Practical Magic

Every single thing. Come visit us , she begged, but she knew Gillian would never come back of her own free will. Gillian had confessed that when she even thought the name of their town, she broke out in hives. Just seeing a map of Massachusetts made her sick to her stomach. The past was so wretched she refused to think about it; she still woke in the night remembering what pathetic little orphans they'd been. Forget a visit. Forget any sort of relationship with the aunts, who never understood what it meant for the sisters to be such outsiders. Someone would have to pay Gillian a quarter of a million, cash, to get her to cross back over the Mississippi, no matter how much she would love to see her dear nieces, who were, of course, always in her thoughts.

The lesson Sally had learned so long ago in the kitchen—to be careful what you wish for—was so far and so faded it had turned to yellow dust. But it was the sort of dust that can never be swept up, and instead waits in the corner and blows into the eyes of those you love when a draft moves through your house. Antonia was nearly four, and Kylie was beginning to sleep through the night, and life seemed quite wonderful in every way, when the deathwatch beetle was found beside the chair where Michael most often sat at supper. This insect, which marks off time, clicking like a clock, issues the sound no one ever wants to hear beside her beloved. A man's tenure on earth is limited enough, but once the beetle's ticking begins there's no way to stop it; there's no plug to pull, no pendulum to stop, no switch that will restore the time you once thought you had.

The aunts listened to the ticking for several weeks and finally drew Sally aside to issue a warning, but Sally would pay no attention. "Nonsense," she said, and she laughed out loud. She tolerated the clients who still came to the back door at dusk every now and then, but she would not allow the aunts' foolishness to affect her family. The aunts' practice was rubbish and nothing more, a gruel mixed up to feed the delusions of the desperate. Sally wouldn't hear another word about it. She wouldn't look when the aunts insisted on pointing out that a black dog had taken to sitting out on the sidewalk every evening. She wouldn't listen when they swore that the dog always pointed its face to the sky whenever Michael approached, and that it howled at the sight of him and quickly backed away from his shadow, tail between its legs.

In spite of Sally's admonition, the aunts placed myrtle beneath Michael's pillow and urged him to bathe with holly and a bar of their special black soap. Into his jacket pocket they slipped the foot of a rabbit they had once caught eating their lettuce. They mixed rosemary into his breakfast cereal, lavender into his nightly cup of tea. Still they heard the beetle in the dining room. Finally they said a prayer backward, but of course that had consequences of its own: soon everyone in the house came down with the flu and insomnia and a rash that wouldn't go away for weeks, not even when a mixture of calamine and balm of Gilead was applied to the skin. By the end of the winter, Kylie and Antonia had begun crying whenever their father tried to leave the room. The aunts explained to Sally that no one who was doomed could hear the sound of the deathwatch beetle, and this was why Michael insisted that nothing could possibly go wrong. All the same he must have known something: He stopped wearing a watch and set back all the clocks. Then, when the ticking grew louder, he pulled down all the shades in the house and kept them drawn against the sun and the moon, as if that could stop time. As if anything could.

Sally didn't believe a word the aunts said. Still she grew nervous from all this talk of death. Her skin became blotchy; her hair lost its shine. She stopped eating and sleeping and she hated to let Michael out of her sight. Now whenever he kissed her, she cried and wished she had never fallen in love in the first place. It had made her too helpless, because that's what love did. There was no way around it and no way to fight it. Now if she lost, she lost everything. Not that it would happen just because the aunts said it would. They were know-nothings, as a matter of fact. Sally had gone down to the public library and looked through every entomological reference book. The deathwatch beetle ate wood and nothing more. How did the aunts like that! Furniture and woodwork might be in danger, but flesh and blood were safe, or so Sally then believed.

One rainy afternoon, as she was folding a white tablecloth, Sally thought she heard something. The dining room was empty and no one else was home, but there it was. A click, a clatter, like a heartbeat or a clock. She covered her ears with her hands, allowing the tablecloth to tumble to the floor in a heap of clean linen. She refused to believe in superstition, she wouldn't; yet it was claiming her, and that was when she saw something dart beneath Michael's chair. A shadowy creature, too swift and too artful to ever be caught beneath a boot heel.

That night, at twilight, Sally found the aunts in the kitchen. She dropped to her knees and begged them to help her, just as all those desperate women before her had done. She offered up all that she had of any value: the rings on her fingers, her two daughters, her blood, but the aunts shook their heads sadly.

"I'll do anything," Sally cried. "I'll believe in anything. Just tell me what to do."

But the aunts had already tried their best, and the beetle was still beside Michael's chair. Some fates are guaranteed, no matter who tries to intervene. On a spring evening that was particularly pleasant and mild, Michael stepped off the curb on his way home from the hardware store and was killed by a car full of teenagers who, in celebration of their courage and youth, had had too much to drink.

After that, Sally didn't talk for an entire year. She simply had nothing to say. She could not look at the aunts; they were pitiful charlatans, in her opinion, old women who wielded less power than the flies left to die on the windowsills, trapped behind glass, translucent wings tapping weakly. Let me out. Let me out . If she heard the rustle of the aunts' skirts announce their entrance into a room, Sally walked out. If she recognized their footsteps on the stairs, as they came to check on her or wish her good night, she got up from the chair by the window in time to bolt her door, and she never heard them knocking; she just put her hands over her ears.

Whenever Sally went to the drugstore, for toothpaste or diaper rash cream, she'd see the drugstore girl behind the counter and their eyes would lock. Sally understood now what love could do to a person. She understood far too well to ever let it happen to her again. The poor drugstore girl couldn't have been much more than thirty, but she seemed old, her hair had already turned white; if she needed to tell you anything—a price, for instance, or the special ice cream sundae of the week—she'd have to write it out on a pad of paper. Her husband sat on the last stool at the counter nearly all the time, nursing a cup of coffee for hours. But Sally barely noticed him; it was the girl she couldn't take her eyes off; she was looking for that person who had first appeared in the aunts' kitchen, that sweet rosy girl filled with hope.

One Saturday, when Sally was buying vitamin C, the drugstore girl slipped her a piece of white paper along with her change. Help me , she had written, in perfect script. But Sally could not even help herself. She couldn't help her children or her husband or the way the world had spun out of control. From then on Sally would not shop at the drugstore. Instead, she had everything they needed delivered by a high school boy, who left their order on the bluestone path—rain, sleet, or snow—refusing to come to their door, even if that meant forfeiting his tip.

During that year, Sally let the aunts take care of Antonia and Kylie. She let bees nest in the rafters in July and allowed snow to pile up along the walkway in January so that the postman, who had always feared that he'd break his neck one way or the other delivering mail to the Owenses, would not venture past their gate. She didn't bother about healthy dinners and mealtimes; she waited until she was starving, then ate canned peas out of the tin as she stood near the sink. Her hair became permanently knotted; there were holes in her socks and her gloves. She rarely went outside now, and when she did, people made sure to avoid her. Children were afraid of the blank look in her eyes. Neighbors who used to invite Sally over for coffee now crossed the street if they saw her coming and quickly murmured a prayer; they preferred to look straight into the sun and be temporarily blinded, rather than see what had happened to her.

Gillian phoned once a week, always on Tuesday nights, at ten o'clock, the only schedule she had kept to in years. Sally would hold the receiver to her ear and she'd listen, but she still wouldn't talk. "You can't fall apart," Gillian would insist in her rich, urgent voice. "That's my job," she'd say.

All the same, it was Sally who wouldn't bathe or eat or play pattycake with her baby. Sally was the one who cried so many tears there were mornings when she couldn't open her eyes. Each evening she searched the dining room for the deathwatch beetle who'd been said to have caused all this grief. Of course she never found it and so she didn't believe in it. But such things hide, in the folds of a widow's black skirts and beneath the white sheets where one person sleeps, restlessly dreaming of everything she'll never have. In time, Sally stopped believing in anything at all, and then the whole world went gray. She could not see orange or red, and certain shades of green—her favorite sweater and the leaves of new daffodils—were completely and utterly lost.

"Wake up," Gillian would say when she called on her appointed night. "What do I have to do to snap you out of it?"

Really, there was nothing Gillian could say, although Sally kept on listening when her sister called. She thought over her sister's words of advice because lately Gillian's voice was the only sound she wanted to hear; it brought a comfort nothing else could, and Sally found herself positioned by the phone on Tuesdays, awaiting her sister's call.

"Life is for the living," Gillian told her. "Life is what you make of it. Come on. Just listen to what I'm saying. Please."

Sally thought long and hard each time she hung up the phone. She thought about the girl in the drugstore and the sound of Antonia's footsteps on the stairs when she went up to bed without a good-night hug. She thought about Michael's life and his death, and about every second they had spent together. She considered each one of his kisses and all the words he had ever said to her. Everything was still gray—the paintings Antonia brought home from school and slipped beneath her door, the flannel pajamas Kylie wore on chilly mornings, the velvet curtains that kept the world at bay. But now Sally began to order things in her mind—grief and joy, dollars and cents, a baby's cry and the look on her face when you blew her a kiss on a windy afternoon. Such things might be worth something, a glance, a peek, a deeper look.

And when a year had passed, to the very day, since the moment when Michael had stepped off the curb, Sally saw green leaves outside her window. It was a delicate vine that had always wound its way up the drainpipe, but on this day Sally noticed how tender each leaf was, how absolutely new, so that the green was nearly yellow, and the yellow rich as butter. Sally spent a good portion of her days in bed, and it was already afternoon: She saw the golden light filtering through the curtains, and the way it spread out in bars across her wall. Quickly, she got out of bed and brushed her long black hair. She put on a dress she hadn't worn since the previous spring, took her coat from the hook by the back door, and went out for a walk.

Again it was spring, and the sky was so blue it could take your breath away. It was blue and she could see it, the color of his eyes, the color of veins beneath the skin, and of hope and of shirts pinned to a laundry line. Sally could make out nearly every shade and hue that had been missing all year, although she still could not see orange, which was too close to the color of the faded stop sign the teenagers never saw on the day Michael was killed, and she never would again. But orange was never a great favorite of Sally's, a small loss, considering all the others.

She walked on, through the center of town, wearing her old wool coat and her high black boots. It was a warm and breezy day, too warm for Sally's heavy clothes, so she draped her coat over her arm. The sun went through the fabric of her dress, a hot hand across flesh and bones. Sally felt as though she'd been dead and now that she was back she was particularly sensitive to the world of the living: the touch of the wind against her skin, the gnats in the air, the scent of mud and new leaves, the sweetness of blues and greens. For the first time in ages, Sally thought how pleasant it would be to speak again, to read bedtime stories to her daughters and recite a poem and name all the flowers that bloomed early in the season, lily of the valley and jack-in-the-pulpit and purple hyacinth. She was thinking about flowers, those white ones shaped like bells, when, for no particular reason, she turned left on Endicott Street and headed for the park.

In this park there was a pond, where a couple of horrid swans ruled, a playground with a slide and swing, and a green field where the older boys held serious soccer matches and baseball games that went on past dusk. Sally could hear the voices of children playing, and she walked into the park eagerly. Her cheeks were pink and her long black hair flew out behind her like a ribbon; amazingly enough, she had discovered that she was still young. Sally planned to take the path down to the pond, but she stopped when she saw the wrought-iron bench. Sitting there, as they did every day, were the aunts. Sally had never thought to ask what they did with the children all day while she stayed in bed, unable to drag herself from beneath the covers until the long afternoon shadows fell across her pillowcase.

On this day's outing, the aunts had brought their knitting along. They were working on a throw for Kylie's crib, made out of the finest black wool, a coverlet so soft that whenever Kylie would sleep beneath it she'd dream of little black lambs and fields of grass. Antonia was beside the aunts, her legs neatly crossed. Kylie had been plopped down on the grass, where she sat motionless. All of them wore black woolen coats, and their complexions seemed sallow in the afternoon light. Antonia's red hair looked especially brilliant, a color so deep and startling it appeared quite unnatural in the sun. The aunts did not speak to each other, and the girls certainly did not play. The aunts saw no point in jumping rope or tossing a ball back and forth. In their opinion, such things were a silly waste of time. Better to observe the world around you. Better to watch the swans, and the blue sky, and the other children, who shouted and laughed during wild games of kickball and tag. Learn to be as quiet as a mouse. Concentrate until you are as silent as the spider in the grass.

A ball was being walloped around by a bunch of unruly boys, and finally it was booted too hard. It flew into the bright blue air, then rolled along the grass, past a quince in bloom. Antonia had been imagining that she was a blue jay, free among the branches of a weeping birch. Now she happily jumped off the bench and scooped up the ball, then ran toward a boy who'd been sent to retrieve it. The boy wasn't more than ten, but he was still as death, pale as paste, when Antonia approached. She held the ball out to him.

"Here you go," Antonia said.

By then all the children in the park had stopped their playing. The swans flapped their big, beautiful wings. More than ten years later, Sally still dreams about those swans, a male and a female who guarded the pond ferociously, as though they were Dobermans. She dreams about the way the aunts clucked their tongues, sadly, since they knew what was about to happen.

Poor Antonia looked at the boy, who had not moved and did not even appear to be breathing. She tilted her head, as though trying to figure whether he was stupid or merely polite.

"Don't you want the ball?" she asked him.

The swans took flight slowly as the boy ran to Antonia, grabbed the ball, then pushed her down. Her black coat flared out behind her; her black shoes flew right off her feet.

"Stop it!" Sally called out. Her first words in a year.

The children on the playground all heard her. They took off running together, as far away as possible from Antonia Owens, who might hex you if you did her wrong, and from her aunts, who might boil up garden toads and slip them into your stew, and from her mother, who was so angry and protective she might just freeze you in time, ensuring that you were forever trapped on the green grass at the age of ten or eleven.

Sally packed their clothes that same night. She loved the aunts and knew they meant well, but what she wanted for her girls was something the aunts could never provide. She wanted a town where no one pointed when her daughters walked down the street. She wanted her own house, where birthday parties could be held in the living room, with streamers and a hired clown and a cake, and a neighborhood where every house was the same and not a single one had a slate roof where squirrels nested, or bats in the garden, or woodwork that never needed polishing.

In the morning, Sally phoned a real-estate broker in New York, then lugged her suitcases out to the porch. The aunts insisted that, no matter what, the past would follow Sally around. She'd wind up like Gillian, a sorry soul that only grew heavier in each new town. She couldn't run away, that's what they told her, but in Sally's opinion, there was no proof of that. No one had driven the old station wagon for over a year, but it started right up and was sputtering like a kettle as Sally got her girls settled into the backseat. The aunts vowed she'd be miserable and they shook their fingers at her. But as soon as Sally took off, the aunts began to shrink, until they were like little black toadstools waving goodbye at the far end of the street where Sally and Gillian used to play hopscotch on hot August days, when they had only each other for company and the asphalt all around them was melting into black pools.

Sally got onto Route 95 and went south, and she didn't stop until Kylie woke, sweaty and confused and extremely overheated beneath the black woolen blanket that smelled of lavender, the scent that always clung to the aunts' clothes. Kylie had been dreaming that she was being chased by a flock of sheep; she called out "Baa, baa" in a panicky voice, then climbed over the seat to be closer to her mother. Sally soothed her with a hug and the promise of ice cream, but it was not so easy to deal with Antonia.

Antonia, who loved the aunts and had always been their favorite, refused to be consoled. She was wearing one of the black dresses they'd sewn for her at the dressmaker's on Peabody, and her red hair stuck out from her head in angry wisps. She gave off a sour, lemony odor, which was a mixture of equal parts rage and despair.

"I despise you," she informed Sally as they sat in the cabin of the ferry that took them across Long Island Sound. It was one of those odd and surprising spring days that suddenly turn nearly as hot as summer. Sally and her children had been eating sticky slices of tangerine and drinking the Cokes they'd bought at the snack bar, but now that the waves had grown wilder, their stomachs were lurching. Sally had just finished a postcard she planned to send to Gillian, although she wasn't certain whether her sister was still at her last address. Have finally done it , she'd scrawled in handwriting that was looser than anyone would have! expected from someone so orderly. Have tied the sheets together and jumped !

"I will hate you for the rest of my life," Antonia went on, and her little hands formed into fists.

"That's your prerogative," Sally said brightly, though deep down she was hurt. She waved the postcard in front of her face in order to cool off. Antonia could really get to her, but this time Sally wasn't going to let that happen. "I do think you'll change your mind."

"No" Antonia said. "I won't. I'll never forgive you."

The aunts had adored Antonia because she was beautiful and nasty. They encouraged her to be bossy and self-centered, and during that year when Sally had been too sad and broken to speak to her children, or even take an interest in them, Antonia had been allowed to stay up past midnight and order adults around. She ate Butterfingers for dinner and smacked her baby sister with a rolled-up newspaper for fun. She had been doing just as she pleased for some time, and she was smart enough to know all that had changed as of this very day. She threw her tangerine down on the deck and squashed it beneath her foot, and when that didn't work she cried and pleaded to be taken home.

"Please," she begged her mother. "I want the aunts. Take me back there. I'll be good," she vowed.

By then, Sally was crying too. When she was a girl, the aunts had been the ones to sit up with her all night whenever she'd had an ear infection or the flu; they'd told her stories and fixed her broth and hot tea. They were the ones who'd rocked Gillian when she couldn't fall asleep, especially at the start, when the girls first came to live at the house on Magnolia Street, and Gillian couldn't sleep a wink.

There had been a rainstorm the night that Sally and Gillian were told their parents weren't coming back, and it was their bad fortune that another storm struck when they were in the plane on their way to Massachusetts. Sally was four, but she remembers the lightning they flew through; she can close her eyes and conjure it with no trouble at all. They were right up in the sky alongside those fierce white lines, with no place to hide. Gillian had vomited several times, and when the plane began to land she started to scream. Sally had to hold her hand over her sister's mouth and promise her gumballs and licorice sticks if she'd only be quiet for a few minutes more.

Sally had picked out their best party dresses to wear for the trip. Gillian's was a pale violet, Sally's pink trimmed with ivory lace. They were holding hands as they walked through the airport terminal, listening to the funny sound their crinolines made every time they took a step, when they saw the aunts waiting for them. The aunts stood on tiptoe, the better to see over the barricades; they had balloons tied to their sleeves, so that the children would recognize them. After they hugged the girls and collected their small leather suitcases, the aunts bundled Sally and Gillian into two black wool coats, then reached into their purses and brought out gumballs and red licorice, as if they knew exactly what little girls needed, or, at any rate, exactly what they might want.

Sally was grateful for all the aunts had done, really she was. Still, she had made up her mind. She would get the key at the realtor's for the house she would later buy, then get hold of some furniture. She would have to find a job eventually, but she had a little money from Michael's insurance policy, and frankly she wasn't going to think about the past or the future. She was thinking about the highway in front of her. She was thinking about road signs and right turns, and she just couldn't afford to listen when Antonia started to howl, which set Kylie off as well. Instead, she switched on the radio and sang along and told herself that sometimes the right thing felt all wrong until it was over and done with.

By the time they turned into the driveway of their new house, it was already late in the day. A band of children was playing kickball in the street, and when Sally got out of the car she waved and the children waved back, each and every one of them. A robin was on the front lawn, pulling at the grass and the weeds, and all up and down the street, lights were being turned on and tables were set for dinner. The scent of pot roast and chicken paprikash and lasagna drifted through the mild air. Sally's girls had both fallen asleep in the backseat, their faces streaked with dirt and tears. Sally had bought them ice cream cones and lollipops; she'd told stories for hours and stopped at two toy stores. Still, it would take years before they forgave her. They laughed at the little white fence Sally put up at the edge of their lawn. Antonia asked to paint her bedroom walls black and Kylie begged for a black kittycat. Both of these wishes were denied. Antonia's room was painted yellow, and Kylie was given a goldfish named Sunshine, but that didn't mean the girls had forgotten where they came from or that they didn't long for it still.

Every summer, in August, they would visit the aunts. They would draw in their breath as soon as they turned the corner onto Magnolia and could spy the big old house with its black fence and green-tinted windows. The aunts always made a tipsy chocolate cake and gave Antonia and Kylie far too many presents. There were no bedtimes, of course, and no well-balanced meals. No rules were put forth about drawing on the wallpaper or filling the bathtub so high that bubbles and tepid water sloshed over the sides and dripped down through the ceiling of the parlor. Every year the girls were taller when they arrived for their visit—they knew this because the aunts were seeming smaller all the time—and every year they went wild: they danced through the herb garden and played softball on the front lawn and stayed up past midnight. Sometimes they ate nothing but Snickers and Milky Ways for nearly the whole week, until their stomachs began to ache and they finally called for a salad or a glass of milk.

During their August vacations, Sally insisted on getting the girls out of the house, at least in the afternoons. She took them on day trips, to the beach at Plum Island, to the swan boats in Boston, out into the blue bay in Gloucester on rented sailboats. But the girls always begged to return to the aunts' house. They pouted and made Sally's life miserable, until she gave in. It wasn't the girls' bad temper that convinced Sally to turn back for the house, it was that they were united in something. This was so unusual and so delightful to see that Sally just couldn't say no.

Sally had expected Antonia to be a big sister in the same manner she herself had been, but that wasn't Antonia's style. Antonia felt no responsibility to anyone; she was nobody's caretaker. From the very start she would tease Kylie without mercy and could bring her little sister to tears with a glance. It was only at the aunts' house that the girls became allies, perhaps even friends. Here, where everything was worn and frayed, except for the shining woodwork, the girls spent hours together. They collected lavender and had picnics in the shade of the garden. They sat in the cool parlor late in the day, or sprawled out on the second-floor landing where there were thin bands of lemony sunlight, playing Parcheesi and endless rounds of gin rummy.

Their closeness may have been the result of sharing the attic bedroom, or only because the girls had no choice of playmates, since the children in town still crossed over to the other side of the street when they passed the Owens house. Whatever the reason, it brought Sally great joy to see the girls at the kitchen table, heads bent near enough to touch as they worked a puzzle or made a card to send off to Gillian at her new address in Iowa or New Mexico. Soon enough, they'd be at each other's throats, arguing over petty privileges or some nasty trick of Antonia's—a daddy longlegs left under Kylie's baby blanket, which she continued to be attached to at the age of eleven and even at twelve, or dirt and stones slipped into the bottom of her boots. And so Sally allowed the girls to do as they wished, for that one week in August, even though she knew, in the end, it was not to their benefit.

Each year, as their vacation wore on, the girls always slept later and later in the day; black circles appeared around their eyes. They began to complain about the heat, which made them too tired to even walk to the drugstore for ice cream sundaes and cold bottles of Coke, though they found the old woman who worked there fascinating, since she never said a word and could make a banana split in seconds flat, peeling the banana and pouring out the syrups and marshmallow whip before you could blink your eyes. After a while, Kylie and Antonia were spending most of their time in the garden, where belladonna and digitalis have always grown beside the peppermint, and the cats the aunts love so dearly—including two ratty creatures from Sally's childhood, Magpie and Raven, who have simply refused to die—still dig in the rubbish heap for fish heads and bones.

There is always a time when Sally knows they have to leave. Each August, a night comes when she wakes from a deep sleep, and when she goes to the window she sees that her daughters are out by themselves in the moonlight. There are toads between the cabbages and the zinnias. There are green caterpillars munching at the leaves, preparing to turn into white moths that will fling themselves at screen windows and at the lights that burn brightly beside back doors. There is the same horse's skull nailed to the fence, bleached white now and falling to dust, but still more than enough to keep people away.

Sally always waits until her girls come inside the house before she crawls back into bed. The very next morning, she will make her excuses and take off a day or two earlier than scheduled. She will wake her daughters, and though they gripe about the early hour and the heat, and will surely be sullen all day, they'll pile into the car.