Arcadia Falls Read Free Page B

private school or send her to the public school in the town of Arcadia Falls. “I think you’ll really like the art classes here.”
    “I liked the art classes at my old school. And three, it was founded by hippie lesbian witches.”
    “Witches?” I repeat only the last part because I’ve heard the accusation of
hippie
and
lesbian
already.
    “I looked it up online. Do you know that there’s a legend that the town of Arcadia Falls was founded by a group of witches who were thrown out of the Dutch settlement in Kingston?”
    I should be glad, I suppose, that Sally’s taking an interest in American history and that she’s bothered to try to find out anything about our new home, but I would prefer she’d chosen some other feature of the local landscape, like the history of bluestone quarrying or the short stories of Washington Irving. “That sounds like a pretty outlandish story, but even if there was some truth to it, that’s the town, not the school. The school was founded by artists—”
    “Who were drawn here by the whole witchcraft thing. I’ve been looking at the Facebook profiles of the students here. They’re all into Wicca and voodoo. They even teach it here.”
    “That’s the folklore class, Sally, which is why this is such a great place for me to teach. Not many high schools have classes in my field.”
    “Maybe that’s because it’s a field for
losers
, no offense. And four, it’s almost all girls here.”
    “The school went co-ed in the seventies,” I say, ignoring the hurt of my own daughter labeling the discipline I’ve devoted myself to for the last eight years as a field for losers. When did she start dividing the world up into winners and losers, anyway? And when did I land on the losing side of her score book? I can’t help but remember, though, that when I chose my specialization—fairy tales in nineteenth-and twentieth-century women’s fiction—eight-year-old Sally thought it was
cool
that I was going to get to use the stories I read to her at bedtime for
schoolwork
. So did I. “It’s sixty-forty now. Not that I think you should be worrying about boys anyway.”
    “Why don’t you just lock me up in a convent?” Sally screams, her voice reaching into registers that are as painful to my ears as they must be to her vocal cords. The enclosed space of the car (
A two-seater, Jude, what were you thinking?
) can’t hold her anymore. She opens the passenger side door (which has made a wrenching noise since a Hummer grazed it in the Food Emporium parking lot three months ago) and steps out while issuing her last invective.
    “Just because you can’t have sex anymore doesn’t mean no one else should be allowed to.”
    Leaving the door open, she stomps up the weed-choked path and sits down on the cracked front step. I get out of the car to let her in. Sally’s fury has released us from the spell of inertia and that, I suppose as I approach the threshold of our new home, is probably the only kind of magic we’re going to get for a while.
    Inside I find Sally poking around in the packing crates I had shipped up ahead of us.
    “Pew! It smells like shop class in here!” Sally complains.
    “Pine wood,” I say, opening all the windows to let out the stale, musty air. They’re the old-fashioned double-sash kind, like the ones in the first apartment Jude and I shared on Avenue B in the East Village. Jude had called them guillotine windows. These make a sound like a Frenchwoman having her head chopped off when I pry them open.
    “Do we have to live with this gloomy furniture? I told you we should have kept our old stuff.”
    I could point out that our massive leather sofa wouldn’t have fit into this tiny living room, but that would be calling attention to how very small the house is. The parlor is about the size of the laundry room in our old house.
    “This is Arts and Crafts style,” I say instead, patting a Morris chair upholstered in a design that appears to be lettuce leaves