Matchmaking for Beginners
Page 57
“Would you please even look at the book of spells? I know you could find something in there to help us. This girl at my school said she knows this psychic lady and she rubs people’s heads and tells them what’s going to happen. So I know you could just read some words. I’d do it myself except you and Blix are the ones with the magic.”
“How do you know that?” I say.
He shrugs. “I dunno. I just know it.”
I glance over at the bookshelf, where the book of spells sits, bulging with papers. Its cover looks torn. Funny how some days I don’t even see it there, and some days it’s the focal point of the whole kitchen.
Like now.
Andrew, with his usual hangdog countenance (what I assume is the result of a perpetual, lifelong guilty conscience) arrives then, and Sammy leaves with his dad, trailing his overnight bag and holding on to his soccer ball, giving me backward looks and wagging his eyebrows at me. He mouths, “DO IT” as they leave. I sit there drinking my tea for a long while, listening to the way the house settles and creaks. The windows need washing. Everything needs washing around here.
I should call a real estate agent, find out what I have to do to put the place on the market. Why don’t I ever seem able to set all this in motion?
Bedford, lying at my feet, turns over in his sleep and thumps his tail. Tap tap tap.
I wash the dishes and sweep the kitchen floor, then go outside to get some fresh air. The wind is whipping up the trees. Patrick has put the recycling out by the curb and it’s full of cardboard boxes and containers. I look longingly at his apartment; the windows with the wrought-iron bars are a perfect metaphor for everything about Patrick.
Lola’s shades are up, I’m pleased to see. She got a pacemaker last week, and it’s made her feel worlds better, she says, filled with energy she hasn’t felt in years.
I pull the dead leaves off the rosebush and then traipse up the stairs and straighten the Tibetan prayer flags on my way inside. Maybe I should call my sister—but then I find myself standing in front of the book of spells.
It would not hurt to look at this book.
I could open it up and see how ridiculous it is—probably just a book of parlor games. Somebody probably gave it to Blix as a joke, a nod to her interest in unconventional things.
I open the front cover. There are a whole bunch of papers shoved between the pages, so I take them out very carefully and set them aside. They are grocery lists, little doodles, a note Blix evidently wrote to Houndy reminding him to bring home four extra lobsters because Lola and Patrick were both coming over for dinner. (Patrick came up for dinner? Really?) All the stuff of life that you shove away somewhere when company is coming over and you aren’t ready to sort through the papers cluttering the table.
But the book itself. The book is trying very hard—too hard—to be serious. It has a whole section about the history of spells, blah blah blah, an explanation of how humans have always thought they needed to claim some influence over the vagaries of life. And then, getting down to business, there are some five thousand actual spells for everything: cleansing energy, winning court cases, ensuring protection, finding lost objects, healing disease, getting money—and, of course, a huge section on love and sex.
In the love section, there are mentions of ingredients for a proper spell: rosemary, roses, chamomile. Some vanilla beans wouldn’t hurt.
A piece of paper falls out onto the floor.
On it, I see that someone has written in a scratchy light scrawl: “Lola open heart love brave dream. You know the man now. The man who will love you.”
At the very back of the book, there’s a thin green leather journal wedged between a couple of pages, wrapped up with a brown cord with a star charm attached.
I shouldn’t open this. Blix’s secrets are there, I’m sure of it.
But maybe—maybe she wanted me to see it. This isn’t exactly hidden away, after all. She could have destroyed all the things she didn’t want found. It wasn’t like her death surprised her; she knew for ages she was going to die. No, I am certain she put everything exactly where she wanted it, and for a purpose.
My hand touches the leather cord, and I take a deep breath, and then I’m pulling on it slightly and opening the journal. I’ll read a little bit, I tell myself. See if she mentioned me. I have a right to know if I was mentioned in her journal, don’t I? After all, she left me her house—maybe there are instructions here on what else I should be doing.
And there it is, the thing that breaks my heart.
She has listed the spells she was using for healing, and the date she employed each one, and the results. The Acorn Good Health Spell, for instance, that she used the previous fall. “I threw the acorns in the air. They scattered over the ground.”
On another page of her journal: “I’m frightened sometimes in the morning. I look at Houndy and I feel the fear. But it’s not like I’m desperate,” she wrote in a beautiful, looping scrawl with curlicues and little stars. “Everyone thinks medical science can cure this cancer. Why don’t they see what I see? That death is not the enemy.” Here she drew a starburst. “I know that my tumor is a living entity and that the tumor and I together can heal ourselves if it is meant to be that way.”
I turn the page and see, “I am not afraid of death, and I am not afraid of life. These days are full of passion and love and richness, now that I know the end is coming. I carry the ocean in my blood. I float out into the night, knowing that when the time comes, I will leave on the luminous huge milky moon. I am disappearing by degrees, yet I want to stay longer, look back at my whole glorious life. Where did you go?”
Later, she invoked Obatala, whoever that is, and said she’d gone out at night, offering him milk and coconut, for healing. She summoned the Dark Moon Spirit and the Ancient Egyptian Fumigation for Expelling Disease Demons.
My heart is beating hard.
Oh my goodness, she did use spells.
“I am wearing the special blessing crystals and the amber beads,” she wrote. “But Cassandra is strong. I am making myself ready, but sometimes I am filled with a longing to stay. Is that so bad, to want to stay a bit longer, to see my projects through?”
There’s a buzzing in my ears. I run my fingers over her printing. Where she wrote Cassandra’s name the handwriting is jazzy, almost childlike, with lowercase letters all in different colors. She dug into the paper so hard that when I run my fingers over the name, the writing feels almost three-dimensional.
A few more pages in: “Houndy calling to me from the other side. Last night I saw my mother and my grandmother and sat with them in an orchard. My mother told me that I know what I need to do. I had a conversation with Houndy, and he reached over and touched my arm and it left a little mark. He says Patrick will see me through. Patrick knows the way.”
I am fingering the pages, letting my eyes drift over them—when I hear the front door slam.
I jump up, startled and guilty. Bedford lifts his head and wags his tail.
“Marnie! You home?” calls Noah up the stairs, and I close the book quickly, shoving the journal deep inside—except that as I do, I see my name on a tiny piece of paper lodged into the binding of the book, and I pull it out, fast.
At the top she’s written the date, September 10, which I remember was the day before she died. The handwriting looks like it was scratched with a pencil that had hardly any lead left to it. I have to strain to see what it says.
Then my heart twists. She has written in capital letters, each one etched deep into the paper:
MARNIE NOAH HAS TO LEAVE DO NOT LET HIM STAY!!
THIRTY-FOUR
MARNIE
I’ve only barely managed to stash the book of spells away when Noah clumps up the stairs, bringing his jangly, disruptive vibes into the room.
Blix didn’t want Noah here. Blix didn’t want Noah here. Blix didn’t want Noah here. That sentence runs through my head on a continuous loop—and now here he is, standing in front of me, eyes crinkled in a smile—and I’m in the middle of the kitchen, feeling like a trapped animal. Who stands in the very middle of the kitchen, for heaven’s sake? And who stands there looking like she just completed the hundred-yard dash to arrive there, cheeks flushed, hair standing on end, looking like she’s just seen a ghost?
“How do you know that?” I say.
He shrugs. “I dunno. I just know it.”
I glance over at the bookshelf, where the book of spells sits, bulging with papers. Its cover looks torn. Funny how some days I don’t even see it there, and some days it’s the focal point of the whole kitchen.
Like now.
Andrew, with his usual hangdog countenance (what I assume is the result of a perpetual, lifelong guilty conscience) arrives then, and Sammy leaves with his dad, trailing his overnight bag and holding on to his soccer ball, giving me backward looks and wagging his eyebrows at me. He mouths, “DO IT” as they leave. I sit there drinking my tea for a long while, listening to the way the house settles and creaks. The windows need washing. Everything needs washing around here.
I should call a real estate agent, find out what I have to do to put the place on the market. Why don’t I ever seem able to set all this in motion?
Bedford, lying at my feet, turns over in his sleep and thumps his tail. Tap tap tap.
I wash the dishes and sweep the kitchen floor, then go outside to get some fresh air. The wind is whipping up the trees. Patrick has put the recycling out by the curb and it’s full of cardboard boxes and containers. I look longingly at his apartment; the windows with the wrought-iron bars are a perfect metaphor for everything about Patrick.
Lola’s shades are up, I’m pleased to see. She got a pacemaker last week, and it’s made her feel worlds better, she says, filled with energy she hasn’t felt in years.
I pull the dead leaves off the rosebush and then traipse up the stairs and straighten the Tibetan prayer flags on my way inside. Maybe I should call my sister—but then I find myself standing in front of the book of spells.
It would not hurt to look at this book.
I could open it up and see how ridiculous it is—probably just a book of parlor games. Somebody probably gave it to Blix as a joke, a nod to her interest in unconventional things.
I open the front cover. There are a whole bunch of papers shoved between the pages, so I take them out very carefully and set them aside. They are grocery lists, little doodles, a note Blix evidently wrote to Houndy reminding him to bring home four extra lobsters because Lola and Patrick were both coming over for dinner. (Patrick came up for dinner? Really?) All the stuff of life that you shove away somewhere when company is coming over and you aren’t ready to sort through the papers cluttering the table.
But the book itself. The book is trying very hard—too hard—to be serious. It has a whole section about the history of spells, blah blah blah, an explanation of how humans have always thought they needed to claim some influence over the vagaries of life. And then, getting down to business, there are some five thousand actual spells for everything: cleansing energy, winning court cases, ensuring protection, finding lost objects, healing disease, getting money—and, of course, a huge section on love and sex.
In the love section, there are mentions of ingredients for a proper spell: rosemary, roses, chamomile. Some vanilla beans wouldn’t hurt.
A piece of paper falls out onto the floor.
On it, I see that someone has written in a scratchy light scrawl: “Lola open heart love brave dream. You know the man now. The man who will love you.”
At the very back of the book, there’s a thin green leather journal wedged between a couple of pages, wrapped up with a brown cord with a star charm attached.
I shouldn’t open this. Blix’s secrets are there, I’m sure of it.
But maybe—maybe she wanted me to see it. This isn’t exactly hidden away, after all. She could have destroyed all the things she didn’t want found. It wasn’t like her death surprised her; she knew for ages she was going to die. No, I am certain she put everything exactly where she wanted it, and for a purpose.
My hand touches the leather cord, and I take a deep breath, and then I’m pulling on it slightly and opening the journal. I’ll read a little bit, I tell myself. See if she mentioned me. I have a right to know if I was mentioned in her journal, don’t I? After all, she left me her house—maybe there are instructions here on what else I should be doing.
And there it is, the thing that breaks my heart.
She has listed the spells she was using for healing, and the date she employed each one, and the results. The Acorn Good Health Spell, for instance, that she used the previous fall. “I threw the acorns in the air. They scattered over the ground.”
On another page of her journal: “I’m frightened sometimes in the morning. I look at Houndy and I feel the fear. But it’s not like I’m desperate,” she wrote in a beautiful, looping scrawl with curlicues and little stars. “Everyone thinks medical science can cure this cancer. Why don’t they see what I see? That death is not the enemy.” Here she drew a starburst. “I know that my tumor is a living entity and that the tumor and I together can heal ourselves if it is meant to be that way.”
I turn the page and see, “I am not afraid of death, and I am not afraid of life. These days are full of passion and love and richness, now that I know the end is coming. I carry the ocean in my blood. I float out into the night, knowing that when the time comes, I will leave on the luminous huge milky moon. I am disappearing by degrees, yet I want to stay longer, look back at my whole glorious life. Where did you go?”
Later, she invoked Obatala, whoever that is, and said she’d gone out at night, offering him milk and coconut, for healing. She summoned the Dark Moon Spirit and the Ancient Egyptian Fumigation for Expelling Disease Demons.
My heart is beating hard.
Oh my goodness, she did use spells.
“I am wearing the special blessing crystals and the amber beads,” she wrote. “But Cassandra is strong. I am making myself ready, but sometimes I am filled with a longing to stay. Is that so bad, to want to stay a bit longer, to see my projects through?”
There’s a buzzing in my ears. I run my fingers over her printing. Where she wrote Cassandra’s name the handwriting is jazzy, almost childlike, with lowercase letters all in different colors. She dug into the paper so hard that when I run my fingers over the name, the writing feels almost three-dimensional.
A few more pages in: “Houndy calling to me from the other side. Last night I saw my mother and my grandmother and sat with them in an orchard. My mother told me that I know what I need to do. I had a conversation with Houndy, and he reached over and touched my arm and it left a little mark. He says Patrick will see me through. Patrick knows the way.”
I am fingering the pages, letting my eyes drift over them—when I hear the front door slam.
I jump up, startled and guilty. Bedford lifts his head and wags his tail.
“Marnie! You home?” calls Noah up the stairs, and I close the book quickly, shoving the journal deep inside—except that as I do, I see my name on a tiny piece of paper lodged into the binding of the book, and I pull it out, fast.
At the top she’s written the date, September 10, which I remember was the day before she died. The handwriting looks like it was scratched with a pencil that had hardly any lead left to it. I have to strain to see what it says.
Then my heart twists. She has written in capital letters, each one etched deep into the paper:
MARNIE NOAH HAS TO LEAVE DO NOT LET HIM STAY!!
THIRTY-FOUR
MARNIE
I’ve only barely managed to stash the book of spells away when Noah clumps up the stairs, bringing his jangly, disruptive vibes into the room.
Blix didn’t want Noah here. Blix didn’t want Noah here. Blix didn’t want Noah here. That sentence runs through my head on a continuous loop—and now here he is, standing in front of me, eyes crinkled in a smile—and I’m in the middle of the kitchen, feeling like a trapped animal. Who stands in the very middle of the kitchen, for heaven’s sake? And who stands there looking like she just completed the hundred-yard dash to arrive there, cheeks flushed, hair standing on end, looking like she’s just seen a ghost?
