in the glove compartment of the Ford. Girls would be girls, was the way the aunts figured it, which was especially true for an Owens. The only advice the aunts offered was that a baby was easier to prevent than to raise, and even Gillian, as foolhardy as she was, could see the truth in that.

It was Sally the aunts brooded about. Sally, who cooked nutritious dinners every night and washed up afterward, who did the marketing on Tuesdays and hung the laundry out on Thursdays, so the sheets and the towels would smell fresh and sweet. The aunts tried to encourage her not to be so good. Goodness, in their opinion, was not a virtue but merely spinelessness and fear disguised as humility. The aunts believed there were more important things to worry about than dust bunnies under the beds or fallen leaves piling up on the porch. Owens women ignored convention; they were headstrong and willful, and meant to be that way. Those cousins who married had always insisted on keeping their own name, and their daughters were Owenses as well. Gillian and Sally’s mother, Regina, had been especially difficult to control. The aunts blinked back tears whenever they thought about how Regina would walk along the porch railing in her stocking feet on evenings when she drank a little too much whiskey, her arms out for balance. She may have been foolish, but Regina knew how to have fun, an ability the Owens women were proud of. Gillian had inherited her mother’s wild streak, but Sally wouldn’t have known a good time if it sat up and bit her.

“Go out,” the aunts urged on Saturday nights, when Sally was curled up on the couch with a library book. “Have fun,” they suggested, in their small, scratchy voices that could scare the snails out of their garden but couldn’t get Sally off the couch.

The aunts tried to help Sally become more social. They began to collect young gentlemen the way other old ladies collected stray cats. They placed ads in college newspapers and telephoned fraternity houses. Every Sunday they held garden parties with cold beef sandwiches and bottles of dark beer, but Sally just sat on a metal chair, her legs crossed, her mind elsewhere. The aunts bought her tubes of rose-colored lipstick and bath salts from Spain. They mail-ordered party dresses and lace slips and soft suede boots, but Sally gave it all to Gillian, who could put these gifts to use, and she went on reading books on Saturday nights, just as she did the laundry on Thursdays.

This is not to say that Sally didn’t try her best to fall in love. She was thoughtful and deep, with amazing powers of concentration, and for a while she accepted offers to go to the movies and dances and take walks around the pond down at the park. Boys who dated Sally in high school were astounded by how long she could concentrate on a single kiss, and they couldn’t help but wonder just what else she might be capable of. Twenty years later, many of them were still thinking of her when they shouldn’t, but she had never cared for a single one and could never even remember their names. She wouldn’t go out with the same boy twice, because in her opinion that wouldn’t be fair, and she believed in things like fairness back then, even in matters as strange and unusual as love.

Watching Gillian go through half the town made Sally wonder if perhaps she had only granite in the place where her heart should have been. But by the time the sisters were out of high school, it became clear that although Gillian could fall in love, she couldn’t stay there for more than two weeks. Sally began to think they were equally cursed, and given their background and their upbringing, it really was no surprise that the sisters should have such bad luck. The aunts, after all, still kept photographs on their bureaus of the young men they had once loved, brothers who’d had too much pride to take shelter during a stormy picnic. The boys had been struck down by lightning on the town green, which was where they were now buried, beneath a smooth, round stone where mourning doves gathered at dawn and at dusk. Each August, lightning was drawn there again, and lovers dared each other to run across the green whenever black storm clouds appeared. Gillian’s boyfriends were the only ones lovesick enough to take the risk of being struck, and two of them had found themselves in the hospital after their runs across the green, their hair forever standing on end, their eyes open wide from that time onward, even while they slept.

When Gillian was eighteen she stayed in love for three months, long enough to decide to run off to Maryland and get married. She had to elope since the aunts had refused to give their blessing. In their estimation Gillian was young and stupid and would get herself pregnant in record time—all the prerequisites for a miserable and ordinary life. As it turned out, the aunts were right only about her stupidity and youth. Gillian didn’t have time to get pregnant—two weeks after the wedding, she left her husband for the mechanic who fixed their Toyota. It was the first of many marital disasters, but on the night she eloped anything seemed possible, even happiness. Sally helped to tie a line of white sheets together so that Gillian could escape. Sally considered her little sister greedy and selfish; Gillian thought of Sally as a prig and a prude, but they were still sisters, and now that they were about to be separated, they stood in front of the open window and hugged each other and cried, then vowed they would be apart for only a short while.

“I wish you were coming with us.” Gillian’s voice had been whispery, the way it was during thunderstorms.

“You don’t have to do this,” Sally had said. “If you’re not sure.”

“I’ve had it with the aunts. I want a real life. I want to go where nobody has ever heard of the Owenses.” Gillian was wearing a short white dress that she had to keep pulling down against her thighs. Instead of sobbing, she rummaged through her purse until she found a crumpled pack of cigarettes. Both sisters blinked when she lit the match. They stood in the dark and watched the orange glow of the cigarette each time Gillian inhaled, and Sally didn’t even bother to point out that hot ashes were falling onto the floor she had swept earlier that day.

“Promise me you won’t stay here,” Gillian said. “You’ll get all crumpled up like a piece of paper. You’ll ruin your life.”

Down in the yard, the boy Gillian was about to run off with was nervous. Gillian had been known to back out when it came time to commit; in fact, she was famous for it. This year alone, three college boys had each been convinced that he was the one Gillian meant to marry, and each had brought her a diamond ring. For a while Gillian wore three rings on a gold chain, but in the end she gave them all back, breaking hearts in Princeton, Providence, and Cambridge all in the very same week. The other students in her graduating class took bets on who her date would be for the senior prom, since she’d been accepting and breaking invitations from various suitors for months.

The boy in the yard, who would soon be Gillian’s first husband, began to toss stones up on the roof, and the echo sounded exactly like a hailstorm. The sisters threw their arms around each other; they felt as though fate was picking them up, rattling them around, then releasing them into completely alternate futures. It would be years before they’d see each other again. They’d be grown-up women by then, too old to whisper secrets or climb up to the roof in the middle of the night.

“Come with us,” Gillian said.

“No,” Sally said. “Impossible.” Certain facts of love she knew for certain. “Only two people can elope.”

There were dozens of stones falling on the roof; there were a thousand stars in the sky.

“I’ll miss you too much,” Gillian said.

“Go on,” Sally said. She’d be the last one in the world to hold her sister back. “Go now.”

Gillian hugged Sally one last time, and then she disappeared out the window. They’d fed the aunts barley soup laced with a generous amount of whiskey, so the old women were asleep on the couch. They never heard a thing. But Sally could hear her sister running down the bluestone path, and she wept all that night and imagined she heard footsteps when nothing was moving outside but the garden toads. In the morning, Sally went outside to collect the white sheets Gillian had left in a heap beside the wisteria. Why was Sally the one who always stayed behind to do laundry? Why did she care that there were dirt stains in the fabric that would need extra bleaching? She had never felt more alone or lonely. If only she could believe in love’s salvation, but desire had been ruined for her. She saw craving as obsession, fervor as heated preoccupation. She wished she had never sneaked down the back stairs to listen in while the aunts’ customers cried and begged and made fools of themselves. All of that had only served to make her love-resistant, and frankly, she thought she’d probably never change.