Excerpt 1—Darkness
Mary and Josie sat atop the hill, waiting for the sun to fade behind the mountains. Unlike games their schoolmates noisily played in the bright light of day, Red Rover or Hopscotch, theirs relied on darkness and silence. Mary’s and Josie’s game did not have a name; it was not bound by rules, teams or scores. It required only two commonplace items, a spool of twine and an old purse. Mary raided Debbie Mom’s kitchen junk drawer for the twine, and Josie snuck the purse out of her aunt’s closet.
They looped the twine five times around the stiff straps of the black leather purse and placed it in the center of two-lane Jericho Road at a sharp bend locals referred to as Dead Man’s Curve. Anyone rounding the curve would naturally let up on the gas pedal, unless they were drunk, and might see the purse reflected in their headlights.
Back in their positions at the top of the hill, Mary and Josie crouched and waited, taking turns holding the spool end of the twine, the soft light of the pink and blue Belt of Venus their backdrop on the horizon. As twilight melted into night, they heard a car backfire.
“Someone’s coming,” Mary whispered. “Get ready.”
“It sounds like Lettie Johnson’s car,” Josie said.
Lettie slammed on her brakes and got out, approaching the dark object cautiously, not knowing for sure what it was. Her heart beat a little faster, and not because of the danger posed by a tiny woman like herself standing in the middle of Dead Man’s Curve on a moonless night; as the purse came into focus, the shiny black patent leather pumps she’d admired, on the mannequin in the window of Dalton’s Department Store, flashed through her mind. For a second, she imagined herself with shoes and purse to match, or close enough, walking into town, her head held high.
Lettie stooped to take a closer look at the purse, brushed her fingertips across its cool, damp surface, then jerked her hand away. Had it moved ever so slightly? As she lifted the purse off the ground, she felt a gentle tug, followed by a steady resistance. Mary reeled in the purse, like a hooked fish, and watched it flop side-to-side, up the hill and beyond Lettie’s reach.
“I didn’t plan to steal it, just wanted to see who it belonged to,” Lettie yelled into the darkness before driving off.
She avoided Dead Man’s Curve whenever possible now, hoping to forget the guilt and shame she carried home that night, instead of a new purse.
A single-bulb light socket dangled from the ceiling of Debbie Mom and Daddy John’s bedroom at the end of the hall. The cracked glass globe that once concealed it lay on a side table waiting for Daddy John to take it to the hardware store and buy a replacement. With no cover to obstruct it, the bulb’s yellowish-orange light slithered through the door’s gap and crept under Mary’s door in no time. Unable to sleep under the invasion of artificial light, Mary blocked the imposter by folding and placing a faded mermaid beach towel lengthwise across the bottom of her door.
The beach towel came from a ubiquitous seaside shop during a rare family vacation to Myrtle Beach, when Mary was five. After seasoned sunbathers and serious sandcastle aficionados were forced off the beach by heavy rain, they swarmed the tiny shops, browsing a myriad of items useful only on a sunny day—suntan lotion featuring the iconic Coppertone girl, plastic buckets and shovels, lounge chairs and beach towels.
Exhausted parents, at a loss to dream up any rainy-day activities to placate their whiny children, bickered with each other as they dragged their kids from one shop to the next.
“Weren’t we here before?” kids complained.
“You were in charge of just one thing, checking the weather!” exasperated mothers said to their husbands.
Because it rained the entire week, the mermaid beach towel was the sharpest memory Mary carried home. She was certain she pulled it off the shelf accidentally. A heavy woman, in a one-piece bathing suit, charged into her while chasing after a little boy squirting a water gun. Mary reflexively grabbed the towel for support, knocked over a rack of post cards and landed on the floor.
The mermaid beach towel cloaked her head, and dozens of Wish You Were Here in Beautiful Myrtle Beach post cards lay scattered around scores of bare, sand-caked feet, inches from her face.
“You knocked my baby, down,” Debbie Mom yelled at the woman.
Then, “You know better than to pull things off shelves,” she screamed at Mary.
Her other memory of the trip was Debbie Mom and Daddy John bickering over where they should eat dinner.
“Let’s go to Howard Johnson’s,” Debbie Mom said.
“I prefer Dairy Queen,” Daddy John said. “I like their hot dogs.”
“Why would we travel five hundred miles to eat at the same restaurant we can eat at back home?” Debbie Mom asked.
Nobody asked me. We ended up at Howard Johnson’s.
“We should have stayed home and gone to Hillbilly Beach at Jordan Creek,” Daddy John mumbled.
Before she arrived on earth, Mary floated in a black sea far-removed from Myrtle Beach. She was alone, yet not alone, in the depths of the wet darkness. Lured by a siren’s song toward a beacon of light onshore, a steady, rhythmic force propelled her through the rough waves.
Growing up, Mary’s life was filled with music between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m., and again between 3:30 and 6:30 p.m., when she and Debbie Mom were home alone. Debbie Mom was especially fond of Doris Day, gliding across the kitchen floor, clutching a mop or broom, singing along; it’s not easy to glide on cracked linoleum. She placed the mop or broom in the corner, just long enough to pour herself another cup of coffee or flip the record.
Mary’s favorite Doris Day song was Que Sera, on the A side of the 78 RPM record. She admired its array of real-life questions about what lay ahead, will I be pretty, will I be rich? but its withholding of pat answers, whatever will be, will be, the future’s not ours to see, que sera. Still, coming from Doris’s lips, it sounded as though everything would be wonderful. Mary recognized that it made Debbie Mom happy to believe this.
Excerpt 2
“Girls, let’s go. I don’t want to be late.” Velvet was already halfway out the door. Sam and I were watching The Edge of Night on TV. Mel now lived in the dorms at the University of Miami.
“Where are we going?” we said in unison.
“To see Mambo Mama Matabay, High Priestess of Voodoo.” She said it casually, as if we were going to get our hair cut.
A half hour later, the bus dropped us off in Little Haiti. We walked into the Voodoo Botanica, a colorful shop with a variety of tiny wooden and cloth dolls, candles, bones, potions, books, and of course, straight pins.
“Good afternoon,” a black lady with a head scarf said. She had an accent, but it was nothing like the Appalachian drawl I once had.
“I’m Velvet Summers. I have an appointment with Mambo Mama Matabay. She’s going to teach me a spell.”
“Yes, she’s expecting you. The children will need to wait out here.”
“Can we pet the chickens?” Sam asked.
“Janie, watch Sam,” Velvet ordered.
About an hour later, Velvet emerged from behind the beaded curtains and said, “I need three dolls, some rope, a black candle, and straight pins.”
The black lady gathered up the items. “That will be twenty-five dollars, including the session.”
Velvet paid and we left. On the bus ride home, we got an earful.
“Girls, we’re going to cast a spell on the rotten men in our lives. Do you have any questions?”
“Is Daddy a rotten man?” Sam asked.
“Your daddy will be exempt from this one.”
“What kind of spell?” I said.
“It won’t kill them, but they won’t mess with us again.” I had hoped for more details.
“Can I help?” Sam sounded just like that Shake n’ Bake commercial on TV.
“You can both help, but you have to promise never to tell anyone.”
Sam and I both crossed our hearts and hoped to die.
“We’ll start practicing tonight right after the Ed Sullivan Show.”
Ed’s “really big shew” having ended, Velvet removed the dolls, the rope, the black candle, and the pins from a brown paper bag. She turned off all the lights except one, and we sat on the floor in a circle.
“This is our sacred circle,” she said. “Now keep your voices very low, and do exactly as I say. We don’t want this to backfire.”
“How will we know if it backfires?” I said.
“You might wake up blind in one eye or with a terrible pain in your leg, that kind of thing.”
Velvet had our full attention. She spread out a towel on the floor and placed the three dolls on top. Next, she pulled three black and white photos, one each of Ray, Tommy Clay, and Jim the Mailman, out of her pocket.
“Get me some scissors out of the drawer,” she said.
I got up as quietly as I could and returned with the scissors. Velvet cut off each man’s head in the pictures and pinned each of them to a doll. She wrapped a piece of rope around each doll and lit the black candle.
“Okay girls, repeat with me. ‘Curse my enemies, curse my fears, curse those who have brought me tears. Curse those who have done me wrong, make their punishment long and strong. This is my will so might it be.’”
We repeated the curse three times, one for each rotten man doll.
“What will happen to Ray, Tommy Clay and Jim the Mailman?” I asked, when we had finished.
“That remains to be seen,” Velvet said.
