Magic for Beginners: Stories (17 page)

“Sure you can,” Will says. “There’s moonlight.”

“I only have one contact lens in,” Carly says.

Will stands on the bed and lifts the painting of the garden off
its picture hook. How can a painting of some flowers be so heavy?
He leans it against the bed and hangs up the painting from the car.
Iceberg, zombie, a bunch of trees. Some obscured and unknowable
thing. How are you supposed to tell what it is? It makes him want
to die, sometimes. “There you go,” he says. “It’s yours.”

“It’s beautiful,” Carly says. Will thinks maybe she’s crying
again. She says, “Will? Will you just lie down with me? For a
little while?”

Sometimes Soap has this dream. He isn’t sure whether it’s a
prison dream or a dream about art or a dream about zombies. Maybe
it isn’t about any of those things. He dreams that he’s in a dark
room. Sometimes it’s an enormous room, very long and narrow.
Sometimes there are people in it, leaning silently up against the
walls. He can only figure out if there are people or how big the
room is when he stretches out his arms and walks forward. He has no
idea what they’re doing in the room with him. He has no idea what
he’s supposed to do, either. Sometimes it’s a very small room. It’s
dark. It’s dark.

“Hey, kid. Hey, Leo. Wake up, Leo. We gotta go.” Soap is lying
on the floor beside the bed, holding up the dust ruffle. He has to
whisper. Carly is asleep on the too-big bed, under the covers.

Leo uncurls. He wriggles forward, towards Will. Then he wiggles
back again, away from Will. He’s maybe six or seven years old. “Who
are you?” Leo says. “Where’s Carly?”

“Carly sent me to get you, Leo,” Soap says. “You have to be
very, very quiet and do exactly what I say. There are zombies in
the house. There are brain-eating zombies in the house. We have to
get to a safe place. We have to go get Carly. She needs us.” Leo
stretches out his hand. Soap takes it and pulls him out from under
the bed. He picks Leo up. Leo holds on to Will tightly. He doesn’t
weigh a lot, but he’s so warm. Little kids have fast
metabolisms.

“The zombies are chasing Carly?” Leo says.

“That’s right,” Soap says. “We have to go save her.”

“Can I bring my robot?” Leo says.

“I’ve already put your robot in the car,” Will says. “And your
dinosaur T-shirt and your basketball.”

“Are you Wolverine?” Leo says.

“That’s right,” Wolverine says. “I’m Wolverine. Let’s get out of
here.”

Leo says, “Can I see your claws?”

“Not now,” Wolverine says.

“I have to go to the bathroom before we go,” Leo says.

“Okay,” Wolverine says. “That’s a great idea. I’m proud of you
for telling me that.”

Some things that you could try with zombies, but which won’t
work:

Panic.

Don’t panic. Remain calm.

Call the police.

Take them out to dinner. Get them drunk.

Ask them to come back later.

Ignore them.

Take them home.

Tell them jokes. Play board games with them.

Tell them you love them.

Rescue them.

Wolverine and Leo have a backpack. They put a box of Cheerios
and some bananas and Leo and Carly’s parents’ gun and a Game Boy
and some batteries and a Ziploc bag full of twenty-dollar bills
from the closet in the master bedroom in the backpack. There’s a
late-night horror movie on TV, but no one is there to watch it. The
girl in the dress on the lawn is gone. If there’s someone in the
pool, they’re keeping quiet.

Wolverine and Leo get in Wolverine’s car and drive away.

Carly is dreaming that she’s the President of the United States
of America. She’s living in the White House—it turns out that the
White House is built out of ice. It’s more like the Whitish
Greenish Bluish House. Everybody wears big fur coats and when
President Carly gives presidential addresses, she can see her
breath. All her words hanging there. She’s hanging out with rock
stars and Nobel Prize winners. It’s a wonderful dream. Carly’s
going to save the world. Everyone loves her, even her parents. Her
parents are so proud of her. When she wakes up, the first thing she
sees—before she sees all the other things that are missing besides
the oil painting of the woods that nobody lives in, nobody painted,
and nobody stole—is the empty space on the wall in the bedroom
above her parents’ bed.

`There once was a man whose wife was dead. She was dead when he
fell in love with her, and she was dead for the twelve years they
lived together, during which time she bore him three children, all
of them dead as well, and at the time of which I am speaking, the
time during which her husband began to suspect that she was having
an affair, she was still dead.

It has been only in the last two decades that the living have
been in the habit of marrying the dead, and it is still not common
practice. Divorcing the dead is still less common. More usual is
that the living husband—or wife—who regrets a marriage no longer
acknowledges the admittedly tenuous presence of his spouse. Bigamy
is easily accomplished when one’s first wife is dead. It may not
even be bigamy. And yet, where there are children concerned, the
dissolution of a mixed marriage becomes stickier. Thirteen years
after they first met at a cocktail party in the home of a
celebrated medium and matchmaker who had been both profiled in
The New Yorker
and picketed by conservative religious
groups, it was clear to both Alan Robley (living) and Lavvie Tyler
(deceased), that there were worse fates than death. Their marriage
was as dead as a doorknob.

At least, that was what Alan Robley said.

Alan and Lavvie Robley-Tyler’s children had communicated to
their father, via the household planchette and Ouija board, a
desire to be taken to Disneyland; because divorce is always hardest
on the children, and because Disneyland offered, at that time, an
extraordinary discount to the dead, their medium had agreed to meet
Alan Robley and his wife at Disneyland, which was only a
fifteen-minute commute from her home, provided Alan Robley pay her
admission as well as the usual fee. Besides, the medium had always
loved watching amusement park visitors wait in long, orderly lines.
She found it comforting.

The medium’s name was Sarah Parminter. Her movements were
economical: abbreviated and curiously ungraceful. Alan Robley
imagined that this was so because she could see, at all times, the
dead crowding around her. He himself had grown accustomed to moving
slowly when he came home from work, in order to avoid unexpectedly
stepping on or passing through his wife, or one of his three
children. It takes great effort for the dead to make the living see
them and therefore mixed marriages rely on dedicated dead-spaces:
areas of floor and furniture that have been marked out with special
red tape, red tile, squares of red fabric. (The children of the
living and the dead most often take after their dead parents. Life,
like red hair or blue eyes, is a recessive gene.)

Alan Robley longed for a better, less complicated relationship
with his children. He wanted to know them better. Who doesn’t?

Sarah Parminter and Alan sat on an uncomfortable bench beneath a
pink bougainvillea. The three Robley-Tyler children were ignoring a
you must be this tall sign. There are advantages to being the child
of a mixed marriage. The usual rules don’t apply. Their mother,
Lavvie, was sitting in the crown of the bougainvillea above the
bench, shaking down the papery flowers. He loves me not. He loves
me not. The bougainvillea hung like tiny lanterns in Alan Robley’s
longish hair and in the curl of his collar. He ignored them. Lavvie
got up to worse things. At one time, he’d found her behavior
endearing.

Lavvie Tyler had stopped living sometime around the turn of the
century. She’d been twenty-two and unmarried. She’d died of
tuberculosis. Even in death, she still trembled and coughed,
silently, so that the bougainvillea shook too. She was both older
and younger than her husband. Marriage and the birth of three
children had only made this more true.

“Explain this to me again, Alan,” Sarah Parminter said. “You say
that you and Lavvie have talked about this a great deal. You agree
that there are irreconcilable differences. You say you both want
this. This divorce.”

“Yes,” Alan said. He looked away. He wore an expensive shirt, in
a shade of red that the dead were supposed to find attractive. He
wore lipstick in the same shade of red, and there were greasy
little flecks of it on his front teeth. Red fingernail polish. No
doubt the soles of his shoes were red as well. Was it for Lavvie,
despite their difficulties, or for his children? To draw them near?
Sarah wondered why the living, who were so very much more solid,
after all, than the dead, so often looked shifty and deceitful to
her. She tried not to be prejudiced. But the dead were so
beautiful, so fixed and so fluid, like sheets of calligraphy. They
belonged to her, although she told herself that she was wrong to
feel this way.

“Lavvie says that this is your idea, not hers,” Sarah said.
“That’s what she’s telling me. She says that there have been
difficulties. She admits that. She says that the children take up a
great deal of her time. She says that your romantic life has
suffered. She says that there have been arguments. Smashed dishes,
icy silences, bouts of unearthly weeping. She knows that she has a
temper. But she says she still loves you. You don’t understand her,
but she still loves you. She says she wonders if you’ve met someone
else.”

“I don’t believe this!” Alan said. He laughed. He looked around,
as if Lavvie might suddenly, finally, at last, materialize. But he
never once looked up at the top of the bougainvillea. “Why is she
saying this? I sat up all Tuesday night with the Ouija board,
helping Carson and Allie and Essie with their homework, and she
never said one single word to me. Carson said that Lavvie was down
in the basement folding laundry, but I think it was one of the kids
who was folding laundry, covering up for their mother. I think
Lavvie has a boyfriend. A dead boyfriend. Some days I don’t even
feel like the kids are mine. I love them to pieces, but it’s hard
for me, thinking that they don’t really belong to me. They already
spend so much time with their mother. Who knows what she says to
them about me?”

“Lavvie says you’re jealous of her friends,” Sarah said. “She
says she’s the one who should be jealous. She says that you only
married a dead woman because you like the people at your work to
think you’re trendy. She says she can see the way you look at
living women. You’re always flirting with women at the grocery
store. She knows you spend hours looking at porn online, and you
don’t even think about whether the children are there, too.”

Silence. Sarah could hear Alan Robley’s teeth, grinding together
like pieces of chalk. Lavvie trembled in her tree.

“Where are the kids?” Alan said. “Do me a favor, Sarah, tell the
kids not to get too far away. Last time we came, Essie got lost.
Apparently she just kept getting on different boats at It’s a Small
World. She was singing “It’s a Small World After All” in people’s
ears, only she kept changing the lyrics. All these kids were
getting off the ride in tears. If Carson wants to go to
Frontierland, he should come ask us. We can all walk over.”

“They’re still in line for Space Mountain,” Sarah said. “They’re
beautiful kids, Alan. And even though this must be difficult for
them, they’re handling it so well. You and Lavvie must be very
proud. Lavvie says she falls in love with you again each time she
looks at them. They look so much like you, Alan.”

Alan’s red lower lip was trembling now, too. Tremble, tremble:
Lavvie in the bougainvillea. Tremble, tremble: Alan’s lip. Sarah
Parminter realized that she had begun to tap one foot in sympathy.
She stopped her foot and made herself look at the faces of the
people waiting in line. Dead people hung in the air, their heels
resting on the shoulders of living people, and living people walked
right through two dead people who were making out, well, having sex
right there in line, practically, but nobody got upset. It was
astonishing how well the dead and living got along under normal
circumstances, just so long as they could ignore each other.

Alan said, “I only look at other women because—because when a
woman walks by, I think maybe that’s how Lavvie looks. Maybe Lavvie
walks fast like that. Maybe Lavvie’s ass moves like that when she’s
walking. And when some woman laughs, I think maybe that’s how
Lavvie sounds when she laughs. I know Lavvie’s hair is blonde. I
find her hairs on the sheets sometimes, and in the drain. She’s
told me that she has brown eyes. I know how tall she is. Sex. Ah,
sex isn’t very good right now, but sometimes I wake up in the
middle of the night and I can feel her lying on top of me. She’s so
heavy! She’s cold and she’s real curvy and she doesn’t breathe, but
sometimes she coughs and coughs and can’t stop. She just lies there
on top of me, with her cheek on my cheek. And I think she’s
smiling, but I don’t know why she’s smiling. I don’t know what
she’s smiling about. She won’t tell me. She writes stuff on my skin
with her finger, but I don’t know what she’s writing. Sometimes the
kids get in bed too, and do you know what that’s like, rolling over
and there are a couple of dead kids in bed with you? And Lavvie, I
don’t know if Lavvie bounces when she walks, or if she trips over
things, or if she still thinks my jokes are funny, or if she even
listens when I’m talking. If she’s even there. Or if she just
laughs at me when I’m yelling at her. I don’t know when she’s being
sarcastic or when I’ve really hurt her feelings or when she’s
teasing me. I know she’s there, but she seems so far away.
Sometimes when I come up to bed, I think maybe somebody else has
been up there. Not one of the kids, or Lavvie, but somebody else.
Some other dead person. He goes through my drawers and he throws
stuff around. If it isn’t Lavvie’s boyfriend, then it’s Lavvie or
one of the kids. But they swear up and down it isn’t them, they say
I’m imagining things. And then I think, so okay, even if you’re
really my kids, you’re her kids, really. Because they’re like her.
They’re just like her. They’re dead too. So what I keep thinking is
that this was a mistake right from the beginning. Like people say.
Maybe the living shouldn’t fall in love with the dead.”

Now Lavvie had come down out of the bougainvillea. She was
curled up in her husband’s lap, gazing up at him. Alan didn’t seem
to know she was there. Lavvie didn’t say anything, she just winked
at Sarah Parminter. It was a furious wink. Isn’t he a card? Isn’t
he a blabbermouth? He never shuts up, she said to Sarah. Talk,
talk, talk. Let me tell you what I did today, Lavvie. Let me tell
you what this guy said at work. Blah, blah, blah. Don’t you just
want to eat him up? If he leaves me, I’ll make him wish he were
dead, too.

“What’s she saying?” Alan said. “She’s saying something to you,
isn’t she? Where is she? You can’t believe a word she says. You
think that just because you can hear her talking, just because you
can see her, you think you know what she’s thinking. You think you
can tell if she’s telling the truth. But I’ve lived with her for
the last twelve years and she’s a liar and a bitch and she’s a
whore. Every time she opens that cold little mouth of hers, it’s
because she’s thought up some new lie. Every time she says she
loves me. If she could lie about death, if she could make people
believe she was a living woman, she’d lie about that, too. Just
because.”

The bougainvillea was getting thick with dead people. They hung
down from the branches and listened to Alan. Lavvie listened
hardest of all. Her face shone with wifely approval.

“Alan,” Sarah said. “Let’s try to talk about this in a calm and
reasonable manner.”

Recently, Sarah Parminter’s clients had been coming to her,
wanting her to fix their love lives. If you read horoscopes, you’d
think it was something in the air. Perhaps someday soon the
alignment of the stars would change, all recent unhappinesses and
catastrophes would be reversed and people would fall in love all
over again and life would be good and death would be good too.
Perhaps Sarah Parminter’s own horoscope had advised her not to
meddle in other people’s affairs at this time. But Sarah didn’t
believe in astrology. Her cousin Fred was also a medium, and his
clients were just as difficult, just as unhappy. Sarah and Fred
sometimes sat out on her balcony in the airless, dirty yellow
afternoons, watching cars go up and down the ramps of the I-5. They
talked about work. Opposite the apartment building, there was a
dead end sign across the street which someone had turned into dead
ed. Every time she saw it, Sarah Parminter thought about going down
and adding an fr. But Fred didn’t have a great sense of humor. He
claimed it had been eroded away by contact with the other world.
But Sarah remembered him as a child, and even then he’d never
enjoyed the sort of practical jokes that the dead liked to
play.

Fred had a new client, a man named Sam Callahan whose wife was
also dead, just like Lavvie Tyler. Only the Callahans had been
married for decades while both were still living, and the problem
was now that she was dead, his wife didn’t want to have anything to
do with Sam Callahan. As far as she was concerned, the marriage was
over. But Callahan couldn’t let go.

Fred didn’t approve of the way that Sarah coddled her clients.
When Callahan came in, what he’d said straightaway was, “I know who
you want to talk to. But she doesn’t want to talk to you.”

Callahan was a big man with small hands. He said, “I was just
hoping that I could talk to her one more time. I fucked up. I’m
sorry. I wanted to explain. I need to tell her how much I loved
her. Please make her talk to me.”

Fred said, “You do know she’s dead, right?”

There had been a boy at Callahan’s school. Paul. That had been
his name. After he did what he did, he still wasn’t very popular,
but he became more distinct. He came into focus.

The name of the girl he’d done it for: Popsicle. A nickname,
because she was so cool.