The Uses of Enchantment (28 page)

So you don’t want to kiss me, the girl said. She had to hurry to keep up with the man, who was suddenly walking very fast.

Not really, the man said.

You’ve gone through quite a bit of trouble in that case. What’s your reason for bringing me here?

Reason? the man said. Do I need a reason?

Just because you have amnesia doesn’t mean you’re an all-purpose idiot, the girl said.

OK then, the man said. My reason.

He kicked his boots against the outside wall of the cabin. He unhooked the nearest shutter and pulled a key from a nail on the windowsill. He opened the front door and stood aside to allow her to pass first.

He smiled at the girl as she brushed past him.

I’ve brought you here, he said, because this is our little get-to-know-you father-daughter trip.

West Salem

NOVEMBER 9, 1999

M
ary called from the train station.

“It’s eight o’clock, where have you
been
?” Regina said.

“I need someone to pick me up,” Mary said.

No answer.

“Hello?” Mary said.

Regina inhaled audibly. Weegee barked in the background, indicating Aunt Helen was somewhere in the background, too.

The connection terminated.

Mary stared at the dead receiver, uncertain if something had happened to Regina
(Weegee’s feeling homicidal)
, or if Regina intended to pick her up, or if Regina expected Mary to call back and plead for a ride. She chose optimism: Regina was unharmed and en route. She rechecked her pocket—as she had every few minutes—for the scrap of paper with Dr. Hammer’s address in Chadwick. Strange that he would have remained in the Boston area—then again, she reasoned, since he was no longer a therapist, he didn’t require a new city for his new start after the trial. The owners of hedges wouldn’t hold his past against him if he’d become a landscaper. The buyers of kitchen tiles wouldn’t care if their salesman was a defrocked shrink.

To keep warm, Mary kicked at the hardened disks of dirty snow that hemmed the base of each streetlamp, slowly chipping them away with her boot heel. Across the street and through the bare woods, the perfect squares of house windows blinked as their inhabitants walked past. She smelled burning wood, could see the chimney smoke rising above the tree line. A delicious melancholy overtook her as she recalled the many nights she’d waited to be picked up at the train station by her mother who was always, at least until Mary disappeared, late. She’d huddle in her never-warm-enough coat and search hopefully for headlights illuminating the black gap through the trees that was Old Bellows Road. The headlights would round the horseshoe and drive straight toward the train platform.
Here she is
, she’d tell herself, and she’d experience the hopeful chest lift of a lost skier who hears the distant rumble of an avalanche and chooses to mistake it for a snowmobile. She’d feel a little less cold, her shoulders would unwinch. Then the car, at the very last second, would take the second sharp turn in Old Bellows Road, missing the parking lot, the sound of its engine fading more quickly than it had intensified upon approach. Her heart would drop, and the cold would attack her exposed neck with renewed fervor, and she would grow self-pityingly enraged.
How could she be late again
. The rage would mutate from incendiary to a dull, pragmatic thudding. Soon a vengeful possibility would overtake her; she would hide. She would stick out her thumb and accept a ride from the next car that passed. She would simply, soundlessly vanish.

This plotting kept her warm.

Once, when her mother was fifty-three minutes late, a record even for her, Mary had gone so far as to act; she’d tried to hitchhike, but no cars passed. When the headlights of her mother’s Peugeot rounded the horseshoe, she slid along the side of the station steps and crouched behind the Dumpster, fenced off with lattice. She gripped the lattice with her gloved fingers and wondered how long she would let her mother’s panic build. Three minutes, perhaps. Three minutes to check the station waiting area and the station restroom and the train platform seemed a generously brief amount of time, given that her mother had kept her waiting in the cold for nearly an hour.

Her mother pulled into the parking lot and sat in the idling car, peering upward through the windshield at the clock on the station’s exterior wall. She squinted toward the empty train platform, again at the clock. Mary waited for her to honk. She waited for her to emerge from the car and search the platform. But her mother did neither of these things. One minute and twenty-three seconds after arriving, her mother put the Peugeot in gear and, without a backward glance, drove away.

Mary stared at the Peugeot’s brake lights, dumbfounded. Her coat pockets were empty of change so she called home collect, trying to keep the outraged teariness from her voice as she gave her name to the operator. Her father appeared within seven minutes, smelling of gin and peanuts. Her mother, when Mary arrived home, stood at the kitchen counter cutting onions.
Strange
, her mother said.
I looked for you everywhere
.

Mary heard the screech of tires as the Peugeot—the same Peugeot—careered into the parking lot. Classical music blared behind the windshield, the entire car pulsing like a salt-rusted cocoon about to pop a bombastic insect.

She slid into the passenger seat, cringing against the wall of sound.

Regina pulled recklessly back onto Old Bellows Road. She looked awful, the lights from the dashboard transforming her face into a haggard landscape of sinkholes and fault lines.

The humid smell of pizza pressed against Mary’s cold nose. The closeness of the air plus the decibel level of the music made her feel sweatily claustrophobic.

“Can I turn this down?” she asked.

Regina didn’t respond.

“Do you mind?” Mary asked. “I have a headache.”

“
You
have a headache,” Regina said. “You didn’t have to spend the past two hours with Aunt Helen. Did you know you broke her vase?”

“I didn’t break it,” Mary said.

“She found a hairline crack,” Regina said. “It’s worthless now.”

“Too bad,” Mary said.

Regina didn’t respond.

“I bet Weegee’s upset.”

Regina didn’t laugh.

“That was funny,” Mary said.

“What?”

“That was funny. You should laugh.”

“
Hah hah hah
,” said Regina.

Regina glared through the windshield. Clearly she was in a bad mood, which probably exempted her, in her own mind, from her promise to
be nicer
. But Mary was feeling vulnerable, not to mention giddy, after her visit with Roz Biedelman. If selfishness were a virtue, than she would persist in being selfish. She would selfishly force her sister into a confiding, kindly relationship with her even though Regina was not in a headspace that made provisions for sisterly bonding opportunities.

“So,” Mary said. “You look tired.”

“I am tired,” Regina said.

“Have you been exercising?” Mary asked. She couldn’t help herself.

“Me?” Regina said.

“I mean—what I mean is, how are you?”

“I’m fine,” Regina said. “And by the way I picked up the pizzas for dinner. I paid for them myself.”

“I’ll pay you back,” Mary said.

“Don’t worry. It cost $50, including the tip. But really don’t worry about it. It’s my treat.”

A pinched silence descended.

“I’m sorry about Bill,” Mary said.

Regina sniffed.

“It must be hard dealing with a breakup on top of Mum and everything else.”

What Mary didn’t say was
it must be hard to lose three fiancés in four years
. By which she would mean emotionally hard, but also impressively difficult to accomplish. Then again, Regina’s first two fiancés were fuss-potty men who Gaby suspected, somewhat predictably, to be gay; Regina’s first fiancé, Jim, was a cruddified preppy from Concord and the sort of man who wrote on the endpapers of novels the date he finished reading said novel and where he was at that historically momentous instant; Perry, an urban planner, was such a tedious expert at the obvious that he earned the nickname “Perry Is Perry.” (After the breakup, Gaby renamed him “Perry Was Perry.”) Bill, according to Gaby the most promising of the bunch, ran a domestic abuse hotline in Somerville.

“You never even met Bill,” Regina said, half accusingingly.

“Gaby liked him,” Mary said. “Gaby said he was her favorite.”

“And you consider Gaby, who’s never had a boyfriend, a reliable judge of fiancés.”

Mary considered this. “I do,” she said. “She’s…unbiased.”

Regina snorted.

“Seriously though,” Mary persisted. “Do you feel like talking about what happened?”

Regina took her eyes from the road long enough to gauge her sister’s sincerity. Apparently, Mary appeared convincingly sincere.

“What always happens?” Regina said. “I exhaust people.” She tried to say this boastfully, as though to imply that “people” were pathetic and lacked stamina. But Mary could tell that she was more destabilized by this realization than proud of it.

Mary nodded. “You do have a certain intensity,” she said. “Someday you’ll find a person who treasures that side of you.”

Regina cocked her head. “Do you think that would make a difference?”

“I do,” Mary said.

“Bill was that person. He treasured all my worst qualities.”

“That’s rare,” Mary said. “That’s the mark of a keeper.”

“Except that he broke up with me.”

“Still,” Mary said. “As a type, maybe you can see Bill as…an improvement. I mean over the long haul. You’re trending upward, I guess is what I’m saying.”

“Is a person who treasures your worst qualities a keeper,” Regina asked, “or is he a doormat?”

“One person’s doormat…” Mary offered.

“I exhausted Bill, but he was determined to love me. Not some future improved person.
Me
.”

“Like Dad did with Mum. That’s not a bad thing,” Mary said. As a vision of her slack-faced father flashed through her mind, she realized that she did not believe this.

“Nobody told me that I need to calm down, or get rational, or stop being so self-obsessed. He practically
encouraged
me to misbehave. And so I became Myself Plus Plus. It was unbearable. Not for him. Or not only for him. It was unbearable for me.”

“What an honest statement,” Mary said, immediately regretting her knee-jerk Roz-ism. She meant the comment in a sincere, not a patronizing, way. She truly was impressed with Regina’s sudden onslaught of self-knowledge—as perhaps, she reflected, Roz had been sincerely impressed with hers.

Fortunately Regina took her comment in the manner it was intended; she smiled appreciatively, and Mary glimpsed behind her listless features, a touching flicker of the plain girl who could convince people that she was beautiful. She had to stifle an urge to put her hand on her sister’s arm.

“I’ve been doing some soul-searching,” Regina said. “And I’ve been writing a lot. I’m assembling the more polished poems into a chapbook.”

“That’s great,” Mary said encouragingly. “It’s about time somebody published you.”

“It’s self-published,” Regina said.

“Oh,” Mary said. “Well. You’re somebody.”

“Maybe you can fly out for my publication party,” Regina said.

“I’d like that,” Mary said.

“Have you ever tried writing poetry?” Regina asked. “It’s very therapeutic, so long as you don’t worry about rhyme. Or meter.”

“I don’t think I’d be very good at writing poetry,” Mary said, her face heating up. “Bake Sale 1621” wasn’t the covertly mocking success she’d hoped it would be. She’d written the poem but it hadn’t won the Semmering Poetry Contest. Regina’s poem hadn’t won either. Nothing had unfolded as she’d planned and she should have learned something from the experience. She had not.

“Do you see a therapist?” Regina asked.

“Me?” Mary said, relieved that the topic had shifted. “Who would have me?”

Regina laughed. “Now
that’s
funny.”

Out her window, Mary clocked the familiar beginnings of the Semmering grounds—the sharp-tipped, wrought-iron fence that lassoed the entire 110 acres and was as much intended to keep its students within as to prevent the much-feared vagrants from invading. The sports fields swept like an unreflecting black sea up to the school itself. As the building emerged from the dark, Mary imagined that Miss Pym stood in one of the windows, spookily observing them as they drove by.

Regina, similarly transfixed, pulled her foot off the accelerator. As the car slowed, the fence’s metal bars transformed from a translucent black blur into the ever slowing tick of individual spokes.

The Peugeot coasted to a stop before the school’s entry arch.

“
Vox in Suburbo
,” Regina announced.

Mary said nothing. She wanted Regina to continue driving, to allow the building to recede back into the night, but didn’t want to call attention to this desire. She worried it might imply something damning about her, the fact that this place could still unnerve her so.

“Do you remember the Semmering fight song?” Regina asked.

“Kind of,” Mary lied.

“Give a roar, give a roar, for the feisty Semmering whores…” Regina tapped on the steering wheel. “They will suck out all your blood, they will nah nah nah nah nah…”

Regina peered at her expectantly. Mary perceived a slight barometric change inside the car, the formerly chummy atmosphere tensing into one more potentially hazardous.

“I guess I don’t remember it,” Mary said.

Regina laughed. “
Really? You
don’t remember?”

“You didn’t even play sports,” Mary said. “Why do you care about the stupid fight song?”

“Because I feel overcome by team spirit,” Regina said. “Don’t you? Don’t you feel overcome by team spirit? Or possibly you’re just overcome by spirits in general. Tomahawk-waving rapist witch spirits. How about it, Mimsy. Do you feel like
talking about it
?”