By Laurie Holding
This is the story of my sister Georgie, the story from which all others stem.
You know me as Madeline Brooklyn Bridges, and yes, I know it's a funny name. My big sister's is funny, too: GeorgeAnn Tappan Zee Bridges. Naming us after New York City bridges was my mother's attempt at humor, which is ironic since Mother is not known for her levity.
This story sits on the map of my life like a bruise, where I can press my finger down and say, "Right there. Everything that happened prior to this was before. All else, after."
I am not unusual. Lots of people have told me of similar patterns in their lives. Something jolted us as we meandered down our paths, and instead of growing up gently and slowly like plants, we have pivoted on one event which now serves as the fulcrum on which the rest of our lives balance.
In those days, there was less of a to-do over car seats. When I was a kid, if you were anywhere north of three years old, you were freed from it, plopped into a booster seat in the back. Then, once you weighed enough, or maybe it was when you were tall enough, I forget, but at some point, you were finally allowed to sit up front with the driver.
On the day I joined my big sister in emancipation from the back seat, all hell broke loose.
You know how it is. Everyone wants that view from the front seat. Plus, the front-seat kid got to drive the radio. And at our ages, eight and twelve, Georgie and I also wanted the driver's full attention.
From the moment we both qualified for the coveted seat, my mother referred to the passenger side of the car as "that damned front seat," which made Georgie and me giggle even if were mad at each other. Swear words were funny.
For a while, we tried the "call it" game: On the way out to the car, whoever first called "Shotgun!" won it. When that game became an all-out catfight, Mother installed a giant whiteboard in our playroom, the kind you used to see in conference rooms and lecture halls before technology took over our lives.
The whiteboard originally had us on a simple alternating schedule, so every other day I'd get the front. That solution died a fast death because some days we never even left the house, while other days it seemed like all we did was drive around.
After that came the mileage log. The whiteboard became a chicken-scratched mess of how many miles each of us had under our belts, so to speak. Every ten miles, Georgie and I switched seats. Looking back, I suppose I should feel some sort of sympathy for our mother; that phase must have been maddening.
The day before, the truly before, Georgie had her Friday ballet lesson, which meant that after Mother and I dropped her off and got her all settled into her foo-foo Tutu Land, I got the front seat by default because I was the only kid in the car. "Alone in the car? You get to be the star," that's what Dad always said.
I knew Georgie was her favorite, but when we were alone together, back then, that is, Mother and I found lots to talk about. We shared a love of all things natural: plants, herbs that she used for cooking, and concoctions from the Earth that she used as medicinal remedies. The two of us collected wildflowers to dry and arrange, and we worked together in our garden beds that sprawled around our house.
Georgie was impatient with nature. She wanted to go to stores or skating rinks or movies. She pretended to sneeze a lot when she had had enough of the outdoors, claiming she had seasonal allergies, so she didn't know half the stuff I did about the Earth and what it offers up to us.
For instance, on hiking days, days that found Georgie with friends at a mall or a bowling alley, Mother and I would gather up fallen leaves, touch their trees' trunks, and repeat their names in reverence, almost like prayers. I kept a scrapbook that housed hundreds of flattened leaves that I studied in my bedroom so that I could impress Mother later in the car.
We cruised away from Georgie's dance studio that day, and Mother drove nice and slow so that we could take up our long-running game of Name that Tree, pointing and shouting out the names we had memorized.
It was magical but much harder at this wintry time of year; without their leaves, most of the trees had only their skeletons and bark to help us identify them. We shouted out species' names and called each other's bluffs the whole way to our favorite store, Nature's Cure.
"Red Oak!"
"White Oak!"
"No way, that's another Red."
"Sycamore!"
"Balding Cypress!"
"Weeping Alaskan Cedar!"
Filled with the mysteries of plants and the Earth's natural healing remedies, Nature's Cure was another yawner for Georgie, but for Mother and me, it was the best place you could be if you had to be indoors. When we got inside, we swapped out our tree game to take turns reading the labels on little bottles of tinctures and pouches of exotic herbs.
There are hundreds of ways to use plants and oils that come straight from the Earth, and to her credit, my mother loved indulging my curiosity. We bought teas, supplements, and all kinds of tincture drops, methodically testing them on ourselves and Dad and Georgie. Mother kept track of any changes in our bodies or our mental outlooks in her journal.
This was, mind you, back in the late '90s, when the alternative medicine entrepreneurs were still new enough to be considered "quacks", but maybe that's why the two of us were so enamored; Mother and I also shared a love of all things quirky.
We gulped facts down, reading labels to each other from opposite sides of the store. We didn't care what people thought of us. Some things are too exciting to keep quiet. Astounding, to learn the magic of lavender, that it calms you, can even regulate your heartbeat when you rub its oils into your palms. Or to learn that vanilla helps to prevent acne. Or that ginger, when added to tea, acts as an anti-inflammatory.
Mother had just gotten a paper cut that morning, and she was in search of a wound-healing salve. In her "office," the room where she "worked," Mother had stacks and stacks of books, and in those days, they were mostly on gardening. She hadn't yet started her passion for all things African.
"Origanum dictamnus," she chanted to the wrinkled lady at Nature's Cure, and I giggled a little. For Christmas, Georgie and I had gotten a book that Mother was reading out loud to us at night because I still wasn't reading big thick books on my own. It was about this kid Harry Potter, who got to go to a school to become a wizard. Harry had to learn all kinds of spells while he pointed his new wand. "Origanum dictamnus" sounded like something Harry would say when he wanted a room to light up.
"Hmmm," said the lady behind the shop's counter. "I don't think I'm familiar with that one. Organic whatus?" She leaned over with her hand up to her ear.
"Origanum dictamnus," my mother said again, only this time really, really slowly, like she was talking to a stupid person. "It usually comes in a tincture? But I'm looking for the salve. It's for wounds." She blinked once, then leaned onto the counter to show the lady. "See? I got a nasty paper cut this morning, and Origanum dictamnusâ?"â?"hey, you know what? Maybe you know it by its common name. Dittany?" She brightened up a bit, hoping her translation might shed some light.
"Dittany? Ha!" said the shopkeeper, taking off her glasses and breathing onto the lenses with her exclamation. She looked out the window, rubbing her pilled-up green sweater onto the glasses to clean them. "Sounds like some Brit!"
"Excuse me?" my mother asked, tap-tap-tapping her manicured fingernails on the counter. I examined them in wonder. Not one chip in the polish, ever.
"You know how those Brits talk," said the lady. "Went to 'er shop taday, ditt-ne? Had on 'is green britches again, ditt-ne?" She gave a weird cackle, and I cringed at the sound of the phlegm in the back of her throat.
Mouth noises always raised my hackles.
Mother gave her what I'm sure the woman thought was a smile, but it looked like the grimace she made that used to warn Georgie and me to get the heck out of her way.
"Mom's gonna blow," Georgie would stage whisper, and we would snort with forbidden laughter, the same kind of laughter you get in church, as we ran to one of our rooms, even as we felt the thrill of terror that Mother might come after us in a rage.
Now, she took a deep yoga breath, the kind she taught us would save lots of hurt feelings as we got older, and then she stood a little taller.
"Let me tell you the story of dit-tan-y of Crete," she said to the lady, brushing several of her long black braids over her shoulder. Their little pink beads hit against each other with satisfying clicks. "Legend has it that Origanum dictamnus was what the goddess Venus used to heal her beloved son, Aeneas, when he was wounded in battle.
"And if you aren't a legend kind of person," Mother went on, lowering her eyelids just a hair, "maybe you'll recognize the name Aristotle? Ancient Greek philosopher? Aristotle wrote a famous piece on wild animal behavior that detailed how he himself experimented with goats who had been wounded with arrows. After the goats ate dittany, their wounds were miraculously closed! And that's not all." Mother put her perfect manicure inches away from the shop lady's open mouth.
"Hippocrates? You know him, I'm sure. He prescribed dittany of Crete for all manner of ailments. Wound healing was just one of them."
She leaned back, and I hoped she would catch her breath. You didn't have to do or say much to get my mother up on her lectern.
At this point, cashier lady had pulled out a field guide from under the register and was flipping through it.
"Ah, here we are!" she read. "Says here the number one use for dittany of Crete has historically been ... wait for it ... as an aphrodisiac!" She looked up at my mother and made her eyebrows bounce up and down, like they were sharing a very special secret or something. "Need a little extra action, do ya?" And here she took on that weird accent again. "Needs a lit-al bump between the shates? Ditt-ne?"
I was eight. I didn't have a clue what sheets that lady was talking about. All I knew was that once you made my mother mad, almost nothing, not even pralines and cream ice cream, could bring her back.
When you're with a grumpy person, nothing is fun. Even before, before this day, I sensed that there was something edgy about my mother. She was always ready to pounce or point her finger or send somebody into their room, so unless we were gardening or talking trees, I usually kept my distance.
After the missed dittany connection, I knew Mother was smoldering and indignant, silent as she slammed her way into the car. I decided to settle into the back seat even though I could have stayed up there with her and her simmering resentment toward that lady. It would have been my third trip in a row up there, something I could easily have rubbed Georgie's face in later, but I didn't need to be near Mother's tension.
She didn't seem to care either way. Where her youngest kid sat in the car that day has probably never even crossed her mind.
But it crosses mine even today.
| Author Notes | Maddie Bridges, a contemporary witch who owns a plant and tincture store in Greenwich Village, appeared in my first book, Planted on Perry Street, which is available here on FanStory, as well as on Amazon. All in the Cards is her backstory, a novella that I hope to launch simultaneously with Book II in the series, tentatively entitled Party on Perry Street. This first chapter has been edited from a FanStory contest for First Chapters. |
By Laurie Holding
Still on winter break from school, we had gotten used to our gifts from Christmas, and television had lost its luster, too. The day after our Nature's Cure trip, Mother had asked Dad for the day off, and whatever that might have meant for her, for Georgie and me it meant a long Saturday adventure with our father in the city.
My city. My favorite place on Earth, New York City.
I came out of the house and saw Georgie sitting all smug in the front seat, and I knew. I knew that she knew that I knew that she should be in the back seat, since she'd had the front on the way home from dance the day before. I had practically handed it to her on a silver platter.
Dad never gave a hoot about who had the front seat. He just wanted to get from point A to point B. One kid got the front seat until the first stop, then we switched, regardless of miles or time. Whatever he said was law, and because he always made sure that the back seat person got to participate in whatever the day's magic happened to be, trips with Dad tended to be light-hearted.
We lived in Scarsdale, and while we loved taking the train into Manhattan, my father usually had all kinds of people to see and things to do, so when we were with him the train was out of the question.
"A man has to have control over where he goes, right, girls?" he'd say in his boom voice.
Now, Georgie was chattering away to Dad, and I knew it was all a distraction act. I felt my adrenaline getting all worked up and I tried my best to give my anger a voice, something my friend Minnie Pinnister had told me I needed to practice.
"Hey!" I said, opening the door on her side of my father's beloved black car that was always clean. "It's my turn, Georgie. You had the front on the way home from dance yesterday." I forced a friendly smile. "Remember?"
"Doesn't matter, Chickadee! Just get in! Get in with thee!" Dad sang. He was always trying to rhyme the ends of his sentences, like all of life should be a funny poem.
He whistled at my mother who stood in the doorway, watching us. She was dressed even nicer than usual, with a flowy kind of dress and high skinny heels.
"Where's she going today?" I asked, ignoring Georgie as she gave me the silent laugh, pointing toward the back seat and acting every bit the conqueror.
"Out with the girls for a post-holiday spree. That's what she says, and so says she," Dad said. He was doing his best Dr. Seuss, but there was a catch somewhere in his throat. I watched him all the way to our next stop. Sometimes Dad had lots going on inside his head, and I liked trying to read him.
All the while, though, the most important thing on my mind was my prayer for a lucky roll of the dice that would land me in the front seat for the long trip into my New York.
"Booze first, before I burst!" Dad sang.
"Daddy!" Georgie play-punched his arm. "You aren't drinking a cocktail while you drive?!"
He let out his good old belly laugh. "Well heavens no, my little one! This special bottle is for future fun!" He sang opera style and made us both wince a little. "There's a new boy in town, just launched this day! His name is Mr. Blanton, and his price is cra�¢?"�¢?"zay." He threw his head back.
"Sorry, had to fabricate that last rhyme," he said, adjusting the radio knobs. "Premier bourbon, single barrel, brought to you for the very first time this week by your friendly Kentucky Scots, and we need it. Yes sir, we need it yesterday." He whistled that whistle he had just used on my mother. We pulled up to the bottle store, which I always thought was a funny name for a store.
"Just a spot check, ladies. You can stay in your seats. Fingers crossed for whiskey treats!"
He slammed the door and for a minute Georgie and I tried to whistle that whistle of his, but it only made us laugh, and you can't whistle while you laugh.
"Nope, nada, zilch, outta luck on this boozy front, ladies and germs," Dad said as he got back in the car and slammed the door again. "Apparently, word has gotten out, and there is only so much of my magical elixir available. No worries, New York has more stores. We all know New York has lots and lots of stores. Okay, go! Everybody switch!"
We switched seats, with Georgie begrudgingly climbing to the back, then me clamoring up to buckle myself in next to him. We weren't little kids anymore, but we still liked the physical stretch it took to swap seats without leaving the car.
Dad was kind of talking to himself, so Georgie and I took up the whistle thing again, trying to hit the notes the radio was putting out.
"Can we listen to Q?" Georgie said. Q was a top forty kind of station that teenagers loved back then, and Georgie was trying hard to act cool those days even though she was still a "tween."
"After this song, Princess, the radio is yours. Actually, no, the radio belongs to Miss Mads, since she's up here. Be nice to her and maybe she'll give you your Q. But after this song, please."
It was a sad song by the Eagles, Dad's all-time favorite band, about not being able to tell you why, and how the singer kept trying to walk away, and Georgie and I let him listen to it while he drove without his usual steering wheel slapping, without the pretend mic, without pointing at phantom audience members. Dad usually put on a terrific driving show.
The dry cleaner was next, and this was always a definite inside visit for us because we liked watching all the clean clothes do what Dad called the Whirling Dervish. It never got old, all that swishing cellophane, all those clicks of the dervish machine as it hunted for our father's suits.
Dad had lots and lots of suits, most of which were some shade of blue or gray. I understood that he worked on "The Street" but had no idea what that could possibly entail. Sometimes I pictured him out on the streets of New York City, entertaining people with his lip-synching, pointing at them as they passed, dancing to the Supremes.
After the dry cleaner, it was my turn for the back seat again, and believe me, there's only one thing worse than being the back seat kid, and that's being the back seat kid on dry cleaning day. All those suits had to hang from this weird little hook behind the driver's head, and your view was blocked from that side of the car for the whole ride.
And of course, we were finally off to the city, which meant my prayer's answer was a big fat "NO." I was doomed to sit in the back seat all the way to my favorite place in my whole world.
Experiencing New York City as a child is like hearing a kaleidoscope, like tasting colors, like getting to be Alice in Wonderland, only having a grownup with you. Straight up, towers that are built in all kinds of fancy shapes, with scoopy roofs made of glass. Shop windows full of televisions and lampshades, tee-shirts and flowers, fish tanks and pomegranates. It was too busy for your eyeballs to take it all in.
And on both sides of the car, well, unless you're the back seat kid on dry cleaning day, there are wall-to-wall people, every color and size imaginable. People who looked more like me, and people who looked more like Georgie.
Our family wasn't like that last scene in Lady and the Tramp, where half the puppies look just like Lady and the other half look just like Tramp. Our family looked sort of like what would happen if you stuck our parents in a food processor and put it on gentle speed for a few seconds; we were what my mother called an "eclectic mix."
Georgie was born with lighter skin, closer to our dad's color. I got darker skin, more like our mother's, but my hair was a weird and frustrating mix of the two of them. It was wiry and needed lots of extra time, like my mother's, but it was tinged with a little of my dad's ginger. If I had been allowed to take a straightener to it, it could have looked almost as good as Georgie's, whose hair fell to her shoulders, wavy, thick, and pitch black. But Mother claimed I was still too little to handle a straightening iron, and anyways I should be proud of what Nature had given me.
New York didn't care what color you were or what the heck your hair looked like; in fact, lots of these people seemed like they were in some kind of contest for Weirdest Looking. People wearing boas, people in brilliant oranges and purples, one guy in his underwear playing a guitar and wearing a white cowboy hat. The list was ever-changing and gloriously endless. I tried not to blink so I wouldn't miss anything.
That day, the city's Christmas decorations were still up. Some of them were giant, I mean gigunda, like bigger than Georgie and me put together, laid out in the plazas and along the avenues, red and green balls and those funny old-fashioned tree lights like Dad said he'd had on his tree when he was a kid. The store windows were filled with scenes of snow and people sledding, greens and reds and golds all flying by.
"Slow down!" I said from the back, again trying my Strong but Friendly voice like Minnie Pinnister was teaching me.
"I have to keep up with the pace of traffic, Chickadee! Sorry. We'll go slow on the way back, okay? When we're leaving town?"
I grunted and did my best to catch sight of things, at least from my non-dry cleaning side of the car, as they went past, thanking the universe for red lights.
| Author Notes | Maddie Bridges, a contemporary witch who owns a plant and tincture store in Greenwich Village, appeared in my first book, Planted on Perry Street, which is available here on FanStory, as well as on Amazon. All in the Cards is her backstory, a novella that I hope to launch simultaneously with Book II in the series, tentatively entitled Party on Perry Street. |
By Laurie Holding
I so wanted to live in this place. To wake up to this cacophony, this noise and action that looked almost choreographed. To not know what the day would hold, to be free to choose where to go, what to eat, who to play with. To do different things every single day. To be pressed into the madness of all these people.
We hit Midtown. This was where all the non-natives were. That's what Mother called them. Tourists were easy to spot, easier than a red maple in the late fall, she'd say. They were all looking up, they all had cameras out and ready to go, and they all looked like they had just stumbled into Disney World. Confused but generally cheerful.
"So what are we doing, anyway?" asked Georgie.
"Hmm. I thought it might be good to get away from the hive here, spend some quality time in the Village?" Dad switched her Q station off, right in the middle of Puff Daddy's "It's All About the Benjamins," which I was secretly trying to memorize up in my room when I was supposed to be doing homework. I grunted in frustration when he switched my song over to some whiney woman singing about how is she supposed to live without him, blah, blah, blah. Drama queen.
Despite the music switch, my heart ticked up a beat at the mention of where Dad was taking us. I loved Greenwich Village. It was where The Fossil Store was. At the Fossil Store, you could actually buy an ancient shark's tooth or the fossilized etching of a snake or the dead body of a tarantula. They had crystals and freeze-dried bats and molded replicas of saber-toothed tigers' teeth from back when there weren't even people living in the world yet.
Besides The Fossil Store, Greenwich Village was also home to Miss Minnie Pinnister herself, the lady who came to our school to teach us about what she called natural magic. She was also, of course, teaching me how to speak up for myself, since I tended to stew in silence with my feelings.
Minnie Pinnister used to live up where we did, in Scarsdale, but she told us she had "escaped" to the city as soon as she was legally allowed. She still came back to our school once in a while, though, when she visited her parents, which I thought was just about the craziest thing I'd ever heard since Minnie seemed so old herself. I couldn't even imagine how ancient her parents had to be.
These days, Minnie owned a shop in Greenwich Village where she mixed potions and made ointments and blended teas that would help people live their best lives. Minnie told me once that every one of us holds magic inside that's just busting to get out.
Ours was not, unfortunately, a magical school like that Harry Potter kid went to, but when Minnie came to visit us for assembly, she brought her brand of magic to us every time.
I was almost positive most of my school's grownups didn't like it when Minnie came to talk. Even Mrs. Dumars, my third-grade science teacher who always got yelled at for setting things on fire for us, seemed a little ill-at-ease when Minnie would come in dragging her big old carpetbag behind her. But word had it Minnie was related to somebody who was on the "board," whatever that was, so they had to let her show up now and then.
Minnie would come into our classroom hauling her carpetbag full of strange concoctions, then ask if anybody had problems on their bodies, which always made us laugh. She doled out treatments to the kids who spoke up, though, and they always came away happy customers.
Once, she gave Michael Bester a mixture of lavender tea and local honey, and his cough went away. She gave Annie Gilchrest some tea tree oil mixed with grape seeds and cucumber seeds to rub onto her psoriasis, and the white blotches that once covered her arms and the back of her neck were erased by the next week. Minnie put that same tea tree oil, mixed in with some cloves and lemon and the root of a calendula plant on Shane Cobbin's planter wart and let him take home the whole bottle. By the following week, goodbye wart.
But when the principal, Miss Felmin, sat in on one of Minnie Pinnister's presentations, she told Minnie she had to stop giving kids anything we could taste, which was a bummer. That's when she started bringing her plants into our class, teaching us how each plant, just like each of us, has magic inside it.
Principal Felmin didn't like that so much either. She made Minnie promise to always advise against us trying plant concoctions at home without some grown up watching.
Every time she came to my school, Minnie Pinnister awarded a prize to the kid who guessed the right plants to use for whatever our ailment was. We all chimed in and she never even yelled at us for not raising our hands.
One day, she asked us what we could do about a common cold. I was the winner, because I knew that you could boil the roots of purple coneflowers in tea for any kind of breathing problem or for the beginnings of a cold. I also knew that purple coneflowers were known in the science world as Echinacea. Minnie leaned back on her heels with her mouth in a big "O", and then asked me to come to the front of the room to get my prize.
"Have you ever seen a magician who pulls quarters out of children's ears?" she asked me.
I solemnly shook my head, but thought about my Uncle Archie, who tried that trick with me, only with silver dollars. He did a bad job of it, but I mean, who's going to call attention to bad magic when there's a silver dollar in front of you?
"Well," Minnie was saying, "I don't use quarters."
She reached behind me with one hand, snapped the fingers on the other hand, and the next thing I knew there was a Tamagotchi hanging right in front of my eyeballs.
Tamagotchis were the newest fad that just about every kid was obsessed with, even older kids like Georgie. They were these little electronic devices, the size of my palm, that housed the virtual egg of an alien creature, and you, the owner, were responsible for this alien's growth and happiness. When you pushed the right buttons, you could watch your Tomagotchi hatch from its egg. Then you had to feed it, or play with it, or clean up its poop, or sometimes even discipline it. The creature lived only as long as you took the right kind of care of it.
I could not believe my fortune.
"Are you a witch?" I asked her, breathless as I stared at my alien's egg, and I think my eyes were probably the size of Uncle Archie's silver dollars.
She kind of pursed her lips and her forehead got crinkled up.
"Some people don't like that word," she said, squatting down so she could look me in the eye. "But yes, I suppose that's what I am, and here's how I define that word, witch: A witch is someone who is always searching for the best solutions, always puzzling over what might heal an ache or a sadness, not only for themselves but for everyone they know. The witches I know believe in helping people see the beauty in life, to find joy and healing from the Earth's bounty. I believe we should explore this extraordinary world every day, learning and growing until the day we die. These Tomawhatchamaycallits," she pointed at my new treasure, "they aren't really alive, are they?"
I shook my head.
"But it's fun to pretend they are, right? And by taking care of something outside of your own self, you're learning. And all learning is good."
"What if I kill it?" I asked, afraid to even touch one of my Tomagotchi's buttons. "If you forget to take care of your Tomagotchi, it dies!"
"Everything does that, you know," said Minnie Pinnister, grunting with the strain as she stood up. "Plants, people, you name it, we all die sooner or later. But we all serve a purpose, and that's to learn and to help others learn and enjoy this life, the one we have right now."
I stared at my new treasure. "I think if I kill it, I can reset it." I'd heard other kids talking about putting new batteries into their Tomagotchis or pushing the reset button to start their aliens over as eggs if they got their angel wings because they hadn't been fed for a while.
"It's a toy, Madeline, not a living being. Yes, you can reset a Tomagotchi. Not so much a person or plant who dies. Just as your toy's 'death' will teach you a lesson, our humans and plants who pass over also have something to teach us and can comfort us during our bad times. When they go away, we can still find ways to reach them, and they can still find ways to reach us. But only," she pointed to my chest, "if we believe."
"I believe," I whispered. "Can I be a witch, too?"
"With hard work and a whole lotta faith, my little friend," she said.
Now I looked out my backseat window and I realized I had once again left my Tomagotchi at home, where it would certainly die. Again. Maybe I just wasn't cut out for taking care of things.
I sighed, but my attention was back on the streets. They were getting narrower as we wove through the Village traffic, and their names were words now instead of numbers. Hudson. Greenwich. Bleeker. Perry.
"Can we visit Minnie Pinnister?" I asked, but my voice was drowned out by some guy on the radio who was screaming about Jungleland. Dad's favorite hobby was making mixtapes. This tape was all about his college days, and every song pretty much sounded like the last one if you asked me.
"We'll see, my Sweet," Dad said, eyeing me in the rearview mirror. "But first, but first, a special treat!" His eyes did that thing I loved, like a little dance of excitement.
"What is it?" Sometimes Georgie and I said things at exactly the same time, at which point we would scream "Jinx!" and then start counting, to see who had to buy the other one a Coke. As usual, I lost this time. I think I owed her about twenty Cokes.
Dad wouldn't tell us where he was taking us, but his eyes kept dancing.
We parked in one of those spooky garages that have the ceilings coming at you and you're absolutely sure the roof of your car is going to get sawed clean off. The walls were the color of bandaids. When we got out of the car, the sounds of the place, the cars' engines, the slamming doors, our voices, were like echos inside a cave.
Outside, we squinted against the sudden brightness and wandered through flurries of snow, catching flakes on our tongues, and laughing up into the sky, until we got to a weird corner building that was shaped like a triangle. Dad ushered us in.
The room was dark and smelled like mashed potatoes. There were candles everywhere, and long strands of beads hanging over the windows and in the back entryway. A lady sat behind a table with what I'm pretty sure was a crystal ball.
Georgie stopped dead and put her hands on her hips. She turned to face Dad and glared up at him. "Are you kidding me?"
| Author Notes | Maddie Bridges, a contemporary witch who owns a plant and tincture store in Greenwich Village, appeared in my first book, Planted on Perry Street, which is available here on FanStory, as well as on Amazon. All in the Cards is her backstory, a novella that I hope to launch simultaneously with Book II in the series, tentatively entitled Party on Perry Street. |
By Laurie Holding
"We're getting our fortunes told?" Georgie said, and already I could tell she was in that mode that I hated; she would feign boredom, rolling her eyes and sighing real loud because whatever we were doing didn't quite match up to what Georgie wanted to be doing.
"Well, yeah, Sunshine! Both yours, then mine!" Dad said. He smiled at the lady who sat inside behind a table, resting her head on her hand. She was chewing something.
"It'll be fun, Georgie! You're allowed to ask questions about the future, and about what's going on with you now, like at school. Like with Thomas!"
Well, gross misstep on my part. Georgie flashed her stink eye at me, and her face got all red. I should probably have kept that Thomas Crush thing quiet.
The lady's name was Zana, and she was pretty. I remember her eyes, at first so bright and cheery, like she was excited to finally be reading for kids who would maybe believe in her magic more than a grownup would. She had shiny red hair that hung in Shirley Temple kind of ringlets. They bounced all around her face and I whispered, "Boing, boing, boing," while I watched her move.
Sitting three in a row on an over-stuffed couch that afternoon, with the snow wisping away in front of Zana's big paned windows and the storefronts still shining with post-holiday lights, I watched my dad being Dad as his true self for the last time. He was kind of flirty with Zana, which made me squirmy in my seat, but it was hard to stay uncomfortable, listening to Dad's bark of laughter. He slapped his knee, threw his arms around us, and squeezed.
"What are you planning for my Princesses today, Miss Zana?" he asked.
"Well, you had mentioned on the phone that you wanted to keep it simple today for you three," Zana said. Her eyes were closed, and her hands rested on her deck of cards. "So I'm just planning on a one-card pull." Her eyes opened. "Some people do a one-card pull every day, to help direct their path and bring them clarity about the stuff that life is sending their way. You can come back anytime for a full reading, which is much more complicated."
"And more expensive, I'm sure," said Georgie, ever the skeptic.
Zana smiled and dipped her chin. "Yes, it does cost more, in both time and dollars. You are astute."
"What's a stute?" I asked.
Georgie turned to me and rolled her eyes, and even though I'm pretty sure that she didn't know either, she could tell that a stute was something good, so she perked up a little bit. Any kind of positive attention, and Georgie perked up.
Zana did me first, which made me feel uber-special, since I was the youngest, and usually the second to go at anything.
I made myself comfy in the chair across from her while she shuffled her cards. She didn't shuffle those things like you would on poker night, that's for sure. She pulled sections out from the middle of the deck slowly, like at least seven times, then handed them across her table to me.
The cards were big and heavy and their edges were golden. Zana told me to split them, cut the deck, as many times as I wanted, and then she had me spread them all out like when we play Fish, like the cards were a pond. Then she leaned over the table with her eyes closed and blew.
You heard me. She blew on those things like they were candles on her birthday cake. Then, once they were all back in one stack again, she picked up a little black bell on the table and rang it over the deck.
I picked out a card that felt right, and she kind of prayed over it for a little bit. I held my breath as we both leaned over my card.
"See this lady here?" Zana tap-tap-tapped her finger. Her fingernails were painted purple, my favorite color. The paint was chipping off, but so what? I never dreamed you could even get purple nail polish.
I had to give myself a little shake to get myself to focus.
I nodded and stood up to see my card better. A pretty woman with a long red robe and a crown on her bowed head sat on a fancy chair under some kind of fruit tree.
"She's telling us," Zana said, "that you are much more powerful than you think you are." She nodded, as if listening to the actual woman on the card, who was holding a giant star on her lap, the kind of star we put on the top of our Christmas tree.
"See how she's surrounded by leaves and branches that are laden with fruit?" Zana asked. I nodded again. "That means you have a special tie to the earth, nature, plants, and animals. But look," she said, pointing to the bunny who sat at the woman's feet. "This rabbit? He's telling me you probably have all kinds of energy. Is that right?" I nodded again.
"The rabbit is here as a warning. He's telling you that even though you have great potential to be successful, you must be careful not to leap before you think." When I looked up, Georgie was church laughing into her hand. I gave her my best stink eye.
I cleared my throat, my mouth suddenly dry.
"Do you sometimes talk before you've thought things through?" she asked.
I nodded, but when I opened my mouth, it made that awful sound a mouth makes when it needs spit.
"A cup of tea, maybe?" Zana looked at me with one eyebrow up and one eyebrow down.
I was amazed. "Did youâ?"â?"can you read minds or something?"
She smiled, a nice smile, but with yellow teeth. "Sometimes, sure. That's why I'm here, right?" She got up, opened a tiny refrigerator, and pulled out a bottle of water. This was fascinating to me; we always drank straight out of the tap at home.
"I always use bottled," she explained, and again I got the shivers up my spine, thinking she must have heard me thinking again. I tried to put my mind on neutral so she'd stay the heck out.
She poured the water into a mug that had lots of tall buildings on its side, some that I recognized, like the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, because duh, I lived right here. But I also knew the Eiffel Tower, because I loved the Madeline stories that happened in Paris, because duh, Madeline was my name.
There was a giant pyramid on the mug, too, with that cat god in front of it, the Sphinx. I touched my finger to the mug to read the words under the sands of the desert that spread beneath the giant cat and the pyramid.
"The Magic of Las Vegas," I read out loud.
"Hm, yes," Zana said. "There's magic there, for sure. Vegas is like a man-made vortex."
"Vortex?" I didn't want to look stupid in front of this lady, but I hated not knowing what words meant.
"A vortex, hm." Zana leaned in so our faces were close and I could smell what I was pretty sure was peanut butter on her breath. I started breathing through my mouth. "A vortex is a special spot where energy is either entering into the Earth or projecting out from Earth's plane. Like Stonehenge. Or Giza, where the real pyramid is. Anyplace that makes you feel its mystery and cosmic force."
"Like New York City?" I asked.
She laughed as she swung around to get a wooden tray filled with a whole bunch of different kinds of tea bags. "Except like Vegas, New York is a manmade vortex, not a natural one, right? Pick a tea, any tea!"
I didn't want to take too long because I could hear Georgie starting up with her sighing.
One time, my mom took Georgie to her yoga class, and Georgie learned about Ujjayi breathing, where you make the sounds of waves on the beach as you breathe in and then out. Georgie made Ujjayi breaths whenever she was feeling bored or times like now when she just wanted people to hurry the heck up. When Zana offered her the tea bags, she held both her hands up and shook her head no, even while she kept on doing the ocean thing.
I rolled my eyes at my father, hoping he'd catch my drift. He just gave me a grin with half his mouth.
I picked the red raspberry teabag because who wouldn't? She popped it into my mug of cold water, put it in the tiny microwave that stood beside the tiny refrigerator, and just stood there motionless, staring at the red numbers on the seconds as they ticked away.
What should have been an awkward moment was actually a very comfortable silence, like the four of us weren't strangers, like we weren't paying her money to tell us things about ourselves at all. Just friends gathered on a wintry day for a cup of tea and some light tarot.
Zana cut the thinnest slice of lemon I had ever seen and made a slit in it so that it could perch right there on the lip of my mug. Then she picked up a plastic bear filled with honey and raised her eyebrow at me. I gave her just the hint of a nod and she squeezed a couple drops into my mug, then slid it over the table.
I watched the steam rise and breathed it in so that my throat and mouth would stop being dry and it worked. When I gave her a shy smile, she continued, even seeming to enjoy the accompanying Ujjayi breath that Georgie was doing louder and louder.
"So basically, then, my dear, I'll tell you this, for what it's worth: You should cultivate that love of the Earth you have. Enjoy nature. And maybe take a deep breath, sort of like the ones your sister is making right now, before you react to what people have said to you, yes?" We took a moment, just Zana and me, to sit with our tea and our silence, and I deliberately let that silence grow before I smiled up and nodded at her.
"Your turn!" Zana said, and she made a graceful turn of her wrist toward Georgie.
Georgie, all positive and suddenly raring to go, swished her hands to make me sit back on the couch, then she pulled up the chair to Zana's little table.
"I'm tall enough, so I don't need to stand at your table like a little kid," she said, swishing her hair behind her and throwing me a sneer. She took her good old time picking out her card. Zana leaned over it, bit her lip, and looked over at my dad before starting in.
"Your card, for today, is The Tower. Now, I know it looks a little scary at first, but bear with me and we'll squeeze lemonade out of this lemon." She gave a nervous kind of giggle, and I stood up to look at Georgie's card. Georgie put one hand in front of my chest and pushed me hard, but I got to see the card for just an instant.
"See how the building is being hit by lightning?" Zana said. I licked my lips and sat back down with Dad. There had been fire coming out the Tower's windows, and people were falling, maybe jumping out of it.
Georgie sat like a stone.
Zana went on. "Well, this card usually needs to be taken in context with the cards that surround it. Maybe a one-card pull wasn't the best idea, after all. Most people who do one-card pulls do it on an everyday kind of basis, you know?" She looked up and her eyes went first to my dad, then back to Georgie, who still hadn't moved.
"Let's just do our best with it, though, hmm?" Zana bent over her table with her eyes closed and touched The Tower with little tap tap taps of her fingers.
"The Tower signifies changes in plans, sometimes rather drastic changes," Zana said. "Usually, it stands for a shakeup in your perceived reality." She stopped here and looked at my dad again.
Perceived reality? What the heck did that mean?
I looked up at my dad to make sure that last part didn't come out. I had a problem talking out loud to myself. Kids made fun of me.
But no, I hadn't said it out loud. Following Zana's advice, I took a deep breath. Then I put my tea up to my lips, thinking maybe keeping them busy would help me stay quiet.
Dad cleared his throat and exchanged a glance with Zana, who took a big breath. I sensed a wrap-up coming.
"Ultimately," she said, "you just need to be aware of your surroundings. Sometimes The Tower serves us well, in that it raises our consciousness to the here and now. It allows us to watch out for our bodily and spiritual safety. Just be cautious. Watch yourself as if you were watching...um, maybe Sabrina the Teenage Witch on television, instead of your own life, from an objective stance."
"I don't watch that show. It's stupid. It's for little kids. Maddie watches it," Georgie said, and at that, she turned and glared at me.
I shrugged, like, So what? It's a popular show! And then I made slurpy sounds with my tea.
"Well, ha!" Zana said, swishing a couple of crazy red curls over her shoulder. "You get what I mean, though, right?"
"I guess so?" Georgie said. "Not that I believe in any of this stuff, but what you're trying to say nicely to me is that something bad is going to happen to me?"
"No, not necessarily, no," Zana said. "I mean, bad things happen all the time, right? More often than not, the cards point to your internal life, not just what is 'happening' to you, coming from external sources. And dramatic changes are not always what we would label as 'bad'." She stopped and took a drink of water.
"Think of it this way. The Tower could represent a prison, a jail of sorts, and sometimes it takes something traumatic in our lives for us to realize that we need to break out of that prison, even if we might hurt ourselves temporarily in the process."
"Huh?" Dad finally spoke up. "Georgie's twelve years old. You think she's got enough baggage that she's already had time to build 'internal prisons'? Look, don't you think maybe the card could have an opposite foretelling? Isn't that the way these cards work? That everything has a reverse meaning, no matter what the card stands for?"
His voice was getting louder like it does when he's really happy or really mad.
"Well, um, sure. Sure!" Zana did a little show here that almost made me giggle. She curled her fingers into an 'OK' sign and made her lips move like she was talking to someone, but I know that move; she was talking to herself.
"The reversal of any card carries with it caution and awareness, like I said. Maybe this is a simple case of a love interest that needs to be reevaluated?"
This is where I couldn't stop the laughter from coming out, and I think it might have been what relaxed everyone, at least the grownups, because they both seemed to lower their shoulders and their voices from then on.
Georgie's latest crush on Thomas Hunter was her biggest secret, one that I kept coaxing out of her, little by little, without her realizing it. Some of the story, the inside gooey feelings of it at least, were pretty much out there for anyone to see. She left her doodles of his name in places right out in the open, and once she even inked a tattoo of his name on her arm, so I figured she secretly wanted me to know about him.
It wasn't unusual, seeing Georgie with steam coming out her ears. She got mad at the drop of a hat. After I laughed and the grownups untensed, her face was all red and her eyes filled up with water and her hands clenched.
"First of all," she said with her teeth still together, "I do not have a 'love interest.' Second of all, this is a stupid game and you don't really know what you're talking about and you're probably a fake fortune teller just like the Wizard of Oz. And third of allâ?"â?" I have to go to the restroom. If you even have one of those, that is."
Gosh, she was mean.
| Author Notes | Maddie Bridges, a contemporary witch who owns a plant and tincture store in Greenwich Village, appeared in my first book, Planted on Perry Street, which is available here on FanStory, as well as on Amazon. All in the Cards is her backstory, a novella that I hope to launch simultaneously with Book II in the series, tentatively entitled Party on Perry Street. |
By Laurie Holding
Zana got up right away and pushed aside some plastic beads that led to the hallway and the back of her store. She showed Georgie the bathroom, then came back and put one of her purple fingernails into her mouth.
I thought about all the dirt and dog poop and germs and human spit there was in downtown New York, winter or no winter, and I closed my eyes.
"Sorry, really," Zana kind of whispered. "I'm not very good at covering up for bad cards." She looked at me, as if she were just remembering I was there, and said, "But really, I'm sure it's just a natural puberty upset coming her way. You want yours? Or have I spoiled all the fun?"
She looked up at Dad, then made a frowny face as she examined her fingernail. I figured she was finally noticing that her nail polish was all chipped.
"No, hey! Absolutely!" Dad's voice had taken on that 'I'm game for anything!' tone that I usually didn't believe, but I was liking the secret kind of air in here, the dark corners of life that tarot was peeling back for a sneak peek. I was happy he wanted to stay.
He took the seat in front of Zana and cracked his knuckles. My mother always told him he was going to get arthritis in his fingers when he got old, but he'd wave her away and crack his neck to make a point.
Zana hid that Tower card in the middle of the deck and had him swish the cards around, and just as Dad touched his card, I heard the toilet flush.
Toilets flushing always made me laugh. I don't know why. I coughed into one of Zana's sequined pillows on the couch to cover myself.
"Ah, the Wheel of Fortune!" Zana seemed pleased, like she knew she could handle this one. I stood up and tiptoed to my father's side to look at his card.
It sure didn't look like Pat Sajak's Wheel of Fortune, let me tell you. There were weird creatures with wings all around the wheel, and letters that weren't really letters on it. I looked up at Zana and then back down to the Egyptian guy with a cat body who sat on the very top of the wheel.
I thought of the Sphinx on Zana's mug and wondered if cats had natural magic.
"The Wheel of Fortune card is symbolic of the cycles that life brings to us," Zana said. "The seasons, good and bad financial times, times of ease and love in relationships, followed by rocky roads. No matter what you are experiencing, the very best advice to give your soul each day is that things continue to change, no matter what you have planned. Some things are out of human control, and we need to constantly check ourselves, allowing the universe to unfold its churning tides."
She took a sip of water. The plastic beads clicked against each other, sounding like my mother's braids, and Georgie came into the room. There was water on her face.
"Did you wash your face in there?" I asked.
"Shut up," she said.
Zana smiled at me and cocked her head. "You're just about the age of my little girl, Hannah," she said. "She's eight. Are you almost nine?"
My jaw dropped, but Georgie started in her Ujjayi breathing again, so I just smiled and nodded.
"Anywho," Zana went on, smiling at my dad, "here's what's specific to you, with this card. As with your daughters' cards, caution is a good takeaway today for you. Yes, it is a wheel of fortune, but if you are now experiencing financial success, it would be wise to make sure you are always putting plenty aside for when the wheel turns. If you have been unlucky recently, your luck will probably be changing soon. If you are experiencing difficult times in your key relationships, those too might be ready to blossom once again. Always, the message is in the ephemeral quality of life's conditions. Do your best, no matter if times are good or bad. And sometimes?" She put her hands on top of my dad's. "Sometimes, life offers both at once. That can be confusing, frustrating, especially for someone who is used to success and comfort."
Dad shrugged his easygoing shrug and gave her a goofy smile.
"Comfort, dear Zana, can be highly overrated," he said. "I myself prefer to be on the edge of my seat, on my game, you know? And speaking of which, girls." He stood up and made the thumb over the shoulder move that told us it was time to vamoose.
"Thank you very much," I said as we got our coats on. "This has been really interesting. Do you know Minnie Pinnister? She has a shop down here in the Village."
Zana pursed her lips. "Now that's a name that wouldn't get forgotten, right?" She laughed like an angel, starting way up high and letting her voice trickle down. "Do you know the name of her shop?"
"Something having to do with tea and an orchestra. Or a symphony, maybe," I said.
She laughed again and put her hand on my father's arm. "Oh, Tea and Sympathy? Sure! She's right around the corner, just a couple of blocks from here! I haven't been there, but I love tea, well, you know that by now. I'll step out someday soon and explore her shop! Thanks for the recommendation. Is she a friend of the family?"
Georgie gave an oomphy sound and made a show of zipping up her coat real fast.
"No, just a friend of mine," I said, giving Georgie my squinty mean look. "She's a witch, but she doesn't say that when she comes to our school. She comes to talk about plants. Like, well, dittany of Crete, for one. My mother was just looking for dittany the other day, actually, and hey! I have an idea! Since she's so near, maybe we could..."
"Not today, Chickadee," my dad said. "I'm sorry, but there's a place I have to go to meet somebody today. Just a short stop, but it's a bit of a drive."
Georgie and I looked up at him. I bit my tongue, swallowed my words.
"What?" he said. "Who says it isn't someplace super cool for you two? Have I ever disappointed you?" He gave us that grin and blinked a few times.
The thing about my father? He turned everyday errands into fun adventures, and I couldn't complain. I always had this feeling, though, that my sister and I were just along for his ride, getting things done for him. I was pretty sure that most of the adventures "for us" were pitstops for him, disguised as little girl entertainment.
You couldn't get too much past me, boy.
Minnie Pinnister taught our class about what she called the "Fake it till you Make it" game. Minnie said that even when boring or bad things were going on all around you, it's your job to react in ways that help make it fun, for you and for other people. Here was just another chance to practice, I thought. I would again plan to go along to get along.
Georgie, though, she was a different person altogether.
"Wait, what?" she said, digging out a scraggly old Kleenex from her coat pocket and inspecting it as if wondering if it would still be good enough to work.
"Fresh tissue?" said Zana, offering up a box that was right there on her table. Maybe Zana's customers cried from Zana's card reads. No wonder, I thought.
It did the job, though. Georgie got distracted wiping her nose with the new snot rag as Dad paid Zana. We said our goodbyes and he ushered us into the blowy snowy air.
I had the front seat for this stretch, which was super exciting. We didn't go straight through the city but clung to the side of Manhattan where the Hudson River was on our left, so Georgie couldn't see the shoreline of Jersey because of the dry cleaning. I could see it, but concentrated on my own side, where New York whizzed by me.
I wondered about the people who lived behind all those thousands of windows in the buildings we passed, what their jobs were, where they got their Christmas trees, if their dogs ever peed in the elevators because their humans waited too long to take them out. So many stories were going on inside those buildings. I crammed my face up against the window and tried not to blink.
"So?" Georgie leaned between us from the back seat where Dad's suits were swishing around and I tried to smile at her, all friendly-like.
"Where's the next little adventure?" she asked.
"Well, I thought you girls might like to stop off at the Cloisters at the Met, check out the plants and what happens to them in the wintertime. I heard they bring some of them in, force some of them to bloom, whatever that means. You're into that kind of thing like your mom, right?"
"Oh, my gosh, yes!" I just about shouted at him, and at the very same time Georgie threw herself back, all drama queen-like.
"You've got to be kidding me."
She says that a lot.
| Author Notes | Maddie Bridges, a contemporary witch who owns a plant and tincture store in Greenwich Village, appeared in my first book, Planted on Perry Street, which is available here on FanStory, as well as on Amazon. All in the Cards is her backstory, a novella that I hope to launch simultaneously with Book II in the series, tentatively entitled Party on Perry Street. |
By Laurie Holding
"What?" Dad said, looking in his rear-view mirror. "You don't like plants and stuff?"
"She's just being a crank, that's all," I said. "She likes gardening as long as Mom lets her carry the basket with all the flowers and stuff in it. She likes to play wedding."
"So not true, you dorkus," Georgie fired back. "You're just so busy smelling and tasting all that nasty dirt and sucking on stones that you have no clue what I like at all. Dad, she sucks on stones. Says she's testing for minerals. It's so gross."
My father threw his head back and laughed and I loved him fiercely for making my favorite sound in the world.
"That's not gross if you're a geologist, Princess. Pretty standard behavior. Poppin' little rocks in your mouth, tasting their minerals as you slosh along up a stream." He started whistling "Islands in the Stream" and it shut Georgie up for a hot minute.
"All I'm saying," she said when he took a breath, "is that it seems like everything we did today is about Maddie or you. Your dry cleaning. Your bottle store. Her stupid tarot magic. And now her dirt and gardens."
"Maybe that's karma for stealing the front seat from me in the first place," I said, but I said it real quiet because deep down I was scared of her when she was mad. Dad heard me, though, and he swatted my leg even while he looked out his window.
"Hey there, Georgie Girl, you might just have a point there, and if so, please accept my sorry. Hey, look! It's one of the bridges you were named after!" We rolled right past the exit for the George Washington Bridge. "That counts for something, right?"
"Wrong."
"It's the George Washington Bridge! GeorgeAnn Tappan Zee Bridges, right? I was there, I'll have you know," he said. "Your mother was set on it, and I had no say in it, but I was there when she named you. I know the logic that went into it, and that, my love," he pointed out his window, "is one of your two heavily traveled namesakes."
A minute went by, with Georgie still steaming away back there. She was ruining the whole day.
"Ah," he said, looking at her in his mirror. "How about this: I need to talk to a man at the track after this stop, anyway. How about you guys come in, maybe even place a bet? You probably won't get to meet any of the horses this time, but you'd still get a kick out of laying eyes on them, right, Georgie Girl? Seems like 'My Own Horse' has been on your wish list since you could talk, right?"
"Yeah, like that's ever gonna happen," she said.
I turned around and looked at her. "How about you take what you can get, Georgie? Take a pill and lie down. Sheesh, what a crank!"
I think she started crying back there. She switched sides real quick, to the dry cleaning side of the car, which was risky because grownups hate when you take your seat belt off for any reason at all, but Dad ignored it. She stuck her head behind his suits, to look out the window, maybe. But I'm pretty sure she was crying.
Later, I thought maybe she was just upset about other things. Whatshisface, Thomas, at school. Her bad card back at Zana's.
My mother, when she was trying to stay calm during one of Georgie's outbursts, talked a lot about puberty coming. Maybe Georgie was growing up and getting all emotional against her will. Who knew? But when I heard her sniffling, I decided to zip it.
Whether you're a gardener or not, the Gardens of the Cloisters will just about take your breath away. The whole place looks like a medieval monastery, all arches and stone and gothic silence. Even in summer when there were people crawling everywhere, this place was quiet, and I liked pretending I was one of those monks who couldn't talk.
The gardens are all different, but now, in the wintertime, most of the tender plants had been brought into the one where we were going, the Cuxa Garden, which was glassed-in for the season. Even citrus trees did well here, all year round.
Back in the medieval days, people grew plants for medicine and magic, just like Minnie Pinnister did now. Usually, my mother came here with us; it felt odd without her.
"Mom loves it here," I offered up to no one in particular. I was getting weary of Dad's soulful songs on the radio. The same guy who had been screaming about Jungleland earlier was now whining about going down to the river. I turned the volume down.
"Well, what's not to love, right?" Dad said. His heart wasn't in it, though. Maybe he was just thinking about where to park.
I tried again. "Mom and I went to that holistic place the other day? The place that sells all those little bottles like the ones Minnie Pinnister brings to my school? Nature's Cure?"
"Hmm," he said.
"But the lady didn't have any dit-tan-y." I pronounced it in three clear-cut syllables, just like my mother had yesterday. "And she kind of made fun of it, which made Mom super mad. The lady said 'dittany' in like a British sort of accent. Dit nee?" I said it again. "Dit nee? 'E chised a fox inta the wood, dit nee?"
That did it. Like magic. Both Dad and Georgie laughed, and I knew we were all back on track.
Once we parked, we climbed up the stone steps into the monastery and Dad paid for our tickets. The Cloisters are part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but you'd never even know you were still in New York City because it's surrounded by parks and trails and peace. We made our way up the stone steps, where arched windows let in what little winter sun was left, past gothic stained glass windowed rooms where stone people lay on top of stone coffins. We weren't supposed to touch them, (there were signs everywhere), but I did. I had to.
One room was lined with big tapestries of unicorns. It took my breath away every time I got to see it. I loved the magic of this place, the hushed and solemn shuffle of people's feet as they stopped to look, to pretend not to touch.
The halls that surround the outside courtyard gardens look out to a world of color in the summertime, but today it was just brown and white. The snow was everywhere and coming down harder now. I looked out into the courtyard where the Quince trees' gnarled old branches seemed weighted down with white frosting.
"Pretend you're a Quince tree, Georgie!" I twisted my arms and fingers every which way and curled down, hoping the dancer in her would follow my lead.
Instead, she was quiet, and her forehead was all wrinkled up.
I slipped my hand into hers and she pulled it away. I guess we were getting too old for that, which made my heart hurt a little.
"What's black and white and red all over?" I tried.
She blinked. "A nun falling down the stairs with a knife in her hand?"
Well, let me tell you I started laughing and couldn't stop. It wasn't just church laughter, either; it was the real belly kind of laugh, the kind that you're pretty sure is going to make you wet your pants. Dad was guffawing, too.
Funny what laughter can cure. Suddenly, she was fine again.
Dad asked the guard at the bottom of the tower's steps if we were allowed up there, but it was a definite no. Something about the stones and how human touch wears away even rock. Since all the stones of the Cloisters were brought to America from actual old monasteries in other countries, they didn't want to take their chances, I guess.
Probably for the best, I thought. Being up there in the tower might remind Georgie of her rotten tower tarot card that had soured her in the first place.
Instead, we went to the halls where they kept the plants, now safe and sound behind the winterized windows. Like Dad had mentioned, the gardeners here actually forced spring flowers to bloom early, just to entertain people like us.
Dad said he had to make a call, so Georgie and I busied ourselves guessing plant names before reading the little signs in their pots. I watched my father out of the corner of my eye as he paced outside underneath stone arches that were still decorated for Christmas. Holly leaves and berries, clumps of red and green apples, and English ivies hung over his head. The arches looked just like my tarot card's queen, sitting under all those leaves and fruit.
We called Dad's telephone the "car phone" because that's pretty much where it lived. He didn't usually carry it around with him because it was as big as a brick, so this was weird for us, seeing him walking and talking at the same time, flapping his free arm to make a point. His face was all red, like it got when he and our mother yelled at each other.
"Cyclamen!" I shouted. "Dwarf Pomegranate!"
She had gotten distracted for a second by Dad's argument, so I gave Georgie's coat sleeve a tug.
"Narcissus!" I chirped. Her gaze finally fell from him, and she played along.
"Paperwhites!"
"That's the same thing, Georgie. Paperwhites are Narcissus."
"Nope. Narcissus are Daffodils, Dumdum."
"No name-calling! Narcissus is how both of them start, Georgie. But their last names are too hard to remember. So we're both right. Look! Stars of Bethlehem!"
Stars of Bethlehem always shut people up. They're delicate little white things that dance like fairies in the wind. Well, that's if they're outside. These were inside, so no dancing, but they were still little beauties. We both squatted down, and I thought about the sadness that comes when holidays come to their ends. Mother often talked about Christmastide during the Middle Ages, the time when everyone had to eat up all the food they had stored because it would rot if they waited any longer.
Just thinking about them all feasting made my stomach growl. Why the heck hadn't we stopped after Zana and had something to eat?
"Hey, Hyacinths!" Georgie got up and I followed her to sniff in the glory of a clump of purple and white flowers.
"Very Easter-y," I said.
"That's not a word."
I just bit my tongue. It just wasn't worth it to argue.
"Hey, look!" I ran to a terra cotta pot where a fuzzy-leaved plant grew. It had beautiful new flowers that hung like green and purple bells from its delicate little stems.
"It's Origanum dictamnus," I whispered.
| Author Notes | Maddie Bridges, a contemporary witch who owns a plant and tincture store in Greenwich Village, appeared in my first book, Planted on Perry Street, which is available here on FanStory, as well as on Amazon. All in the Cards is her backstory, a novella that I hope to launch simultaneously with Book II in the series, tentatively entitled Party on Perry Street. |
By Laurie Holding
"What is it?" Georgie asked as she sidled up behind me. "Pretty!"
"It's dittany, Georgie," I said. "Dittany of Crete. It's what Mom was looking for yesterday at that oil store where the woman made fun of her. I mean, she made fun of the word. Dittany."
"Oh, wow, what are the chances?"
"Right?" I reached out and did it; I snapped one of those beautiful stems right off, brought the flowers up to my nose for a sniff. It smelled of summertime and something cooking. I carefully tucked it into my coat pocket. I looked up at Georgie. "Don't tell."
"You're stealing, Maddie."
"Don't tell. They'll never miss it. Look how many she still has!"
"She?" Georgie looked around. "Who's 'she'?"
I jerked my chin to the plant. "Her."
"Oh, man, you are such a weirdo." Georgie turned on her heel like she was on a mission.
"I mean it, Georgie, don't tell."
"Or what?"
I thought a minute. I was so bad at this, this constant on-your-toes-ready-for- a-fight kind of thing that came so naturally to her.
"Or I'll tell Ruthie Levinson that you have a massive crush on Thomas. And she'll tell her sister."
The Levinson sisters lived in a neighborhood near us and were exactly our ages. Ruthie was my age, and her sister Sarah was Georgie's age. Sarah Levinson had an especially big mouth. Some people called her TeleLevinson, because when you told her something, you might as well have just gotten on the telephone and announced it to the local news station.
Magically, it worked. Georgie seemed stunned that I would even think of starting a gossip chain.
"So how are you planning on explaining this little branch of dit-nee, you Cretan?"
Clever, I thought. It was like she walked around with a storehouse of mean words and witty phrases resting on her tongue, ready to shoot them out at a second's notice.
"It's dit-tan-y. And I don't know. I guess I didn't think about what I'd tell her. Maybe that I found it lying on the ground next to the plant? Yeah, that works. These people probably sweep up lots of dead branches all the time."
"What's it used for again?" Georgie said as we started walking back toward the gothic archways.
"Hmm. Some people use it in tea. For stomach aches and stuff, I think. But the other day, Mom told that mean lady that Origanum dictamnus was used way back, like before the Middle Ages, for open wounds. And in ancient times, one goddess, Athena? Hypocrite? Venus the Milo? I forget. No! I remember now. It was Aphro...Aphrodisiac! Anyway, she rubbed it into her son's skin after he got pierced with a sword. Or a spear. And he healed, like right away."
Our father came up to us as I was so professionally delivering my lesson on dittany, but his face didn't look impressed; instead, he stopped in his tracks like the neighbor cat who sees the birds taking a bath in our backyard.
"What did you just say about an aphrodisiac?" he said.
"That's the name of the goddess who rubbed Origanum dictamnus into the big bloody hole in her kid's back when he got stabbed in the war. I think. At least it was one of the names Mom and that lady at the store were throwing around. Aphrodisiac. Yeah. Anyway, whatever her name was, dittany works! For open wounds! And Mom has a paper cut."
"Hmm." He still clutched his phone, and his eyes weren't so much looking at me, but kind of through me, like you had to do with those Magic Eye books that were all the rage back then. You had to squint and cross your eyes a little, pretend that the pictures in front of you were windows, and as you stared with your crossed eyes, suddenly boom! You'd see that there were fish swimming behind other fish, or the flat old design you were staring at would morph into this crazy 3-D design. I spent way too much time in my room with my Magic Eye books.
Now Dad looked at his watch. "Time to go, girls."
"Wait," I said, "What about your meeting? Weren't you supposed to meet somebody here?"
"Yeah, well, it fell through, Love. I guess this storm is here to stay and some people are Nervous Nellies about it. The friend who was supposed to meet me here says he's going to find us at the track." He looked down as he tucked the car phone into its special leather bag. "So, let's be off like rockets, sprockets! Let's go see some horses."
His smile was kind of weird, like a jack-o'-lantern's. His teeth smiled but his eyes stayed the same.
"Wait," said Georgie. "I thought you were already supposed to meet somebody at the track."
"Indeed," Dad said, his hand resting on her shoulder. "And now there are two men to meet. It's okay, it'll all work out, really."
He sounded like he was talking more to himself, though, than to us.
Whatever, I thought. I was busy figuring out my front seat position. I'd had it coming here to the Cloisters, so I'd have the back seat on the way to the track, then Booyah and Abracadabra! The front would be mine all the way home from Yonkers.
On the way to the racetrack, Dad was quiet, but since Georgie and I were on friendly terms again, we played the Alphabet Game where you shout out the letters from signs you're passing. It's the easiest game in the world when you're going across the island of Manhattan, let me tell you. The signs are just about fighting each other for your attention.
After "P", though, there's always that dreaded lull in the game. You're almost always looking for a "Q". I closed my eyes and thought about Zana and how I'd like to understand tarot cards someday, and I think I fell asleep because suddenly we were there, in the parking lot at Yonkers Raceway, where we usually got a ten dollar bill and could bet on any horse we liked, based on things like the horses' names, or the names of the guys who drove the tiny carriages behind the horses. Or in my case, gut feelings.
Thing was, the parking lot was almost empty.
I rubbed my eyes.
"What the heck?" Georgie said. I guess she'd fallen asleep, too.
Dad was tapping the keys of the car phone and didn't answer her.
"Dad?" I said.
"I'll be with you in a minute, girls. Don't get those panties in a twist, now."
It's how they talked back then. He thought he sounded cool. He was trying too hard to make his voice sound okay, normal, and I saw right through it, with my mad Magic Eye skills.
He got out of the car, slammed the door.
"What the heck?" Georgie said again. "I have to pee! And I'm hungry! And I don't think they're even open!" I unfastened my seatbelt and leaned up so I could see her. She was grabbing her crotch, which made me laugh, but that made her even madder.
"Didn't you just pee back at Zana's? Gosh, you pee a lot, Georgie."
"Shut your stupid pie hole."
"Just open the door and pee in front of it, Georgie! Like when we went to the beach that time, and I couldn't hold it 'til we got to the rest stop? I'll stand in front of you." I undid my seatbelt and opened the door. Dad was flapping his arm again, pacing away from the car, and once again yelling into the phone.
"Damn it, Jerry!" he said, but then he turned around and saw me. "Hang on. Madeline. Get. Back. Into the Car. Now." His voice was lower than usual, and his mouth made a perfect upside-down U.
"But Georgie..."
"No buts. Get back in the car!"
We were rarely on this side of Dad's yells, Georgie and me. He yelled at our mother sometimes, but only when she yelled first. And once I heard him yell a swear word when he was trying to put wallpaper up in the bathroom.
I got back in the car.
"Um. Just rock back and forth, maybe," I said. "Sometimes when you rock back and forth, the pee in your stomach sloshes around and it's too busy to get out."
George undid her seatbelt and started rocking back and forth and I decided not to talk anymore so that I could watch Dad and figure out what the heck had made him so mad. And why the heck we were here at the racetrack all alone.
The wind was whipping his hair around, and I sat for a moment, watching new snow fall and thinking about what a handsome man my father was and how someday I wanted to marry someone who was handsome and funny and knew all the words to lots of songs. I still felt stung from him yelling at me, but with his hair over his eyeballs and his face all red from the cold and from being upset, I think I felt sorry for him for the very first time in my life.
When he slammed back into the car, Georgie started in right away. I should have warned her to shut the heck up and that maybe there were worse things going on than having to pee and being hungry.
She grabbed her crotch again and with her other hand reached out to clamp onto his arm.
"Daaaaad," she moaned. "I have to go to the bathroom!"
He cranked his neck and looked all around the parking lot. "What the heck? Didn't you just go back at the psychic place? There's no one here, George. Just get out and pee. No one will see." His voice had softened a little, but he was breathing hard.
"I caaaaan't pee out in the middle of a parking lot!"
"Fine. Buckle up. We'll find a place."
"Wait," I said, but he had already started the engine and we were rolling back onto the highway. It was supposed to be my turn for the front. I got a lightbulb idea, though, of how I could make this work because of Georgie needing to pee. So I stayed away from the front seat subject. "Why was the track closed?"
Georgie made mewling sounds up front and was still rocking wildly.
"Weather. I guess we should have called first to check if they were racing. Dumb of me." Dad threw the car phone down beside him and flipped the fan on to clear the fog from the windshield. "The roads are a mess, apparently. And Central Park Avenue was closed down completely. No way for us to have known unless we'd called ahead. Here we are," he said, and his breathing seemed almost back to normal.
He had magically landed us at the Raceway Diner, which had the best hamburger anywhere, and chocolate shakes. But most important, they had a bathroom, so Georgie was in there like a lightning bolt, out of sight by the time Dad and I got inside the front door and were stomping the snow off our boots.
"Hungry?" he asked, with his hand on top of my head.
"Starving."
"You're not starving. You don't know starving, kiddo." He ruffled my hair, and I looked up, but he wasn't looking at me. His eyes were on the window, far away.
The lady at the podium got us a booth, and I made sure to take my coat off and get comfortable next to Dad so that by the time Georgie came back from the bathroom, that seat couldn't even be an option for her.
And no, I didn't even feel guilty.
| Author Notes | Maddie Bridges, a contemporary witch who owns a plant and tincture store in Greenwich Village, appeared in my first book, Planted on Perry Street, which is available here on FanStory, as well as on Amazon. All in the Cards is her backstory, a novella that I hope to launch simultaneously with Book II in the series, tentatively entitled Party on Perry Street. |
By Laurie Holding
I checked the menu, but I already knew exactly what I would get.
Georgie came back looking like a new woman.
"Better?" Dad asked. She nodded and I watched her ponytail bounce behind her head, shiny black and wavier now with the snow that had fallen into it. No kinks like mine, though. I started thinking mean thoughts about her, but that's what I do when I'm hungry, so I took a deep yoga breath, closed my eyes, and blew the bad thoughts away.
We ordered, and except for the waitress wanting me to order the Davy Crockett kids' meal instead of the adult-size hamburger and regular Coke, we didn't have any issues. My stomach was much happier afterward, and I secretly thanked Georgie's weak bladder because no matter what my father said, I certainly did know starving.
"Hey!" Georgie said as I opened the front door. "The front is mine, dorkazoid. Get back there."
"No way!" I screamed back, all energized like the battery bunny and ready for a good round. "I gave you the front from the track to the diner because you had to pee and I didn't want you to wet your pants all over the seat. I was being nice! And now you've had it twice in a row, GeorgeAnn Tappan Zee Bridges!" Sometimes I used her whole name, secretly hoping it would make us laugh.
It didn't, but at least I was using my voice, just like Minnie told me I'd need to learn how to do.
"That was your decision, not mine!" she screeched at me. "A trip is a trip, and you should have had the front to here. It's my turn! Fair and square!"
I felt a rush of adrenaline whoosh through me as I pushed her out of the way and grabbed the front door handle, waiting for Dad to unlock the car.
"Dad?!" Georgie cried, and her screech was loud enough for an old lady in the parking lot to turn around and look at us. "Daddy?!"
I looked at him, my hand still on the front door. His face was all squinched up again like it had been earlier, when he was on the car phone. For a minute there I thought I saw his eyes well up.
This just wasn't worth it. I caved before he had a chance to talk or yell or cry.
"Okay, fine." I said, but I gave the curb next to car a good kick before going to the back seat.
Once there, I sulked. I swore to myself that I wouldn't say a word to Georgie or Dad for the rest of my life. Well, at least for the rest of the day. He should've stood up for me. She should have known that if she had the whole way into the city, it was only fair that I get the way back, even if it was only from Yonkers. I blew up an angry black cloud in my mind and let it rest over me as we moved through the snow and the whirling dervish that was going on outside.
Dad didn't listen to the radio this time, and it was obvious that driving wasn't easy with the storm going on. The Bronx River Parkway was the friendliest way home from the city, with plenty of trees on both sides of the car, but I sensed his struggle.
"Sycamore," I whispered to myself. "Weeping Alaskan Cedar."
Cars were pulled over as if their drivers had given up the ghost and had decided to wait it out. Until what, I wondered. Warm weather? Spring? Morning?
The wind had carved out beautiful dunes of snow all along the highway, and I squinted to see animal shapes or funny faces in them. We were creeping along slower and slower, which made the game easier. When I told Georgie what I was doing to amuse myself, she ignored me.
It was still a crazy thing, the sound of a cell phone's jangling ring inside the silence of a car. When the car phone went off, we all three jumped like we had electrodes attached to our hearts or something. The car slid right as Dad tried to grab the phone, then it slid left as he dropped it and grabbed the wheel with both hands.
I just held my breath and watched the white up ahead.
"Dammit!" Dad shouted, and that was saying something, because like I said, if Dad was anywhere near us, he kept his swear words to a bare minimum. I scrunched down and for the first time ever said a secret prayer of thanks for the back seat.
He finally let the car just slow down on its own, his eyes on the rearview mirror, then out into the white up ahead for the next, then back again. I didn't want to drive when I got big. It looked like a lot of pressure.
The car came to a crunchy kind of stop off the highway, and who knows what lay under all that snow, but being where we were it could have been the entrance to a park or just a place where parents pull over when a kid is puking or something. A sign just about a foot in front of our car said "Scarsdale 1 Mile".
All three of us sat in silence for a second, and I closed my eyes, blew out my breath.
"Okay, my sweets!" Dad said after clearing his throat. "I'm going to return that phone call, and you? And you?" He turned back and pointed at me. "Are both on Snow Angel Duty."
"Really?" Georgie said, looking out her window. "It looks kind of stormy for snow angels, Dad. Like the wind would whip them away once we made them."
"Aw, come on," he said. "Where's your sense of adventure? And just sheer fun? This is a memory in the making, my Chickadee. Grab life by the coattails and let the winds blow you where they may! That's what I say!"
Well, you didn't have to ask me twice. I wanted to be part of the mayhem going on out there. I opened my door and clomped my way toward a stand of cottonwoods in snow that hit me almost at the knee. I watched as my My Little Pony boots were completely buried, even up to the purple fuzz at their tops.
Georgie's car door slammed hard, and I turned to see her begrudgingly make her way toward me.
"This is so unbelievably dumb. I mean, like, literally, dumb."
Georgie had recently started to use the word "literally" and I still didn't quite get what it meant.
I scooped up two mittens full of snow, packed them, and looked around. She was not a good target, not today, and it hurt me to think of throwing a snowball at a tree, but that's what I did; I figured maybe trees on the Bronx River Parkway don't get to play with kids very often. Maybe it would be fun for this big old cottonwood to catch one in the trunk.
"Let's do angels!" I screamed into the wind, but Georgie ignored me. She held herself in a big hug against the snowy craziness of it all and watched Dad inside the car, yelling into his phone.
No matter, I thought. I threw myself down into the crunchy sequined snow and flapped my arms and legs. Looking up through the towering cottonwood branches, all layered with white powdered sugar icing like the tootsie-roll trees my mother makes for our annual gingerbread house, I felt a peace and awe, regardless of the storm.
She was right, Zana. I belonged to these trees, and they belonged to me. Sometimes I danced with the stand of baby poplars in my backyard. I didn't give a hoot if old Mrs. Christianson was peeping out from her dining room sheers, watching me Do-SiDo and Allemande Left with my favorite five trees. I didn't think much about what other people thought of me.
I stood up and bowed to the cottonwoods, one at a time, thanking them for this delicious winter's treat, then turned back to the car. Dad was off the phone and waving his arms like a snow angel. I tried to run to the car, but my boot came off and I stood for a second like a flamingo, then just gave up and sat my butt down to get the boot back on.
"You're both in the back!" Dad shouted across the car at us.
"But it was finally my turn!" I screamed into the wind. I grabbed the passenger side handle.
"No way, Madeline. It's back seat or no seat. The storm is bad, you see that, right? I want you safe."
When Dad called either of us by our real names, I knew it was final. The front-seat game was over. I crawled in and buckled up on the side with no dry cleaning.
But Georgie decided to buck the system.
"I'm twelve years old! I'm not some little kid! I'm almost as tall as a grownup! And I don't want to sit with her back there!" She kicked the tire, which just about made my jaw drop. You don't kick Dad's car, no matter what. But especially when he just used somebody's real name.
I watched them scream at each other and wondered. What in the world could make a snowy day in New York City turn this ugly? Why not just go along and get along?
Dad finally threw his hands up after pointing at her and got in after slamming the door. He yanked his seat belt over him then raked his hands over his hair to brush the snow off.
"She is almost, not quite, but almost, as hard-headed as your mother," he said.
Georgie had decided to mope and be miserable. Her arms were folded, and she had her hood up. Finally, she came back to my side of the car and opened the door.
"Move over, turd."
"No!" I said. I was tired of her mood, tired of always trying to make her happy. "Get in the other side!" I smiled when she slammed the door, and Dad caught it in the rearview mirror.
"You could've moved over, kid," he said.
"That's the dry cleaning side! And besides, Minnie Pinnister told me I needed to stand up for myself and use my voice more," I explained.
I turned and watched her black coat make its way around the back of the car. Her coat's hood had pretty rabbit hair that was getting all fluffed and flown by the wind. I wished, not for the first time, that my coat had fur around it. Just pretend fur, though, not fur from a real bunny. I thought about the bunny on my tarot reading, the warning behind all the earthy deliciousness of my card.
I saw the white car coming, and because of the snow, it kind of fooled my eyes like when you see a Magic Eye picture for the first time. From the flat white of our car's back window, it emerged from the snow, and it came at us like that giant shark in Jaws, swaying from side to side with its big-toothed grill grinning at us.
| Author Notes | Maddie Bridges, a contemporary witch who owns a plant and tincture store in Greenwich Village, appeared in my first book, Planted on Perry Street, which is available here on FanStory, as well as on Amazon. All in the Cards is her backstory, a novella that I hope to launch simultaneously with Book II in the series, tentatively entitled Party on Perry Street. I WELCOME CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM/ADVICE, AS I'M PLANNING ON LAUNCHING THIS PIECE WITHIN THE MONTH. THANK YOU!!! |
By Laurie Holding
There are sounds that go with this picture, sounds that I am unable even today to recreate or explain, but anyone who's ever been in an accident will know what I'm talking about. The sounds come to me in the dead of night, even now. I try to blow them away, chant them away, pray them away. But they always find their way back to me.
I woke up in a white room. There were gray machines with green numbers and red lights beside my bed. But this wasn't my bed. I turned my head both ways. I was alone.
I bent my arms, wiggled my toes, blinked, stuck out my tongue. Everything seemed to be working, and I was pretty sure this wasn't a dream. Sometimes it took me a while to figure that out.
"Hello?" I said, but it was tentative. I cleared my throat, then remembered.
I had been smack in the middle of using my voice, standing up for myself, when the shark came.
I mean the white car.
"Georgie?" I looked at the empty bed beside me.
I took a big ujjayi breath, heard the ocean inside my head, closed my eyes, and fell back asleep.
Impossible, to lose a person who had been by your side from the very beginning, and yet here I was, and Georgie was gone. That's what my mother said of her when my parents finally found me. I guessed they had been with doctors, maybe with Georgie until then.
"She's gone." My mother didn't look right at me but kept her eyes down. I watched in wonder as giant teardrops fell from her eyes to her lap.
I had never seen this, my mother, crying. Not once, even when our dog, Tumbleweed, died a couple of years ago. At the time, Mother had explained that what's inside our bodies stays alive forever, probably just moves into another body and starts all over again, and I thought that made sense. From that day on, every time I saw a dog on the sidewalk, I wondered if Tumbleweed's soul was inside of it.
But now she cried. My mother cried like those ladies on the soap operas do, only with lots more snot and goop coming from her nose and mouth.
I was woozy and sleepy.
My dad? He couldn't talk. And they didn't talk. Together, I mean. None of us did. He stood at my window, looking out on the traffic, and each time I fell back asleep I saw his Wheel of Fortune card on my closed eyelids.
They operated on my back for the first of many times that night; I never counted how many surgeries there were, but it was a big number. Lucky for me, I wasn't taking dance like Georgie, and I wouldn't have to quit anything. Except maybe my square dancing with the Poplars.
One day, while I waited for another operation and stared out my window at the snow swirls in the sky, Minnie Pinnister came to visit me. She didn't stay long, but she showed me what she had smuggled into the hospital in her giant carpetbag: a tiny gray ball of fluff that mewed. I think that was probably the first time I cracked a real smile since the bad day.
Minnie let the kitten play on my bed and told me that she was a very special kitten, not just your average kitten. Minnie said she had already talked my parents into letting the kitten keep me, and that's how she phrased it, the kitten keeping me, forever. And now I had to figure out a magical name for her.
At first I was worried.
"Will she die?" I asked.
"Sure, just like we all do," Minnie answered. "But I've confirmed she will live as long as you do."
"Is she magical?"
"Of course she's magical. Why would I give you anything that wasn't magical?"
I thought for a minute about witches and magic and cats, my mind naturally landing on my favorite TGIF show, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, which of course made me think about Georgie for the millionth time that day, and how she had claimed to not like that show anymore. But I knew better.
My tongue played around with that word Sabrina while I watched my kitten roll around on the hospital bed.
"Is there a magical name that's kind of like Sabrina?" I wondered out loud.
"Lots, sure," Minnie said. "But hmm, you need one that has to do with magical healing powers, I'm thinking. For your back, for your legs, but especially for your heart." She reached into her carpetbag again and pulled out a big book. "This will help us."
She dragged her finger down a few pages while I closed my eyes and thought.
"Here's Sirona!" she said, and my eyes had to open with her booming voice. "Sirona was the Celtic goddess of health! That's a good one!" She looked up at me and I looked down at my kitten, so tiny and weak.
"Maybe?" I patted her little head, and she grabbed my finger with her needly claws.
Minnie went back to her book. "How about this one? Sekhmet? She was an Egyptian deity, that means goddess, and her name means 'Woman of Power'. That's good, right?"
I looked again at my kitten, rolling down my leg.
"I don't know, Minnie, she doesn't look very powerful or goddess-y to me. Sirona was better than that Sikmut one, or whatever the Egypt one was." Thinking of Egypt made my mind flash pictures from that mug that Zana the tarot lady had lent to me, the one with the giant cat and the pyramid on it and my eyes got heavy again.
Las Vegas. The desert.
I opened my eyes. "Got anything that means vortex?" I tried to sit up but my back wouldn't let me.
Minnie was quiet for a couple of seconds.
"Wow," she said. Her finger stopped on the page she was on, and her eyes locked on me. "You really are magic, aren't you, little Madeline?"
I turned my head to her, scooping my kitten to my chest. "Why?"
"It's a name that sounds like Sirona, but it symbolizes a special vortex on earth, in Arizona. It means 'rock' or 'steady', and it's a sacred, powerful spot that people travel to see from all over the earth, red and rocky and...sacred."
"What is it?" I whispered.
"Sedona," she whispered back.
I looked down at my kitten and she was staring at me, unblinking.
"That's it," I said, and my Sedona smiled and nodded her soft head. She couldn't talk yet. That was still to come. But Sedona was my first magic, and the magic that has always mattered the very most.
When we were finally discharged from the hospital after that first long stay, it was just my mother and me. I don't know, maybe Dad had to go back to work on the Street? Maybe he was just sad and didn't want to come to the hospital ever again?
Either way, it was just Mother and me. Her hair hadn't been done for a long time, and there were actual chips in her fingernail polish. I couldn't rip my eyeballs off of those things as she helped me with the new coat she'd brought with her.
"Wait!" I said, suddenly coming out of a silence that had lasted so long I wasn't even sure I still had a voice. My throat was all gunky like it had oysters in it or something. My mother reached for the plastic cup of water by my bed and tipped it into my mouth.
"My coat," I said. "The coat I wore that day! Where is it?"
"It's gone, Madeline."
She said it the way she had said it when she was talking about Georgie.
"Gone? Gone? I need it!" I said. "I had something in my pocket for you!"
"We had to throw it out. What was it? In the pocket?" She stopped buttoning me and looked into my eyes for the first time since I'd been here.
"Origanum dictamnus," I whispered. "I stole dittany from the dittany of Crete plant at the Cloisters. For your papercut."
Her lips made a little one-sided jerk of what could have been trying to be a smile. "That was kind of you. But we don't steal, Madeline." She breathed a ragged breath and for a horrible moment I thought maybe she was going to cry again like that first day.
"Is it stealing if the branch had already fallen on the ground?"
"I guess not, no. They would've thrown it out anyway."
"That's what I told Georg..."
Before I could get the whole word out, we both froze.
I don't know that we've ever mentioned my sister's name since then. In hindsight, I know that what I wanted to ask my mother was a stupid kid's question, and I'm glad I never asked it, but what I wanted to know more than anything was whether my dittany would have saved my sister if I had been awake to rub it into her wounds. What were her wounds, anyway? Did she suffer? Did that big white car with its grilled shark teeth smoosh her flat like in the coyote cartoons? Was there blood everywhere on the highway? Did my father find his giant car phone and call for help?
I suppose there's a newspaper article somewhere. But what I really ache for are the stories told from each of my parents' perspectives, so that I might be able to weave the two together and make some sense of it.
Instead, what I'm left with is a memory of fighting over the front seat, finally using my Stand Up For Yourself Voice against my big sister, and having her disappear because of it.
These days, I grow dittany in my shop, of course. How could I not? I touch its fuzzy leaves as I water it, say a prayer to Venus, (not Aphrodisiac, after all), and whisper words to Georgie, hoping she hears my British accent, hoping I can still make her laugh.
| Author Notes | Maddie Bridges, a contemporary witch who owns a plant and tincture store in Greenwich Village, appeared in my first book, Planted on Perry Street, which is available here on FanStory, as well as on Amazon. All in the Cards is her backstory, a novella that I hope to launch simultaneously with Book II in the series, tentatively entitled Party on Perry Street. I WELCOME CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM/ADVICE, AS I'M PLANNING ON LAUNCHING THIS PIECE WITHIN THE MONTH. THANK YOU!!! |
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