Hags
Kim Magowan
My younger daughter, Abby, is sitting at the dining room table with her laptop, working on her research paper on the Salem Witch Trials. I’m 10 feet away from her, my own laptop open on the kitchen counter, trying to make sense of The New York Times recipe my older daughter, Hannah, emailed me a link to. A simple recipe, allegedly, for butter chickpeas (“just as good as butter chicken, you won’t miss the chicken,” the pull-quote promises).
Simple, ha. I had to go to three different stores to find all the ingredients. But I will do what it takes to get Hannah to eat.
Both of us are here, grumpily regarding our different screens, because of Hannah: Abby because Hannah has commandeered the desk of their shared room. Not much of a shared room, even I have to concede. The only space Abby has of her own there, besides her bed, is the patch of wall behind her headboard, where she’s tacked up a few photo booth strips of her and her friends and some Studio Ghibli postcards. Otherwise, Hannah is in charge of interior design. Even Abby’s bedspread color was her second choice, because orange clashed with Hannah’s green duvet.
“It’s not fair,” Abby complains, about being shoved downstairs to the dining room table. I can’t dispute that. It’s not fair.
“In a few months, Hannah will go to college, and you can do what you want with your room,” I remind her. “Be patient. She’ll be gone in a heartbeat.”
Abby sighs. “Jasper has had his own room since he was age 2.”
“Jasper’s a boy.”
“Fucking patriarchy,” Abby says, under her breath. I don’t give her a hard time for swearing—why should I? I’m not Puritan—and because it amuses me, how “patriarchy” has become Abby’s favorite word since we saw the Barbie movie. Plus, she’s right.
“Tell me about your paper,” I say, to change the subject, but it doesn’t change the subject, so much as attack it from a different angle.
Apparently there are many theories about the causes of the Salem Witch Trials. Some are truly bizarre. One scholar claims the Puritans foraged and accidentally consumed hallucinogenic mushrooms that gave them paranoid visions. In that same bad-trip vein, another theory postulates the Puritans drank fermented mead that filled them with a siege-sense of being surrounded and possessed by witches.
“But my argument,” Abby says, “is that it was a combination of misogyny and ageism. Fourteen of the nineteen executed witches were women, and most of them were menopausal or post-menopausal. The Puritans saw all women as second-class citizens, but especially once they were past child-bearing age and physically weaker, couldn’t do all their endless domestic chores as efficiently. Also, Puritans really didn’t like women who talked back and wouldn’t play ball.”
Abby tells me about Ann Hibbens, who was hung as a witch in 1656, decades before the Salem Witch Trials, but a perfect example of the kind of women the trials targeted. “She was an obnoxious blabbermouth,” Abby says. Ann Hibbens made herself unpopular by engaging in “traditional” female sins—gossip, slander, scolding, vanity. After her husband died, she became much more vulnerable, an older woman not under a man’s protection. And though she eventually married again, Hibbens chose badly. When she was tried a year later for being a witch, her second husband William Hibbens publicly condemned her in court. Abby reads me his testimony: he said he humbly accepted the court’s recommendation of execution, and encouraged his wife to do likewise.
I gasp, audibly enough that Abby laughs.
Abby says, “Can you imagine Dad saying that? ‘I accept your recommendation, and encourage my wife to submit to death with good grace’?”
“I’d like to see him try!”
“Older women were screwed. The Puritans regarded them as economic liabilities.” Abby reads out loud another primary source. In 1622, Rebecca Greensmith was hung as a witch in Hartford, Connecticut. Her minister, John Whiting, described Greensmith as a “lewd, ignorant, and considerably aged woman.” Abby says, “So ‘lewd’ and ‘ignorant’ are both part of what makes her witchy. But note, the minister saves ‘considerably aged’ for last, as if it’s her worst and most damnable trait. And listen to this dude!” Abby reads me another primary source. In Discoverie of Witchcraft, Reginald Scot argued that the most defining characteristic of a witch is her age: “The bodies of aged persons are impure … they wax cankered in malice.”
“That makes the Inuits putting their elderly on ice floes and pushing them out to sea seem downright humane,” I say.
Abby ponders this. “I might rather get hung than starve to death. Though freezing to death isn’t supposed to be bad. You just fall asleep, right?”
“Starve to death” reminds me of my chickpea recipe. I start peeling a knobby root of ginger that looks, frankly, like it could go in a witch’s cauldron.
Three years ago, I learned that vegetarianism is an excuse many teens with eating disorders give for changing their diets and restricting calories. Another common sign of anorexia is an intense interest in food—researching recipes, for instance—that is strangely disconnected from actually consuming food. Anorexics will sometimes go to supermarkets or bakeries just to look at and smell and touch food. Three years ago, I would have insisted on chicken, not chickpeas, for dinner. I try to reassure myself that these days, Hannah looks OK—thin, but OK. In a matter of months, this is out of our hands, anyway. Hannah will be a college freshman thousands of miles away, and in charge of her own body, just as now she’s in charge of her shared room.
I rap the countertop three times thinking of this, even though the counter is granite, not wood.
I have rituals. If I happen to see the clock when it’s 11:11, I make a wish. I won’t walk under ladders. Do these irrational superstitions make me witchy? I never grew out of avoiding stepping on cracks. Come to think of it, that consequence was displaced onto someone else—“step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” What if you wanted to break your mother’s back?
“Listen to what happened to Rebecca Greensmith at her trial,” Abby says, and reads me her notes. Layers of Greensmith’s skin mysteriously peeled off her chest, revealing muscles and tendons. Her skin condition was used against her in court, proof that Greensmith was a witch. “But supposedly it’s a skin condition that’s a result of aging, called avulsion,” Abby says. “Have you heard of avulsion, Mom?”
“Good God, no!” I say. I try not to visualize flayed skin, exposed, sticky tendons. That’s an extreme one to add to the list! Avulsion puts into diminished perspective hot flashes, slow metabolism, and the constant, sludgy forgetfulness—what Abby calls “brain farts,” but what my son, Jasper, Abby’s sardonic twin who gets away with all kinds of crap because he’s charming, good-looking, and funny, calls my “senior moments.”
Jasper hasn’t even started his history paper. I don’t think he’s gotten further than a topic, something about the Sikh mutiny in 1857, how it was a product of cultural misunderstanding, the British being racist and insensitive. Being Jasper, he will probably bang out the paper the night before it’s due and get an A, whereas Abby will work for a week and genuinely care about her topic, and get a B. Of my three, Abby is the child most like me: hard-working, indignant, a little average. She’s inherited these qualities like she’s inherited my lank hair. Hannah is a perfectionist and gets straight A’s. Jasper, like his father, is a “natural”: things come easily for Jasper and Gabe.
I was 38 when I had the twins. Though we didn’t have trouble conceiving Hannah, two years later, we had to do in vitro. Gabe and I had a big argument about whether to implant two embryos or one. Given the high risk of miscarriage, I wanted two; given the risk of twins, he wanted one. I prevailed, with the doctor’s backing—“Most couples implant two,” our fertility doctor said, and Gabe submitted to the double prong of professional authority and the logic of majority.
To this day, Gabe will lift his eyebrows at me when Abby complains about not being able to study in her own room, or when Abby experiences any setback—their high school accepted Jasper but waitlisted Abby, who got in only a month later, after many tears. Then, Gabe whispered to me, “You sure she can handle it?” Yes, she can handle it, I told him. Things don’t have to be easy to be worth it.
I know Gabe loves Abby just as much as he loves Hannah and Jasper, but there’s a way in which he regards Abby as my child, my impractical choice.
“Do you remember that old lady at the pajama store you were always scared of? The one with that big, round wart on her lip? You’d hide behind me when we went in?” I ask Abby.
“No!” Abby looks horrified. Being afraid of someone for being old and ugly doesn’t go with 16-year-old Abby’s feminist ethos. She wants to treat old women like Barbie does in the movie, when Barbie smiles at the old lady in the bus stop and says, “You’re beautiful.” The old lady smiles and says, “I know.” When Abby and I saw Barbie together, that was our favorite scene. Supposedly the producers wanted Greta Gerwig to cut it, and she insisted on keeping it in: “If we cut that scene,” Gerwig allegedly said, “I don’t know what this movie is about.”
“You thought the pajama store lady was a witch,” I tell Abby.
“I don’t remember that at all. Ugh. Maybe I’ll dedicate this history paper to her: ‘To the lady at the pajama store, with profound apologies.’”
I smile at Abby. Refusal to give a shit, invisibility, a new capacity to mind-read, a laying bare of the heart that is something like avulsion. There are components of being age 54 that feel adjacent to magic.
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