Practical Magic

Wherever the girl went, to the market or her exercise class, Mr. Halliwell would follow, like a well-trained dog that has no need for a leash. As soon as school let out, he would head for the drugstore; he would show up at odd hours, with a handful of violets or a box of nougat, and sometimes the sisters could hear his new wife snipe at him, in spite of his gifts. Couldn't he let her out of his sight for a minute? That's what she hissed to her beloved. Couldn't he give her a minute of peace?

By the time the wisteria had begun to bloom the following spring, the girl from the drugstore was back. Sally and Gillian were working in the garden at dusk, gathering spring onions for a vegetable stew. The lemon thyme in the rear of the garden had started to give off its delicious scent, as it always did at this time of year, and the rosemary was less chalky and brittle. The season was so damp that the mosquitoes were out in full force and Gillian was hitting the bugs that had settled on her skin. Sally had to tug on her sleeve to get her to notice who it was coming up the bluestone path.

"Uh-oh," Gillian said. She stopped smacking herself. "She looks awful."

The drugstore girl didn't even look like a girl anymore, she looked old. Her hair wasn't shiny, and her mouth had a funny shape, as though she'd bitten into something sour. She rubbed her hands together; perhaps the skin was chapped, but more likely she was nervous in some terrible way. Sally picked up the wicker basket of onions and watched as their aunts' customer knocked on the back door. No one answered, so she pounded against the wood, frantic and angry. "Open up!" she called out, again and again. She kept right on knocking, and the sound echoed, unanswered.

When the girl noticed the sisters and headed toward the garden, Gillian turned white as a ghost and clung to her sister. Sally stood her ground, since there was, after all, nowhere to go. The aunts had nailed the skull of a horse to the fence, to keep away neighborhood children with a taste for strawberries and mint. Now Sally found herself hoping it would keep away evil spirits as well, because that's what the drugstore girl looked like, that's what she seemed to be as she flew at them, in that garden where lavender and rosemary and Spanish garlic already grew in abundance, while most of their neighbors' yards remained muddy and bare.

"Look what they did to me," the girl from the drugstore cried. "He won't leave me alone for a minute. He's taken all the locks off, even on the bathroom door. I can't sleep or eat, because he's always watching me. He wants to fuck me constantly. I'm sore inside and out."

Sally took two steps backward, nearly stumbling over Gillian, who was clinging to her still. This was not the way people ordinarily spoke to children, but the girl from the drugstore obviously didn't give a damn about what was right or wrong. Sally could see that her eyes were red from crying. Her mouth looked mean, as if only bad words could come from between those lips.

"Where are the witches who did this to me?" said the girl.

The aunts were looking out the window, watching what avarice and stupidity could do to a person. They shook their heads sadly when Sally glanced at the window. They did not wish to be involved any further with the drugstore girl. Some people cannot be warned away from disaster. You can try, you can put up every alert, but they'll still go their own way.

"Our aunts went on vacation," Sally said in a breakable, untrustworthy voice. She had never told a lie before, and it left a black taste in her throat.

"Go get them," the girl shouted. She was no longer the person she used to be. At choir practice she wept during her solos and had to be led into the parking lot so she wouldn't disrupt the entire program. "Do it now, or I'll smack you silly."

"Leave us alone," Gillian said from the safety of her hiding place behind Sally. "If you don't, we'll put a worse curse on you."

The girl from the drugstore snapped when she heard that. She grabbed for Gillian and flung her arm forward. But it was Sally she slapped, and she struck her so hard that Sally lurched backward and trampled the rosemary and the verbena. Behind the window glass, the aunts recited the words they were taught as children to hush the chickens. There had been a whole pen of scrawny brown-and-white specimens, but by the time the aunts got through with them they never screeched again; in fact, it was their silence that allowed for them to be carried off by stray dogs in the middle of the night.

"Oh," Gillian said when she realized what had happened to her sister. A blood-red mark was forming on Sally's cheek, but Gillian was the one who started to cry. "You horrible thing,", she said to the drugstore girl. "You're just horrible!"

"Didn't you hear me? Get me your aunts!" Or at least that was what the drugstore girl tried to say, but no one heard a word. Nothing came out of her mouth. Not a shout or a scream and certainly not an apology. She put her hand to her throat, as though someone were strangling her, but really she was choking on all that love she thought she'd needed so badly.

Sally watched the girl, whose face had already grown white with fear. As it turned out, the girl from the drugstore never spoke again, although sometimes she made little cooing noises, like the call of a pigeon or a dove, or, when she was truly furious, a harsh shrieking that was not unlike the panicked sound chickens make when they're chased and then caught for basting and broiling. Her friends in the choir wept at the loss of her beautiful voice, but in time they began to avoid her. Her back had become arched, like the spine of a cat who has stepped onto a burning hot coal. She could not hear a kind word without covering her ears with her hands and stamping her foot like a spoiled child.

For the rest of her life she'd be followed around by a man who loved her too much, and she wouldn't even be able to tell him to go away. Sally knew the aunts would never open the door for this client of theirs, not if she came back a thousand times. This girl had no right to demand anything more. What had she thought, that love was a toy, something easy and sweet, just to play with? Real love was dangerous, it got you from inside and held on tight, and if you didn't let go fast enough you might be willing to do anything for its sake. If the girl from the drugstore had been smart, she would have asked for an antidote, not a charm, in the first place. In the end, she had gotten what she'd wanted, and if she still hadn't learned a lesson from it, there was one person in this garden who had. There was one girl who knew enough to go inside and lock the door three times, and not shed a single tear as she cut up the onions that were so bitter they would have made anyone else cry all night long.

ONCE A YEAR, on midsummer's eve, a sparrow would find its way into the Owens house. No matter how anyone tried to prevent it, the bird always managed to get inside. They could set out saucers of salt on the windowsills and hire a handyman to fix the gutters and the roof, and still the bird would appear. It would enter the house at twilight, the hour of sorrow, and it always came in silence, yet with a strange resolve, which defied both salt and bricks, as though the poor thing had no choice but to perch on the drapes and the dusty chandelier, from which glass drops spilled down like tears.

The aunts kept their brooms ready, in order to chase the bird out the window, but the sparrow flew too high to be trapped. As it circled the dining room, the sisters counted, for they knew that three times around signified trouble, and three times around it always was. Trouble, of course, was nothing new to the Owens sisters, especially as they grew up. The instant the girls began high school, the boys who had avoided them for all those years suddenly couldn't keep away from Gillian. She could go to the market for a can of split pea soup and come back going steady with the boy who stocked the frozen food case. The older she got, the worse it became. Maybe it was the black soap she washed with that made her skin seem illuminated; whatever the reason, she was hot to the touch and impossible to ignore.

Boys looked at her and got so dizzy they had to be rushed to the emergency room for a hit of oxygen or a pint of new blood. Men who'd been happily married, and were old enough to be her father, suddenly took it into their heads to propose and offer her the world, or at least their version of it.

When Gillian wore short skirts she caused car accidents on Endicott Street. When she passed by, dogs tied to kennels with thick metal chains forgot to snarl and bite. One blistering Memorial Day, Gillian cut off most of her hair, so that it was as short as a boy's, and nearly every girl in town copied her. But none of them could stop traffic by revealing her pretty neck. Not one of them could use her brilliant smile in order to pass biology and social studies without taking a single exam or ever doing a night's homework. During the summer when Gillian was sixteen, the entire varsity football team spent every single Saturday in the aunts' garden. There they could be found, all in a row, hulking and silent and madly in love, pulling weeds between the rows of nightshade and verbena, careful to avoid the scallions, which were so scorchingly potent they burned the skin right off any boy's fingers if he wasn't paying attention.

Gillian broke hearts the way other people broke kindling for firewood. By the time she was a senior in high school, she was so fast and expert at it that some boys didn't even know what was happening until they were left in one big emotional heap. If you took all the trouble most girls got into as teenagers and boiled it down for twenty-four hours, you'd wind up with something the size of a Snickers candy bar. But if you melted down all the trouble Gillian Owens got herself into, not to mention all the grief she caused, you'd have yourself a sticky mess as tall as the statehouse in Boston.

The aunts didn't worry in the least about Gillian's reputation. They never once thought to give her a curfew or a good talking to. When Sally got her license she used the station wagon to pick up groceries and haul trash to the dump, but as soon as Gillian could drive she took the car every Saturday night and she didn't come home until dawn. The aunts heard Gillian sneak in the front door; they found beer bottles hidden in the glove compartment of the Ford. Girls would be girls, was the way the aunts figured it, which was especially true for an Owens. The only advice the aunts offered was that a baby was easier to prevent than to raise, and even Gillian, as foolhardy as she was, could see the truth in that.

It was Sally the aunts brooded about. Sally, who cooked nutritious dinners every night and washed up afterward, who did the marketing on Tuesdays and hung the laundry out on Thursdays, so the sheets and the towels would smell fresh and sweet. The aunts tried to encourage her not to be so good. Goodness, in their opinion, was not a virtue but merely spinelessness and fear disguised as humility. The aunts believed there were more important things to worry about than dust bunnies under the beds or fallen leaves piling up on the porch. Owens women ignored convention; they were headstrong and willful, and meant to be that way. Those cousins who married had always insisted on keeping their own name, and their daughters were Owenses as well. Gillian and Sally's mother, Regina, had been especially difficult to control. The aunts blinked back tears whenever they thought about how Regina would walk along the porch railing in her stocking feet on evenings when she drank a little too much whiskey, her arms out for balance. She may have been foolish, but Regina knew how to have fun, an ability the Owens women were proud of. Gillian had inherited her mother's wild streak, but Sally wouldn't have known a good time if it sat up and bit her.

"Go out," the aunts urged on Saturday nights, when Sally was curled up on the couch with a library book. "Have fun," they suggested, in their small, scratchy voices that could scare the snails out of their garden but couldn't get Sally off the couch.

The aunts tried to help Sally become more social. They began to collect young gentlemen the way other old ladies collected stray cats. They placed ads in college newspapers and telephoned fraternity houses. Every Sunday they held garden parties with cold beef sandwiches and bottles of dark beer, but Sally just sat on a metal chair, her legs crossed, her mind elsewhere. The aunts bought her tubes of rose-colored lipstick and bath salts from Spain. They mail-ordered party dresses and lace slips and soft suede boots, but Sally gave it all to Gillian, who could put these gifts to use, and she went on reading books on Saturday nights, just as she did the laundry on Thursdays.

This is not to say that Sally didn't try her best to fall in love. She was thoughtful and deep, with amazing powers of concentration, and for a while she accepted offers to go to the movies and dances and take walks around the pond down at the park. Boys who dated Sally in high school were astounded by how long she could concentrate on a single kiss, and they couldn't help but wonder just what else she might be capable of. Twenty years later, many of them were still thinking of her when they shouldn't, but she had never cared for a single one and could never even remember their names. She wouldn't go out with the same boy twice, because in her opinion that wouldn't be fair, and she believed in things like fairness back then, even in matters as strange and unusual as love.

Watching Gillian go through half the town made Sally wonder if perhaps she had only granite in the place where her heart should have been. But by the time the sisters were out of high school, it became clear that although Gillian could fall in love, she couldn't stay there for more than two weeks. Sally began to think they were equally cursed, and given their background and their upbringing, it really was no surprise that the sisters should have such bad luck. The aunts, after all, still kept photographs on their bureaus of the young men they had once loved, brothers who'd had too much pride to take shelter during a stormy picnic. The boys had been struck down by lightning on the town green, which was where they were now buried, beneath a smooth, round stone where mourning doves gathered at dawn and at dusk. Each August, lightning was drawn there again, and lovers dared each other to run across the green whenever black storm clouds appeared. Gillian's boyfriends were the only ones lovesick enough to take the risk of being struck, and two of them had found themselves in the hospital after their runs across the green, their hair forever standing on end, their eyes open wide from that time onward, even while they slept.

When Gillian was eighteen she stayed in love for three months, long enough to decide to run off to Maryland and get married. She had to elope since the aunts had refused to give their blessing. In their estimation Gillian was young and stupid and would get herself pregnant in record time—all the prerequisites for a miserable and ordinary life. As it turned out, the aunts were right only about her stupidity and youth. Gillian didn't have time to get pregnant—two weeks after the wedding, she left her husband for the mechanic who fixed their Toyota. It was the first of many marital disasters, but on the night she eloped anything seemed possible, even happiness. Sally helped to tie a line of white sheets together so that Gillian could escape. Sally considered her little sister greedy and selfish; Gillian thought of Sally as a prig and a prude, but they were still sisters, and now that they were about to be separated, they stood in front of the open window and hugged each other and cried, then vowed they would be apart for only a short while.

"I wish you were coming with us." Gillian's voice had been whispery, the way it was during thunderstorms.

"You don't have to do this," Sally had said. "If you're not sure."

"I've had it with the aunts. I want a real life. I want to go where nobody has ever heard of the Owenses." Gillian was wearing a short white dress that she had to keep pulling down against her thighs. Instead of sobbing, she rummaged through her purse until she found a crumpled pack of cigarettes. Both sisters blinked when she lit the match. They stood in the dark and watched the orange glow of the cigarette each time Gillian inhaled, and Sally didn't even bother to point out that hot ashes were falling onto the floor she had swept earlier that day.

"Promise me you won't stay here," Gillian said. "You'll get all crumpled up like a piece of paper. You'll ruin your life."

Down in the yard, the boy Gillian was about to run off with was nervous. Gillian had been known to back out when it came time to commit; in fact, she was famous for it. This year alone, three college boys had each been convinced that he was the one Gillian meant to marry, and each had brought her a diamond ring. For a while Gillian wore three rings on a gold chain, but in the end she gave them all back, breaking hearts in Princeton, Providence, and Cambridge all in the very same week. The other students in her graduating class took bets on who her date would be for the senior prom, since she'd been accepting and breaking invitations from various suitors for months.

The boy in the yard, who would soon be Gillian's first husband, began to toss stones up on the roof, and the echo sounded exactly like a hailstorm. The sisters threw their arms around each other; they felt as though fate was picking them up, rattling them around, then releasing them into completely alternate futures. It would be years before they'd see each other again. They'd be grown-up women by then, too old to whisper secrets or climb up to the roof in the middle of the night.

"Come with us," Gillian said.

"No," Sally said. "Impossible." Certain facts of love she knew for certain. "Only two people can elope."

There were dozens of stones falling on the roof; there were a thousand stars in the sky.

"I'll miss you too much," Gillian said.

"Go on," Sally said. She'd be the last one in the world to hold her sister back. "Go now."

Gillian hugged Sally one last time, and then she disappeared out the window. They'd fed the aunts barley soup laced with a generous amount of whiskey, so the old women were asleep on the couch. They never heard a thing. But Sally could hear her sister running down the bluestone path, and she wept all that night and imagined she heard footsteps when nothing was moving outside but the garden toads. In the morning, Sally went outside to collect the white sheets Gillian had left in a heap beside the wisteria. Why was Sally the one who always stayed behind to do laundry? Why did she care that there were dirt stains in the fabric that would need extra bleaching? She had never felt more alone or lonely. If only she could believe in love's salvation, but desire had been ruined for her. She saw craving as obsession, fervor as heated preoccupation. She wished she had never sneaked down the back stairs to listen in while the aunts' customers cried and begged and made fools of themselves. All of that had only served to make her love-resistant, and frankly, she thought she'd probably never change.

For the next two years postcards from Gillian would occasionally arrive, with hugs-and-kisses and wish-you-were-heres, but without a forwarding address. During this time Sally had less hope that her life would open up into something other than cooking meals the aunts didn't want and cleaning a house where the woodwork never needed polishing. She was twenty-one; most of the girls her age were finishing up college, or getting a raise at work so they could move into their own apartments, but the most exciting thing Sally did was walk to the hardware store. Sometimes it took close to an hour for her to choose between cleansers.

"What do you think? What's best for a kitchen floor?" she'd ask the clerk, a good-looking young man who was so confused by this question he'd simply point to the Lysol. The clerk was six-foot-four, and Sally could never see the expression on his face as he directed her to the preferred cleaning product. If she had been taller, or had climbed up on the stepladder used for stocking the shelves, Sally would have noticed that whenever the clerk looked at her his mouth was open, as if there were words he wished would spill out of their own accord to convey what he was too shy to speak of. Walking home from the hardware store, Sally kicked at stones. A band of black birds took to following her, screaming and cawing over what a laughable creature she was, and although she cringed each time the birds flew overhead, Sally agreed with them. Her fate appeared to be set. She would forever be scrubbing the floor and calling the aunts in from the garden on afternoons that were too chilly and damp for them to be down in the dirt on their hands and knees. In fact, the days were seeming more and more similar, interchangeable even; she barely noticed the difference between winter and spring. But summertime in the Owens house had its own delineation—that dreadful bird who invaded their peace—and when the next midsummer's evening arrived, Sally and the aunts were ready for their unwanted guest, as they were every year. They were waiting in the dining room for the sparrow to appear, and nothing happened. Hours passed—they could hear the clock in the parlor—and still, no arrival, no flutter, no feathers. Sally, with her odd fear of birds in flight, had tied a scarf around her head, but now she saw there was no need for it. No bird came in through the window or through the hole in the roof the handyman hadn't managed to find. It did not fly around three times to announce misfortune. It did not even tap at the window with its small sharp beak.

The aunts looked at each other, puzzled. But Sally laughed out loud. She, with her insistence of proof, had just been granted some powerful evidence: Things changed. They shifted. One year was not just like the next and the one after and the one after that. Sally ran from the house and she kept right on running until she got to the front of the hardware store, where she crashed into the man she would marry. As soon as she looked at him, Sally felt dizzy and had to sit on the curb, with her head down so she wouldn't faint, and the clerk who knew so much about washing a kitchen floor sat right beside her, even though his boss yelled for him to get back to work, since a line had already formed at the cash register.

The man Sally fell in love with was named Michael. He was so thoughtful and good-natured that he kissed the aunts the first time he met them and immediately asked if they needed their trash taken out to the curb, which won them over then and there, no questions asked. Sally married him quickly, and they moved into the attic, which suddenly seemed the only place in the world where Sally wished to be.

Let Gillian travel from California to Memphis. Let her marry and divorce three times in a row. Let her kiss every man who crossed her path and break every promise she ever made about coming home for the holidays. Let her pity her sister, cooped up in that old house. Sally did not mind a bit. In Sally's opinion, it was impossible to exist in the world and not be in love with Michael. Even the aunts had begun to listen for the sound of his whistle when he came home from the hardware store in the evenings. In autumn, he turned the garden for the aunts. In winter, he put up the storm windows and filled in the cracks around the foggy old windows with putty. He took the ancient Ford station wagon apart and put it back together, and the aunts were so impressed they gave him the car, as well as their abiding affection. He knew enough to stay out of the kitchen, especially at twilight, and if he noticed the women who came to the back door, he never questioned Sally about them. His kisses were slow and deep and he liked to take off Sally's clothes with the bedside table light turned on and he always made certain to lose when he played gin rummy with one of the aunts.

When Michael moved in, the house itself began to change, and even the bats in the attic knew it and took to nesting out by the garden shed. By the following June, roses had begun to grow up along the porch railing, choking out ragweed, instead of the other way around. In January, the draft in the parlor disappeared and ice would not form on the bluestone path. The house stayed cheery and warm, and when Antonia was born, at home, since a horrid snowstorm was brewing outside, the chandelier with the glass teardrops moved back and forth all on its own. Throughout the night, it sounded as if a river were flowing right through the house; the noise was so beautiful and so real that the mice came out of the walls to make certain the house was still standing and that a meadow hadn't taken its place.

Antonia was given the last name of Owens, at the aunts' insistence, in accordance with family tradition. The aunts set about spoiling the child immediately, adding chocolate syrup to her bottles of formula, allowing her to play with unstrung pearls, taking her into the garden to make mud pies and pick chokeberries as soon as she could crawl. Antonia would have been perfectly happy to be an only child forever, but three and a half years later, at midnight exactly, Kylie was born, and everyone noticed right away how unusual she was. Even the aunts, who could not have loved another child more than Antonia, predicted that Kylie would see what others could not. She tilted her head and listened to the rain before it fell. She pointed to the ceiling moments before a dragonfly appeared in the very same spot. Kylie was such a good baby that people who peeked into her stroller felt peaceful and sleepy just looking at her. Mosquitoes never bit her, and the aunts' black cats wouldn't scratch her, even when she grabbed for their tails. Kylie was a peach of an infant, so sweet and so mild that Antonia grew greedier and more selfish by the day.

"Look at me!" she'd cry, whenever she dressed up in the aunts' old chiffon dresses or when she finished every pea on her plate. Sally and Michael patted her head and went about taking care of the baby, but the aunts knew what Antonia wanted to hear. They took her out to the garden at midnight, an hour too late for a silly infant, and they showed her how nightshade bloomed in the dark, and how, if she listened carefully with her big-girl's ears, which were much more sensitive to sound than her little sister's ever would be, she could hear the earthworms moving through the soil.

To celebrate the baby's arrival, Michael had invited everyone who worked at the hardware store, which he now managed, and all the people on their block to a party. To Sally's surprise they all showed up. Even those guests who'd been afraid to hurry past their front walkway on dark nights seemed eager to come and celebrate. They drank cold beer and ate icebox cake and danced along the bluestone path. Antonia was dressed in organdy and lace, and a circle of admirers applauded when Michael lifted her onto an old picnic table so she could sing "The Old Gray Mare" and "Yankee Doodle."

At first the aunts refused to participate and insisted upon watching the festivities through the kitchen window, like black pieces of paper taped against the glass. They were antisocial old dames who had better things to do with their time, or so they maintained. But even they couldn't resist joining in, and when at last everyone raised a glass of champagne in tribute to the new baby, the aunts shocked them all when they came into the garden for the toast. In the spirit of a good time, they threw their glasses onto the path, not caring that for weeks afterward shards would appear in the earth between the rows of cabbages.

You will not believe how everything has changed , Sally confided to her sister. She wrote to Gillian at least twice a month, on pale blue paper. Sometimes she would misfire completely, sending her letters to St. Louis, for instance, only to discover that her sister had already moved to Texas. We seem so normal , Sally wrote. I think you might faint if you could see us. I really and truly do .

They had dinner together every night when Michael came home from work, and the aunts no longer shook their heads when they saw the healthy platters of vegetables Sally insisted on serving her daughters. Though they set no store by good manners, they didn't cluck their tongues when Antonia cleared the table. They didn't complain when Sally signed Antonia up for nursery school at the community center, where she was taught to say "Please" and "Thank you" when she wanted cookies and where it was suggested that it might be best not to carry worms in her pockets if she wanted the other little girls to play with her. The aunts did, however, put their foot down about children's parties, since that would mean cheerful, rowdy monsters traipsing through the house, laughing and drinking pink lemonade and leaving piles of jelly beans between the couch cushions.

For birthdays and holidays, Sally took to giving parties in the back room of the hardware store, where there was a gumball machine and a metal pony that would give free rides all afternoon if you knew to kick it in the knees. An invitation to one of these parties was coveted by every child in town. "Don't forget me," the girls in Antonia's class would remind her as the day of her birthday approached. "I'm your best friend," they'd whisper, as Halloween and the Fourth of July drew near.

When Sally and Michael took the children for walks, neighbors waved to them instead of quickly crossing the street. Before long, they found themselves invited to potluck suppers and Christmas parties, and one year Sally was actually placed in charge of the pie booth at the Harvest Fair.

It's just what I wanted , Sally wrote.