CHAPTER ONE
Not that I’m bitter or anything—because I’m most certainly not—but thirty-five years later, the thing that still irks me is that my first husband left me for a woman who had him convinced she was a witch.
“I’ve been bewitched!” he said, as though this was a medical diagnosis that could not be disputed. “I have to be honest with you. I’m helpless. Helpless!” He was grinning, and even his black hair looked like it was standing up in little peaks of happiness. I was afraid he was going to break out in a soft-shoe.
It was a freezing-cold December morning, which is supposed to be a really wonderful time of the year—holiday cheer and all that—and ohhh, he was so smug in his guilty, proud way, giddy over the fact that his life was about to become fascinating, while I knew mine was going to get so much worse.
I knew who had bewitched him. His poetry instructor at the city college. Her name was Juliette Pierrot. The kind of woman who fluttered her closed eyelids when she spoke and who wore almost cartoonishly low-cut blouses and a bunch of silver necklaces that she called talismans. She thought Shakespeare and Robert Frost would show up if you simply chanted a few words to channel them.
Big deal, I remember telling him, all false bravado. I had a grandmother in backwater Florida who knew how to get rid of people’s warts just by wishing them away, and who once actually transferred warts from one person to another simply by concentrating. Not exactly a world-class witch perhaps, but still, someone you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of.
“I can’t let you go off with a woman who imagines she’s a witch just because she’s got you all hot for her,” I said, though it killed me having to even say those words. “You bring her around here, and I’ll show her what’s what.”
Victor threw back his head and laughed, showing white, even teeth. “She’d never come here,” he said. “I can’t even think of how weird that would be.”
“Too much reality for her, huh?” I said. “Well, some can take it, and some can’t.”
“Too much something,” he said. And when he looked around the messy kitchen, at the spilled everything, and at our reflections in the gray windowpane that showed my curly, disheveled hair, it was clear that he saw none of it for the glorious mess that it was. We were no longer us.
I was twenty-five years old, and I had been up since four fifteen with the baby and had nursed her and sung her songs that made her laugh and had baked the cinnamon muffins that Victor had just wolfed down. And the heartbreaking thing was, I’d been so happy there in the middle of the night, so pleased and contented in our messy, unconventional life, thinking of what to get at the grocery store later and did Victor’s mother need me to get her some seltzer water again, and oh yes, I needed to take the garbage cans down to the curb because it was garbage day, and also I had to remember that my mother had wanted me to come upstairs and bring her my recipe for lemon bars, and where was that recipe card—was it in the junk drawer? My mother lived on the third floor of our house, and his mother lived beneath us on the first floor, and I had my hands full, balancing these two mothers, one up and one down, both full of opinions and unhappiness and needs. I was the mistress of it all: juggling the moms, the baby, and—why not be honest here?—all the sex my husband insisted he needed just so he could live through each day. I did like that part.
I was a freaking domestic sorceress, presiding over a magical chaotic mess.
And then just like that, he casually crushed me like a paper cup.
I stood there looking at him, aware that certain circuits were already flicking off in my brain’s central control panel. The trust was the first to leave, followed by all the pockets of love I held hidden inside, and then the hope trudged out, turning off the lights. It hurt a lot when the hope left.
Minutes ticked by and he was still talking and talking, not even noticing that I had gone dark. I looked toward the refrigerator, and I saw the little amber mound on the linoleum, dried now and hardened. It was a symbol of us, that hard little place. A whole year before, he’d dropped the bottle of maple syrup, and I’d asked him to clean it up, and he said I should clean it up, and I said I wouldn’t, I was done with cleaning up after him and why was I the one who always had to clean up everything, and he said, well that was certainly tough toenails, because he wasn’t going to, and then nobody ever did it, and it dried into something three-dimensional and smooth. Something your foot knocked against when you stood in front of the fridge.
It had become a funny story, a symbol of our relaxed, bohemian household. We pointed it out to friends, with a little jiggle of pride. This is who we are. Aren’t we amusing and fun and clever with the way we don’t let stupid stuff bother us?
But right then I knew that it didn’t say that at all. That little hard mound of maple syrup really said we were hopeless idiots who couldn’t even clean up a spill on the floor. Idiots who wouldn’t ever agree.
What if you just let her have him? I heard myself think.
Give up? said my witchy grandmother in my head. Are you talking about . . . giving him up . . . to a woman who can’t even talk with her eyes open? Get your head on straight, child.
“Victor,” I said, taking a deep breath that started my heart beating again. “You are not leaving me for some wannabe witch, and that is that. I refuse to hear any more about the idea.” I wiped up a pool of milk on the floor so that it wouldn’t come to the same fate as the syrup, but I really did that only so I didn’t have to look at his rosy, lovesick face.
“Well, Billie,” he said in a voice strained from the need to explain the obvious, “we can’t very well stay together if I’m in love with someone else. What kind of life would that be?”
I said, “I tell you what. You can leave in ten years, when Louise, whom I named for your sainted mother under great duress, is in middle school. Until then, you have to do your part.”
He blanched and looked over at Louise, who was busy mashing up butter and cinnamon bits and rubbing them into her hair. I knew he was thinking that she would never be in middle school, and that even if she did ever get there, this sexy witch-who-wasn’t-really-a-witch wouldn’t still be waiting for him with her beguiling cleavage and silk scarves and her silver necklaces and the poetry.
“Also, you bastard, in case it has slipped your mind,” I said, pulling myself up to my full height and letting my eyes go wild enough to match my spiky-ass hair, “I myself have probably inherited my grandmother’s freaky witch genes, and I don’t think you want to get tangled up with two witches, especially when I would bet that only one of us has legit genetic credentials, and that one happens to be the one you’re married to.”
Boom.
Six months later, he was gone.
I’d like to report that I vaporized him with my steely blue eyes or planted warts all over his body, but the simple truth is that one day he finished restoring the antique car he’d been working on since time immemorial, and he got in it and drove off—a Romeo heading to his bewitching Juliette. The two of them eventually moved to the coast of France to write poetry and make love by the sea and observe life as he thought it was meant to be lived: a wild, magical, childless adventure, so he said in his poems. life at the bone. Yep, that was the name of his book, written in all lower-case letters like he was some avant-garde darling. Critics hailed him as a “modern Walt Whitman, but with a female muse.”