Authors: Mary Rickert
Nan widens her eyes, pulls her chin in slightly, and lowers her voice, trying to affect Mavis’s rasp. “In Africa, there will be no young people with impossible names, like Howard!”
Ruthie has a surprising laugh, girlishly clean and light. She lifts a soapy hand, waving tiny bubbles in the air, signaling Nan to stop, which only inspires her all the more.
“In Africa, there will be no tiresome people. I shall sleep with lions and dine with kings.”
Ruthie splashes one hand into the bubbles and presses the other tightly over her mouth. Nan suspects immediately what has happened. She composes herself as she turns, but how funny is this, Mavis standing there, holding the door open with one foot, her red lips smeared, her drawn eyebrows sharp against her pasty skin, blinking like someone surprised by the light.
Nan steals herself for the imperious remark sure to come, but Mavis only cocks her head ever so slightly, shakes it a bit, and says, “I wonder if either of you have seen my cigarettes?”
Nan points at the pack on the kitchen counter. “Mavis, I hope I didn’t make you feel bad. The wine has made me silly and…”
“Feel bad?” Mavis says sharply as she drops one hand, clawlike, across the cigarettes. “Why would I feel bad about being made to look ridiculous?”
“Are you upset?” Ruthie asks.
“I’m too old to be upset, don’t you know? Too old for Africa, but you do know that, don’t you? Just too damn old for almost anything.”
It is quite shocking to hear Mavis’s voice tremble. Ruthie rushes to give her a hug. After a moment, Nan joins them, noting that Ruthie smells like lemons but Mavis smells like dust. Ruthie, though she has lost all that weight, is soft and easy to hold, while Mavis is hard as stone, which has the effect of quickly dispersing them.
“We need to discuss why we’re here,” Mavis says.
“Well, I figured it out.” Ruthie squirts more dish soap into the water; Nan makes a mental note that she’ll need to restock soon. “I wrote the date down correctly. I know because I have my book with me. Every time Nan and I talked, I checked. I always had it right. I had the date right, it’s the day I got mixed up. Do you see? I had the right date all along; I just thought it fell on a different day! I do this sort of thing frequently. My husband says I’m an idiot half the time and the other half…well, any who, do you see what I mean? Am I making sense?”
“What are you talking about?” Mavis asks. “This is the right day. I wouldn’t make a mistake like that.”
Nan looks at the plate she is drying, a white plate with a border of pink and yellow flowers. Strange, the things one remembers: the sunny morning when she bought it at a tag sale forty-some years ago, when she thought mixed china would be her pattern of choice for all those dinner parties that never happened. She tries to concentrate, but she is tired, and nothing Ruthie says makes much sense.
“I’m just saying it was meant to be, that’s all,” Ruthie says.
With a grunt, Mavis pulls out a chair and sits, taps out a cigarette and places it, unlit, between her lips, where it droops from her bright red mouth. Beneath the glare of kitchen light, the lipstick’s glamorous effect has been replaced by something else; her complexion, white, her hooded, lashless eyes, the drawn eyebrows beneath the shock of lavender hair—why, Mavis looks a bit clownish! She turns slowly, her head held at an odd angle as if burdened by some invisible weight, as though she read Nan’s mind while Nan, for her part, is suddenly filled with dread. After all, in spite of Mavis’s new appearance, her attitude remains unchanged, as if she has never been guilty of anything.
“Where’s Bay?” Nan asks.
Mavis talks around the unlit cigarette dangling from her mouth. “She’s with the boy.”
“You left her alone with him?”
“She’s perfectly safe.”
“How do you know that? How do you know she’s safe? Have you seen the way she looks at him?”
Mavis takes a cold drag on her cigarette. “And?”
“And what?”
“Have you noticed what part of the formula is missing?”
“Mavis, I don’t—”
“The boy is not interested.”
Of course Bay is too young for romance and doesn’t need some boy to save her life. Yet, how could Howard not feel honored to be a recipient of her affection? “How is that possible?”
“Gay.”
“Howard? Are you sure?”
“He told me so himself. That’s why he came home this weekend. To tell his folks.”
“They don’t know?” Nan asks, wondering at Mavis’s power to charm deep secrets from dark hiding places.
“They know now. They didn’t take it well, especially the father. Trust me, Nan; he has absolutely no interest in Bailey.”
Nan can’t help but feel a little sad. It’s ridiculous, of course. Doesn’t she know she can’t protect Bay from life’s disappointments? Isn’t that why she’s invited her old friends here? On the scale of disappointments, an unrequited crush, given no chance for hint of blossom, is very minor as opposed to, oh, having a mother sent to prison, for instance.
“Can we get back to something that matters?” Mavis rasps.
“Right,” says Nan, already annoyed with Mavis’s bossy ways. “I think I might be going away for a while, and I need someone to take care of Bay. You can see for yourself what a remarkable child she is, no trouble at all.” Nan works against the grimace engendered by the salty lie. “Well, hardly any.”
“Remember when Grace Winter went away,” Ruthie says. “Oh, remember that weekend?”
Nan finds herself quite relieved to be taken off this difficult subject by one of Ruthie’s strange associations. “I haven’t thought about that night in years,” Ruthie says. “We were such bad girls.”
“Bad girls?”
“I’m not talking about what happened with Eve,” Ruthie says, which in itself is shockingly close to doing so. “I haven’t forgotten our promise.”
Nan tries to hold her breath against the scent of memory, but there they are, the three of them in whispered conference, standing in the snow, promising to die with the secret of Eve’s last hours, bound by the very oath that would tear them asunder.
“I’m talking about sneaking into Miss Winter’s house.” Ruthie’s voice, cheery even in dispute, breaks through the past, and Nan squints at the summer kitchen with its divine perfume: floral, savory—a fertile scent, Nan thinks, shaking her head at the irony.
“We didn’t sneak in.”
“Nan had a key.”
“Well, of course we weren’t robbers. I’m just saying Miss Winter wouldn’t have wanted us going through her personal things. I know how I would feel if someone went through all my stuff like that. Besides, isn’t that the night we…” Ruthie stops midsentence, staring into space for so long Nan begins to wonder if she will have to slap her old friend to bring her back to her senses, but before there is time to act, Ruthie walks across the room, trailing tiny bubbles, to sit on the chair across from Mavis. “Oh, remember?”
Nan doesn’t know why they have to talk about this now. Unlike Ruthie, apparently, Nan’s spent most of her life avoiding the memory of the string of events that led from Eve’s death to Miss Winter’s house burning down: the flames swallowing the pine-swathed arbor, the snow melting at Nan’s feet, that strange noise that sounded so much like moaning. Nan pictures, as if it were a memory, though it is not, the cat’s corpse; poor Fairy, dead. She remembers Miss Winter, wrapped in an old quilt, slowly turning away from the burning to look across the not very large distance at Nan—both of them standing alone, neither making a move toward the other.
“With all this talk of being bad girls,” Mavis says, her hand shaking slightly as she fumbles with the cigarette, “I take it, Ruthie, you no longer believe?”
“Believe? Of course I believe! Oh, wait, are you saying you…do you mean…you…well, don’t be silly. Are we talking about magic? Who would believe in such nonsense? Not me, that’s for sure.”
Nan is stunned. How could she not have thought of this possibility?
“Ruthie?”
“Yes, Nan?”
“I don’t understand what… It’s wonderful to see you after all these years.”
“I feel the same way. I thought we would never see each other again. When I think of how often I wished I could call you girls, well, that’s water under the table now, isn’t it? What’s done is done. Who would have guessed? When we were young?”
“Guessed what?”
“Well, you know”—Ruthie frowns—“how long the past is. The way it just goes on and on.”
Ruthie always did have a way of veering off subject, and Nan refuses to be dragged into one of her wanderings now. “This isn’t about us. We need to talk about Bay.”
“Well, that’s my pointer,” Ruthie says. “We need to let go of the past so it doesn’t weigh down the child.”
Nan and Mavis exchange a look.
“Even as we speak, there is a circle, yes there is, a prayer circle I meant to say, in my community for Bay, and us as well. I asked them to remember all of us. Don’t look so worried. I didn’t tell them why. I just said we could use their help, isn’t that right?”
Nan mumbles a thank you as she pulls the chair away from the computer table and sits, suddenly possessed of a need for more wine.
“Now, look,” Ruthie says. “We’ve come to this naturally. We are in perfect position for a circle ourselves.”
Mavis coughs, or gasps. She makes some indefinite noise between the two. Nan rises to fill a glass with water, but Mavis waves her away, and the strange noise dissipates into a throat clearing, during which she scowls at Ruthie. When silence finally settles on the kitchen, it seems unusually thick.
“Ruthie, honey?”
Ruthie, who is looking at Mavis as though she emits a sour odor, turns to Nan with a beatific smile. “Yes?”
“I think, what I need to know, what I wonder after all these years, it’s just lovely, I mean, just lovely to see you again.”
“I feel the same.”
“Yes. But what I wonder, now that the conversation has turned this way. I understand that you, yourself, don’t believe in…well, you know, but how do you feel about, well…believers?”
Ruthie sits up, her posture, from the top of her copper-colored hair to the soles of her white-shoed feet flat on the floor, erect. She pulls her lips in tight, a morning glory shut against the dark. “Sinners? Is that the word you’re looking for?”
Mavis breaks into another coughing fit. This time Ruthie fills a glass with water. Nan studies the way Mavis arches her neck, hunching into herself, making a rather convenient ruckus, which stops abruptly when she takes the glass Ruthie offers, eyeing Nan over the rim.
“Ruthie, what I’m trying to understand is what you would do if you found out someone was an actual witch?”
Ruthie, her lips pressed thin, her eyebrows drawn close to her narrow nose, shakes her head. “No, no, no,” she says as if accused. “What are you saying? Is this some kind of trick? Did my husband put you up to this?”
“I’m talking about the way we were. I don’t even know your husband.”
“Well, you’re beginning to sound an awful lot like him. I think we can all agree that life is not a fairy tale.”
“Well no, of course not,” Nan says. “But we did read her book, didn’t we? We did try a few things. Remember?”
Ruthie’s hands are folded neatly in her lap, her lips pursed. She shakes her head. “We were playing. We didn’t understand. We were practically children ourselves. We weren’t”—she leans over to whisper the word—“witches.”
“All right then,” says Nan. “What about Miss Winter?”
“What about her?”
“Let’s say she lived here. Next door, for instance.”
“But, Nan, you don’t have any neighbors.”
“Pretend I did. It doesn’t have to make sense, Ruthie. I’m just trying to understand your position. Say, through some impossible way, Miss Winter was my neighbor today—”
“She would be well over a hundred years old by now!”
With an exhalation, Nan slumps in her chair.
Mavis raises her gaze from the glass. “What Nan is asking,” she says, drawing out the words, “is what you would do if you met a witch today?”
“A real witch?”
Mavis nods.
Ruthie looks from Mavis to Nan, settling at last to stare at some distant point between them. “Obviously, I would pray for that person to be released from evil.”
“But, Ruthie,” Nan says, “what if the person, you know, is young?”
“Young?” Ruthie says as though it is a dirty word. “Well, that would be easy enough then, wouldn’t it? The young can be retrained. Also, I’d consult an exorcist.”
Mavis, her spotted hand shaking, fumbles with the matchbook tucked into the cellophane of the cigarette package, dropping it at her feet. Ruthie leans over, but Mavis makes an odd noise—a bark? a growl?—picks it up herself, strikes the flap, and lights the long-abused cigarette.
“Ruthie, what did you think when I told you about what happened to Bay at the river?”
“Well, I, Nan, you can’t be—”
“We understood you were speaking figuratively,” Mavis says.
“Well, of course. Nan, you can’t be thinking…oh my. Nan, Nan, Nan. People get stuck in ghostwort all the time without drowning. You can’t possibly believe that sweet child out there is a witch?”
Ghostwort? Nan has never heard of such a thing. Ruthie has been mixing up words all day, and somehow she turned duckweed into ghostwort. Nan smells the sharp odor of salt permeating the scent of lemon, smoke, and the flower-scented dish soap before she even opens her mouth, but what is she supposed to do? It’s obvious she can’t tell the truth.
“Don’t be silly. Of course I don’t think Bay is a witch.”
“Well, I hope not. Teenagers are difficult, Nan. It’s just their nature. Why, my own Billy got so upset he shot his father once.”
“He shot his father?”
“Just a graze. He suffers from poor impulse control, as well as poor aim.” Ruthie sighs. “A trait that runs in the family.”
Nan starts to speak, but is cut short by a sharp throat clearing from Mavis. It is just as well. How can things be so completely messed up before they’ve even begun?
“Time for bed,” Mavis says, looking meaningfully at Nan. “We can take care of this mess in the morning.”
“Bed?” Ruthie squints at the stove-top clock. “Oh my heavens, well would you look at that? I had no idea it was so late.”