Girl's Guide to Witchcraft

by Mindy Klasky

CHAPTER 16

  THE NEXT DAY, I conferred with Melissa, and she suggested that I bring the pear tart to Gran’s apartment. It’s a good thing that she remembered my social calendar—I had completely forgotten that I was supposed to help Gran with a little party she was hosting for the concert opera guild board of directors.

  A soiree, she called it. They were putting the finishing touches on plans for their Harvest Gala, their biggest fund-raising event of the year. With only two weeks left until the fete, there wasn’t much to be done, but the board members enjoyed each other’s company, and Gran never passed up a chance to use her fine china.

  A gathering of operaphiles was not my first choice for a Friday night date, particularly since I was still exhausted from the night before. David had rewarded my hard work by taking me to Paparazzi, a late-night Italian restaurant down by the canal. The waiter had rolled his eyes at my order of baked ravioli, but he had conceded that the kitchen was still open despite the relatively late hour. I had not even realized that the pasta came with mozzarella cheese—stringy, baked mozzarella cheese—until after I ordered, but I decided to take my chances. After all, this wasn’t a first date, so Melissa’s food rules did not apply.

  David and I had talked until they threw us out of the place, at nearly one in the morning. We’d avoided witchcraft and Jason Templeton, managing to fill in a couple of hours of light conversation about favorite foods, treasured childhood books, and dream vacations.

  My late night activities had made for a long day at the office—a day made longer by the arrival of a thin envelope from one of the foundations I had queried about grants. That envelope contained a parsimonious half-sheet of paper with a form letter that had been photocopied so many times the words were scarcely legible. I made out the message, though. The Peabridge could not expect any funding from the Institute of Library Preservation.

  Oh well. There were more fish in that sea. Twelve more, in fact. I tried not to let myself get depressed. After all, Eleanor didn’t know that I was trying to track down grants. I didn’t need to admit my failure to her.

  By the time evening rolled around, I resorted to a Starbucks latte with an extra shot of espresso just to keep awake. No, I don’t drink coffee. But lattes are medicinal.

  Especially when I hadn’t seen my grandmother since I’d run out on her at the Four Seasons. At least we’d spoken on the phone several times in the past few days.

  Ostensibly, I was invited to this meeting as the Voice of Youth. (I could hear a chamberlain introducing me at the Gala: “Miss Jane Madison. The Voice of Youth.” Smattering of applause as I swept into the ballroom wearing a stunning gown and tiara.) The entire board wanted my opinion about what “You Young People” thought about the Harvest Gala. Apparently We Young People all think alike, act alike, and donate to charities alike.

  Would You Young People mind paying for your drinks at a cash bar? (Yes, and we’d be more inclined to donate if we felt indebted to the Guild for our liquor.) Was it sufficient to have wine and soft drinks, or was the hard stuff mandatory for You Young People? (Not mandatory, but “spirits” would loosen a lot of wallets.) Should the dress code be strictly black tie, or would that frighten off You Young People? (They should label it black tie; people would wear what they had in their closets.)

  I’m not sure why I got to make all the decisions, but it made Gran happy for me to help out. Besides, where else was I going to get such excellent counseling on my love life?

  “Wonderful to see you,” Uncle George said, kissing my cheek after I let myself in the front door. “Doesn’t that tart look delicious! And homemade? That’s where you’ve gone wrong, Jane dear. You should advertise your baking skills more. They will help you find a good man.”

  If he only knew how my cooking had worked the night before. Or that Melissa was still frustratedly single, despite being a baker extraordinaire. He only meant well, though. “Thanks, Uncle George.”

  “Your grandmother is in the kitchen.”

  I thanked him again and threaded my way through the gathering in the living room - a dozen opera fans whose average age was higher than the freeway speed limit. What did it matter, the advice that I gave at these meetings? Concert opera just did not attract young listeners; I could not think of a single person my age who went.

  In fact, with a few exceptions—Bugs Bunny cartoons or the Marriage of Figaro scene from The Shawshank Redemption—I could not think of any opera that was familiar to my peers. Certainly none that would make them fork over thousands of dollars to support the arts.

  I sighed. If I could find a few enthusiastic opera lovers, I might be able to identify someone to help support the Peabridge. I’d been upset enough about the morning’s rejection letter that I’d crumpled it and tossed it into my wastebasket. That led poor besotted Harold to hurry across the lobby and ask me if anything was wrong with the way he’d delivered my mail. It had taken nearly half an hour to reassure him, although I think that part of that time he was dragging his feet, purposely staying on to have a few more minutes to bask in the glory of my presence. Yeah. Right.

  And I need hardly add that Jason had not shown up at the library that afternoon. Not that he ever did on Fridays, but still. He could have called. To make sure that I was all right. That I hadn’t burned down anything else.

  “Jane, dear! Why so glum?” Gran looked up from the counter, where she was pouring coffee into a monstrous silver pot.

  “Nothing, Gran.” I brushed a kiss against her cheek, noticing how flushed she was in the close heat of the kitchen. “Let me take care of that.”

  “What a beautiful tart! To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  The greatest disaster of my dating life, I thought of saying. That would only worry her, though. “I had the pears sitting around, and I thought you’d enjoy the treat.”

  “How sweet of you!” Gran nodded toward a pink cardboard box. “You’ll put my store-bought cookies to shame.”

  Her cookies were shameful, but not because she bought them in a store. If she’d stopped by Cake Walk, for example, she could have had any number of toothsome treats. Instead, Gran insisted on buying from the Watergate Bakery. The name was prestigious, but the sweets hadn’t been updated since Nixon was a boy—there were plenty of pink lady-fingers and a passel of green leaf-shaped cookies, all of which crumbled into dusty remnants when you picked them up.

  Gran and I made small talk as I sat down on the floor, reaching back into the deep cabinets to retrieve her china cups and saucers, along with the dessert plates that were her pride and joy. She had polished her silver earlier in the day; the dessert forks gleamed on the countertop.

  When everything was ready to be carried into the other room, Gran laid a hand on my arm. “I’m so sorry, dear. I heard that things did not go well when you met your mother.”

  For one brief moment, I thought that Melissa must have phoned Gran, must have filled her in on the unhappy reunion. I quickly realized, though, that Clara had done the dirty work herself. She’d probably called my grandmother straightaway, reporting on all of my perceived shortcomings.

  “Yeah, well….” I shrugged and tried to figure out an explanation. Not an excuse, mind you. I didn’t have anything to excuse. Just a reason why things had not gone as Gran had hoped.

  “Your mother felt just terrible, dear. She worried that she’d put too much pressure on you, that she overwhelmed you with too much information all at once.”

  I shrugged again, feeling like a teenager who had lost the last vestige ability to communicate with her elders. If I weren’t careful, I was going to be reduced to a vocabulary consisting entirely of exasperated sighs, eye rolls, and deep grunts. I made myself say, “I think that too much time has gone by, Gran. If we were ever going to find a way to talk to each other, it had to be years ago.”

  Gran’s lips thinned into a greyish line. “We’re never so old that we don’t need people who love us.”

  “Gran, that woman doesn’t love me! She doesn’t even know
me! At most, she loves the idea of me, a perfect little girl that she tragically lost so many years ago.”

  My grandmother shook her head. “I don’t expect you to understand, Jane. You’ve never had children, so you don’t know what it’s like.” That’s right. Let’s turn this conversation into a referendum on my floundering love life and nonexistent children. Gran went on, though, obviously unaware of how much her words bothered me. “You can’t imagine how it feels, Jane. A mother is always connected to her children. She always feels the bond that once fed them, nourished them, kept them safe and sound—”

  Gran would have gone on (was she really waxing eloquent about the umbilical cord, or was there something else she was getting at?) but she started coughing. She made a terrible noise, deep and wheezing, as if her lungs were melting inside her chest.

  “Gran!” I said, throwing an arm around her waist to support her. She felt so frail, so tiny. For one terrible moment, I realized that my grandmother was old. Not old as in she-liked-opera. But old. Old as in she-was-going-to-die-some-day. Old.

  Her face turned crimson with the exertion of her coughing, and she turned away from me. I didn’t know whether she was trying to hide her weakness or just keep her face away from the counter, the cups, and the food. The motion, though, only served to make her look more vulnerable.

  I grabbed a glass and filled it with water, but she waved me away. By then, she was able to snag great shuddering breaths in between coughs. Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes, but I wasn’t sure if she was crying from emotion or physical effort.

  When the coughing finally died away, she accepted the water, sipping it slowly. After emptying the glass, she set it firmly on the counter. She gathered up her apron and used the hem to wipe at her eyes. She turned to the sink and washed her hands, lathering them up like a surgeon getting ready to enter the operating room.

  “Gran!” I said, when she started to pick up the saucers as if nothing had happened. “How long have you had that cough?”

  “It comes and goes.”

  “Comes and goes! It sounds like you’ve got pneumonia!”

  “It’s allergies. You know, the changing seasons always get to me.”

  I knew that spring always got to her. Spring, and its pollen. My grandmother had never had a problem with ragweed, or mold, or burning leaves. As if anyone still burned leaves in the fall. “You’ve never had problems in September before.”

  “I’m fine, Jane. Just fine.” She patted my hand and turned to the door, only to draw herself up short. “If you really are worried, though, there is one thing you can do, dear.”

  “What?” I would do whatever she asked. Run out to the drug store. Phone her doctor’s emergency line. Take her to the hospital.

  “Make me a promise.”

  “Gran!”

  “Promise me that we’ll go to the Smithsonian, next Saturday. A week from tomorrow. The Natural History Museum, like we used to visit when you were a little girl.”

  “Gran, I haven’t—”

  “Promise me! The three of us will go—you, me, and your mother.”

  I wanted to say no. I wanted to tell her that I had work to do. I wanted to make up some hot date, or some important library meeting, or some absolute need to wash my hair.

  But her coughing fit had frightened me. My grandmother wasn’t going to be around to extract promises forever.

  And, I had to admit, there was a teeny, tiny part of me that wanted to give Clara one more try. After all, she was my biological mother. And we’d spent less than an hour together. Her whole cult thing couldn’t possibly be as alarming as I’d made it out to be. And she certainly couldn’t be as into crystals as she’d seemed.

  “All right, Gran. Next Saturday.”

  “Wonderful. We’ll meet at the elephant. At 10:00.”

  The giant bull elephant was in the building’s rotunda; it greeted thousands of amazed tourists every single day. I had marveled at him when I was a little girl, inventing long, involved stories about his elephant wife and elephant children, and their happy lives in the African bush. Father, mother, perfect kids. Life was simple back then.

  “Now you bring in the tart, dear. We’ll serve it out here.” Then my grandmother swept into the living room, apologizing for her delay and serving up coffee, tea, tart, and crumbling cookies.

  I found myself sitting next to Samuel Potter, an old friend of Uncle George and the newest member of the concert opera guild board. “So, Jane,” he said. There was a glimmer in his eye, and I suspected that he pulled coins out of his own granddaughters’ ears. “Do you come to these little get-togethers every month?”

  “Oh, no. Only when I can help with the Gala planning.” That sounded wrong, as if I thought there was something wrong with opera, or with the board gatherings. I added, “I’m usually too busy at work.”

  “And where do you work?”

  “At the Peabridge Library.”

  “Is that part of D.C. Public?”

  I knew two things by the way he asked the question. First, he was a librarian, or someone he knew was one. We librarians were all hip and happening folks; we dropped “Library” from the names of major systems because we all knew what we were talking about. I had once dreamed of being a reference librarian at “New York City Public”, until Melissa told me that I sounded totally affected, phrasing it that way.

  The other thing, though, was more important: My magic spell was still working. I recognized the expression on Mr. Potter’s face; I’d come to know it well over the past couple of weeks. He was nowhere near as smitten as poor Harold Weems, but Mr. Potter was attracted to me. Not in an icky, dirty old man way. Rather, in an avuncular way. I thought that he might buy me a box of salt water taffy, or invite me to an ice cream social. And there was a part of me that was pleased to have that effect on him.

  I really had meant to ask David about that spell. About ways to soften its effect, or to withdraw it altogether. I’d forgotten, though, the night before. We’d had too many other things to talk about.

  Withdrawing from the only good memory of the night before, I smiled at Mr. Potter. “No, the Peabridge is a private library. We specialize in colonial America.”

  “Ah! I’ve walked by your place! You’re over by the University, right? In the heart of Georgetown?”

  I agreed that we were. Mr. Potter told me that he took his dog for a walk near us almost every evening. The shih-tzu had actually belonged to Mrs. Potter, but poor Lucinda had passed away about six months before. She was the one who had been a librarian, a cataloger. She’d always loved the profession.

  “I’m sorry that I didn’t have the chance to meet her, Mr. Potter.”

  “Aren’t you a dear.” He patted my hand. “She spoiled that silly dog as if it were her own flesh and blood baby. We were never blessed with children.”

  So much for his pulling coins from his granddaughters’ ears. Now I wanted to pat his hand. He shook his head, though, as if he were well-accustomed to changing his mood by force of will. “So tell me, dear. What do you do at the Peabridge?”

  “I’m a reference librarian by training.” Because I was at the board meeting of an arts society, I felt compelled to add, “But I’ve become involved with development lately.” Development. Not fund-raising. I’d picked up the lingo in the course of drafting my grant applications.

  “Have you now? What sort of projects are you working on?”

  “I’ve started to apply for grant funding. We’ve got several specific projects that we want to take on, cataloging our collection of manuscripts, developing a system to track all of our ephemera.”

  “Ah… My Lucinda would have loved to talk to you about those things. When we lived in Indianapolis, she got our little opera library in order. She organized all of the sheet music, along with the archives of programs, production notes….”

  “She sounds like a very interesting woman. Dedicated, too.”

  “She would have loved the Harvest Gala,” Mr. Potter said
. His eyes started to look sad again, but he speared a bite of pear tart into his mouth. “Oh! This is wonderful!” He smiled at me conspiratorially. “Much better than those nasty cookies from the Watergate.”

  I laughed out loud, and then I needed to make up an explanation when Uncle George asked me what was so funny. I didn’t want him to think that I disrespected Gran’s choices, even if she did woefully misjudge baked goods.

  The rest of the evening passed quickly. Gran led the review of plans for the Gala. Ticket sales were strong. The reach-out program to local universities seemed to have worked; there were more young people (everyone turned to smile at me) than the Guild had seen in years. The caterer was an opera fan himself, and he was upgrading the hors d’oeuvres as a donation to the Guild. The silent auction was organized; a fussy-looking woman sitting on the chaise lounge had agreed to print out the bid sheets on her home computer.

  In fact, the meeting would have been perfect, if Gran had not succumbed to two more coughing fits. The first one left her surrounded by her fellow board members, each trying to help in perfectly ineffective ways, passing over glasses of water, trying to fan her with napkins, patting the backs of her hands. The second fit must have given her some warning; she said that she had something to check on in the kitchen and escaped before it grabbed hold completely.

  I followed her out of the room, trying to avoid setting off an alarm among the guests even as I moved quickly. The spasm wasn’t as bad as its predecessors, and Gran caught her breath quickly. “Silly me. I must have swallowed something wrong.”

  “Don’t play around with this, Gran. If you’re still coughing tomorrow, I want you to phone Dr. Wilson.”

  “He doesn’t want to waste his time with the likes of me. Especially on the weekend.”

  “You’re not a waste of time. You’re his patient.”

  She made a noise that sounded like, “Pshaw.”

  “Gran,” I said. “Come on, now. Promise me. You’re the only grandmother I’m ever going to have, and I don’t want to see you suffer like this for no reason.”

  She smiled at the mock warning tone in my voice. She’d used it often enough on me. “Fine, Jane. I promise.”

  By the time we returned to the living room, the meeting was breaking up. I collected another round of compliments on my pear tart and a handful of avowals that I would make some lucky man an excellent wife. I had my cheek pinched my Mr. Potter, and I submitted to a slobbery farewell from Uncle George. It took half an hour to gather up the china and wash it, another half hour to return all the finery to its properly appointed cabinets.

  As I slipped my coat from the hall closet, Gran rested her palm against my cheek. “Thank you, dear. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “You’d do just fine, and you know it. Besides, I enjoyed the meeting. I think the Gala is going to be wonderful.”

  “I certainly hope so.” She smiled. “It’s late, sweetheart. Why don’t you just go sleep in your old room?”

  Gran had kept my bedroom set up, almost as a shrine. It had last been decorated when I was sixteen years old. Although I had torn down the movie star posters and taken the high school yearbook photos from the frame of my mirror, I couldn’t do anything about the Barbie pink color that I had once thought was the height of sophistication. I’d tried to convince Gran that she should convert my bedroom into a home office, but she just laughed and reminded me that she didn’t work from home. And I have to admit, a part of me was pleased that everything was just the way I’d left it.

  Of course, I couldn’t sleep in Gran’s apartment. I had to go home and feed Stupid Fish. I had to make sure that Neko had not gotten into any trouble. I had to start organizing those books in the basement; there were several spells that David had mentioned the night before that seemed intriguing.

  Besides, Jason might have called.

  My life was much more complicated than Gran needed to know. I laughed as if I thought she was joking about my spending the night. She sighed but saw me to the door. “Now, you aren’t going to take a bus at this hour are you?”

  “Of course not, Gran. I’ll take a cab.”

  “I can give you money.”

  “I don’t need your money.” I patted my purse. “I’ve got my own.”

  “Promise!” she insisted.

  “I promise!”

  My fingers were still crossed as I walked out the door of her apartment building and headed up the street. I went two blocks north, up to Calvert, so that there was no possible way for her to see me getting on to the 42R. My timing was good. I only needed to wait five minutes, and I got a seat at the front of the bus. I wondered if I could find a spell to make all of my transportation endeavors work so flawlessly.