The Reluctant Psychic

by Suzan Saxman

  “Get down here! Right this instant!” my mother would screech.

  But I had to do my whole little Macarena of tics before I was ready to do anything. This toxic mix of frustration and rage percolated inside of me and made my heart race. I had no way other than my counting to manage it. Nothing could be discussed. I had no friend to share what was happening. I was a nervous wreck.

  I remember seeing Daddy’s car turning into our driveway one day and panicking. Was it really Daddy’s car? Steve had already arrived, hadn’t he? Oh no, he was in Mommy’s room and Daddy was already getting out of the Renault! I flew upstairs so fast I tripped over the hassock in the living room, sprawling as I shouted, “He’s coming! He’s almost here.”

  “Oh God, oh God, oh God!” I heard Steve shouting.

  My mother pushed past me on the stairs, straightening her hair. Already out of breath, I staggered up to the second-floor hallway and grabbed Steve, dragging him to my toy-filled closet, shutting the door, and sitting on my bed, my heart pounding.

  I still have dreams of hiding Steve and I still have dreams of Daddy, but even in my dreams I never let them meet each other.

  Aunt Mary came over from time to time, too. Crippled by polio as a little girl, my mother’s sister lived nearby with my grandmother. Aunt Mary claimed to see things. If a bird flew into the house, she was sure someone was going to die. She had a lot of the old superstitious folk beliefs that she’d whisper to me when my mother was out of the room. Aunt Mary said she’d once seen a black-hooded figure floating through her house. She said that my grandfather, who was from Yugoslavia, had seen a man turn into a dog. She hinted that there was an old curse on our family. I wondered if I wasn’t that curse.

  She said later that she always knew that there was something different about me.

  Not long after my illness, we were playing cards together (I think it was the children’s game Concentration) when she noticed that I wasn’t remembering which cards were which, but that I seemed to know what they were before they were turned over. She began testing me. She’d take a deck out and lay the cards facedown on the table. She would point to a card and ask me what color it was, red or black. I’d tell her. Then she would ask me to tell her the suit of the card she was pointing to. “It’s a club,” I’d know. “It’s a heart.” It got to where I could tell what number the card was—an ace or a queen or a ten.

  Unfortunately, I can’t do this anymore. As I got older, it wasn’t a skill that I thought was particularly interesting or important, so I never cultivated it. Believe me, I’ve tried at casinos, but if it has to do with money, I’m useless. Don’t come to me if what you want are the winning lottery numbers. I don’t know them. But when I was a little kid, reading cards was the only talent I had and I clung to it. I didn’t take dance classes, I didn’t draw, I didn’t play sports, and I couldn’t even ride a bike. But I could win at Concentration without even trying.

  “She got forty of them right this time,” I heard Aunt Mary whispering to my mother. But it was all kept very hush-hush. I knew this information upset my mother. She’d shake her head, make Aunt Mary put away the cards, make her promise not to test me again. My mother certainly never praised me or even talked to me about what had happened.

  I knew enough not to show off my abilities at school, but even so I didn’t fit in. I was both older than the other children and smaller than them. I couldn’t run or play sports on the playground. I didn’t watch the right TV shows or listen to the right music. I didn’t know what I was allowed to talk about and what I wasn’t. The other little girls were obsessed with babies, but when I visited Daddy at the hospital where he worked, I used to ride the elevator down to the basement in the hopes that I’d see a dead body being wheeled into the morgue. I had never seen an actual corpse, but I wanted to. I wondered if I might be able to detect its soul still lingering close. I had no idea how to be a child. No wonder I was teased and bullied at my Catholic school.

  The other kids didn’t play with me. They’d grab my lunch on the playground and throw it around. They’d shout at me, “Are you retarded? Is there something the matter with you?” And they would start chanting, “Suzan is a retard. Suzan is a retard.”

  I balled my hands into fists and dug my fingernails into my palms. I was genuinely scared of these kids. I thought they might hurt me. At the same time, I was desperate for a friend and I had no idea how to have one. I was scared to go to school. I hated being at home. It felt like there was no place in the world where I belonged or where I was safe.

  I’d run away at recess to the steps of St. Theresa’s Church. But I didn’t sit on them. I climbed through a hole underneath them into a small crypt-like space next to the graveyard. You’d think a little kid would be scared and lonely in a place like that, but I wasn’t. I was comfortable. Happy even. That dark and dirty cobwebbed lair was the only place I felt any comfort and security. And I wasn’t really alone.

  Often, when I was sitting in the crypt, I would look up and see a woman in black walking by. I don’t think she was dressed in modern clothes. She never said anything or stopped to peer into where I was hiding, but I felt like she knew I was there. Sometimes an old nun would crawl under the stairs and sit beside me. She was ancient, with a face like a dried-apple doll, and she wore an old-fashioned habit with rosary beads hanging from her belt. The nuns at school wore skirts, and for some reason I couldn’t really explain, I didn’t approve. Nuns were supposed to dress like this, like my nun, Sister Agatha.

  Sometimes Sister Agatha would gently ask how I was, but other than that she didn’t say anything that I remember. She just sat there with me, the way few adults know how to be with children. Once when I was very upset after my classmates’ teasing, she patted me on the arm reassuringly. Her touch was as real and soothing as that of any living human being, although she was probably dead because she wore an old-fashioned habit. I don’t really know. I never saw her in the school or the convent and I knew enough not to ask who she might be. She was a lot nicer than the living nuns at my school, in any case.

  It’s very hard for the dead to fully materialize in our world so that they can be seen by the naked eye, and if they can get here from their dimension we should treat them with respect and affection. It’s easy for them to be around us, but it’s hard for them to assume a form that we can recognize. Ghosts don’t have to be scary. They can comfort us. We can comfort them.

  At home no one knew what was going on, that I spent much of each day in a crypt like a vampire.

  I was frightened to tell my mother what was happening. She would assume that I was doing something to the other children, that I was the problem. Still, one of the nuns must have called her and told her that I wasn’t fitting in, because one day she showed up on the playground as a monitor.

  She arrived wearing a leopard fur coat, penciled-in eyebrows, and bright red lipstick. She stood on the edge of the playground with her arms crossed, glaring at the children like she was Joan Crawford or Eva Braun. The kids were all whispering to one another.

  “Who’s the scary lady?”

  “There’s a mean lady, Sister, staring at us!” screamed one of the kids to a passing nun.

  “Who is she?”

  “Who is she?”

  “That’s my mother,” I finally admitted.

  “That’s Suzan Ellzer’s mother!” The word spread like wildfire. For weeks after her appearance, kids were still teasing me about her. Luckily, she never came back.

  My mother never talked to me about the other children. She never let me invite anyone over. There were no birthday parties. If I did befriend some little girl as hopeless as myself, my mother would mock her until I dropped her.

  At one point in elementary school, a small Italian girl befriended me. She used to offer to ride me home on her bike. I loved riding double with her. I didn’t have a bike of my own. But each day when I came inside, my mother would be staring out the window. “She’s so unkempt,” my mother said. The next day sh
e commented, “What a big nose that girl has.” One day she just sighed. “That girl’s family…” Her voice trailed. Whatever was the matter with them was too terrible to speak out loud.

  The next time I briefly befriended another girl, my mother kept pointing out how ugly her hair was. “Have you noticed how matted it is in the back?” my mother said. Even worse was when she would tell me that the girl wasn’t really my friend, that she couldn’t be. “She doesn’t really like you, you know.” I believed my mother, too. I accepted that there was something fundamentally unlikeable about me.

  I think Steve knew that life wasn’t always easy for me. After one of his trips with the merchant marines, he brought me a Dracula statue that I loved. Steve told me that his mother was Transylvanian and that we were related to Vlad the Impaler, who was, in Steve’s imagination, a hero in Romania.

  Steve traveled to England, Australia, Greece, and all over the world and brought me fairy-tale books with beautiful illustrations. He told me the stories of the Arthurian knights and took me out into the woods to learn how to duel. We’d thrust and parry, plastic swords in our hands. He taught me how to use a rope swing. When my mother got angry at him (and that happened a lot because she was very jealous of his other girlfriends), she’d throw away all the things he’d given me, banging pots and pans, screaming that I was just like him. “I can’t even look at you! You look like your father!”

  I loved my father’s stories. He’d traveled all over the world; he loved music and film and literature. He’d been an actor for a while in Hollywood and said he’d kissed Marilyn Monroe and been friends with Boris Karloff and gotten somebody famous pregnant. My father said that’s why he’d had to leave L.A.

  Steve loved taking my mother and me to the movies, even if sometimes he fell asleep, a cigarette in his mouth, and his hair caught on fire. Sometimes we’d meet him at night at the army base on Staten Island to catch a film and he’d drive us home. Once our green Renault passed Daddy’s green Renault and my mother screamed, “Quick! Hit the ground!” and she and I ducked down in the bottom of the car. My mother made up some lie about how we got home.

  Can little children have heart attacks? I used to worry that I might. I was always in the midst of some pulse-pounding, adrenaline-fueled state of high alert.

  Steve brought my mother a talking mynah bird. He’d belonged to a friend of Steve’s who’d had to get rid of him. The bird, black with an orange beak, could say, “Hello, Sue!” and, “Hi, chum!”

  Daddy and my mother got into one of the few fights I ever remember them having about that bird.

  “Where’d you get the bird?” he yelled when he got home, his voice filled with suspicion.

  I was sitting on the steps, eavesdropping.

  “A friend of Suzan’s gave it to us,” said my mother.

  “Yeah, a friend of mine gave me the bird,” I said, coming into the room.

  “Which friend?” asked my father suspiciously. I couldn’t blame him. No one ever came over. I never went to birthday parties or sleepovers. I didn’t have any friends.

  I shrugged. “You don’t know her.” I made up a name. “Agatha.” I knew I existed to cover up my mother’s lies. I was my mother’s lie. Still, we all loved that bird, even Daddy. When the bird died, eight years later, Daddy took off from work for the day, he was so upset.

  I loved that if you told the bird you had to go, he’d answer, “What’s the use of going?”

  I liked, too, that it was like having my real father in the house even when he wasn’t there.

  Once in fifth grade when I was hiding in my crypt, a mass of the worst school bullies came over to the church steps and started taunting me. They were huge bulldozer girls. One of them yelled, “C’mon out, kid, ’cause I want to break your arm!” The other kids were egging her on with shouts of “Weirdo!” and “Retard!”

  Usually I would have cowered and done nothing, but on this day the frustration and rage inside of me erupted at last. I couldn’t take it anymore. I just couldn’t. I wasn’t going to be a victim anymore.

  I leapt out like a lunatic on fire. I wasn’t thinking at all as I took a fencing stance, in my outstretched hand an invisible sword.

  “Bring it on!” I shouted at the startled kids. “My father’s Robin Hood.”

  I don’t know where the words had come from, but at that moment I felt my father beside me. He was my defender. He was my champion. He wouldn’t let these kids hurt me. I stared them all down as I waved a sword only I could see in their faces.

  No one said anything. They looked completely stunned and more than a little horrified. But I didn’t move, and one by one the kids backed down, muttering that I was even weirder than they thought, a ticking time bomb. I didn’t cry that day. I never cried anymore. Why should I?

  That was the day my father picked me up at school. I’ll never forget it, because Steve showed up dressed in his Robin Hood costume. He got out of the Renault in his tights, sword dangling from his waist, and held the door open for me as I walked down the school steps, head held high, knowing the other kids were watching me, amazed. I was Robin Hood’s daughter, and even if my sword was invisible, it was sharp. I suppose it must have been some psychic intuition that had fueled my bravery that day. Or maybe my father was psychic, too.

  Dueling with Steve, my beloved Robin Hood

  I had to mention the snake. I could see him coiled and floating above this man’s head. The snake was emitting a golden light and flicking his tongue in and out. I often see people’s dead pets close to them, but this was stranger than that, almost mystical. It was very weird.

  “Excuse me, did you ever have a boa constrictor?” I asked tentatively.

  This man, he must have been in his early sixties, a good-looking guy, a businessman; he just stared at me for a moment, dumbfounded. “Henry?” he whispered, and tears started welling up in his eyes.

  “Henry, Henry, Henry,” he sobbed. He’d covered his face with his hands.

  The snake was looking down on him and I knew what Henry wanted to tell this man. “He forgives you for what you did,” I said.

  The man was bawling now, blubbering.

  It turned out that thirty years ago he’d had this snake, Henry, and one day the man had accidentally left the heat rock turned on and burned him up. The man had lived with the guilt all these years. It had been terrible.

  The Christian church thinks snakes are the most diabolical of all life-forms, but nothing in nature is evil. I think God created everything in his image, even snakes. Everything is capable of forgiveness.

  3

  Quick! Call an Exorcist!

  I asked too many questions for Catholic school. My problems began in kindergarten when I argued with Sister Patricia about the souls of animals. She tried to tell me that they didn’t have souls, but I knew that they did.

  “Only people have souls,” said Sister Patricia.

  “But God created dogs and cats, right?”

  “God created human beings in His image,” she said. “He did not create the animals in His image.” Her face was getting redder with every word. She was puffing up like a blowfish.

  “But what about when we come back? What if we come back as an animal? Don’t we still have our same soul? Isn’t that what keeps coming back? Our souls? Can’t we come back as lots of different things? As people? As dogs? Don’t dogs have souls then?” I’d never heard the word reincarnation, but I knew all about it just the same.

  Sister Patricia was staring at me, astounded, over her double chin. “What are you talking about, Suzan Victoria Ellzer?”

  How could I tell her that I could feel the essences of animals and that they were no different from what I sensed from people? I could feel the fear coming from the beating life force of the earthworms the children would pull apart on the playground. I could feel how wrong it was when the neighborhood kids trapped lightning bugs in jars. How could you not know that every living thing had a soul?

  When I was barely five, my
mother had tried to serve me lamb chops, and I had refused to eat them. How could anyone eat a baby lamb, a child just like me? I had a toy chest with white wooly lambs painted on it.

  “Lamb chops don’t come from animals,” said my mother. “Meat’s just meat.”

  I knew she was lying and I wrote a poem. “Lamb of God, Lamb of God I do not wish to eat this thing that lies upon my plate, this thing the world calls meat.” Except for a few months during pregnancy, I have never touched meat since then.

  When I met the nuns in kindergarten, I felt sure they would understand about the Lamb of God. I thought the point of the nuns and the priests was that at last I could talk to someone about the spiritual world. At last I wouldn’t be alone. These were my people, weren’t they? I wanted to talk about God, about heaven, about souls, about death, about angels, about the man with the black beard who radiated peace, but I learned all too quickly that Catholic school was the last place I should bring any of this up. We went to Mass every day and we prayed in class, but we weren’t supposed to have any of our own thoughts about God. We were supposed to do what we were told, believe what we were told, and not question anything.

  The other children sat in class like dutiful lumps of lard and groaned when I raised my hand yet again.

  One day, a boy who often teased me arrived in class with a shoe box filled with two garter snakes he had captured. He was showing them off to the other kids.

  The principal, also a nun, stormed into the classroom and confiscated the box.

  I knew she wasn’t going to set them free. “You’re going to kill them!” I screamed hysterically. “You can’t kill them! It’s not their fault he brought them to school!”

  “No one is supposed to have snakes in school,” she said, annoyed. “Sit down at once, young lady.”