“Later,” I said, pushing the limit. “I’ve got homework.”
“Don’t make me point!” She lifted one hand out of the bowl: it was covered with niblets of raw flesh, and pink with blood.
I felt a chill. I certainly didn’t want any pointing going on; pointing was how you directed a spell. People used to get hanged for pointing back in the old days, my mother had told me—or else they were barbecued. Death by burning at the stake was very painful, she could testify to that. There were laws against pointing, once upon a time. If you pointed at a cow and it got sick, everyone knew you were neck-deep in the Black Arts.
I flounced out of the kitchen with as much defiance as I dared. I’m not sure I’d remember now how to flounce—it’s an accomplishment, though not one you hear of teenaged girls practicing nowadays. They still pout and sneer, however, just as I did.
I moped off to my room, where I made the bed as sloppily as I could, then gathered up several days’ worth of my shed clothes and stuffed them into the laundry hamper. We had a new automatic washing machine, so at least I wouldn’t be put to work at the old wringer-washer tub.
I did collect the hair from my hairbrush and set fire to it in a red glass ashtray I kept for that purpose. My mother would be sure to conduct a hairbrush inspection, which would include the wastepaper basket, to check that I hadn’t shirked. Until a year ago my mother had worn her long, red-gold hair in an elegant French roll, but then she’d cut it off with the poultry shears—the Kim Novak look, she’d said. There had been a conflagration in the kitchen sink—she did practice what she preached, unlike some parents—and the house had stunk like a singed cat for days. “Singed cat” was her term. I’d never smelled a singed cat, but she had. Cats regularly got singed in the old days along with their owners, according to her.
There was no sense in going head-to-head with my mother. Nor could I try sneaking around behind her back: she had eyes in the back of her head, and little birds told her things. Brian would have to be given up. I had a weep about that: goodbye, Old Spice shaving-lotion aroma and the scents of cigarettes and freshly washed white T-shirts; goodbye, heavy breathing in movie theaters during the dance numbers in musicals; goodbye, feeding Brian the extra fries from my hamburger, followed by greasy, potato-flavored kisses . . . He was such a good kisser, he was so solid to hug, and he loved me—though he didn’t say so, which was admirable. Saying it would have been soft.
Later that evening, I phoned him and told him our Saturday night date was canceled. He wasn’t pleased. “Why?” he said.
I could hardly tell him that my mother had consulted some old cards with weird pictures on them and predicted he would die in a car crash if he went out with me. I didn’t need to fuel any more school rumors about her; there were more than enough as it was. “I just can’t go out with you,” I said. “I need us to break up.”
“Is there another guy?” he asked in a menacing tone. “I’ll punch his face in!”
“No,” I said. I started to cry. “I really like you. I can’t explain. It’s for your own good.”
“I bet it’s your crazy mother,” he said. I cried harder.
That night I crept out into our backyard, buried Brian’s picture under a lilac bush, and made a wish. My wish was that I would somehow get him back. But wishes made out of earshot of my mother did not come true. According to her, I lacked the talent. Perhaps I might develop it later—grow into it, as it were—but it could skip a generation, or even two. I hadn’t been born with a caul, unlike her. Luck of the draw.
The next day at school there were whisperings. I tried to ignore them, though I couldn’t help hearing the odd phrase: Cuckoo as a clock. Addled as an egg. Crazy as a box of hair. Mad as a sack of hammers. And the worst: No man in the house, so what can you expect? Within a week, Brian was going out with a girl called Suzie, though he still shot reproachful glances in my direction. I comforted myself with versions of my own saintly unselfishness: because of me, Brian’s heart was still beating. I’m not saying I didn’t suffer.
Several years later, Brian became a drug dealer and ended up on a sidewalk with nine bullets in him. So maybe my mother had got the main event right, but the time and the method wrong. She said that could happen. It was like a radio: nothing amiss with the broadcast end, but the reception could be faulty.
No man in the house described our situation. Of course, everyone has a father—or, as they would say nowadays, a sperm provider, fatherhood in the old sense of paternity having fallen into disrepute—and I had one, too, though at that date I wasn’t sure this father was still what you’d call “alive.” When I was four or five, my mother told me she’d changed him into the garden gnome that sat beside our front steps; he was happier that way, she said. As a garden gnome he didn’t need to do anything, such as mow the lawn—he was bad at it anyway—or make any decisions, a thing he hated. He could just enjoy the weather.