The children in town could whisper whatever rumors they wished, but the truth was that most of their mothers had gone to see the aunts at least once in their lives. Occasionally, someone might appear who wanted red pepper tea for a persnickety stomach, or butterfly weed for nerves, but every woman in town knew what the aunts’ real business was: their specialty was love. The aunts were not invited to potluck suppers or library fund-raisers, but when a woman in town quarreled with her lover, when she found herself pregnant by someone who wasn’t her husband, or discovered that the man she’d married was unfaithful as a hound, then there she’d be, at the Owens back door, just after twilight, the hour when the shadows could hide your features so that no one would recognize you as you stood beneath the wisteria, a tangled vine that had grown above the door for longer than anyone in town had been alive.
It didn’t matter if a woman was the fifth-grade teacher at the elementary school, or if she was the pastor’s wife, or perhaps the longtime girlfriend of the orthodontist on Peabody Street. It didn’t matter that people swore black birds dropped from the sky, ready to peck out your eyes when you approached the Owens house from the east. Desire had a way of making a person oddly courageous. In the aunts’ opinion, it could sneak up on a grown woman and turn her from a sensible creature into something as foolish as a flea that keeps chasing after the same old dog. Once someone had made the decision to come to the back door, she was more than ready to drink pennyroyal tea, prepared with ingredients that couldn’t even be spoken aloud, which would surely bring on bleeding that night. She’d already decided to let one of the aunts prick the third finger of her left hand with a silver needle if that’s what it took to get her darling back once more.
The aunts clucked like chickens whenever a woman walked up the bluestone path. They could read desperation from half a mile away. A woman who was head over heels and wanted to make certain her love was returned would be happy to hand over a cameo that had been in her family for generations. One who had been betrayed would pay even more. But those women who wanted someone else’s husband, they were the worst. They would do absolutely anything for love. They got all twisted up, like rubber bands, just from the heat of their desire, and they didn’t give a damn for convention and good manners. As soon as the aunts saw one of those women walking up the path, they sent the girls straight to the attic, even on December nights, when twilight came well before four-thirty.
On those murky evenings, the sisters never protested that it was too early, or that they weren’t yet tired. They tiptoed up the stairs, holding hands. From the landing, beneath the dusty old portrait of Maria Owens, the girls called out their good nights; they went to their rooms, slipped their nightgowns over their heads, then went directly to the back staircase, so they could creep down again, press their ears against the door, and listen in to every word. Sometimes, when it was an extremely dark evening and Gillian was feeling especially brave, she would push the door ajar with her foot, and Sally wouldn’t dare to close it again, for fear it might creak and give them away.
“This is so silly,” Sally would whisper. “It’s utter nonsense,” she’d decree.
“Then go to bed,” Gillian would whisper right back. “Go on,” she’d suggest, knowing that Sally wouldn’t dare to miss any of what happened next.
From the angle of the back stairs, the girls could see the old black stove and the table and the hooked rug, where the aunts’ customers often paced back and forth. They could see how love might control you, from your head to your toes, not to mention every single part of you in between.
Because of this, Sally and Gillian had learned things most children their age had not: that it was always wise to collect fingernail clippings that had once been the living tissue of your beloved, just in case he should take it into his head to stray; that a woman could want a man so much she might vomit in the kitchen sink or cry so fiercely blood would form in the corners of her eyes.
On evenings when the orange moon was rising in the sky, and some woman was crying in their kitchen, Sally and Gillian would lock pinkies and vow never to be ruled by their passions.
“Yuck,” the girls would whisper to each other when a client of their aunts would weep or lift her blouse to show the raw marks where she’d cut the name of her beloved into her skin with a razor.
“Not us,” the sisters would swear, locking their fingers even more tightly.
During the winter when Sally was twelve and Gillian almost eleven, they learned that sometimes the most dangerous thing of all in matters of love was to be granted your heart’s desire. That was the winter when a young woman who worked in the drugstore came to see the aunts. For days the temperature had been dropping. The engine of the aunts’ Ford station wagon sputtered and refused to turn over and the tires were frozen to the concrete floor of the garage. Mice would not venture out from the warmth of the bedroom walls; swans in the park picked at icy weeds and still they went hungry. The season was so cold and the sky so heartless and purple it made young girls shiver just to look upward.
The customer who arrived one dark evening wasn’t pretty, but she was known for her kindness and sweet disposition. She delivered holiday meals to the elderly and sang in a choir with a voice like an angel’s and always put an extra squirt of syrup in the glass when children ordered vanilla Cokes at the soda fountain. But when she arrived at twilight, this plain, mild girl was in such agony that she curled up on the hand-hooked rug; her fists were so tightly clenched they were like the claws of a cat. She threw her head back and her glossy hair fell over her face like a curtain; she chewed on her lip until her flesh bled. She was being eaten alive by love and had already lost thirty pounds. Because of this the aunts seemed to take pity on her, something they rarely did. Though the girl hadn’t much money, they gave her the strongest potion they could, with exact instructions on how to make another woman’s husband fall in love with her. Then they warned her that what was done could never be undone, and so she must be sure.
“I’m sure,” the girl said, in her calm beautiful voice, and the aunts must have been satisfied, because they gave her the heart of a dove, set on one of their best saucers, the kind with the blue willows and the river of tears.
Sally and Gillian sat on the back stairs in the dark, their knees touching, their feet dirty and bare. They were shivering, but still they grinned at each other and whispered right along with the aunts a charm they knew well enough to recite in their sleep: “My lover’s heart will feel this pin, and his devotion I will win. There’ll be no way for him to rest nor sleep, until he comes to me to speak. Only when he loves me best will he find peace, and with peace, rest.” Gillian made little stabbing motions, which is what the girl was to do to the dove’s heart when she repeated these words for seven nights in a row before she went to bed.
“It will never work,” Sally whispered afterward, as they felt their way along in the dark, up the stairs and along the hall to their rooms.
“It might work,” Gillian whispered back. “Even though she’s not pretty, it’s still within the realm of possibility.”
Sally drew herself up; she was older and taller and always knew best. “We’ll just see about that.”
For nearly two weeks, Sally and Gillian watched the lovesick girl. Like hired detectives, they sat for hours at the counter in the drugstore and spent all their pocket money on Cokes and french fries so they could keep an eye on her. They trailed after when she went home to the apartment she shared with another girl, who worked at the dry cleaner’s. The more they followed her schedule, the more Sally began to feel they were invading the girl’s privacy, but the sisters continued to believe they were doing important research, although now and then Gillian was confused as to what their goal really was.