Description
practical magic black soap, from the novel
“At night Sally dreamed of ranch houses and picket white fences, and when she woke in the morning and looked out to see the black metal spikes that surrounded them, tears formed in her eyes. Other girls, she knew, washed with bars of Ivory and sweet-scented Camay, while she and Gillian were forced to use the black soap the aunts made twice a year, on the back burner of their stove.”
“Trouble, of course, was nothing new to the Owens sisters, especially as they grew up. The instant the girls began high school, the boys who had avoided them for all those years suddenly couldn’t keep away from Gillian. She could go to the market for a can of split pea soup and come back going steady with the boy who stocked the frozen food case. The older she got, the worse it became. Maybe it was the black soap she washed with that made her skin seem illuminated; whatever the reason, she was hot to touch and impossible to ignore.”
Gary: “So what kind of craft do you do?”
Sally: “Do I do? I manufacture bath oils, and soaps, and hand lotions, and shampoo. And the aunts, they like to meddle in people’s love lives.”
