I have never been so well baby-sat. The Greats laid out my pajamas and folded down the covers of my cot. They filled the bathtub for me and checked the temperature of the water. Great-uncle Frank called it “drawing my bath.” Great-aunt Drusilla even put the toothpaste on my toothbrush for me. After I got to bed, both of them came into the bedroom every half hour to check me. It was almost impossible to go to sleep. They kept covering me. Every part of me was covered except those parts I needed for breathing.
New Year’s Day was cloudy and cold. My father slept through the first breakfast of the new year. My mother got up and kept smiling and yawning and thanking the Greats for baby-sitting. At five minutes before 7:00 P. M. I went to the Jennifer tree. I carried a flashlight; it was very dark out. It was also very cold. I got to the tree, and there was the note in Jennifer’s own writing. It said:
I bent down toward the roots of the tree. The flashlight shone on something small and round. I picked it up. It was the roundest, cutest watermelon I had ever seen in my whole, entire life. I carried it home, cradled it in my arms like a baby. When I walked into the living room, I put it in the middle of the floor and asked, “Watermelon, anyone?”
Everyone asked the same question at the same time, “Where did you get that?” I answered that I found it under a tree. I held it high over my head and led the parade to the kitchen. Even the Greats dug in and enjoyed it.
“Save the seeds!” I yelled.
Everyone was so busy eating, no one even asked me why.
7
THE LAST SATURDAY OF OUR winter vacation was a lazy day. I got up late and didn’t do much until just before 2:00 P.M. except watch Great-aunt Drusilla and Great-uncle Frank pack for their trip home. They weren’t leaving until after supper, but they began packing after breakfast. I think they would have stayed longer, but they were almost out of Health Foods. They wanted to get back to Manhattan for a fresh supply.
My mother breathed a sigh of relief when I told her that I was going to the library. I think she was exhausted from vacuuming; she had to vacuum three times a day because the Greats scattered so many seeds after each meal. I suggested to my mother that we get a parakeet instead of vacuuming. She hit me.
When I got to the library, I saw Jennifer’s wagon outside the reference room. Jennifer was reading the encyclopedia, volume Vase-Zygote. I had not seen her for over a week. I was anxious to find out how she had spent her vacation. When she saw me walking in she looked up and whispered, “Did you bring anything to eat?”
“Some nuts,” I answered.
“What kind?” she asked.
“Brazil nuts,” I answered.
“Hard to crack,” she said. She got up from the table and checked out her books. We piled our reading supply into Jennifer’s wagon. Then we started toward the park. As we walked, we took turns pulling the wagon. I said, “Thanks for the watermelon. Where did you get it this time of year.”
“Same place you did,” she answered.
“But I just picked it off the ground,” I said, and she answered, “That’s where they grow.” She gave me a sideways look and then marched on with her chin up, eyes up toward the sky. She never looked down as we walked. Even when we were going up and down curbs. She never fell or bumped into anything. Sometimes in school, I would see her walking down the hall reading a book. She could turn corners in the corridor, and she could open doors while she was still reading her book. She never tripped or fell. Reading and walking were her two best subjects, you might say.
Our magic circle was a mess. It was all gray and slushy and full of crumbs someone had thrown out for the squirrels and the birds. Jennifer looked at it and said, “Isn’t it beautiful?” I looked at it and shrugged my shoulders. We hooked our fingers together and marched around as we always did to start. Then we sat down on the bench and began cracking and eating the Brazil nuts. Jennifer reached into her wagon and brought out a big box of salt . . . as if she had been certain that I would bring nuts or something that needed salt. Before salting each nut she licked it a little so that the salt would stick.
As we were eating our nuts, Cynthia and Dolores walked through the park. They were going ice skating. Both of them had ice skates over their shoulders. Dolores was sensibly dressed. She had on ski pants, a jacket, mittens, boots, stocking cap, and earmuffs. That was just the top layer. That was all I could see. That was what my mother called sensibly dressed. Cynthia was in-sensibly dressed. She had on one of those short skirts that flare out when you twirl, if you know how to twirl on ice. I hoped she was cold.
I had been an apprentice for a couple of months now. I thought that if I could just make Cynthia trip and fall down, all my apprenticeship would be worth it. As they walked past me, I followed them silently with my eyes and chanted to myself, “Trip and fall. Trip and fall. Trip and fall. Trip and fall.” As they passed, Cynthia tripped over the handle of Jennifer’s wagon. Since she tripped but did not fall, I felt like a one hundred per cent successful half witch.
After we finished eating all the nuts, we got down to business. Jennifer asked if I had eaten any F.F. before New Year’s Day. I replied that I was insulted that she should even ask. Then I described the seeds and the Lion’s Milk I had collected from the Greats. She looked pleased. I told her about how they always said everything as if it were a question. She looked pleased, so I imitated how Great-aunt Drusilla and Great-uncle Frank always repeated what each other said. For a minute I thought Jennifer was going to laugh. She didn’t; she looked pleased, though.
Next Jennifer surprised me. She gave me a promotion. I was graduated from apprentice witch to journeyman witch. Now I was no longer to eat special foods. Instead, I was to take very careful precautions. She went over these precautions one by one. She called them taboos.
Taboo 1: Never lie on a pillow when I sleep.
Taboo 2: Never cut my hair. (I saw some problems there. I was already playing hide and seek through my bangs. My mother kept saying that she would cut them as soon as she had a minute free from vacuuming.)
Taboo 3: Never eat after 7:30 P.M. o’clock of the evening.
Taboo 4: Never make a call on the telephone. I asked Jennifer if I had permission to answer the phone if someone called me. Jennifer said, “Of course.” She continued with the list.
Taboo 5: Never wear shoes in the house on Sundays.
Taboo 6: Never use red ink.
Taboo 7: Never light a match.
Taboo 8: Never touch straight pins or needles.
Taboo 9: Never dance at a wedding.
Taboo 10: Never get into bed without walking around it three times. (Another problem: my bed was in a corner pushed against the wall. Either I would have to convince my mother to change my room around, or I’d have to pull it out at night.)
Taboo 11: Never walk on the same side of the street as a hospital.
Taboo 12: Never sing before breakfast.
Taboo 13: Never cry before supper.
Some of these taboos seemed pretty hard. I told Jennifer that I didn’t think some of them made any sense. She told me that if I were looking for things to make sense, perhaps I wasn’t yet ready for promotion. I asked Jennifer if she always obeyed the taboos. She said that she always did—except that now she was allowed to light matches. I remembered that she had had to light a candle when I first became her apprentice. I was convinced that I could, I would, obey. I asked Jennifer for a list of the taboos so that I wouldn’t disobey by mistake. She said that witches don’t rely on lists. The list might get lost and fall into the hands of some good person and that would mean trouble for witches all over. She said that I must memorize the list before school started the next day. She was afraid that back at school my mind would be all cluttered up with school stuff. Right then I had to learn them all; Jennifer checked me. She stood up and said to me, “You have reached the end of your apprenticeship. You are now a journeyman witch.”
I was pleased. I asked, “What comes next?”
“A master witch,” she ans
wered.
“Are you a master?” I asked.
“Of course,” she replied. “Only masters can train new witches.”
“What can a journeyman witch do?” I asked.
“You can cast short spells. Like making people trip.”
I smiled happily. I had already done that; I began to feel full of electricity. “When will I become a master witch?” I asked.
“After we’ve successfully made the ointment and successfully used it,” she answered.
I was so happy that I almost flew up to our apartment. I stopped short at the door and took off my shoes. I wanted to practice for Sundays.
School is very dull in January and February. No holidays, nothing to do but learn until Washington’s birthday on February 22nd. Sometimes it snowed and sometimes it slushed, but we always met on Saturdays. I saved up everything that happened to me during the week to tell Jennifer. She seemed to enjoy all the details of life in the apartment house. She told me things, too. Not things about her other life, though. She talked about her interests. She was interested in weaving. She wanted to weave cloth so that it could have a pattern in it. The pattern would be seen only if the cloth was held in a special way. And the pattern she wanted to weave in was people’s names . . . people she didn’t like and sometimes people she liked. Then, if she folded the cloth, the person whose name was almost-invisibly-woven would double over with cramps; if she snipped a few of the pattern threads, the person whose name was almost-invisibly-woven would get a slight cut. She let me imagine what other things could happen to the cloth. The people she liked whose names were almost-invisibly-woven would stay smooth and clean and well aired. Jennifer was also interested in cryptography. We tried to talk in a couple of the codes she made up, but it took awfully long to say anything, and, after all, we had only our Saturdays together.
One Saturday in February we didn’t meet. I’ll tell about that one now.
Cynthia had a birthday party, and she invited me. I was amazed when I got the invitation. It came in the mail. R.S.V.P. was printed at the bottom. My mother said that R.S.V.P. meant that I had to let her know if I would come or not. I told my mother that I guessed I couldn’t make it. She asked me why not. I told her that I was busy on Saturday.
“Doing what?” she asked.
“Going to the library,” I answered.
“Can’t you do that work some other time?” she asked. At this point I have to admit that I had never yet told my mother about Jennifer. She thought that I went to the library every Saturday to do school-work. At first I didn’t tell her because she didn’t ask. Later I didn’t tell her because I didn’t want to. Because Jennifer was a witch. And my mother always liked me to have cousins and proper friends. Besides, witchcraft is a private affair.
My mother was worried about what she called my “social development.” That means that she thought I should make some friends.
I had heard my mother and father discussing me one night when they thought that I was asleep. My mother told my father that she didn’t think it was normal for me to be happy without friends. My father told her that a usual body temperature was 98.6 degrees, but some people were healthy with a body temperature of only 98.4 degrees. That was normal for them. “So who’s to say exactly what normal is?” my father said. My mother seemed to understand. For a while after this, she didn’t bother me about my “social development.” Until Cynthia’s invitation came. Immediately, my mother began believing again that normal must be 98.6 degrees.
“Go to the library after school on weekdays and finish up your work. Then you’ll be able to go to the party. I think it’s very nice of Cynthia to invite you.”
“Her mother made her do it,” I said.
“That’s a mean thing to say. It shows you don’t think much of Cynthia, and it shows that you think even less of yourself.” She paused a minute, pointed a finger at me and said, “You’re going. Call Cynthia now.” With that, she took the receiver from the telephone and held it out for me. How could I tell my mother that I wouldn’t go and also tell her that I wouldn’t use the phone? I hadn’t yet broken a single taboo. I didn’t want anything as foolish as Cynthia’s party to make me break one.
I thought fast; I talked fast. “I won’t bother to telephone. I’ll run upstairs with my message.”
“That’s the spirit,” my mother answered.
I went upstairs, knocked on Cynthia’s door and R.S.V.P.’d, “Yes.”
Cynthia said that she was delighted that I could come and that she was sorry she couldn’t invite me in right then, but she was busy. Her good manners didn’t impress me. They just told me that her mother was within hearing distance. Her good manners always got me mad.
Now I was faced with a real problem: letting Jennifer know that I couldn’t meet her on Saturday. I wrote her a note explaining the situation. I pinned it to the Jennifer tree on my way to school the next morning. When school was dismissed at lunch, I checked the tree and saw that she had put a note in its place. Jennifer had answered:
After I had told Cynthia “yes” and after I had received this permission from Jennifer, I was glad that I was going to the party. I enjoyed getting mad at Cynthia. I also thought that it would be fun to tell Jennifer all about how ordinary girls act at a party; normal girls who had a temperature of 98.6 degrees.
From the first moment I awakened on the Saturday of the party, things did not go well. Not at all. In the first place it was a butterscotch day; I was never in a good mood on butterscotch days. There was a candy factory in our town. On different days they made different flavors. In our part of town, we breathed flavored air. Orange was pleasant; cherry and lime were hardly noticeable; mint was delicious (I could pretend that I was smoking a menthol cigarette). But butterscotch was a hard flavor to breathe.
In the second place, my mother looked at my hair and decided that I couldn’t go to the party without a trim. Especially my bangs. She said something about my head looking like a pot of spaghetti that had boiled over. She ran to get the scissors. I ran to get my bathing cap.
“Get that thing off your head,” she said. “All I want to do is trim your bangs.”
“I want them to grow out. Please,” I answered.
“How can you possibly look neat for the party?” she asked.
“I’ll shampoo it and pin it back,” I answered. “After all, it is my hair.”
“I never doubt that it’s yours,” my mother said, “but I sometimes doubt that it’s hair. Okay, go wash it.”
I worked hard on the shampoo job, and I used about fifty thousand bobby pins to hold it back. If someone had held a magnet anywhere near my head, I feel certain that it would have lifted me five feet off the floor.
My party dress was also a problem; it was two years old. I always grew, but every year I grew less than most people. If I had grown a great deal, my mother would have bought me a new dress, but everything always almost fitted, and so we managed to get another year’s wear out of it. That was what had happened with the Pilgrim costume, too. I was very uncomfortable. With my hair pinned back tight and my dress so tight, I felt as if I wouldn’t be able to move unless someone pulled my arms and legs with strings the way you pull a marionette. I was in no party mood.
My mother wrapped the gift she had gotten for Cynthia. Two days before, she had asked me what I thought Cynthia would like; I had answered, “A pet boa constrictor.” My mother didn’t think that was very funny. She bought her a pair of stretch gloves, since we didn’t know her size.
I went up to Cynthia’s apartment and rang the bell. When she opened the door and greeted me, all I could see was pink. She was wearing a pink dress. Pink balloons were hanging from the ceiling; the table was set with pink paper cups and pink paper dishes. In the middle of the table was a pinkly frosted cake.
I limped in. I had planned a limp right after Jennifer’s note. I needed an excuse to not play musical chairs, so I invented a sore leg. Most of the girls were late for the party. All were in the fifth grad
e at William McKinley Elementary School, but I hadn’t been to a party with them before. They were either surprised to see me there or else they didn’t recognize me with my hair pinned back. They would look over at me and say “Hi,” then look again and say “Oh, hi, I didn’t recognize you at first.” I wasn’t being a great social success at the party. The party wasn’t being a great social success with me.
Instead of turning a record player or radio on and off for musical chairs, Cynthia played the piano. I hoped the neighbors on the fifth floor who lived under her would call up and complain about the noise. They didn’t. Cynthia probably had them enchanted. To what Cynthia could do, there was no end; to what I, Elizabeth, the journeyman witch, could do, there was no start.
I couldn’t play pin the tail on the donkey (there was a pink donkey and pink tails, imagine!) because I could not touch pins: Taboo Number 8.1 couldn’t play musical chairs; I couldn’t eat cake: Jennifer’s warning. I was so miserable about my hair and musical chairs and my dress that I tried hard to accidentally forget the taboos. I tried to make a slight mistake that couldn’t possibly be my fault; but the harder I tried, the harder it was to forget that I was a journeyman witch. Then I thought that, perhaps, this party was one of the torture trials I had read about in the Black Book. So I decided instead to enjoy being odd. And I did.
After pin the tail and musical chairs, everyone played treasure hunt. The treasure was the prize. I found the treasure with no trouble at all. As soon as the treasure hunt was announced, I walked straight to it. It was under the sofa pillow. I had sat on it during musical chairs and pin the tail. I had been too polite to mention the lump in the sofa. All the girls said, “Oh, how did you?” I just shrugged my shoulders and gave them a Jennifer-type look. The treasure was a little box of chocolates. Squashed chocolates.