Practical Magic (Practical Magic #2)(23)
Kylie’s aunt Gillian has been sharing her bedroom for the past two weeks, which is how Kylie knows that Gillian sleeps like a little girl, hidden under a heavy quilt even though the temperature has been in the nineties ever since she arrived, as if she’s brought some of the Southwest she loves so well along with her in the trunk of her car. They’ve fixed the place the way two roommates would, everything right down the middle, except that Gillian needs extra closet space and she’s asked Kylie to do a tiny bit of redecoration. The black baby blanket that has always been kept at the foot of Kylie’s bed is now folded and stored in a box down in the basement, along with the chessboard that Gillian said occupied way too much space. The black soap the aunts send as a present every year has been taken out of the soapdish and has been replaced with a bar of clear, rose-scented soap from France.
Gillian has very particular likes and dislikes and an opinion about everything. She sleeps a lot, she borrows things without asking, and she makes great brownies with M&M’s stirred into the batter. She’s beautiful and she laughs about a thousand times more than Kylie’s mother does, and Kylie wants to be exactly like her. She follows Gillian around and studies her and is thinking of chopping off all her hair, if she has the guts, that is. Were Kylie to be granted a single wish, it would be to wake and discover that her mouse-brown hair has miraculously become the same glorious blond that Gillian is lucky enough to have, like hay left out in the sun or pieces of gold.
What makes Gillian even more wonderful is that she and Antonia don’t get along. Given time enough, they may grow to despise each other. Last week, Gillian borrowed Antonia’s short black skirt to wear to the Fourth of July block party, spilled a Diet Coke on it accidentally, then told Antonia she was intolerant when she dared to complain. Now Antonia has asked their mother if she can put a lock on her closet door. She has informed Kylie that their aunt is a nothing, a loser, a pathetic creature.
Gillian has taken a job at the Hamburger Shack on the Turnpike, where all the teenage boys have fallen madly in love with her, ordering cheeseburgers they don’t want and gallons of ginger ale and Coke just to be near her.
“Work is what people have to do in order to have the bucks to party,” Gillian announced last night, an attitude that has already hindered her plan of heading out to California, since she is drawn to shopping malls—shoe stores in particular tend to call out to her—and can’t seem to save a cent.
That evening they were having hot dogs made out of tofu and some sort of bean that is supposed to be good for you, even though it tastes, in Kylie’s opinion, like the tires of a truck. Sally refuses to have meat, fish, or fowl at their table in spite of her daughters’ complaints. She has to close her eyes when she walks past the packaged chicken legs in the market, and still she’s always reminded of the dove the aunts used for their most serious love charm.
“Tell that to a brain surgeon,” Sally had responded to her sister’s remark about the limited worth of work. “Tell that to a nuclear physicist or a poet.”
“Okay.” Gillian was still smoking, although she made new plans to quit every morning, and was well aware that the smoke drove everyone but Kylie crazy. She puffed quickly, as though that would lessen anyone’s distaste. “Go on and find me a poet or a physicist. Are there any in this neighborhood?”
Kylie was pleased by this putdown of their formless suburb, a place with no beginning and no end, but with plenty of gossips. Everyone is always giving her friend Gideon a hard time, even more so now that he’s shaved his head. He said he didn’t give a damn and insisted that most of their neighbors had minds as small as weasels’, but lately he got flustered when anyone spoke to him directly, and when they walked alongside the Turnpike and a car horn honked he sometimes jumped, as though somehow he’d been insulted.
People were looking to talk, for any reason. Anything different or slightly unusual would do. Already, most people on their street had discussed the fact that Gillian did not wear the top half of her bathing suit when she sunbathed in the backyard. They all knew exactly what the tattoo on her wrist looked like, and that she’d had at least a six-pack at the block party—maybe even more—and then had gone and turned Ed Borelli down flat when he asked her out, even though he was the vice-principal and her sister’s boss as well. The Owenses’ neighbor Linda Bennett refused to have the optometrist she was dating come to her house to collect her before darkness fell, that’s how nervous she was about having someone who looked like Gillian living right next door. Everyone agreed that Sally’s sister was confusing. There were times when you’d meet her at the grocery and she’d insist you come on over and let her play around with her tarot cards for you, and other times when you’d say hello to her on the street only to have her look right through you, as if she were a million miles away, say in a place like Tucson, where life was a lot more interesting.
As far as Kylie was concerned, Gillian had the ability to make any place interesting; even a dump like their block could look sparkly in the right kind of light. The lilacs had gone absolutely wild since Gillian’s arrival, as though paying homage to her beauty and her grace, and had spilled out from the backyard into the front, a purple bower hanging over the fence and the driveway. Lilacs were not supposed to bloom in July, that was a simple botanical fact, at least it had been until now. Girls in the neighborhood had begun to whisper that if you kissed the boy you loved beneath the Owenses’ lilacs he’d be yours forever, whether he wanted to be or not. The State University, in Stony Brook, had sent two botanists to study the bud formations of these amazing plants going mad out of season, growing taller and more lush with every passing hour. Sally had refused to let the botanists into the yard; she had sprayed them with the garden hose to make them go away, but occasionally the scientists would park across from the driveway, mooning over the specimens they couldn’t get to, debating whether it was ethical to run across the lawn with some gardening shears and take whatever they wanted.