by Amber Foxx
“I’m too nervous to eat. I can’t seem to get right with this gift. I hate it when people think it’s not real or it’s wrong, but when I use it I worry about how I can aim it.”
“I’m sure it’s hard on you not having a teacher. Most traditional societies would train you with an elder who shared your gift. You’d apprentice for a long time.”
“Mama wouldn’t let Granma tell me.”
Bernadette ate, sipped her coffee, looked at Mae, then off into space, as if she could see something of interest on the blank white wall.
A pear-shaped woman in jeans and an India-print cotton shirt and gauzy scarf stopped at their table. “Excuse me,” she said to Bernadette, “you’re American Indian?”
“Apache,” Bernadette said.
“Oh. How wonderful. I’m part Cherokee, on my mother’s side.” The woman was as white as Mae. “I feel a lot of kinship with that part of my heritage. Do you know where I could find someone doing a sweat lodge around here?”
Bernadette shook her head, smiling politely, and said, “Sorry, I don’t,” then returned her attention to eating. The woman walked away. “If I were corrupt,” Bernadette said, “I could make a lot of money from people like her. It’s sad. Spiritually hungry people can be very gullible.”
Mae thought of the conversation she’d overheard between Charlie and Dana. It sounded like Dana had believed in the reincarnation book—and perhaps even believed that she’d known Charlie in past lives. Could Dana, the former skeptic, be spiritually hungry now—and gullible? Mae’s experiment in class might have opened the door for that to happen, but Charlie must have pushed a lot through that opening. “I’m worried about what I’ll come up with for them. I don’t want to take people in.” And she didn’t want to see more than she had to, as she had with Dana. “Do you know ways I can concentrate better?”
“You could learn to meditate, I suppose. But that’s a discipline that takes time.” Bernadette took another thoughtful pause. “Our part-Cherokee friend made me think. Some Cherokee healers, and some Navajo healers too, use crystals. To help them see, to diagnose.”
“Like a crystal ball?”
“No, rock crystals. And there are some uses for precious metals and minerals in Ayurveda, for balancing your own energy. It might work. They sell crystals in the bookstore. We should take a look.”
Once she saw the expanse of the store, Mae wanted to look at everything, so Bernadette took her on a quick tour, explaining as they went. It intrigued and surprised Mae that books on subjects she’d been taught were hocus-pocus, like astrology and herbal medicine, as well as things she’d never heard of, like astral travel, sold well enough to support a store. A lot of people must take this stuff seriously.
In the back of the store was a small section on Native American traditions, which offered books, CDs, drums and wooden flutes, and some bundles of dried plants.
“These are smudges.” Bernadette handed a thick bundle of velvety yet crisp grayish leaves to Mae. The scent was earthy but sweet. “That’s sage. I like to use it with cedar or juniper.”
“What does this do?”
“Besides smell good? The smoke is a path for spirits to walk on, and for your prayers to travel on. It’s also for protection and cleansing.” Bernadette picked up a cedar bundle as well as a sage smudge stick. “Do you want some?”
“If I brought that home, I’d never hear the end of it.”
Bernadette smiled and carried the smudge sticks to the cash register at the central glass counter that filled the middle of the bookstore.
The glass turned out to be a case filled with crystals. Mae was transfixed. A row of geodes, like caves full of gemstone stalactites, sat on one of the shelves. Some of the large ones glowed pale purple with amethyst, others glimmered with translucent golden crystals, and the small ones held dark gray points in their tiny cave mouths. Clear quartz points, green rocks, blue rocks, and pink rocks drew her in. It was not only the way they absorbed the light and sent it back to her, or the colors and shapes, but something else. She wanted to hold them.
“How would I choose which ones would help me?” Mae asked.
The salesclerk pointed to a row of books between bookends on the counter to her left. The bookends were made from geodes, glorious and mysterious wombs of deep purple crystals inside rough gray ovals of rock. “We have a few books. They’re all good. But if you don’t have time to read them, you could start with whatever appeals to you.”
“They all do.”
Bernadette laid a turquoise-ringed hand on the counter above a display of small stones and asked the clerk to get them out. “Maybe if you touch them, you’ll know.”
The clerk spread the small colorful stones on the glass, and Mae started to sort through them, attracted to certain colors and shapes. Then she stopped, imagining her family’s objections. “I can’t spend my money on a bunch of rocks.”
“Those are the least expensive ones,” the clerk said. “And they still should have their powers.”
In the background, played music such as Mae had never heard before. A deep, droning, buzzing instrument, layered with drumming, and a man’s clear tenor voice chanting pure tones without words. It was like being swept up in the ocean. She fought the urge to give into it all and buy crystals.
“I can’t do this.”
“So just look at them,” Bernadette said, browsing through the books on crystals. “Get to know them.”
Mae sifted through the stones in front of her. If she were going to buy some, she would pick these. She slid a rose quartz, a cluster of little pale green crystals, a bright green translucent stone, a small hunk of turquoise, and a piece of amethyst, into a little heap. Then a pure white stone and a white one that seemed to have green leaves in it spoke to her. They felt healing or steadying. How strange to feel this way about some rocks. The atmosphere of the store was making her spiritually hungry and gullible.
“This book says clear quartz is powerful. Quartz points. I think that’s what the Navajo crystal gazers use.” Bernadette closed the book, but left it on the counter and moved it towards Mae’s pile of stones. “Add four of those.”
As the clerk took four pointed clear crystals from the case and added them to the heap, Mae protested. “I’m just looking. I can’t buy this. Sorry. I didn’t mean to make you think—”
“And the book,” Bernadette said, laying her purse on the counter and taking her wallet out. “I can’t be your teacher, Mae. I’m only a scholar, not a medicine woman. But I want to do something. I think these speak to you, don’t they? Please, let me.”
“I appreciate the offer, really, but I can’t come home with a bunch of crystals and a book about them. My husband will—I told him I wasn’t going to let this take over my life.”
The clerk looked back and forth from Mae to Bernadette. “Should I ring these up?”
Mae gazed at the sparkling collection of crystals. Something in her actually craved them. Her hand wanted to wrap around each stone and feel it, and she could even imagine herself walking right into the big purple geode of the bookend and closing her eyes and feeling more at home in that cave than she had anywhere on earth.
“I don’t get it. Why do I like these so much?”
“Stones are powerful,” Bernadette said. “There are sacred places all over the world, caves and mountains, where people have felt energy and healing for centuries. My people have four sacred mountains.” She arranged a black, a yellow, a blue and a multi-colored stone in a square. Still gazing at her arrangement, she said to Mae, “Aren’t you from the mountains?”
“Yeah.” Mae handled the crystals she had chosen again. The North Carolina mountains were full of gemstones. “I still miss them.” She suspected Bernadette did, too.
“And they’re made of rocks. It's not so strange, Mae. These are the bones of the earth.” Bernadette moved her four sacred mountains into Mae’s pile. “If they speak to you, I’d like to give them to you.”
Bernadette’s wor
ds, and perhaps the crystals themselves, stirred Mae with a sense of something powerful and unsettling. “Thank you. It’s really kind. But ... what if they really work?”
Bernadette nodded to the salesclerk and handed her a credit card, then looked at Mae. “You really are afraid of your calling, aren’t you?”
Mae put the bag with the book and crystals in her purse, glad that it was big enough to hold it all. The salesclerk had wrapped the stones in a little dark green velvet pouch with a drawstring. That pouch and the book were only coming out of her purse when no one else was at home.
Mae climbed the stairs to the area above the store, looking for the manager’s office. She wound through several narrow hallways with flat gray industrial carpets and plain white walls decorated with posters of people with lights along their spines before she found it, a lavender-walled room that smelled of incense. A large-bosomed light-skinned African-American woman, so fair that freckles showed across her golden face, rose from behind a desk.
“Welcome. You must be Mae. I’m Deborah.” She reached across the desk to shake Mae's hand. “Charlie said you were great. Are you his student? I went to CVU—must be ten years ago now.”
“No ma’am. I’m taking a personal trainer certification course there. His TA is teaching it. That’s how he met me.”
“Isn’t he great? You’ve got to love Charlie.” Deborah sank back into her chair. “He makes you laugh, and he makes you think.”
Mae held back her opinion of Charlie. Was she the only person in the world immune to him? No—the dean seemed to be, that woman on the stairs who wished he would retire. “He did make me think.”
“You know, I didn’t believe in anything but good old Bible-toting Christianity when I started his classes. And look at me now. I still have Jesus and everything else. It’s been a wonderful journey.” Deborah beamed. All Mae could think of was the wolf and the glowing hand, and the way Charlie acted around Dana.
Deborah seemed to take the silence well, though, as she soon spoke again. “I’m glad you can work Sundays. That’s one of our big days for readings. Here’s how we work. If you do readings up here, in one of the private rooms, people make appointments, and we take walk-ins if you’re not busy. You get a break in-between, so you don’t see two people exactly back-to-back. Our different psychics have different needs for their breaks, so you decide how long you need. See how today goes. People sign up for a minimum of fifteen minutes, and up to an hour. Another thing about doing readings up here. It’s peaceful and private and you can concentrate, but because the store is providing the space, we do split the take with you. If you prefer to freelance downstairs, you’re welcome to use the table and chairs in the bookstore if no one’s sitting there. Or if the café isn’t busy, take a table there. Anything you can earn downstairs is yours.”
Mae’s heart sank. “So, upstairs you split the money what way?”
“Seventy-thirty. You get seventy percent. It comes to forty-two an hour, for an hour-long session. Since most of our psychics only work a few hours a week, we write the check at end of your workday.”
Not bad, Mae realized, still better than the sixty-forty split she would get at Health Quest for personal training. But she needed the whole thing. No one had warned her of this, and she had been counting on earning the money in three weeks and quitting.
“Do you have a preference what I do?”
“Today we have a few people booked up here, and you’re the only person doing readings until two. Most psychics prefer to be up here for the quiet.”
“So I’m on for four hours up here?”
“I hope that’s all right. Right now you have five fifteen-minute appointments with space in-between. I made sure you didn’t have any appointments from twelve to twelve thirty so you can run down to the café and get some lunch. Let me show you around and take you to your room.”
Rising again, Deborah came out from behind her desk and led Mae back into the maze of hallways. Many of the doors had signs that indicated massages in session. A large room on one hallway had a yoga class. Deborah pointed out the restrooms and reminded Mae of how to get from the stairway back to the manager’s office.
“Here you are.” Deborah flipped a light switch and the room glowed. The lights were like Christmas tree lights around the edges of the ceiling, only pink and purple. Brook and Stream would like them—but Mae didn’t.
Two metal folding chairs sat on either side of a small round table draped with a purple cloth. On the walls, pictures of people, most appearing to be from India, gazed beatifically across at each other. The only face Mae recognized was Tibetan, the Dalai Lama. His picture might be only part of the room Mae liked. And she was going to be in here for most of four hours, to earn fifty-two dollars, if she’d done the math right. By the time she bought lunch and gas ... it looked bad.
“You have an eleven fifteen,” Deborah said. “I’ll send them back. And, one more thing. Next week,” Deborah gave Mae a scrutinizing glance, “you might dress a little more ... like people expect for a psychic.”
Deborah was wearing a long batik print dress in flattering shades of gold and brown and African-looking bronze earrings. Mae wondered if that was the desired look. As someone who never wore anything but workout clothes or jeans, she tried to think what might be in her closet—maybe some dresses Rhoda-Rae had given her over the years. But she didn’t like the idea of having to put on an act or a costume. “I don’t dress up, really. I think I’ll be fine being myself.”
“Belief is important. They have to think you’re different and special.”
“I don’t have to wear a turban or anything, do I?”
Deborah laughed. “No. But something softer would be good. Play up the Celtic look. All right, I’ll send your first client back. Do you have a working name?”
Like a stripper? The girls at that club out past Colerain that Mack liked to go to called themselves things like Tiger and Kitten. “I’d rather not.”
“It helps. Like the clothes. Something that sets the mood.”
Mae began to sense that Deborah thought the way Charlie did—that this was mostly theater with a little bit of actual ability thrown in. “I have no idea. I’m Mae, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t want to come across as some kind of act.”
Deborah waved her hand dismissively. “Looking at you, I’d try Deirdre or Maeve, but listening to you ... Are you Appalachian? How about Breda? Sort of Irish, could be mountain-like, I guess.”
Mae thought she could answer to it if she had to, and tried to hold back the irritation she felt. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to get herself fired before her first client, but her tone still came out with a touch of resentment. “If it helps people for some reason, I reckon you can call me that.”
“I like it. Breda.” Deborah nodded, satisfied, and left, her exotic dress swaying with her walk.
Mae paced the purple-pink room. Great. I’m making next to nothing going under some fake name in this tacky little pink room. She pictured dressing herself in some ridiculous flowing outfit with beads and feathers, and hoped it wouldn’t have to come to that. Breda. Why not Oz the Great and Powerful?
“Hi,” said a timid voice. Mae stopped pacing and turned to see a short, thin young man with a sunken chest. He wore thick glasses, his hair seemed to need washing, his pants fit loose on his scrawny frame, and his shirt needed ironing. Mae felt sorry for him, and her anger faded. He asked, “Are you Breda?”
“Yes. Come on in, have a seat. What’s your name?”
“Jimmy.”
They sat opposite each other, and Jimmy peered hopefully into Mae’s eyes.
“How can I help you, Jimmy? What would you like to ask?”
He described a plan for a business he wanted to start and asked if she could see if it would succeed. The future. Could she do it? Mae asked for something of his to hold, something he used often, and he took off his glasses. They felt unpleasantly greasy, but she held them, closed her eyes, and tried to ignore Ji
mmy’s rancid breath. Poor guy, he really was a mess.
Visualizing a ball game to focus her mind, Mae breathed slowly and tried to tune into Jimmy’s energy from his glasses. Anxiety, a tremble of fear, came through. But the tunnel didn’t open, and the ball didn’t come to her. She felt pressured—he’d paid for fifteen minutes—and she couldn’t stay focused while she was so aware of the need to get somewhere fast and get an answer to him ... about something she couldn’t know. It wasn’t like the class at CVU, when Bernadette had called it an experiment. This was paid work. All she could sense was his anxiety, and her own.
She opened her eyes and took a guess. “Have you had a business fail in the past?”
“Yes,” he said, wide-eyed with amazement. “How did you know?”
She guessed again. “You’re really worried about trying again.”
“Terrified. But I think I have a better idea this time.”
The idea that he described, a custom cap and T-shirt shop, was hardly far-fetched, and from what he told her he seemed to have done a lot of planning. “I just need to get a loan, but I know the location. There’s a perfect spot coming open.”
Would a loan officer look only at the business plan, or also at Jimmy? After resenting Deborah’s suggestions that she dress better, Mae felt as if she were arguing with herself. Finally she said, “I see you doing something different.” She handed his glasses back. “I see you going to a stylist and shopping for some new clothes. I see you changing your whole look.”
“Really?” He frowned. “Me?”
“I do. And ...” She hesitated, but his breath. He needed to do something or he’d lose business just by talking to people. “I also see you going to your dentist about something. Has it been a while?”
He nodded, smiling with closed lips. “You’re incredible. So is this before or after I get the loan?”
“Before.”
“But the business?”
“Keep in mind ... The future ...” Mae fumbled. She couldn’t tell this man whether his business would succeed or fail. She wanted to run out of the room and yell, I’m not Breda and I can’t see the future.