{"product_id":"the-uses-of-enchantment-isbn-9781400078110","title":"The Uses of Enchantment","description":"One Autumn day in 1985, sixteen-year-old Mary Veal vanishes from her Massachusetts prep school. A few weeks later she reappears unharmed and with little memory of what happened to her--or at least little that she is willing to share.  Was Mary abducted, or did she fake her disappearance? This question haunts Mary's family, her psychologist, even Mary herself. Weaving together three narratives, \u003ci\u003eThe Uses of Enchantment \u003c\/i\u003econjures a spell in which the hallucinatory power of a young woman’s sexuality, and her desire to wield it, has devastating consequences for all involved.“A novel of ideas that moves with the speed and inevitability of a freight train. . . . Entertaining, devastating and as slippery as a strand of its anti-heroine’s lank hair.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The quest to excavate the intact truth from layers of mythology, ideology, and memory is what yokes the reader to every word of Heidi Julavits's new novel. . . . A riveting, at times deeply funny, disturbing book.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Beautifully wrought. . . . Assertively smart, trickily constructed.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An ingenious, seriocomic study of the female imagination’s power to alter and contort the lives it touches.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Miami Herald\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eHeidi Julavits \u003c\/b\u003eis the author of two previous novels, \u003ci\u003eThe Mineral Palace \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Effect of Living Backwards\u003c\/i\u003e, as well as a collaborative book, \u003ci\u003eHotel Andromeda\u003c\/i\u003e, with the artist Jenny Gage. She is a founding editor of \u003ci\u003eThe Believer\u003c\/i\u003e, and her writings have appeared in \u003ci\u003eEsquire, Time, The New York Times, McSweeney's \u003c\/i\u003eamong other places. She lives in Manhattan and Maine.What Might Have Happened\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    NOVEMBER 7, 1985\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e     \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The following might have happened on a late-fall afternoon in the Boston  suburb of West Salem. The afternoon in question was biting enough to suggest  the early possibility of snow. The cloud cover made it seem later than the  actual time of 3:35 p.m.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The girl was one of many girls in field hockey skirts, sweatpants, and ski  shells, huddled together in the green lean-to emblazoned with Semmering  Academy's scripted S. It had rained all morning and all afternoon; though  the rain had temporarily ceased, the playing field remained a patchwork of  brown grass and mud bordered by a rain-swept chalk line. Last month a  Semmering wing had torn an ankle tendon in similarly poor conditions, but  the referee refused to call the game until 4 p.m. because the preparatory  school extracurricular activities rules and regulations handbook stipulated  that \"sporting events shall not be canceled due to weather until one hour  past the official start time.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    At 3:37, the rain recommenced. The girls whined and shivered while Coach  Betsy glowered beneath the brim of her umass crew baseball cap. These girls  were not tough girls and they had little incentive, given their eight-game  losing streak, to endure a rainy November afternoon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    At 3:42, the girl asked Coach Betsy if she could be excused to the field  house. The girl did not say, but she implied that she had her period. Coach  Betsy nodded her reluctant permission. The girl departed from the lean-to,  unnoticed by her teammates.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e     \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ***\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e     \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Rain pattered over the grass as the girl traversed the empty field, her  cleats suctioning in and out of the mud. She did not hurry. The man, she  knew, would wait for her. Every afternoon the man parked across the street  from the cemetery where she and her friends escaped after lunch to smoke  cigarettes. At first they thought he was an undercover cop or a truant  officer, someone hired by their headmaster Miss Pym to keep tabs on their  forbidden roaming during school hours. But the man's car, a 1975 gray  Mercedes, rendered this suspicion unlikely. He'd since been downgraded to  probable pervert and treated by the girls as their mascot, rallying proof of  their irresistibility. The girl made sure to pause each day in his line of  vision to adjust her knee sock, or swing her Semmering-issue skirt around so  that the rear knife pleats snapped back and forth like a school of fish when  she walked. She had noticed that, as the weeks of fall progressed, as the  trees became more and more naked and the humid tropical haze over the  cemetery thinned to an astringent veneer, the man stopped watching in his  non-watching way the anonymous passing of girls and focused on one girl in  particular.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This should have been thrill enough.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The girl entered the new field house. She meandered down the empty halls  with their long fluorescent tube lighting and glassed-in trophy cases, she  pushed through the swinging olive-green door into the olive-green locker  room with the olive-green tiles and the pervasive smell of pink hand soap.  She stood in front of the mirror. She applied some lip balm but otherwise  did nothing to improve her appearance. She was wet, she was bedraggled, and  like all teenagers after a halfhearted day of French, trigonometry, study  hall, drama, field hockey, she was in desperate need of a ride and a greasy  meal, two very innocent things to want, even from a stranger.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She spun her locker combination, she propped her field hockey stick inside  her locker and removed her book bag. Then she changed her mind, replacing  her book bag, removing her stick. On her way toward the front doors of the  field house, she stopped in front of the thirty-foot-long mural dominating  the lobby. Miss Pym and the Semmering trustees, after securing the funds for  the new field house, had announced a mural contest in which \"entries should  illustrate, with reference to our area's rich past, the trials,  tribulations, and triumphs of New England women.\" The winning mural depicted  women being chased by tomahawk-wielding Indians and women tied to stakes,  their skirt hems blotted by flames fanning upward from crudely rendered  piles of logs. The clouds above the heads of the  soon-to-be-scalped-or-burned women transformed, with a little squinting and  very little imagination, into faces that surveyed the scene with expressions  commonly interpreted as enthusiasm. To the handful of actively feminist  teachers at Semmering, these possibly enthusiastic clouds were read as a  perverse endorsement of injustice against women by the school's trustees,  who \"noted\" their complaint as a way to actively ignore it. The mural's  official title--The Disappearing Women--was all but unknown among the  student body, who referred to the thirty-foot wall painting as The  Grin-and-Bear-It Mural; to them it aptly summed up the way they had been  taught to approach the world by parents and teachers: to keep their sadness  to themselves even as they were materially spoiled in this suburban enclave  with its lurid history of torment.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The girl walked past The Grin-and-Bear-It Mural, heart beating at an average  pace, the disappearing women gazing down at her with their irisless eyes.  She exited the field house and walked three blocks north to the cemetery.  She saw the man's gray Mercedes parked near the stone archway, the engine  running, windshield wipers chick-chocking back and forth. The rain had  increased its intensity, the patter giving way to pelting drops that formed  puddles and then rivers as the water slooshed toward the leaf-clogged  drains. The girl took her time. Water dripped from her nose and her chin and  the hem of her skirt, soaking a perfect dark line across the thighs of her  sweatpants. Her cleats made squinching noises as she walked. So little light  seeped through the clouds at 3:59 p.m. that the streetlamps buzzed and  ignited.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She sidled next to the Mercedes. By the car's interior light she could see  the man's head bent over his newspaper. His hair fell longer than the collar  of his scruffy trench coat and this slight unkemptness suggested that he was  not indispensable to any job or anyone. The girl had decided that he was a  banker or possibly a doctor but an undedicated one; she'd decided that he  had enough family money that his profession was simply a decent way to keep  his days occupied. There were plenty of men like this in her town; he was an  identifiable and harmless type.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The girl paused in the ambient light shining through the Mercedes's window,  illuminated, she imagined, like a beguiling specter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The man pretended not to see her. How coy, she thought. It increased her  fondness for him, the fact that he was treating this abduction like a formal  courtship. Using the upturned goose head of her field hockey stick, she  tapped on the glass.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The man stared at her. He reached over his newspaper to roll down the  window.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The girl leaned into the car. She smelled old cigarette smoke and damp  carpets. Close up, the man appeared more tired, more old, more possibly  crazy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She coughed, momentarily unsettled by the fact that this man might not be  who she'd imagined him to be. She clamped her neck with the U formed by her  thumb and forefinger the way her mother did when talking to someone she  disliked at a cocktail party, squeezing her fingers tightly around her own  throat.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The girl asked if he had a dime.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    No response.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    For the pay phone, she explained. Her ride had left without her, and home  was too far a walk in the rain.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He responded with cautious politeness, which she read as bewildered  gratitude to some unspecified higher power that this girl should walk into a  trap he had yet to even set.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I'll drive you home, he said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He unlocked the passenger-side door, sprung the latch.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The girl scurried through his headlights. She paused on the curb as the  opposing team's athletic bus drove by--it was 4:05 by Semmering's steeple  clock and the game had finally been postponed--to ensure that somebody might  witness her getting into the car. Just in case, she dropped her field hockey  stick into the gutter where it would be recovered and remarked upon by  journalists and police, family, friends, teachers. She grasped the door  handle and experienced a fleeting sensation of fear, an electrical charge  that caused her fingers to retract into a self-protective claw. She  imagined, because she was dramatically inclined, that the handle was burning  hot; that her body was on fire; that she was immolating from within and her  cells were being set individually ablaze because she, too, fancied herself  to be a disappearing woman, her eyes a blank white stare.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e     \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e     \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    West Salem\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    NOVEMBER 8, 1999\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e     \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Once again, Mary Veal found herself the aggressively unnoticed guest at a  tense social gathering at the house on Rumney Marsh. Once again, she wore a  hand-me-down wool dress that itched horribly and smelled like a closet; her  father was nowhere to be seen; the punch bowl provided the conversational  focal point. Once again, her sisters were snubbing her. Once again, the hors  d'oeuvres were lame.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Mum's funeral notwithstanding, she reflected, it felt just like old times.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    From behind her plaid wingback redoubt, she watched as her older sister,  Regina, ruddy hair yanked flat by a headband and thinner than her usual  thin, listlessly orbited the downstairs. Her younger sister, Gaby, hunched  on the piano bench, wearing a tight navy pantsuit that made her look like a  down-and-out real estate agent. Gaby picked vacantly at her paper plate of  grapes and salmon mousse Triscuits. She appeared, Mary thought, in need of  an awkward social encounter with an estranged family member.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A wary Gaby clocked Mary's approach with her green-brown Mum eyes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Nice suit,\" Mary offered.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Mum's,\" Gaby said through a mouthful of grape.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"It fits you,\" Mary said. She fingered the empty candy dish atop the piano,  its circumference encircled by a green ribbon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This elicited no response from Gaby.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Except for the pants. And the jacket.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Hmmppphh,\" said Gaby.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"It fits nicely around the wrists,\" Mary said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The two of them wordlessly observed the arriving guests clot into  special-interest groups around the punch bowl: Mum's sister, Helen, and  their handful of local cousins; Mum's historical society co-workers; Mum's  Wellesley College Alumnae Association friends; Mum's former Semmering  Academy PTA colleagues. The wake felt uncomfortably overseen from the mantel  by Mum herself, her ashes stowed in a Laotian dung vase forced upon them by  Aunt Helen and flanked by two florist arrangements of pussy willows and  weedy-looking filler plants.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Regina completed one last enervated rotation and dropped onto the piano  bench beside Gaby. She folded her legs and coiled her left foot around her  right ankle, a holdover gesture from adolescence; she'd claimed once to Mary  that this tourniquet pose helped to stave off weight gain, at least in the  leg area, which seemed about as reasonable as believing in the slimming  powers of the electric massage belt.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Mary remained determined to forge an emotional connection with her sisters.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"How about that sermon?\" Mary said, referring to Reverend Whittemore's  selection from the New Testament--For one believes he can eat all things,  but he who is weak eats only vegetables--offered, she suspected, as biblical  proof that their mother's subsistence diet of white wine and pickles had  been a more decisive element in her demise than the melanoma.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"He reads that sermon at every funeral,\" Regina said. \"Once he called the  dead person, who was a man, 'Beloved Phyllis.' \"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Gaby yawned.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Do you remember in junior choir how Reverend Whittemore smelled like  embalming fluid?\" Regina said. \"The old perv was always hugging me after we  sang 'Praise Him! Praise Him!' saying, 'How the heavens applaud you my  dear!' \"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Blick,\" Gaby said through shards of Triscuit.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"At least Aunt Helen almost made it through her poem without crying,\" Mary  said. She didn't mention Regina's poem, written specifically for Mum's  funeral. The most truthful response she could muster, as she and Regina and  Gaby waited for Dad to bring the car around after the service, had been: \"It  was so brave of you to read that.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Or plugging her herbal grief tea,\" Regina said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"I thought Healthy Acceptance filed for bankruptcy,\" Mary said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Dad bailed her out, which is why we have seventeen cases of grief tea in  the attic,\" Regina said. \"Where have you been? Oh right. You were out West.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"When Aunt Helen cries,\" Mary said, ignoring the dig, \"I wonder how anyone  could ever appear convincingly sad.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Which I guess explains why you didn't even bother to try,\" Regina said.  \"Gaby, where did you get that awful suit?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Mum's closet,\" Gaby said. \"Is grief tea supposed to make you feel grief or  make you not feel it?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Not feel grief,\" Mary said dully. \"I think.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"That's not Mum's suit,\" Regina said. \"Mum hated navy.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Gaby turned her suit coat inside out to reveal a green ribbon tied to the  dry clean only tag. Their father had donated the house's contents to the  historical society for auctioning and an overly apologetic volunteer had  come around the previous day to tag the desirable items with ribbons. To be  safe, the volunteer had overdone the job, or maybe, given she knew the wake  was to be held at 34 Rumney Marsh, she saw herself doubling as decorator for  the occasion. All four legs of the couch were adorned with ribbon, both  andirons, both candlesticks, the lamp bases and the lamp shades and even the  spare box of light bulbs, every individual kitchen item (eggbeater, potato  masher, potato peeler, wine key), the collection of circa 1979-1983  Association of Descendants of the American Witch newsletters stacked beneath  the rattan coffee table.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"So,\" Regina said, \"speaking of not feeling grief, has anyone checked on Dad  recently?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"I'll go,\" Mary offered, relieved to escape the hostile tedium of her  sisters' company; it depressed her too intensely and made her feel abrased  by an all-body loneliness. In the three years since Mary and Regina and Gaby  had been together in the same room, nothing had changed. She tried to  rekindle the heart-wrenching warmth she'd imagined feeling toward her  sisters as she walked down the airplane exit ramp to their teary reunion,  but instead found herself irked by Regina's self-centered prickliness and  Gaby's wrathful apathy. Despite how she'd envisioned this  homecoming--horribly sad, yes, stilted, yes, but glinting with the potential  for everyone to recast themselves as expansively generous and affectionate  people--the remaining Veal family members, herself included, hadn't really  shown themselves capable of improvement.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Mary passed through the living room, her mobile presence registered only by  the way the guests she neared strived to move actively ignore her. She split  the curtains behind the punch table expecting to see her father, Clyde Veal,  still stationed on the front lawn directing parking, but he'd abandoned his  post; since his departure, guests had parked along the north side of the  street, ignoring the fliers he'd taped to the streetlamps in order to avoid  the territorial wrath of the neighbor Mum had christened Ye Olde Bastard.  Eventually she found him, fingers pittering against his key-filled pockets,  waiting in the foyer to receive coats, even though people had long since  stopped arriving.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Dad, she started to say. But the two of them had pointedly arranged never to  be alone without a chaperone since her arrival so, in fairness to him, she  chose to \"check on Dad\" from behind the broken grandfather clock. He opened  the door and peered down the street as if expecting a calvacade of mourners  to turn onto Rumney Marsh and invade the house in desperate need of a  coat-check attendant. Her father hadn't invited any of his work  acquaintances from St. Hugh's today, nor any of his golf cronies from the  public golf range, a nonselective, dress-code-free club overlooking a swamp  that boasted, among its members, a gay couple and an acquitted child abuser.  Her father maintained his connection with the local working-class community  while respecting Mum's unspoken hope that these people never be invited to  their house. So it was in deference to Mum, she assumed, that he'd failed to  invite his friends. Or it was for some more complicated, self-defeating  reason.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Mary knew without ever needing to be told: her father was a self-made lonely  man.","brand":"Anchor","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299910701285,"sku":"NP9781400078110","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400078110.jpg?v=1767742027","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-uses-of-enchantment-isbn-9781400078110","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}