The Uses of Enchantment Read Online Free PDF Page B

disturbingly older than their respective ages of thirty-one and twenty-eight. Regina in particular looked preternaturally ruined due to a combination of the lighting—the Itty Bitty Book Light clamped to the headboard exposed the hollows under her eyes and the rumples around her mouth—her resolute underweight-ness, and the physical toll exacted by her crashingly doomed love life. In high school, Regina had been the only functional Veal beauty, which did not mean that she’d been beautiful. Since she exuded the composure and the sense of entitlement that typically accompanied beauty, many were charitably willing to concede her the privileges. Mary, who was neither pretty nor its opposite, learned at an early age that what beauty she might lay claim to was directly related to the occasional moods that possessed her as a child and as an adolescent, and which now rarely did; a sense that her body did not matter and her face did not matter, that when people looked at her they were struck by a light that radiated from inside of her and was so entrancing as to make her physical self irrelevant. But really it was Gaby who, despite her alternately irate and affectless manner and her asexual-to-lesbian leanings, had the most lovely moon face of the three, hidden behind a perpetual scrim of baby-fine, brown hair. Part of her allure could be attributed to the fact that people felt self-congratulatory when they discovered it, as though this said something special about them and their unique powers of perception.
    Her sisters stopped talking when they saw Mary standing in the doorway. They did not invite her into the room. Detached conversation ensued. The kitchen was clean yes the waspy women were sweet yes and even Aunt Helen was on her best behavior amazing how is Dad Dad is fine Dad is Dad glad it’s over now just glad it’s over.
    Silence.
    Mary said good night. She did not try to kiss them or appear to need to be kissed and they were clearly relieved about this.
    “Yes, well, good night,” she repeated.
    Mary shut her bedroom door, surrounded now by the cabbage-rose wallpaper she’d chosen as a ten-year-old, jail bars of pink-and-red flowers. Regina’s and Gaby’s rooms had been stripped and repainted into the guest room and the study-cum-second-guest-room respectively, while her room—for possibly no more significant reason than that it was the smallest and the darkest—had been left intact, right down to the elementary-school swim-team ribbons pinned to the bulletin board and the robe in the closet. She sat on the edge of her dotty-coverleted bed and roughly worked her temples with her thumb and index finger, trying to poke away the effects of the day. She took a healthy gulp of Healthy Acceptance grief tea to maximize her attempts at relaxation.
    Fuck.
    She spat the scalding mouthful back into the mug. Her hand jiggled, spilling more tea and forcing her to drop the mug awkwardly on the bedside table. The mug overturned and grief tea splashed on the spines of the books in the nearby bookshelf and over the off-white carpet.
    Fuck fuck .
    She pulled the books from the shelf and one by one blotted them dry with her bathrobe sleeve. The worst hit, coincidentally, was her signed copy of Trampled Ivy: How Abusive Marriages Happen to Smart Women by Dr. Rosemary Biedelman. Mary removed the book’s sheeny dust jacket (a crepuscular orangey-pink backdrop foregrounding a menacing silhouette of ivy) to swipe at the water droplets beneath it. The spine, stiff from never having been read, was nonetheless practiced at opening to this one page.
    For Dora: We await your true story.
    Beneath the ballpointed inscription was a scribble that might have read Roz Biedelman but had always looked more to Mary like Skuz Bod .
    Her formerly treasured edition of The Abduction and Captivity of Dorcas Hobbs by the Malygnant Savages of the Kenebek , she noticed, though located on a shelf above the spill’s Biedelman epicenter, had also been victim