Girl's Guide to Witchcraft (17 page)

Withdrawing from the only good memory of the night before, I smiled at Mr. Potter. “No, the Peabridge is a private library. We specialize in colonial America.”

“Ah! I’ve walked by your place! You’re over by the university, right? In the heart of Georgetown?”

I agreed that we were. Mr. Potter told me that he took his dog for a walk near us almost every evening. The shih tzu had actually belonged to
Mrs.
Potter, but poor Lucinda had passed away about six months before. She was the one who had been a librarian, a cataloger. She’d always loved the profession.

“I’m sorry that I didn’t have the chance to meet her, Mr. Potter.”

“Aren’t you a dear.” He patted my hand. “She spoiled that silly dog as if it were her own flesh-and-blood baby. We were never blessed with children.”

So much for his pulling coins from his granddaughters’ ears. Now I wanted to pat
his
hand. He shook his head, though, as if he were well-accustomed to changing his mood by force of will. “So tell me, dear. What do you do at the Peabridge?”

“I’m a reference librarian by training.” Because I was at the board meeting of an arts society, I felt compelled to add, “But I’ve become involved with development lately.” Development. Not fund-raising. I’d picked up the lingo in the course of drafting my grant applications.

“Have you now? What sort of projects are you working on?”

“I’ve started to apply for grant funding. We’ve got several specific projects that we want to take on, cataloging our collection of manuscripts, developing a system to track all of our ephemera.”

“Ah…My Lucinda would have loved to talk to you about those things. When we lived in Indianapolis, she got our little opera library in order. She organized all of the sheet music, along with the archives of programs, production notes…”

“She sounds like a very interesting woman. Dedicated, too.”

“She would have loved the Harvest Gala,” Mr. Potter said. His eyes started to look sad again, but he speared a bite of pear tart into his mouth. “Oh! This is wonderful!” He smiled at me conspiratorially. “Much better than those nasty cookies from the Watergate.”

I laughed out loud, and then I needed to make up an explanation when Uncle George asked me what was so funny. I didn’t want him to think that I disrespected Gran’s choices, even if she did woefully misjudge baked goods.

The rest of the evening passed quickly. Gran led the review of plans for the Gala. Ticket sales were strong. The reach-out program to local universities seemed to have worked; there were more young people (everyone turned to smile at me) than the guild had seen in years. The caterer was an opera fan himself, and he was upgrading the hors d’oeuvres as a donation to the guild. The silent auction was organized; a fussy-looking woman sitting on the chaise longue had agreed to print out the bid sheets on her home computer.

In fact, the meeting would have been perfect, if Gran had not succumbed to two more coughing fits. The first one left her surrounded by her fellow board members, each trying to help in perfectly ineffective ways, passing over glasses of water, trying to fan her with napkins, patting the backs of her hands. The second fit must have given her some warning; she said that she had something to check on in the kitchen and escaped before it grabbed hold completely.

I followed her out of the room, trying to avoid setting off an alarm among the guests even as I moved quickly. The spasm wasn’t as bad as its predecessors, and Gran caught her breath quickly. “Silly me. I must have swallowed something wrong.”

“Don’t play around with this, Gran. If you’re still coughing tomorrow, I want you to phone Dr. Wilson.”

“He doesn’t want to waste his time with the likes of me. Especially on the weekend.”

“You’re not a waste of time. You’re his patient.”

She made a noise that sounded like “Pshaw.”

“Gran,” I said. “Come on, now. Promise me. You’re the only grandmother I’m ever going to have, and I don’t want to see you suffer like this for no reason.”

She smiled at the mock warning tone in my voice. She’d used it often enough on me. “Fine, Jane. I promise.”

By the time we returned to the living room, the meeting was breaking up. I collected another round of compliments on my pear tart and a handful of avowals that I would make some lucky man an excellent wife. I had my cheek pinched by Mr. Potter, and I submitted to a slobbery farewell from Uncle George. It took half an hour to gather up the china and wash it, another half hour to return all the finery to its properly appointed cabinets.

As I slipped my coat from the hall closet, Gran rested her palm against my cheek. “Thank you, dear. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“You’d do just fine, and you know it. Besides, I enjoyed the meeting. I think the Gala is going to be wonderful.”

“I certainly hope so.” She smiled. “It’s late, sweetheart. Why don’t you just go sleep in your old room?”

Gran had kept my bedroom set up, almost as a shrine. It had last been decorated when I was sixteen years old. Although I had torn down the Daniel Day-Lewis and Ralph Fiennes posters and taken the high school yearbook photos from the frame of my mirror, I couldn’t do anything about the Barbie-pink color that I had once thought was the height of sophistication. I’d tried to convince Gran that she should convert my bedroom into a home office, but she just laughed and reminded me that she didn’t work from home. And I have to admit, a part of me was pleased that everything was just the way I’d left it.

Of course, I couldn’t sleep in Gran’s apartment. I had to go home and feed Stupid Fish. I had to make sure that Neko had not gotten into any trouble. I had to start organizing those books in the basement; there were several spells that David had mentioned the night before that seemed intriguing.

Besides, Jason might have called.

My life was much more complicated than Gran needed to know. I laughed as if I thought she was joking about my spending the night. She sighed, but saw me to the door. “Now, you aren’t going to take a bus at this hour are you?”

“Of course not, Gran. I’ll take a cab.”

“I can give you money.”

“I don’t need your money.” I patted my purse. “I’ve got my own.”

“Promise!” she insisted.

“I promise!”

My fingers were still crossed as I walked out the door of her apartment building and headed up the street. I went two blocks north, up to Calvert, so that there was no possible way for her to see me getting onto the 42R. My timing was good. I only needed to wait five minutes, and I got a seat at the front of the bus. I wondered if I could find a spell to make all of my transportation endeavors work so flawlessly.

I stared out the window of the yoga studio, cursing my choice of “scissors” that had succumbed to Melissa’s “rock.” Unaware of my thoughts, the instructor was saying, “Today, we’re going to work on inverted poses. We’ll start with a supported shoulderstand.”

I wondered if our colonial fathers had ever considered using the asana, instead of placing people in public stocks for humiliating punishment. Taking a deep breath, I met Melissa’s game smile. “I love this,” she whispered to me. “I feel so strong when the energies shift to my head.”

Strong
was not the word I would think of.
Silly,
maybe.
Foolish. Completely and utterly out of balance.

The yoga instructor was undaunted. “The pose is called Salamba Sarvangasana. It is extremely important that you do it properly. You must not turn your head to either side, or you risk serious neck injury. You can use a blanket if you’d like, folded once on top of your mat, but don’t give yourself any more padding. You can hurt yourself badly with this posture.”

Okay, now I was getting a little afraid. There were more qualifications for contorting my body than there were for working magic. It sounded like the instructor was doing her best to keep from being sued. I imagined my legs, kicking up into the posture. I saw myself toppling sideways, knocking over Melissa to my right and sending her falling into the next three students. I envisioned myself in a hospital bed, tied to one of those strange triangular bars that looked like an oversized instrument from a giant child’s music class. I saw the bandages wrapped around my head and neck, turning me into a classic mummy.

I sat back on my heels.

“Come on,” Melissa whispered. “Just try it once. It’s easier than it looks.”

“Easier for you,” I muttered. But then, I stopped to think. Since my last yoga class, I had accomplished any number of new things. I had worked successful spells. I had begun a campaign to keep the Peabridge alive. I had faced Clara. I had even kept from chewing my fingernails—sure, my nail polish was chipped from use, but I had not gnawed it off since Roger had given me my manicure.

No silly supported shoulderstand was going to get the better of me.

And I did it.

I followed the instructor’s words, and I did it. My legs moved into the air as if they had a power all their own. The pose felt out of balance, but I shifted my hands higher on my hips, providing a little more support for my lower back. I tucked my chin in closer to my chest, and I felt my spine stretch and relax, just like the instructor had said that it would.

Melissa was right. It
was
easier than it looked. And the energies did shift to my head. I felt them, just as I had felt the power of my magic when I extinguished the fire in my kitchen. There was a distinct hum, a definite buzz as my body realigned itself.

I should remember this, I told myself. I should draw on this when I’m working with David.

The instructor had us hold the shoulderstand for a few more minutes before she walked us through a supported headstand. Salamba Sirsasana, for those of us who wanted to add to our Sanskrit vocabularies. Not that I’d remember that name after I left the studio.

We took up stations along the wall as the instructor assured us that many students needed the security of a vertical surface. In fact, she pointed to a patch of wall where the paint was a half-shade lighter than the rest, and she admitted that she had put her own foot through the wall not two weeks before.

Maybe that should have intimidated me, but it had the opposite effect. If my instructor had not perfected the pose, then how could I expect my own attempt to be flawless? I might as well try.

The headstand was harder than the shoulderstand—it
hurt.
I felt as if the crown of my head was going to break open. But then the instructor reminded us to take as much weight as we could on our arms, to transfer our balance outward. People around me were falling down, and I got distracted more than once, but each time I was able to try again. I finally managed to hold the pose for a full minute, and then the instructor decided it was time to move on to our closing sequence.

As we stretched and balanced before settling into corpse pose, I could not keep a smile from my face. I had conquered the inverted poses.

Okay, that might not have been a very yogic way of thinking about things—“conquering” was probably not the central metaphor that I should use when talking about peace, meditation and harmony between body and mind. But I knew what I meant.

As I practiced my deep breathing and blanking my mind to conscious thoughts, the instructor walked around the room. She approached each student with lavender oil on her palms, making small adjustments to our necks and shoulders. When she lengthened my spine, she leaned close to my ear and whispered, “Excellent job today, Jane.”

Well, maybe she didn’t. I’d never heard her compliment anyone like that during class. I’d never heard her make any purposeful noise to break up the meditative silence. But I could sense her approval in her fingers.

“Really!” I said to Melissa as we walked away from the studio. “I could tell that’s what she believed. For once, she didn’t think that I was wasting my time there. She was proud of me.”

“She’s always proud of you,” Melissa said, shrugging. “You’re the only person who thinks you should be perfect the first time you try anything.”

“I don’t think I should be perfect!” I met Melissa’s smirk, and I corrected myself. “I don’t
always
think I should be perfect. I should just be more flexible than I am. I should be able to stretch more.”

“And you do. Over time.”

I started to argue, purely out of habit, but I realized that Melissa was right. Yoga
was
getting easier. Even Downward-Facing Dog—I had enjoyed the stretch instead of feeling like my calf muscles were about to tear loose from my bones. Or tendons. Or ligaments. Or whatever my muscles attached to.

I was spared needing to reply because we’d reached M Street, the main drag of Georgetown. We were supposed to meet Neko on the corner. He was going to join us for mojito therapy.

Roger had gone out of town for his sister’s big-deal thirtieth birthday party, and Neko was sulking because he hadn’t been invited. I didn’t think that my familiar truly wanted to wander the wilds of West Virginia, attending long-scheduled family events as the ho-mo-sex-you-al companion of a hometown boy, but I hadn’t said anything. I understood that Neko had wanted to be
invited,
even if he didn’t actually attend. I just didn’t think it would do any good to tell him how miserable he would likely be. Or to point out that he’d only known Roger for a couple of weeks. Or to mention that he was squandering his ability to roam free from our book collection if he only used it to moon after Roger. I bit my tongue.

We found him on the corner, leaning against a streetlight. He sighed as we approached, the deepest sigh I’d ever heard from someone who wasn’t a teenage girl. Anyone passing on the street might have thought that the poor man had just learned that he was suffering from some terminal disease. “Hey, Neko!” Melissa said. We’d already decided that our best strategy was to ignore his despondency.

Another sigh, even deeper. Entire wind farms could be fueled if he went on like this. “Hello.”

This wasn’t going to be easy. Melissa tried, though. “You should have seen Jane in yoga class! She mastered the inverted poses.”

He gave me a wan smile that might have broken my heart if I’d thought for a second that he was truly suffering. “Wonderful.”

We moved down the sidewalk, avoiding the early revelers who were starting their big nights out in Georgetown’s trendy restaurants and bars. Amateurs, Melissa called them. People who wanted to see and be seen.

Passing by the plateglass windows of Sephora, I was amazed by the number of women buying cosmetics on a Saturday evening. Hard to believe, but I’d never been inside the place. I knew that it was a high-end cosmetics emporium; I’d seen the ads and walked by the classy black-and-white storefront. But when I was with Scott, it seemed silly to spend all that time and effort making myself beautiful for my own fiancé. And since he’d dumped me, I hadn’t had any reason to splurge.

I shrugged and said. “Can you imagine spending hours shopping for makeup?”

Neko sighed. “
Roger
could spend hours shopping for makeup.” He made life as a spendthrift sound downright noble.

Melissa started to retort—I knew that she would say that she had never spent more than five minutes at the drugstore selecting a lipstick. And I suspected that Neko would bite back with something unkind. I was desperate to avoid sniping between the two of them, so I said, “Well,
I
want to see what they’ve got.”

I grabbed both Neko and Melissa by their hands and plunged inside, only to be stopped by the first display. TARTE, said large letters. I picked up a bottle of Clean Slate and read the ingredients. “Here, Melissa. This should sound familiar—avocado oil, rosemary, hibiscus oil.”

“I wouldn’t know whether to cook with it or put it on my face.”

“Roger uses hibiscus oil.” Wistfully, Neko picked up the makeup base and read the rest of the label, barely summoning the strength to return it to the counter.

“But Roger isn’t here now,” I said, deciding to take a firm hand with my lovelorn familiar. I wasn’t totally heartless, though. I knew that I’d have to do something to distract him. “I’m going to have to rely on
you
to help me.”

“Me?” Neko perked up at that, but then he remembered that he was supposed to be drowning in the slough of despond.

“You.”

“What are
you
looking for?” Melissa sounded incredulous, and I tried to flash her a warning look over Neko’s bowed head.

“A new image. A new me. I’ve got fingernails for the first time in my adult life. I remembered to put on Pick-Me-Up-Pink lipstick every morning last week. I have to do
something
to brighten up my colonial wardrobe. And there’s certainly a lot to choose from here.”

When I’d started cranking out my explanation, I had no idea what I would say. I didn’t even know what half the things
were
in the store; I’d certainly never applied them to my body before. But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered why I shouldn’t go on a shopping spree. After all, my brilliant foundation idea looked like it was going to be a bust. I wasn’t likely to shed my Martha Washington look anytime soon. I might as well do all I could to freshen up my appearance. Especially if I ever hoped to regain Jason’s attention, after the Great Indoor Barbecue Fiasco.

“Come on, Neko,” I said. “What would you suggest?”

“Mojitos. Extra rum.”

“I’m serious!”

“So am I,” he said mournfully.

“We’ll make the mojitos,” I promised. “But first you have to help me choose some makeup.”

Nothing. I was having flashbacks to the babysitting I had done when I was twelve, to my desperate attempts to get an overtired five-year-old to pay attention to dinner and get ready for bed.

Melissa wasn’t helping. She had wandered down the counter, studying the rest of the Tarte line. I watched her pick up a palette of eye shadow and flip it over so that she could read the price tag. It must have been pretty steep; she practically slammed it back into its Lucite holder.

Well, fine then. I wasn’t going to waste the rest of my evening trying to orchestrate fun for the whole gang. “Okay,” I said. “I’m just going to buy this eyeliner, and then we can go.” I chose the purple one. Purple has always been one of my favorite colors—that must go back to my Barbie dream-girl days.

“You’re not going to buy the plum!” Neko could not have sounded more scandalized if I had suggested stripping bare and performing a bump and grind under the chic store’s pinlights. A dozen heads swiveled in our direction.

“Um, no,” I said, blushing a color only a shade lighter than the offending eyeliner. “I just meant that I would buy this brand.”

Neko took the pencil from my hand and eased it back into its container. “Step away from the plum. It would bring out all the red in your face. You need something green. But not too green. You don’t want to lean toward sallow. Green-blue. Like Roger’s eyes…”

And for a moment there, I’d thought we were making progress. Melissa rolled her own eyes. “Look,” she said. “I’m heading down to the bakery. I’ll make the mojitos. Come down when you’re finished here.”

I nodded, not quite ready to give up on revivifying Neko. I was certain that we’d be fine for the rest of the weekend if I could just make him forget his vacationing love for five straight minutes. Consecutive minutes. Whatever. “Go on,” I said to Melissa. “Just don’t forget to—”

“Add extra lime. I know.”

I gave her a finger wave as she ducked out the door. She actually shook her head when she got out to the street, as if she were clearing away a physical residue of froufrou girliness. I thought of a Labrador retriever puppy shaking off raindrops.

“Green-blue,” I prompted Neko. “Help me find something.”

“It doesn’t really matter.”

“All right then.” I strode over to the Cargo display. “I’ll go with this Casablanca palette. Mmm. Caramel lip gloss.”

“Caramel?” Neko’s shriek actually stopped a transaction at the cash register. He swept over to me and covered my hand with his own. “If you get the caramel, you will absolutely look like a corpse. It will bleach every hint of color that you have in your cheeks.”

I bit back a smile as Neko led me down the row. “Here,” he said. “You need something more pink. A little sheer. No glitter.”

His hands moved as if he were dealing blackjack. Before I knew it, I was holding foundation and blush, pressed powder and loose. He passed me a pair of eyeliners and a tube of mascara. Seven lipsticks—they were all just too luscious to pass up he assured me—and three different bottles of nail polish.