The Uses of Enchantment (7 page)

NOVEMBER 9, 1999

M
ary awoke at 9 a.m. to the zippery sounds of packing tape and the hollow thumping of cardboard boxes. Downstairs she found Regina picking up cork coasters and ashtrays and other seemingly non-auctionable items that had nonetheless been tagged with green ribbon, huffing to herself
of all the tacky nerve
. Gaby, presumably in the process of sorting through the books on the shelves that flanked the fireplace, had become sidetracked by a paperback entitled
Famous Canadian Shipwrecks
; she’d since given up all pretenses of assisting Regina and was reclining on the sofa, reading. Their father appeared to have respected the well-meaning eviction notice issued to him by his daughters, who wished to spare him the packing ordeal. According to Gaby he gone to the diner for breakfast, after which he had plans to meet a friend at the golf course to spend the day chipping balls around the half-frozen scruff.

Regina emerged from the downstairs bathroom holding a beribboned, warped box of Kotex.

“They want an antique box of tampons?” she said.

The kitchen pantry items, Mary discovered as she searched for the jar of instant coffee, were similarly tagged.

Mary wandered back into the living room. Outside, it appeared to be sleeting.

“It’s for the time capsule,” Gaby called from the couch. Clearly she’d been sorting through her closet and thus, in a fit of nostalgia, had chosen to revisit the bizarrely layered uniform she’d favored during grades seven through twelve—a whale-patterned turtleneck covered by a pink Oxford button-down covered by a green Fair Isle sweater covered by a napless navy chamois shirt. On her feet she wore mukluks furred with an even coating of purply gray closet lint.

“The what?” Regina said.

“The Greene mausoleum got
raided by a vagrant
,” Gaby said.

Regina tossed Mary a perplexedly irritated look.

“A
vagrant
,” Gaby repeated.

“And the vagrant wants…I’m sorry. What does the vagrant want?” Regina said.

“Didn’t you read the Semmering Alumnae Bulletin?” Gaby asked.

“It seems not as closely as you did,” Regina said.

Gaby scuffled under the couch. She retrieved a newletter, ringleted with mug stains.

“Miss Pym plans, with the help of the West Salem Historical Society to ‘bury the past for the sake of the future,’ ” she read.

“An apt motto for Miss Pym,” Mary said, yawning. She was still emerging from her blunt night of sleep. Her sisters hurt her brain.

“Miss Pym convinced the Greenes to donate their mausoleum to the sixth graders to use as a receptacle for their yearlong cultural history study. ‘Where once was death, there will now be life.’ ”

“Where once there were dead people, there will now be our trash,” Mary said. “Is there any coffee?”

“There’s no shortage of grief tea,” Gaby said.

Regina glared at Mary.

“So it was
you
,” she said accusingly.

“What,” Mary said. “What was me.”

“
You
told them they could have our tampons,” Regina said.

Mary winced; without a few more minutes of awakeness under her belt, she hadn’t had a chance to fortify herself against random Regina assaults. Mary didn’t bother countering Regina’s accusation with the obvious—that, due to her recent exile, she’d had zero involvement with the auction arrangements, or the real estate agent, or the funeral specifics. This defense, while true, would only introduce new areas for venomous critique.

“Sorry,” she said. “I forgot you’d probably want them.”

Gaby laughed from behind her paperback. Mary, for a quasi-instant, considered that Gaby, even while appearing to be a Regina disciple, might be a neutral party. Gaby had been to visit her in Beaverton last spring, just after Mum was officially diagnosed, and they’d spent the weekend smoking pot and eating the same re-microwaved tureen of chowder. She and Gaby, she’d believed, had a sibling closeness based on the unspoken agreement that they would never be close; this shared understanding of the limits of their relationship made it the easiest relationship Mary shared with anyone in her family.

Regina’s eyes flared. Mary could see her teetering between states of increased or decreased or differently aimed rage.

“Well,” she sniffed, her ire deflating into morbundity. “It’s not like Mum left us anything else.”

“Poor you,” Gaby chided.

Regina checked her watch and ordered Gaby off the couch. They hurried into rubber boots and two of Mum’s wool coats, hanging in the foyer.

“So it would be great if you could clean out Mum’s study while we’re gone,” Regina said, consulting the to-do list on the credenza.

“Where are you going?” Mary asked.

“The auction truck’s coming
tomorrow
,” Regina said.

“Yes but we’re not donating her personal files to the historical society…”

“Do you want to fight me on this?” Regina said. “Or do you want to help?”

It was too fucking early for this.

“Fine,” Mary said. “Anything else you need? Should I repaper the hall? Do some stencil touch-ups?”

Regina put a line through an item on the list. She pointed the pencil at Mary.

“I did that while you were sleeping.”

“And you’re going where?” Mary asked a second time, trying to appear only passingly to care about the answer. But her disinterest masked her growing nervousness. When faced with the prospect she realized: she did not want to be left in the house alone.

“We have an appointment with Mr. Bolt,” Regina replied, as though this explained anything.

“Who’s Mr. Bolt,” Mary said.

“Mr. Bolt? The art appraiser?” Regina feigned impatience. She knew damned well that Mary had no idea about any Mr. Bolt.

A familiar dullness descended over Mary. Though a presumably full-grown adult, she was still able to inhabit, quite instantly and quite viscerally and with quite a hefty dash of self-pity, the childhood terror of being left out of something.

“It’s for the tax write-off,” Regina said. “I can’t stand here and explain it to you. We’re late.”

“What tax write-off?” said Mary.

Regina glanced toward the conspicuously blank space on the living-room wall where Abigail Lake used to hang.

“You’re selling her?” Mary said, dumbfounded.

“We’re getting her
appraised
. For the tax write-off.”

“But how can we justify a tax write-off if…”

Mary noticed Gaby absently tweedling the green ribbon hanging from her coat’s buttonhole.

“I’ve already spoken to Mrs. Bigelow,” Regina said. “Abigail Lake
belongs
at the historical society.”

“But the painting’s only ten years old,” Mary said.

“Last I checked, 1989 was still a part of history,” Regina said. “At least in the reality I inhabit.”

Her sisters departed. Mary returned to the box-strewn living room, nerves ignited. She sat on the couch in her pajamas, trying not to brood over the situation nor further freak herself out, even though the house creaked and rustled around her and she couldn’t snuff out the irrational suspicion that she was somehow endangered.

To calm herself she stared at the space on the wall where Abigail Lake had once hung; the previously shaded portion of wall was paler than the wall around it and appeared, in this light, as a fossil-like depression in the plaster. The punted andirons, she noticed, had been stored safely inside the coal hod, which had been tucked inside the fireplace. After twenty-five years of out-of-service drafty space consumption, the fireplace’s “working order” had finally been restored last month, its chimney a justifiable household expense only now that Dad was selling the house. Mary would have found this detail touchingly indicative of her family’s penchant for parsimony where warmth, both literal and figurative, was concerned; but given the uncomfortably close parallel this act shared with her own last-minute attempts to restore working order, as it were, to her relationship with Mum, she viewed the new fireplace as further rebuke of her family’s—of her own—self-defeating ways.

She returned her attention to the blank space on the wall. Poor Abigail Lake, she thought. Yes, she too was
disappointed
that her mother had left her nothing more meaningful than a painting she despised and was furthermore meant to share with her sisters, none of whom lived in the same town. But to take this disappointment out on Abigail Lake—to donate her along with the throw rugs and the andirons—struck Mary in that tender place she reserved for the outsize pity she experienced on behalf of inanimate objects. Easier to be ruined by the sight of a child’s abandoned stuffed duck on the sidewalk. Easier to be ruined by the rejection suffered by a well-intentioned if misguided birthday gift—an ugly purple scarf. Easier to be ruined by “the pain” experienced by an ugly and unwanted purple scarf than the death, say, of one’s own mother.

Returning to the foyer, Mary checked the to-do list on the credenza. Second on the list, beneath “M’s Closet,” was “M’s Desk.” An arrow traversed the paper and pointed to three keys on a ring with a masking-tape tag (
KEYS TO DESK
) resting on the credenza.

Looking at the keys, her immediate conviction was that she would find
Miriam
in one of her mother’s desk drawers. Now, she realized, she just wanted to find the book, regardless of whether or not her mother meant her to find it. Then again (her un-caffeinated brain spun fuzzily), maybe her mother meant her to find it without consciously meaning her to find it. Meaning: Mary, when she’d packed up her belongings to move to Oregon for college, had neglected to take the book as an unconscious way to communicate to her mother—though she’d be hard-pressed to designate what, exactly, she’d been trying to say. One could argue that she had abandoned the book as a signal to her mother that she did not cherish nor self-centeredly fetishize her disappearance and its aftermath; she was, in fact, deeply ashamed of it, and wished to separate herself from it by inserting the span of a continent. But in that case, why not destroy the book? One could
thus
argue that her leaving it behind was an unconsciously aggressive maneuver and not an innocent, if misguided, mea culpa; that she could move across the country and symbolically leave behind her past for her mother to caretake was irresponsible and immature and even a little cruel. As was the possibility that she’d left the book behind as bait. Had she? Had she left it behind to test if her mother would take it?

Mary took the keys upstairs and unlocked the desk drawers, quickly surmising there were no books to be found, only sheets and sheets of disorganized paper. She diverted her disappointment through work, subdividing the drawer contents into five piles on the guest bed:
PHOTOS
,
HISTORICAL SOCIETY
,
ABIGAIL LAKE
,
MISC
.
CORRESPONDENCE
,
MISC
.
JUNK
.
HISTORICAL SOCIETY
became a jumble of press releases, meeting minutes, fund-raising pitches, unused letterhead.
ABIGAIL LAKE
included the sheaves of template responses Mum had received from governors and senators and local historians.
We are sorry but at this juncture
, they commenced, never ones to beat around the bush, those governors and senators and local historians.
We sympathize with your situation, however
. Many times Mary had found herself fascinated, but also perplexed, by Mum’s obsession with clearing the name of poor long-dead Abigail Lake. For whose sake is this energy being expended, she had often wondered. For whose sake is this forgiveness being so single-mindedly sought.

MISC
.
CORRESPONDENCE
was limited to European cathedral postcards from Maxie or Susan.
MISC
.
JUNK
included grocery receipts, a few dry cleaning tickets, fabric swatches and paint chips left over from the redecorating project Mum embarked upon after her daughters had left for college.
PHOTOS
became a repetitive pile of women in straw hats (summer) or loden coats (fall) stacked in neat unsmiling rows. Mum’s left-leaning cursive identified the back of each photo. “Annual Beekman Plaza Luncheon,” “West Salem Cemetery Restoration Committee,” “Dibble Library Fund-raiser.” After Abigail Lake, the Dibble Library was Mum’s second-most-consuming pet project. Mrs. Dibble, a polio victim and fanatical collector of witch trial memorabilia, agreed to donate her collection to the historical society so long as it remained in her actual library, a miniature version of her larger stone house right down to the octagonal turret. The library had been moved from the Dibble Estate in Hulls Cove to the grounds of the West Salem Historical Society in 1981. A giant portrait of a younger Mrs. Dibble hung in the Dibble Library foyer, her thin form flanked by a pair of coal-black Scotties, her leg braces hidden beneath a skirt. In the reading nook hung a second portrait, of a red-haired girl leaning on a decorative musket. Mum liked to tell potential donors that the Dibble daughter, at twenty, had hung herself from the library’s chandelier while her parents were vacationing in Acapulco. Whether this was true or not, Mary never learned. But her mother claimed that the average donation to the library tripled after the donor had been told, in whispered tones, about the daughter’s suicide.

Mary broke for a cup of grief tea, then returned to tackle her mother’s filing cabinet. Bills, more letterhead, tax returns, a family tree that traced the Veal family back to Abigail Lake and very few other notables save a Nantucket whaling captain named Alonzo Veal. Alonzo Veal was the reason her mother had stipulated in her will that the family should go on a whale-watching trip on her next birthday, her sixtieth, and scatter her ashes at the first sight of a whale. Given her mother’s practical allergies against powerboats and earnest poetic gestures, this request struck Mary as more than a bit peculiar; and again, while in the esteemed mahogany chambers of Harold “Buzz” Stanworth as he read droningly through the will’s subsections, she had to remind herself how little she knew her mother anymore.