Practical Magic

by Alice Hoffman

  This is what it must be like to be drunk, Sally finds herself thinking, as Gary presses against her. His hands are on her skin, and she doesn’t stop him. They’re under her T-shirt, they’re into her shorts, and still she doesn’t stop him. She wants the heat he’s making her feel; she, who can’t function without directions and a map, wants to get lost right now. She can feel herself giving in to his kisses; she’s ready to do just about anything. This is what it must be like to be crazy, she guesses. Everything she’s doing is so unlike her usual self that when Sally catches sight of her image in the cloudy side-view mirror, she’s stunned. It’s a woman who could fall in love if she let herself, a woman who doesn’t stop Gary when he lifts her dark hair away, then presses his mouth to the hollow of her throat.

  What good would it do her to get involved with someone like him? She’d have to feel so much, and she’s not that kind. She couldn’t abide those poor, incoherent women who came to the aunts’ back door, and she could not stand to be one of them now, wild with grief, overcome with what some people call love.

  She pulls away from Gary, out of breath, her mouth hot, the rest of her burning. She has managed to exist this long without; she can keep on doing it. She can make herself go cold, from the inside out. The drizzle is letting up, but the sky has become as dark as a pot of ink. In the east, thunder sounds as the storm moves in from the sea.

  “Maybe I’m letting you do this so you’ll stop the investigation,” Sally says. “Did you ever think of that? Maybe I’m so desperate I’d fuck anyone, including you.”

  Her mouth tastes bitter and cruel, but she doesn’t care. She wants to see that wounded look on his face. She wants to stop this before that option is no longer hers. Before what she feels takes hold and she’s trapped, like those women at the aunts’ back door.

  “Sally,” Gary says. “You’re not like that.”

  “Oh, really?” Sally says. “You don’t know me. You just think you do.”

  “That’s right. I think I do,” he says, which is about as much of an argument as Sally’s going to get.

  “Get out,” she tells Gary. “Get out of the car.”

  At this moment, Gary wishes he could grab her and force her, at least until she gave in. He’d like to make love to her right here, he’d like to do it all night and not give a damn about anything else, and not listen if she told him no. But he’s not that kind of man, and he never will be. He’s seen too many lives go wrong when a man allows himself to be led around by his dick. It’s like giving in to drugs or alcohol or the fast cash you’ve just got to have, no questions asked. Gary has always understood why people give in and do as they please with no thought of anyone else. Their minds shut off, and he’s not going to do that, even if it means he won’t get what he really wants.

  “Sally,” he says, and his voice causes her more anguish than she would ever have imagined possible. It’s the kindness that undoes her, it’s the mercy in spite of everything that’s happened and is happening still.

  “I want you to get out,” Sally says. “This is a mistake. It’s all wrong.”

  “It isn’t.” But Gary opens the door and gets out. He leans back down, and Sally makes herself look straight ahead, at the windshield. She doesn’t dare look at him.

  “Close it,” Sally says. Her voice sounds fragile, a shattered, undependable thing. “I mean it.”

  He closes the car door, but he stands there watching. Even if she doesn’t look, Sally knows he hasn’t walked away. This is the way it has to be. She’ll be removed forever, distant as stars, unhurt and untouched, forever and ever. Sally steps on the gas, knowing that if she turned to see, she’d find he was still standing in the parking lot. But she doesn’t look back, because if she did she’d also discover how much she wants him, for all the good it will ever do her.

  Gary does watch her drive away, and he’s watching still when the first bit of lightning cracks across the sky. He’s there when the crab apple on the far side of the parking lot turns white with heat; he’s close enough to feel the charge, and he’ll feel it all the way home, as he’s high above them in the sky, headed west. With a close call like that, it makes perfect sense that he’ll be shaking as he turns the key in his own front door. As Gary understands it, the greatest portion of grief is the one you dish out for yourself, and he and Sally have both served themselves from the same table tonight, the only difference being that he knows what he’s missing, and she has no idea of what’s causing her to cry as she drives down the Turnpike.

  When Sally gets home, her dark hair loose, her mouth bruised by kisses, Gillian is waiting up for her. She’s sitting in the kitchen, drinking tea and listening to the thunder.

  “Did you fuck him?” Gillian says.

  The question is both completely startling and totally commonplace, since it’s Gillian who’s asking. Sally actually laughs. “No.”

  “Too bad,” Gillian says. “I thought you would. I thought you were hooked. You had that look in your eye.”

  “You were wrong,” Sally says.

  “Did he at least make you a deal? Did he tell you we’re not suspects? Will he let it slide?”

  “He has to think it over.” Sally sits down at the table. She feels the way she would if someone had smacked her. The weight of never seeing Gary again descends like a cloak made of ashes. She thinks about his kisses and the way he touched her, and she gets turned inside out all over again. “He has a conscience.”

  “Just our luck. And it only gets worse.”

  Tonight the wind will continue to rise, until there’s not a single trashcan left standing on the street. The clouds will be as tall as black mountains. In the backyard, beneath the hedge of thorns, the earth will turn to mud, and then to water, a pool of deception and regret.

  “Jimmy’s not staying buried. First the ring, then a boot. I’m afraid to guess what’s going to come up next. I start to think about it, and I just kind of black out. I listened to the news, and the storm that’s coming is going to be bad.”

  Sally moves her chair closer to Gillian’s. Their knees touch. Their pulse rate is exactly the same, the way it always was during a thunderstorm. “What do we do?” Sally whispers.

  It’s the first time she’s ever asked for Gillian’s opinion or advice, and Gillian follows her example. It’s actually true, what they say about asking for help. Take a deep breath and it hurts a whole lot less to admit it out loud.

  “Call the aunts,” Gillian tells Sally. “Do it now.”

  ON the eighth day of the eighth month the aunts arrive on a Greyhound bus. The minute the driver hops down, he makes certain to get their black suitcases from the luggage compartment first thing, even though the larger of their suitcases is so heavy he has to use all his strength just to budge it and he nearly tears a ligament when he lifts it out.

  “Hold your horses,” he advises the other passengers, who are all complaining that they’re the ones who must have their suitcases now in order to catch a connecting bus or run to meet a husband or a friend. The driver just ignores them and goes about his business. “I wouldn’t want you ladies to wait,” he tells the aunts.

  The aunts are so old it’s impossible to tell their age. Their hair is white and their spines are crooked. They wear long black skirts and laced leather boots. Though they haven’t left Massachusetts in more than forty years, they’re certainly not intimidated by travel. Or by anything else, for that matter. They know what they want and they’re not afraid to be outspoken, which is why they pay no attention to the other passengers’ complaints, and continue to direct the driver on how to place the larger suitcase on the curb carefully.

  “What have you got in here?” the driver jokes. “A ton of bricks?”

  The aunts don’t bother to answer; they have very little tolerance for dim-witted humor, and they’re not interested in making polite conversation. They stand on the corner near the bus station and whistle for a taxi; as soon as one pulls over, they tell the driver exactly where to go—along the
Turnpike for seven miles, past the mall and the shopping centers, past the Chinese restaurant and the deli and the ice cream shop where Antonia has worked this summer. The aunts smell like lavender and sulfur, a disquieting mixture, and maybe that’s the reason the taxi driver holds the door open for them when they arrive at Sally’s house, even though they didn’t bother to tip him. The aunts don’t believe in tips, and they never have. They believe in earning your worth and doing the job right. And, when you come right down to it, that’s what they’re here for.

  Sally offered to pick them up at the bus station, but the aunts would have none of that. They can get around just fine on their own. They prefer to come to a place slowly, and that’s what they’re doing now. The lawns are wet, and the air is motionless and thick, the way it always is before a storm. A haze hangs over the houses and the chimney tops. The aunts stand in Sally’s driveway, between the Honda and Jimmy’s Oldsmobile, their black suitcases set down beside them. They close their eyes, to get a sense of this place. In the poplar trees, the sparrows watch with interest. The spiders stop spinning their webs. The rain will begin after midnight, on this the aunts agree. It will fall in sheets, like rivers of glass. It will fall until the whole world seems silver and turned upside down. You can feel such things when you have rheumatism, or when you’ve lived as long as the aunts have.

  Inside the house, Gillian feels twitchy, the way people do before lightning is about to strike. She’s wearing old blue jeans and a black cotton shirt, and her hair’s uncombed. She’s like a kid who refuses to dress up for company. But the company’s arrived anyway; Gillian can feel their presence. The air is as dense as chocolate cake, the good kind, made without flour. The ceiling light in the living room has begun to sway; its metal chain makes a clackety sound, as if somewhere a top had been spun too fast. Gillian yanks the curtains back and takes a look.

  “Oh, my god,” she says. “The aunts are in the driveway.”

  Outside, the air is turning even thicker, like soup, and it has a yellow, sulfury odor, which some people find rather pleasant and others experience as so revolting they slam their windows shut, then turn their air conditioners on high. By evening, the wind will be strong enough to carry off small dogs and toss children from their swing sets, but for now it’s just a slight breeze. Linda Bennett has pulled into her driveway next door; when she gets out of her car, she has a bag of groceries balanced on her hip and she waves to the aunts with her free hand. Sally mentioned that some elderly relatives might arrive for a visit.

  “They’re a bit odd,” Sally warned her next-door neighbor, but to Linda they look like sweet little old ladies.

  Linda’s daughter, who used to be Jessie and now calls herself Isabella, slides out of the passenger seat and wrinkles her nose—through which she has taken to wearing three silver rings—as if she smells something rotten. She looks over and sees the aunts studying Sally’s house.

  “Who are those old bats?” the so-called Isabella asks her mother.

  Her words are carried across the lawn, each nasty syllable falling into Sally’s driveway with a clatter. The aunts turn and look at Isabella with their clear gray eyes, and when they do she feels something absolutely weird in her fingers and her toes, a sensation so threatening and strange that she runs into the house, gets into bed, and pulls the covers over her head. It will be weeks before this girl mouths off to her mother, or anyone else, and even then she’ll think twice, she’ll reconsider, then rephrase, with a “Please” or a “Thank you” thrown in.

  “Let me know if you need anything during your visit,” Linda calls to Sally’s aunts, and all at once she feels better than she has in years.

  Sally has come to stand beside her sister, and she taps on the window to get the aunts’ attention. The aunts look up and blink; and when they spy Sally and Gillian on the other side of the glass, they wave, just as they did when the girls first arrived at the airport in Boston. For Sally to see the aunts in her own driveway, however, is like seeing two worlds collide. It would be no less unusual for a meteorite to have landed beside the Oldsmobile, or for shooting stars to drift across the lawn, than it is to have the aunts here at last.

  “Come on,” Sally says, tugging on Gillian’s sleeve, but Gillian just shakes her head no.

  Gillian hasn’t seen the aunts for eighteen years, and although they haven’t aged as much as she, she never quite took notice of how old they were. She always thought of them together, a unit, and now she sees that Aunt Frances is nearly six inches taller than her sister, and that Aunt Bridget, whom they always called Aunt Jet, is actually cheerful and plump, like a little hen dressed up in black skirts and boots.

  “I need time to process this,” Gillian says.

  “Two minutes had better be enough,” Sally informs her, as she goes outside to welcome their guests.

  “The aunts!” Kylie shouts when she sees they’ve arrived. She calls upstairs to Antonia, who rushes to join her, taking two steps at a time. The sisters make a dash for the open door, then realize that Gillian is still at the window.

  “Come with us,” Kylie says to her.

  “Go on,” Gillian advises the girls. “I’ll be right here.”

  Kylie and Antonia hurry to the driveway and throw themselves at the aunts. They hoot and holler and dance the aunts around until they are all flushed and out of breath. When Sally phoned and explained about the problem in the yard, the aunts listened carefully, then assured her they’d be on the bus to New York as soon as they set out food for the last remaining cat, old Magpie. The aunts always kept their promises, and they still do. They believe that every problem has a solution, although it may not be the outcome that was originally hoped for or expected.

  For instance, the aunts had never expected their own lives to be so completely altered by a single phone call in the middle of the night those many years ago. It was October and cold, and the big house was drafty; the sky outside was so gloomy it pushed down on anyone who dared to walk beneath it. The aunts had their schedule, to which they kept no matter what. They took their walk in the morning, then read and wrote in their journals, then had lunch—the same lunch every day—mashed parsnips and potatoes, noodle pudding, and apple tart for dessert. They napped in the afternoon and did their business at twilight, should anyone come to the back door. They always had their supper in the kitchen—beans and toast, soup and crackers—and they kept the lights turned low, to save on electricity. Every night they faced the dark, since they could never sleep.

  Their hearts had been broken on the night those two brothers ran across the town green; they’d been broken so hard and so suddenly that the aunts never again allowed themselves to be taken by surprise, not by lightning, and certainly not by love. They believed in their schedules and very little else. Occasionally they would attend a town meeting, where their stern presence could easily sway a vote, or they’d visit the library, where the sight of their black skirts and boots induced silence in even the rowdiest book borrowers.

  The aunts assumed they knew their life and all that it would bring. They were well acquainted with their own fates, or so they believed. They were quite convinced nothing could come between their present and their own quiet deaths, in bed, of course, from pneumonia and complications of the flu at the ages of ninety-two and ninety-four. But they must have missed something, or perhaps it’s simply that one can never predict one’s own fortune. The aunts never imagined that a small and serious voice would phone in the middle of the night, demanding to be taken in, disrupting everything. That was the end of parsnips and potatoes at lunch. Instead, the aunts got used to peanut butter and jelly, graham crackers and alphabet soup, Mallomar cookies and handfuls of M&M’s. How odd that they would be grateful to have had to deal with sore throats and nightmares. Without those two girls, they would never have had to run down the hall in their bare feet in the middle of the night to see which one had a stomach virus and which one was sleeping tight.

  Frances comes to the porch to better assess her
niece’s house.

  “Modern, but very nice,” she announces.

  Sally feels the sting of pride. It’s as high a compliment as Aunt Frances would ever give; it means that Sally’s done it all on her own, and done well. Sally’s grateful for any kind words or deeds; she can use them. She was awake all night because every time she closed her eyes she’d see Gary so clearly it was as if he were there beside her at the kitchen table, in the easy chair, in her bed. She has a tape that keeps playing inside her head, over and over, and she can’t seem to stop it. Gary Hallet is touching her right now, he has his hands on her as she leans to grab her aunt’s suitcase. When she tries to lift this piece of luggage, Sally is shocked to discover she hasn’t the strength to do it alone. Something inside rattles like beads, or bricks, or perhaps even bones.

  “For the problem in the yard,” Aunt Frances explains.

  “Ah,” Sally says.

  Aunt Jet comes over and links her arm through Sally’s. During the summer that Jet turned sixteen, two local boys killed themselves for her love. One tied iron bars to his ankles and drowned himself in a quarry. The other was done in on the train tracks outside of town by the 10:02 to Boston. Of all the Owens women, Jet Owens was the most beautiful, and she never even noticed. She preferred cats to human beings and turned down every offer from the men who fell in love with her. The only one she ever cared for was that boy who was hit by lightning when he and his brother went tearing off across the town green to prove how brave and daring they were. Sometimes, late at night, Jet and Frances both hear the sound of those boys laughing as they run through the rain, then stumble into the darkness. Their voices are still young and filled with expectation, exactly as they sounded at the moment they were struck down.

  Lately, Aunt Jet has to carry a black cane that has a carved raven’s head; she’s bent over with arthritis, but she never complains about the way her back feels when she unlaces her boots at the end of the day. Each morning she washes with the black soap she and Frances mix up twice a year, and her complexion is close to perfect. She works in her garden and can remember the Latin name of every plant that grows there. But not a day goes by that she doesn’t think about the boy she loved. Not a moment passes that she doesn’t wish that time were a movable entity and that she could go backward and kiss that boy again.