Practical Magic (8 page)

These women in the neighborhood respect Sally Owens, and what’s more, they truly like her. She has a serious expression even when she laughs, and long dark hair, and no idea of how pretty she is. Sally is always the first parent listed on the snow chain, since it’s best to have someone responsible in charge of letting other parents know when school will be closed in stormy weather, rather than one of those ditsy mothers who are prone to believe life will work itself out just fine, without any intervention from somebody sensible. All over the neighborhood, Sally is well known for both her kindness and her prudent ways. If you really need her, she’ll baby-sit for your toddler at a moment’s notice on a Saturday afternoon; she’ll pick your kids up at the high school or lend you sugar or eggs. She’ll sit there with you on your back porch if you should find some woman’s phone number written on a slip of paper in your husband’s night-table drawer, and she’ll be smart enough to listen rather than offer some half-baked advice. More important, she’ll never mention your difficulties again or repeat a word you say. When you ask about her own marriage, she gets a dreamy look on her face that is completely unlike her usual expression. “That was ages ago,” is all she’ll say. “That was another lifetime.”

Since leaving Massachusetts, Sally has worked as an assistant to the vice principal at the high school. In all this time, she has had fewer than a dozen dates, and those attempts at romance were set up by neighbors, fix-ups that went nowhere but back to her own front door, long before she was expected home. Sally now finds that she’s often tired and cranky, and although she’s still terrific looking, she’s not getting any younger. Lately, she’s been so tense that the muscles in her neck feel like strands of wire that someone has been twisting.

When her neck starts to go, when she wakes up from a deep sleep in a panic, and she gets so lonely the ancient janitor at the high school starts to look good, Sally reminds herself of how hard she has worked to make a good life for her girls. Antonia is so popular that for three years running she’s been chosen to play the lead in the school play. Kylie, though she seems to have no close friends other than Gideon Barnes, is the Nassau County spelling champion and the president of the chess club. Sally’s girls have always had birthday parties and ballet lessons. She has made absolutely certain that they never miss their dentist appointments and that they’re at school on time every weekday morning. They are expected to do their homework before they watch TV and are not allowed to stay up past midnight or idly hang out on the Turnpike or at the mall. Sally’s children are rooted here; they’re treated like anyone else, just normal kids, like any others on the block. This is why Sally left Massachusetts and the aunts in the first place. It’s why she refuses to think about what might be missing from her life.

Never look back, that’s what she’s told herself. Don’t think about swans or being alone in the dark. Don’t think of storms, or lightning and thunder, or the true love you won’t ever have. Life is brushing your teeth and making breakfast for your children and not thinking about things, and as it turns out, Sally is first-rate at all of this. She gets things done, and done on time. Still, she often dreams of the aunts’ garden. In the farthest corner there was lemon verbena, lemon thyme, and lemon balm. When Sally sat there cross-legged, and closed her eyes, the citrus scent was so rich she sometimes got dizzy. Everything in the garden had a purpose, even the lush peonies, which protect against bad weather and motion sickness and have been known to ward off evil. Sally isn’t sure she can still name all the varieties of the herbs that grew there, although she thinks she could recognize coltsfoot and comfrey by sight, lavender and rosemary by their distinctive scents.

Her own garden is simple and halfhearted, which is just the way she likes it. There is a hedge of listless lilacs, some dog-woods, and a small vegetable patch where only yellow tomatoes and a few spindly cucumbers ever grow. The cucumber seedlings seem dusty from the heat on this last afternoon in June. It is so great to have the summers off. It’s worth everything she has to put up with over at the high school, where you have to always keep a smile on your face. Ed Borelli, the vice principal and Sally’s immediate superior, has suggested that everyone who works in the office have a grin surgically applied in order to be ready when parents come in and complain. Niceness counts, Ed Borelli reminds the secretaries on awful days, when unruly students are being suspended and meetings overlap and the school board threatens to extend the school year due to snow days. But false cheer is draining, and if you pretend long enough there’s always the possibility that you’ll become an automaton. By the end of the school term, Sally usually finds herself saying “Mr. Borelli will be right with you” in her sleep. That’s when she starts to count the days until summer; that’s when she just can’t wait for the last bell to ring.

Since the semester ended twenty-four hours earlier, Sally should be feeling great, but she’s not. All she can make out is the throbbing of her own pulse and the beat of the radio blaring in Antonia’s bedroom upstairs. Something is not right. It’s nothing apparent, nothing that will come up and smack you in the face; it’s less like a hole in a sweater than a frayed hem that has unraveled into a puddle of thread. The air in the house feels charged, so that the hair on the back of Sally’s neck stands up, and her white shirt gives off little sparks.

All afternoon, Sally finds she’s waiting for disaster. She tells herself to snap out of it; she doesn’t even believe it’s possible to foretell future misfortune, since there has never been any scientific documentation that such visionary phenomena exist. But when she does the marketing, she grabs a dozen lemons and before she can stop herself she begins to cry, there in the produce department, as though she were suddenly homesick for that old house on Magnolia Street, after all these years. When she leaves the grocery store, Sally drives by the YMCA field, where Kylie and her friend Gideon are playing soccer. Gideon is the vice president of the chess club, and Kylie suspects he may have thrown the deciding match in her favor so she could be president. Kylie is the only person on earth who seems able to tolerate Gideon. His mother, Jeannie Barnes, went into therapy two weeks after he was born; that’s how difficult he was and continues to be. He simply refuses to be like anyone else. He just won’t allow it. Now, for instance, he’s shaved off all his hair and is wearing combat boots and a black leather jacket, though it must be ninety in the shade.

Sally is never comfortable around Gideon; she finds him rude and obnoxious and has always considered him a bad influence. But seeing him and Kylie playing soccer, she feels a wave of relief. Kylie is laughing as Gideon stumbles over his own boots as he chases after the ball. She’s not hurt or kidnapped, she’s here on this field of grass, running as fast as she can. It’s a hot, lazy afternoon, a day like any other, and Sally would do well to relax. She’s silly to have been so certain that something was about to go wrong. That’s what she tells herself, but it’s not what she believes. When Antonia comes home, thrilled to have gotten a summer job at the ice cream parlor up on the Turnpike, Sally is so suspicious she insists on calling the owner and finding out what Antonia’s hours and responsibilities will be. She asks for the owner’s personal history as well, including address, marital status, and number of dependents.

“Thanks for embarrassing me,” Antonia says coolly when Sally hangs up the phone. “My boss will think I’m real mature, having my mother check on me.”

These days Antonia wears only black, which makes her red hair seem even more brilliant. Last week, to test out her allegiance to black clothes, Sally bought her a white cotton sweater trimmed with lace, which she knew any number of Antonia’s girlfriends would have died for. Antonia tossed the sweater into the washer with a package of Rit dye, then threw the coal-colored thing into the dryer. The result was an article of clothing so small that whenever she wears it Sally frets that Antonia will wind up running off with someone, just the way Gillian did. It worries Sally to think that one of her girls might follow in her sister’s footsteps, a trail that has led to only self-destruction and wasted time, including three brief marriages, not one of which yielded a cent of alimony.

Certainly, Antonia is greedy the way beautiful girls sometimes are, and she thinks quite well of herself. But now, on this hot June day, she is suddenly filled with doubt. What if she isn’t as special as she thinks she is? What if her beauty fades as soon as she passes eighteen, the way it does with some girls, who have no idea that they’ve peaked until it’s all over and they glance in the mirror to discover they no longer recognize themselves. She’s always assumed she’ll be an actress someday; she’ll go to Manhattan or Los Angeles the day after graduation and be given a leading role, just as she has been all the way through high school. Now she’s not so sure. She doesn’t know if she has any talent, or if she even cares. Frankly, she never liked acting much; it was having everyone stare at her that was so appealing. It was knowing they couldn’t take their eyes off her.

When Kylie comes home, all sweaty and grass-stained and gawky, Antonia doesn’t even bother to insult her.

“Didn’t you want to say something to me?” Kylie asks tentatively when they meet in the hallway. Her brown hair is sticking straight up and her cheeks are flushed and blotchy with heat. She’s a perfect target and she knows it.

“You can use the shower first,” Antonia says in a voice so sad and dreamy it doesn’t even sound like her.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Kylie says, but Antonia has already drifted down the hall, to paint her nails red and consider her future, something she has never once done before.

By dinnertime Sally has nearly forgotten the sense of dread she carried around earlier in the day. Never believe what you can’t see, that’s always been Sally’s motto. You have nothing to fear but fear itself, she quoted again and again when her girls were little and convinced monsters resided on the second shelf of the laundry closet in the hall. But just when she’s relaxed enough to consider having a beer, the shades in the kitchen snap shut all at once, as if there is a buildup of energy in the walls. Sally has made a bean and tofu salad, carrot sticks, and cold marinated broccoli, with angel food cake for dessert. The cake, however, is now doubtful; when the shades snap closed the cake begins to sink, first on one side, then on the other, until it is as flat as a serving plate.

“It’s nothing,” Sally says to her daughters about the way the shades seem to have been activated by a strange force, but her voice sounds unsteady, even to herself.

The evening is so humid and dense that laundry left on the line will only get wetter if left out overnight. The sky is deep blue, a curtain of heat.

“It’s something, all right,” Antonia says, because an odd sort of wind has just started up. It comes in through the screen door and the open windows, rattling the silverware and the dinner plates. Kylie has to run and get herself a sweater. Even though the temperature is still climbing, the wind is giving her the shivers; it’s making goose bumps rise along her skin.

Outside, in the neighbors’ backyards, swing sets are uprooted and cats claw at back doors, desperate to be let in. Halfway down the block, a poplar tree cracks in two and plummets to the ground, hitting a fire hydrant and crashing through the window of a parked Honda Civic. That’s when Sally and her daughters hear the knocking. The girls look up at the ceiling, then turn to their mother.

“Squirrels,” Sally assures them. “Nesting in the attic.”

But the knocking continues, and the wind does, too, and the heat just rises higher and higher. Finally, near midnight, the neighborhood quiets down. At last people can get some sleep. Sally is one of the few who stay up late, in order to fix an apple tart—complete with her secret ingredients, black pepper and nutmeg—which she’ll freeze and have ready to take to the block party on the Fourth of July. But even Sally falls asleep before long, in spite of the weather; she stretches out under a cool white sheet and keeps the bedroom windows open so that the breeze comes in and wraps around the room. The first of the season’s crickets have grown quiet and the sparrows are nesting in the bushes, safe within a bower of branches that are too delicate to support a cat’s weight. And just when people are beginning to dream, of cut grass and blueberry pie and lions who lie down beside lambs, a ring appears around the moon.

A halo around the moon is always a sign of disruption, either a change in the weather, a fever to come, or a streak of bad fortune that won’t go away. But when it’s a double ring, all tangled and snarled, like an agitated rainbow or a love affair gone wrong, anything can happen. At times such as this, it’s wise not to answer the telephone. People who know enough to be careful always shut their windows; they lock their doors, and they never dare to kiss their sweethearts over a garden gate or reach out to pat a stray dog. Trouble is just like love, after all; it comes in unannounced and takes over before you’ve had a chance to reconsider, or even to think.

High above the neighborhood, the ring has already begun to twist around itself, an illuminated snake of possibility, double-looped and pulled tight by gravity. If people hadn’t been sound asleep, they might have gazed out their windows and admired the beautiful circle of light, but they slept on, oblivious, not noticing the moon, or the silence, or the Oldsmobile that had already pulled into Sally Owens’s driveway to park behind the Honda Sally bought a few years ago to replace the aunts’ ancient station wagon. On a night such as this, it’s possible for a woman to get out of her car so quietly none of the neighbors will hear her. When it’s this warm in June, when the sky is this inky and thick, a knock on the screen door doesn’t even echo. It falls into your dreams, like a stone into a stream, so that you wake suddenly, heart beating too fast, pulse going crazy, drowning inside your own panic.