My Evil Mother: A Short Story(3)

“Can’t you stop it? The car accident?” I asked hopefully. She’d stopped a couple of other looming disasters that had been threatening me, including an algebra test. The teacher had thrown his back out just in time. He was absent for three whole weeks, during which I’d actually studied.

“Not this time,” said my mother. “It’s too strong. The Tower plus the Moon and the Ten of Swords. It’s very clear.”

“Maybe you could mess up his car,” I said. Brian’s car was a mess anyway: thirdhand and no muffler, plus it made strange clanks and bangs for no reason. Couldn’t she just cause the car to fall apart? “Then he’d have to borrow another car.”

“Did I say it has to be his own car?” She handed me the glass of milk she’d poured, sat down at the kitchen table, placed both her hands on it, palms down—drawing energy from the Earth, as I knew—and gave me the benefit of her direct green-eyed stare. “I don’t know which car it will be. Maybe a rental. Now do as I tell you. The long and short of it is, if you dump Brian he won’t die, but if you don’t then he will, and most likely so will you. Or else you’ll end up in a wheelchair.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Queen of Hearts. That’s you. You wouldn’t want his blood on your hands. The lifelong guilt.”

“This is nuts!”

“Go ahead, ignore my advice,” she said placidly. She stood up, snapped her fingers to release the excess Earth energy, then took some hamburger out of the fridge along with a plate of mushrooms she’d already chopped. “Your choice.” She spooned the garlic mixture into the meat, broke an egg into it, added dried bread crumbs and the mushrooms: meatloaf, it would become. I wish now that I’d got the recipe. Then she began mixing in everything with her hands—the only proper way to do it, according to her. She made biscuit dough like that, too.

“There is absolutely no way of proving any of this!” I said. I’d been on the high school debating team that year, until Brian had said it was a brainy thing to do. For a girl, he meant. Now I pretended to disdain it, though I’d secretly taken up the study of logic and was keen on the scientific method. Did I hope for an antidote to my mother? Probably.

“You wanted that pink angora sweater, did you not?” she said.

“So?”

“And then it appeared.”

“You probably just bought it,” I said.

“Don’t be silly. I never just buy things.”

“Bet you did! You’re not the Easter Bunny,” I said rudely.

“This conversation is over,” she said with chilling calm. “Change the sheets on your bed, they’re practically crawling, and pick those dirty clothes up off the floor before they fester. Panties are not carpets.”

“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.