an excerpt from Girly by Elizabeth Merrick

Part of CHAPTER FOUR: CHAR (1973)


[There's a beginning to this chapter--but you can check that out later in the book. What you need to know is that Amandine is visiting a psychic. Let's start here:]


She’s relieved when I appear in the living room that I am younger than she is. This way if I'm wrong or if I tell her something she doesn't want to hear she can deny me. She is relieved as well that I am not beautiful—that my nose is too pointy and I have a pallor to my complexion that she thinks has something to do with drugs. She might not be too far off the mark on that one, though I don't think the weed is responsible, probably it was the stuff I used to do before I kind of settled down.

"Hi, I'm Char," I say.

"Char?" she says, like those four letters haven't been superimposed on every stopsign and taillight and cloud she's encountered in the last half hour.

"It's short for Charlotte," I reassure her, "It's my middle name. Naomi Charlotte."

She suddenly looks upset, well, more upset than she did before. She isn't as clear to me now that she is here—her high-strung mannerisms blur my sense of her. I pick up on her now, not as a pull-you-right-along story, but in distinct images that come and go. It's up to me now to string them together into some kind of sense, and, well, suddenly I’m not feeling so motivated as all that.

"Come sit in my reading room," I tell her.

I take my cigarettes out of my pocket—I need to burn her edge off me. She grimaces behind me as I light one and follows me to the corner of the dining room I have rigged up as a sort of a parlor. As I settle into my seat, with my back to the picture windows, and concentrate on her as she adjusts herself across from me, I see a filmy wash of treetops in back of her, like the ghost of a slide show on my wall there. Behind me she sees the actual trunks of trees through the window—grayish brown lines, thick, nubby. What I see behind her moves and is transparent, as if the shifting leafy bursts are a film projection.

This is odd. What I see is usually not physical like that, I mean usually I see it in my head. Not on walls, for sure.

I rip the filter off my Lucky and suck deeply. The treetops fade and I catch a glimpse of her current, most superficial thought, the things folks are generally wrong to fear psychics can read, because we so rarely catch these little ripply flashes. What we do pick up on are the deeper currents, the water so far down in the ocean of people's selves that the fish there don't have eyes.

But right now, I can tell she is thinking: How and why did this woman, Char, dye two potato sacks black and make them into a dress?

She thinks she’s sly, thinks she seems like a polite person.

I want her to calm down. I put out my cigarette and I ask her what she would like to know about, what seems to be the problem.

She takes a little breath even though she wants a big, full one. She surprises me:

"I want to know how to get my daughter back," she says.

Her eyes look flat and clear and ready.

"All right," I say. I tap another cigarette out of the pack, light it, then set it on the ashtray while I get out my cards.

"A three-card reading is five, would you like to start there?" I ask. I don't know how much money she has on her. I am useless for money readings. If I got so much as hunches in that department I wouldn't be sitting here right now.

"What else do you have?" she says. She wants to spend more.

"There's the full spread for fifteen, that'll take twenty minutes," I say. I cross my legs and bounce the top one so that my sandal slaps my heel over and over.

"That one," she says, "The full,"

She reaches into her handbag to reassure herself of something. I fixate on this purse and don't respond to her. It needs an oil streak on it, needs a pen or a lipstick to drop across it and mar its perfect white leatherness. It makes me think of a visual clue in a movie—the rest of the furniture, the clothes in the room, the paint on the walls, the sky, complexions, all go together, and you know, watching, that one little object's color is off. But maybe your knowing isn’t' conscious. Maybe you just sense it— but you don't think, "Oh, the color scheme is off." That's what her purse is like in my house.

"Okay," I say. I can’t help a big sigh and almost rolling my eyes.

Maybe I smoked too much weed—I can feel myself detaching from her, I don't want to do this reading and I don't want to re-open the portal that lets her story come pouring through me so that she can listen to it being told.

In my mind I see hands fumbling with locks. I see gusts of wind banging a screendoor wide.

"Shuffle the cards and spread them out when you feel satisfied," I say. I edge the deck over towards her.

There is a curiosity to her as she picks them up. Not even asking permission, she flips the deck over and looks at the faces of the cards. The multitude of the images overwhelms her—she wants to look at each one carefully and she knows she can't, that there isn't time. There is no guilt to her, little fear, just that sheer excitement of taking a quick peek at herself. Then she shuffles with the faces down.

Two men. Dirt and quiet. Quiet. The handle of a chrome electric coffee pot, its woven cord. A woman who could help is out and the door is locked. The pictures come to me as her hand leads the cards out into a smear on the table. It is as horrible as it gets—a ceiling fan spinning to a stop, a pet chewing its leg bloody in the yard, the “accident,” coming soon, sooner, that will leave her broken in that way—are ever different and that somehow makes it worse.

I feel the pain in my neck that comes at such moments. My hand clamps there.

"Amandine," I say. Of course she is surprised that I know her name. "Amandine, give me a minute."

I stumble a little as I get up. The hot shattering at the top of my spine shifts once I am on my little concrete stoop out back. As I take a joint out of my pocket, light it up, the darkness from Amandine increases, there is a low ominous note of music, it picks up power, and on my first hit the searing knot loosens. With the exhale it is gone. Amandine's past recedes into the forest, rushing backwards so quickly I imagine it made of dense matter, its velocity and weight strong enough to knock a hole in the side of a development house across the thick woods, strong enough to splinter siding and drywall and two by fours.

I used to try to rush the sad cases with pills, speed myself through them so fast I couldn't remember or repeat anything, quicken myself through the deep-down and then up, back across much, much surface. But now, bud works just fine—weed tempers the stories, mixes them up with impressions from my other senses, tosses in wild cards, unrelated, sort of like commercial-breaks to pause the process, dilute it. Dampen its effects on me. I become simply the teller—the story doesn’t leave an impression on my body.

Okay.

Her daughter. A young girl—separate from this woman. I close my eyes and try to find a way in. But—there is nothing there, just the woods and the afternoon light and the sound of the bugs in the grass. I stand up and for a second I think I see two little girls, but then they move together, four translucent arms blurring into one pair, one set of legs submerged in the other.

"Which daughter?" I ask her when I sit back down in the parlor.

"I have a daughter," she says. She almost stammers. "My daughter, Ruth."

"Oh," I say. I pick up the cards and I start to lay them out.

This is you. This is what crosses you. This is what crowns you. This is your immediate past. This is your deep past. This card represents your near future.

She can tell that the Tower is not a cake and ice cream party, her eyes widen a bit.

This card is your distant future. This card is the base of your problem. This card is the influence of family and close friends. This card is your deepest hopes and fears. This card is the final outcome.

She isn't ready to hear what this spread wants me to tell her.

* * *

The Jesus on our wall belongs to my husband, Lucas. His auntie gave it to him, and he won’t ever take it down. It sits above the dining room table and would close Its Eyes, I imagined, squinting, when I used to smoke pot in front of Him—He couldn’t help but peek, though, I saw Him. That’s why I now almost always go outside for anything stronger than cigarettes. My husband keeps smiling at me when I complain about Jesus up there, when I say, “Well tell old Jesus to come down here and pack a bowl if He’s so freaking curious.” My husband gets on my case about smoking too much everything, winks and smiles and says, maybe He can help you with those bad stories. My husband is no Jesus-freak, though, almost never goes to church, has his own personal religion of trees, sky, and a convertible; he just likes to nudge me about this, get a rise out of me, like a brother. Part of his religion, too, is that if something simple annoys you so much, it’s probably you and not that thing that’s got the problem. Me, I don’t have my own religion yet, I’m too high-strung still, but when I get one, I’m going to incorporate that last idea so that I can say it back to Lucas, see how he likes it from that angle.

So Jesus is setting up there above Amandine’s head, and sometimes I like to imagine Him doing what I wish my response could be in a given situation. Like now, with this prissy groomed mouse desperate for help but too superioristic to admit it here in my living room, Jesus might strike His forehead like he was in the Mafia, roll His eyes, make a sour, tongue-out face. When He does this I mind His constant staring at me and Lucas a lot less, believe me. He’s just not my kind of deity, I guess, although I know His universal love policy is a good one. He always gets that much in my book.

Anyway, there we are, me, Amandine, and the Jesus that Auntie Racinda gave Lucas one Christmas. We all knew she stole it from the church basement out of spite for some questionable comments the preacher’s girlfriend made to her involving the nutritious value of lemon bars verses oatmeal cookies. My husband saw the empty, clean square on the wall behind the urinal in the men’s room during Christmas Eve services with his family. I never go with them to church, just barely make it through holiday meals at some auntie or other’s table. I’m not so popular with them—I agree with the preacher’s wife on the lemon bar thing, for example, but of course I’m not dumb enough to speak up on that. They can tell though. They know.

“Honey, you’re all the Jesus I need,” I told Lucas after Christmas dinner that year, once we were home again amid soft, colored beams thrown from the tree lights off wads of metallic wrapping paper scattered around. Jesus, annoyingly calm and underfed, folded His hands inside His frame, leaning on top of a pile of presents for my people I hadn’t quite gotten around to mailing before the date.

Lucas’s neck and shoulders were in knots from the Yuletide tension of all the chatty women he grew up with. I showed him the Boat, the Cobra, the Bear—yoga poses that might help the muscle strain—but it only took one little look, one little smile from him to convince me to get his undershirt off him and push Tiger Balm into the gold-brown of his upper torso. Jesus watched—He, Jesus, didn’t mind. . . although, Auntie Racinda—generally so free and easy with many of the commandments, herself—maybe would not have appreciated subjecting her gift to what we were enjoying so much.

Anyway.

"You've had a hard time," I say to Amandine. This is how I always begin. Why not? It's true for everyone on Planet Earth.

So I get into it with her. I tell her her own version, what she can handle, and I'll butter up and slip in a harsher truth now and then, once she's feeling good and right and can handle it. I tell her the older woman is helping her out by babysitting for awhile, not being mean, not edging in on Amandine’s share of good stuff in the world, and I tell her to try to be thankful for this woman she doesn’t like. I tell her she will have her daughter back soon enough. Which is only partially true.

"And you'll have another one," I say.

"But my husband. . .we don’t really spend time together any—" she says.

"Look—it’s important for you to have the next one! A girl, you need to have another daughter. She will bring Ruth back to you," I tell her.

And I see the double image, the four legs condensing into two.

Amandine is almost scowling at me now. Her disbelief and irritation bubble up and mar her face.

“There’s another girl coming,” I say to Amandine.

“That’s impossible,” she says, pleased I’m wrong, whitish lips turning up just so slightly.

Me and Jesus, old hat at these topics by now, both raise one eyebrow each at her.

“No, I mean it’s impossible. I haven’t—seen—my husband in months.”

“Well, I’m not saying she’s a physical entity yet—I’m saying she’s zooming her way down to you through the ether as we speak.”

I think Amandine’s just a rock over there, but tears start coming, tears without sobs, just wetness.

“I just don’t see how—“

“Don’t worry. She’s coming,” I say.

Amandine’s white purse slides off her lap, breaking the stillness, and she jumps. As she bends down to pick it up, she sees the big wads of dust and cat hair that collect in the corners of my house. She reels in her exclamation of disgust before it gets anywhere near out of her, but she forgets who she’s dealing with here. She’s pissing me off now.

So I’m not Betty Crocker. So what.

Jesus taps His forehead, closes His eyes at her ingratitude, her judgement, and at my own.

“She’s on her way,” I say, “Another daughter. She’s a sweet girl, a good girl.” I light another Lucky and look at the door.

And again, I see two girls moving together to become one. I see them—separate from one another. I see them turn to stare at each other and I don't see Amandine, their mother, anywhere near them.

"But what is most important," I hurry, "Is for you to treat yourself right." I pat her forearm twice. "And you need some good love, some real romantic, sweet love."

The irritation breaks and a sweet, childish hunger washes across her.

"Your husband," I say.

Amandine tightens her fingers on the purse, and aha!, I think, maybe the flaw will be five sharp fingernail crescents. Her eyes have intensified on me.

"This is what you need to do," I say. I give her my only love spell, which I got out of Cosmo a few years ago. I have heard that in the short term it often works.

"Go spend forty dollars on a haircut and something nice to wear. It has to be forty, no less. Then go home, take a bath, and put a tablespoon of the water in his dinner."

I know it is not hygienic, but neither are public bathrooms, and she uses those.

"You'll have another girl," I say.

It's time for the reading to end. But she just sits there and looks at me hopefully.

"It's very important,” I say “. . . So . . ."

She doesn't want to get up. She is halfway in love with me and wants me to walk with her through her days, wants to be allowed to call me at 3am when she can't sleep and is awake, blanched, chewing a horrible thought..

Seeping in at the corners of my mind, the images from her past—a dark cat wandering in circles, the thin-lipped man and his son—begin to irritate me. I've done my job. I light a cigarette and don't worry anymore about not letting the smoke waft her way. I’m getting bored, getting petty. I know that when I get my religion I will have an easier time with these things, but for now, there’s not much I can do. I start to want a little fun, and I just can’t resist.

"And it's crucial. . . " I say, "That you name her . . ."

Jesus gives me an eager nod— I start to giggle at myself but I cover it with a cough: you just can’t name a girl Jesus. Sorry. I shake my head at him a little. Then I put on my best psychic-concentrating-on-the-nether-realms face, close my eyes, open them with a suddenness:

". . . that you name her Racinda."

Oh my.

"Racinda?" she says, dazed, her hand rising to her cheek and pushing the flesh there around a bit.

"R-A-C-I-N-D-A. Very important."

I suck on my cigarette till the filter's soggy and I can taste its fiberglass. I get frivolous and antsy with these girls.

"Very important." I clasp her hands in mine and look at her meaningfully.

If the child ends up anything close to my husband's wild Auntie it will do Amandine some good.

"Very," I say. I stare at the ceiling. I stare at my hands clumping up the tablecloth in rows. I look around the room quickly, as if she has already gone.

“Okay. . . okay. . . okay. . .” she says, then, staccato, “Thanks!” and tightens herself a bit, gathers her purse to her stomach, pushes herself from the table. A little giddiness seeps into her on the way to the porch.

In the doorway, with the smell of the trees streaming down to us on the afternoon shadows, she pays me ten bucks extra—a shock—but it doesn’t take away my annoyance at her. I see her begin to sweat as she starts the car up, before she turns it around to leave.

The driveway’s yellow dirt flies and redistributes itself around her car. Yuck. I’m still touched by her, she’s still somehow contaminating me, but I can feel my world, my little house, strengthening already in her absence. Only half an hour till Lucas gets home and I haven't even thought about a meal. Some housewife. When I think about how bad I am at it I feel despondent, actually, just so doubtful that this house and Lucas will ever be able to hold me in.

Hamburger helper. In any case. Or tuna, I think, and I have some greens in the crisper. I light a cigarette, still in that doorway, the pale wood door thumping the wall every now and then on the breeze.

Somewhere in my limbs a leaden exhaustion pulls at me. It increases in weight until I have to go lie down on the living room sofa. I let the cigarette sit there in the ashtray and smoke itself out.

But I don't sleep. Prone, I am not immune to her details. They travel through me in clear relief. The trip to Wanamaker's and the comforting smell of the clay facial at the salon, the surprising rose she buys to finish off the forty bucks and the petals floating, wilting, sinking in the scalding bathwater, her skin reddening, desperately, then pruning itself up.

Her husband’s surprise that she solicits his attention, warms to his touch. That she’s back to giggling for him, that he can see the old girlishness emerging in her, pushing dewy through her laughter. And his surprise again—gullible this one—the next morning, to wake up alone, and to wake up to the sound of her vacuum not only revving, but slamming into the baseboards downstairs.

She’ll be down there because the sweetness of the truth, that he really does love her, will curdle in Amandine when she wakes up freezing and sweating, ceiling fan twisting slicing stopping, husband’s lips thinning, a cat screaming, her memory of its yelps from her girlhood fading only with the devouring roar of the Hoover once she’s dressed, downstairs, busy. The cold sweat somehow causing one awful moment of that good night last night with Lyman to expand in her memory—the moment Lyman forgot that she never allowed him to touch her hair, her ears. The cringe and the terror when his hand grabbed for her face, her wig—a treacherous near miss—overtakes and swallows, in Amandine’s heart, the hours of kindness that have passed between them and she then knows she cannot remain in the bed next to him. She whips herself from under the covers in one lightening motion, like the crack of a belt, or a cord.

To vacuum up all the dirt, to make tidy, perfect, safe.

This gift is so horrible. I say this aloud to nobody but Jesus over there on the wall. He’s ignoring me. I open my eyes. And then I go out back, to numb it all down.

Elizabeth Merrick © 2006