The Uses of Enchantment (11 page)

The man stirred his malted. The girl collapsed her pie crust with the backside of her spoon.

So what you’re saying, the girl said, is that if you have amnesia, you know things you don’t know. Or no. The reverse. You don’t know things you do know.

I guess so, said the man.

Which could be kind of cool, the girl said. I mean if you’re sick of your life and you get hit by a car. You can wake up and be a totally blank person.

True, the man said.

Like the girl in my story whom everybody believed was dead, the girl said. She could decide to be anyone.

But she’s being chased by an arsonist, the man reminded her. He knows who she is.

If she escaped the arsonist, the girl said. Let’s say she escaped. Let’s say she moved to Paris and the arsonist forgot about her.

Memories are shoddy things, even under the best of circumstances, the man said.

Which makes me wonder, the girl said. Can you really trust this ex-wife of yours?

The man shrugged.
Trust
, he said.

I mean, she could be messing with you. I think that would be a lot of fun. To mess with a person’s head like that.

How do you mean? the man said.

Maybe you were never allergic to shrimp. Maybe you weren’t even a lawyer. Maybe you were something far, far worse.

Worse than a lawyer, the man said, trying to make a joke of her observation. But the girl could see she’d unnerved him.

Maybe she’s not even your ex-wife, the girl said. She’s just some deceitful nurse.

She showed me pictures of our wedding, the man said. We honeymooned in the Keys.

Still, the girl said, you can’t be too trusting. For example, I could tell you something about yourself that you’d probably be tempted to believe.

Such as? the man said.

Such as, we used to be neighbors.

On Beacon Hill? the man asked.

Exactly, the girl said. Before my family moved to the suburbs.

OK, the man said slowly.

We lived in the brownstone across from your brownstone. You and I were fast friends. You took me to movies, you took me to restaurants. My parents didn’t care because they were those sorts of parents, and I was a middle child, and they figured the extra attention was good for me. Plus they assumed my regular companionship eased the pain of the fact that your ex-wife couldn’t have children.

My ex-wife didn’t want children, the man said.

That’s what she told you, the girl said. In fact, she was infertile. I overheard her confessing to my mother that she’d had an abortion when she was just out of college and dating around. She was ambitious, your ex-wife; she didn’t want to be saddled with a husband and children before she’d had a chance to establish herself in the world of finance. The operation went badly. She probably told you all this before you married her, but you’ve forgotten. Now she’s decided there’s little point in divulging personal details to an ex-husband who doesn’t remember the marriage anyway.

The man nodded, his face vaguely gray.

So. You and I, we were like a father and a daughter who never fought. I trusted you. Even after everything that happened, I trusted you.

After everything that happened, the man said.

You were ashamed, of course. That’s why you burned down our house. Ask your wife if it’s true—the family’s house across the street burned down. An electrical fire, they determined. But I knew. You knew I knew.

This is obscene, the man said, signaling for the check.

Is it? the girl asked. Then why have you parked across from the cemetery every single school day this semester? Why have you been so interested in me?

You have a good imagination, I’ll give you that, the man said, flapping open his billfold. He wedged too much money under his malted glass.

Maybe this isn’t imagined, the girl said. Maybe I know something. I know something and you want to know what I know.

The man refused to look at her.

I’m taking you home, he said.

Outside, the rain had abated to a random spattering of drops, shaken loose from the nearby tree branches by the gusting wind. The man started the Mercedes, put the car in drive, then put the car in park again.

A person would remember, he said. A person would remember if he’d done a thing like that.

But you forget, the girl replied. Memories are shoddy things, even under the best of circumstances.

West Salem

NOVEMBER 9, 1999

D
espite the house’s state of festooned disarray, Mary found the phone book where the phone book had always been, fitted inside a roasting pan in the farthest right-hand kitchen cabinet.
Biedelman, Rosemary
was not listed in the Hulls Cove–West Salem–Massapoisset white pages; nor was she listed in the yellow pages under
psychiatrist
,
mental health professional
,
overzealous Freud-hater
,
feminist rabblerouser
, or
recurring life-disrupting nuisance
. Mary dialed the number for Semmering Academy; the switchboard operator speedily routed her to Roz’s personal line.

She hung up before Roz’s phone could ring.

Since Regina and Gaby had taken Mum’s Peugeot to Boston and Dad had disappeared for the day with his American-generic sedan, Mary’s transportation options were limited to feet or bike, neither of which was especially tempting given the weather. But the sleet-rain-snow had stopped; the moisture was in the process of being sucked back up to the sky and the air had warmed and thickened. Mary found three Semmering-era bikes leaning against the far wall of the garage behind a folded card table and a stack of equally old firewood, the remnants of a backyard maple her father had split and stacked in the early ’80s on the assumption that their defunct fireplace chimney would soon be restored to working order.

Detangling the bikes from one another was like freeing a single coat hanger from a pile of coat hangers; the curled, raggedy-taped handlebars caught on the brake cables, the toothed pedals caught in the spokes. The first bike she freed was Regina’s; were Regina home to witness Mary commandeering her bike (unridden for more than a decade), Mary would never have done so, since Regina remained viciously possessive over long-neglected objects well into her so-called adulthood. The color-coded belongings of childhood (bikes, hairbrushes, toothbrushes, mugs) were clung to like hard-won plastic checker pieces, forever reminding Mary that there was still a score being kept.

Mary found a bike pump and inflated the warped front wheel; she tested the arthritic brakes on the wet street, much to the evident irritation of Ye Olde Bastard, wearing a tam-o’-shanter and walking his miniature schnauzer back and forth across his lawn. She felt a momentary flush of affection for the man, his disgruntlement was so sincere and unconditional that he couldn’t even quell it for politeness’ sake, dead mother be damned. She far preferred it to the glassy courtesy of Mum’s friends and the sundry neighbors who, in the days before the funeral, had stopped by with casseroles in foil pans or tin containers of cookies. They peered into the kitchen as though she weren’t even there, perhaps hoping that her father or her sisters were nearby and might be recruited to dilute the encounter with the pretend invisible person at the door.

Mary biked past the Smiths’ house, the Harringtons’, the Ewings’, the Pooles’, dodging the icy snow remnants still condensed near the curbs and over the storm drains. She made a left on Neale Street and narrowly missed the pothole she’d hit at the age of twelve trying to turn the corner while standing on the bike pedals, arms outstretched and jerkily feathering the air. The barrette she’d been wearing at the time dug into her scalp and she’d suffered temporary amnesia, wandering the streets until a neighbor found her and drove her to the hospital. For three hours she didn’t know who she was or why she was upset, but she knew definitively that something was wrong. It was a terrible sensation, and ironically, she could remember quite viscerally this experience of non-remembering, the sensation of knowing something while not knowing it at the same time.

She passed the West Salem Cemetery, its wrought-iron gate painted a wet seal black and glinting beneath the overcast sky. Three blocks later Mary passed through the Semmering Academy brick gates, past the marble plaque with the school’s motto
VOX IN DESERTO
, “A Voice in the Wilderness,” the “wilderness” part always a bit of a misnomer. Yes, there used to be farmland surrounding the Gothic Revival brick structure built in 1891 by the philanthropic Semmerings, but by the time Mary attended the motto had been colloquially rephrased as
VOX IN SUBURBO
, the farms having been sold off by impoverished heirs to subdividers, the fields replaced by cul-de-sacs that looked from the catwalk on the academy roof like a series of asphalt crop circles. Semmering Academy had been famously endowed by the Semmerings for the purpose of “educating the savages,” of whom very few remained and those who did expressed little interest in learning French and geography; ten years later, the enrollment at three, the academy’s mission shifted slightly from educating savages to educating girls.

Mary stashed her bike by the back Dumpster. She stood in the shadow of Semmering and reflected how much it resembled a sanitarium from this vantage point, with its barred rear windows and its ominous smokestack and its sinister industrial hum. The back door opened to expel a trio of girls, their skirts longer than in the days when Mary was a student, hanging nearly to mid-knee and so gaping around the waist that each hip-swaying step revealed flashes of stomach. They didn’t notice Mary, standing by the Dumpster. They didn’t even look glancingly in her direction. Mary slipped inside and walked the length of the fluorescent-lit basement hall, through the old cafeteria, now an empty art classroom. The room smelled of paint and glue, the walls papered with mooning charcoal self-portraits.

Mary walked up the north staircase, onto the main floor, past the main office and the bulletin board. Behind the closed doors of the classrooms she could hear the muted clacking of chalk, the incantatory drone of the teachers. She found her old locker, 4565. She spun the lock, still remembering the combination (13–23–12).

The locker opened.

Mary stared at the familiar interior, at the mushroom-painted metal, at the rust spot on the lower shelf in the shape of Alaska minus its archipelago tail. Part of her wanted to read this empty locker as an homage, but of course she knew the opposite to be true. The headmistress, Miss Pym, was famously thorough when it came to eradicating threats to her academy’s reputation, a thoroughness that even took the form of forbidding the future assignation of Mary’s locker to any Semmering student, just as she had forbidden the future assignation of Bettina Spencer’s locker to any future Semmering student after Bettina burned down the library in 1972. Both stood as empty as the Greenes’ mausoleum. But Miss Pym was less superstitious than she was wise to the ways that young girls infected one another, usually through silly coincidence, and with all the discerningness of pink eye in February. She wanted no new outbreaks of publicized bad conduct on her watch, and thus had gone out of her way to minimize contact between Mary and the girls who followed her.

So it was not out of any tenderness toward Mary that Miss Pym suggested, once Mary returned to school the fall of her senior year, that she eat her meals in an empty and unmonitored classroom. She allowed Mary to quit the history club without the usual hecticness of notes and signatures, she expressed no concern that Mary spent afternoons alone in the woodshop making three-peg coatracks and lidless boxes because that was all the shop teacher was willing to teach girls how to make. Mary was allowed by Miss Pym, in a school that prized distinction, to become unnotable to the point of invisibility.

Then
Miriam
was published in the winter term of Mary’s senior year, and everything changed.

Within two weeks of its publication,
Miriam
became a best seller in Boston and the surrounding towns and was featured in the front window of every suburban bookstore, stacked beside a four-foot cardboard cutout of Dr. Hammer wearing a black turtleneck and looking more like a diet pioneer than a therapist. The Semmering students carried the book around school, reading passages aloud in the hallways and in the cafeteria. Miss Pym attempted to ban the book from the school grounds out of respect for Mary and her privacy, but in fact Mary knew that Miss Pym found the subject matter potentially inciting. Here was a girl—another Semmering student, no less—who had faked her abduction. Who had craftily engineered a situation in which she was not only a highly pitied victim (for a time) but had managed to star in her own pop psychology book, thereby securing her status as teenage idol of subversion. The teachers, however, were so excited that the students were treating with such reverence a
book
rather than a new slipcover for their Bermuda bag that they were hesitant to discourage this newfound, and presumably delicate, enthrallment, for fear of scaring the girls off of books for good.

Instead of banning
Miriam
, Miss Pym offered to provide Mary with a private tutor so that she could study from home for the remainder of her senior year.

Mary accepted.

In retrospect, however, the tutor was a mistake. Mary’s remove from the battering, equalizing social milieu of high school—where any person encountered on a daily basis becomes tiresome, no matter how many books are written about them—only heightened her mystique. Had Mary remained at Semmering, no doubt the furor and the reverence would have subsided much sooner. Instead it was as if she’d disappeared anew, and any Mary spottings were gathered like clues to a new mystery.
Miriam
continued to be toted through the Semmering hallways in a talismanic manner, much to Miss Pym’s unarticulated misery.

But perhaps nobody suffered so much as her mother, who had at first tried in every way to minimize the reverberations of her daughter’s abduction. Yet when
Miriam
was first published—a book that claimed Mary, despite what she’d implied, had been neither abducted nor sexually abused—her mother’s enthusiasm to remove the “raped girl” suspicions overrode her formerly crazed need for privacy on the matter. Better a liar, her mother figured, better the disturbed perpetrator of a grand-scale hoax than an innocent victim of sexual assault. Though Mary’s role in
Miriam
was supposed to remain anonymous, her mother told the women in the Boston Wellesley alumnae group. She told her former dorm mates who lived as far as away as Hong Kong, her historical society colleagues, the government officials to whom she made her monthly pardon phone call on behalf of Abigail Lake. While everyone within the Semmering community knew of Miriam’s actual identity, Mary’s alias was now guaranteed to be known throughout Greater Boston and beyond.