Practical Magic - Alice Hoffman [40]
“I don’t think you’re screwed up,” Sally tells her sister. A white lie doesn’t count if you cross your fingers behind your back, or if you tell it so that someone you love will stop crying.
“Ha.” Gillian’s voice breaks in two, like a hard piece of sugar.
“I’m really happy that you’re here.” This is not an outright lie. No one knows you like a person with whom you’ve shared a childhood. No one will ever understand you in quite the same way.
“Oh, yeah, right.” Gillian blows her nose on the sleeve of her white blouse. Antonia’s blouse, actually, which she borrowed yesterday, and which, because it fits her so well, Gillian has already begun to consider her own.
“Seriously,” Sally insists. “I want you to be here. I want you to stay. Only, from now on, think before you act.”
“Understood,” Gillian says.
The sisters embrace and get up off the grass. They mean to go inside the house, but their gaze is caught by the hedge of lilacs.
“That’s one thing I don’t want to think about,” Gillian whispers.
“We just have to put it out of our minds,” Sally says. “Right,” Gillian agrees, as if she could stop thinking about him.
The lilacs have grown as high as the telephone wires, with blooms so abundant some of the branches have begun to bow toward the ground.
“He was never even here,” Sally says. She would probably sound more sure of herself if it weren’t for all those bad dreams she keeps having and the line of earth beneath her fingernails that refuses to come clean. This, plus the fact that she can’t stop thinking about the way he stared up at her from that hole in the ground.
“Jimmy who?” Gillian says brightly, even though the bruises he left on her arms are still there, like little shadows.
Sally goes inside, to wake Antonia and wash the breakfast dishes, but Gillian stays where she is for a while. She tilts her head back and closes her pale eyes against the sun, and thinks about how crazy love can be. That is how she is, standing barefoot in the grass, with the salt mark of tears left on her cheeks, and a funny sort of smile on her face, when the biology teacher from the high school unlatches the back gate so he can come around and give Sally the notice about the meeting in the cafeteria on Saturday night. He never gets beyond the gate, however—he’s stuck there on the path as soon as he sees Gillian, and from then on whenever he smells lilacs he’ll think about this moment. How the bees were circling above him, how purple the ink on the leaflets he’s been distributing suddenly seemed, how he realized, all at once, just how beautiful a woman can be.
ALL of the teenage boys down at the Hamburger Shack say, “No onions,” when Gillian takes their orders. Ketchup is fine, as are mustard and relish. Pickles on the side are all right as well. But when you’re in love, when you’re so fixated you can’t even blink, you don’t want onions, and it’s not to ensure that your kiss will stay sweet. Onions wake you up, they rattle you and snap right through you and tell you to get real. Go find someone who will love you back. Go out and dance all night, then walk through the dark, hand in hand, and forget about whoever it is who’s driving you mad.
Those boys at the counter are too dreamy and young to do anything but drool as they watch Gillian. And, to her credit, Gillian is especially kind to them, even when Ephraim, the cook, suggests she kick them out. She understands that theirs might just be the last hearts she will break. When you’re thirty-six and tired, when you’ve been living in places where the temperature rises to a hundred and ten and the air is so dry you have to use gallons of moisturizer, when you’ve been smacked around, late at night, by a man who loves bourbon, you start to realize that everything is limited, including your own appeal. You begin to look at young boys with tenderness, since they know so little and think they know so much. You watch teenage girls and feel shivers up and down your arms—those poor creatures don’t know the first thing about time or agony or the price they’re going to have to