Practical Magic (Practical Magic, #1)

by Alice Hoffman

in the long run we carry our heritage with us no matter how far we might run.

Unfortunately, over the past quarter century, the place of a woman in society has not moved forward as we had wished, then and now. There are still many of the same issues left to address: equal pay, childcare, healthcare, sexual assault. Magic may not be able to right these wrongs, but sisterhood just might.

FOR more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in town.

The little girls who lived up in the attic were sisters, only thirteen months apart in age.

The girls were being raised by their aunts, who, as much as they might have wanted to, simply couldn’t turn their nieces away.

Gillian was lazy and liked to sleep past noon. She saved up her allowance money, then paid Sally to do her math homework and iron her party dresses. She drank bottles of Yoo-Hoo and ate goopy Hershey’s bars while sprawled out on the cool basement floor, content to watch as Sally dusted the metal shelves where the aunts kept pickles and preserves.

Sally, three hundred ninety-seven days older than her sister, was as conscientious as Gillian was idle. She never believed in anything that could not be proven with facts and figures.

the moon is always jealous of the heat of the day, just as the sun always longs for something dark and deep.

even the best athletes, the ones who were the stars of their Little League teams, could never get a hit when they took aim at the Owens girls. Every stone, each apple, always landed at the sisters’ feet.

“Fuck them all,” Gillian would say,

Black cats can do that to some people; they make them go all shivery and scared and remind them of dark, wicked nights. The aunts’ cats, however, were not particularly frightening.

A panic had spread and the more high-strung of Sally’s classmates were already whispering witchery. A witch, after all, was often accompanied by a familiar, an animal to do her most evil bidding. The more familiars there were, the nastier the bidding, and here was an entire troop of disgusting creatures.

She did not ask the aunts for special favors, or even request those small rewards she deserved. Sally could not have had a more intractable and uncompromising judge; she had found herself lacking, in compassion and fortitude, and the punishment was self-denial, from that moment on.

The children in town could whisper whatever rumors they wished, but the truth was that most of their mothers had gone to see the aunts at least once in their lives.

every woman in town knew what the aunts’ real business was: their specialty was love.

Desire had a way of making a person oddly courageous.

During the winter when Sally was twelve and Gillian almost eleven, they learned that sometimes the most dangerous thing of all in matters of love was to be granted your heart’s desire.

“My lover’s heart will feel this pin, and his devotion I will win. There’ll be no way for him to rest nor sleep, until he comes to me to speak. Only when he loves me best will he find peace, and with peace, rest.” Gillian made little stabbing motions, which is what the girl was to do to the dove’s heart when she repeated these words for seven nights in a row before she went to bed.

“If the aunts are full of baloney”—Gillian grinned—“then we’ll be just like everyone else.” Sally nodded. She could not begin to express how deeply she felt about this matter, since being like everyone else was her personal heart’s desire.

Some people cannot be warned away from disaster. You can try, you can put up every alert, but they’ll still go their own way.

She put her hand to her throat, as though someone were strangling her, but really she was choking on all that love she thought she’d needed so badly.

The instant the girls began high school, the boys who had avoided them for all those years suddenly couldn’t keep away from Gillian.

Gillian broke hearts the way other people broke kindling for firewood.

The only advice the aunts offered was that a baby was easier to prevent than to raise, and even Gillian, as foolhardy as she was, could see the truth in that.

The aunts tried to encourage her not to be so good. Goodness, in their opinion, was not a virtue but merely spinelessness and fear disguised as humility.

Twenty years later, many of them were still thinking of her when they shouldn’t, but she had never cared for a single one and could never even remember their names.

But by the time the sisters were out of high school, it became clear that although Gillian could fall in love, she couldn’t stay there for more than two weeks.

In their estimation Gillian was young and stupid and would get herself pregnant in record time—all the prerequisites for a miserable and ordinary life.

The aunts looked at each other, puzzled. But Sally laughed out loud. She, with her insistence of proof, had just been granted some powerful evidence: Things changed. They shifted. One year was not just like the next and the one after and the one after that. Sally ran from the house and she kept right on running until she got to the front of the hardware store, where she crashed into the man she would marry.

He knew enough to stay out of the kitchen, especially at twilight, and if he noticed the women who came to the back door, he never questioned Sally about them. His kisses were slow and deep and he liked to take off Sally’s clothes with the bedside table light turned on and he always made certain to lose when he played gin rummy with one of the aunts.

The house stayed cheery and warm, and when Antonia was born, at home, since a horrid snowstorm was brewing outside, the chandelier with the glass teardrops moved back and forth all on its own.

Antonia would have been perfectly happy to be an only child forever, but three and a half years later, at midnight exactly, Kylie was born, and everyone noticed right away how unusual she was.

It’s just what I wanted, Sally wrote. Every single thing. Come visit us, she begged, but she knew Gillian would never come back of her own free will. Gillian had confessed that when she even thought the name of their town, she broke out in hives.

The lesson Sally had learned so long ago in the kitchen—to be careful what you wish for—was so far and so faded it had turned to yellow dust. But it was the sort of dust that can never be swept up, and instead waits in the corner and blows into the eyes of those you love when a draft moves through your house.

That night, at twilight, Sally found the aunts in the kitchen. She dropped to her knees and begged them to help her, just as all those desperate women before her had done.

Neighbors who used to invite Sally over for coffee now crossed the street if they saw her coming and quickly murmured a prayer; they preferred to look straight into the sun and be temporarily blinded, rather than see what had happened to her.

Sally felt as though she’d been dead and now that she was back she was particularly sensitive to the world of the living: the touch of the wind against her skin, the gnats in the air, the scent of mud and new leaves, the sweetness of blues and greens.

The aunts insisted that, no matter what, the past would follow Sally around. She’d wind up like Gillian, a sorry soul that only grew heavier in each new town.

“I despise you,” she informed Sally as they sat in the cabin of the ferry that took them across Long Island Sound.

Instead, she switched on the radio and sang along and told herself that sometimes the right thing felt all wrong until it was over and done with.

Every summer, in August, they would visit the aunts. They would draw in their breath as soon as they turned the corner onto Magnolia and could spy the big old house with its black fence and green-tinted windows.

Antonia felt no responsibility to anyone; she was nobody’s caretaker.

It doesn’t matter what people tell you. It doesn’t matter what they might say. Sometimes you have to leave home. Sometimes, running away means you’re headed in the exact right direction.

At the age of sixteen, Antonia is so beautiful that it’s impossible for any stranger seeing her for the first time to even begin to guess how miserable she can make those closest to her.

To have a sister who is perfect, at least from the outside, is bad enough. To have one who can make you feel like a speck of dust with a few well-chosen mean words is almost more than Kylie can take.

Kylie, though she seems to have no close friends other than Gideon Barnes, is the Nassau County spelling champion and the president of the chess club.

But false cheer is draining, and if you pretend long enough there’s always the possibility that you’ll become an automaton.

And just when people are beginning to dream, of cut grass and blueberry pie and lions who lie down beside lambs, a ring appears around the moon. A halo around the moon is always a sign of disruption, either a change in the weather, a fever to come, or a streak of bad fortune that won’t go away. But when it’s a double ring, all tangled and snarled, like an agitated rainbow or a love affair gone wrong, anything can happen.

For all the time they’ve been apart, living separate lives, Gillian has been doing as she pleased, fucking whomever she cares to and waking at noon.

Anyone else might assume Gillian is lying or exaggerating or just goofing around. But Sally knows her sister. She knows better. There’s a dead man in the car. Guaranteed.