by Rhian Ellis
And later, when I went home feeling half-fraudulent, half-brilliant, I thought, Well, why shouldn’t they buy it? Had I said anything patently false? Or harmful? And how was I to know whether the thoughts that came to me weren’t Mr. McGlynn’s?
For several months I gave readings and held séances at school, after school, at parties, in the pink-and-yellow bedrooms of popular girls, in the basement rec rooms of rich kids. I affected a mysterious look: loose hair, dark clothes, a slow smile. I quit forcing myself to talk to people when I didn’t have to. I made sure, though, that I didn’t go too far.
It wasn’t long before my mother found out about what I was doing. She feigned nonchalance.
“Darva Lawrence told me that you gave Teeny an excellent reading,” she said one day at the beginning of the summer. I’d been flopping around the house, bored out of my skull. “She wouldn’t stop talking about it. Maybe you should try working a message service sometime.”
Teeny was a tough girl, a year or two older than me, and though her mother was a medium, Teeny never took any flak for it. I’d given her a truly inspired reading the week before. We all crouched in an alley behind the Ha-Ha, and I said that a spirit who called herself Nana was telling me how misunderstood Teeny was. You can usually hit some kind of pay dirt by telling people they’re misunderstood, or that they have an undeveloped talent—they’re two of the universal truths of mediumship—but it must have struck a particularly resonant chord in Teeny. I saw in her big mean face how wholly misunderstood she felt, and when I told her about her sensitive side, how it needed to come out before she’d ever find true love, she started crying. So did a couple of her mean, leather-jacketed pals.
I knew, when I gave her the reading, that it would get back to my mother sooner or later, since Mrs. Lawrence was my mother’s best friend. Besides lurking around each other’s kitchens, they met once a week for the lunch special at the Italian Fisherman, on the wharf in Wallamee. When we were younger, Teeny and I went with them—Teeny always ordered french fries and applesauce and coleslaw, and she’d kick me hard under the table if I looked at her—and sometimes we’d be thrown together with the same babysitter if our mothers went out on the town. I hated her, really. And she’d never had a good word to say to me until the reading. Seeing that there was a sensitive side to Teeny Lawrence took more empathy than I’d known I had.
With my new hobby out in the open, and my mother giving no sign that she’d laugh at me, I talked to Troy Versted about working a message service. If he was surprised, he didn’t say so. He just shook my hand, said Welcome, and put me on the schedule for a lunchtime Illumination Stump meeting later in the week.
Summers, there were three message services a day in Train Line, the beginning of each signaled by the clanging of the lecture-hall bell. The first was at the Stump at noon, another at the Forest Temple at four, and the last one was at six-thirty, back at the Stump again.
Illumination Stump was in a clearing in the Violet Woods, accessible only by a short walk under towering maple trees and pines. The original stump had been sealed in concrete in order to preserve it, but it still looked like a stump. It was surrounded by a frilly border of petunias and, on holidays, miniature American flags. Facing it were rows of wooden benches painted gray. A sign nailed high on a tree said PLEASE OBSERVE SILENCE AS THIS IS A PLACE OF WORSHIP. During a message service, visitors sat on the benches and mediums gathered in back, behind them. In the old days, the rumor was, mediums stood right up on the stump, but now that was considered dangerous, as many of the mediums were elderly, so these days they stood next to it. They’d take turns going up front, where they pulled messages out of the air until Troy or whoever else was mediating gave them the time’s-up signal: a finger across the eyes.
The morning before the first time I worked the Stump, I sweated and paced and changed my clothes three times. I settled on a black sundress with tiny buttons down the front and put my hair back in two silver clips. My mother had agreed to go after me, so that if I flopped she could flop too, and thereby lessen the effect. She encouraged me to come up with some interesting topics ahead of time (“How about sea travel? I haven’t heard that one in a while. And jewelry! No one ever mentions jewelry, but you know, it’s very important to people…”) but I snootily told her I thought that was cheating.
“Oh, please!” said my mother, rolling her eyes.
We walked together through the dappled shade of the Violet Woods. Here and there alongside the path were marble benches, installed by the Victorians so the weak and consumptive could take a little rest on their way to the Stump. A spring of healing waters on the grounds drew crowds during the early part of the century. I imagined the pale young ladies making their way through the woods, skirts trailing, cheeks pinkening in the fresh air. I tried to feel them. I could not feel them. I was a fraud, a fraud, a fraud.
We got there early and gossiped about the new summer visitors, the regulars, the other mediums. My mother pointed out a woman—a wizened old lady with an orange dress and a matching hat—for whom she’d read the night before.
“She’s gone through six husbands. Six. Some divorced but mostly widowed. She’s like Henry the Eighth, or what’s-her-name, that actress. All those men were just crowding around me last night, each trying to get his two cents in. She thought it was the funniest thing. Her name’s—now what is it?—Ginger. That’s why she wears that peculiar color.”
A man lurched by, leaning heavily on his cane. “Darva told me about him. A former rocket scientist! Honestly. But he was in an accident and got a touch of brain damage. Anyway, if anyone says science, he’s the one you want.”
My mother’s archenemy, Winnie Sandox, stood in front of us and looked around for someone to talk to. She was small and round and had a big puff of hair. Her blouse fluttered.
“Look what’s deigning us with her presence,” whispered my mother. “Ugh.”
Troy said a prayer and Grace Batsummer started us off. She was old even then, as most mediums seemed to be when I was a teenager, before the New Agers began showing up. Grace was a very good, very clever medium, with a dry sense of humor and original things to say.
“Now, I sense a problem here in terms of—how shall I put it—productivity. It’s coming to me in the form of a garden, you see. It’s a garden with lovely flowers, vines and leaves and lush foliage, but—where’s the fruit? This is for you, dear—yes, you with the darling hat. You know what this garden is, don’t you? I know you do. It’s you, dear.”
The sun was right overhead, burning through my hair. Squirrels jumped from tree to tree above us, the thin branches bending under their weight.
After Grace there were two others, visiting mediums I didn’t know, then Troy gave me the signal. I walked up front, my eyes straight ahead.
“This is young Naomi Ash, one of our newest mediums,” said Troy. “We’re so happy to have her. All right, then, Naomi.”
I should have looked at my mother, or at Troy, or at the squirrels or even at Winnie Sandox, but instead I looked at the audience. The faces across the first row were bored, dubious, and self-absorbed. Someone looked at his watch.
“Thank you,” I said.
For the first few minutes I repeated stuff I’d heard a million times—someone named Mary…an illness…they’re watching over you—but after a while I found a groove. I picked a promising-looking person in the back, a plump thirtyish woman with a shiny black bob and white teeth. I told her about someone lost, someone she hadn’t heard from in ages and ages, and she nodded right along. I gained confidence.
“You have to reestablish contact with this person. They’re still on this plane, and they’re thinking of you. It’s a she, am I right?”
She nodded vigorously.
“And she needs you…” Suddenly, I could see this person: a laughing young woman with pretty clothes and long, sun-streaked hair. She appeared in front of me like a reflection in a pane of glass, transparent but real, and when I closed my eyes I could see
her even more clearly. And she wasn’t dead—I knew this with a certainty I would be hard-pressed to explain. I was so surprised: a real vision! I gasped a little. “You’ll need her, too, later, but right now she’s the one in need. You can help her. She’ll never make the first move—it’s all up to you.” The woman turned a little pink, embarrassed, and looked down at her hands.
Then Troy drew his finger across his round blue eyes.
I stumbled to the back, my eyes on the ground. It was my mother’s turn, then, and I didn’t hear what she said but there was no doubt it had to do with sea voyages and jewelry. Every cell in my body was thrumming. I felt so certain about what I’d said to the woman in the back. She just had to find this person, whoever it was. She leaned toward a man next to her and whispered in his ear, and I thought, I’ve done it. I’ve connected with this woman. This wasn’t true mediumship, yet, since no spirits were involved, but something else, something close—telepathy, maybe. Still. A weird little buzz of electricity hummed in my chest, and I imagined it was a kind of power line, linking me to the black-haired woman. I connected. Perhaps I wasn’t such a big faker after all. It made me so happy I almost died.
That evening, after Vivian went home, I poked through all my clothes and tried to find something to wear to dinner with Dave the Alien.
I’d spread everything I owned across the rumpled blankets of my bed, and the overhead light was on. Usually I just wore a dress of some kind and a sweater and forgot about my clothes entirely. But all my dresses, and skirts and blouses and stockings and sweaters, seemed to have fallen apart overnight. There were frayed bits of string where there used to be buttons, belts were missing, hems dragged, seams opened up. There were stains and pills and moth holes. Some didn’t smell very good. It hadn’t happened overnight, of course. But the thought that it had been happening for a long time and I hadn’t even noticed was worrying. That morning, during the interview with Officer Peterson, I’d been wearing a green, supposedly pleated, skirt, but the pleats had fallen out some time ago. The collar of my flowered blouse was bunched because I hadn’t bothered ironing it. Fur from my mother’s cats covered me from head to foot; I even found it in my hair. The elastic was gone in my underclothes.
Dave the Alien doesn’t care, I told myself. You don’t even like Dave the Alien.
That wasn’t exactly true. I liked him fine. At first I’d thought I would try to get out of dinner, but I’d promised him, because I knew he wouldn’t leave me alone until I did. It had been a very long while since I’d been on a date, though. It didn’t come naturally.
I ended up choosing a skirt and a bulky blue sweater. They weren’t very snappy. But they looked clean, and they didn’t have much fur on them. So I put them on and walked to my mother’s house, borrowed her Oldsmobile, and drove to Wallamee.
Dave the Alien’s place was the upstairs apartment of a mint-green house in a run-down part of town. He’d told me to go right in and walk up the stairs, so I did. It was so dark I had to feel my way along the wall with my hand. The house smelled old: bad pipes and rotting wallpaper and leaky gas furnaces. Also, garbage. Light glowed around the door at the top of the stairs. It flew open.
“I heard you!” he said. “What, can mediums see in the dark?”
“I couldn’t find a switch.”
“There isn’t one. Sorry. Here.” He reached over his head and pulled a string. A dim bulb illuminated me. “Welcome. I hope you like spaghetti.”
Dave had dressed up. He was wearing a white shirt and khaki pants. A gold chain glinted from his open collar and he smelled like cologne. He poured a can of beer into a glass and handed it to me. “Have a seat.”
I sat.
While Dave cooked—I realized how often I seemed to be watching other people cook these days, and how rarely I seemed to do it myself—he asked me a series of questions. I answered them, and was beginning to feel as I had that morning, with Officer Peterson, when it occurred to me that I could just turn them back to Dave.
“What do you like to do in your spare time?”
This, possibly, was what Dave was after. He answered in great detail.
“Well,” he said, “cars are my number-one pastime, but as you can guess, I also like history. My specialty is the Civil War through World War One. Which is what brought me to Train Line, incidentally.”
He described his major at Bonaventura College in Wilson County, Pennsylvania. He somehow got back to cars, and had to turn off the gas under the spaghetti sauce so he could show me his collection of framed prints of antique automobiles, which covered the walls of his bedroom. Other than the prints and the unmade-up mattress on the floor, there was nothing else in the room. I was glad when he turned the light off and we went back to the kitchen.
“Would you like another beer?” he asked, holding open the fridge.
I would.
The food was fairly tasty—spaghetti, white bread with garlic butter, and an iceberg lettuce salad. I recognized this meal from an earlier, short-lived period in my life: a year or two when my mother was dating, and bringing the dates home to meet me. She always served this meal. It was the sure bet, the no-risk supper. I twirled the pasta around my fork, bit, sucked.
“Shit!” cried Dave. A tendril of saucy noodle clung to his white shirt. He peeled it off, threw it onto his plate in disgust, and jumped up to wash the sauce away. “Pardon my français,” he said, dampening a rag and mournfully daubing at his chest.
“Let’s go talk in the other room,” he said when we were finished. “I’ll get you another beer.”
“Oh, I’d better…” I started to say, but took the fresh can.
In the living room there was a sofa and a matching easy chair. I sat in the easy chair, leaned back, and raised the built-in footrest. Dave sat on the sofa.
“Hey,” he said after a minute or two. “You want to see my star machine?”
“Star machine?”
“Another one of my hobbies. Astronomy. I just bought this thing.”
He went to a closet and pulled out a bulky black object. It looked like some kind of globe with a power cord.
“I’m going to turn the lights off. Don’t be scared.” Then he hit himself in the forehead with the palm of his hand. “‘Don’t be scared’? Look who I’m talking to!” He plugged the thing in and snapped off the lamp.
It certainly was dark. I felt better right away; my face relaxed out of the stiff half-smile I’d been maintaining. The star machine gave off tiny pinpricks of light. “Neat,” I said.
“No no no. I have to focus.” I saw, in the dim light of the star machine, that Dave was craning his neck and looking upward.
“Oh. I get it.”
Constellations resolved themselves across the bumpy plaster of Dave’s ceiling.
“It’s like being outside, but with all the comforts of home. Here,” he said, thumping the carpet with his hand. “Get down here so you can pretend you’re lying back in a field.”
“I’m pretty comfy.”
“Come on.”
I climbed, a little woozily, out of the easy chair. The floor was hard in comparison. It made me feel as if I was lying on a basketball court, not a field.
“See the Dipper?”
“The big one. Yes, sir.”
All of a sudden I saw his plan. He was moving incrementally toward me. His hand, glowing palely in the starlight, was a mere four inches from mine.
“Ouch,” I said, sitting up.
“What?”
“Nothing. A zipper.” I rubbed the back of my skirt, vigorously. Discreetly, I shoved over a few inches. After a couple of minutes, Dave followed.
I began to feel very, very bleak.
We had inched ourselves almost halfway around the room when Dave, frustrated, got up and flicked on the lights. I climbed guiltily back into my easy chair and picked up my beer from the carpet.
“Well,” said Dave.
“I like your machine,” I said, blinking.
On the wall, I noticed,
there was a photograph of a rock band, a few more car prints, and a poster from a Train Line workshop last summer: “The Power of Color.”
I gestured at the poster with my drink. “Did you go to that?”
He blushed slightly. “Yeah, I did.”
“How was it?”
“It was all right. You remember, I had to get someone to fill in for me at the cafeteria for a couple days.”
“Oh, right.”
“I mean,” he said, “it was interesting, that’s for sure. All that about what color you should paint your car and different colors for different days of the week and depending on your mood. I didn’t totally buy it. I mean, some Fridays I just want to wear a red shirt.”
“I hear you.”
He was thoughtful a moment. “You remember that lime- green Datsun Peter Morton used to have?”
“Peter…Morton.”
“That quiet guy with the glasses? Didn’t you used to go out with him?”
“Oh, yeah. Uh-huh.”
He gave me a long, steady look. “Yeah. I thought so. Well, did you know I bought that car from him?”
“You?” I remembered Peter telling me he sold it to a high school kid. It was the kid’s first car—Peter liked that idea and gave him a discount.
Dave smiled. “I was sixteen. That car ran freaking forever. Lime green is supposed to be the worst color of all for cars.”
“How did you know I…?”
“I went over to Train Line to pick up the papers from him. You were sitting on the steps of the house, reading a book. You looked exactly the same.”
“Really? That was an awful long time ago.”
“I know.” Dave took a swig of his drink. “I liked the way you looked. I remembered you.”
“That was an awful long time ago,” I said again, feeling stunned.
“Yeah, well. It wasn’t like I was sitting around waiting until I thought I was old enough. I was in the army, then college, etcetera. When I started working at Train Line and you were over in the library, I thought I’d sooner or later make a move. You don’t exactly make a guy welcome, you know.”