The Spice Cupboard

by Ruth Latta

"Young lady!" The voice was soft but penetrating. Automatically I put my hand on my jeans pocket, which contained my money and my keys. A year earlier in this very store, my purse had been stolen, and it had been hell to replace I.D. and credit cards. Now I was wary of my fellow-shoppers. Here, at the front of the store, near these shelves laden with dishes, cutlery and trinkets, it was easier to move about safely than in the narrowly spaced rows of clothing.

That day I didn't need any wearing apparel -- didn't need anything, except to get out of the house.

"Young lady!"

Weariness swept over me at the sound. Insomnia, and now this? Joan-of-Arc voices to add to my list of symptoms? Had my psyche finally fractured?

No, it was from outside myself. No one had ever addressed me as "young lady," not even my mother, God rest her soul. My former boss, who was the reason why I was wandering a nearly-new store on a weekday afternoon, had treated me like a doddering crone on the verge of senility, though I was a mere forty-nine to her forty-two years. She'd had a peremptory voice not unlike the one I'd just heard, but wouldn't have called me "young."

I heard it again. "Let me out!" it demanded. Out of what? I looked around. The change rooms were far off to my right, the washrooms yards away to my left. There were no footlockers, no suitcases on display. Had I crossed a line? In Shirley Valentine, the husband said to the wife: "You've looped the freaking loop." There was nothing big enough to conceal a person, not even a child. That china sugar bowl with a lid could have held the Dormouse from Alice in Wonderland.  The Avon bud vase with a stopper could have concealed a genie, I suppose, but the latter had transparent sides, and contained nothing. There were no teapots, no bread boxes. Wait. What was this? A spice
cupboard, like a piece of doll's furniture, painted blue, with pink flowers around the tiny doors, and below, a shelf of the proper height for a bottle of sage or cinnamon.

"Psst!" The whisper was compelling. I reached out and opened a tiny door. Empty. I tried the other. It wouldn't budge. "Help! I'm imprisoned. Get me out of here."

No "please." My troubled soul had generated a demanding voice. Was it a classic symptom of schizophrenia? I didn't know. I was no psychiatrist, only a lab technician who'd had ambitions for a career in science until Jerusha Burnside had shriveled them.

"Who are you?" I whispered, thinking back to my Sunday School days and the Bible heroes who had heard messages from Beyond.

"I'm Mrs. Daisy Vetch," the voice replied, "and my daughter-in-law is a witch."

Pretending to examine some gas-station china, I inched closer to the spice cupboard. "Did she cast a spell on you?"

"That's right. I knew from the moment my Fred married her that he had made a big mistake." Peevishly, Mrs. Vetch began her story. She had been visiting at her son's home, as she did four days a week, because her daughter-in-law Joanie was overwhelmed by the twins, and had
completely abandoned any pretence of housekeeping. Their sweet little bungalow was a dust-heap littered with diapers. Sometimes, when the children got whiny, their shrill voices cut through her head like a knife, but even so, she always made it a point to go and visit according to schedule, because her son Fred had grown up in a nice home and she owed it to him to give his wife a few pointers.

I was hypnotized. Other people's domestic situations intrigued me, especially since I'd lost my job. My husband had been wonderful and consoling when I came home sobbing one day and announced that I could no longer tolerate Jerusha, the boss from hell. Jerusha was notorious in the Institute, though I hadn't known that before coming to work for her, and hadn't had a choice of group leaders anyway. When a project got underway, she would then change the rules. Frequently she took data from her underlings and presented it as her own. In
front of other members of the group she berated me for my alleged stupidity. Was it for this that I had slaved over a lab bench to get my Ph.D. in Chemistry? My family doctor said no; that I should take time off. My husband urged me to quit outright. Disability insurance seemed a better option, however, because we were still paying support to the children of my husband's first marriage.

It sounded as if Mrs. Daisy Vetch's domestic situation was more fraught than mine. I listened.

On the fateful day, she had offered to show Joanie how to make a spaghetti sauce. "Would you believe," she whispered, through the crack in the spice box," That she had been using sauce from cans?"

I could; that was what I used.

"Instead of paying attention," Mrs. Vetch continued, "Joanie was unloading the dishwasher. She started to ask me for measurements -- how many teaspoons of this, how many tablespoons of that, and of course I couldn't tell her, because like all good cooks I trust my instincts and go by taste."

Joanie then accused her mother-in-law of not wanting her to be able to recreate this culinary specialty. The twins, feeling the tension, started to scream. Suddenly, Joanie raised her hands, pointed her index fingers at them and said, "Shush!" To Mrs.Vetch's surprise, they quit rocking their
playpen and sat down quietly and reached for their toys.

Mrs.Vetch's knees turned to jelly. She blanched and faced her daughter-in-law with an accusing stare. "You are a witch," she gasped.

Mrs. Vetch already knew that her daughter-in-law dabbled in the occult; she had crystals hanging from the ceiling, and had bought books on the mystic nature of trees, on Reiki, and on other New Age subjects. 

The younger woman laughed in her face and said that if she were a witch, she would know the quantities of ingredients for the spaghetti sauce without having to ask.

"If I were a witch," she said, "I would have rid myself of you long ago, you meddlesome old biddy." Then, according to Mrs.Vetch, a wicked smile came over her face and she said, "Of course, I've never tried."

Smiling, she held out her arm and pointed her finger at Mrs. Vetch, and the old woman felt her blood coursing through her body. Next thing she knew, she had shrunk to the size of a Fisher Price doll. Then Joanie's large hand, with its talon-like fingernails and mysterious silver rings, reached down, picked her up, and placed her in the spice cupboard.
"And here I've been ever since," the voice moaned.

Apparently Joanie had gotten rid of the cupboard a few days later, when her husband complained of rattling noises around the house and began to worry about squirrels in the attic. Mrs. Vetch had been trundled away by a charitable organization which collected used clothing and household items and sold them to Bargain Village.

"I want out," she declared. "Get a knife and pry open the door."

Stunned, I looked around. Sure enough, there was a pile of old silverware, including a table knife. Inserting the tip under the edge, I heard her squeak: "Be careful of my hair," but the door refused to budge. Evidently Joanie had jammed it on purpose, or had put a spell on it, too.

"What are you doing?" This second voice was at my elbow. A young woman in a red tunic over a white pullover peered at me.

"Just trying to get this little door open." What a foolish admission, for what would I do when a tiny live woman tumbled out? "I'm giving up on it," I added. "I don't want to buy it."

The clerk shook her head, and went back to her cash register.

"I'm sorry, I can't budge it," I told Mrs.Vetch.

"You'll have to get a little saw and cut the spice cupboard in half," she told me.

My husband wasn't the handyman type. Where would I get a saw?

As if reading my mind, she said, "At a hardware store." Her tone implied that I was stupid for wondering. She was Jerusha Burnside all over again.

"But what will I do with you once I set you free?" I asked. Certainly I couldn't take her home with me and rely on her to keep silent in a drawer, and she couldn't stay here either, where she might well fall prey to prankish children, big spiders, and mice.

Brusquely she informed me that when I'd set her free I would have to take her to her son and daughter-in-law's home, where she would confront Joanie. Fred would finally see his wife's true nature, and after the younger woman had restored Mrs.Vetch to full size, he would kick his witch-wife out of the house.

"There's a hardware store across the street," I told her. "I'll be back."

"Wait! "Don't leave me here. Buy the spice cupboard. Take me with you."

I looked at the price tag. Fifteen dollars was not unreasonable, but I had only ten in my pocket, to prevent myself from over-spending. I explained in a whisper, while keeping an eye on two shoppers moving within earshot. "See you later," I murmured, and left.

The hardware store had an astonishing variety of little saws for every conceivable hobby purpose. I identified one that I thought I could use without severing a finger, and had the clerk put it away for me. When I arrived home it was 4:30 and my husband was back from his school day, with a pile of student essays on the coffee table alongside his Coors can. He seized the remote, snapped off the rerun of Drew Carey, told me that I looked peaked, and that we should order in.
Gratefully I accepted.

That night I couldn't sleep. Finally, at 6:00 a.m., when the birds were twittering, I came to a decision. Before buying any little saw, I would pay a visit to Mrs.Vetch's daughter-in-law -- if she existed outside my fevered brain. Joanie didn't sound like the name of a witch; Endorra, Esmerelda, or something along those lines were what I would have expected. This foray into suburbia and the scene of the alleged crime was to be my test -- of Mrs.Vetch's veracity and of my sanity.

My little plastic daffodil from the Cancer Society was on the dressing table; I could easily pretend to be canvassing. If Joanie seemed reasonable, I would liberate Mrs. Vetch and present her to the younger woman. Presumably Joanie had spread the story that her mother-in-law had gone on a long vacation. Perhaps the two could make a deal; a restoration to normal size for Thumbelina Vetch, in return for a solemn vow of future non-interference.

Then again, Joanie might hand her miniature mother-in-law over to the children or the cat for mauling, or squash her under her heel, or put her in the garbage grinder. Before I freed Daisy, I had to see what the younger woman was like as a human being -- if she was a human being.

After seeing my husband off to school, I dressed as if for work, and found Fred Vetch's address in the telephone directory. At 9:15 I was halfway out the door when the telephone rang. I could guess who it was. Representatives of the insurance company that paid my disability pension liked to make spot checks, to root out malingerers. Naturally the firm did not want to pay three quarters of my salary on into the
future, but hoped to find grounds to cut me off.

Could I be in the office at 11:00 to meet with my new counselor?

On the bus, heading downtown, I fretted about my attire. Would my neat, working-world clothes make me seem rehabilitated. Should I have worn stained jeans and a sweater? The counselors kept changing from visit to visit; either there was a high attrition rate, or the shuffling was intentional to keep the clients on edge?

When the receptionist told me the name of my new counselor, my hands began to sweat and my knees to tremble. Certainly I seemed too agitated to hold down a job. Why? Because I was to meet with a Joan Vetch.

The tall woman's face was framed with dark curly hair, like Cher in The Witches of Eastwick. Her smiled was friendly, and not at all mysterious. Her navy suit and white blouse were unexceptional, but she wore an amethyst necklace -- said to have magical powers. Her dangling pewter earrings fascinated me -- one was of a smiling sun, the other, a crescent
moon.

From a silver frame on her desk beamed a man with two children, one on either side of him. They were blond, identical, and somewhere between one and two years of age.

So this was the evil Joanie? I was too overwhelmed to do more than nod when she said my name, and shook my hand. Her clasp was warm and dry, and as I sank into the chair that she indicated, I relaxed. She too sat down, not behind the desk, but in the chair opposite mine, where she leafed through my file and looked at me with a kindly expression.

"I see that you worked for Jerusha Burnside." She nibbled her lip and nodded thoughtfully. "Quite a few people on disability pension once worked for her at the Institute." Joan leaned toward me in a woman-to-woman manner. "This is off the record, but Jerusha is well known as a toxic personality. Someday you'll recover from the experience of working for her, and get your career together again, but you must take your time to recover your equilibrium." Her large hand with long red nails and gleaming rings reached out and patted mine. "If we manage to escape the negative forces in our lives, we eventually heal, but it takes a while, as I know from personal experience."

She confided that a year ago she was bogged down in domesticity, in a climate of negativity and was beginning to lose hope. Summoning up all her energy, she had taken action on her own behalf and had gotten away from the forces that pulled her down. "Relax. You'll get there," she said. "Your pension is assured for the next fifteen months, and you needn't come for any more interviews until that time is up."

I floated out of her office. In fifteen months, the last of my husband's kids would have graduated and would be self-supporting. A balloon of hope began to inflate inside me. I almost regretted not having frequent interviews with Joan. In our brief time together, some of her strength seemed to have brushed off on me.

At the mall at the center of the downtown core, I bought myself an amethyst paperweight. At the book store I purchased several New Age works. At home, engrossed in them, I surfaced in time to cook a nutritious, tasty meal for my husband. That evening I looked through the night school offerings from the board of education calendar. On the weekend, my husband decided to go to Bargain Village to scout out some used flowerpots. On entering, I spied the blue spice cupboard, and when he was browsing, I approached it, trembling.

Both little doors hung open. So did my mouth.

Someone must have pried open the stuck door, and if anyone had been captive, she was gone.

Copyright © 2001-2007 J. Kristin Dreyer
All Rights Reserved

Author bio:
Ruth Latta is the author of more than 200 published short stories, which have appeared in publications such as North American literary magazines (Fiddlehead, The Storyteller, and White Wall Review) and the British Quality Fiction for Women. She is the author of two books: Life Writing: Autobiographers and Their Craft and her collection of short stories, A Wild Streak. Her book review column appears in the Ottawa monthly, Forever Young.