There were Laws against Pointing, Once Upon a Time.

“This conversation is over,” she said with chilling calm. “Change the sheets on your bed, they’re practically crawling, and pick those dirty clothes up off the floor before they fester. Panties are not carpets.” 

“Later,” I said, pushing the limit. “I’ve got homework.”

“Don’t make me point!” She lifted one hand out of the bowl : it was covered with niblets of raw flesh, and pink with blood. I felt a chill. I certainly didn’t want any pointing going on; pointing was how you directed a spell. 

People used to get hanged for pointing back in the old days, my mother had told me — or else they were barbecued. Death by burning at the stake was very painful, she could testify to that. There were laws against pointing, once upon a time. If you pointed at a cow and it got sick, everyone knew you were neck-deep in the Black Arts. 

I flounced out of the kitchen with as much defiance as I dared. I’m not sure I’d remember now how to flounce — it’s an accomplishment, though not one you hear of teenage girls practising nowadays. They still pout and sneer, however, just as I did. I moped off to my room, where I made the bed as sloppily as I could, then gathered up several days’ worth of my shed clothes and stuffed them into the laundry hamper. We had a new automatic washing machine, so at least I wouldn’t be put to work at the old wringer-washer tub. 

I did collect the hair from my hairbrush and set fire to it in a red glass ashtray I kept for that purpose. My mother would be sure to conduct a hairbrush inspection, which would include the wastebasket, to check that I hadn’t shirked. Until a year ago my mother had worn her long, red-gold hair in an elegant French roll, but then she’d cut it off with the poultry shears — the Kim Novak look, she’d said. There had been a conflagration in the kitchen sink — she did practise what she preached, unlike some parents — and the house had stunk like a singed cat for days. Singed cat was her term. I’d never smelled a singed cat, but she had. Cats regularly got singed in the old days along with their owners, according to her. 

There was no sense in going toe-to-toe with my mother. Nor could I try sneaking around : she had eyes in the back of her head, and little birds told her things. Brian would have to be given up. I had a weep about that : goodbye, Old Spice shaving-lotion aroma and the scents of cigarettes and freshly washed white T-shirts; goodbye, heavy breathing in movie theatres during the dance numbers in musicals; goodbye, feeding Brian the extra fries from my hamburger, followed by greasy, potato-flavoured kisses … He was such a good kisser, he was so solid to hug, and he loved me — though he didn’t say so, which was admirable. 

Saying it would have been soft. 

Later that evening, I phoned to tell him our Saturday-night date was cancelled. He wasn’t pleased. 

“Why?” he said. I could hardly tell him that my mother had consulted some old cards with weird pictures on them and predicted he would die in a car crash if he went out with me. I didn’t need to fuel any more school rumours about her; there were more than enough as it was. 

“I just can’t go out with you,” I said. “I need us to break up.” “Is there another guy?” he asked in a menacing tone. “I’ll punch his face in!” “No,” I said. I started to cry. “I really like you. I can’t explain. It’s for your own good.” “I bet it’s your crazy mother,” he said. I cried harder. That night I crept out into our backyard, buried Brian’s picture under a lilac bush, and made a wish. My wish was that I would somehow get him back. But wishes made out of earshot of my mother did not come true. According to her, I lacked the talent. Perhaps I might develop it later—grow into it, as it were—but it could skip a generation, or even two. I hadn’t been born with a caul, unlike her. Luck of the draw. The next day at school there were whisperings. I tried to ignore them, though I couldn’t help hearing the odd phrase: Cuckoo as a clock. Addled as an egg. Crazy as a box of hair. Mad as a sack of hammers. And the worst: No man in the house, so what can you expect? Within a week, Brian was going out with a girl called Suzie, though he still shot reproachful glances in my direction. I comforted myself with versions of my own saintly unselfishness: because of me, Brian’s heart was still beating. I’m not saying I didn’t suffer. Several years later, Brian became a drug dealer and ended up on a sidewalk with nine bullets in him. So maybe my mother had got the main event right, but the time and the method wrong. She said that could happen. It was like a radio: nothing amiss with the broadcast end, but the reception could be faulty. No man in the house described our situation. Of course, everyone has a father—or, as they would say nowadays, a sperm provider, fatherhood in the old sense of paternity having fallen into disrepute—and I had one too, though at that date I wasn’t sure this father was still what you’d call “alive.” When I was four or five, my mother told me she’d changed him into the garden gnome that sat beside our front steps; he was happier that way, she said. As a garden gnome he didn’t need to do anything, such as mow the lawn—he was bad at it anyway—or make any decisions, a thing he hated. He could just enjoy the weather. When I was wheedling her over something she’d initially denied me, she’d say, “Ask your father,” and I’d trot out and hunker down beside the garden gnome—hunker just a little, as he wasn’t much shorter than me—and stare into his jovial stone face. He appeared to be winking. “Can I have an ice-cream cone?” I’d plead. I was sure that he and I had a pact of sorts—that he would always be on my side, as opposed to my mother, who was on her own side. It gave me a warm feeling to be with him. It was comforting. “What did he say?” my mother would ask when I went back in. “He said I can.” I was almost sure I’d heard a gruff voice mumbling from within his grinning, bearded stone face. “Very well, then. Did you give him a hug?” “Yes.” I always hugged my father when he’d allowed something marginally forbidden. “Well done. It’s nice to say thank you.” This fantasy had to be given up, naturally. Well before the time I was fifteen, I’d heard the other, supposedly real version: my father had deserted us. According to my mother he’d had urgent business elsewhere, though at school they said he’d run away, unable to tolerate my mother’s craziness, and who could blame him? I was jeered at for his absence; it wasn’t usual in that decade for fathers to be missing, not unless they’d been killed in the war. “Where’s your father?” was annoying, but “Who’s your father?” was insulting. It implied my mother had generated me with someone she didn’t even know. I brooded. Why had my father abandoned me? If he was still alive, why didn’t he at least write to me? Hadn’t he loved me even a little? Though I no longer believed that my father was a garden gnome, I did suspect my mother of having transformed him in some other way. I’m ashamed to say that I went through a period of wondering if she’d done him in—with mushrooms or something ground in a mortar—and had buried him in the cellar. I could almost see her lugging his inert body down the stairs, digging the hole—she’d have had to use a jackhammer to get through the cement—then dumping him in and plastering him over. I inspected the cellar floor for clues and found none. But that proved nothing. My mother was very clever: she’d have taken care to leave no traces. Then, when I was twenty-three, my father suddenly turned up. By that time, I’d finished university and left my mother’s house. My departure was not amicable: she was bossy, she was spying on me, she was treating me like a child! Those were my parting words. “Suit yourself, my pet,” she’d said. “When you need help, I’ll be here. Shall I donate your old stuffed animals to charity?” A pang shot through me. “No!” I cried. In our clashes I inevitably lost my cool, and a shard of dignity along with it. I was determined not to need help. I’d found a job at an insurance company, on a low rung, and was sharing a cheap rented house west of the university with two roommates who had similar peasant-level jobs. 

My father made contact by sending me a letter. He must have got my address from my mother, I realised later, but since I was in one of my phases of not speaking to her I didn’t ask her about that. It seemed to me she’d been getting crazier. Her latest thing — before I’d put her on hold — had been a scheme to kill her next-door neighbour’s weeping willow tree. I wasn’t to worry, she’d said : she’d do it by pointing, at night, so no one would see her. This would be in revenge for something about running over a toad on a driveway, and anyway, the willow roots were getting into the drains. 

Avenging a toad. 

Pointing at a tree. 

Who could handle that kind of thing, in a mother? 

At first I was surprised to get my father’s letter. Then I found that I was angry : Where had he been? What had taken him so long? 

I answered with a note of three lines that included the house phone number. We spoke, a terse, embarrassed exchange, and arranged to meet. I was on the edge of cutting him off, telling him I had no interest in seeing him—but this would not have been true.