Juniper Tea

It doesn't surprise me any more to meet fringe people on trains. I'm not talking about lunatics; I meet those on the streets. But the fringe people, the ones who hang on at the outer edges of sanity, near the borders that we like to keep a distance from, seem to like to take trains. Something about the way telephone lines and peoples' backyards speed past the window as a cartoon must appeal to the fringe mentality. I don't even want to know what makes them sit next to me.

On my first trip home for Christmas break, I hadn't yet realized this was going to be a trend. The girl who sat next to me was young, about seventeen, with a pleasant round face and a lot of long black hair that kept falling into it. She wore a tie-dyed T-shirt with such brilliant yellows and jewel blues and electric greens that for a moment I wished that I liked the Grateful Dead's music enough to follow them, so that I too could own such T-shirts instead of stealing them from my brother. He was about to graduate from law school and wouldn't be needing them any more.

"I love your tie-dye," I couldn't help saying.

She was pleased to be addressed by a stranger. That should have been my first clue. "Thanks! I got it in Saratoga." She twisted around in her seat to show me the design on the back, a skull crowned with a wreath of crimson roses. As she turned back, her intertwined necklaces jangled. I looked at one of them.

She laughed. "I see you've noticed the pentagram." She disentangled it from the peace symbol and small pouch and held it up. It was a five-pointed star inscribed in a circle, cast in some dull bronzelike metal. "Worried?"

"No, from what my Satanist-anarchist pre-law friend tells me, Satanists wear theirs upside-down, so you must be something else."

"Satanism is bullshit! It's just a reaction against Christianity, turning it upside down and doing everything backwards. A bunch of metal heads getting off on perversion." She paused to stew in her outrage, then asked, "How can an anarchist be pre-law?"

I sighed. "I keep telling him that, but he won't listen. It's not a political thing with him, really. It's just that carving an anarchy symbol into your arm with a razor blade will get peoples' attention."

"Oh, goddess," she muttered. "Is he really messed up?"

"We can't get him to go for help, and our attempts to bring the help to him have failed." I swallowed the dryness in my throat. "But what are you, since you're not a Satanist?"

"I'm a witch." She pushed the hair behind her ears and waited for my reaction.

"Cool," I said. "Can you cast spells?"

Her eyes lit up. She leaned toward me. "No, I can, but I don't. Whatever you do comes back to you three times over, see, that's part of the creed."

"Then what do you do, exactly?"

Silly question. I learned more about goddess worship and white witchcraft than I had ever wanted to know. "We don't believe in the Devil at all, see, or in the Judeo-Christian type god. But there is a mother force that's the source of all life, and that force can be contacted and channeled through the magic arts."

Her eyes shone as she spoke of the Magic Arts, as she filled my lap with crystals, dried stumps of plants, amulets, and other paraphernalia. From her urgent tone and animated face I guessed that she was starved for an audience. We were, after all, on the Stamford Local, a suburban line that stops at all the settlements of people who make enough money in New York to be able to live somewhere else. It's not heavy witch territory.

As she spread the witches' newsletter out on my lap, I realized why I was beginning to like her. She lifted each object, described each tenet and ritual, not with the zeal of the missionary but the love of a worshipper, the joy and wonder of a believer who doesn't care what you think.

And as it gradually dawned on her that I wasn't laughing, or arguing, or suggesting that she seek professional help, she smiled nervously and extended her hand. "I'm Judith, by the way. But my spirit name is Juniper."

I had heard enough to feel honored by the spirit name. "I'm Celia."

"That's pretty. I hate Judith."

"Because of Holofernes?"

"Who?"

"Holofernes. I don't remember the story exactly, but somewhere in the Old Testament a woman named Judith saves the Israelites by cutting off Holofernes' head."

She was intrigued. "I'll bet my mother doesn't even know that. She probably just figured it was a good, solid Jewish name."

"Is your family religious?"

She laughed. "Not until I became a witch they weren't. Our synagogue's so reform we have a Christmas party. My mom suddenly started keeping Kosher this year. I'll bet she went out and looked the rules up the day I started doing spells. Even my big sister thinks she's flipped. And now poor little Andrew has to go to Hebrew school. It's a mess."

She spoke sadly, but with a certain pride. And I could understand her being simultaneously delighted and sorry to have caused a mess. Considering the train we were on.

"Did you pick Juniper because of the fairy tale?"

"What fairy tale?"

"Good Lord, woman, you have two names and you don't know the story behind either one?"

My amazement amused her. "No. Tell me the story."

She settled back in her seat with the content, expectant look of a child before a bedtime story. It's not much of a bedtime story, really: the mother decapitates her stepson and serves him to his unsuspecting father in a stew, and then the stepsister Margery buries his bones under the juniper tree. But I told it anyway, and she listened, eating up the description of the bird with the blood-red feathers and flame-tipped wings that rises from the tree to avenge the little boy. And as I realized that I too had been starved for an audience, I began weaving my own details in, finally adding a coda after the bird drops the millstone on the mother's head.

"...The bird flew away, for his work was done; and though love is strong it is not as strong as spilt blood, not strong enough to keep the dead with us. Margery never saw her brother's spirit again. But every Easter when she put the lilies on the grave at the foot of the juniper tree, the branches shuddered as the wind raked through them, and she heard all around her the bird's wordless song."

Juniper applauded vigorously, shaking her hair loose so that it swung across her face. She pushed it impatiently back. "That's a great story. Are you a writer?"

"No."

"But you're such a good storyteller."

"That's not enough." I heard the bite in my voice, and saw her withdrawing. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to jump down your throat."

She was instantly leaning toward me again. Lonely people learn to forgive quickly. "Does your name have a story?"

"No, but it does mean 'holy.' Hell of a name for an ex-Catholic."

In the ensuing comparison of familial and religious backgrounds, we discovered that not only did we both hate the Pope but we lived in towns that were carbon copies of each other and about a ten-minute drive apart. "We should exchange phone numbers!" she said, searching her pockets. "Then we can get together and do stuff. I don't have a pen. Do you?"

When a crucial decision is smuggled in among the banalities, as it sometimes is, it's easy to miss the importance. But I have a strange sensitivity to what is urgent. And at these moments, when it is in my power to either find the pen in my purse and give a stranger the way into my world, or let the pen disappear into my purse and let her fade away, unreachable and forgotten, my consciousness of how much rides on a ballpoint pen can almost make me dizzy.

I found the pen. We scribbled our phone numbers on the back of a canceled check. When she tore it in half and handed me my part, I realized with a familiar apprehension that I had signed a pact. I was a little frightened. After these decisions I can never tell why they were important, or whether I have done the right thing.

My brother was waiting in the car. His hair was cut short and combed, and he looked comfortable in his thin-striped shirt and tie. He had also, I realized with a sinking feeling, lost weight. My last hope was dashed when he turned a clean-shaven face to me as I climbed in with my luggage. "Hi. How was your trip?"

"Okay." Hopefully, I added, "I met a witch."

"I'm not surprised," he said. "That happens to you."

I let it drop and glanced at the blank lobe where his earring usually was. "Mom make you take it out?"

He shook his head. "I don't wear it any more. I just got sick of it."

I studied his face, hoping to detect a hint of defiance, or even the dull consciousness of defeat, but there was nothing in it but bored resentment of the clogged streets. "How's Mom?"

"Tense."

"Shit." I glanced at myself in the mirror. "Jim, did you have to do everything? Couldn't you at least have forgotten to shave this morning? It's not fair."

He shook his head. "It's your turn. I got more than my share of shit."

As we walked up the steps, I thought of crying out, "Et tu, Jimmy?" But the door opened, and I had to hug my mother.

She must have just had her hair done, because the layering was perfect. Her carefully, skillfully made-up face rose above a brightly colored wool sweater and gray wool slacks. My friends talk about how pretty she is and I must admit she does forty better than I ever did twenty.

"Welcome home, honey," she smiled. "How was your trip?" As I dragged my suitcase into the kitchen, I saw her looking me up and down, and the shadow of disappointment that crossed her face. With my shaggy long hair tied back in a red ribbon, my huge sweater doing nothing to conceal the bulges about my hips and midriff, and my worn jeans leading down to very sick-looking flats, I felt shabby and unclean. I would have run to touch up my makeup if I had been wearing any.

When I sat down across the table from her, I could see that she was trying hard to ignore it. I admired her desire for willpower even though I knew she wouldn't find it. "So how was your first semester?"

I spun out a long string of class descriptions, anecdotes, background information on friends, roommate stories, and other trivia. Mom has always preferred style to content in parent-child discussions. She seemed pleased enough as I reached the end, but I felt the question fighting its way out.

"Any romantic developments?" she finally blurted.

She didn't want to know about the Satanist-anarchist, about the nights I had spent waking over his unconscious form, listening for a choking noise. She didn't really want to hear about the kisses that left the sour taste of cheap beer in my mouth, or the night he decided to prove his devotion by carving my initials into his palm with the point of his jackknife. And she especially didn't want to know how I had finally ended it one night when I decided that whoever did take my virginity had damn well better remember the experience the next morning.

"None worth mentioning."
Her disappointment was genuine. My mother would like me to have a boyfriend, then she wouldn't worry so much. Hoping to deflect the lecture I smelled in the wind, I asked, "Where's Dad?"

"He won't be back until late, he has a client dinner. Listen, honey, I wish..."

I knew my lines for the next scene as well as she knew hers, and there were no surprises. And after I was done crying and confessing my sins, and she had put her merciful face on, I was relieved to have got it behind me so early. She pulled over a one-year planner and reeled off the list of things I had to do.

"The partners' Christmas party is here this Friday, so you'll need a new dress for that. We can take you to--" She looked at me "I don't know. We'll see. Grandma Burstyn isn't coming until Thursday and I want to deliver the cookies before the party so you're on your own this year. We've decorated the tree and everything but I saved the manger scene for you. You have an appointment to get your hair cut Friday morning at Cheveux with Amelia and an appointment at eleven tomorrow with Dr. Stearon."

I had been trying to stay calm, clenching my hands under the table, but this was too much. "Why? It's my vacation!"

She dropped her voice very low, as she always did at this point. "If something's wrong, we have to know."

"But I hate going to see him! It hurts!"

She must have heard the fear and known it was real, because the angry set of her mouth softened and she said with something deeper than worry, "I know it hurts, honey. But you have to go."

If it weren't for these moments, I could probably convince myself that I didn't really love her, and that would make my life a lot easier. But sometimes I can see her life in her eyes and know that I'm only part of it, that she was born into this desert too and is doing her best. It would be easier if I didn't see what is hidden from my brother, that this is the way she has to love us and it is really not her fault.

"I'll go." I dragged my suitcase up to my room.

I stopped on the threshold, aghast. My mother had told me that she had redone my room as a guest room, but I was still shocked. Mom's always loved pastels, but my vocal and intense opposition had kept her in check until I left. A pure white comforter covered the double bed, ending with a ruffle above the lavender carpet. The curtains were lavender with white lace trim, and the walls were white with rows of tiny lavender flowerbuds running from floor to ceiling between lavender stripes. The lacy pillow shams at the head of the bed were also in the flowerbud motif. With a sick apprehension, I tuned back a corner of the comforter. The sheets matched the curtains.

"I don't match, Mom," I shouted down the stairs. "I'd better go sleep in Jim's room."

"Don't complain," Jim replied, climbing the steps. "They redid mine in peach."

I sat gingerly on the edge of the bed. I was afraid to unpack, to put my stretched-out, baggy-elbowed, faded and torn clothes into the drawers of the clean white dresser that looked too delicate and gingerbread to actually hold anything. I almost lay down, but it was the sort of bed you were afraid to put your shoes on.

"Dr. Stearon will be with you in a moment. Please remove all your clothing." The nurse handed me two oversized pieces of paper toweling called "drape sheets" with which I was supposed to cover my nakedness, and left the examination room.

I disrobed, sat on the table, and wondered what to do with the sheets. On my first visit over Thanksgiving break I had tied on around my waist as a skirt and the other under my arms as a sort of tube top, and Dr. Stearon had laughed at me. It was no use, anyway; even the little tube top came apart during the breast exam. I lay down and draped them over me.

Dr. Stearon was a nondescript, balding middle-aged man who had perfected the art of making small talk with naked women. I found it unnerving to discuss my classes in that situation, but I suppose he thought it best to pretend nothing unusual was going on. "Hi, Celia, how are you? How's college treating you?"

I answered in the same conversational tone as he put on the latex glove and took out the speculum. "Ready?"

The ceiling and walls were stark white, unrelieved even by diplomas. They didn't really need to make it white,; they could have been just as clean if they were painted blue, or something. And his lab coat could have been green, or maybe raspberry. Maybe they don't make raspberry lab coats. But they could.

I was proud of myself; I only yelled once. He dropped the tools on the tray with a metallic clatter and the nurse whisked them off. "That's it, you're all done. Come on into my office once you've dressed and we'll talk."

His office had been done, unbelievably, in mint green, with framed Monet posters to match. I sat down in a wooden chair with mint-green cushions and he began to explain.

"Nothing abnormal on your pelvic, and the blood tests we took last time show normal levels of estrogen. What you don't seem to have is a normal FSH cycle..."

Follicle stimulating hormone: that far I could follow. And I knew what it meant, too, before he got there: I wasn't ovulating. Why, he couldn't tell me. At least, he didn't. "What I'm going to do," he added, scribbling on a prescription pad, "is put you on Provera, which will induce menstruation. Provera is really progesterone, which is the hormone that--"

"I know, I just took my human biology final." He looked a bit taken aback. "But why do I have to induce my period?"

He drew himself up a little straighter in his chair. "If you don't menstruate regularly, you run an increased risk of uterine cancer." I got quiet and attentive. He handed me the prescription solemnly. "Take one tablet every day for ten days. That'll bring on your period. It may be a little heavier than what you were used to. Wait a month and repeat it. You want about a six-week cycle. Be sure and make a follow-up appointment with the receptionist before you go." I nodded. He showed me to the door. "Say hello to your mother for me."

My mother had let me take the car because I had insisted that I go alone. It was beginning to rain, that cold gray December rain I hate for not being snow. I switched on the wipers and watched them go back and forth. I had done fairly well in human bio; I knew that progesterone didn't induce ovulation. I tried to keep my mind on how much I'd save on birth control, if I ever needed birth control.

"Mom wants you to set up the manger scene," Jim said the moment I walked in. "When are you going to do the cookies?"

"Are you your sister's keeper?" I snapped, just to see him roll his eyes. "Where's Mom, anyway?"

"In the dining room with the caterers. I wouldn't go in there if I were you."

"When's Dad coming home?"

"Not till late. What's in the bag?"

"Prescription." I dropped it on the table.

"For what?"

"A hassle. Where are you going?"

He snaked the car keys out of the drawer in a single dextrous motion. "To a land without caterers."

The box was already open in the living room. I dusted off the miniature stable and scattered the fake straw over its floor, to the accompaniment of muted dialogue from the next room.

"...but not too many, or they won't have room for the entree. The miniature sausages are wonderful, but some of the guests don't eat meat, so maybe not so many bacon-based things..."

I started with the animals, as I did every year. Long after Jim lost interest in the little Santa Clauses he used to set out on the mantelpiece, I continued to fight for the manger scene. I didn't know why, looking down at the plastic figurines. It had been a gift from my father to my mother before us, in the less affluent days. The colors were gaudy, and the molded plastic was beginning to atrophy. But when my mother tried, as she had been trying for years, to toss it in favor of a white porcelain or carved wood set, I raised such a fuss that she let it stay.

I liked the animals, but my favorite was Mary because she had a blue hooded cape. It had faded to sky blue, except in the creases around her shoulders where it was still the blue of French stained glass and the sea under bright sunlight. I set her next to the crib across from Joseph.

"...everyone loved those chocolate mousse cups. But I don't know about the creampuff angel. Could you do a reindeer or something instead?"

It had never occurred to me before that Mary, kneeling in the straw with her hands clasped in prayer, looked remarkably fit and well-groomed for a mother who had just given birth, or that the figurine of the infant Jesus had the features and proportions of a two-year-old. I stuffed the rest of the fake straw into the box and carried it back to the attic.

The phone rang as I came back down. I ran to answer it. "Hi, Juniper, what's up?"

"Hel--how did you know it was me?"

Good question. "No one else in this state would call me."

"But how'd you know it was for you?"

"Because...that's the way it rang. Haven't you ever done that, known it was for you by the way it rang?"

She laughed. "So you're telepathic. I can deal. You want to get together? I can't use the car, you'd have to come here."

"Sure. I can't get out till tonight, there's a dayful of Christmas crap ahead of me."

"That's all right. Whenever you can, I'll be here all day." She gave me directions and we hung up. I went to make the cookies.

My grandmother usually made them with me, pottering around spilling flour and squinting through her bifocals at the recipe. It was a complicated process: there were six kinds and our oven was temperamental and untrustworthy. My organizational skills had developed as hers deteriorated, and we had gradually exchanged roles. Now, rolling the dough alone, I knew finally how important the cookies were and how sad she would be to have missed them. There was so little she could do now that someone else was caring for her son with ruthless efficiency and the grandchildren were old enough to be irritated. It is terrible to feel useless, to wander silently through a strange house with nothing to do but worry about the price of stamps. I stamped down the cookie cutters with one hand and kneaded the sick lump in my stomach with the other, wishing I could have waited for her.

I was just finishing cleaning up after the sandtarts and was about to start on the peanut butter cookies when my mother finished with the caterers. I heard them trooping out the door long before she finally came into the kitchen, dressed for aerobics.

She made a noise that sounded like a sigh as she sat down. The lines in her face were showing through as they did at the end of the day. She took a cookie off the rack and munched it, her expression becoming slightly more cheerful. "These are good. You did a good job."

"Can I have the car tonight? I don't care which one. I want to visit a friend."

"Who?"

I gave her a sketchy description, leaving out the witchcraft.

"Well, I guess you can use the Volvo. Your father won't be home until around eleven; they're closing on something. You'll be home by then?" I nodded. She noticed the paper bag. "What did Dr. Stearon say?"

"I'm not ovulating. He doesn't know why but it's probably organic. That stuff is supposed to give me my period so I don't get cancer."

"And you got it filled today. Good. You're getting better about these things."

"Mom..."

I was standing behind the counter with flour all over me and bits of dough in my hair. I felt ridiculous, unfit for this discussion, but I said anyway, "That means I'm sterile, doesn't it?"

She toyed with the paper bag. "I don't think you have to worry about that now, honey. Maybe it'll straighten itself out by the time you get married. And if not, there are all kinds of things you can do. They'll probably be much better at in vitro fertilization."

"But..."

She looked at her watch and grabbed the Saab keys out of the drawer. "I'll be back soon, honey, we'll talk about it later. Don't forget to take your medicine. It's important. I don't want anything to happen to you."

I washed my hands, then took the brown vial out of the bag. I climbed the stairs, put away the other things I had bought at the pharmacy, then went into the bathroom and swallowed the first chalky pill.

The house was perfect. It was huge, with two rambling wings stretching out to the forest on either side, commanding a hill that rose above a cul-de-sac. The driveway, although I didn't know this, was on the other side of the hill, and there was no path leading up from the cul-de-sac where I had parked, so I climbed the slope of dead brown grass under the glare of the stained-glass windows in the upper story. It was a pseudo-Tudor building with dark beams slanting across its face under the windows, and when after a few minutes of circling I finally found the driveway and front door, it was a solid piece of oak with a tiny iron grille at the top for a window and an iron hand clutching an apple for a knocker. Pleased to have found a Victorian haunted house in the middle of American suburbia, I grasped the knocker. It didn't move. Disappointed, I rang the doorbell.

A shortish, angular woman with stiff, upstanding black hair and harsh lines about her mouth opened the door. She was wearing a taupe silk pantsuit and some chunky turquoise and silver jewelry. "Hello...I'm looking for Judith...?"

She smiled, though I felt more as if she were showing her teeth than welcoming me. "Come in, come in. I'm Ruth, Judith's mother." My spirits sank as I followed her through a mauve and white living room whose centerpiece was a gleaming glass-topped stainless-steel coffee table. I don't know much about abstract art, but I could tell that the painting on the wall-smudges of colors that went suspiciously well with the furniture--had been expensive. The kitchen she stopped in had been done in black, down to the black matte-finish microwave and black refrigerator with the little spot in the door where you could get ice water. A bowling ball in a business suit was reading the paper in one of the black metal chairs at the molded-plastic table. "This is my husband Robert," Ruth said. He looked up and nodded perfunctorily, then back to his paper as Ruth continued, "Celia is a friend of Judith's."

He acknowledged this with a sort of grunt, and she clicked her tongue angrily against her teeth. "Judith's room is in the left wing as you go up the stairs. You'll find it." She smiled again, nervously and with such obvious effort that I felt uneasy, as if she knew of a terrible fate that awaited me at the top of the steps.

They had installed track lighting, so the hallway was not lit by candles in sconces between oil paintings of ancestors, as it should have been. I reminded myself that no one in America had ancestral homes, and that this Tudor house had probably been built, like mine, in the 1920s. Juniper's door was marked with one of those Hallmark party decorations--a black construction paper witch riding a broom. She had ripped off the orange letters that had once read "Happy Halloween" underneath it.

When I closed the door behind me, the room was pitch dark, except for a glowing hollow made by the five candles that stood at the corners of the chalk pentagram traced on the hardwood floor. Each candle cast a flickering circle of light on the planks below it, that lurched from ring to ellipse to squat egg to long thin spear in the current I had set moving. At odd moments when a flame leaped higher I caught a subliminal glimpse of something, a table leg or bedspread or perhaps something else, a shape my own mind had thrown into the darkness, something with sleek black fur stretched over huge, powerful muscles, something gigantic and velvety black crouched beyond the edge of the circle. I brushed the cobwebs off my arms, then remembered I was wearing a long-sleeved sweater.

"Sit down, Celia. I'm about to start." I couldn't tell whether Juniper was next to me or on the either side of the room.

I squatted on the floor. I heard a soft padding of bare feet, and Juniper stepped into the light. Her hair was down but out of her face, and the candlelight glowed in her eyes. Her shirt and long skirt could have been any color, but they looked black in that light. As she walked slowly around the circle that bounded the pentagram, she scattered a flaky brown substance that sputtered and sizzled in the candle flames. The room began to smell faintly of incense as she chanted a low song in a strange language. I watched her feet and the swishing hem of her skirt, which were thrown into white relief by the candles, until she stepped into the center of the pentagram.

"Mother of all things," she began in a deadly serious tone, "your daughter comes to you on behalf of a sister, Danielle."

I would certainly have laughed, if it hadn't been for the candles. Since the points were equidistant from her, she was equally lit from all angles, and from below. The lower part of her skirt seemed translucent, and the undersides of her outstretched arms, uplifted chin, her breasts an her neck were traced in yellow light. The rules of vision had been inverted, and what usually receded into shadow was painted luridly against the blackness into which the familiar curves of waist, shoulder and forehead vanished. My mind wandered easily from the words, but was held by the underworld figure in the center of the star.

"One month from today she joins her life with that of one of your sons." She brought her hands together and the light glinted on a small metal object, a box or maybe a picture frame. "Bless this charm, that through its power their union may prosper and render back unto you the life you have given them." She knelt and placed it in the center of the pentagram, then drew backwards and out of sight. The candles burnt lower in silence.

Although I was mentally snickering over the stilted language, I felt the hairs rising on the backs of my arms. I looked up. Five rings of light were also wheeling on the ceiling, a yellow pool with flecks of black darting in and out of it like dark minnows. I didn't move, reluctant to spoil the patterns with a draft.

One by one, the candles guttered and went out, leaving me in absolute darkness. If I held my own breath, I could hear Juniper's from across the room, low and regular and amplified by the silence.

There was a rustle, a click, and the room blazed into view. When the glare refined itself into shapes I saw Juniper kneeling on the floor, scraping at the wax droppings with a butter knife.

"What do you think?" she asked, glancing at me. "Does it lose something without the broomstick and cauldron?"

"No," I said, "but you need some help with the words."

I sat down on the canopied bed. It must have come with the house, because it was the only piece of furniture I'd seen so far that was dark and old. It was covered with thick burgundy brocade, and tattered remnants of the same fabric hung from the top. The only other furniture was a solid chest of drawers, mahogany or meant to look like it, a rush-seated rocking chair, and a tall bookcase stuffed with yellowed paperbacks, dilapidated hardcovers, and piles of loose paper. I tucked my left foot under the knee of my extended right leg. She climbed up and lay down next to me after replacing the rug over the pentagram. "For personal petitions, you have to make them up yourself, and I'm not a poet."

"Your sister's getting married, is that it?"

"To a psychiatrist from Manhattan. He keeps telling my mother he'll treat me for free. But I do want her to be happy, anyhow."

"I met your parents."

"What do you think?"

"They have terrible taste in furniture."

Not tactful, I realized as I said it, but she sat bolt upright and began agreeing with me. "Isn't it nasty, what they've done to this great old house? You couldn't pay a spider to build a cobweb in here. And my dad's allergic to cats. Along with everything else the goddess ever made."

"She seemed eager to make me welcome, though."

Juniper laughed. "I don't have many friends in my age group. You're probably the only one who's been over in a few years. And since you're so normal-looking, she'll want to hold onto you for dear life."

Her smile was nervous, almost shy, reminding me that she was still in high school. Her town had its own counterculture, but it was based on the use of certain controlled substances that Juniper had told me she wasn't into. I imagined who her friends were, how far away most of them lived. Probably a lot of them were still trailing the Grateful Dead from stadium to ticket line across the country.

"But really. What did you think of the ceremony? I've never let a non-witch observe one."

I told her about the illusory feline thing I had seen and then dismissed. "You must be sensitive," she said, excited. "Some people are really sensitive to psychic energy--you must be one of them."

"I'm easily suggestible, if that's what you mean," I said. "That's why tarot readings work so well for me."

She jumped off the bed and dug her tarot deck out of the bookcase. "I just got these. I'm going to teach myself how to read them. I love the pictures." She spread them out face down on the bed between us, tucking her hair behind her ears as she leaned over them intently. "Pick a card, any card," she ordered me. "Don't look at it." I didn't. "Now tell me what you think it is."

"The Hanged Man," I said.

She took the card and turned it over. A pair of panicked eyes fixed on mine as she turned it face up and showed me the Hanged Man, dangling by one foot from the top of the frame with his hands behind his haloed head and his free foot resting in the crook of his other knee.

I felt the hum of electricity around me as she said, "I mean that as a joke. There are 64 cards in the at deck. Do you know what the odds of your guessing right were?"

"One in sixty-four," I said diffidently, trying to defuse her fear. I try not to make too much out of these coincidences, they happen to me too often. I can't explain why, for instance, I have an almost 100% record for predicting home runs in baseball games, or why I scared the hell out of my psych-major roommate by scoring way too high on the ESP test she was administering to everyone on our hallway, so I try not to look for meaning in correct guesses.

"It's just chance," I said. "I happen to have a special attachment to the Hanged Man."

"Why?"

"Well, because it's in The Wasteland, and because...well, look how I'm sitting."

She suddenly noticed that my legs were laid out on the bed in the position of the Hanged Man's. I laughed at her terrified expression and lay back with my hands behind my head. "Stop it!" I sat up. "I bet you could be really psychic if you learned how to channel this properly."

"Don't talk to me about channeling, my mother reads Shirley Maclaine."

Juniper laughed. "She a New Age woman?"

"Well, not really. She's Catholic."

Her eyes lit up and she tapped me on the knee. "That's right. Tell me about midnight mass. I've never been."

"It's not as exciting as it sounds," I said. I told her, though, about the swinging censer and the burnished crucifix, the candles on the altar, the gold-embroidered copes and white robes, Latin chants coming out of mothballs, trumpets and organs, hymns. I laid on the ritual details, figuring she'd enjoy them. I could see the procession coming down the aisle, the preternaturally solemn altar boys in their white gowns, and remembered there had been a time when I really had seen kindly and clueless Father Connaught as a magician, transfigured by the wonderful stole and the soaring music, who was going to perform the alchemy that turned our prayers into the perfect love of a father for his children, a father who had loved us so much that he gave up his only son.

"It must be beautiful," Juniper breathed.

I realized I must have gotten carried away.

"And you believe in it?"
I was beginning to appreciate her talent for picking the hard questions. "It's a beautiful ceremony, and it's a beautiful story. For a long time, that was enough. I used to think all beautiful stories were true."

"How do you know they're not?"

"Because I learned to make them up myself. I could tell you a hundred of them, probably even a thousand and one if my life depended on it. But none of them are true. If you learn enough about language, it's like paint or clay or silver or anything else; you can make some very pretty and completely useless things with it."

"I think you're wrong," she said, smiling through the wisps of hair that migrated back from behind her ears. "I believe all beautiful stories. There's something at the bottom of everything. Like the fairy tales about changelings."

"You don't believe that fairies really steal babies, do you?"

She nodded. "I doubt it. Particularly now that parents have discovered video cameras and are documenting their offspring's every move. I know my mom kept an exhaustive baby book on me and my brother; she'd have noticed if anyone pulled a switch."

She shook her head. "Still, it happens. Who says the fairy child is visible? Say they just slip a fairy soul into the child's body. Who'd know the difference?" I laughed. "It happens. I'm a changeling. So are you." I began to argue, but she cut me off. "You must be, or you wouldn't be here, up in a creepy dark room with a lunatic who thinks she's a witch."

Something about the tilt of her smile, or the line of her eyelashes over her eyes, almost stopped my heart cold. I got that prickly feeling up my spine that I have felt at some point with every one of my friends as he or she looks at me with that lopsided smile of gratitude and says, "You're the only sane person I know." I don't get this tingle of fear because I know it's true, but because I see them looking back at me with my own face.

"All right," I laughed. "So I'm a changeling. But it would break my mother's heart if she found out."

"You can't let that stand in your way." She was dead serious.

I glanced at my watch. "Shit! I have to be home in five minutes. My dad's coming back and I haven't seen him since I got home."

I started looking for my car keys. She asked, quietly, "You get along with your dad?"

"Yeah, pretty well. Better than with my mom. Probably because he's not around as much. Anyway, I want to see him before he goes to bed."

"Good night." She shook my hand, absurdly. I hugged her instead. She seemed surprised, though not at all offended. "Have a safe trip. I think it's supposed to snow soon."

I waved and started down the stairway. I expected the house to echo, even though most of the floors had been carpeted. It didn't, so the sounds from the kitchen were muted. I wasn't used to that. In my dorm at college the hallways were tiled and the stairs were bare; sound flew everywhere and we learned to fight behind closed doors. So I had stopped suspecting muted sounds. It really wasn't my fault.

That was what I would have said, if I had been able to speak at all, when I walked in the kitchen. But I didn't understand it right away. I saw the hardback cookbook lying on the floor with its pages crushed underneath it, and thought that was no way to treat such a glossy thick book. It wasn't until I bent to pick it up that I saw Ruth standing a few feet to its left, holding a hand to one side of her head, and Robert standing across from her next to the bookshelf above the Cuisinart.

I straightened up with the cookbook and glanced from one to the other, but whatever had just been played out had left no trace in either expression. Both stared at me, as frightened and uneasy as I was, until Ruth came to life and jerked her lips upward over her teeth in a ghastly smile. "Are you leaving, Celia? Did you two have a nice time?"

Except for the click of my heels on the terracotta tile, there wasn't a sound as I crossed the floor and replaced the book on the shelf. Robert didn't look at me, though I was two feet away from him and could hear his angry, rasping breath. I looked back at Ruth, who had gone white and was still covering one temple with a hand. "Yes, I had a lovely time. Thank you for having me. I'll find my own way out."

My legs shook a little as I walked to the car. What could I have done? Something, I told myself. Something besides pretend you didn't see anything. I remembered writing a story in high school about a babysitter who discovers that the children she sits for are being abused by their father. My English teacher spoke very highly of the confrontation between the babysitter and the father. And she was right. It was a beautiful story.

Everyone had gone to bed when I got home; I can always tell from the kitchen. Even empty, if people are about to come in or have just left, the kitchen isn't as...dark, somehow, behind the yellow lights, as it is when the house is asleep.

I was angry about missing my father, but since there was no reason to sit up in an empty house I turned off the kitchen light and went up to Lavenderland to fall asleep.

In the dark, all I saw was a fuzzy outline, but I knew it was my father. He must have come home later than he'd planned. I had been closing in on sleep after half an hour of staring at the ceiling and waiting for the wheels to stop spinning in my head. I kept still, not committing myself to sleep or wakefulness, as he approached timidly.

"Celia...?"
As long as I was awake now, I might as well talk to him. "Hi, Dad."

"Hi, baby. How was college?"

"It was fun."

"Good. How's vacation been?"

"Okay."

He sat down on the edge of the bed. There was a long pause. Then he said, "Mom told me you were upset about what the doctor said."

"Yeah," I answered slowly. So he was going to console me. It would take a long time to convince him that I was really all right, but I didn't want him going to bed worried.

"You can still have children, you know. You can adopt. Or maybe when you get married there'll be a cure for it."

I heard the same slightly bewildered but earnest tone he used in all of our discussions. My father is a great believer in explanations. According to him, you only need to have a discussion once. This, of course, is a lie, but it makes him much easier to deal with than my shrewder mother.

"I know, Dad. I've thought a lot about it and it doesn't bother me so much any more."

"You sure?"

It might have been kinder to say no, and let him talk a little while longer. But I was suddenly very tired and wanted to sleep. "Yeah. I'm sure. But thanks for coming in."

He stood up sadly. "How was your dinner out?" I asked.

He brightened. "It was fun. We went to Lutece. Barth really seemed to enjoy it. I like the food there. But I think next time I'll bring him to that little Japanese place where they make you sit on the floor."

"That'll be fun," I said. "Goodnight, Dad."

"Goodnight, baby. Sweet dreams."

I knew the child was mine. I had no memory of how I had conceived or delivered it, but wasn't the least bit curious about either event. It lay on a pile of straw in the bassinet, very tiny and wrinkled. My mother say in a rocking chair nearby. She stood and picked up my baby, holding it to her chest. "I'll take care of it, honey. I've done this before." She began nursing it. I left.

When I came back, my mother was gone and the baby was in the bassinet. Through the huge bay window at the front I could see the ocean crashing on black jagged hulks of granite under a leaden overcast sky. A seagull screamed up toward the window, then veered off.

I cried out when I looked back at the baby. It had turned blue and its limbs were shrunken and withered. My mother was shaking her head at me. "You haven't been taking care of it. I knew this would happen. Give it to me."

"No," I said. "You made it turn blue. It's my baby." I lifted it and started nursing it. Its limbs filled out and it cooed happily, but even after it was done and smiling at me it was still blue.

"You see?" my mother said. "You can't do it right. Let me."

I turned to see Juniper behind me with a candle in each hand. "It's still blue, Juniper," I said.

She shook her head. "It'll always be blue. All your children will come out that way."

"But I don't want to have blue children."

"You can't help it." She lifted her left foot to the crook of her right knee. "You have to. Otherwise the pink children will have no one to play with."

I looked at my mother, but she had turned into a tree. Another flaming seagull shot toward me from the sky, but this time it smashed through the window and the dream shattered into fragments of orange and blue.

Ringed in mascara and eyeliner, my eyes looked foreign, and the skin on my face felt synthetic when I touched it. My hair, moussed to stay out of my face, was stiff. I decided that I looked horrible in white, and specifically in white lace-trimmed dresses with puffed sleeves and sweetheart necklines. Jim passed the hall mirror and stopped to inspect his ear. “Can you see the hole?”

“Of course not. It’s closed by now. Relax.”

“You look pretty. A regular ice princess.”

“Fuck you. Mom bought this dress. It’s not my fault.”

“Or mine either.”

“I’m sorry. I’m just edgy.”

“Christ.” He went to help my grandmother down the stairs.

She had been crushed about the cookies, and though my father had taken her out to dinner in the city she was still sad, and that make her weaker. She leaned all of her slight weight on Jim’s arm. I wondered how often she bothered to make herself a meal in her apartment in Florida. I wished she hadn’t moved there; I still couldn’t help thinking of Florida as a place people went to die. Jim had got better at helping her. Maybe law school had been good for something after all. She stopped to look at me. “You look pretty, dear. Why don’t you wear makeup all the time? You look so much more attractive with a little makeup.”

I thanked her for the compliment through gritted teeth. My mother walked in, adjusting her earrings. “They should start coming soon. You look nice, Celia.” She pushed a stray wisp of hair out of my face, and I felt a slight tremor in her fingers. It had never occurred to me before to wonder whether she really enjoyed these things. She kissed me lightly on the cheek and ran to see how the caterers were doing.

The doorbell rang. I opened it, remembered to smile, and let the first couple in.

"Hello, merry Christmas, Celia,” they chorused. I responded in kind, wondering who they were, and trotted upstairs with their coats.

I had been taking coats at my mother’s parties for years, long before they were catered. With the arrival of the caterers my brother had been relieved of his function as bartender, but I was kept on as coat-checker, a job for which I received only strained facial muscles, tired legs, and the dubious honor of seeing more mink coats in one place than most people ever do.

All the guests remembered me, which was disturbing as I remembered roughly a quarter of them. I tended to remember the men, who all looked the same, by their wives, and a lot of them ha changed wives since last year. I could always spot second wives; they were younger, smiled more nervously, and wore newer, flashier jewelry.

After a half-hour or so there was a lull, and I thought I had finished. Just as I was bracing myself for the worst part of the ordeal—entering the living room and telling seventy people whose names I had forgotten how well my first semester of college had gone—the doorbell rang again. I scampered past two platter-wielding caterers to answer it, wondering as I saw the female silhouette outside the door why someone had sent his wife on ahead. When I opened it I realized it was Emily, the firm’s only woman partner.

“Hi, Celia. Merry Christmas.” She gave me her coat. “Am I late?”

“Not really. You’ll wish you’d been later soon enough.” She laughed. When Emily made partner a few years earlier, my father had invited her out to dinner with our family, and she and I had got along well ever since. I liked her because she was younger than the others, and talked about things none of the others would have mentioned in front of the boss’s daughter.

When I got back after dumping off her coat she was still at the foot of the stairs, looking in at the living room.

“Is something wrong?”

Her chin was quivering and through the thin sleeves of her silk dress I could see the muscles of her arms tensing and relaxing.

She turned to me with unsettling bright eyes. “Is there somewhere I can go and have a cigarette?”

“You can smoke in the den, everyone—“

“No, I mean alone.”

I hesitated, and she said, “I’ll go outside. Yes, that’s—“

“You can use my room,” I said. “I’ll just open the window afterwards. Come on.”

She followed me in and stood in the middle of the lavender carpet, glancing guiltily around. “You can sit on the bed, you won’t hurt the comforter.”

“I’m just looking for an ashtray.”

I took a little clay saucer with a unicorn’s head painted on it off my bookcase and gave it to her. “I made this ten years ago at day camp. I’m glad someone’s finally using it.”

She kicked off her heels and tucked her legs underneath her as she sat on my bed and lit up. “This is really nice of you. You don’t smoke, do you?”

“No, but I’m not psycho about other people smoking.”

Which is wrong, because I’m too sensitive to smells, and I hate the smell of cigarette smoke the most, especially that stale odor that hangs after a smoker leaves a room. I couldn’t believe I was encouraging this woman to pollute my bedroom.

“Where’s your husband?”

Emily blew out an angry stream of smoke. “He wouldn’t come. He hates these things. It’s understandable. I hate his business functions too.”

“But this is a party,” I said cheerfully. “We have little tiny sausages wrapped in bacon on sticks and little dabs of chocolate mousse in milk chocolate cups. In my eyes, that makes up for a lot.”

“I’m on a diet.” She tapped the ashes into the saucer right on the unicorn’s nose. “So my last motivation for liking this season is gone.”

She smoked in silence. I couldn’t believe she was dieting. She had started out thin and had lost at least ten pounds since I first met her. Over the years I had seen her change, abandon one by one what she must have come to see as her mistakes: her long hair, her exotic jangling jewelry, her bright blouses and shorter skirts. Now, with her short hair styled back from her face to show off the small pearl earrings with diamond chips, a hiss of smoke issuing from between her coral lips, she looked so polished and perfect that I would almost have been frightened of her if the stocking feet hadn’t added a comic touch to the portrait. “So what’s up with you?”

I sighed. “Not much that’s cocktail conversation.”

Her eyes glinted feverishly as they turned on me. “No, of course not. You’re in college. But what’s really going on?”

“Well, let’s see…I’ve semi-dated a friend of mine who worships the devil and tattoos himself for evening entertainment, I’ve just discovered that I was left in the cradle by fairies, and I can’t have children.”

“How do you know you can’t have children?” I explained. “Do you want children?”

I fell unhappily silent, wishing I hadn’t told her. She nodded and stubbed out her cigarette. “Of course you don’t want them now, and maybe not ever. But you’d like to have the choice, wouldn’t you?” She left the butt in the ashtray and lay back on my bed, stretching her arms and legs, a black angel figure in the snow. “Don’t worry, Celia, you’re not the only one. It hardly bothers you at all, after a while. I can’t have children either.”

“What’s the matter with your insides?”

“Nothing. But I still can’t have children.”

She sat up, stretching. “You’re lucky, actually. You’ll never have to worry. And the worst decision you’ll have to make has already been made for you.” She put her shoes back on. “I’d better go put in my appearance. Thanks. I feel much better.” She opened the door. “You coming down?”

I shook my head. She disappeared.

I emptied the ashtray, shut the door, and opened all the windows. It was snowing, and a few stray flakes blew in to settle on my hair. I hugged my knees to my chest as the wind chilled the room. Even after the stale smell of smoke had been scoured out, I huddled in the center of my bed, a ball of white on a white field, while the cold stung water into my eyes.

Jim was a little surprised when he opened the door and saw me hunched up on my bed with snow dripping off the ends of my hair.

“Phone for you,” was all he said.

I stood and adjusted my dress, stockings and face.

“It’s the Antichrist Wanna-Be.”

I swore inwardly never, ever to tell Jim anything about my personal life again. “I don’t want to talk to him.”

“I already told him you were home.”

“So tell him you were wrong.”

“You want me to lie?” He sounded shocked.

“Thank you, born-again Boy Scout.” I walked past him. “Tell me you never asked me to lie for you.”

“That was different.”

“Oh, of course.” I sat on the pile of fur coats and picked up the phone in my parents’ bedroom. “Hello?”

“Hello, Celia.” At least he wasn’t slurring. “Is there a party going on?”

“It’s my parents’ party. What’s up?”

“I miss you.”

“Did it not work out with Amy?”

He shifted into his Greek tragedy voice. “That has nothing to do with it. I don’t care about her or any of those other blond boring people. None of them really care about me. That’s why I miss you.”

He was worse than drunk; he was depressed. “Of course they care about you. Amy wrote you all those long letters.” So what if they were in pink ink with little hearts dotting the I’s.

“But she doesn’t understand me. I told her about that night at the lake and she just laughed.”

I shivered, remembering. Arlon was a strong boy; I’m surprised we didn’t both end up floating on the surface. “Demonic possession is not something high schoolers are ready to deal with, no matter how mature they might look.”

“You really think I was possessed?”

Nothing has ever irritated me as much as the eagerness in his voice at that moment did. “Yes, Arlon, but I doubt it was by the Lord of the Flies.”

“What, then?”

I didn’t understand why he loved to rehash what was one of the worst nights of my young life. But whenever he felt low, he brought up the night he had run screaming out to the edge of the pier and let me stop him from throwing himself in. I suppose I may really have saved his life; he couldn’t swim even when sober and even if he’d kept himself afloat the lightning might well have finished him off. But somewhere deep inside—or maybe not so deep—a malicious little bitch wants to know whether he really would have jumped.

“I don’t know, Arlon. Maybe me.” Because it is a way, after all, of making sure; anyone who’s willing to risk her life to save yours has to love you, doesn’t she? And that night I did love him, because he let me pull him back from the brink, because isn’t saving a life a little like creating one?

“What?”

“Never mind. I’m just glad it only happened once.” But it happened all the time, only in different guises; I spent the entire half-relationship rescuing him from his own clutches, until I finally realized the difference between giving life and saving it about the time I figured out why he was a Satanist.

“I miss you. Amy wouldn’t do that for me.”

“Maybe not. But you wouldn’t do that to Amy.”

“You never forgave me for that.”

“It was my fault too.”

“You loved me.”

“Of course I did.”

“And you still do.”

At least this signaled the end of the conversation. “Yes, Arlon, I still do.”

“Then why won’t you go out with me?”

Because as long as I was there to save him, he was going to teeter there on the brink, flirting with death and the devil. Because eventually, even saving his life wouldn’t have been enough to prove to him that I loved him. Because my needs and his needs fit together perfectly to make a mirror image of love.

“Because I’m not good for you, Arlon. You need someone stable and sane.”

“But you’re the sanest person I know.”

“That’s only because you live in California.”

He laughed. I could hang up now that he had laughed. When I finally did, I went into the kitchen to say hello to the caterers and look in my mother’s calendar to see when I’d be able to visit Juniper.

I had done all my shopping at school, but I still had to work to wangle a free afternoon between breakfast with my brother and my dad and helping my mother wrap presents. I would have liked to have Juniper over, since I didn’t relish meeting her parents again, but it would have created unnecessary havoc, so I climbed the hill, now lightly frosted with snow, to the front door and its useless knocker.

Her mother’s nervous, astonished smile of gratitude made me faintly queasy. I realized she had been afraid that I wouldn’t come back. “So nice to see you again! I hope you can stay for dinner. We’re having a traditional Chanukah dinner.”

“I’m afraid I can’t. I have to be home for dinner. But thank you for offering.” She walked me to the kitchen and motioned upstairs. “Judith’s in her room. I don’t know what she does up there all day.” And you’re thinking probably drugs, I thought, staring at her next to the bookshelf wearing her apologetic anxious grin. On the thick binding of the book I had picked up off the floor a few days ago I read, The Joy of Jewish Cooking. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or groan, but I didn’t want to do either in front of Ruth so I hurried upstairs.

Juniper was sitting on the floor with her back to the doorway. In one hand she held an open paperback and with the other she was dealing tarot cards from a deck. She had already laid out most of the spread. The last card, which stands for the general outcome, was of course the Hanged Man.

She nearly hit the ceiling when I tapped her shoulder.

“Celia! I didn’t hear you—“ She looked at the outcome of her reading. “I should have known, though.”

“Yep, you should have.” I sat down Hanged-Man Style on the bed.

“You’re doing that on purpose. Stop it.”

I laughed and extended both legs. “What’s it for, anyway?”

“Nothing, I was just practicing.” She scooped the cards up and sat on the bed.

“What’s all this for?” There was a small cat figurine on the bed, between half an apple and a snapshot.

She handed me the photo. “It’s for a love charm.” In the picture she was standing next to a bearded man with round wire-rimmed glasses in a tie-dye and sandals in front of a van. Even in faded Kodachrome, I