Julia's Chocolates

by Cathy Lamb

  “I wouldn’t call it a living, my dear Julia. She ekes out a life. Barely, I think. She sells her vegetables and fruits at the farmer’s market, and she also bakes bread. Delicious bread. Bread that can almost bring you to orgasm, it’s so good. I told her to call it Orgasmic Bread, but she didn’t think that would work. She does the readings on the side. I have never met anyone as frugal as Caroline. Oh, she’s generous with a capital G, but if you gave her a piece of sackcloth, she would whip out her sewing machine and make the most beautiful curtains out of it you’ve ever seen.”

  I started to chuckle, and Aunt Lydia narrowed her eyes, but I could see a smile tugging at those full lips of hers. Sixty-three years old and her mouth was one that many a starlet had paid thousands and thousands of dollars to achieve.

  “You don’t believe she’s a real psychic, do you?” Aunt Lydia put her hands on her hips, as if ready to draw her guns.

  I didn’t roll my eyes and prided myself on that. I was back to staring at the reds swirling hotly in the pan.

  “I’m telling you, Julia, that woman has been right on the button so many times—for all of us. And she doesn’t charge for her services on Psychic Night. We try to pay her, but she won’t take a dime, so all of us, just to keep her going, drop off eggs and cookies and dinners.” Lydia shook her head back and forth like a bowling ball gone crazy. “She’s a proud one, though. Proud as a stallion who can flip all the cowboys off his back.

  “And it’s her upside-down pineapple pound cake and her carrot bread with cream cheese frosting that brings in the most money every year at the church’s auction. Every year. Sweetest woman you ever did want to meet, that’s dear Caroline. Doesn’t open up and tell us much about herself, but she is as straight and honest as my cornstalks.”

  “I’ll look forward to meeting her.” Unexpectedly, my eyes filled with tears. “Thanks for letting me come, Aunt Lydia.”

  “You’re welcome. You’ll love Psychic Night.” She had misinterpreted what I said. She walked over and gave me a big hug, smelling like vanilla and lavender and chocolate, and I buried my face in her shoulder. “Don’t cry, love! You’ve escaped a life’s prison sentence with King Prick. Prison! You might as well have worn a shirt that said ‘Inmate’ on the back. ‘Inmate of King Prick’! Aren’t you happy you’re not an inmate?”

  “I am,” I cried. “I am.” I ached. My face hurt. I’m fat. No one would marry me. Robert had wanted to, but as I couldn’t see letting my face become his punching bag for forty years, I’d bolted. Finally. And I didn’t regret it, did I? I wanted a husband, but not that much. Right?

  I pulled away from Lydia, sniffling. She went back to her brownies, extolling the virtues of feminine freedom from men, how they and they alone were responsible for the turmoil of our hormones. Then she made up a song about men with little penises.

  My stomach gnawed again at my insides as if anxiety were eating it alive, and my heart suddenly started to palpitate, seemingly bent on cruising me right into a coronary.

  I coughed, coughed again, knowing what was coming. The Dread Disease was back. I instantly felt as if I couldn’t drag enough air into my deflated lungs. My hands froze into little clenched blocks of ice while at the same time my body trembled as if a giant hand were shaking it.

  I closed my eyes in defeat, knowing I could easier stop a speeding train with my ample buttocks than stop this. Death was after my sorry hide, I knew it. I had some horrible, currently unnamed disease that would torture me for months, probably devour my insides until they collapsed into their own wormholes, and then I’d die. That was why my heart often raced as if I’d been running a marathon and why I would feel cold, then burning hot, and my hands shook like leaves on speed and I couldn’t breathe.

  I listened to Aunt Lydia’s penis song half-heartedly, trying to hide the fact that, at least to me, the air had been siphoned from the room, every last molecule of it. I rode the “wave of fear,” as I’d dubbed it, the best I could. The air was already gone, and then a familiar feeling of overwhelming panic flooded my body. This happened because my body knew it was dying, I surmised.

  I clenched my teeth together and tried to breathe through my nose as dizziness struck. I was going crazy. Losing my mind. Hello, sanitarium!

  And then, after what seemed like hours, my heartbeat started to slow, the air whooshed back into the room, and my body stopped trembling. It was replaced by a familiar bone-racking exhaustion, but it was better than suffocating—much better.

  I have so come to appreciate air these last months. Air, glorious air.

  I pushed my frizzy curls off my damp forehead with a shaky hand, desperate to get my mind away from my imminent death and on to another subject. I inhaled, ragged and low. “What are we doing at Breast Power Psychic Night, then?” I choked out, amazed that Aunt Lydia hadn’t noticed that I was temporarily dying, though I prided myself on my ability to hide this peculiar aspect of my life from others.

  “Why, we’re going to be talking about our breasts. What else did you think we were going to do?” She blinked at me, her huge eyes round and curious as she used both hands to crack six eggs at once with great force against the rim of a pan. “Breasts have a lot to say, Julia! You simply have to listen to them.”

  I looked at my breasts, still heaving. They had nothing to say, I surmised. They were simply happy they weren’t attached to a corpse.

  Breast Power Psychic Night had begun in Aunt Lydia’s living room. The lights were turned down low, windows opened to let in the freshness of a spring evening in the mountains. The furniture might be old, but it was plush and worn and plentiful. A red couch and two purple loveseats were covered with pillows Aunt Lydia had embroidered and two quilts she had sewn. Stacks of books competed for space with herbs growing in huge trays, a forest of plants, and an abundance of vanilla-scented candles.

  A huge wreath decorated with dried roses, purple and sage-colored ribbons, raffia, pinecones, and tiny birdhouses hung on the fireplace hearth. As much as my Aunt Lydia likes her guns and her chickens, she loves a good craft project. Martha Stewart would love her.

  “We’re here to find the power within our breasts,” Aunt Lydia semi-shouted, cupping her boobs, her tie-dyed T-shirt bunching up under her hands. “Men have objectified us long enough, judged us by the size of our breasts. Our worth summed up with a look at our top half.”

  The darkened room flickered with candlelight, alighting on each of the women’s faces as Lydia led the group. I laced my fingers together, almost surprised I wasn’t having another coronary.

  Here I was, sitting on an overstuffed pillow, in the dark, on the floor, about to flip off my shirt in front of three women I didn’t know, and I felt perfectly calm. As if I disrobed and swung my boobs around and about all the time in front of people.

  “It’s so nice to meet you,” Katie Margold said quietly over the candlelight when Aunt Lydia made a quick trip to the bathroom to expel “the earth’s yellow poisons” from her bladder.

  Katie’s brown eyes were soft, like chocolate, but they looked tired, defeated. They skirted about as if she were waiting for me to quickly move on and talk to someone else more interesting. But then she examined my cheek and my eye, both still a lovely shade of purple with puke-green thrown in. Her lips pursed, though not in judgment.

  “It’s nice to meet you, too,” I said. “I love your hair. It’s so bouncy. It reminds me of mermaid hair.”

  Oh, I am strange, I thought instantly, my shoulders slumping. I was searching for something to say, and there it was.

  Tall, no makeup, and heavy, Katie wore an old green T-shirt with a couple of stains and baggy blue jeans. But her hair was her crowning glory. A reddish auburn color, it tumbled in deep waves down her back, clean and shiny. She could have been in one of those shampoo ads.

  But I felt like an idiot. The poor woman probably thought I was gay. I wasn’t gay, but neither did I particularly like men at this point in my life.

  “Oh! Well, I…” it was har
d to tell in the darkened room, but I think Katie blushed a little, then looked enormously pleased, and huge tears formed in her eyes, giant, perfectly shaped tears. If eyes had to breathe for us, she would have drowned.

  I stumbled about for something else to say. Good Lord. I’d been invited to Breast Power Psychic Night, and already I had one of the women in tears. I was a classless, chubby, socially inept cow, who often couldn’t breathe and who was going to be chased down by an obsessive fiancé at any moment.

  Katie wiped the tears away with her fingers. “Thank you.” She sighed, the sigh a little shaky.

  The thank-you was so heartfelt, I felt hot tears spring to my own eyes. “You’re welcome. I’ve always wanted red hair, long hair. I always thought…I saw this mermaid in a book with long red hair once, and I never forgot it. Compared to a mop of dirty-blond curls, well—”

  “I remember a mermaid just like that, too—the Little Mermaid.” Her brown eyes pooled again. “I can’t believe I’m crying about a mermaid!”

  I couldn’t believe she cried about mermaids, either. “What a loon,” I said, shaking my head, and Katie laughed.

  But I knew I didn’t really think she was a loon. About a month ago, I had stood in line at the library and cried because it was so wonderful I could check out books without paying for them. I didn’t have any money that day because I had taken Robert out to an expensive meal the night before, which he had complained about being tasteless, and I thought to myself, “I love Thomas Jefferson.” And then I had cried, right there in line.

  Katie and I were two of a pathetic kind.

  To her left sat the psychic, Caroline Harper, and there was not a woman on the planet who looked less like a psychic than she. Petite and willowy, wearing a loose flowered skirt and a black tank top, she looked more like a model for tiny women. High cheekbones plunged to a full mouth, her murky, sea-green eyes slanting in her face.

  The only remarkable thing was the constant twitching of her right eye, which she now and then raised a hand to rub, to hold, as if willing the twitch away. When she’d walked into the house, I’d instantly reached up to tuck my wayward curls behind my ears, feeling like a mammoth, worm-eating buffalo as I towered over her. One wrong step and I’d crush the woman.

  Caroline was the frugal one. The woman who lived off pennies and made the best pineapple upside-down cake ever. The one who sold produce at the farmer’s market each week and did readings on the side and barely made it month to month with the help of her neighbors, those who dropped off eggs and meals and were then treated the next day to one of Caroline’s perfect baked goods.

  Caroline smiled at me over the candlelight, her smile huge, her teeth large and brilliant white, her eyes crinkling just a bit in the corners. I judged her to be about five years older than myself.

  She peered into my eyes, bruised and otherwise, and I waited for her to recognize the quaking, ridiculous woman with a yucky past and a strange disease that I am. She would foresee my future and turn pale and sickly-looking.

  But she didn’t. In fact, she just kept smiling at me. Cheerful-like. Open. For some reason she reminded me of Cheerios.

  “Welcome to Golden.” Caroline’s eye kept winking, but the rest of her face was peaceful, tranquil. “Did Lydia tell you that she calls this Psychic Night each week?”

  I nodded my assent, kneading the edge of my blue sweater in my lap, hoping it would hide my hips. Had I gotten even fatter since tiny Caroline walked through the door?

  “Lydia!” she laughed, as Aunt Lydia walked back into the room, her bladder apparently having expelled all poisonous yellow liquids from her body. Caroline’s laughter bubbled right there at the surface, even as that eye kept twitching. Twitch. Twitch.

  “Well, it is, Caroline! I always call it Psychic Night. After each session, you do our readings for us.” Lydia then glared at her. “I did not like my reading last week, Car-o-line. Not at all.”

  “But I was right, wasn’t I?” Caroline laughed, pushing her long brown hair away from her finely carved face. She looked like a queen, not a near-poverty stricken neighbor living off her backyard’s vegetables.

  “You planned it with Stash,” Lydia declared, hands on hips.

  “I did nothing of the sort. I merely told you that I saw a bit of red in your reading. Soft red for love. For passion. It was all around you, Lydia. Red, red, red.” Caroline smiled, and two dimples flashed in her cheeks.

  “And then Stash brought me this!” Lydia stood with righteous anger and opened a drawer of a nearby armoire and yanked out a red negligee with black furry trim.

  I tried not to laugh.

  “He is a bad-mannered old fool. Comes by, parks his tractor in front of my house, hands me the box, forces a kiss on me, and drives off. I’m going to get another pig and name him Stash Two, that I am.”

  Aunt Lydia dropped onto the floor with me and Katie and Caroline, fluffing out the negligee. “Stash thinks that because he owns all the land surrounding my place that he can do what he wants. Really! As if I’d get in something like that!”

  “Be glad you get negligees.”

  The words, soft, with a tinge of bitterness, dropped from Katie’s lips like tiny ballistic missiles. When we turned to look at her, she covered her mouth with both hands. “Oh dear. Dear, dear. I didn’t mean to sound so pitiful. Of course, my husband and I are past that stage, and look at me. I’d hardly fit in one, anyhow!” She laughed, hollow and embarrassed.

  Lydia tossed the negligee over her shoulder, and it landed in a silky pile on the floor. “I am glad we’re having Breast Power Psychic Night tonight! A negligee is really a gift to the man. To the man!” She leaned over and shook Katie’s shoulders, the flame from the candle only inches away from her swinging gray braids. I reached out and lifted them away before her hair turned into a flaming mass, but Aunt Lydia hardly noticed.

  “Do you think women, real women, want to be dressed up like hooker dolls? Lace isn’t comfortable. It itches my crotch. It causes me to break out in an emotional rash! These negligees go straight up your butt, and no woman should be showing the backs of her thighs to any man when she’s passed the age of sixteen. See? This is what men do to us! They make us feel like sexual objects who are there to please them, listen to them, cater to them!”

  “Right,” said Katie. Her brown eyes darted to the negligee, and I saw her swallow hard. “We don’t need that. It’s ridiculous, really. We’re not toys. It’s ridiculous that women would want to wear them in the first place.”

  “Of course it is!” We all looked at our fearless leader with more than a little fear as she raised both fists in the air. “They drive up in tractors, toss us lingerie that we’re supposed to model for them, making us feel downright cheap, with our breasts yanked to our throats, then we’re to tickle their teensies, and they drive off! Leaving our breasts spiritually unawakened. Dead!”

  “Amen to that. Dead breasts, I mean.” The door slammed as another woman walked in, dropping three bottles of wine on the kitchen counter, then expertly opening each one of them. I could only assume it was Lara Keene, the minister’s wife.

  Lara grabbed five huge goblets from the cupboards. The goblets were in the shapes of ogres. She filled each ogre goblet to the top. “Praise be to God that I did not kill Mrs. Ellensby.”

  Praise be to God that she didn’t kill Mrs. Ellensby?

  Lara distributed the wine to all of us, with a nod and a perfunctory smile in my direction. “She called me over, supposedly to study the Bible, then left the room ‘for a wee minute’ to spend five thousand four hundred and eighty-nine dollars online at Pottery Avenue. Then, in the midst of my reading Psalms to her, at her request, she informed me that she sees no reason to have a fund-raiser for a new roof for the church even though there’s an enormous hole over the preschoolers’ classroom.”

  Lara imitated the woman’s voice by pitching hers at the highest level, then pinching her throat and waggling it back and forth. “‘We don’t need another roof. We n
eed to pray to God and ask Him what He feels we need. God will provide what needs to be provided. That’s His will, and I know that God will say that the church is fine. I know how God works! People have no money in this town!’” Lara’s voice rose several octaves, shrill like a fish wife’s. “‘We’re scraping by, Lara. Really. You young ministers. You need everything. You want everything. Im-medi-ately.’”

  Lara settled herself to my left and took a very long drink of wine. The ogre goblet was half empty when she finally put it down. “I told her that it was difficult for the children to concentrate on their Bible verses when there was water trickling down a wall, and she said, ‘I am going to pray for you, Mrs. Keene. Pray that you will grow with the Lord and not against Him. Suffering is what makes us better people. Suffering is what makes us sacrifice for others. Jesus suffered for us, and we must suffer for Him, and those young children need to learn at an early age that not everything in life is perfect. Now, let’s hurry up and pray. I need to get my manicure.’”

  “Damn.” Lara slumped into the circle beside us. “Damn and damnation.”

  The silence was complete as all of us women, preparing for Breast Power Psychic Night, contemplated damn and damnation.

  After several quiet minutes, Lydia spoke up, “Lara, this is my niece, Julia.”

  Lara and I shook hands. “A pleasure,” I said. “What did she buy?”

  “Sorry?” Lara looked confused.

  “The woman who talks to God. Who knows what He wants. Perhaps God told her what to buy at Pottery Avenue?”

  Lara smiled, then sagged. “Well. He told her to buy three different sets of dishes, a chair, tablecloths, a new set of pans…I listened to her arguing with the saleswoman about the bill. ‘No’ to the roof for the preschoolers, but ‘yes’ to a set of striped picnic basket plates for five hundred and thirty-five dollars.”

  Lara’s blond hair was ripped up tight into a bun. Bright blue eyes summed me up pretty quickly. I knew that she was taller than me, but almost as thin as the twitchy-eyed but beautiful psychic.