by Suzan Saxman
I resented the Virgin, all covered up in her blue and white robes like she was hiding something. There was something false about her. Or maybe I had her confused with my own mother.
“Isn’t there another Mary?” I asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“I like the other Mary.”
“Mary Magdalene?”
“That’s her,” I said. “That one.”
I recognized her name. I saw her in my mind, a woman with long dark hair, naked and dancing in the woods. She was of the forest; she was part of nature; she was nature, the essence of nature. She was freedom and laughter and music. I didn’t see any of that when I looked at my mother’s statue. That Mary was bound beneath her chaste blue and white robes, controlled by men. She was what men wanted women to be. My heart yearned for the other Mary, the untamed one. But all of these sensations were trapped inside of me and I had no idea how I was supposed to express them. My thoughts were too big for my little head, and they were dark and deep and wild.
“Mary Magdalene wasn’t a very nice lady. How do you know about her?” My mother’s eyes narrowed.
“The TV,” I lied. I had no idea how I knew that there was another Mary, but I did.
“You don’t need to know anything at all about Mary Magdalene,” said my mother. I could tell she didn’t like her.
I also knew my mother didn’t like children. She told me so. Sometimes she remembered to add as an afterthought that she did like my sister and me, and sometimes she didn’t. She decorated our house with Hummel figurines of rosy-cheeked Alpine girls and boys. They were frighteningly cheerful in their frozen state of happiness. I thought they were hideous. Was this who I was supposed to be? A von Trapp family singer?
She made me wear velvet dresses and gold shoes—outfits so fanciful that the other kindergartners called me Princess Suzan when I went to school—but I never remember her once telling me that she loved me.
In kindergarten, the teachers realized that I was practically blind. I had always been used to the world being blurry and unfocused, but now I couldn’t see the blackboard. My mother took me to the optometrist, and he told us I needed thick corrective lenses.
My mother let me pick out pastel pink plastic frames that made me feel pretty. When we got home, however, she told me how ugly I looked in them. “They don’t do anything for you. I hope you’re not going to let people see you in them.”
I immediately lost them, and everything became fuzzy again. I could read print, but the wider world didn’t exist for me. It’s amazing I never got hit by a car. I was that blind.
I could see the dead around me, though, with perfect clarity. Everything else was fuzzy, but the spirits had edges, detail, brilliance. I was seeing them with my third eye, and that eye, apparently, did not need glasses. Even today I like to do blind readings. My eyes are open, but I take out my contacts and let the real world blur so I can bring the spiritual realm into focus.
In bed with my mother at night, I’d often wake up to find three spirits watching over me. They were the hooded figures of men dressed in robes. I knew they were holy and wise; they radiated peace and made me feel perfectly serene. The man in the middle was tall, with a black beard. He would nod at me; I would nod back. He smiled when I acknowledged him, but we never spoke to each other. I would wake up and see them, usually around three o’clock: the witching hour, the hour of God.
All throughout the day I would look forward to that moment when I would see my three men, and I would panic if for some reason I didn’t see them. But they came almost every night until I was ten years old, which is around the age when even ordinary kids stop seeing their invisible friends. My mother was always asleep when they arrived. I knew they wouldn’t come if she was awake. Even today I don’t know for certain exactly who they were. But I sensed I had known them for lifetimes, and somehow I knew that they were my guardians. Somehow I also knew that they had given me the gift of prophecy.
Later I would realize that these men were probably the keepers of the Akashic Records. According to Hinduism everything that is destined to happen to us is contained within the Akashic Records, and my sweet little monks were giving me access to them. What a blessing that turned out to be!
Given what my life has been like as a psychic, I probably should have been more frightened of the Three Amigos than the man in the black hat. Thanks, guys! What a gift. They gave me an instrument to play and the skill to play it, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stuck it in the closet and tried to ignore it. But that’s the way it is for a lot of people, not just me. You’ve got a destiny, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t run from it. You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.
I’m sure that’s why I got so sick when I was six years old. I came down with a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis—an old person’s disease invading a young person’s body. My fever soared and the family brought me to the hospital. The doctors were getting ready to immerse me in an ice bath when the fever miraculously broke. Still, they kept me in the hospital for days.
My family behaved appropriately, arriving with a stuffed rabbit for me to cuddle. But I knew that something was missing from my mother when she looked at me—some kind of honest affection. She didn’t touch me, but just stared at me from the end of the bed. Hers was a masquerade of concern.
I knew I might die when I was in the hospital, but I wasn’t afraid. I thought about death all the time: not in any particularly morbid way, but with a simple, clear awareness that it might happen at any moment. I recognized the likelihood of death the way old people often do. It was right around the corner. It was no big deal.
I knew I might ascend to the next level. I can remember thinking about it just that way, ascend to the next level, and it certainly wasn’t something I’d heard talked about in Catholic kindergarten. It wasn’t the way most little girls thought; I knew that. The problem was, I didn’t feel connected to anything around me. I wasn’t of this time, of this country, of this family. Maybe I could die and come back and find my true place. I was the thing in the picture that didn’t belong. What’s wrong with this picture? Me.
But I didn’t die.
I did get left back that year and had to do kindergarten all over again. I returned to school older than the other kids and unable to play at recess or run around in gym because my joints would swell and hurt. I couldn’t see the ball to play games anyway. I couldn’t see the kids.
I was embarrassed and I wanted to fit in, and at the same time I knew that I wasn’t a kid anyway. When the other children teased me or ignored me, I accepted it as my lot in life. I was supposed to be separate and different. That’s the way it had always been for me, right? I was a blind, crippled old lady. The child’s body was just a disguise. And it didn’t surprise me that it didn’t fool the other kids.
I continued to have high fevers, which I actually looked forward to and enjoyed. Dazed and delirious in bed, I would gaze up at the ceiling at tiny winged beings hovering in the corner of my room. They had the ugly, pointed faces of rodents, a twitchy sweetness, and they gazed at me with affection. These Beatrix Potter characters gone wrong were my real friends. Even today, I keep pet rats in memory of them. They were emissaries, but I didn’t understand yet the message that they were bringing to me.
I know now that people like me often have illnesses as children that separate them from the world. Many of the psychics I would meet later on had experienced debilitating viruses and strange life-threatening infections. Lots of artists, musicians, and writers also got really sick when they were kids. Shamans almost always suffered through some kind of disease before they were identified. Perhaps there was something about the fever that changed the workings of my brain, but I don’t think that’s really it. I was as open to the spirits before my illness as I was after it. What my rheumatism did was make it impossible for me to participate in ordinary life. Like my blindness, it turned me in on myself, and that’s what enhanced my psychic powers. I’ve
read that young racehorses are confined to their stalls except when they’re training. They’re not allowed to play in the fields with the other foals. They might hurt themselves. They might waste their energy. They don’t get to play reindeer games. They’re different.
Even within my own family I was alone, and that loneliness left me to explore the only world I could really see, the world that was invisible to everyone else. If I had grown up in a nice family, an ordinary family with warmth and love, I might have forgotten who I was and become, well, if not ordinary, then more ordinary than I was. But that never happened. I was born knowing that these people were not my real family and theirs was not my home. Home was somewhere else—only it would be many, many years before I would figure out where that home really was.
A soldier came to see me. He’d been in Afghanistan. He had shark eyes, blank and dead. His girlfriend had made the appointment and she dragged him into the store. He slouched in the chair opposite me, his arms crossed protectively around his middle. He wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“You’ve fathered a lot of kids,” I noted. “I can see them all over.”
“Yeah,” he muttered. “Whatever.”
“Do you want to know where they are?”
“Nope.”
“Really?”
“I said no.”
As he was talking to me, I saw him with a stick in his hand, bashing in someone’s head. He was brutal, violent, out of control. “You’re a tough guy,” I said. “Where do you work now?”
“Maximum-security prison,” he said.
“You hurt the prisoners,” I said.
“I give them what they deserve.” He shifted in his chair uncomfortably and looked at the door.
“But you used to be a sniper,” I said. “You killed a lot of people.”
“Something like that.” The lack of emotion in his face was disturbing.
A young girl had come into the room and was standing beside him. About four years old and tiny, with long brown hair, she was touching his arm protectively, as if she loved him.
“I see a little girl beside you,” I said. “She has long brown hair. Beautiful green eyes.”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” he snapped. His whole body had suddenly become tense. He started rocking back and forth, back and forth.
“She says it wasn’t your fault. She wants you to know that. Your parents should never have left you in charge of her in the first place. You were too young. Much too young.”
“I don’t want to talk about this. Can we please not talk about this?”
“Your sister wants you to know that she loves you. It’s not your fault she drowned in the pool. She’s never blamed you. You were only a year older than she was. You couldn’t swim either. She loves you so much. So much.”
“Please,” he begged me. “Can we not talk about this?”
He wasn’t crying or showing any emotion, but at least I knew why he was such a monster. I don’t know if it changed him or not. But a whole slew of corrections officers started calling me for appointments after that.
2
Tales from the Crypt
As a little girl, I was small and dark, with deep brown eyes and two black braids that hung on either side of my face. I didn’t look like anyone else in the family. My mother was blond with blue eyes. My sister was blond with blue eyes. Daddy, too, was Nordic and blond.
“Whose daughter are you?” relatives would ask me at get-togethers.
“Anne’s,” I’d answer, catching the confused expression on their faces.
I just didn’t look like any of them. I looked like Wednesday Addams.
I looked like Steve.
Steve was the man who came over every day after Daddy left for work.
Steve was a pirate, a madman, a failed actor, a womanizer, a merchant marine, and a homeless man who lived under the Verrazano Bridge in his car like a troll. He was also my real father.
Every morning, Daddy drove off in his green Renault and Steve drove up in his car, also—coincidentally, strangely, confusingly—a green Renault. He always parked it down the street, just a little bit away from our house, and then walked up to the front door. From the time I was very little, I was the lookout. I’d peer out the window watching Daddy’s car disappear around the corner, hoping I wouldn’t see it again that morning, that he hadn’t forgotten anything, that he wouldn’t be coming back. I’d let my mother know when I saw Steve in his trench coat, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, a smile on his lips, approaching our front door. He had to be let in quickly, before the neighbors could see.
This daily craziness made me totally neurotic. I was on edge all the time. What if someone sees? What if Daddy comes home? What if someone figures out Steve is really my father? I always knew I was his daughter. Even if he hadn’t told me, hadn’t whispered to me that when I was twenty-one I could change my name to his, I still would have known. Steve and I were kindred spirits, and I adored him.
Daddy was a pleasant face behind the newspaper. He was very kind, but in my whole life we never had any kind of conversation. He was there. He was a constant. He was a part of the furniture. He must have known I wasn’t his daughter, but he never once spoke of it. In fact, years later, long after he was dead, he visited me and told me he’d known everything and it didn’t matter, adding that I should stop cooking with Teflon pans because they caused cancer. He did play catch with me in the backyard sometimes, but I couldn’t see the ball, of course. He worked. He read the paper. He golfed. If I were casting the movie of my life, he’d be played by Henry Fonda.
And for my real father, for Steve, I would cast Errol Flynn.
In fact, Steve used to dress up as Robin Hood. I have a photo of him in the real Sherwood Forest. He used to like to frolic through the woods in full costume—in tights, wearing a little Robin Hood hat, carrying a real bow and arrow. He loved dressing up and always wanted his costumes to be as historically accurate as possible. The jerkin and the belt were made from real leather. He had swords he claimed came from the set of Robin Hood, and, well, they might have. He’d been in Hollywood for a time.
Before my sister was born, when my mother was still a newlywed, she was working at Wanamaker’s in Manhattan, in the cosmetics department. One day, at lunch, she was walking up Fifth Avenue when this incredibly handsome man in a trench coat approached her. She was sure he was a movie star, maybe Tyrone Power. He was smiling at her.
My mother was very blond and very pretty.
“Excuse me, my dear,” the stranger said smoothly. “Can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?”
Dazzled already, my mother offered to show him the way. She knew she’d seen this man in a movie. She just couldn’t think which one.
“Why don’t you take my arm?” he asked her as they walked along.
She placed her arm in his, and as she did so she noticed a strange rustling noise coming from his feet. She looked down and saw wadded-up newspapers poking out from the soles of the man’s shoes. She realized that the trousers he was wearing were torn and dirty and that beneath the trench coat was not a dapper suit but remnants and rags. But he had this charm about him. That’s what she told me later, how she explained it. He had this charm about him.
And she was right. He did.
So my mother, married and Catholic and pious, began a twenty-year affair with a homeless man she met on the streets of New York. And I was the child who came of it.
She fixed him eggs and bacon every morning while I kept guard from the living room. Later they’d disappear into my mother’s bedroom. “If Daddy comes home, we have to hide Steve,” my mother had explained to me, and I was very anxious about my two fathers running into each other. Any number of times they almost did.
I felt like my head was going to explode. The world was filled with things I wasn’t supposed to talk about. I saw spirits I wasn’t supposed to see. I saw real people I had to pretend I didn’t know about. If I made a mistake, if I mentioned to Daddy that
Mommy and I had gone to the department store or a showing of the movie Doctor Dolittle, my mother would grab my arm, pinching it hard, digging her fingernails into my skin, and glaring at me with her eyebrows raised. She didn’t drive, you see.
“How did you get there?” Daddy would ask.
Everything had to be hidden from him, every single activity, every toy and book that Steve brought to me. I had no idea what was safe to talk about and what wasn’t. I learned not to talk about anything, but it made me feel insane.
I began falling into mirrors. I would go into the bathroom to brush my teeth and two hours later I would hear my mother screaming at me, “Where are you? What are you doing?” My toothbrush would be in the sink. Where had I been? What had I been doing?
Mirrors, for me, are like portals to other worlds. Maybe there’s some truth to the reflective power of crystal balls, although I’ve certainly never used one. As an adult I often had to keep the mirrors covered so they wouldn’t pull me in and even today I don’t look in them, but as a child I couldn’t tell anyone what was happening.
It would begin as a buzzing sound that emanated from the reflected images inside the mirrored world. They were voices, so many voices, hundreds of voices, in languages I sometimes recognized but usually didn’t, and they were all clamoring for my attention. They needed me to hear them. They had things to say. So many urgent, desperate things to say. I couldn’t move; I was trying with every cell of my body to listen to them and I’d completely lose track of time. The voices were mesmerizing. And always, somewhere behind them, among them, hidden in the shadows, was the man in the black hat. Was he tormenting me? Was he trying to make me crazy? Was I crazy? I worried that I was. Even as a little girl I knew that only crazy people heard voices in the mirrors.
Every other kid in the United States in the 1960s was glued to the television, but I was hypnotized by the bathroom mirror. I only wish the reception had been better.
I became very compulsive. I counted the steps it took me to walk from the front door to the window. I snapped my fingers three times whenever I sat down. I checked lights; I twisted doorknobs. I had to have my little rituals to make me feel in control. Because, clearly, everything in my life was out of control.