After the divorce my mother started working more, and I was sent to the babysitter’s after school. Mary Ann was a big woman with pasty skin and short, jet black hair. Her partner Grant was a thin, bald mailman who wore glasses and did yoga. I say partner and not husband because it was made very clear that the two were not married. Both of them volunteered at the YMCA, where Mary Ann met my mother and got the babysitting gig. Their daughter Emily was a year older than me. She had the same pale skin as her mother, green eyes and thin straight hair the colour of a red roan. I liked her because she was pretty and because we both liked to make believe we had magic powers or that we were characters in The Wizard of Oz.
The house was built before the war and smelled like it. The floors were creaky and wooden and the basement was dank and unfinished. Down there were several stacks of National Geographic dating back to the 50s that reached heights of four or five feet. Back upstairs was the kitchen, wherein Mary Ann prepared us food that was practically inedible, like mayonnaise sandwiches and chocolate pudding with a thick, gelatinous skin. In the sitting room was a velvet sofa the colour of the inside of a seashell held together with bronze studs. We would draw pictures in the upholstery by dragging our fingernails across the velvet before smoothing it out to erase and start over again.
Our days at Mary Ann’s were designated as either inside days or outside days. On indoor days we spent our time playing inside. Emily had beanie babies and magic wands and a bucket of lego with dragons and a wicked witch. Television was limited to one hour a day, not that there was much to watch on their TV. They didn’t have cable, and only got six channels or so. We could watch The Magic School Bus or Oprah.
Outdoor days were better. The front lawn was overgrown and had unkempt flowerbeds overflowing with silver dollar plants, which in the fall we would collect and pretend we were rich. The backyard must’ve been several acres, most of which was forested. This is where we’d spend most of our time. There were several vegetable patches, our favourite of which had chives that we could snack on. It felt wild and liberating to be able to eat something that was still growing out of the ground. There was an umbrella clothesline that was rusty and always bare; there was a big black compost bin that smelled of decaying vegetables and rotting grass. Further back there was a dilapidated tree house that stood on four crooked legs and was home to a mattress that looked like it belonged at a crime scene.
One day Emily and I were playing in the treehouse, sitting on the mattress and mashing together clover flowers and buttercups into a paste. Mary Ann came trudging through the forest to bring us each an apple. She looked around, disgusted.
“It’s filthy in here. Why don’t you play on the lawn?”
“This is our castle,” Emily said, gesturing to the mashed-up flower petals. “We’re making potions.”
“We’re the wicked witches,” I added. “Of the North and the South.”
“Well, go be wicked witches somewhere else,” she said, eyeing the mattress, and ushering us back to ground level. “This place is off limits.”
As she sauntered back into the house, we sat next to the patch of chives. Emily leaned toward me. “I know a good game.”
We finished our apples and Emily taught me how to play. “It’s called Dead Pheasant. I made it up. You’ll be the pheasant. It’s like a fancy chicken. You go hide behind the big tree in the back. I’m the hunter. I keep my back turned. When I shout ‘bang bang!’ then you have ten seconds to move to a closer tree without making any noise. If I hear you then I shout ‘three two one dead pheasant!’ and turn around, and if I can see you, you lose.”
“How do I win?”
“You have to poke me in the back.”
We played this game every day before and after our designated hour of television, and Emily always won. Over the weekends I would independently strategize and try out new techniques the following week. I discovered that if I removed my shoes and tip-toed barefoot, I could move silently from tree to tree. Eventually I made it within a few feet of her, but once I was caught, she deemed my strategy cheating.
One day Emily and I were walking home from school with one of her classmates, Cody, who lived at the far end of her street. He spat a lot and ripped the leaves off of trees as he passed them.
“Do you wanna come play dead pheasant with us?” Emily asked. She explained the rules.
“What are you, babies? That sounds stupid.”
Offended, I chimed in. “Its fun!”
Cody scoffed. “Loser.”
We were a few houses down from Emily’s when Cody leaned in to us. “Do you know who lives there?”
He gestured to a small red-brick house with an immaculate garden with a spindly Japanese maple, rosebushes and flowerbeds full of carefully placed tulips and daffodils. Despite having walked past it hundreds of times, I hadn’t noticed it before now.
“That’s Gary’s house,” said Emily. “He helps my parents with the garden.”
Cody chuckled. “He’s a fruitcake. Gary the fairy.”
Something inside of me lit up. I was old enough to know that fairies weren’t real, but young enough that I still held onto the possibility. “Cool! Does he know how to cast spells?”
“It’s not a good thing, dumbass. He’s a pansy. My dad says he’s a goddamn fag.”
“What does that mean?” asked Emily.
“I don’t know, he won’t tell me.”
I began to look forward to passing Gary’s house on our walks home from school. Each time we passed it I would examine the property for signs of magic. I was constantly thinking about Gary, despite having never met him. I wondered about his potential magical practices, considering carefully things like which plants in his garden he might use to make potions. The yellow roses and the black tulips, I imagined, must be far more potent than the weeds Emily and I used to make ours. The house itself looked like something out of a storybook. The idiosyncrasies like the scalloped bargeboard and the brass knocker on the front door were further proof that whoever lived here must indeed possess magical powers.
That spring there was a violent storm that wreaked havoc, felling trees and littering the whole town with debris. Mary Ann’s backyard was full of splintered wood and fallen branches, and was therefore deemed too dangerous for us to play in. That week, we were confined indoors while Mary Ann and Grant worked on clearing out the yard. Bored of having to stay inside, Emily and I were watching from the window, eagerly keeping an eye on the progress.
As they were dragging a branch across the lawn, Grant waved across the yard. I craned my neck to see who he was waving at, and a man wielding a chainsaw and hedge clippers stepped into frame.
“That’s Gary,” Emily whispered.
He was a stocky man, red in the face with horn-rimmed glasses and thin hair swept into a combover. He didn’t look magical, though I reasoned that if he was actually a fairy he wouldn’t want to make it too obvious. He handed Grant the chainsaw and the two headed back into the forest to chop up a fallen tree.
Mary Ann came into the house and headed for the kitchen.
“After lunch, Grant and I need to take all these branches to the dump,” she called to us as she filled a saucepan with water. “Gary’s going to look after you two for a few hours.”
As Emily and I sat and ate our boiled spinach soaked with butter—one of the more palatable of the austere dishes Mary Ann was known to cook—I eagerly anticipated the rest of the afternoon.
Gary’s house was the cleanest I had ever seen. Much like his garden, the interior was perfectly curated. An ornate rug with tassels and patterns that swirled around one-another welcomed us in the small foyer. A gilt-framed mirror hung next to a coat rack upon which hung a green tweed jacket and a shiny purple windbreaker. He led us into the kitchen, which was brightly lit by windows with floral valances. The linoleum floors were shiny with alternating yellow squares containing ornate shapes I had never seen before. I surmised these must have something to do with some sort of magical ritual.
“How about some lemonade?” Gary asked us as he produced a glass pitcher filled with pink liquid from the fridge.
“Why is it pink?” I asked.
“It’s called pink lemonade. Try it,” Gary said as he handed me and Emily a glass each.
I took the glass and gulped it down. It tasted the same as any lemonade I’d had before—proof, I thought, that Gary had magically changed its colour.
“Why don’t we play outside?” Gary asked, as he opened the screen door that led to his backyard.
We followed him outside, onto a small patio, beyond which was a small lawn with an assortment of bushes and small trees I had never seen before. The yard was far smaller than Mary Ann’s, though, where hers was forested with maples and poplar’s, Gary’s yard was full of plants with unusual shapes and showy blooms.
“I’ve got some garden work to do, so you kids play and let me know if you need anything,” said Gary as he grabbed a bag of garden tools and knelt next to a flower bed.
“Let’s play Dead Pheasant!” Emily said as she grabbed my arm and had me stand at the edge of the patio, my back toward the yard. I stood staring at the wrought iron patio furniture. The backs of the chairs were designed to resemble twisting vines. I imagined Gary weeding his garden and casting a spell that turned the unwanted plants into furniture.
After a few rounds of Dead Pheasant, as I was hiding in among the foliage of a forsythia bush, I noticed Gary deadheading his flowers. My suspicions about his potion-making were confirmed. I watched as he carefully snipped off the blooms and placed them into a pile. Forgetting we were in the middle of a game, I walked over to Emily, pointed to the pile of flowers and whispered in her ear: “Gary’s making potions.”
After this first visit, Emily and I began to beg Mary Ann to let us visit Gary again. It had occurred to me that if I played my cards right, he might invite me to become a fairy as well, or better yet, turn me into one. I continued to keep a close eye on his home, wondering what sort of things he might be doing inside, and taking it upon myself to study any fairy-like activity that might be going on.
One day Emily and I were walking home from school and she was telling me about how Gary had looked after her for a few hours over the weekend. As she explained how they baked cookies together, I began to feel a storm of jealousy whirling inside myself. It didn’t seem fair. I promised myself that the next time I saw Gary I would make an effort to show him I was ready to be converted into a fairy.
As we passed Gary’s, we noticed that someone had egged his house. There were bits of shell sticking to the pale yellow splatters that painted the windows and the front door.
Emily frowned. “Poor Gary.”
“He’ll be okay,” I said. “I bet you he’ll turn whoever did that into a toad.”
The next time we saw him he had just finished helping Mary Ann and Grant plant a rose of Sharon in their front yard. Emily and I ran out side.
“Gary, can we come over to your house?!” Emily said as she ran up and hugged him.
“Please!” I joined it, tugging on Mary Ann’s shirt.
Mary Ann looked down at us, wiping her brow and leaving a smear of soil on her forehead. “I’m sure Gary’s got better things to do than look after you little monsters.”
“I don’t mind,” Gary said as he tucked soil around the plant and patted it with a trowel. “I’m sure they’d like to see the studio.”
After a half hour of impatiently waiting, Gary walked Emily and I over to his house. He gave us a glass of pink lemonade and took us into the basement. It was nothing like any basement I had seen before—there were actual walls instead of exposed insulation and the stairs were real stairs and not just planks of unfinished plywood. Gary led us into another room. “This is the studio.”
The room was small with a little square rectangle window up in the corner. Underneath it was a strange, hexagonal machine—some sort of state-of-the-art cauldron—next to which was a table with shallow bowl on top and a pedal underneath. There was another small table with paintbrushes and a plastic bin.The walls were lined with shelves upon shelves of assorted ceramics—urns, vases, cups, plant pots. Most of them were an off-white colour, but some had been painted with deep, rich colours and glistened in the light.
Gary sat us down at the table with the paint brushes and grabbed two narrow, cylindrical objects from the shelves.
“Would you two like to help me paint these?”
“Yeah!” we said in unison, as he placed them on the table in front of us.
“Hold on, there’s one more thing,” he said as he looked around on the shelves. “He we go.” He pulled out two small, ceramic discs—one topped with an orb, and the other with a star— and plopped them on top of the cylinders.
“I want this one!” Emily said as she grabbed the star-topped vial. I was secretly happy to be left with the orb—I hadn’t seen anything star shaped in Gary’s home before but I had noticed plenty of spherical objects.
“I like this one,” I said, grabbing the vial. “I can keep my potions in here.”
I looked up at Gary, seeking approval. He winked at me and opened the plastic bin, revealing the paint inside. “Pick any colour you like.”
Emily and I painted the vials as Gary sat at the bowl with the pedal and started morphing a chunk of clay into another, bigger cylinder. I anxiously wondered whether the lid for his container would be topped with an orb or a star, desperately hoping I had made the right decision. In case I’d chosen wrong, I made sure to paint with precision, choosing pink and yellow—colours of which I knew Gary was fond. After an hour or so, Gary came over and complimented our paint jobs.
“If you’re all finished I’ll take these and put them in the kiln,” he said. “The next time you see me they’ll be ready to take home.”
The next time couldn’t come soon enough. The outside of Gary’s house would no longer suffice—I needed to know more about the inside. I had been watching Gary’s house every day for over a month now, and I hadn’t noticed anything new, save for the day I saw his car had a flat tire and several crude, silver marks etched into the side of his door. I imagined that a dragon or an ogre had attacked him, but I was certain that Gary knew the right spells to keep creatures like that at bay.
A week later Emily, Cody and I were walking home. Cody was boasting about how his dad had let him try some beer over the weekend. Uninterested, Emily turned to me and said, “Mom’s going lawn bowling this afternoon. She said we should go straight to Gary’s house.”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said Cody, sneering. “My dad finally told me what fag means.” Emily and I leaned in. “It means he sleeps with other men. That guy’s a fucking pervert. Dad says the neighbourhood would be better without him.”
“Go suck an egg, Cody!” said Emily. “My mom says your dad’s a low-life wino. You’re just jealous because Gary likes us best. I bet he hates little turds like you.”
“He’s gonna turn you into a newt!” I chimed in as we reached Gary’s house.
Cody scoffed. “Whatever. Have fun with Gary the fairy.”
He sauntered off and Emily leaned into me. “Don’t listen to that idiot. He only walks with us because his parents don’t trust him to walk home alone.”
We walked up to the front door and rang the doorbell. Instead of a simple ding it played a little song that sounded like church bells. Gary answered the door and ushered us inside. He took us into the kitchen for the usual glass of pink lemonade. The kitchen table was covered in an assortment of fabrics—pink chiffon, red and gold jacquard, orange velvet. At one of the chairs sat a woman with long, wavy grey hair and cat eye glasses. She wore a lilac jacket and black high heels. I stood in awe, thinking she must be a fairy godmother.
“This is Genevieve,” said Gary. Genevieve gave a little wave.
“How do you do?” I asked, trying my best to be cordial. Gary laughed.
“Very well, thank you,” she replied with a smile.
“Genevieve is helping me pick out fabrics,” Gary said, gesturing to the table.
“I like the orange one!” Emily said as she ran her hands over the velvet.
“I like the pink,” I said firmly, believing it to be the most fairy-like.
“I like that one too,” said Gary with a wink. “Why don’t you two go play in the yard while Genevieve and I finish up.”
Emily and I went outside and played a round of Dead Pheasant before I came back to use the bathroom. Gary’s bathroom was one of the most magical parts of the house—the toilet seat was adorned with magenta carpet and there was a matching rug underneath. On the tank was a small dish with fragrant, dried plants. As I was washing my hands with the melon-scented soap, I heard a crash from another room.
As I exited the bathroom I saw Gary and Genevieve standing in the living room, shards of glass and a stone at their feet. Gary ushered me into the kitchen and told me to go back outside. I opened the door and stood for moment, listening to Gary and Genevieve in the other room.
“Christ, first your car and now this?”
“That prick down the street really has it in for me.”
“Can’t you call the police? Surely they’d do something about it.”
“With what evidence? Plus, I think some of his buddies are cops. You should hear the things they say when I walk by.”
Mary Ann had started to take lawn bowling very seriously, and Gary agreed to watch us on Wednesdays. We were in the living room when Gary asked us if we wanted a snack. The window had been repaired. Emily and I sat next to each other on the sofa which had several cushions embroidered with birds and flowers.
Across from the couch was a television set with shelves and shelves of VHS tapes of movies I had never heard of. There were two wicker chairs with pink cushions and a cabinet filled with glistening glassware and a china tea set.
Gary emerged from the kitchen with a tray full of brightly coloured food I’d never seen before. There was a bowl full of white cubes with black specks and a plate with what looked like pointy slices of cucumber.
“Vegetables?” I said with a frown. He was a normal adult after all, I thought.
“These aren’t vegetables,” Gary said, laughing. “It’s fruit. Try it, you’ll like it.”
I hesitantly reached for one of the cucumber slices. It was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. My faith in his magical abilities was restored. I quickly ate another. “It tastes like candy!”
“That’s called starfruit. It’s from China.” He gestured at the white cubes. “This one’s called dragonfruit. Do you want to watch a movie?”
Emily and I ran over the VHS tapes and started riffling through them. Nearly everything was unfamiliar, but the box with a busty blonde woman and a man in a cowboy hat caught my attention.
“The Best Little Wh- War House in Texas,” I read, confused. What’s a war house?”
Gary let out a deep chuckle. “That’s, uh, a movie for grown ups. Maybe pick another. Have you kids seen The Wizard of Oz?”
“A hundred times!” I replied.
“A thousand times!” said Emily, trying to best me. “Let’s put it on. But skip the black and white parts.” I nodded in agreement.
“Don’t you want to hear Somewhere Over the Rainbow?”
“It’s too slow,” I complained. “I like the munchkin songs better. Glinda’s my favourite.”
“Well, all right,” said Gary. He inserted the tape and hit the fast-forward button.
We watched the movie and ate the rest of the strange fruits. Once they got to the Emerald City, I turned to Gary. “Do you have magic powers?”
“Magic powers?” he said. “What makes you think I might have magic powers?”
“Cody said you were a fairy.”
Gary smiled, “I’m not sure that’s what he meant. But no, I don’t have any powers. I’m just a normal person.”
“Why did he say that then?”
“Well, I think he was just trying to be mean.”
“Cody’s a farthead,” said Emily, to me. “Gary’s the best.”
Despite the fact that I now had confirmation that Gary did not, in fact, possess magical abilities, I continued to fixate on him. It was almost as if the revelation that he was just a normal person made him more intriguing. It occurred to me that the qualities that I had previously imagined were indicative of his being some sort of folklorish creature were things we had in common— penchants for shiny things and the idiosyncratic. Emily and I admired and idolized him, largely because he was so unlike the other adults in our lives. He wasn’t overworked and impatient like my own mother, or irritable and exhausted like Mary Ann. It was as if he held onto something that was apparently lost somewhere in the transition from childhood to adulthood.
There was a drought that June and all of the lawns in the neighbourhood were crispy and smelled like straw. The last day of school was fast approaching and I was beginning to think about how much I would miss Emily over the summer. Emily, Cody and I were walking home as usual when we noticed a commotion down the street. A police car was parked outside of Gary’s house— there was a small crowd gathered across the street.
“Gary the fairy’s going to jail,” said Cody, laughing.
“Get lost, asswipe,” said Emily.
As we approached the scene, we saw that all of the windows in Gary’s house had been smashed. All of the flowers in the garden had been uprooted, the Japanese maple had been axed down. Across the garage door someone had spray painted F AG A ID S. I didn’t know what a fagaids was but I knew it was bad. Gary was on his front porch, talking to a police officer while another surveyed the damage. At first I thought that Gary just looked worried, but then I saw that he was crying. I had never seen an adult cry before, let alone one I liked so much. I immediately started bawling, and Emily had to pull me away and back to her house where we both wept all afternoon.
Over the next few weeks we didn’t hear from or see Gary at all. On the last day of school I passed his house and saw that the spray paint had been reduced to faded smudges, and that all of the windows had been repaired. When my mom picked me up that evening, I gave Emily a hug and said I would see her in September. I took one final look at Gary’s house from the car window. He was standing with a woman in a suit at the end of his yard, hammering a FOR SALE sign into the ground. I waved erratically, hoping he would notice me through the window. He saw, and waved back, though he seemed despondent, restrained, entirely lacking any of the qualities I liked best in him. I began to cry as the car turned off the street.
I never saw Gary again.