Practical Magic (Practical Magic #2)(34)
It chills Antonia through and through to see Mr. Frye on the front porch, so obviously in love it seems he’s placed his pride and his self-respect on the concrete for anyone to trample. Antonia finds this display of devotion extremely disgusting, she really does. When she walks past him, on her way to work, she doesn’t even bother to say hello. Her veins are filled with ice water instead of blood. Lately Antonia doesn’t bother with carefully choosing her clothes. She doesn’t brush her hair a thousand times at night, or pluck her eyebrows, or bathe with sesame oil so her skin will stay smooth. In a world without love, what is the point of any of that? She broke her mirror and put away her high-heeled sandals. From now on she will concentrate on working as many hours as she can at the ice cream parlor. At least things are tangible there: You put in your time and pick up your paycheck. No expectations and no let-downs, and right now that’s what Antonia wants.
“Are you having a nervous breakdown?” Scott Morrison asks when he sees her at the ice cream parlor later that night.
Scott is home from Harvard for summer vacation and is delivering chocolate syrup and marshmallow topping, as well as sprinkles and maraschino cherries and wet walnuts. He’d been the smartest boy ever to graduate from their high school, and the only one to ever be accepted at Harvard. But so what? All the time he was growing up in this neighborhood, he was so smart that no one talked to him, least of all Antonia, who considered him to be a pitiful drip.
Antonia has been methodically cleaning the ice cream scoopers, which she’s lined up all in a row. She hasn’t even bothered to glance at Scott while he delivered buckets of syrup. She certainly seems different from the way she used to be—she was beautiful and snooty, but tonight she looks like something that’s been left out in a storm. When he asks her the completely innocent question about the nervous breakdown, Antonia bursts into tears. She dissolves into them. She is nothing but water. She lets herself slip to the floor, her back against the freezer. Scott leaves his metal dolly and comes to kneel beside her.
“A simple yes or no would have been just fine,” he says.
Antonia blows her nose on her white apron. “Yes.”
“I can see that,” Scott tells her. “You’re definitely psychiatric material.”
“I thought I was in love with someone,” Antonia explains. Tears continue to leak from her eyes.
“Love,” Scott says with contempt. He shakes his head, disgusted. “Love is worth the sum of itself, and nothing more.”
Antonia stops crying and looks at him. “Exactly,” she agrees.
At Harvard, Scott had been shocked to find out that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of people as smart as he was. He’d been getting away with murder for years, using a tenth of his brain power, and now he actually had to work. He’d been so busy competing all year he hadn’t had time for daily life—he’d repudiated things like breakfast and haircuts, the consequences of which are that he’s lost twenty pounds and has shoulder-length hair, which his boss makes him tie back with a piece of leather so he doesn’t offend the customers.
Antonia stares at him, hard, and discovers that Scott looks completely different and exactly the same. Out in the parking lot, Scott’s summer partner, who’s been driving this delivery route for twenty years and has never before had an assistant who received a 790 on his verbal SATs, leans on the horn.
“Work,” Scott says ruefully. “Hell with a paycheck.”
That does it. Antonia follows him when he goes to collect his metal dolly. Her face feels hot, even though the air conditioner is switched on.
“See you next week,” Scott says. “You’re low on hot fudge.”
“You could come in before that,” Antonia tells him. There are some things she hasn’t forgotten, in spite of her depression and this mess with her aunt Gillian and Mr. Frye.
“I could,” Scott agrees, realizing, before he heads for the truck, that Antonia Owens is much deeper than he would have ever imagined.
That night Antonia runs all the way home after work. She is suddenly filled with energy; she’s absolutely charged. When she turns the corner onto her street she can smell the lilacs, and the odor makes her laugh at the silly reactions caused by some ridiculous out-of-season blooms. Most people in the neighborhood have gotten used to the incredible size of the flowers. They no longer notice that there are whole hours of the day when the entire street echoes with the sound of buzzing bees and the light turns especially purple and sweet. Yet some people return again and again. There are women who stand on the sidewalk and weep at the sight of the lilacs for no reason at all, and still others who have plenty of reasons to cry out loud, although none they’d admit to if questioned.
A hot wind is threading through the trees, shaking the branches, and heat lightning has begun to appear in the east. It’s a curious night, so hot and so heavy it seems better suited to the tropics, but despite the weather Antonia sees that two women, one whose hair is white and the other who is not much more than a girl, have come to see the lilacs. As Antonia hurries past, she can hear weeping, and she quickens her pace, goes inside, then locks the door behind her.
“Pathetic,” Antonia decrees as she and Kylie peer out the front window to watch the women on the sidewalk cry.
Kylie has been more withdrawn than usual since her birthday supper. She misses Gideon; she has to force herself not to break down and phone him. She feels terrible, but, if anything, she’s become even more beautiful. Her cropped blond hair is no longer as shocking. She has stopped slouching to hide how tall she is, and now that she’s claimed her full posture, her chin usually tilts up, so that she seems to be considering the blue sky or the cracks in the living room ceiling. She squints her gray-green eyes to see through the glass. She has a particular interest in these two women, since they’ve come to stand on the sidewalk each night for weeks. The older woman has a white aura around her, as though snow were falling above her alone. The girl, who is her granddaughter and who has just graduated from college, has little pink sparks of confusion rising off her skin. They are here to weep for the same man—the older woman’s son, the girl’s father—someone who went from boyhood to manhood without ever changing his attitude, convinced till the last that the universe revolved around him alone. The women on the sidewalk spoiled him, both of them, then blamed themselves when he was careless enough to kill himself in a motorboat in Long Island Sound. Now, they’re drawn to the lilacs because the flowers remind them of a June night, years ago, when the girl was still tender and awkward and the woman still had thick black hair.