White Magic

by Elissa Washuta

  What did I need to get away from that brought me to that ER bed, anyway? I was in a long-term relationship with my best drinking buddy, Kevin. We were drowning and would not lend each other a hand. When we split bottles of Crown Royal, he wobbled on long legs, threaded cigarette smoke through pursing lips, narrowed eyes that looked as empty as the alley we ashed into from his balcony late at night. I tried to get drunk enough to dissolve the barrier between my mouth and the ugliest thing my heart housed. You don’t love me enough, I said, but that was hardly his problem because nobody could.

  Four months into drying out, I dated a man who’d gone to rehab to save his marriage, which folded, but sobriety suited him. He’d talk about powerlessness over alcohol and repeat stories about things he did to lose his wife and things he did to get his life back. That man wanted a housewife; I wanted to stare at the death I’d just pulled from my body in the greatest magic trick of my life.

  He said he was most likely going to die from alcoholism because, really, we’re all just one drink away from that death. Actually, I am most likely going to die by choking on a magnesium tablet in my kitchen. I’ve had three close calls: the first two happened during that first year sober; the last time, here in Ohio, I had to slam my body into the counter to knock the tablet loose from my throat. I did give up the narrative menace of a possible death from drowning in my own vomit. Life was easier when I had an escape hatch, a way to die in a fire I set.

  In Pennsylvania mining towns, Grandma tells me, there was a bar and a church on every corner. In the bars, I’ve read, there were men with dust ground into their skin. In the men, there was liquid they called “rotgut.” As soon as I read the word, I felt I loved this liquid more than I would ever love anyone or anything.

  The men were sooty ghouls, spirits left in the underworld, and alcohol seemed to be the only thing animating their dust-stuffed bodies.

  Drinking was paid for through a practice called the “knockdown”: a mine worker would reserve a portion of his paycheck for his own spending and conceal this from his wife or mother. Women were house bosses. Girls were selected for their toughness as early as age thirteen and arranged into marriages. By twenty, they looked old, broken by work and birth. My great-grandmother Anna worked for a wealthy family in Pittsburgh until her brother insisted she return to her hometown to marry Michael Washuta. She did, but she didn’t want to.

  After Michael died in 1929, she took on boarders. Grandpa, still a child, worked in a bootleg mine and picked huckleberries in the hills. On Anna’s death certificate—congestive heart failure, 1962—her occupation is listed as housewife.

  When I look for myself in this family, I see my image moving from body to body like a restless spirit. I am the woman who does what she does not want to do. I am the man drowning himself in liquor faster than his lungs can drown in dust. I am the child who knows what a body looks like when it’s wounded from the inside out.

  For a while, threatening my own safety worked to show me I was resilient enough to take the obliteration. A year after the emergency room visit that resulted in the doctor’s order to stop drinking, I began pissing blood. Two doctors sat with me and begged me to stop drinking, to repeat after them: My life is worth saving. Even their tears didn’t stop me from drinking for two and a half more years. I broke up with Kevin. I dried out and saturated myself again. I dated a man who baked me a rum cake with rum sauce and served it to me for breakfast the morning after he choked me. Sometimes, men were nothing but alcohol-delivery devices, glass to a Guinness, ever present because you’re a drunk only if you do it alone. Alcohol, a friend told me, is called spirits for a reason. It will possess you if you let it.

  The final, climactic battle didn’t look like much. I stared at the gray girl in the mirror and smelled the carcass stench. I took a taxi to the car I’d left across town. I went for a walk with a friend I’d gotten absolutely trashed with before she’d gotten sober. I made a decision. I drove to a Catholic school gymnasium, joined the old men sitting around a card table, and said I didn’t know how to go on. They did not seem to find my pain profound; they, for my benefit, brought out stories of how they’d destroyed cars, careers, and marriages until they didn’t. At home, I poured out the rum and whiskey. I broke up with the choking man. I never drank again.

  I still don’t know what to make of the hands around my neck. I feel guilty for even bringing it up. The choking was not, I feel certain, meant to harm me. But he never asked what I wanted before he tightened his grip on my neck while an old fear woke inside me: my breathing cut off by a man’s hands years before; somewhere in my cells, maybe, Tumulth’s neck in the ligature, the shove of the hangman, the drop, his own body tightening the noose.

  I lied to myself, decided I liked it. That was easier than telling him not just to go lighter, not just to avoid leaving bruises, but to stop. I’d been experimenting with “moderation,” but I went back to getting so drunk and high I could slip into the void where I didn’t care whether I lived or died, and so, in a blackout, might say yes or say more or say nothing. Did I ask for more? I may, in those moments I abandoned myself into memory gaps, have asked for more.

  Stevie Nicks believes in ghosts. In a 1981 Rolling Stone profile, she describes herself as “very sensitive.” She recounts a recent visit from a furniture-upending ghost. I keep trying to make sense of the opening:

  It is said that the door to the other side of this existence, to the Spirit Corridor and the Plain of Souls, has no knob on it and can only be opened from the outside. You, on this side of the door, must answer the spectral knock with a beckoning, for the Darkness cannot cross your threshold unless it is invited in.

  Which side of the door am I on?

  In my first weeks sober, I learned the term drunkalogue and that I was going to want to build one. Nobody wanted to know about my job. My only identity, beyond the observable, was my narrative. The drunkalogue resists gaps and subtext; it is chronological, linear, and causation-driven; a good one packs the rise, climax, and fall of Freytag’s Pyramid into one riveting minute. It is meant to be spoken. I say none of this to dismiss or reduce: I’ve heard stories in meetings that I recognized as what I’d wanted God to say back when I prayed.

  Nobody sets out to craft a story of this kind—it’s not The Moth—but after a person speaks in enough meetings about what drinking was like and why it had to end, the narrative makes itself. Mine went like this: I had my first drink in high school; I drank NyQuil sometimes but stopped for a few years, started drinking hard and often partway through college, drank a lot, got sick, realized it, stopped. Alcoholism was said to be a sickness: a spiritual one, the program literature said, or a medical one, as my psychiatrist told me.

  When I reconstructed the narrative of my drinking, I kept getting stuck on the inciting incident. Drinking NyQuil was part of a timeline, but not the beginning of a story, because there was no question, no stakes. The plot point that set me on my true course came years later, my sophomore year of college: rape.

  I wanted my drinking story to be one I could tell without talking about rape. I couldn’t bring it up in meetings, so I said I’d been born thirsty, and the more I said it, the truer it seemed.

  I told myself it was my wanting that had gotten me perforated and bloody inside, my driving obsession to be loved. Alcohol doesn’t make these things happen; men do. Alcohol weakens the paper shield I hold up to stop these things from happening. It is simultaneously true that the rape was not my fault and that it wouldn’t have happened if I could stand to be alone. I’ve found only one thing that could ever obliterate the wanting: enough whiskey to scorch my stomach lining before turning me to a near corpse on the floor. Now I sit in my yearning, alone with my crystals, turning over tarot cards on the cold wood floor of my rented house.

  My great-great-grandmother Mary (or Kalliah), horseback carrier of federal mail, daughter of Tumulth, had an allotment on the Yakama Reservation, but she gave it up and returned to the river. Some white people tried to s
teal her land, because Native people couldn’t legally own land in Washington then; in 1893, President Grover Cleveland signed a bill to hold Mary’s land in trust so claim jumpers couldn’t force her from it.

  She had three husbands, as far as I know. With Louis, a Cowlitz and Frenchman, she gave birth to my great-grandmother Abbie. Abbie’s first husband, Morris, my great-grandfather, was white. He died a young man in his thirties after a few days at home with a brief and powerful illness. Years later, Abbie remarried.

  I have no husbands. No land. If my ancestors are watching me, what do they see?

  I feel like an old maid. My body is young but my heart is a crone’s. I think of Carl but won’t text him because I don’t like waiting days for his response. I’d rather petrify on my couch than go on another first date with a man who wants to explain IPAs to me, and anyway, I’m not exactly emotionally available. I spend most nights in my creaking house Google Image searching Stevie Nicks and her large sleeves. I save images while weeping and listening to “Silver Springs,” the song Stevie wrote and loved and could not get onto Rumours because that decision wasn’t hers to make. Mick Fleetwood shuttled the song into B-side obscurity. The band included the song in The Dance, its 1997 live greatest hits record, the video for which was omnipresent on VH1 the year I began looking up love spells on Ask Jeeves.

  It’s not until pining over Carl, my own brooding, curly-haired guitarist who keeps getting away and returning, that I see what was happening onstage during the performance of “Silver Springs” for The Dance: Stevie, in her characteristic wing-sleeved black dress, her hand on her neck, turns to Lindsey Buckingham and sings, I’ll follow you down ’til the sound of my voice will haunt you / You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you. The whites of his eyes are moons against the dark backdrop as he sings back and along. Never get away. She grips the mic with ringed sorcerer fingers. Never get away. Her eyes are ritual blades. Never get away. Her mouth casts a circle around them both. He never will. I watch to imitate.

  The looks between Stevie and Lindsey during “Silver Springs” supposedly didn’t happen during rehearsals for the taping of The Dance, but after they were exchanged onstage, they never went away. In every YouTube-available live performance of “Silver Springs” following that resurrection, Stevie turns to Lindsey at the same moment. Every time, the energy feels real. In 2009, Stevie told MTV News, “He’s married, he’s happy, he has three beautiful children that I love. You know, he’s found a good, happy, calm, safe place—but who Lindsey and I are to each other will never change.”

  In 2013, Lindsey told Rolling Stone, “For me, getting married and having children was a positive outcome. I wonder sometimes how Stevie feels about the choices she made, because she doesn’t really have a relationship—she has her career.”

  I buy a blonde wig. I am trying to be alone with myself, but I can manage to be alone only with my Instagram. I draw black lines on my eyelids and wear my gauziest black witch clothes. I braid my hair, gather it under a mesh cap, and lower the wig onto my skull. I set my phone camera on a timer and ask it to capture me, looking at it like a person I want to put my wet red mouth on. There’s no one in this house but me and the ghost that recently pulled my curtains off the walls and shattered a glass bowl in the drying rack while I stood at the sink. I show the ghost the tip of my thirsty tongue between my teeth.

  I’ve thought about Carl every day since I last saw him, but I hardly text him because I don’t want to be needy. After my first boyfriend broke up with me, my high school friends asked, “Do you need him because you love him, or do you love him because you need him?” How was I supposed to know?

  Nearly a year before our maybe-date, Carl broke up with me. You have to let him go, my friends said. This is toxic. But our astrological compatibility looked so strong. I’ve examined the lines crossing the chart wheel until dawn some nights, trying to see our narrative there, trying to find some meaning.

  Alone in my apartment in the days after our breakup, I began to smell the hot tang of his summer body. I saw his owl eyes mirrored in my own sockets. My gut was split by the lightning bolt of white streaking a dark curl at his forehead. Even after I put all this land between us, I’ve felt him sitting on the foot of my bed. I cast every spell I could find to sever the energetic cord, but his energy clings. A residue of his spirit nests inside my skin. He’s a living ghost haunting my house.

  In Middle English, to intoxicate was “to poison.”

  Poison, in Middle English, came from the Old French poison, meaning “magic potion,” related to the classical Latin potare, meaning “to drink.”

  In astrology, the natal chart locates the planetary positions at the time of birth. It tells a story about a lifetime of wants and weaknesses, the bundle of traits that form a person, the work we’re meant to do while living, and the timing of important events. Between Stevie’s chart and mine, I notice only one similarity of interest: the chart location of the moon’s nodes, which are points where the moon’s orbit crosses the ecliptic, the path the sun appears to follow around the earth over the course of a year. The south node represents what we’re pulled back to from previous lives, what we fall back on. The north node represents the work we need to stretch to in this lifetime.

  For both Stevie and me, the north node is in Taurus and the first house (the house of self), and the south node is in Scorpio and the seventh house (the house of partnerships). This means we’re meant to learn to love ourselves, embrace independence, trust our intuition, and let go of codependency. We look for soulmates who can never complete us, because we need to stop trying to grow through others. I don’t like this. I want to grow through another by incorporating him into my being and becoming twice as large.

  I have loved manboys who couldn’t love me back. I’ve placed myself alone in strange bars, my intuition a heavy potion in my gut, because I thought I might find love there. I’ve struggled with sleep on nights when men lay openmouthed and cadaverish in my small bed. I’m a pretty wretch with red intention candles, heart-shielding labradorite necklaces, three dozen black dresses and no white ones, staples-and-string binding spells to immobilize the men who truly scarred me and would do it again. I keep letting myself hope that, this time, I really will be loved. But I need to work on devotion to my own swollen heart.

  In light of what I’ve learned about my nodal destiny, I decide to buy a house. In Ohio, a house is not an abstraction. I’m driving around, compiling mental catalogs of every neighborhood bar despite myself, considering getting a house with enough space for a husband, when Carl texts me. It’s been a week since I asked about a pot of soup he’d posted on Instagram. He replies with no words, just a link to a recipe. I don’t open it.

  I haven’t touched a man under his clothes in so long I’ve reverted to my high school freshman self, interested in touching someone under his clothes but skeptical that it will ever happen. I lusted after my friend’s older brother, whose face I’d seen glowing like a moon outside the school one day. Eventually, he became my first boyfriend, and when he put his tongue in my mouth in the hallway, I attained everything I’d wanted. I sent him an email about the ways I was going to touch him, but instead of replying, he asked his sister to tell me we were broken up.

  The next day, I wrapped my wrists in medical gauze, dotted them with red food coloring, and went to school. He saw and walked away. I shoved nasty rectangles of folded loose-leaf into his locker, but he didn’t write back. I wanted him, but I could only spit poison. I soon began drinking NyQuil on Fridays, then whenever.

  It’s hard to know how to make sense of this opening to my drinking history. Before I was raped, I didn’t drink heavily, but before I was raped, for a short while, I did drink full bottles of cough elixir meant to be sipped from a tiny cup. Maybe the story didn’t start in either place. Or maybe a causal chain will never work because multiple causes, some mostly mystery, interwound to make me need to alter reality. Even before I couldn’t bear the violence of th
e world, I flailed against it because it wasn’t enough.

  The night of our last date, Carl slept over, but we agreed it would be friendship sleeping only. Then he changed his mind. I hold on to my modest collection of memories of that night, as though I could use them to conjure up his body:

  My knees touching his knees under the empty egg plate while I asked, “Do you think, if one of us dies, the other will know?”

  My fingers under the soft rag of his old T-shirt.

  My thirsty tongue, wet again in his mouth.

  In Astrology for the Soul, Jan Spiller says what we Taurus north node people want is to merge with another person; what we need is to stop feeding our power to another. She writes, “The first step toward self-acceptance for Taurus North Node people is to acknowledge that there is a needy person inside and to take personal responsibility for filling those needs.”

  It takes great effort, but I do not text Carl back about the soup.

  In Destiny Rules, a documentary about the making of Fleetwood Mac’s 2003 record, Say You Will (the occasion for their first studio reunion in fifteen years), it’s clear Stevie never got over Lindsey. Maybe he didn’t get over her, either, but I’m fresh out of interest in the inner workings of complicated men.

  Lindsey and Stevie sit in the house rented for the recording process and talk over Lindsey’s concerns about Stevie’s lyrics. He’s brought up tense and person disagreement, but he seems to be talking about something other than how to “strengthen the narrative.” He asks, “When you say, ‘Now you’re going home,’ who are you talking about?”