Charms for the Easy Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

grave. I was strong enough to go home, but that in no way meant I wanted to. My grief had been plain and unpoetic, and the hole in my heart would’ve grown wide enough and deep enough to consume me had my mother and grandmother not kept me with them, and still. My grandmother put me to sleep those afternoons and evenings by reading to me from The New England Journal of Medicine,The Old Farmer’s Almanac, and The Atlanta Constitution. I became fascinated with her mind, enamored of her muscular soul.
    My father came home late on the evening my mother and I returned home. He made no excuses, offered no apologies. He passed the table where my mother and I sat playing Chinese checkers, and went to bed. My mother slept with me. The next day was Saturday, Maveen’s day off, a day I had always associated with eating a roast beef platter at the Sir Walter Hotel, but that day my mother and I ate at home because she couldn’t work the swelling out of her face. She had cried so long and so hard that her face was puffed into one large, pink welt. This is what had happened to her: She had gone into the bedroom early in the morning and picked my father’s clothes up off the floor. Cleaning out his pockets, she found his wedding band. She shook him awake and asked him why it was there and not on his finger. He mumbled, “It hurts her feelings.” Then he rolled over and went back to sleep. He slept until noon.
    In the meantime, we went to my grandmother’s. She was sitting at her white metal table pressing pills. My mother told her the story, making large motions with her arms. When she finished, she said, “I want you to do something about him, not kill him, but make him sick. I’ve had enough.”
    My grandmother said she could not do it. “I can make them well,” she said, “but I will not make them sick.”
    My mother tried to change her mind, but it didn’t work. My grandmother finally cut her off by saying, “Don’t worry yourself. I’ve seen him out and about places. He’s due for a stroke of paralysis or something nastier. His facial capillaries are exploding daily, even the ones on his ears, a true sign of something ugly to come. But even if that weren’t the case, I wouldn’t make him sick. You know I never do that.”
    She had a certain integrity in that regard. She refused to cross over the line from natural medicine into black magic, although in many cases, if she had not combined useless folk remedies with treatments she judged to be therapeutic, her uneducated and overly superstitious patients would not have trusted her. But still, she had to remind people of what she would and would not do for them. I had heard her tell patients many times, “I do not perform voodoo. I do not even dabble.” Once I watched her throw a young man out of her house because he would not accept her refusal to conjure his wife. He wanted to hire my grandmother at an inflated rate to toss a bag of cemetery dirt into his yard at midnight. His wife had been unfaithful, and this particular hex, he believed, would keep the woman in a constant state of disappointment. My grandmother said, “If she’s living with you, she’s that way already. Get out of here and never come back.” She wouldn’t deal in the psyche, unless a broken heart, for example, had played on the nerves and thrown a body off kilter. This was the case the day I watched her wrap a piece of valerian root in bleached muslin for a young woman who had ground all the enamel off her back teeth. She had been thrown over for, I was sure, a prettier and smarter girl. She wasn’t so smart and pretty. She asked my grandmother what she should do if sleeping with the valerian root underneath her pillow for the prescribed seven nights did not work. My grandmother looked up from the seven-knotted string she was tying around the muslin and said: “Get over him.”

    My father was dead in two months. My first monthly started the week he died. This is what may have happened to