The Uses of Enchantment (41 page)

The end, said the man. He did not remove his blindfold. He remained in the center of the carpets.

He stretched out his legs, massaging his kneecaps.

I’m right, aren’t I, he said. I get it now. I understand why we’re here.

And that makes you feel superior, she said, her heart beating angrily. Or nervously. All her emotions combined indistinctly, like a Morse code message so rapid it fibrillates into nonsense.

More than you do, the man said.

At least I wasn’t such an idiot that I stopped to light a cigarette in the middle of a street. At least I didn’t hate my life so much that I was willing to nearly kill myself to become another person.

And you aren’t? the man said meanly. What a disappointment.

Above the man, the pink tongues of insulation waggled at her mockingly.

The girl coughed. The insulation tongues shed tiny iridescent filaments made visible by the projector’s lights. She breathed them in and they burrowed like quills into her throat. She would cough for years, she thought.

Aren’t you willing? the man taunted.
Scheherazade
?

Shut up
, she thought, trying to work up her nerve.
Shut up shut up.

She coughed again, a timid, exploratory cough, nothing involuntary about it. But soon it became involuntary. Soon she found herself so overcome by the quilled sensation in her throat that she could barely catch her breath and even, in a strangely becalmed fashion, felt herself beginning to lose consciousness—the white blankness of the projector breathed onto the bedspread, the white blurriness caused by hyperventilation—as she stumbled over to the blindfolded man, who, clumsily, caught her between his outstretched legs.

Apparently, she began, ignoring the throat scratchiness that made her eyes water so profusely she worried he might think that she was crying. She pushed her face into his face, her hands braced on his inner thighs.

Apparently, she repeated, her lips over his, I am.

West Salem

NOVEMBER 10, 1999

S
he took the Mercedes because the keys were in the ignition, parked on a side driveway that skirted an orchard of apple trees besieged by silhouetted vines; the predawn sky pushed through the diamond-shaped gaps and created a menacing landscape of points and tangles. The Mercedes was salt-scarred to the point of looking frostbitten in places, the baseboards were filigreed with rust, and the heat, when she cued it, stank of charred mice nests.

Sleepy still, drunk still, hovering on the bruised edge of a hangover, her brain was strangely suited to the task of driving. She passed through the gate without incurring further damage to either cars or the wall. Driving down Water Street and toward the empty town, however, her hands started to shake, her stomach yawning acidly as the vodka dregs were suctioned up by her capillaries and distributed to the only parts of her not already saturated with alcohol. Her body was in shock, not yet ready to register the damage she’d done to herself last night as she revisited, again and again, the bottom of her glass.

Though she’d gotten less than two hours of sleep, she was giddy—practically manic. This was the starry limbo period that followed a shock; she allowed her as-yet-unprocessed night with the man to stun her into this strange, dreamy happiness. She fiddled with the radio dial and found a newscast that pinged off her eardrums but grounded her to the predawn day outside her windshield, a grounding that was challenged by her distorted take on her surroundings. To her right she saw a woman in a white bathrobe walking a dog in a white bathrobe, a tiny dog in a tiny white bathrobe—how ludicrous!—a dog in a tiny white bathrobe that transformed, as she passed closer and the woman entered the dimming circle of a streetlight, into a normal Pomeranian, just fur and eyes and little black feet. Normal Pomeranian is an oxymoron,
hah hah hah
, she thought, but still she repeated it in her head,
normal Pomeranian
,
normal Pomeranian
, and this repetition anchored her to a day that seemed determined to feel unreal.

Given her failure with shortcuts, she stuck to the main roads and spent the drive concentrating on the salt- and snow-scummed yellow line while mentally deliberating over what she would tell Aunt Helen. The truth was out of the question, so she tried to conjure a plausible reason to explain why she’d needed Aunt Helen’s car in the middle of the night, why she’d failed to return with the car, why the car was unreturnable for the foreseeable future. Usually she excelled at this sort of challenge but bending her head around what might have happened, rather than what actually happened, felt as ridiculously impossible as animal shape-shifting; she could sooner transform herself into a normal Pomeranian, so entrenched in her own queasy self did she feel.

Two miles from her house she saw, driving toward her, her father’s car. As he passed her she caught the mercury flash of his face through the streetlight-reflecting windshield, neither tired nor sad nor relieved. He looked blandly dead to her, void of the pinch and scowl of everyday humanness.

She slowed the Mercedes and turned into the next available driveway, thinking she would follow him. Not to spy on him but to make sure that he hadn’t died behind the wheel, or died last night, or died earlier in the week without his daughters noticing. She owed him this much; the man needed some reminding that he was, at least technically, alive. Or maybe it was she who needed the reminding.

Her father drove under the speed limit and so she caught up with him quickly, just as he began his counterclockwise trip around the West Salem rotary. Three-quarters of the way around he pulled into the diner lot. She pulled in after him, parking near the Dumpster.

She waited in the Mercedes until he’d gone inside. She watched him order a cup of coffee and make a joke that the waitress laughed at out of politeness. She walked quickly to the diner’s door, passing just outside her father’s seat.

She saw him notice her through the window. She saw him pretending that he hadn’t.

When she slid into the booth opposite him, he was busy reading the menu.

He didn’t glance up.

“You’re out late,” he said.

“You’re up early,” Mary said.

The waitress appeared. Mary ordered a coffee. Her father ordered eggs and bacon and toast.

“I’m not hungry,” Mary said.

“Make it two,” he said to the waitress.

They sat in silence; sizzling noises exploded from the kitchen.

Her father was dressed for the outside, wool pants and a chamois shirt, a down vest, a wool hat. He reached into the pocket of his down vest and placed the plastic baggie filled with ashes on the table.

The baggie, Mary noted distastefully, had become creased from multiple handlings and transfers; the plastic had turned cloudy and begun to look like trash.

“And here I thought you were dining alone,” Mary said.

Her father tore open a sugar packet, added it to his mug, failed to stir it.

“You don’t think much of me, do you?” her father said.

“What?” Mary said.

“You heard me,” he said.

Mary reddened.

“I was just making a joke,” she said. “I’m sorry. It was inappropriate.”

Her father didn’t reply. She’d clearly upset him.

“Interpret it as the strangled sign of affection it’s meant to convey,” she persisted. “OK?”

She smiled beseechingly.

“No need to tell me how to interpret strangled signs of affection,” her father said. “I’ve been doing it for thirty-seven years.”

Her father turned his attention to the large plate-glass window to their right, to the mostly empty parking lot and the mostly quiet West Salem rotary. Frost veined the perimeter of the glass; rather than signaling the death knell of autumn, the tendrils looked to Mary like the hopeful beginnings of something, a crystalline root system surviving against all odds.

“Fine,” Mary said. She gestured toward the baggie. “So then. What are you two getting up to after breakfast?”

Her father scrunched his face ruefully at the window.

“Golf course,” he said.

“The country club?” Mary said.

“No,” he said. “The public course.”

Mary nodded. The coffee had begun to infiltrate her system, failing to awaken anything but her awareness that she’d recently, like two minutes ago, been drunk.

“Mum hated that club,” she said.

He shrugged. “Could be,” he said. “Could be she just liked to pretend that she hated it.”

“Keeping up appearances,” Mary said, her mind flashing to the book, wrapped in a plastic shopping bag and sitting on the passenger seat of the Mercedes.

“It wasn’t easy,” he said.

“I doubt it was,” Mary said.

“What I mean is,” her father said, “it cost her.”

Mary nodded knowingly, though she had no idea what her father was talking about. Did he mean it gave her mother cancer? It made him love her mother less?

“We never told you girls,” her father said, “but your mother and I talked about separating. More than once.”

“You were married for a long time,” Mary said, not at all surprised to hear this. She’d received the occasional guilt-inducing letter from Regina detailing the tension in the house, so much more thick and stagnant now that the three sisters, and their erratic energies, weren’t around to destabilize the air.

“When I thought we’d reached the end of our marriage, I’d go golfing. I’d go to the place she pretended most to hate. When I got home I’d feel better.”

He stared at her searchingly, as though wanting confirmation that he’d done a brave and unusual thing. Mary didn’t know how to respond. Her father’s meager form of rebellion was touching, but also sadly pathetic.

“So,” her father said, changing the subject, “I won’t ask what you’ve been up to.”

“You don’t have to ask,” she said. “I’ll tell you.”

“Your mother used to disappear on me,” he said, ignoring her offer. “Those last few weeks. When she could still drive. I never asked her where she went.”

“Maybe she wanted you to ask,” Mary said, considering for the first time the emotional hardships her mother must have suffered in this marriage—a happy enough marriage that was, like all permanent arrangements, an occasional prison for both parties. Her mother was obviously the more difficult personality, yes; but her father had made it easy for her to be difficult. He’d made it easy for her to be strangled by her own worst tendencies.

Her father stared at her balefully. “You think you know what she wanted,” he said.

He was still angry with her, she thought. But then she more correctly read his expression: he was sincerely curious.

“I like to think so,” she said. “But it’s hard to distinguish what she wanted from what I want her to want. To say
she would have wanted this
is really to say
I want this
.”

The waitress arrived with their food. Her father replaced the baggie in his vest pocket to make room for the plates.

“So then,” her father said, salting up his eggs, “how about you come with me to the course.”

Mary played with her eggs. They wobbled unappetizingly at the touch of a fork tine.

“What about the whale watch?” she said.

Her father shrugged. “That’s just a lot of silliness, don’t you think?”

Mary smiled.

“It is pretty silly,” she said.

“Your mum’s ashes won’t know the difference between a whale sighting and a swamp view, and we won’t have to get seasick.”

“Fair point,” Mary said.

“So what do you say,” her father said. “Eat up and we’ll go to the course together.”

Her father stared at her with his rumpled bulldog eyes. Whatever she wanted from him, she realized, he wanted so much more from her. They had reached that parent-child turning point where she knew, or so she believed, what was better for him than he did. This realization flat-out broke her heart. Equally heartbreaking was the realization that she didn’t want, or rather
need
, to scatter her mother’s ashes. She had the book.

“I think,” she said, putting a hand on his hand, “I think Mum would have wanted you to go alone.”

A
s she pulled onto Rumney Marsh, she was greeted by the calming sight of Ye Olde Bastard walking his schnauzer, his wool coat over his pajamas, cuffs bunched inside the emerging fleece linings of his boots. He stared at her as she drove past, his face absent his usual extra helping of scorn. Maybe he was more friendly in the morning, she thought. Maybe he suddenly saw her as a colleague of the dawn. She waved to him—it seemed only polite—and his expression shifted from neutral to mystified, mystified to dubious, dubious to skeptical. She averted her eyes before his skepticism reverted back to scorn, because she wanted to locate a meaningful sign in Ye Olde Bastard’s comparatively affable reception; she was different today, she’d sunk back to her common-denominator self and it took a man of gourmet derision like Ye Olde Bastard to detect it.

She parked the Mercedes where Aunt Helen’s station wagon had been parked last night. She snuffed the engine and closed her eyes, inhaling the mildewed skank of floor mats. As she stepped into the street, a car slalomed past her, bulleting her face, her jacket, her pants with a gritty gray slush.

She yelped involuntarily. Ye Olde Bastard glowered at her from beneath his tam-o’-shanter.

The jerk, she thought. The crabby, controlling, heartless old jerk.

“Take Umbrage!” she yelled at him.

Ye Olde Bastard’s schnauzer squatted to take a dump.

“Take Umbrage!” she repeated.

Ye Olde Bastard stooped awkwardly, his hand clad in a white surgical glove.

Her outrage stunned her awake more bracingly than the corrosive diner coffee, and she entered the kitchen feeling giddily refreshed. The kettle on the stove released a leisurely thread of steam through its snout. She heard, from the living room, the crumple of paper. Somebody was packing. Or somebody was unpacking. Maybe, she thought with a jolt of hopefulness, her father—since he was embracing his rebellious side—had decided not to sell the house. Maybe in a fit of predawn regret he’d enlisted Regina to unpack all the items meant for donation to the historical society, because he’d realized, from the gloom of his sleeping-pill coma, that total erasure of a person did not achieve total erasure of a person.