Practical Magic (12 page)

“Happy birthday,” Sally says to Kylie, but she sounds downright gloomy.

“Emphasis on the ‘happy,’” Gillian reminds Sally as she pours herself a huge cup of coffee.

Gillian spies her reflection in the toaster; this is not a good hour for her. She smooths out the skin near her eyes. From now on she will not get out of bed until nine or ten at the earliest, although sometime after noon would be preferable.

Sally hands Kylie a small box, wrapped with pink ribbon. Sally has been especially careful, monitoring her grocery spending and avoiding restaurants in order to afford this gold heart on a chain. She can’t help but notice that before Kylie allows herself a reaction, she looks over at Gillian.

“Nice.” Gillian nods. “Real gold?” she asks.

Sally can feel something hot and red begin to move across her chest and her throat. What if Gillian had said the locket was a piece of junk; what would Kylie have done then?

“Thanks, Mom,” Kylie says. “It’s really nice.”

“Which is amazing, since your mom usually has no taste when it comes to jewelry. But this is really good.” Gillian holds the chain up to her neck and lets the heart dangle above her breasts. Kylie has begun to pile pancakes onto a plate. “You’re going to eat those?” Gillian asks. “All those carbohydrates?”

“She’s thirteen. A pancake won’t kill her.” Sally would like to strangle her sister. “She’s much too young to be thinking about carbohydrates.”

“Fine,” Gillian says. “She can think about it when she’s thirty. After it’s too late.”

Kylie goes for the fruit salad. Unless Sally is mistaken, she’s wearing Gillian’s blue pencil streaked beneath her eyes. Kylie carefully scoops two measly spoonfuls of fruit into a bowl and takes teeny, tiny bites, even though she’s nearly six feet tall and weighs only a hundred and eighteen pounds.

Gillian takes a bowl of fruit for herself. “Come by the Hamburger Shack at six. That will give us some time before dinner.”

“Great,” Kylie says.

Sally’s back is way up. “Time for what?”

“Nothing,” Kylie says, sullen as a full-fledged teenager.

“Girl talk.” Gillian shrugs. “Hey,” she says, reaching into the pocket of her jeans. “I almost forgot.”

Gillian brings forth a silver bracelet that she picked up in a pawnshop east of Tucson for only twelve bucks, in spite of the impressive chunk of turquoise in its center. Someone must have been down-and-out to give this up so easily. She must have had no luck left at all.

“Oh, my gosh,” Kylie says when Gillian hands her the bracelet. “It’s totally fabulous. I’ll never take it off.”

“I need to see you outside,” Sally informs Gillian.

Sally’s face is flushed to the hairline, and she’s twisted into jealous knots, but Gillian doesn’t notice anything is wrong. She slowly refills her coffee cup, adds half-and-half, then ambles into the yard after Sally.

“I want you to butt out,” Sally says. “Do you understand what I’m saying? Is it getting through to you?”

It rained last night and the grass is squishy and filled with worms. Neither of the sisters is wearing shoes, but it’s too late to turn back and go into the house.

“Don’t yell at me,” Gillian says. “I can’t take it. I’ll flip out, Sally. I’m way too fragile for this.”

“I’m not yelling. All right? I’m just simply stating that Kylie is my daughter.”

“Do you think I’m not aware of that?” Gillian sounds icy now, except for the tremble in her voice, which gives her away.

In Sally’s opinion, Gillian really is fragile, that’s the awful part. Or at least she thinks she is, and that’s pretty much the same damn thing.

“Maybe you think I’m a bad influence,” Gillian says now. “Maybe that’s what this is all about.”

The tremble is getting worse. Gillian sounds the way she used to when they had to walk home from school late in November. It would already be dark and Sally would wait for her, so she wouldn’t get lost, the way she did once in kindergarten. That time she wandered off and the aunts didn’t find her until past midnight, sitting on a bench outside the shuttered library, crying so hard she couldn’t catch her breath.

“Look,” Sally says. “I don’t want to fight with you.”

“Yes, you do.” Gillian is gulping her coffee. Sally is only now noticing how thin her sister is. “Everything I do is wrong. You think I don’t know that? I’ve screwed up my entire existence, and everyone who’s close to me gets screwed right along with me.”

“Oh, come on. Don’t.”

Sally means to say something about culpability, as well as all the men Gillian has screwed throughout the years, but she shuts up when Gillian sinks to the grass and begins to cry. Gillian’s eyelids always turn blue when she cries, which makes her seem breakable and lost and even more beautiful than usual. Sally crouches down beside her.

“I don’t think you’re screwed up,” Sally tells her sister. A white lie doesn’t count if you cross your fingers behind your back, or if you tell it so that someone you love will stop crying.

“Ha.” Gillian’s voice breaks in two, like a hard piece of sugar.

“I’m really happy that you’re here.” This is not an outright lie. No one knows you like a person with whom you’ve shared a childhood. No one will ever understand you in quite the same way.

“Oh, yeah, right.” Gillian blows her nose on the sleeve of her white blouse. Antonia’s blouse, actually, which she borrowed yesterday, and which, because it fits her so well, Gillian has already begun to consider her own.

“Seriously,” Sally insists. “I want you to be here. I want you to stay. Only, from now on, think before you act.”

“Understood,” Gillian says.

The sisters embrace and get up off the grass. They mean to go inside the house, but their gaze is caught by the hedge of lilacs.

“That’s one thing I don’t want to think about,” Gillian whispers.

“We just have to put it out of our minds,” Sally says. “Right,” Gillian agrees, as if she could stop thinking about him.

The lilacs have grown as high as the telephone wires, with blooms so abundant some of the branches have begun to bow toward the ground.

“He was never even here,” Sally says. She would probably sound more sure of herself if it weren’t for all those bad dreams she keeps having and the line of earth beneath her fingernails that refuses to come clean. This, plus the fact that she can’t stop thinking about the way he stared up at her from that hole in the ground.

“Jimmy who?” Gillian says brightly, even though the bruises he left on her arms are still there, like little shadows.

Sally goes inside, to wake Antonia and wash the breakfast dishes, but Gillian stays where she is for a while. She tilts her head back and closes her pale eyes against the sun, and thinks about how crazy love can be. That is how she is, standing barefoot in the grass, with the salt mark of tears left on her cheeks, and a funny sort of smile on her face, when the biology teacher from the high school unlatches the back gate so he can come around and give Sally the notice about the meeting in the cafeteria on Saturday night. He never gets beyond the gate, however—he’s stuck there on the path as soon as he sees Gillian, and from then on whenever he smells lilacs he’ll think about this moment. How the bees were circling above him, how purple the ink on the leaflets he’s been distributing suddenly seemed, how he realized, all at once, just how beautiful a woman can be.

 

ALL of the teenage boys down at the Hamburger Shack say, “No onions,” when Gillian takes their orders. Ketchup is fine, as are mustard and relish. Pickles on the side are all right as well. But when you’re in love, when you’re so fixated you can’t even blink, you don’t want onions, and it’s not to ensure that your kiss will stay sweet. Onions wake you up, they rattle you and snap right through you and tell you to get real. Go find someone who will love you back. Go out and dance all night, then walk through the dark, hand in hand, and forget about whoever it is who’s driving you mad.

Those boys at the counter are too dreamy and young to do anything but drool as they watch Gillian. And, to her credit, Gillian is especially kind to them, even when Ephraim, the cook, suggests she kick them out. She understands that theirs might just be the last hearts she will break. When you’re thirty-six and tired, when you’ve been living in places where the temperature rises to a hundred and ten and the air is so dry you have to use gallons of moisturizer, when you’ve been smacked around, late at night, by a man who loves bourbon, you start to realize that everything is limited, including your own appeal. You begin to look at young boys with tenderness, since they know so little and think they know so much. You watch teenage girls and feel shivers up and down your arms—those poor creatures don’t know the first thing about time or agony or the price they’re going to have to pay for just about everything.

And so Gillian has decided that she will come to her niece’s rescue. She will be Kylie’s mentor as she leaves childhood behind. Gillian has never felt this attached to a kid before; to be honest, she’s never even known any, and she’s certainly never been interested in anyone else’s future or fate. But Kylie brings out some strange instinct to protect and to guide. There are times when Gillian has found herself thinking that if she had had a daughter, she would have wanted her to be like Kylie. Only a little more bold and daring. A bit more like Gillian herself.

Although she is usually late, on the evening of her niece’s birthday Gillian has everything ready before Kylie arrives at the Hamburger Shack; she’s even spoken to Ephraim about leaving early so they can get to Del Vecchio’s for the birthday dinner on time. But first, there is the matter of Gillian’s other present, the one that will count for a great deal more than the turquoise bracelet. This present will take a good two hours and will, like most things Gillian is involved with, also make a big mess.

Kylie, who’s wearing cutoffs and an old Knicks T-shirt, obediently follows Gillian into the ladies’ room, although she hasn’t the faintest idea of what’s about to transpire. She’s wearing the bracelet Gillian gave her, as well as the locket her mother saved for for so long; she has a weird sensation in her legs. She wishes she had time to run around the block once or twice; maybe then she wouldn’t feel as if she were about to burn up or shatter.

Gillian turns on the light and locks the door and reaches under the sink for a paper bag. “The secret ingredients,” she tells Kylie, as she takes out a pair of scissors, a bottle of shampoo, and a package of bleach. “What do you say?” she asks when Kylie comes to stand beside her. “Want to find out how beautiful you really are?”

Kylie knows her mother will kill her. She’ll ground her for the rest of her life and take away her privileges—no movies on weekends, no radio, no TV. Worse, her mom will get that awful look of disappointment on her face—
See what has happened,
that’s what her expression will say.
After I’ve worked so hard to support you and Antonia and bring you up right.

“Sure,” Kylie says, easily, as if her heart weren’t going a hundred miles an hour. “Let’s do it,” she tells her aunt, as if her whole life weren’t about to completely flip-flop.

It takes a long time to do almost anything worthwhile to someone’s hair, even longer for a change as radical as this, and so Sally and Antonia and Gideon Barnes wait for nearly an hour in a booth at Del Vecchio’s, drinking diet Cokes and fuming.

“I missed soccer practice for this,” Gideon says mournfully.

“Oh, who cares,” Antonia says.

Antonia has been working at the ice cream parlor all day and she has a pain in her right shoulder from all the scooping she’s done. She doesn’t even feel like herself this evening, although she has no idea of who else she might be. She hasn’t been asked out on a date for weeks. All of a sudden the boys who were so crazy for her seem to be interested either in younger girls—who may not be as pretty as Antonia but who can be impressed by the slightest thing, a stupid award from the computer club or a trophy from the swim team, and go all googly-eyed if a boy pays them the teeniest little compliment—or in an older woman, like her aunt Gillian, who’s had so many more sexual experiences than a girl Antonia’s age that a high school boy could get hard just by trying to guess what she could teach him in bed.

This summer has not been working out as Antonia hoped. She can already tell that tonight is another totally lost cause. Her mother hurried her so they could be on time for this dinner, and Antonia was in such a rush that she grabbed her clothes from her dresser drawer without looking. And now, what she thought was a black T-shirt has turned out to be a horrible olive-green thing she ordinarily wouldn’t be caught dead in. Usually the waiters here wink at Antonia and bring her extra baskets of rolls and garlic bread. This evening not one of them has even noticed she’s alive, except for a creepy busboy who asked if she wanted a ginger ale or a Coke.

“This is so typical of Aunt Gillian,” she tells her mother when they’ve been waiting for what seems like an eternity. “It’s so inconsiderate.”

Sally, who is not completely sure that Gillian wouldn’t encourage Kylie to hop a freight train or hitchhike to Virginia Beach for no particular reason other than a good time, has been drinking wine, something she rarely does.

“Well, to hell with them both,” she says now.

“Mother!” Antonia says, shocked.

“Let’s order,” Sally suggests to Gideon. “Let’s get two pepperoni pizzas.”

“You don’t eat meat,” Antonia reminds her.

“Then I’ll have another glass of Chianti,” Sally says. “And some stuffed mushrooms. Maybe some pasta.”

Antonia turns to signal the waiter but immediately turns back. Her cheeks are flushed and she’s broken into a sweat. Her biology teacher, Mr. Frye, is at one of the small tables in the back, having a beer and discussing the virtues of eggplant rollatini with the waiter. Antonia is crazy about Mr. Frye. He is so brilliant that Antonia considered flunking Biology I just so she could take it again, until she found out he’d be teaching Biology II in the fall. It doesn’t matter that he’s way too old for her; he’s so incredibly handsome that if all the guys in the senior class were rolled up together and tied with a big bow they still wouldn’t come close. Mr. Frye goes running every day at dusk and always circles the reservoir on the far side of the high school three times. Antonia tries to make certain to be there just as the sun is going down, but he never seems to notice her. He never even waves.