There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell - v4 (10 page)

She came to a page of classifieds for groups and community clubs. Ugh, Maye thought, then continued on to the stripper ads. The picture of Pebbles with her head tilted back and eyes closed was indeed eye-grabbing, but Maye thought the ad would have been a little more tasteful if her classmate had opted to wear even a bra for the shot as opposed to the black rectangle that contained the word INAPPROPRIATE, which had been placed across her chest by the magazine’s editors.

It was the last page of the publication, and as Maye hadn’t even ordered yet, she flipped the page back again to kill more time. In a desperate attempt to look occupied, she scanned the listings for groups and clubs and was actually entertained by some of them.

“SACRED CREATIVE ART CLASSES,” one of the listings read. “Solidify the spiritual passage that was your birth experience. Paints, brushes provided. Bring canvas and placenta.”

Maye knew right then and there with a shudder that she’d be ordering a salad.

“MEAN LIBRARIAN,” another boldly proclaimed. “Deviant and desperate. I’m allergic to wheat, soy, and strong scents, but intrepid otherwise. Wanna check me out?”

“No, I do not,” Maye clipped out loud. “Sorry. Can’t take a guilt trip every time I have the craving to eat soy in front of you or light a green tea candle. I can’t go for that. No can do.”

“DHARMA FRIENDS Irish Eskimo raised by Mexican babysitters has been blessed by the company and cultures of many and seeks friends who practice Buddhist Dharma.”

I hated Dharma, Maye thought. I thought that show was canceled.

“ARTISTS COMMUNITY, permaculture project. CLOTHING OPTIONAL diverse household seeking like-minded housemates. NO NEGATIVE ENERGY!”

My God, Maye thought. No wonder I can’t find friends in this place. The people here are a bunch of naked, mean Eskimo librarians who keep their afterbirth in a Rubbermaid container in their purses. Where are the ladies looking at the orchid? I want to be friends with them, she told herself, just as soon as I check the contents of their handbags.

“Open-minded followers of Gothic literature wanted for book group,” another entry read. “Let’s discuss theory, study, and most importantly, craft!”

“Hmmm,” Maye hummed. Could be interesting. Certainly more interesting than nude permaculturing, whatever that is. Maye loved Gothic lit; in college she’d taken every course she could that pertained to the genre. This could be something, she thought; she’d love to read all of her old favorites again—Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton, Bram Stoker. She felt herself getting a little excited, a little hopeful. Some people don’t like the shock and cringe-inducing elements of Gothic lit, she thought; you have to be open-minded to accept and explore some of those themes, although when Maye reread the phrase “open-minded,” it suddenly took on another, more Spaulding-like meaning: no conservatives, no Republicans.

Got it, she understood; I fit that. She took out a pen from her purse, which contained no organs or body parts, spiritual or otherwise, and circled the ad in a swish of bright red ink.

It was a known fact that Maye could not enter a bookstore without reaching the red alert danger level within a mere thirty minutes. Although she chastised Charlie for his boxes upon boxes of books when she was packing, Maye was every bit as guilty of the identical crime; she simply hid her addiction better and was far more talented at being sneaky. In Phoenix, she concealed her overflow books in closets and drawers, by double-parking them in bookcases and hiding them in filing cabinets. In Spaulding, however, it proved more tricky to secure good hiding places, particularly because Maye had to hide her addiction to the printed word by draping her books in camouflage, lest Charlie stumble upon the hidden booty, open them, and out Maye as the book whore she indeed was. As a result, there was an unusually high number of boxes labeled PERIOD SUPPLIES, MAKEUP, and MONISTAT-7, just to throw Charlie off the trail. It was a dicey maneuver, however, and Maye was nearly discovered early one evening when Charlie looked at her after she had been in the house for five days in a row because she said there was no reason to go anywhere.

“You know,” he said carefully, “if I had a purple sweat suit, I’d wear it a lot, too, but whaddya say we freshen it up in the washing machine and break into one of the time capsules in your pyramid of makeup boxes in the basement? Because even though I’m not a meal psychic, I can tell that you had teriyaki chicken today for lunch and ham on rye yesterday because a dollop of Dijon mustard is encrusting part of the zipper on your hoodie and a soy-sauce-stained grain of rice is glued to the drawstring. There is a Hometown Buffet on your boobs, Maye. The only thing separating you from the lady who lives under the old oak tree on campus is four dogs, a shopping cart, and the fact that it looked like she washed up yesterday, even if that means sticking her head in the drinking fountain. There has to be a good amount of pretty in any of those boxes—they weigh even more than your tampons.”

Maye was thinking precisely of that narrow escape as she hauled around fifteen pounds of books at the bookstore, roaming from section to section as the crook of her arm became red and sweaty with her treasures. She thought of how she had to run to cut Charlie off at the pass, lodging her dirty self in the doorway of the basement to prevent her husband from discovering her nest of deception.

“I wouldn’t go down there, Charlie!” Maye warned, preparing to strike at her husband’s most tender, vulnerable fear. “I went to get a tampon today, and I saw a spider sitting on the pyramid that was so big that if we caught it and had it taxidermied, we could use it as a Halloween costume. Big as your head, Charlie. It stared at me and I swore it said, ‘Hello, little girl. Super or regular-absorbency?’”

“
Spider
?” Charlie barely hissed as he backed away from the door.

“The kind you only see on Discovery Channel, like jumping ones,” Maye added in a strike worthy of the devil, since she knew Charlie’s most repulsive moment of life came in the seventh grade when he woke up and felt a daddy longlegs about to attempt a little spelunking into the mysterious warm cavern that was Charlie’s mouth. “And I think it was laying eggs.”

Charlie gasped silently and covered his mouth after emitting a short, tiny yelp. “Spider babies,” he wheezed as he stumbled backward until he collapsed onto one of the benches in the breakfast nook. “I can’t go down there. I’m sorry, I can’t.”

“It’s okay, Charlie,” Maye said. “I’ll just have to pretty up with some berries and charcoal sticks I find around the house.”

It was a slim getaway, Maye admitted, and looked at the books in her arms as if they were a fifteen-pound bundle of joy that shared half of her DNA and would end up hating her like no other and plucking money from her purse in a little over a decade.

“Oh, books,” Maye cooed, caressing them softly. “I have to give you up because of my shame. I can’t bring you home. He would never understand.” She abandoned them sadly, reshelving each one, and proceeded to the H section of fiction, which was why she was there in the first place.

Still reeling from the happy news that her friends were about to visit, Maye had optimistically taken a chance and answered the ad for the Gothic book club. When the club’s leader, Crystal, e-mailed in reply to Maye’s inquiry, she seemed kind and nice and was especially welcoming when Maye e-mailed back that she was basically a disciple of all Gothic literature and would spend her life devoted to the craft if she didn’t need to earn a living.

“A devoted reader and willingness to explore the text is exactly what we’re looking for,” Crystal replied. “We want someone who’s really going to feel free to examine the possibilities.”

“Oooooooh!” Maye cried upon reading this, delighted that she had found someone in Spaulding she had something in common with. She imagined spending the evening deconstructing Henry James’s short story “The Altar of the Dead” or anything by the Brontës. Toss in some brownies and you have heaven, Maye thought, glad she had taken the step to answer the ad. She was therefore a little disappointed when Crystal e-mailed several days later that the next selection the club would embark on was
Practical Magic
. Maye had read the book—a fun one about two sisters who work magic for and against their best interests—years ago and had enjoyed it, although it wasn’t exactly what she’d hoped for for the club. She had lent her copy to Sara, who still had it, something Maye was glad about when it was time to move. Maybe I can suggest a more Gothic book for the next reading, Maye thought to herself as she sat in front of her computer screen after reading the e-mail, realizing that Crystal had spelled
magic
wrong, adding a
k
at the end. It’s a reader’s club, she reminded herself, not a copy editor’s club.

“Anyone can make a typo, stop being so damn snotty,” she said out loud as she stood up, grabbed her car keys, and headed out to the bookstore. “Maybe Crystal learned to read with Hooked on Phonics.”

Now, scanning the “H” section, Maye found
Practical Magic
by Alice Hoffman, pulled it from the shelf, and frowned. There, on the cover, were pictures of Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock from the movie version of the book. The copy Sara still had was a hardback and had on its cover a lovely Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti portrait of the mythical Proserpine, who was taken to Hades from her home in Sicily by a lovestruck Pluto, and was cursed to spend half the year there because she ate a pomegranate, which in the portrait she holds in her hand. Maye had loved that image—it was why she’d bought the book in the first place—and now she looked with scorn at the cover of this edition. She hesitated for a moment, debating whether she should return the movie cover book to the shelf and head to another bookstore, but she put aside her book cover snottiness and headed to the cashier, passing by three more books that she wanted in the ten steps it took to get there. Maye put the mass-market paperback on the counter and reached into her purse for her wallet.

“
Practical Magic
, huh?” commented the cashier, a woman who looked to be about Maye’s age. “This is a quirky little book. I bet you’ll like it.”

“Oh, I read it already, years ago,” Maye replied as she pulled out her credit card. “I joined a Gothic lit book club and this is the first selection, so I figured I should get another copy.”

“Gothic lit?” the cashier questioned. “And they picked this? That is a little puzzling.”

Maye nodded. “I agree,” she said with relief. “I was expecting something different, I guess hoping for something more like Shelley, or even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I mean, I liked the book, the movie was okay, but it’s not really what I think of when I think classic Gothic literature.”

“Are you sure you didn’t join the club for books with movie-poster covers?” the cashier joked. “If
Memoirs of a Geisha
or
The Devil Wears Prada
is the next choice, I’d run for the hills if I were you.”

Maye laughed. “I know,” she said, shaking her head. “I just—I’m new in town, I really don’t know anyone, and I thought this would be a good way to meet people. In this town it’s a little hard to do that, for some reason.”

“Tell me about it,” the cashier laughed. “I just moved here, too, and the only people I’ve met are the people who work here. It is a hard place to make friends.”

“I know! I work at home,” Maye continued. “So my exposure to civilization is rather limited.”

“What do you do that you get to work at home?” the cashier asked.

“Oh,” Maye said blithely. “You know. Phone sex, because honestly, desperate men just really want to talk.”

“Then you should be meeting plenty of people,” the cashier said, laughing.

Maye laughed, too. “None that I want to invite over for a barbecue. I’m a reporter. Well, I
was
a reporter. I
was
. Now I’m freelance, just writing. This and that, whatever I can get my hands on.”

“You’re kidding me!” the cashier cried. “I’m a writer, too, and I worked at a newspaper. I was the food critic for the
Aspen Sentinel
! I thought I could get something at the paper here when I moved, but no dice. So I’m a bookstore manager slinging books. Could be worse—I could be a phone-sex worker. I’m Bonnie, by the way.”

“I’m Maye,” she replied, and held out her hand to shake Bonnie’s. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“It’s nice to meet anybody,” Bonnie added with a chuckle.

“It sure is,” Maye said, and signed her credit card receipt.

“Enjoy the book,” Bonnie said as she handed Maye a bag. “Again.”

Maye nodded and thought for a moment about asking Bonnie if she’d like to grab a coffee sometime, and suddenly felt like an adolescent boy at prom time. Could she ask Bonnie out on a friend date? Would that seem too forward? Was it pushy, was it needy? Should she just play hard to get instead? Would she have to pay for the coffees? Did Bonnie even really like her, or was Maye reading something into the situation that wasn’t really there? Was there something between them, or was Maye imagining it? And who asks a cashier out after a fifteen-second conversation, anyway? A pervert, Maye’s mother would say, that’s who! She’ll think I’m a weirdo, Maye concluded, plus, what if she said no? What will I do then? Never be able to come back to the bookstore to feed my degenerate book thirst, Maye decided, and smiled at Bonnie instead.

“Thanks,” she said and waved quickly before heading out the door.

With her copy of
Practical Magic
nestled in her purse, Maye rang Crystal’s doorbell and then waited, pulling her coat tight around her. The autumn winds had backed down a little to make room for a quickly approaching winter chill as Spaulding’s trademark green landscape succumbed to rusty-colored branches and fallen leaves everywhere. Outside Crystal’s house, tall, browning weeds had grown up and through every opening in the front walk; the house matched the ragged, spotty lawn and the front door, which looked like it had been kicked more times than a bad habit. Maye noticed a barrage of stickers covering not only the bumper but also the back window on a beat-up old Volkswagen Jetta with rust gobbling up its wheel wells. BACK OFF, I’M A GODDESS, Maye read quietly, mouthing the words. ANKH IF YOU LOVE ISIS. WHO’S DRIVING: YOU OR YOUR ADDICT? She was still shivering from that last one when the door swung open suddenly and a generously shaped woman in her fifties wearing a shiny black-and-purple corset smiled at Maye, her face covered in glittery sparkles. Maye had had no idea what to expect from the book club, but she did know one thing; she didn’t expect to be the only participant not dressed as an eighteenth-century pub wench on her way to a rave. Maye looked down at her own below-the-knee, tan corduroy skirt, her now famous vintage sweater, and her black leather Mary Janes as she took her coat off and felt a little Republican when she saw that the rest of the club was swathed in some sort of flowy gauzy or velvet ensemble, mostly the color of night.