Twenty Minutes of Wanda
One: The Letter
The letter came on a Thursday, on real paper, from the Bureau of Godmothers, Region 4.
Dear Ms. Malone: Congratulations. After nine years, four months, and eleven days on the National Registry, you have been assigned a Godmother (Class C, Part-Time). Your appointment window is Tuesdays, 4:00 to 4:20 p.m. Please have your wishes organized.
My mother signed me up before I was born, the way you do for the good preschools. She read the letter over my shoulder and said, “Tuesday is your fairy appointment, then,” in the voice she uses for the orthodontist. “Offer her the store cookies. The good ones are for book club.”
I had been organized since I was six. My wish list was laminated, ranked, and tabbed. Twenty minutes a week is 1,040 minutes a year. I did that math a long time ago, and I redid it Thursday night, and it calmed me down, but not a thousand minutes' worth.
Wanda arrived at 4:00 exactly. No wings. No gown. She looked like the kind of lady who runs a school cafeteria and has opinions about it, and her wand had a strip of electrical tape around the middle and a little tag on the handle, the kind they put on ladders at hardware stores. She sat down at our kitchen table, took out an egg timer, and turned it to twenty.
“All right,” she said. “What have we got.”
I presented the list. She read it with her glasses down her nose, like a pharmacist.
Number one was a horse. “A horse is four Tuesdays, dear, and your yard is two Tuesdays wide.” I moved the horse to long-term goals.
Number two was a redo of April 14th. She read that one twice. “Time is Class A. And even the Class A’s only ever rented it.” We do not discuss April 14th.
Number four was my college fund. “That’s the lottery with homework, dear. No.”
Number nine was snow days. “Weather,” she said, the way you say the name of someone who owes you money. “The farmers ruined weather for everyone.”
I asked, professionally, what she could do. She turned my pencil into a sparrow and back. The sparrow seemed unsurprised. “That was a minute,” she said. “Budget accordingly.”
I looked at my list. The timer ticked like it was being paid to.
Here is the thing about the list. I worked on it for three years, and it is a good list, and every single item on it was a decoy. I knew that even while I was laminating. There is one wish that has never been on any list, because some things you don’t put in writing until you know the person.
At minute nineteen I put it in writing anyway, out loud.
“There’s a club,” I said. “At recess. The Arctic Fox Club. Delia is president. I want in, and I want them to want me in.”
“Statute one,” Wanda said, not unkindly. “No love.”
“It isn’t love. It’s a club.”
“Like is love with training wheels, dear. I can’t touch the wanting. What are the requirements?”
She said requirements the way she’d said weather.
“A charm bracelet,” I said. “Members wear charm bracelets. I looked it up. Arctic foxes are white in winter, so it should be a white one. I have a field guide.”
Wanda looked at me for a longer time than the timer really allowed. Then she took a paper clip out of her bag and asked me one question.
“Would you like it silver now, or silver later?”
“White,” I said, patiently, because adults don’t always listen. “Arctic foxes are white.”
“White it is.”
She bent the paper clip twice, said something to it in a language I didn’t know, and set a bracelet on the table: white as January, with one small fox charm no bigger than a tooth. It was, and I am being professional here, perfect.
The timer rang. Wanda stood, buttoned her cardigan, and wrote something on a little pad.
“Same time next week,” she said.
“What’s the paper?”
“The receipt, dear. I keep those.”
Two: Silver
Wanda arrived at 4:00 exactly and set the timer, and I delivered my report, because that is how professionals begin.
“I wore the bracelet Tuesday through Friday. It was extremely admired. Membership remains pending.”
“Mm,” Wanda said.
“There is one small update.”
Wanda folded her hands.
“The club has rebranded,” I said. “It’s the Silver Fox Club now. There was a vote. Nobody remembers voting, but Delia says quorum was met. Her mother is in marketing.”
“And the bracelet?”
“The bracelet is white.” I laid it on the table between us, the little fox charm looking up like it knew. “Silver foxes are silver. So the requirement is silver now. Which is fair,” I added, “because you can’t argue with nature.”
Wanda looked at me for a moment. She has a way of saying nothing that takes up the whole kitchen.
“It is fair,” I said again, a little slower, in case one of us didn’t believe me.
Wanda picked up the bracelet. She turned it over once, the way you check a price tag, then tapped it with one finger and said a word I felt in my back teeth. The bracelet went silver. Not painted silver. Silver like a January morning decided to be jewelry. The whole thing took four seconds.
She consulted her little pad, found a line, and made a check mark.
“You ordered this last Tuesday, dear,” she said. “You just didn’t know it yet.”
“That’s why you asked. Silver now or silver later.”
“Prepaid,” she said, and put the pad away.
I asked her how she knew, and she said, “Receipts, dear,” which is not an answer, and looked at the timer, which is also not an answer, but I let it go, because we had sixteen minutes left and I am not in the business of wasting inventory.
I proposed we get ahead of things. If the requirements were going to keep arriving, we could manufacture in advance. I had a list of candidates: silver shoelaces, a silver hair ribbon, silver stickers for my binder in case binders came up. Wanda listened to the whole list, which took a minute we both counted.
“You can’t stock a moving target, dear.”
“We could forecast.”
“I don’t do futures. That’s genies.” She said genies the way she’d said weather last week. “Never sign with a genie. Clause three. Always clause three.”
I asked if unused minutes rolled over to next Tuesday. They do not roll over. It’s use them or lose them, like Mom’s phone plan, which is the first thing about magic that has ever made complete sense to me.
So we had fourteen minutes, no forecastable requirements, and a strict no-rollover policy, and I will be honest, I panicked about the waste. I offered Wanda a store cookie to buy time. She ate one and looked at it in a way I have decided not to report to my mother.
“There must be something,” I said. “Fourteen minutes is fourteen minutes.”
“It is,” Wanda agreed. “What would you like?”
And I couldn’t think of a single silver thing, so I said, “Can the sparrow come back? I liked the sparrow.”
Wanda looked at me a moment longer than the question needed. Then she turned my pencil into the sparrow, and this time she let it stay out for a while. It hopped down the table and inspected the sugar bowl and stood on the butter dish like a small commissioner of butter, and we watched it be a sparrow together, which cost twelve minutes, and neither of us said one word about the budget.
The timer rang. The sparrow became a pencil. Wanda buttoned her cardigan.
“Same time next week,” she said. “Wear the silver one Monday.”
“Membership is basically imminent,” I told her.
“Mm,” Wanda said.
After she left I sharpened the pencil, which felt disrespectful, but it was homework season. It still had one feather. I kept it.
Three: The Skates
Wanda arrived at 4:00 exactly. I had my report ready before the timer was set, which is called initiative.
“The silver bracelet was admired,” I said. “Delia asked where I got it. I told her we use a family jeweler.”
“Mm,” Wanda said.
“There are two small updates.”
Wanda folded her hands. She has started doing that at the words small updates, I have noticed.
“Update one. Delia’s birthday was Saturday. She got roller skates. On Sunday the club found its new direction. It’s the Silver Fox Skating Club now.” I let that settle, professionally. “Clubs evolve. Mom’s magazine says organizations evolve or die.”
“And update two?”
“I have been appointed to coats.”
Wanda looked at me.
“When the club skates,” I explained, “somebody trustworthy has to hold the coats. It’s like a cabinet position. Delia says I have trustworthy energy.”
“Where do they skate?”
“The blacktop.”
“And where are the coats?”
“The bench.” I straightened my folder. “You can see almost all of the blacktop from the bench.”
Wanda was quiet for exactly as long as it takes to not say something. Then she took her pad out of the bag. “Skates, then.”
“Skates,” I agreed. “Membership remains pending, but pending with a position is basically a foot in the door, and the foot will now have a skate on it.”
She had me bring my old sneakers and set them on the table next to two soup cans from the pantry, which she studied like a butcher. The spell took eleven minutes. “Wheels are fussy,” she said, and I wrote that down, because it sounded like the kind of thing that would be true about a lot of things. When she finished, there were skates on the table: white with silver laces, which covered the club’s entire branding history in one object. They fit perfectly.
“They’ll fit through two growth spurts,” Wanda said. “After that, we renegotiate.”
She noticed the band-aid on my elbow while I was lacing them, because Wanda notices the way other people breathe.
“I’ve been practicing in the garage,” I said. “In the evenings. For privacy. Professional athletes control their training environment.”
“And the elbow?”
“Occupational.”
Wanda started to say something. I watched her line it up, the whole sentence, right there behind her teeth. Then she looked at the timer, and put the sentence away, wherever she keeps them.
“Left foot first, dear,” is what she said instead. “Push, don’t step.”
We had four minutes left. She didn’t even ask. She turned the pencil into the sparrow, and the sparrow hopped once around the table, inspected the left skate, and stood on the toe of it like a very small commissioner reviewing a very large public works project. We watched it until the timer rang. That’s the usual now. Some clubs meet on Tuesdays.
Wanda buttoned her cardigan and made a note on the pad, and I walked her out with the skates already on, holding the door frame, then the mailbox.
“Same time next week,” she said.
“They’re doing a skating session Friday,” I told her. “At Delia’s. The driveway is brand new concrete. I wasn’t invited yet, but with the skates it’s basically settled.”
“Mm,” Wanda said.
She stood on the walk while I went down the sidewalk, push, not step. It’s a long block. I didn’t fall once the whole way to the corner, and I know that for a fact, because I looked back to check if she was watching every three feet, and she was, every time.
Four: The Original Silver Foxes
Wanda arrived at 4:00 exactly and set the timer, and I delivered my report, because the format is the format even on bad weeks.
“There are three small updates.”
Wanda folded her hands and did not say Mm.
“Update one. The driveway session on Friday was moved. Or I had the date wrong. One of those.” I kept my folder squared to the edge of the table. “Update two. On Monday I wore the skates to recess. Also the bracelet. I was, and I checked this against the bylaws twice, fully compliant.”
“And update three.”
“The club has rebranded.” I read it off my page, although I did not need the page. “It is now the Original Silver Foxes. Delia says clubs have to protect their heritage. Membership is limited to original members, for legacy reasons. So the requirement now is to have been a member since last year.”
The timer ticked.
“I asked about grandfather clauses,” I said. “I looked them up first so I could use the right term. Delia said the grandfather clause is only available to original members.”
“Mm,” Wanda said, very quietly, like a door closing somewhere in a large building.
“I have updated my files. Membership is not pending anymore. Membership is closed.” I squared the folder again. It was already square. “I would like to purchase last year, please.”
“Time is Class A, dear. And even the Class A’s...”
“Only ever rented it. I know. I knew before I asked.” I had known since the first Tuesday, when it was April 14th we were discussing. Some questions you ask anyway. I don’t know why. There should be a statute about it.
I did the other math while Wanda watched me do it. Four Tuesdays is eighty minutes. A sparrow is about a minute. I have spent eighty sparrows on a bracelet, a recoloring, and a pair of skates, and the club I bought them for is now sealed for heritage reasons, like a pharaoh. I did the math three times. The number stayed.
“The skates fit perfectly,” I said, because facts are facts. “I wore them home anyway. They’re good skates. That was never the problem.”
I heard the sentence after I said it, the way you see a step after your foot is already past it. Wanda heard it too. She didn’t pounce on it. She’s a professional.
“What would you like this week?” she asked.
And for the first time in my entire life, including birthdays, I could not think of one single thing to want. There is no object for this. You cannot laminate your way out of last year. I sat there with twenty minutes of magic on the table and nothing to buy with it, and I did not cry, because this was a business meeting.
Wanda didn’t ask again. She turned the pencil into the sparrow and set the timer where we could both see it, and we spent everything that was left, every minute of it, watching a sparrow walk around a kitchen table like it owned it, which, by then, I suppose it did.
Somewhere in the middle, without looking at me, Wanda said, “You did everything they said, dear. That is not the same as everything right.” Then she went back to watching the sparrow, and so did I, because I was not ready for that sentence yet, and she knew it, and the sparrow was right there being excellent.
The timer rang. Pencil. Cardigan. Pad.
At the door she paused, one hand on the frame.
“Next Tuesday,” she said, “remind me to tell you about my guild.”
“Is it a club?”
“It thought so,” Wanda said, and went down the walk.
Five: The Guild
Before she came I got out the good cookies. The ones for book club. This was a book club situation. I would explain it to Mom later, or never.
Wanda arrived at 4:00 exactly, looked at the plate, and looked at me. I looked back with trustworthy energy. She sat, set the timer, and took a cookie, and I opened my notebook, because when somebody schedules a story a week in advance, you bring a notebook.
“You asked me to remind you about your guild,” I said.
“So I did.” She turned the timer so we could both see it. “The Ancient and Honorable Guild of First-Class Godmothers. I made Class A at twenty-six. Youngest in Region 4. That’s not bragging. It’s in a ledger somewhere.”
I wrote down ledger.
“Class A was the storybook work. Coaches. Gowns. Midnight logistics. I did three balls a season. I did Cinderella’s cousin. Not the famous one. The one who married a reasonable man and was happy.” She took a second cookie. “Balls, mostly. Once, a garden.”
She said a garden the way I say April 14th, so I let it go by.
“And the guild had dues, and I paid them for eleven years, and then the Bureau reorganized, and the guild got protective.” She said protective the way she says weather. “Every year after that, there was a new requirement to stay Class A. New hour minimums. A new wand standard. New forms. There was one form, the 118-B, that had to be filed in triplicate. They only ever printed it in duplicate.”
I stopped writing.
“Every year the recertification exam was new. Not harder.” She held up one finger, because this was the important part. “Harder I could have done. New. You’d train all year for the bar, and the bar would be somewhere else, wearing a different hat. And then came the year they required letters of recommendation from three sitting members. I looked up the sitting members. There were four. Three of them were the ones who wrote the rule.”
My stomach did something. “That’s the grandfather clause,” I said.
“Mm,” Wanda said.
“So you failed out.” I said it carefully, like touching a bruise to see.
“I didn’t fail the Class A exam, dear. I stopped taking it.” She brushed a crumb off the table into her hand, tidy as a period at the end of a sentence. “I kept the wand. I kept the work. The work was never the problem.”
I recognized the shape of that sentence. I invented it last Tuesday, about skates.
“Your wand,” I said. “The tape.”
“There’s a seal under there. First Class. I’m not supposed to display it anymore.” She turned the wand over once in her fingers. “Seemed silly to sand it off.”
The timer said three minutes. She had told the whole thing in seventeen. She’s good with budgets.
I took out my club folder. The tab has been crossed out three times. Arctic Fox Club. Silver Fox Club. Silver Fox Skating Club. The Original Silver Foxes, sealed for heritage reasons. I looked at it the way Wanda looked at her wand, and then I closed it and put it at the bottom of the drawer where we keep the manuals for appliances we don’t own anymore.
“I’ve decided not to reapply,” I said.
Wanda said, “Mm.” There are several kinds of Mm. I’m learning the language. This one had a period at the end.
We gave the last two minutes to the sparrow. It got a crumb of the good cookies. Everyone did.
At the door I asked her the question I’d been saving all session, because some questions need the doorway.
“Do you miss it?”
Wanda buttoned her cardigan. Some paragraphs are silent.
“I won’t have an order next week,” I told her. “I’m out of requirements.”
“Mm,” she said, the good kind, and wrote something on her pad. A long note, for her.
“What’s that?”
“Inventory, dear.”
Six: The Nothing Order
Wanda arrived at 4:00 exactly and set the timer, and I delivered my report, which took eleven seconds, a personal best.
“There is one small update. Delia’s club is the Platinum Foxes now. I heard about it the way you hear weather from another county.” I closed my notebook. “That’s the whole report.”
“And your order?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I checked twice.”
Here is the thing about nothing. Two weeks ago I had nothing to order because everything was closed. This week I had nothing to order because nothing was missing. It’s the same word. It’s a different Mm.
“Mm,” Wanda agreed, the good kind.
So we gave the whole session to the usual. I was prepared. I had bought birdseed with my own money, which is a strange purchase for a girl whose bird is a pencil, and the cashier and I both knew it. The sparrow came out at 4:03 and stayed out. It ate some of the seed, or moved it around convincingly. Where the seed goes is not my department.
“Attendance at the Tuesday club remains steady at two,” I said, watching it. “Three if you count the sparrow.”
“We count the sparrow,” Wanda said.
The timer rang at 4:20. The sparrow became a pencil. Wanda stood and buttoned her cardigan, and I got ready to walk her out.
But she did not go to the door. She went to her bag.
I have seen Wanda’s bag every Tuesday for six weeks. It is brown and sensible and it has never once surprised me, which I would have told you was the whole point of Wanda, back when I knew less. She reached in with both arms and took out a coil of rope.
Not clothesline. Rope rope. The color of good weather, with two worn wooden handles, and it hummed a little, in that language I felt in my back teeth.
“This is Class A rope, dear,” Wanda said. “I’ve been saving it.”
“For what?”
“This.”
She paid it out across the kitchen floor, and said one word to it, and the rope shivered once, all down its length, like a dog shaking off a lake.
“It’s a jump rope,” she said. “Double-dutch length. It needs two to turn it before anybody jumps at all, so it’s no good to a girl alone, and it’s no good to a girl who wants to be alone in a crowd, either. And it is always exactly long enough. Six jumpers, it makes room. Sixteen, it makes room.”
“What’s the cap?”
“There’s no maximum, dear. That’s the point.”
I checked the statutes, because I am fluent now. “Is that allowed?”
“It doesn’t touch a heart. It just makes room.”
I picked up one handle. The wood was warm, like it had been holding somebody’s hand for forty years, which, I found out later, it had.
“What are the requirements?” I asked, out of habit, and I heard the question the way you see a step too late, and I would have taken it back, but Wanda was already answering.
“It’s a rope, dear.”
She put on her coat. I looked at her pad, sitting closed on the table, and something was off about the whole transaction, and then I found it.
“No receipt?”
“It’s not an order.”
At the door she paused, one hand on the frame, the way she does.
“Same time next week, June,” she said.
“It’s on my calendar,” I said. “It’s the only thing on my calendar that has never moved.”
Wanda said, “Mm.” Then she went down the walk, and I watched her go from the doorway, and she did not look back, and I have decided that she knew I was watching anyway, every three feet.
The rope is in my backpack for tomorrow. A rope that size needs two turners and at least one jumper, and I own one rope and one self, so recess is going to require other people, which I believe is the design. I did the math. It works out.