The Spell Book Of Listen Taylor (24 page)

“It's not bad,” said Cassie, replacing her juice on the table and wiping her strawberry mouth. “You try it.”

Fancy, Radcliffe, and Marbie reached for their glasses.

Later, while Radcliffe was playing computer games in the study, Fancy said, “What's going on with you, Marbie? We've always known the Secret is illegal.”

Marbie was stacking Fancy's dishwasher. “I kind of forgot,” she said.

“So you also forgot that we let Radcliffe believe we're safe? He believes in all these loopholes, otherwise, he'd be a wreck. But really, we'd go down in a million different ways if we got caught! There's trespass, stalking, all kinds of surveillance offenses, and breaking and entering, of course. The fine print in the lease would be worthless to us! Tenants have rights, apparently. We'd all end up in prison, and the civil suits would ruin us, if we got caught!”

“This is making me feel much better,” Marbie said.

“The thing is,” Fancy said, “we're not getting caught.” She leaned over and retrieved a teaspoon that Marbie had placed in the dishwasher's cutlery rack. “It's too little,” she explained, holding up the teaspoon. “It falls straight through and gets lost in the works.”

Nobody knew what was going on with Marbie, but they supposed it was connected with Nathaniel. The fact was, he
still
had not returned. They were all taken aback by that, so Marbie must have been reeling. She was probably worried that he might use the Secret against them somehow. He would never do that, they all agreed, uneasily.

Radcliffe offered to replace Marbie on the Maintenance Intrusion, but Fancy said she would not feel comfortable. She and Marbie worked so well together. Besides, she added kindly, Radcliffe had spent
hours
on the desktop publishing lately. Everyone agreed that the latest issue of
Elf Epistles
looked fantastic. Such glossy pages!

“Still,” said Radcliffe, “I'm surprised at Nathaniel. I would have sworn he'd have forgiven her by now.”

“Would you just?” said Fancy coldly.

“Well,” said Radcliffe, shelling pistachio nuts and piling the shells onto his thigh, “wouldn't
you
?”

“I miss chatting with Listen,” sighed Fancy unexpectedly.

Coincidentally, Fancy saw Listen at the gym the next day. She had been on the elliptical machine for half an hour.

“Two minutes to go,” said the machine.

I should hope so,
thought Fancy, climbing the stairs.

The machine provided her with a workout summary, and released her, and she ran into Listen at the water fountain.

“Well,
hello
!”

“Hi, Fancy!” Listen seemed shiny-eyed and sweaty, cute in tracksuit pants and a tank top.

“You don't
work out
at the gym, do you?”

“No,” Listen explained, “I'm doing rock-climbing classes. In there—see that fake rock wall they have in there? I just climbed it.”

“Ha! How about
you
!
Mission: Impossible!
James Bond!” They smiled at each other for a moment.

“Anyway,” said Listen, “I'd better go now—Dad's picking me up. Say hi to Cassie for me, would you? I see her around at Redwood sometimes, but she always looks kind of busy.”

“Okay, sure. We all miss you so much, Listen, especially Cassie. I hope we get to see you soon.”

And Listen, running up the stairs to the gym's front doors, her ponytail bouncing behind her, turned back and gave a strange grin. Afterward, Fancy wondered if it was more a grimace.

Finally, after several weeks of sitting on the front porch, Fancy decided that she needed a new tactic. It was obvious that Radcliffe had moved his affair to a different location—perhaps the incident with the vacuum cleaner had been enough to scare him away? Dangerous, after all, to bring a clumsy woman like Gemma into his home. They were probably spending all their time at Gemma's place—breaking
her
crockery.

This realization came to her one Thursday afternoon while she was sitting on the front porch and waving at the postman. He was wheeling his bicycle along, and had just pressed a handful of letters into their mailbox. Fancy stood, still waving, thinking to herself,
I need a new tactic,
and began to walk across her lawn to fetch the mail. It was then that she realized that her gestures were no longer graceful: They were awkward, uneasy, jerky, like a puppet on uneven strings. She blinked, and even her blinking had an arrhythmic twitch.

Here was the problem, she thought, calming herself as she drew out the mail. She was about to lose hold of the affair. Over the last week, there had been days when she wondered where she got the idea in the first place; there had been days when she doubted that a purple daisy sock could
really
mean so much; there had even been days when she
completely forgot
that her husband was having an affair.

She needed to focus, to give the affair the right sort of attention, pin it down, line it with sandbags. Otherwise, she felt, it would slip from her grasp, rise out of reach, and drift away forlornly like a helium balloon.

Looking down at the handful of mail, she saw her answer. It was on a flyer at the top of the envelopes.

Of course! The plan came to her in a tumble: She would set up some sessions with a counselor. She would surprise Radcliffe with these sessions. Tell him it was a kind of gift certificate for their marriage. In fact, the idea would be to ensure an anchor, a controlled environment. Within that environment, she could tell Radcliffe that she knew of his affair. The counselor would ensure that the affair did not skitter away. It was “Guaranteed”! She went straight inside to make an appointment.

Relieved, having restored the graceful swish to her movements, she decided to hang some laundry. It was breezy and sunny, the chill almost
gone. She leaned and pegged, leaned and pegged, then crossed to the other side of the line where yesterday's clothes were ready to be removed.

Grevilleas were blooming, she noticed as she unpegged a pair of her own underwear—cotton underpants, apricot in color. Spring was certainly here. The return of the graceful, floating feeling meant that her hands did not quite grasp at things, so that the wind, when it breezed by, found it easy to take the underpants from her fingers and fling them through the air. Whoosh! Up into the sky! Whoosh! Over the fence and into the neighbor's yard.

She ran to the fence in time to see her underpants blow into the face of the Canadian next door. They flattened against his face, and then dwindled toward the ground. He was surprised, but caught them before they hit the grass. He had a peg out ready himself, she saw, and was hanging his own laundry.

Specifically, he appeared to be hanging out three pairs of women's underpants: tiny, multicolored G-strings, like colorful lizards. He turned to face her, smiling, holding up her underwear.

“And you,” she called, apologetically, “with all that pretty underwear!” Then she wondered at herself.

But he laughed and clumped over his lawn, companionably, to the fence. “Your panties?” he offered graciously.

She took them from him, thinking that the word
panties
was the most intimate thing she had ever heard. She, a writer of wilderness romance. “Sorry to blow them in your face,” she said.

He gave a chin-lift of laughter, and leaned against the fence, and they both turned back toward his clothes hoist, to stare at the row of frilly panties. Which was when Fancy saw it. A single purple sock, hanging from his line, flickering slightly in the wind.

“Excuse me,” she said, “but may I see that sock?”

“Well, sure,” he agreed, and clumped back over to his clothesline. Good-naturedly, he unpegged the sock and brought it back.

Yes, it was the one. It was the pair. A purple sock stitched with a daisy.

“Where did you get this from?” she said, realizing that her voice quivered melodramatically.

“That's a funny question.” He remained good-natured. “I found it in the bottom of my washing machine just now. Unexpected. It belonged to my ex-girlfriend. Ex-
ex
-girlfriend, as a matter of fact. I guess she left some of her laundry behind, and this sock was maybe stuck in the bottom of my washing machine for a while. You know socks.”

“Well, the thing is,” said Fancy, “the thing is that I found the pair to this sock in my bedroom a few weeks back.”

“Did you
really
?”

They both stood still for a moment, while the wind dabbed at their clothes and at their hair. They found themselves gazing at the cotton underpants in Fancy's left hand and the purple sock in her right.

“I guess,” said the Canadian reflectively, “that Tammy's sock might've got blown over the fence one time, just like your panties did today. I guess I might have hung the one sock up to dry while the other one was stuck in the machine, and the line one got blown over the fence and mixed up with your laundry.”

Fancy was doubtful. She was caught up in much more vibrant explanations: a threesome between Radcliffe, his Affair, and this
Tammy,
for example. Or, kinky Canadian climbs into her bedroom in the middle of the night and hides his girlfriend's sock under her bed.

“I guess that could have happened,” she conceded eventually. “I
do
sort my laundry in the bedroom sometimes, so I guess I might have sorted it there and the purple sock fell and got kicked under the bed.”

They were still again. The sun sat on their shoulders.

“Funny,” said the Canadian, “me finding the sock in my washing machine like that, on the day your panties blow over the fence.”

“Shall I get the matching sock for you?” suggested Fancy. “So you can send them back to—Tammy?”

“Ah, forget it,” he shrugged endearingly. “Tammy can live without her purple daisy socks, I guess. She didn't turn out all that nice. Now,
Gina
…,” he continued, looking back at the underwear frill along his line. “But she had to go back to Naples in a hurry. I'm sending on her valuables,” he added vaguely.

“Say ‘out and about,'” said Fancy, out of nowhere.

“Out and about,” he obliged at once. But then, as he strolled back to his clothesline, he turned and called, “Oot and aboot!” and rolled his eyes, in a friendly way.

There is no purple sock,
thought Fancy as she smiled her thanks at the Canadian.
There is no purple daisy sock belonging to a woman from the pay office at Radcliffe's work. Radcliffe's affair
—she thought next, with a strange little thud, like a book falling off a bedside table—
Radcliffe's affair is over.

My husband is not having an affair.

The day after the picnic on the living-room floor, the first day of the new school term, Marbie hit snooze on her alarm clock just as the telephone rang. It was the aeronautical engineer.

“Don't call me
at home
!” she hissed, pretending that Nathaniel and Listen were still there.

“If your boyfriend had answered, I'd have just hung up. Okay? Just chill, okay? Can you talk?”

“No.”

“Well, can you listen for a moment? Marbie, you are a riot. What
was
that yesterday? Showing up at my place, telling me a story about spying on a second-grade teacher, and waltzing right out the front door? You didn't even touch my picnic! I thought to myself, who
was
that?”

“Well,” said Marbie, “it was me.”

“Okay, whatever, I just want to say one thing. I want to say that you are gorgeous, and I want to say how happy I am about the decision that I made, way back when I first met you at the Night Owl Pub.”

“That's more than one thing. And you didn't meet me at the Night Owl Pub. You met me at work.”

“Huh. Yeah, I remember that too. Your paper airplanes! Wo-ho! Dodgy! But what I'm talking about here is my
decision.
At the Night Owl Pub? When I saw you sitting there? All your pals were gone, and my car had just got towed. So I asked you what the time was, and “Five o'clock” you said, in
that voice of yours—and right away I made a decision. The best decision I ever made.”

“What decision?”

“The decision to get a taxi. I thought—like
shazam!
—I thought,
I'll get a taxi.
I was running late for a meeting, see, and I knew I'd miss the bus if I stayed. So I was about to say, “See ya,” but then I thought,
Shazam;
I thought,
A
taxi,
that'll do the trick!
And it was the best decision I ever made.”

“Okay. Well, that's great. I think I should hang up now.”

“Sure. That's all I wanted to say anyway. Just that.”

“Okay.”

“Oh, and Marbie, you've got to come by my place tonight and explain what you were going on about yesterday. You can't tell a spy story like that and just leave me hanging. You hear me?”

“I can't?”

“No.”

“Because I was thinking that I could. I was thinking you could forget I said a word, and get on with your life. Okay?”

“No, because I heard every word, and now I need an explanation or who knows
what
might happen? See you tonight. Another thing, if there's anybody there with you now, just say that this was a wrong number.”

“That's stupid.”

“Righto, gorgeous. Bye.”

Marbie hung up and clutched her pillow tightly to her chest. Quite simply, she did not know why she had slept with the A.E. in the first place, let alone told him the Secret. She looked around the room in confusion. The night before, she remembered, it had suddenly seemed clear that she must tell him, and that this would be the answer. But how could it have been? Here she was, Marbie Zing, embracing an irrational existence. She looked down at the pillow in her arms and thought,
My existence is a pillow.
She did not even know what she meant.

She threw the pillow away and dialed Nathaniel's number, but there was no answer. She left a message saying that she just wanted to wish Listen good luck again, for her first day at Redwood Elementary, and also, if Listen needed anything, well, she, Marbie, was right here in the apartment, except when she was at work.

The seventh-graders were marching down the path at Redwood Elementary. They had been welcomed at the Assembly Hall, and now they had to go to the portable classrooms.

“In pairs!” shouted the teachers. “March in pairs!”

But actually the teachers did not care if they walked in pairs or not, and Chloe, who was next to Listen, faded back from her and joined the two behind. Listen had just said, “How was your holiday?” but at the same time someone had shouted, “GIVE ME MY HAT,” so Chloe had not heard.

There were Redwood Elementary kids at the windows of classrooms, opening their mouths to stare. Listen tried to huddle with the pair in front, so the kids would not think she was alone, but she couldn't because they patterned out and took the whole path.

Two's company. Three's a crowd.
She thought this sadly, and then there was a glint of sunlight on the buckle of her schoolbag, and she thought it again:
Two's company, three's a crowd!
Of course! Let's say somewhere in her grade there was a group of three friends? Well, two's company, three's a crowd. So, they would need a fourth. She could be the fourth.

The teachers tried to teach like a normal day, but the girls messed around like this was a vacation. It should be a vacation; it was the first day back and this was an elementary school.

“That doesn't mean you have to
act
like elementary students,” the
teachers said, over and over. When the bell rang for recess, it was not a junior-high electric bell, it was a strange, clanking elementary bell.

On the muddy grass outside the classroom, Listen pulled her sweater sleeves over her hands and said, “Hi, Kelly.”

Kelly Favoloro, who was walking past, looked surprised and said, “Hi.”

Listen said fast, in a metal-flat voice, “Can I hang out with you guys, maybe, just today?”

Kelly looked around for her two friends, Amber Tang and Sasha James, and all three raised their eyebrows.

Then Kelly said, “Sure, yeah, okay.”

Quickly and politely, the other girls said it too: “Sure, Listen, yeah!”

Listen said, in a serious voice, “Just say no if you want.”

“Don't be stupid.” Kelly twirled Listen's ponytail around her hand. “Why would we say no?”

In her bed in the campervan, Listen had a bumping heart of frightened happiness. This plan could work. She had sat with Kelly and the others at recess and lunchtime that day, and Kelly had admired her hair. “It's so soft,” Kelly said. She suggested Listen wear it in a French braid. Also, Amber told a long story about how her father lost his job during the holidays, but then talked his boss into giving him a
promotion
instead. Sasha told ballet stories: She loved ballet so much that she carried her slippers around with her all the time, like a long, drooping bracelet.

The second day of term, Listen felt both frightened and safe. At recess and lunchtime she sat outside in the winter sun and watched while Kelly Favoloro took turns arm-wrestling with Amber and Sasha. She passed around her bag of Valerio Honey-Mustard Chips, and everybody took one. She asked Amber two questions about her father's promotion, and Sasha three questions about ballet.

The next morning, while the History teacher read to them from the textbook, Judith Sierra, who had braces and ruler-straight bangs, turned around and whispered, “Listen?”

“Yeah?” Listen whispered back.

“Who d'you hang around with?” Carefully, Judith regarded her.

“Kelly Favoloro and Sasha and Amber.”

Judith looked concerned. “Um,” she whispered, “‘cause they were talking to me before school, and they're really worried. They thought you only wanted to sit with them for one day—they didn't think you meant, like, forever?”

“It was just until today,” Listen explained. “They don't need to worry, it was just until today, and that's it.”

Judith looked relieved. “I'll let them know. They were really worried. See, Kelly likes you, but Amber and Sasha aren't so sure because you kind of like just ask questions? Like you're a schoolteacher or something? And they could tell you kind of wanted to
buy
them as friends, the way you kept offering food.”

“Just the chips,” Listen said. “I only offered them honey-mustard chips.”

Judith blinked. “So, anyway,” she said, “Kelly felt guilty about saying you could join.”

“Okay,” said Listen. “Thanks.” She smiled for reassurance, and Judith smiled back.

She would have to go to the A.E.'s place to begin repairing her mistakes. Maybe she could shout “April fool!” and pretend it had all been a trick? But it was not April, and when she arrived, she saw that it was too late to pretend.

His eyes, when he opened the door, had a glittery, greedy look.

So, sitting straight-backed in his lounge chair, Marbie explained the Secret again, more succinctly this time, and with emphasis on confidentiality. She spoke in a soft, serious voice, to show that reverence was the appropriate reaction, rather than feverish excitement. He assumed a grave expression. She concluded by explaining that the Secret was an honor which was rarely bestowed. He smiled and assured her he was worthy of this honor.

Then he served the lasagna and things began to go wrong.

She noticed that the A.E. was frowning. He was staring at his fork, and there were at least thirteen different cracks and creases in his forehead. It was unnecessary, that many cracks and creases.

“So, basically, you spy on this woman without any kind of government authorization, or permit, or, I don't know, police protection? Right?”

“Right. It's just us. But 'spying' is the wrong—”

“And this woman is not only a teacher, she's also a lawyer, you say?”

“Not a lawyer. She just studies law part-time.”

His frown was like a freshly broken mirror. “Studying law part-time? I've got to say, Marbie, you're playing with fire there. What happens when she finds out? Don't think a lawyer's going to pull any punches, do you?”

“Who says she's going to find out?”

“Well,” said the A.E. with a maddening shrug. Then, as he reached for more lasagna, he said, “Come to bed with me?”

“No,” replied Marbie, “thanks all the same.”

Over the next few weeks Marbie's days fell into a pattern. She would arrive home from work, phone Nathaniel, get his answering machine, and go over to the A.E.'s place. The A.E. would ask difficult questions about the Secret, and try to persuade her to go to bed with him. The next day
she would go over to Fancy's place to find answers to the A.E.'s questions, so that, on the following day, she could go to the A.E's place again.

It was exhausting, but she could not see how to stop. The A.E. had the Secret, and he kept setting little brush fires with it. She had to go over and put them out.

Mopping the shop floor in the Banana Bar one late afternoon, Listen discovered that her mind was humming:
Two's company, three's a crowd! Two's company, three's a crowd!
—in a cheerful, mocking tune.
All right,
she thought,
so the plan didn't work. You don't have to sing about it.

She looked at her dad, who was counting money at the register, and thought, with a thud:
Two's company, three's a crowd.
That's why Dad and Marbie broke up! Because
I
made them into a crowd!

She mopped savagely for a few moments, tears in her eyes. Then she calmed down, because she knew what her dad would say if she mentioned that to him. She knew she was being stupid. She wouldn't even waste his time by raising it.

But she would ask something one more time. “Dad,” she said, and he looked up, mouthing
twenty-three
as he did. “What did you and Marbie fight about?”

“Ab-so-lute-ly nothing,” he said with a smile, and returned to his counting.

She squeezed the mop into the bucket. It was too much of a coincidence:
A Spell to Make Two Happy People Have a Huge Fight over
Absolutely Nothing. Even when she reminded herself that there was no such thing as magic, and also that, as far as she knew, the first two spells had not worked—
A Spell to Make Someone Decide to Take a Taxi, A Spell to Make a Vacuum Cleaner Break
—it was
still
too much of a coincidence.

The only hope was the promise on the back of the book:
This Book Will Make You Fly, Will Make You Strong, Will Make You Glad. What's More, This Book Will Mend Your Broken Heart.
As long as she finished
all
the spells, the book would somehow fix its own mistake.

She wondered if the next three spells would work—as far as she could figure out, they were all supposed to happen at the same time in a few weeks.
A Spell to Make Someone Give Someone a Rose
(maybe Dad would give Marbie a rose?);
A Spell to Make Someone Find Something Unexpected in a Washing Machine
(hmm); and
A Spell to Make Someone Eat a Piece of Chocolate Cake
(maybe Marbie would drop by the Banana Bar for cake?).

At least, if those spells worked, they wouldn't hurt a fly.

While she waited for the Spell Book to work, she just needed a new strategy for school. For a start, she would stop asking questions and offering honey-mustard chips. But it was more complicated than that. The fact was, she had never actually belonged to Kelly Favoloro's group. She asked them questions, but they never asked her one. They arm wrestled, but never with her. Why hadn't they included her in the arm wrestling? Or she could have held out her hand and said, “Now try me.”

Waiting to start Tae Kwon Do the other day, Carl Vandenberg and some of the others had been having thumb wars. Listen had stood apart from them, watching. She could never hold her thumb out and say, “Now try me.”

But then Carl had sidestepped toward her, fixed her with a fierce gaze, and grabbed her thumb with his own. Next thing, she'd been having thumb wars with them all.

Whatever she had done at Tae Kwon Do that day must have been right; she must have been standing in a cool way while she was watching the others. Or she had the correct expression on her face. So, the strategy was: While at school, pretend you're at Tae Kwon Do, and stand or sit in exactly the same way.

Actually, the master at Tae Kwon Do had also said that day that she was stronger than she looked. She would have beat Kelly and Amber in arm wrestles. Maybe not Sasha. Sasha had muscular wrists.