“Now,” President Buer went on, “where will you find a store open on Sunday? I know where: there’s a kosher store on 4th Street and Santa Monica. It’s a deli. What would we do without the Jews? We chase them for millennia, but we’re still thankful that their stores are open on Sundays. They open at seven, but the first bus today doesn’t run until nine. Hence, you must cycle. It will take you no more than twenty minutes to get there. What time is it?” The fiend looked at the clock on the wall. “Twenty minutes past three. If you leave by six-forty, you will be back by seven thirty at the latest, in time to eat your soup and attend mass at eight, like a good Christian woman. I’ll stay here, waiting for you. I’ll watch the soup and keep it from your horrible sisters. Not that we should worry; they’ve gone back to sleep and they’re never up before nine… Now, since there’s nothing else for us to do but to wait,” he stretched his front paws, yawning, “I’ll take a nap. You should do the same. Tomorrow, that’s later today, we’ll go shopping. You’ll need lots of new clothes. You’ll be a young woman.”
He snuggled down and went to sleep on the kitchen floor. The little witch sat next to the cat and petted him. She was tired, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep until she had had her soup.
Fifteen minutes before seven, she was on her bike, clenching her coin purse in one hand like a relic.
“Don’t forget my meringues,” the cat bid farewell from the window.
Then he ran into the hallway and jumped onto Rosa’s lap.
The old woman woke up with a start.
She pushed the cat off her lap. “What am I doing still in my chair?” She cried and wheeled herself into the bedroom.
“Victoria, wake up!”
“What do you want?” Victoria mewled from her bed.
“You left me all night in my chair. I could have had a thrombosis.”
“Go back to sleep,” Victoria rolled to the other side
Rosa grabbed the glass of water that Victoria kept on the side table and threw it on her sister’s face.
“I told you to wake up,” she yelled. “Go tell your sister to make us breakfast.”
Victoria rose from the bed, reached for her walker and, with closed eyes, shuffled out of the room.
“She’s not in her shed,” she called from the backyard.
“Then it’s you who will have to make breakfast,” Rosa hollered back. “And today I want pancakes!”
Victoria reentered the house. She saw the soup on the stove and remembered that her sister had been working on it the previous night. She served two bowls and called Rosa to sit at the table.
“I said I wanted pancakes, you stupid hag. This thing smells like cat vomit,” Rosa complained.
“You’re right,” Victoria yowled, spitting the soup back into the bowl after the first spoonful. “It’s disgusting.”
“I think it needs salt,” Rosa replied.
A black hand, covered in blisters, with patches of black hair here and there, like a dog with mange, raised a salt shaker up from under the table. Victoria took the shaker, salted her bowl, and then passed it to her sister.
“Still repulsive,” Rosa commented after a noisy slurp.
Victoria agreed.
But they were hungry. They finished their bowls in a few spoonfuls.
Without any help, Rosa stood up to get seconds. Her sister did the same. Without reaching for her cane or her walker or leaning on any of the furniture, she got another serving.
“I must have been hungry. I feel much better,” Rosa said between sips with a softer voice.
“I feel awake,” her sister said.
“I feel like doing some exercise,” Rosa smiled, stretching her arms.
“I feel the same, too.”
“Maybe,” slurp, “we could go to the beach instead of going to church.”
“It’s gray outside.”
“It’ll burn off.”
“Maybe it will.” Slurp. “We could go for a swim.”
“We could.”
“Your hair looks darker.”
“Yours looks darker too. There’s a spider on the wall behind you.”
“Where?” Victoria turned her head in fear. “I don’t see it… Oh, I see.”
It was a tiny little spider the size of a pin. Victoria took off her slipper and whacked the bug on the wall. She checked the sole of her slipper, but couldn’t see the spider. Rosa used the distraction to steal a spoonful from her sister’s bowl.
“You have good eyes,” Victoria said. “How could you see it?”
“I don’t know… You’re getting thinner.”
“Am I?” Victoria asked, with a voice that sounded as if she had never smoked a cigarette in her life. She pulled at the fabric of her sleeping gown. Her breasts looked rounder and much firmer than a moment before. “You’re getting thinner too,” she said, looking at her sister. “You look ten years younger this morning. Fifteen. Maybe twenty.”
Twenty-five at this point. If asked to describe the scene, a passerby would have referred to them not as two ugly crones a footstep away from the sepulcher, but as two middle-age foxy ladies wearing old-fashioned pajamas.
“I want more soup,” Rosa stood up again.
“And now you’re walking!”
“Am I?” Rosa exclaimed, just as surprised. “I am walking. I feel stronger today. My knees don’t hurt. I’ve been taking my vitamins, you know? There’s only enough for one bowl.”
“We’ll share,” Victoria stood up and offered her plate. “Like sisters.”
Rosa poured the contents of the pot in the two plates and returned to the table.
“You’ve lost some wrinkles.”
“You’ve lost all your white hairs.”
“Your hands have no spots.”
“Your neck looks so smooth.”
“Your nose is so small.”
And their voices sounded now as sweet and melodious as birdsong at daybreak; as if they were twenty-one again, as if life was as simple as a summer day in Venice.
Then silence. The two sisters continued eating, staring at each other in awe, discovering new, younger traits in one another until, upon realizing that she was about to finish the contents of her plate again, Victoria said: “I think you got more soup than I did.”
“No, I didn’t,” her sister responded.
“Yes, you did,” Victoria insisted and tried to reach a spoonful off Rosa’s plate.
Rosa pulled her plate away from the table. “You thief!”
“You’re the thief. You served the soup. You got more than I did.”
“I didn’t,” Rosa replied. “I was fair, like Jesus. I served you half and I served the other half in my bowl—GET AWAY FROM MY SOUP!”
Victoria had tried again to reach for her sister’s bowl. In doing so, she flipped her own off the table.
“Ha!” Rosa laughed, holding her bowl over her head. “That’s what you get, you thief!”
Victoria screeched over her broken bowl and reached for the first thing at hand, the salt shaker, which she threw against her sister, hitting her right on the nose.
“You hurt me!” Rosa cried, but didn’t let her bowl of soup down.
Victoria tried to reach her over the table again, but Rosa hit her with the back of her spoon.
“That hurt!” Victoria hollered in pain.
“Stay away from my soup!”
Victoria ran around the table and grabbed Rosa by her now long and luscious brown hair. She pulled it down as low as she could. “Give me that bowl!”
Still, Rosa wouldn’t let go of it. “You want the bowl?” She rushed to lick the last drops with her tongue. “THEN HAVE IT!” she added, smacking it into her sister’s face.
Victoria let go.
“You cut me!” she yelled, taking her hand to her brow and fi
nding blood in her fingertips.
“That’s what you deserve, you thief!”
“You cut me! It’s going to leave me a scar… I’m GOING TO KILL YOU!”
“Not if I kill you first, you hag!” Rosa threatened her sister with her spoon.
Victoria reached for the cutlery drawer in the kitchen. She grabbed the first thing she found, a barbecue fork, and threw it at her sister. She failed, but Rosa cried as if she hadn’t.
“HELP! POLICE! MY SISTER IS TRYING TO KILL ME!”
Victoria now pulled out a butcher’s knife.
“Cry for help, because I am GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU!” She raised the knife and ran towards her sister.
Rosa bolted to their bedroom and locked the door behind her.
“OPEN UP!” Victoria hit the door repeatedly with the knife. “OPEN UP, ABOMINATION OF HELL! OPEN UP, TREACHEROUS MISTRESS OF SATAN!”
“FUCK YOU!” responded Rosa from inside. She had jumped on top of their bed and was holding a lamp in her hands, ready to smash it on top of her sister’s head in case she tore down the door to get to her. “FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU A MILLION TIMES, YOU PATHETIC IMITATION OF A WOMAN!”
Victoria continued kicking the door from outside. “I’m going to make you a new box!”
“Why? Is your cancer-filled butthole discharging too much pus?” Rosa yelled, at the same time wondering if she could escape through the back window. “Try it! Try to open that door—Ah!” She screamed when her sister began slamming her body against it.
Strong as she felt that morning, taking down the door by hitting it with her shoulder proved to be too difficult a task for Victoria. The cut in her brow was still bleeding and now her whole arm was sore from the banging. She pulled up the sleeve of her pajamas and saw her arm bruised and discolored. She also noticed, as she looked down, that the corns on her feet were gone and her heels were no longer covered with gray calluses. She still had the webbed toes of a duck, but other than that, her feet were those of a teenager. She raised her gown and found that she no longer had black varicose veins on her legs. Her wrath turned into bewilderment. She entered the bathroom and gazed at her reflection in the mirror. The woman that stared back at her was no longer the septuagenarian hag that needed a metal walker to move around the house, but a young maiden, a sixteen-year-old girl, with red tinted cheeks on otherwise perfectly fair skin, and dark eyes, the color of charcoal.
“Ma’am,” a cat with a British accent that Victoria didn’t remember to have seen before entered the bathroom. “You better do something about that cut.”
The cat was right. It would leave a horrible scar.
Inside the bedroom, Rosa had also discovered her own reflection on the tarnished armoire mirror. A young girl with sweet brown eyes and a rounded, youthful face looked back at her. A girl that she hadn’t seen in almost sixty years. She stepped off the bed and took a closer look at her face in the mirror. No wrinkles. The skin was firm and the color was even. No gray hairs. No warts. No purple veins on her legs. She got so distracted inspecting her own reflection that she didn’t notice her sister trying to creep into the room through the back window until she was halfway in.
“I’m going to fucking kill you!” Victoria hollered.
Rosa broke the lamp on her sister’s head and ran out of the room. She slipped and fell down, smashing her face against the frame of the door. Her sister had poured an entire bottle of shampoo on the floor.
“You fucking bitch!” she cried, trying to stand up.
Half an hour later, when the little woman returned to the house, her heart pounding as if it was going to come out of her chest, her face red and feverish, like a boy that has stolen a racy magazine, or like a millionaire with a secret on his way to the stock market, one hand clenching her coin purse and the other a box of iodized salt that claimed to be kosher, what did she find? Not a warm pot of lentil soup waiting for her on the stove, but the bodies of her two sisters floating in the middle of the canal, like two Ophelias, like a couple of lifeless water nymphs from a pre-Raphaelite painting, dead, but younger and more beautiful than she remembered they were sixty years earlier. The scum floating stagnant in the canal served like a modest cover to their wounds and nudity.
“You killed them!” President Buer yelled at the little woman.
His shape had changed again, now into that of a young man dressed in silk and blue velvet, with pearl-white, unblemished skin, a thin waist, and reddish-blond hair.
“You and your stupid obsession with looks! See what you did,” the fiend pointed at the two bodies, tears rolling down his cheeks. “That’s what jealousy and envy look like. Like two dead sisters! You shouldn’t have left them alone. You shouldn’t!”
He had changed his shape into that of a young prince, but the little woman recognized him immediately. Same eyes, same voice, same long fingers. That must have been his real shape, she realized with dismay, the one he normally presented to the subjects of his realm, Falalá-land in Gloucestershire. President Buer was a cover-up name, she reckoned—you couldn’t lead fifty-two legions in Hell and still have the time to be a witch’s familiar, could you?
“They ate all the soup.”
The little woman didn’t need to hear the fiend’s real name to know it either. He was Gillespie Oakenforest, and he wasn’t a fiend, at least not a regular one, but a fairy. He was Rosa’s long lost godfather.
Our poor friend had made the same mistake as many novice employers. She never checked for references!
24
All’s well that ends well
About the same time that morning, Josie woke up to discover that Mrs. Coenegrachts had spent the night at her bedside.
“Do you feel all right?” the woman asked in a motherly tone.
She did not. Everything hurt.
“You fell from the balcony, remember?” Mrs. Coenegrachts continued. “You have a big bump on the back of your head.”
Josie touched her head. She remembered now. Richard’s guests had brought her into the ballroom.
“Does it hurt?”
Josie nodded.
“You poor thing! I’ll go tell Mr. Wehr that you’re awake,” Mrs. Coenegrachts said and left the room.
Richard entered moments later, accompanied by a Middle Eastern man dressed in a suit. “You gave us quite a scare, Lollypop!” the millionaire said.
Josie tried to recognize Richard’s friend as one of his guests at the party but she couldn’t. Her whole body ached.
“Fortunately, Nihar, here,” Richard said, pointing at his friend, “was at the house last night, and he knew exactly what to do. He is a doctor. Have you ever seen an Indian doctor before? I wanted to rub your body with warm urine. I don’t know where I learned that you’re supposed to do that; I thought it was the right thing to do, but Nihar advised otherwise—didn’t you?—and you survived. How do you feel, Lollypop? Do you need more painkillers?”
Josie shook her head.
“You’ll be all right, miss,” the doctor said. “You just need to rest and stay away from that window.”
Richard laughed. “Now, what in God’s name were you trying to do by climbing down the balcony so late at night? I thought I had lost you! Two in one week, Nihar. Two in one week. That would have been disastrous! I should start buying girls by the half dozen—they all break! No more nocturnal fresh air for you, doll. I told Mrs. Coenegrachts to lock the doors to the balcony. And no more roving around during the day, either. You’ll stay locked inside your room day and night until we get married.” He turned to his friend: “Do you want to see the wedding gown?”
The eyes of Richard’s friend shone with enthusiasm.
“It was for Lina, originally,” Richard explained, pulling the dress out of the closet, “but of course we cannot let it go to waste.”
“It is beautiful!” the doctor exclaimed.
/> “I know!” Richard held the dress against his body and danced a few steps around the room. “I chose it myself. Lina had no taste. This young lady will have to lose some weight first, though, because she needs to look absolutely ravishing at my wedding. You have one day!” he warned Josie. “I’m planning to spend a fortune on the party and if there’s one thing I don’t want for a bride, it’s a fatty. Everything has to be wonderful, fabulous, and exquisite!”
Seeing Richard talk to his friend about the wedding dress as if she wasn’t with them in the same room helped Josie remember some specific details about the previous night’s party. The men who had carried her into the ballroom had all been young, dark, and attractive, just like Nihar, with long limbs and thin, angular features. And they all were extravagantly dressed. Some of them even wore makeup. One wore a woman’s gown. Richard, she remembered now, wore a purple a kimono. And Nihar had been wearing a blond wig!
“You are a homosexual!” Josie sprang from the bed.
“I beg your pardon?” Richard exclaimed.
To be fair, our heroine had nothing against them gayboys. She knew a few that frequented the Gas House, and she and Russell fraternized with them often, always in cordial terms, thinking of the practitioners of brown love no less and no more than of others. Love is love; she really didn’t think much about it, and homosexuals made excellent dancing partners. That morning, though, the idea of sharing the rest of her life with a sodomite throwing sex parties in the room just below hers struck her not as a chance to educate herself in the latest fashions but as repulsive.
“That is the secret that Carol mentioned last night,” Josie went on. “You’re a faggot. And that man is your lover!”
“Lollypop, Nihar is a doctor.”
“You’re disgusting!”
“Disgusting? But Lollypop…”
“Don’t call me Lollypop!”
Love, or the Witches of Windward Circle Page 41
