Practical Magic (15 page)

Ben is so mixed up that he’s begun to do magic tricks involuntarily. He reached for his credit card at the gas station and pulled out the queen of hearts. He made his electricity bill disappear and set the rosebush in his backyard on fire. He took a quarter from behind an elderly woman’s ear as he was helping her cross the Turnpike and nearly sent her into cardiac arrest. Worst of all, he’s no longer allowed into the Owl Café at the north end of the Turnpike, where he usually has breakfast, since lately he sets all the soft-boiled eggs spinning and rips the tablecloths off each table he passes on the way to his regular booth.

Ben can’t think of anything but Gillian. He’s started to carry a rope around with him, in order to tie and untie Tom Fool and Jacoby knots, a bad habit that comes back to him whenever he’s nervous or when he can’t get what he wants. But even the rope isn’t helping. He wants her so much that he’s fucking her inside his head when he should be doing things like putting on his brakes at a stoplight or discussing the influx of Japanese beetles with his next-door neighbor, Mrs. Fishman. He’s so overheated that the cuffs of his shirts are singed. He’s hard constantly, ready for something that looks as if it’s never going to happen.

Ben doesn’t know what to do to win Gillian over, he has no idea, so he goes to see Sally, ready to beg for her help. But Sally won’t even open the door for him. She speaks through the screen, with a distant tone, as if he’d appeared on her front stoop with a vacuum to sell, instead of arriving with his heart in his hand.

“Take my advice,” Sally suggests. “Forget Gillian. Don’t even think about her. Marry some nice woman.”

But Ben Frye made up his mind the minute he saw Gillian standing beneath the lilacs. Or maybe it wasn’t his mind that was so intensely affected, but now every piece of him wants her. And so when Sally tells him to go home, Ben refuses to leave. He sits down on the porch as though he had something to protest or all the time in the world. He’s there all day, and when the six o’clock whistle at the fire station over on the Turnpike blows, he still hasn’t moved. Gillian will not even speak to him when she comes home from work. Already, today, she has lost her watch and her favorite lipstick. At work, she dropped so many hamburgers on the floor she could have sworn someone was tipping the plates right out of her hands. Now, Ben Frye is here and in love with her and she can’t even kiss him or wrap her arms around him, because she’s poison and she knows it, which is just her luck.

She rushes past him and locks herself in the bathroom, where she runs the water so that no one can hear her cry. She is not worth his devotion. She wishes he would evaporate into thin air. Maybe then she wouldn’t have this feeling deep inside, a feeling she can deny all she wants, but that won’t stop it from being desire. Still, in spite of her constant refusals, she can’t help but peek out the bathroom window, just to get a look at Ben. There he is, in the fading light, certain of what he wants, certain of her. If Gillian were speaking to her sister, or, more correctly, if Sally were speaking to her, Gillian would draw her over to the window to get a look.
Isn’t he beautiful?
That’s what she would have said if she and Sally had been talking.
I wish I deserved him,
she would have whispered into her sister’s ear.

It chills Antonia through and through to see Mr. Frye on the front porch, so obviously in love it seems he’s placed his pride and his self-respect on the concrete for anyone to trample. Antonia finds this display of devotion extremely disgusting, she really does. When she walks past him, on her way to work, she doesn’t even bother to say hello. Her veins are filled with ice water instead of blood. Lately Antonia doesn’t bother with carefully choosing her clothes. She doesn’t brush her hair a thousand times at night, or pluck her eyebrows, or bathe with sesame oil so her skin will stay smooth. In a world without love, what is the point of any of that? She broke her mirror and put away her high-heeled sandals. From now on she will concentrate on working as many hours as she can at the ice cream parlor. At least things are tangible there: You put in your time and pick up your paycheck. No expectations and no let-downs, and right now that’s what Antonia wants.

“Are you having a nervous breakdown?” Scott Morrison asks when he sees her at the ice cream parlor later that night.

Scott is home from Harvard for summer vacation and is delivering chocolate syrup and marshmallow topping, as well as sprinkles and maraschino cherries and wet walnuts. He’d been the smartest boy ever to graduate from their high school, and the only one to ever be accepted at Harvard. But so what? All the time he was growing up in this neighborhood, he was so smart that no one talked to him, least of all Antonia, who considered him to be a pitiful drip.

Antonia has been methodically cleaning the ice cream scoopers, which she’s lined up all in a row. She hasn’t even bothered to glance at Scott while he delivered buckets of syrup. She certainly seems different from the way she used to be—she was beautiful and snooty, but tonight she looks like something that’s been left out in a storm. When he asks her the completely innocent question about the nervous breakdown, Antonia bursts into tears. She dissolves into them. She is nothing but water. She lets herself slip to the floor, her back against the freezer. Scott leaves his metal dolly and comes to kneel beside her.

“A simple yes or no would have been just fine,” he says.

Antonia blows her nose on her white apron. “Yes.”

“I can see that,” Scott tells her. “You’re definitely psychiatric material.”

“I thought I was in love with someone,” Antonia explains. Tears continue to leak from her eyes.

“Love,” Scott says with contempt. He shakes his head, disgusted. “Love is worth the sum of itself, and nothing more.”

Antonia stops crying and looks at him. “Exactly,” she agrees.

At Harvard, Scott had been shocked to find out that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of people as smart as he was. He’d been getting away with murder for years, using a tenth of his brain power, and now he actually had to work. He’d been so busy competing all year he hadn’t had time for daily life—he’d repudiated things like breakfast and haircuts, the consequences of which are that he’s lost twenty pounds and has shoulder-length hair, which his boss makes him tie back with a piece of leather so he doesn’t offend the customers.

Antonia stares at him, hard, and discovers that Scott looks completely different and exactly the same. Out in the parking lot, Scott’s summer partner, who’s been driving this delivery route for twenty years and has never before had an assistant who received a 790 on his verbal SATs, leans on the horn.

“Work,” Scott says ruefully. “Hell with a paycheck.”

That does it. Antonia follows him when he goes to collect his metal dolly. Her face feels hot, even though the air conditioner is switched on.

“See you next week,” Scott says. “You’re low on hot fudge.”

“You could come in before that,” Antonia tells him. There are some things she hasn’t forgotten, in spite of her depression and this mess with her aunt Gillian and Mr. Frye.

“I could,” Scott agrees, realizing, before he heads for the truck, that Antonia Owens is much deeper than he would have ever imagined.

That night Antonia runs all the way home after work. She is suddenly filled with energy; she’s absolutely charged. When she turns the corner onto her street she can smell the lilacs, and the odor makes her laugh at the silly reactions caused by some ridiculous out-of-season blooms. Most people in the neighborhood have gotten used to the incredible size of the flowers. They no longer notice that there are whole hours of the day when the entire street echoes with the sound of buzzing bees and the light turns especially purple and sweet. Yet some people return again and again. There are women who stand on the sidewalk and weep at the sight of the lilacs for no reason at all, and still others who have plenty of reasons to cry out loud, although none they’d admit to if questioned.

A hot wind is threading through the trees, shaking the branches, and heat lightning has begun to appear in the east. It’s a curious night, so hot and so heavy it seems better suited to the tropics, but despite the weather Antonia sees that two women, one whose hair is white and the other who is not much more than a girl, have come to see the lilacs. As Antonia hurries past, she can hear weeping, and she quickens her pace, goes inside, then locks the door behind her.

“Pathetic,” Antonia decrees as she and Kylie peer out the front window to watch the women on the sidewalk cry.

Kylie has been more withdrawn than usual since her birthday supper. She misses Gideon; she has to force herself not to break down and phone him. She feels terrible, but, if anything, she’s become even more beautiful. Her cropped blond hair is no longer as shocking. She has stopped slouching to hide how tall she is, and now that she’s claimed her full posture, her chin usually tilts up, so that she seems to be considering the blue sky or the cracks in the living room ceiling. She squints her gray-green eyes to see through the glass. She has a particular interest in these two women, since they’ve come to stand on the sidewalk each night for weeks. The older woman has a white aura around her, as though snow were falling above her alone. The girl, who is her granddaughter and who has just graduated from college, has little pink sparks of confusion rising off her skin. They are here to weep for the same man—the older woman’s son, the girl’s father—someone who went from boyhood to manhood without ever changing his attitude, convinced till the last that the universe revolved around him alone. The women on the sidewalk spoiled him, both of them, then blamed themselves when he was careless enough to kill himself in a motorboat in Long Island Sound. Now, they’re drawn to the lilacs because the flowers remind them of a June night, years ago, when the girl was still tender and awkward and the woman still had thick black hair.

On that night there was a pitcher of sangria on the table, and the lilacs in the grandmother’s yard were all in bloom, and the man they both loved, so dearly that they ruined him, took his daughter in his arms and danced with her on the grass. At that moment, beneath the lilacs and the clear sky, he was everything he could have been, if they hadn’t given in to him night and day, if they had once suggested that he get a job or act with kindness or think about someone other than himself. They’re crying for all he might have been, and all they might have been in his presence and by his side. Watching them, sensing that they’ve lost what they had for only a brief time, Kylie cries right along with them.

“Oh, please,” Antonia says.

Since her encounter with Scott, she can’t help but feel a little smug. Unrequited love is so boring. Weeping under a blue-black sky is for suckers or maniacs.

“Will you get real?” she advises her sister. “They’re two total strangers who are probably complete nut cases. Ignore them. Pull the window shade down. Grow up.”

But that is exactly what has happened to Kylie. She’s grown up to discover that she knows and feels too much. No matter where she goes—to the market on an errand, or the town pool for an afternoon swim—she is confronted with people’s innermost emotions, which seep from their skins to billow out and float above them, like clouds. Just yesterday, Kylie passed an old woman walking her ancient poodle, which was crippled by arthritis and could barely move. This woman’s grief was so overpowering—she would take the dog to the animal hospital by the end of the week to put it out of its misery—that Kylie found she could not take another step. She sat down on the curb and she stayed there until dusk, and when she finally walked home she felt dizzy and weak.

She wishes that she could go out and play soccer with Gideon and not feel other people’s pain. She wishes that she were twelve years old again, and that men didn’t shout out their car windows whenever she walks along the Turnpike about how much they’d like to fuck her. She wishes she had a sister who acted like a human being, and an aunt who didn’t cry herself to sleep so often that her pillow has to be wrung out each morning.

Most of all, Kylie wishes that the man in their backyard would go away. He’s out there right now, as Antonia heads for the kitchen, humming, to fetch herself a snack. Kylie can see him from the window that allows a view of both the front and the side yards. Bad weather never affects him; if anything, he relishes black skies and wind. The rain doesn’t bother him in the least. It seems to go right through him, with each drop turning a luminous blue. His polished boots have just the slightest film of dirt. His white shirt looks starched and pressed. All the same, he’s been making a mess of things. Every time he breathes, horrible things come out of his mouth: Little green frogs. Drops of blood. Chocolates wrapped in pretty foil, but with poisonous centers that give off a foul odor each time he breaks one in half. He’s wrecking things just by snapping his fingers. He’s making things fall apart. Inside the walls, the pipes are rusting. The tile floor in the basement is turning to dust. The coils of the refrigerator have been twisted, and nothing will stay fresh; the eggs are spoiling inside their shells, the cheeses have all turned green.

This man in the garden has no aura of his own, but he often reaches to dip his hands into the purple-red shadow above him, then smears the aura of the lilacs all over himself. No one but Kylie can see him, but he’s still able to call all these women out of their houses. He’s the one who whispers to them late at night while they’re sleeping in their beds. Baby, he says, even to the ones who never thought they’d hear a man talk to them this way again. He gets inside a woman’s mind, and he stays there, until she finds herself crying on the sidewalk, crazy for the scent of lilacs, and even then he’s not going anywhere. At least not anytime soon. He’s definitely not through.

Kylie has been watching him ever since her birthday. She understands that no one else can see him, although the birds sense him and avoid the lilacs, and the squirrels stop dead in their tracks whenever they get too close. Bees, on the other hand, have no fear of him. They seem attracted to him; they hover near, and anyone who came too close to him would surely risk a sting, maybe even two. The man in the garden is easier to see on rainy days, or late at night, when he appears out of thin air like a star you’ve been staring at but only now see, right in the center of the sky. He doesn’t eat or sleep or drink, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things he wants. His wanting is so strong Kylie can feel it, like bands of electricity shaking up the air around him. Just recently, he has taken to staring back at her. She gets terrified whenever he does this. She gets cold right through her skin. He’s doing it more and more, staring and staring. It doesn’t matter where she is, behind the kitchen window or on the path to the back door. He can watch her twenty-four hours a day if he likes, since he never has to blink—not even for a second, not anymore.