The Uses of Enchantment (42 page)

She heard a thumping noise and a high-pitched screech. Seconds later, a tail-tucked Weegee appeared, his nails skitching across the linoleum as he ran for the bathroom-cum-storage-closet. Mops and broomsticks toppled as he tried to mash himself into an invisible ball behind the toilet. She waited for the avenging form of Aunt Helen to appear, too corpse-colored for this hour, but nobody came to Weegee’s rescue, a fate he’d obviously intuited by the fact that he’d lapsed into total silence in hopes that his enemy, whoever it was, might not discover him.

In the living room, Regina, still in her nightgown, kneeled before a pyramid of knotted newspaper balanced on the center of the shiny fireplace grate.

“
There
you are,” Regina said. “I was worried.”

“You were?” Mary said, out of breath, her mind’s needle stuck in a manic groove.
Take Umbrage! Take Umbrage!

“You’ve been gone for hours,” she said. “Of course I was worried.”

Mary, a tingle spreading under her chest, was just tired enough, just susceptible enough to be touched. Regina, she thought, was worried about
her
. This was the upside to losing your mother. Sisters rallied behind other sisters they once hated in new and supportive ways. Families, freed from the inevitable string of bad chemical reactions, were forced to regroup in formerly untenable molecular clusters.

“About me?” she said.

“
Yes
about you,” Regina said.

“That’s so sweet,” Mary said.

Regina regarded her scornfully. “If you were dead I was going to have to deal with Aunt Helen myself.”

“Oh,” Mary said stupidly.
Take Umbrage!
“Is she awake?”

“God no,” said Regina. “Pass me the sports section.”

Mary passed Regina the sports section. She found herself wanting to tell her sister about her night with the man. She wanted to show her the book. She wanted to ask her:
What does it mean? What do you think it means?
She wanted to force her sister to entertain a question to which she’d already decided the answer.

“I drove Aunt Helen’s car into a stone wall,” Mary said.

“Did you total it?” Regina said.

“It found a higher calling,” Mary said.

“Who found a higher calling?” Gaby asked from the hallway.

She appeared in the living-room archway, her nightgown streaked with rust and grease, her hair tucked into Regina’s long-lost ski cap with the blue-and-red pompon.

What have we all been up to
, Mary thought.

“Aunt Helen’s car,” Regina said.

“I couldn’t find the ax,” Gaby said. “Do you think it’s in the attic?”

“Why would it be in the attic,” Regina said.

“Because it’s not in the garage,” Gaby said.

“Why do you need the ax?” Mary asked.

“We don’t have any kindling,” Regina replied. “Did you
see
?” She pointed to the hat on Gaby’s head.

“Congratulations,” Mary said.

“I found it in Mum’s old suitcase along with a pair of ice skates. I didn’t find your book.”

“Thanks for remembering to look,” Mary said, slipping her hand inside her coat pocket to feel the chill sheathing of the plastic bag.

“Don’t you think we should have one fire in the new fireplace before we sell the house?” Regina asked, snatching the hat off of Gaby’s head and pulling it onto her own. “Especially since Dad is off scattering Mum’s ashes without us?”

Regina stared at Mary challengingly, as though she’d had a hand in their father’s decision.

“I…no,” Mary said.

“And you don’t care,” Regina said. Her pompon bounced as she talked.

“She was his wife,” Mary said.

“I mean about the
fire
,” Regina said. “You don’t object.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Should I?”

“Not in my opinion,” said Regina. “But I can never predict with you. Can you help look for the ax?”

“Can you wait five minutes?” Mary said.

Neither Regina or Gaby responded.

“Great,” Mary said. “I need to change.” She gestured at her mud-spattered pants.

“Don’t wake up Aunt Helen,” Regina warned.

“I won’t,” Mary promised.

“I mean it,” said Regina.

“She’s not going to like what she sees,” said Gaby.

“She won’t see it,” Mary said.

“That’s the plan,” said Gaby.

“It’s stuck in the wall,” said Mary.

“What?” said Gaby.

“
The car
,” said Regina.

Still wearing her coat, Mary ascended the front hall staircase. The darkened second floor had a vacant and depressing feel, it bleated the way hotels bleat with a squalid loneliness after the guests have left but before the maids have arrived, each door opening onto a room with furniture and a messy bed and no other sign of committed human inhabitation. Mary could scarcely believe this was her house, the house she’d grown up in—and it wasn’t. The people made the house, and when the people were gone, well, the house was just a shelter in the crudest sense. What had she been thinking, offering to live here? Before long she’d have moved to the attic, spread out the remaining rugs, stocked the wardrobe with vodka, occupied her days reading
Famous Canadian Shipwrecks
. She realized that she’d be flying back to the West Coast, probably the day after tomorrow. She was done here.

Through the gap of her bedroom door she could hear her aunt’s slow, regular breathing, like an intubated patient on a hospital respirator. Aunt Helen was dead out. Still, Mary didn’t want to risk waking her. She’d have to find a change of clothing elsewhere. Regina’s clothes were off-limits; she didn’t want to bother with the politics of wearing Regina’s clothes. Gaby’s clothes were always funkily unwashed, dotted here and there with stains and smelling like old juice. Which left whatever wearable items she could drum up in her parents’ bedroom. She still thought of it as “her parents’ bedroom” even though the room had already suffered the effects of her mother’s absence. Empty cardboard boxes near the closet, bills on the bedside table, multiple glasses of water on the bedside table, multiple water rings from multiple glasses of water scarring the bedside table, the bed unmade for so long that the fitted sheet had come undone on her mother’s side of the bed, exposing the askew mattress pad and, beneath that, the actual mattress. Her mother’s smell—grapefruit leather sawdust—lingered among the blankets.

Inside her mother’s walk-in closet her smell redoubled, and redoubled yet again as Mary flipped through the hangers, searching for an inoffensive shirt and pair of pants. Her mother’s style had been trending toward all-purpose golf for years, but she’d never realized how thoroughly this transition had been made—white and khaki and black the predominating colors, everything collared and pleated. Mary pulled all of her mother’s clothes off their hangers and sweaters off their shelves in an attempt to find something—what exactly? She couldn’t say. Soon the shelves and hangers were empty, the clothing piled in an awkward heap of arms and legs on the closet floor. Dutifully, her hangover gathering its ill forces, she loaded the clothes into the waiting cardboard boxes. She stripped the bedsheets, hid the pill bottles in the drawer, covered the water stains with a lace doily, bussed the water glasses to the bathroom sink. She held her breath as she carried the sheets down the hall to the laundry room, then muscled them into the washing machine, added a long pour of soap, turned the machine’s knob to the most intensive setting.

Back in her parents’ bathroom she washed her face and stripped her clothes, dressing in a pair of her father’s old jeans and his
WORCESTER TECH
sweatshirt. She removed the shopping bag from her coat pocket and tucked it into the jeans’ oversized waistband. On the way downstairs with the dirty water glasses, she dumped her slush-spattered outfit, which additionally smelled of vodka, on top of the washing machine.

Now her headache had begun a cyclical attack, the nauseaous spiral inside her head interrupting its orbit once each dizzying turn to smack the inside of her left temple. She had about thirty more functional minutes before she’d have to lie down in whatever room was vacant and sleep off the rest of the day. From the living-room doorway she could see her sisters hovering around the fireplace in their matching nightgowns, each wielding a poker and appearing to her, in her glazed state, like two elderly forest sprites trying to prod a reluctant animal out of a smoldering cave. On the floor beside them lay the remnants of a large wood frame.

“You’re just in time,” Regina said.

Mary’s brain scrambled to patch together the disparate elements into a cohesive scenario.

“We’re having our own ash-scattering ceremony,” Regina said. “But first we need some ashes.”

She gestured toward the scroll of canvas beside the hearth, its edges hacked away, presumably by the serrated bread knife that lay, as though Abigail Lake were being framed for a crime against herself, over her own lumpily rendered hands.

“Who wants to do the honors?” Regina said.

“I’ll flip you,” said Gaby. “Got a quarter?”

“Check inside the piano bench,” Regina suggested.

Gaby shook down the piano bench while Regina, with the jerky nervousness of a first-time firemaker, tossed the remaining frame splinters into the flames, retracting her hands fearfully from the sparks. Abigail Lake withstood her impending injustice stoically. Her face appeared sadder and more elongated than usual—like the countenance of a fancy, spook-eyed hound. Mary had never seen herself in Abigail Lake before, but now the resemblance was so startlingly obvious, she couldn’t believe she’d ever been able to convince herself otherwise.

“This is a bad idea,” Mary said, still too stunned to appropriately respond.
Take Umbrage!

“I told you she’d be a killjoy,” Gaby said. “Mimsy can only disrespect Mum when it’s her idea.”

“We’re not disrespecting Mum,” Regina said. “We’re pissed off and we’re expressing that we’re pissed off.”

“To whom?” Mary asked, trying to keep the quaver from her voice. Why did she care what happened to Abigail Lake? Why did she fucking care? “To whom are you expressing yourself? Mum is dead.”

“Would it have been so hard to leave us each a brooch?” Regina said.

“And you would have liked that better,” Mary said, “being a big fan of brooches.”

“I don’t mind the occasional brooch,” Gaby said.

“I hate brooches. That’s not the point,” Regina said.

“What is the point?” Mary said acidly.

“The point isn’t that Mum left us something she knew we’d hate.”

“Mimsy’s trying to stall,” Gaby said. “She’s stalling until the reinforcements wake up.”

Mary bit her index finger between the two lowest knuckles, the skin rolling away from the bone and leathering between her teeth.

“Maybe Mum hated Abigail Lake as much as we did,” she said finally.

“Which excuses the fact that she gave her to us,” Regina said. “Come on, Mimsy. We’ve been waiting for the joke to end. Gaby and I, we’ve been waiting for Dad to give us the check, or the pearls, some meaningless symbol that she loved us or wanted us to have, even a stupid fucking
brooch
to remember her by.”

Mary’s brain, her poor stupid brain, struggled to action. She’d been so fixated on her own solitary quest, the search for the book, that she’d failed to consider how her sisters felt after that disappointing afternoon in Buzz Stanworth’s office. It wasn’t just her—they’d been left out, too. And yet there had to be a reason for this, she thought. A reason that her mother, not a cruel woman, had behaved in a manner so seemingly cruel toward all her daughters. There had to be a reason. Mary’s nausea intensified as she forced her brain to accelerate and search for this reason. If she was good at one activity, she thought, it was this: creating a plausible story out of disparate details; it seemed only fitting that she would, after all these years of selfishly applying her talent, finally discover a way to put it toward more philanthropic use. Yes indeed, she thought, with a surge of purpose that overrode her queasy lethargy, she could help people make sense of the senseless; as in the game of props, she could take these seemingly unrelated objects or details and weave them into a convincing story that would alter a depressing landscape into one slightly more saturated with hope.

“Maybe,” Mary said, thinking aloud, “maybe she knew we’d burn Abigail Lake.”

“Mum?” Regina said.

“Maybe that was the plan all along,” Mary said.

“
All along
,” mocked Gaby.

“She knew you both dislike me,” Mary said.

“Not true,” said Regina.

“Moderately true,” said Gaby.

“Moderately true to true,” said Regina. “But not for any good reason. I mean not any
recent
good reason. Anyway. Fine. I dislike you.”

“It’s fun to dislike you,” said Gaby. “It’s sporty.”

“Mum gave us Abigail Lake for a reason,” Mary said. “She gave us Abigail Lake so we would have someone to hate.”

“Abigail Lake?” Regina said.

“No, Mum. We’d hate Mum,” Gaby explained.

“By burning Abigail Lake we’re expressing our anger toward Mum,” Mary said. “This would be cathartic for us. We’d also, on a secondary level, be destroying the symbol of me as the unpardoned family member.”

Regina nodded. “OK,” she said. “And then what. We’re supposed to forgive Mum for being a whimsical bitch?”

Abigail Lake appeared, in her usual eerie way, to be eavesdropping. Mary swore, in her half-hallucinating state, that Abigail Lake started to smile.

“She’s dead,” Mary said quietly. “Why do we need to forgive her?”

Gaby and Regina eyed each other. Mary’s forehead buzzed and she could feel a crying jag start its electric descent from the top of her head. Her sisters, too, were about to cry, she could sense it in the room like her elbow could sense a rainstorm.

She waited for the sobbing to erupt. Regina and Gaby, she thought, were both holding their breath.

Mary staved off her dissolve; she didn’t want to be the first.

Cry now
, she silently urged her sisters.
Cry now
.