The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [76]
“Do you have names for them?” Diana asked.
“Oh no,” the old woman said, leaning back. “That would be sentimental.”
“I think we have to go now,” I announced. All this was more than enough for one day. “Our car is parked on the other side of the ridge, and we need time to get back before it gets too dark to see. We’re on our honeymoon,” I added, without thinking. It was still midday. No one paid any attention to me. I was noticing that most of the children’s faces had worn away a bit too much, and the loss of detail was unnerving. No doubt there would be a clearance sale fairly soon.
“I want that one,” Diana said, pointing toward the reclining boy whose head was propped up by his arm. “How much is it? No, I mean, how much is he?”
“I could let you have him for thirty-six dollars,” the old woman said.
“Bradley, you’ll have to bring the car around here to pick this up,” Diana said, smiling curiously at me and scratching her scalp as if in thought. “We can’t lug it back.”
“You didn’t ask me if I wanted it.”
“Oh, this is for me,” Diana told me. “I’ll just put it somewhere.” She was counting out dollar bills into Mrs. Watkins’s hand.
“What mushrooms you got there?” Mrs. Watkins asked me, pointing toward my jacket pockets.
“I don’t know their names,” I said.
“Hand them to me,” she said. “I know mushrooms.”
“No, no, I don’t think so,” I said.
Diana put her hands into my own pockets and pulled all the mushrooms out. She turned them over to the old woman, who dropped them on the ground. Then Mrs. Watkins picked up one with a red cap in her left hand — her right hand still held the cigarette — and sniffed it several times. “This is called a pungent russula,” she said. “It’s not poisonous but it’ll make you vomit. Emetica, they call it. Very delicate structure though.” She passed her fingers around the mushroom’s gills before handing it to Diana. Then she reached down for another one. I wanted to get out of there but Diana was watching all this with considerable attention. Something was happening, and I didn’t know what it was.
More sniffing from Mrs. Watkins. “This is a club foot. It’s no good for eating. The woods are full of those.” She threw it on the ground near one of the boys and reached down again. “Ah,” she said. She stubbed out her second cigarette. “Now this one is something. This one’s a parasol. This is one of the best.”
Then, and I can’t say I was prepared for this, Mrs. Watkins — with her cataracts — bit off a tiny piece of the mushroom and chewed it. “Yes,” she said, smiling, like the ebullient hobgoblin she was, “that’s indeed what it is. Here.” She held it toward Diana.
“No,” I said. “Absolutely not. Don’t you do that.”
“Shut up, Bradley,” Diana said. “Just shut up.”
“No no no,” I said and forced it out of her hand.
“Give it back here,” she said. “Or this will become very serious.”
“This is serious right now,” I said.
Mrs. Watkins looked at us with her inaccurate smile. Perhaps she meant well.
“You don’t know what that is,” I said. “You don’t know what this is all about. Stop all of this, please, Diana.”
“Oh yes, I do,” she said. She pulled the mushroom out of my hand. “This is about us.” She bit into the mushroom. I watched her chew and swallow. Then she leaned toward me. She whispered. “It’s a feeling. This is about this exact moment and where we are exactly right now.” She was biting off more mushroom, and chewing and swallowing. “This is about a favor that is being done to me. This is a spell. This is a charm. From one woman to another.”
“Oh, dear,” the crone said. “A quarrel.” She turned around and went back into her house. She stumbled on the stairs going up.
ON THE WAY HOME, with the reclining boy stashed in the trunk, Diana said to me, “When we get back, I’m going to make such love to you, it’ll take your roof right off.”
When we arrived back at the Porcupine Inn, the bedroom smelled of lilacs, even though it was the wrong season for lilacs. We left the statue, or whatever it was, in the car. I wasn’t about to carry it up to the bedroom. It might have been a joke, that