*
Selma put the box back on the mantle. She didn’t understand why she acted this way. She couldn’t seem to help herself. And she had been this way for so long that she didn’t think she could be any other way. Not that she wanted to. Her mother had hated it, had hated what Selma had become, but Selma didn’t care. She wasn’t her mother. That was all that mattered.
Selma tried not to think of her mother, but when she did, she felt pity. She was a fading photo from the past—thin, transparent, disappearing from the window at the kitchen sink, where she would always stand and wait for her husband to come home to her.
She didn’t like to think of her father either, but when she did she felt anger, sometimes longing. But he too was a whispery figure of her past, consisting mainly of the scent of newspaper ink.
The only thing from her childhood she really liked to think of, what she remembered in striking detail, was the endless string of women with which her father had cheated on her mother. She remembered the hems of their dresses, the curl of their hair, the color of their eyeshadow, the marks their jewelry left on their skin. When she was very young, she’d had no idea who they were, these strange women who would show up at their front door, looking for Selma’s father. Selma’s mother would slam the door in their faces, but Selma would sneak out and follow them down the sidewalk, entranced by these painted creatures and the music created by their bracelets. They’d always had bracelets.
When Selma was older but still too young to stay at home alone, her father would take her to bars on nights her mother drugged herself into a stupor with sleeping pills. Hidden in a corner, drinking Virgin Marys, Selma would watch her father interact with these women. It hadn’t been her father who had called the shots, though. These women had all the power. How charmed they’d been. How potent to the people around them.
Ruby, a beautiful woman with dyed black hair and the largest bosom Selma had ever seen, had been the woman who had finally made Selma’s father leave her mother. The others, Selma realized now, had just been playing with him, batting him around like a cat with a stunned mouse. They hadn’t wanted to marry him, because if they had, he would have left long before then. Selma had been thirteen when this happened, and she had loved going to visit her father and Ruby’s apartment in downtown Jackson. Selma had been on the cusp of womanhood, and Ruby had been all that Selma had wanted to be. Ruby, in her better moods, would show Selma how to apply makeup, making her lips so pink she looked like she’d just taken a bite of a cupcake. It had felt that way, too, sticky and thick. It had been during one of these makeup sessions that Selma had asked Ruby about her bracelet.
Ruby had stepped back and held up her hand, making the four heart charms jingle. “Women like me have exactly eight times in our lives to get the man we want. This is how we keep track.” She’d rattled the bracelet again. “I had eight charms. I have four left.”
“What happens to the charms?”
“They disappear the moment we decide on the man we want, the moment we know. The first few men are usually out of spite. We use them to steal the men of women we don’t like. The last four are usually for money. The very last one is the last chance to get exactly what we want. Is it money? Is it revenge? Is it love? Is it a family? It’s the most important charm.”
Selma had listened with rapt attention. “Do you have to use them all?”
Ruby had laughed, a sharp sound like a barking seal. “Darling, why would you waste them?”
Selma had tried desperately to process it all. She’d wanted to know everything but was afraid it was too much, that she didn’t have what it took to understand. Boys had just started to intrigue her, and she had trouble thinking beyond finding one to hold hands with. That was all. Just one. That had been all she’d wanted. “If you fall in love, can you just keep using the charms on the same man?”
“Of course not,” Ruby had said, and her condescending tone had wounded Selma. “Who could love one man that long?”
“So you’re not going to stay with my dad?” Selma had asked.
“No. Be still,” Ruby had said, putting a row of false lashes on Selma’s eye. “Your mother and I used to go to the same school, a long time ago. She used to make fun of me, she and her friends. She used to think she was so much better than me. Now look at her. Her life is pitiful, and I can have any married man I want. I guess I showed her, didn’t I?”
Selma had felt a shudder go through her. Ruby had felt almost dangerous at that moment. Selma had always hated the powerlessness of her mother. And she’d hated how her father always seemed to get his way with no consequences. Ruby was better, stronger, than them all. Ruby would always win. “I want to be just like you,” Selma had whispered, her voice trembling. Even if she hadn’t really understood, even though it had confused her, she’d known.
Ruby had lifted Selma’s chin with her fingers, her face just inches from Selma’s. “Just by saying that, darling, you already are.” She blew into Selma face, her breath warm. Something came over Selma. She was different now. She could feel it. “Eight charms. That’s all you get. It seems like a lot a first, but you’ll soon see you’ll have to pace yourself. You’re going to be the envy of all women. Any married man who feels a sliver of attraction to you can be yours. You’re going to lead a charmed life.”
Ruby had left four months later. Two weeks after that, Selma had received a package in the mail from her—a bracelet with eight charms.
Selma’s father went back to her mother. She made his life miserable. He continued to cheat. But they realized they were stuck with each other. Selma might as well have become invisible, so focused were they on their hatred for each other.
When Selma turned eighteen, she’d used her first charm to marry an army sergeant who had married a classmate of Selma’s the year before. They were home on leave, and Selma had hated this girl, how she gloated that she was free of this place, how she said that all the other girls were rotting here while she saw the world. Selma had shown her. And that first time she’d watched a charm disappear, knowing she was going to get exactly what she’d wanted, had been wondrous.
At first Selma had been giddy with her power and had married foolishly, just as Ruby had said. Her third husband was stolen from a cocktail waitress who had spilled a drink on her. The later ones had been for more practical reasons.
But with all that Ruby had told her, there had been two things Ruby had failed to share. The first was that the effect of the charms was fleeting. She could get any married man who was attracted to her to leave his wife and marry her, but she couldn’t make him stay. Five years was the upper limit, though there was a rumor among their kind that one of them had managed seventeen years on a single charm. Information was hard to come by. While they instinctively knew one another when they crossed paths, women like her didn’t share their secrets easily.
Selma went to the window in her cabin and watched Kate walk away. Kate threw a look back over her shoulder. Selma knew that look very well. Hundreds of women had given her that look over the years. She wasn’t immune to it.
That was the second thing Ruby had failed to tell her. That those looks would always hurt.
And that, by choosing to be the woman she was, she would never again have female friends.