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Snickerdoodles
by Nancy Springer
* * * *
“Eat this, son,” Blake’s mother told him, handing him a snickerdoodle. “It will help
you know what to do.”
That was different. She usually said, “It’ll make you feel better.” She held the
cookie out toward him, and he noted without particularly noticing how its dimpled
circular surface was incised with the simple six-lobed design some of the old people
called a hex sign. This was not unduly strange. Enola Bloodsworth always decorated
her cookies with hearts or tulips or some sort of design. And they did indeed make
peo-ple feel better. This was a known fact in Diligence, PA, and would have
en-abled her to make a living off the things if she had cared to sell them. But she
preferred, in her cat-walks-by-herself way, to control them, giving them only to
whom she chose.
Her son had been the recipient of many such therapeutic cookies. But after
what he had been telling her, about all the trouble he had been hav-ing in high school,
Blake Bloodsworth had been hoping for something more from her than a pastry
panacea. He shook his head.
“I’m not hungry. Jocks been slam-ming you against lockers all day, you
wouldn’t be hungry either.”
“Eat it,” she insisted. “Since when do you have to be hungry to eat my
cook-ies?”
“Yeah, and I’m getting fat. It’s bad enough being a geek without being a fat
geek.”
He was in fact small and thin, as he had always been. She sat down at the
ashwood kitchen table with him and gave him a hard look.
“Eat the cookie,” she ordered.
Tired of fighting, he took the sweet hex-marked circle from her and in-gested
it. Good, as always. God, why wouldn’t she sell them and make her-self as rich as
the things that came out of her oven? A peering middle-aged woman, ever
housedressed, spending her days in the kitchen passionately baking, she did not eat
much or have any visible source of income. She ap-peared to Blake to live on air,
like one of those spidery tropical plants from Spencer’s Mail Order Gifts.
He wanted someday to make some-thing of himself. He was a good student,
especially in logical subjects such as math and science. Maybe he could be an
 
engineer or a scientist, get out of Diligence and out of poverty. His mother’s
take-it-as-it-comes attitude toward life irritated him. How could anyone so proud be
so sloppy, so blurred at the edges, in the way she dressed, her thinking, her
housekeeping . . . her kitchen, which might as well be her soul, disgusted him.
Dutch-kid plaques on the walls, along with a heart-shaped wreath of plastic roses.
More plastic roses perched atop the cupboards. He hated them, and he hated her
kitchen even when it was clean, but (to add to his adolescent irritation) from where
he sat he could see the mess her day’s cookie-making had left in it: clouds of flour
everywhere, Crisco and eggs sit-ting out on the counter along with her cookbook —
“Hey.” Blake’s mood suddenly changed. Eyes glittering, he got up and went
to look at the book as if he had never seen it before, though in fact he had been
seeing it all his life. An old volume, handwritten and bound in black leather, it had
belonged, so his mother told him, to his great-grandmother. Maternal
great-grandmother, of course; he had no paternal relations. Not only was he a geek,
but a fatherless geek as well.
“Hey,” Blake repeated. He was be-ginning to get an idea what to do about the
jerks in school, one of the best ideas he had ever had; where had it come from? The
recipe book looked plenty spooky enough for what he had in mind. On its black
leather cover was em-bossed, of all things, the slant-eyed face of a cat. He flipped its
pages. Between cobwebs of text (brown-inked in a fine, fine hand) he saw
illustrations: stars, several weird kinds of crosses, hex de-signs of all sorts. Cookie
decorations. But the buttheads didn’t have to know that.
“Mom,” he demanded, “can I take this to school?”
“What for?” she asked in her dry way, seeming as always to know what he
was doing, what he was thinking, but ask-ing the proper questions anyway, as if to
uphold a formality. Holding up his end, he always lied.
“To show the teachers.”
“You expect them to read it? It’s in German, you know.”
“Of course I know.” In fact he hadn’t given the inscrutable text much thought.
“So I show it to the German teacher.”
She smiled with that odd weary pride and tenderness only mothers seem able
to achieve. And if she indeed saw through him as he suspected, her pride had to be
not for what he had said but what he actually intended to do.
After supper Blake retreated to his attic, his dusty lair where his mother never
came. Once he had turned ado-lescent she had seemed to understand instinctively
his need for privacy and his own space, moving him up under the eaves and turning
his former bed-room into her storage area.
 
She understood too much. It was as if she looked at him and read his mind.
Blake lay on his narrow studio couch of a bed and felt faintly uneasy despite
his excited plans. It seemed odd to him that his mother had so readily given him
permission to borrow the recipe book. She used it every day, or else kept it
constantly by her like a lucky charm, and it had been written by her long-dead
grandmother, for gosh sake. The grandmother she had been named after. Another
Enola Bloodsworth. So it had to be precious to her.
His mother was up to something, Blake decided. And no telling what. Enola
Bloodsworth’s thoughts and plans were strictly her own. All of Diligence knew her,
yet she had no close friends. In a town full of couples and families she stood like a
blackthorn tree, in proud isolation. Backward, the name “Enola” spelled “Alone.”
From what Blake had heard, his great-grandmother hadn’t been mar-ried
either. He wondered if that long-dead Enola had done as his mother had done, taking
a man for purposes of in-semination then discarding him. His mother was quite frank
about his father: the man had been no more than a make-do in her life, she scarcely
remembered his face, his name was of no importance. She was just as frank about
her reason for having seduced her unlikely lover: she had wanted a child badly. Too
bad she got me, Blake thought. Probably she had been hoping for a girl to carry on
the rather eccentric Bloodsworth breed-ing tradition.
Never mind, Mom. Plenty of the guys in school keep telling me I’m the next
best thing.
It was tough being small in Diligence, a steel-mill town where even the nouses
stood tall and square-shoul-dered like the cock-of-the-walk foot-ball-playing Irish
and Slavic and Italian guys in their muscle shirts and gladi-ator footgear. Quite aside
from the fact that the jocks sometimes used him as their medicine ball, Blake had a
prob-lem with girls. He liked them. There was a word that rhymed with hex, and it
was often on his mind, but he hadn’t had any. With all the hunks to choose from,
girls laughed in his face when he approached.
His mother knew, of course, though he told her nothing. “Someday there is
going to be a special girl for you, Blake,” she had said to him one evening out of thin
shadowy flour-clouded air. “You’re small and dark, and that means you’re smarter
than the others. So let the gadabout girls choose the big dumb brutes for now.
Someday there will be a beautiful girl who appreciates you the way I do.”
And then she had pushed cookies at his face.
Damn her, she adored him as only a mother could. And he hated her
devo-tion, because it only made him ache for a similar love from . . .
 
Lying on his chaste bed, Blake al-lowed himself daydreams: not of any girl he
knew, because they all scorned him, but of an ideal lover he had never seen.
Passionate. Exotic. Erotic. A few years older than he, maybe, taller than he, even,
but only his lovemaking could satisfy her. Greek profile, with that wonderfully
patrician straight or slightly bowed line from brow to nose. Masses of black hair,
huge dark — no, green — no, purple eyes above fashion-model cheekbones. In his
imagination he kissed those cheekbones and her full hot lips and her exquisite
collarbone and so on down her lithe, throbbing body to her breasts. She had more
than two. The ones that showed through her clothes were full and bobbing, like a
cheerleader’s breasts, but on the rib-cage just below them were two more, smaller
ones with supersensitive nip-ples that excited her to do unspeakable acts, and in all
the world only he, Blake Bloodsworth the Master Lover, knew of them —
Jesus, Blake mocked himself, adjust-ing the position of his hands. Stop now
and maybe you won’t go blind.
Trying to leave the fantasy woman behind on the bedsheets, he got up and
went to his high, narrow window. It was dusk. An orange September moon was
rising. Just outside the glass, so near that he could see their ugly little faces, bats
were swooping down from the eaves, as they did every nightfall. Things that flew in
the dark, like the succubus he could still feel writhing in his brain stem.
Far below, on the stones of the alley, sat a sleek black cat with its aristo-cratic
head tilted back, looking up to-ward him.
“Hey, Geek,” Jason Trovato cheer-fully greeted him the next morning out-side
the school. “How’s your love life?”
“Talk to your dad lately?” someone else put in.
“Long distance?” another butthead, Dane Orwig, suggested. More had
gath-ered, grinning. They never let him for-get. As kids they had chased him down
and rubbed his face in the dirt. Their tactics hadn’t changed much since.
“I’ve had it, you guys,” he told them, his voice coming up squeaky out of his
narrow ribs. “Lay off. I’m not going to take your crap anymore.”
He knew they loved it when he tried to act tough. As he had expected they
would, they laughed and stepped closer. But this time instead of wincing he smiled.
For once he felt strong in his secret way, because he had a plan.
“Look,” he told them quietly, “I’ll warn you once, because hex magic is
nothing to mess with. I’ve got hex witch blood, and now I’ve been anointed.
Any-time I want I can put a curse on you.”
He did not himself believe any of this. His plan was to scare them, nothing
 
more. Most of them had been nurtured under an incense cloud of Catholic
mys-ticism. The few Protestants among them had received their share of fiery
Rev-elation under revival tents pitched in cow pastures. He hoped all of them would
at least halfway believe him. Maybe they did. They were still laugh-ing, true, but it
sounded forced.
“Hey!” called a big freckled football hero named Patrick Sullivan. “How’d
you manage that? Does the coven meet in your ma’s garage, or what?”
“Yeah, geek!” Jason Trovato sounded genuinely eager. “Tell us the details.”
“You stop calling me geek and you can come watch.”
“Sure, geek.”
“So they meet in your ma’s garage,” someone else put in conversationally,
“and they have rites, like? What do they do, geek? Dance naked?”
No, dammit, their laughter was not forced. They were loving every minute of
this.
“Human sacrifice,” Dane Orwig sug-gested.
“Hey, geekie-poo!” Patrick Sullivan pushed forward to physically accost
Blake. “Burn any virgins lately?”
God burn them all, they knew quite well he was a virgin himself. Coldly
fu-rious, Blake threw off the hand clutch-ing his arm. “Shut up. All of you. I mean
it.”
Of course they would not shut up. At this point they should start throwing him
around. But Blake truly did not feel afraid, and something hard and glinting and more
than a little sinister had gathered in his black eyes, because Enola Bloodsworth’s
black textbook rode in his jacket pocket. He pulled it out and held it up with its face
toward them, like a hellfire preacher shaking the Bible. Slantwise the cat stared at
them from its cover.
“I can give you acne like you wouldn’t believe, Sullivan,” Blake challenged.
“Hell, why stop at acne? I can give you AIDS. How would you like that, if I gave
you AIDS?”
Because he wished it were true (though he knew it was not true) his voice
deepened, intense. He knew they would not hit him now, because of the power in his
voice. As in fact they did not. They stood wide-eyed, their grins pasted on their
faces, and he opened the black book so that they could see the pages, the
spiderwebby handwriting gone brown with age, the weird horned moons and
 

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