“It’s called creative nonfiction!” Beatrice cried. She glanced over at her sister, who was silently rereading the pages with a puckered, doubtful expression. “This is a better essay, believe me.”
“I don’t care if it’s better,” their mother declared, and went back to her cleaver and cutting board and the eviscerated bell peppers. “We’ll keep working on it,” she said over her shoulder to Maggie, and then to Beatrice, now standing beside her, “Is this how you help your students at school?”
The question was real, which made it far worse than if it were merely mean. It was all Beatrice could do to keep from throwing herself beneath her mother’s rat-a-tat knife, moving at lightning speed across the board. She was only trying to give Maggie an edge, an advantage — didn’t they understand the urgency? She knew, better than they, what the competition actually looked like. But the two of them seemed determined to proceed innocently, undaunted. Outside in the cold, as Maggie calculated her profits, their mother had mentioned that the high school offered a Young Entrepreneurs Club (Beatrice had asked, Is that like a Young Republicans Club?), then Maggie had chimed in that she could take classes in Mandarin, too. Who needed an ancient, rolling campus? Beatrice realized with a pang that they were busy making the best of things, something that she, so accustomed to the best, had never quite learned how to do.
“Sorry,” she murmured.
She stole a sliver of green pepper; she ran her fingers along the edge of the kitchen table, unearthing her student’s homemade birthday card from beneath the newspaper. On it was a picture of a stick-figure girl with a bubble head and a tiny red mouth — out of her mouth issued a yellow balloon containing the words: Today Is Great! — and inside the card the yellow balloon continued, explaining: Great Because YOU Were Born! (with a smile!) The exclamation marks all carried hearts instead of dots. Standing there, her fingers resting lightly on its surface, Beatrice found herself fighting the urge to open this card, but in the end she lost.
THAT NIGHT SHE RETREATED to her former bedroom, where she sniffed the comforter warily and wondered who else might be sleeping there in months to come. Near eleven Maggie appeared in the doorway with a Ouija board as an offering. “The directions say that you’re supposed to do this with two people.” She climbed up onto the foot of the bed. “A lady and a gentleman preferred, it says, but I think it’ll still work if it’s two ladies.”
Beatrice put down her book. “You’ve really never done this before?”
“In fifth grade Evie Rosenthal came face to face with pure evil,” said Maggie.
She was wearing a faded sweatshirt and a pair of thermal underwear. She didn’t look especially prepared to welcome messengers from the spirit world. Whatever happened to cute pajamas? Beatrice wondered. She thought back sadly on all her little nightgowns, the flowers, the bits of eyelet, the ruffled hems. Even when she turned punk rock she wore pretty things to bed, things sent to her by her grandmothers. But Maggie had no grandmothers — they were all gone, exiting in quick succession, by the time she was four.
“Who are you trying to contact?” Beatrice asked. She saw her Po-Po and her Nana and her Grandma Sara standing there expectantly on the other side, their feeble arms full of red Macy’s boxes with nightgowns tucked into tissue paper. It would be nice to talk to them. They looked as if they desperately wanted to say something kind.
“Oh. I didn’t know you had to pick someone in particular. I just have a few general questions I need answered.” Maggie unfolded the board, and Beatrice, by the water stain in the corner, recognized it as her own. Her father would forget to go down to the basement and empty the dehumidifier. “Can we do that? Just ask the universe? We don’t want to bother anyone.”
“Sure. Why not. We’ll ask the all-purpose universe,” Beatrice said, though this seemed the supernatural equivalent of worshipping at a Unitarian church, with sofas instead of pews, and not a cross in sight. “What are we asking?”
“Just a few business-related things,” said Maggie. “You should think up some questions, too. That way we can take turns.”
“I wouldn’t even know where to begin. We’d be here all night.”
“I don’t mind. Tomorrow’s Sunday.”
“I’m tired, Maggie.”
“I know!” She gave a little bounce at the end of the bed. “You can ask who your next fiancé is going to be!”
Beatrice smiled. That was sweet. She liked how it sounded, as if she were a restless beauty with husbands and broken hearts trailing in her wake, and not a seventh-grade English teacher of dubious judgment and middling abilities whose brief and lucky engagement had ended, and who was now alone. Today was her birthday; today she turned twenty-nine years old.
Whoosh! From out of nowhere, the sheer force of self-pity. She rose sputtering to the surface, soggy and blinded.
“Should we turn off the lights?” Maggie asked.
They lit a candle so they could see. It was shaped like a little seashell and perhaps had come packaged with the soaps. The board shone dully between them, waiting to begin the conversation. Despite herself, Beatrice felt an old flutter of excitement. She had once been an avid practitioner. They would all go down to the basement and allow strange things to occur. She and her friends from school, when they were the same age as Maggie. They rigged towels over the tiny basement window to make the room even darker, and they sat on the cold floor in a circle, and stopped breathing, and the little plastic contraption would go skating wildly across the board. Beatrice liked to speak with the sad ghost of Marilyn Monroe, who said yes to almost every question she was asked. Will it happen? Does he like me? Can I have it? When she said no, it was bad. Someone else had come on the line. Someone angry. Beneath their fingertips, someone tugging. A burnt smell. An electric buzzing in the air. I — AM — SA — They jerked their hands away in fear. They scrambled back from the board, unable to speak, hearts beating fast. They couldn’t look at each other. They couldn’t move. What had they done? What door had they opened? The terror of television static, the scratching of a needle caught in the final groove. Turn it off, fast! That feeling. But they couldn’t move. The door was open. The sound of footsteps on the stairs. Clomp. Clomp. The towel falling from the window with a whump, but no light coming in. The darkness even darker. The footsteps heavy and close. Clomp. Clomp. Hearts racing, lungs panting. Clomp. Clomp. And then—
A big Dracula laugh.
Mwahh-haaa-haaa-haaaaaaa.
“Papa!” she screamed. He came staggering into the basement. His glasses glowed dimly. He held his arms up in the air, as if about to descend on them with a billowing black cape. But he was wearing a tie and sports coat instead. A dank hiccup escaped from the dehumidifier.
Her friends collapsed on each other, shrieking. She let out her breath and folded her arms around him.
“Are your eyes closed?” Maggie asked. “Are you relaxed?”
“Yes,” Beatrice said. She felt everything inside her slowly coming loose.
Her hands joined her sister’s on the contraption. The candle was making the whole room smell like cake. How good it felt to rest her eyes, to rest her fingers on the plastic, to let the unseen forces take over for a little while. She tried to conjure up a picture of the universe and saw styrofoam balls of varying sizes gently bobbing in the breeze. No. That was the solar system, abandoned weeks ago in her homeroom after the science fair. The universe was bigger, much bigger. She would have to try harder.
“I’m asking my question now,” Maggie whispered.
“Go for it.”
“I’m asking it silently, actually. I’m asking it in my head.”