The Wishing Box: A Novel, page 2
Lisa was cracking eggs into a bowl. From the way she crushed the empty shells with her hand, I could see she was still mulling my question.
“Mitch says that you and I are the victims of a childhood trauma,” she said after a pause.
I sighed. Up until two weeks ago, Mitch had been Lisa’s boyfriend. He had left her abruptly after seven months of honeyed loving, and she had been introspective and sulky ever since. Somehow every topic of conversation seemed to circle back to Mitch’s parting shots.
“Everyone’s the victim of something,” I told her. “I’m sure Mitch had something bad happen to him when he was a child that would explain how he became the kind of asshole who psychoanalyzes his girlfriend while he’s breaking up with her.”
Lisa was silent and I knew I had gone too far. Her hands were chapped and spotted with small cuts and burns, the tokens of her work as a chef at a local bistro. Lately it seemed to me that all of her was scabbed that way. I couldn’t open my mouth without nicking one of her tender spots.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “He’s not an asshole. I just don’t think it was a very helpful thing for him to say.”
Lisa brushed the hair back from her face. “But don’t you worry about Steven?” she asked, her whisk slitting open the yellow egg bellies and marching them around the bowl. “About him not having a father?”
“Steven’s doing just fine, if you hadn’t noticed.”
“Aw, get off your high horse. No one’s criticizing Steven. I’m just thinking about what Mitch said. That I didn’t learn to love properly as a child.”
I shook my head. I hated psychology. I hated the way it presumed that you could undo the events of the past just by naming them. Of course Lisa and I were shaped by our father’s disappearance. But our natures were hardened now. Fired, glazed, and set out for display. It was too late to put us back on the wheel.
“Can we talk about something else?” I pleaded. “Did I tell you that Steven’s completely hooked on rap music? He can do all the dances they do in the videos. You won’t believe how graceful he is.” I tried to show her how Steven moved, supple as a blade of grass, but it wasn’t a talent he’d inherited from me.
Anyway, Lisa wasn’t paying attention. She had her hands on her hips, like a squat two-handled jug. “The thing is, is I think he’s right,” she said. “I think I am the casualty of a childhood trauma.” She took the flour mixture out of my hands and began folding it into the other ingredients. “I don’t know. I just wish he’d come back.”
“I think you should find someone who loves you the way you are.”
Lisa’s spoon kept moving, obscured by the flour’s hazy fall. “I don’t mean Mitch,” she said. “I mean Dad.” Then she put the bowl down on the counter. “I mean, don’t you? Just so we could figure it all out?”
Steven’s face opened like a flower when he saw the cake, its candles all aflame.
“Make a wish,” I prompted.
He blew until the candle flames bowed down and disappeared. We all applauded, even Aunt Simone, who doesn’t approve of wishes.
“What did you wish for?” Lisa asked as he tucked into the first slice.
Steven pressed his lips together, chocolate leaking from the corners. He knew the rules. Don’t tell or it won’t come true. Hold it in, hold your breath. Wait. But I knew what he’d wished for. The Oakland A’s looked like they were going to make the play-offs, and Steven was baseball crazy. All he wanted was for them to win the World Series, a gift I gladly would have given him were it in my power. Instead I gave him a green satin A’s jacket, a slightly dog-eared Rickey Henderson rookie card, and a promise that I would find us tickets to a post-season game. That was good enough for Steven, who danced around the room in his new green jacket singing “Oakland A’s, Oakland A’s, Oakland A’s.”
Lucky for me he was still little enough not to mind me kissing him on impulse. When he sat back down at the table, I leaned over and kissed his head, and he edged his chair close to mine and slung his arm around me.
“Seven years old,” I murmured into his hair. “I can’t believe it. I still think I’m the one who’s seven.”
I felt Lisa’s eyes on me and looked up to see her frowning, the cake knife in hand. Childhood trauma, her eyes seemed to say. I shook my head as she offered me a slice.
“No thanks,” I told her. “I think I had enough while we were cooking.”
I let the birthday boy plan the evening, and he insisted on dancing and baseball. My friend Dawn came over when she got off work, and the five of us watched the A’s game. We rooted so passionately for Jose Canseco, the A’s handsome right fielder, that Steven blushed for us and told us to stop. When the game was over, we tuned the radio to the soul station and Steven climbed up on the sofa and demonstrated the latest dance moves, barking out instructions while Lisa, Dawn, and I shimmied below. Aunt Simone watched it all from a chair in the corner, her face inscrutable.
She had dressed up for the party in an orange Chanel suit that would have set off a bidding war at any San Francisco thrift shop, and she had given her bouffant an extra coating of silver hairspray. She glinted as she watched us, but I couldn’t tell if the gleam came from her metallic hair, the rhinestones on her spectacles, or her own steely pupils. When I was a little girl, my father used to make fun of Aunt Simone’s mincing high-heeled walk and prominent front teeth, and her habit of painting her black hair silver. But I stopped laughing at Aunt Simone after he left, and I was glad when she followed me and Lisa to California. We needed someone around who could tell us the truth about things.
“Come dance!” Steven called to her as he shook his little hips across the sofa.
Aunt Simone shook her head. “If I dance, who will watch you?” she asked. “Every performance needs an audience.”
I thought about that as I kicked and hopped in imitation of Steven’s complicated steps. I would have liked to be watching us: heavyset Lisa lumbering arhythmically; Dawn, tall and angular, her hips stabbing from side to side; me, small and spiky-haired and a little too worried about the steps; and conducting it all from Lisa’s oatmeal-colored sofa, my green-eyed and graceful son. I thought he was lucky to be growing up in the company of women, no matter what Lisa said.
By the time we were done dancing, Aunt Simone was dozing in her chair, and Steven had a telltale pinkness around his eyes that told me he was ready for bed. “We’re tired,” I told Lisa and Dawn, and knelt by Aunt Simone’s chair to wake her up.
“I was dreaming,” she said when I whispered her name. She reached up to her face to rub her eyes and succeeded only in dislodging her spectacles. “I saw my mother when she was still a young girl in Mexico.”
Normally I would have been interested in Aunt Simone’s dream, but it was late and Steven had school the next day. “Do you want me to take you home?” I asked her.
“Thank you, dear.” She stood up and smoothed her skirt and waited for Lisa and Dawn to kiss Steven good night. “Do you know,” she said as we walked to the door, “when my mother wanted to make a wish, she used to lock the Virgin Mary in a box.”
I nodded and began rummaging around in the coat closet for Aunt Simone’s raincoat and my leather jacket.
“Blackmail,” Aunt Simone went on. “The people from her village used to torture the images of saints until they got their way. Some Christians, hmm?”
I was about to ask her what had made her think of saints and wishes, but Steven shuffled closer to me and rubbed his face against my stomach. “Time to go,” I said, and then we were on the landing, looking back at Dawn and Lisa waving on the threshold.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Lisa said and tucked her hair behind her ears. It was a gesture she only made when she was trying to be crafty. If I hadn’t been thinking about getting Steven home to bed, I might have thought to worry.
I had trouble concentrating at work the next day. Something was up, some current of change. As I sat at my desk trying to focus on the book I was editing, I felt as if a light breeze were sighing across the nape of my neck, rousing my skin to gooseflesh. In retrospect, I suppose it was a warning, but at the time it felt thrilling. I was tired of my life the way it was. It was 1989. I was twenty-nine, I had no career ambitions to speak of, no relationship, and no clear idea what it was that I wanted from my future. I was ready for something to happen.
It’s hard to avoid thinking about your future when you work at Enhancement Press, an imprint devoted to books about self-improvement, self-fulfillment, self-contemplation, and self-actualization. Is your aura limp and lifeless, your inner child fretful, your spirit guide disoriented? Enhancement Press had all the solutions on hand, in paperback, with a photograph of the tan, self-satisfied author on the front cover.
At the moment, I was copy-editing the latest book by Shantra Maloney, whose seminal tome on the power of positive thinking I Am, I Can, I Do was still one of our best-sellers. As far as I could tell, Maloney was possessed of only one idea, which she faithfully regurgitated into a new manuscript every year. “Every day we have many thoughts,” she wrote this time around. “You maybe think to yourself, ‘I don’t have enough money’ or ‘I am fat’ or ‘I think I will go outside and breathe the fresh air in my beautiful garden.’ You probably think that you are thinking these thoughts because they are true. But the truth is that they are true because you are thinking them!”
Here I stopped reading long enough to wonder why it was that all of Shantra’s books sounded as if they had been translated from the original Croatian.
“Thoughts are much more powerful than you think,” she continued. “Every war, invention, or work of art began as a thought! Everything that happens to us is something we first created in our minds. That is why you must learn to take complete responsibility for your positive future by using the power of your thoughts.”
I tried using the power of my thoughts to make the manuscript burst into flames, but it didn’t, so I continued through the perky sentences, fixing punctuation and grammatical errors and marking where the text should be italicized and whether the headings should be centered or flush left. When I was done with the chapter, I leaned back in my chair and looked up at the sign over my desk. It said, i am relaxed, cheerful, and ready to achieve. Ralph Kaffey, my boss and the founder of Enhancement Press, had made me write it on a three-by-five-inch index card and tape it over my desk one day when I had come into work hungover and in a bad mood. It was supposed to help me cultivate a better attitude.
Ralph was a pudgy man with small, heavy-lidded eyes, thin lips, and strangely prominent jowls that made him look like an overfed iguana. His philosophy was a mixture of New Age and Dark Age, and he had started Enhancement Press for the purpose of publishing his own treatise on employee management, I Love My Job, My Job Loves Me. His method relied on the copious use of affirmations. His nagging little messages were everywhere in the office. The one over the kitchen sink said, i do my share to keep the office clean. The one over the xerox machine said, i treat office property with love. Above the window in my office was one that said, light comes from within. That was to remind me to keep the shades drawn. Sunlight gave Ralph a rash.
I was just about to yank down the affirmation over my desk and tear it into pieces when the man himself wandered into my office, gnawing on some kind of vegan burrito. He positioned himself behind me and stared at the manuscript on my desk. “How’s Shantra’s new book coming?”
“It’s a lot like her last one,” I said. “Except even less well-written.”
“Better fix it the fuck up,” he said. “She’s gonna be on Oprah. We need books in the stores.”
“Okay.” I waited for him to leave. He didn’t. He placed one large buttock on the edge of my desk and stared at me for a long moment, chewing.
“You asked about my season tickets the other day,” he said at last. “Want to see an A’s play-off game?”
“I want to take Steven,” I said, not sure what exactly he was offering. I was pretty sure he didn’t want to go himself, since he’d bought the tickets as a tax write-off and usually sold them to his staff at a 15 percent markup. “Steven would completely flip if I could take him.”
“Makes the tickets a powerful motivator,” Ralph said, licking a dollop of salsa from his upper lip. “You can have ‘em if you can have Shantra’s manuscript ready for the printer two weeks from Monday.”
“Two weeks? I thought it wasn’t going to the printer for another month.”
“Life is full of surprises, Julia,” Ralph said. “Maybe you could surprise me by not questioning every fucking thing I say.”
“I can’t get it done in half the time. It’s impossible.”
“That’s negative languaging, Julia,” Ralph said. “When you use a word like impossible all you do is convince yourself that you can’t succeed.” Then he took an index card from his back pocket and wrote in block letters, i am the cause of my success.
“Something to think about,” he said and pinned it on the wall above my desk.
Lisa stopped by late that night, after her restaurant closed. She sat down at my kitchen table and unwrapped the foil from the dinner she’d brought with her. “Try this,” she said, offering me a forkful of something blue. “It’s a crabcake made with blue cornmeal. Excellent, if I do say so myself.”
I shook my head. Steven and I had eaten packaged Welsh rarebit for dinner and I was still feeling overcheesed. “How’s the restaurant doing?”
“Great. We got reviewed again in the Chronicle, and they said if anything, we’d gotten better.” She smiled, her face still rosy from kitchen heat. “The restaurant is the one thing in my life that’s going great.”
“Good,” I said. I was jealous. It didn’t seem fair that Lisa should be tooling along on the career path of her dreams while I was being affirmed to death at Enhancement Press. “I’m glad one of us is enjoying work.”
“Why? What did Ralph do today?”
“Just the usual lesson on the power of positive thinking.”
“Poor Julia.” Lisa reached across the table to pat my hand. Then she leaned back and rubbed the sides of her arms as if she were cold. “Do you ever wonder, though, if some of that stuff might be true?”
I stared at her and she made a great show of hunting down a morsel of crabcake that was hiding under a leaf of escarole. “I don’t mean affirmations, exactly,” she said without looking up from her plate. “I just mean changing things with your thoughts. Or whatever. Wishing for things.”
I kept still, feeling fear rake its jagged edges over the layer of muscle just below my skin.
“Look,” Lisa said. She put her fork down and began rummaging around in the African basket she used as a purse. After a moment she pulled out a little ivory-colored statue. “Do you remember what Aunt Simone said last night? Well, I ran across this at a junk shop on my way to work today. It seemed like a sign.”
She pushed the statue across the table and I picked it up. It was a plastic Madonna, arms folded in prayer. I peered at its bland little face. Eyes downcast, the Virgin revealed nothing.
I handed her back to Lisa. “A sign of what?”
“I think we should try it,” she said. “Wishing for something.”
“Why?” I felt cross. It was bad enough having to listen to this kind of talk at work.
“I don’t know. Just for the hell of it. What if we wished for Dad to come visit us? Just to see what would happen.” She grinned at me, pink-faced and earnest, wheedling. “Come on, Julia, what could it hurt? The worst thing that could happen is it doesn’t work.”
“The best thing that could happen is it doesn’t work,” I corrected. “What if he’s dead? Haven’t you read ‘The Monkey’s Paw?’ Do you want a decomposing corpse to come knocking on your door, because I certainly don’t.”
Needing to do something, I filched a piece of sautéed summer squash from Lisa’s plate and popped it in my mouth.
“So we’ll phrase it carefully,” she said. “Wish for him or his personal effects, whichever would be less disgusting to look at.” She reached back in her bag and pulled out a little metal index card box. She put the box on the table and stood the tiny Madonna next to it. “Let’s just try it. Please?”
Standing on the Formica kitchen table, the Madonna looked like a misplaced chess piece. I felt a sudden loss of gravity, as if the earth had moved out from under us and we were suspended in midair with the table floating between us.
“Fine,” I said. “Go ahead. I won’t stop you.”
Lisa smiled, her face broad and satisfied. The box and the Virgin were in front of her like ingredients set out for a cooking show. She opened the box and put the little statue in it.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” she said in a ponderous voice, “we are locking you in this box and we won’t let you out until you grant this wish. Send us our father, if he’s alive.” She looked up at me and smiled with just the corners of her mouth. “If not, send us his personal effects. That is our wish.”
She shut the lid of the box and locked it with a tiny key.
“There,” she said. “That ought to do the trick.”
“I can’t imagine that a plastic statue is going to care about being in a box,” I grumbled. “She probably came in a box.”
“She’s more than plastic. I went to St. Francis de Sales Cathedral and dipped her in holy water,” Lisa said, her chest inflating a little with stubbornness. I didn’t bother asking when she’d started to believe in things like holy water. I just shook my head and got up to put her empty paper plate in the trash, leaving the box sitting on the table. It seemed full of promise and evil, like the one Pandora opened.
“Take it with you,” I said from the garbage can, not wanting to touch it.
“Let me leave it here. I don’t want to be tempted to let her out.”
“Fine.” I didn’t see what could tempt her, but I wasn’t going to make it into something more than it was by arguing. I scooped up the box and put it in the spice cabinet behind a wall of cumin and oregano jars. Then I shut the door, leaving the caged Madonna in spice-scented darkness.
