by Suzan Saxman
“Don’t worry about it,” counseled my friend Keith. “He’s bad news. He’s got a girlfriend back home and not only is she pretty crazy, but I’ve heard she might be pregnant.”
I wish I could say that put me off. But something about David’s eccentricities intrigued me. Like me, he seemed to be from another place, another time, another world. He didn’t even try to fit in. Even among the hippies and misfits of the Liberal Religious Youth, he stood out as different. He talked about King Arthur and his knights and the Renaissance as if those days were more real and more familiar than anything that was actually happening around him. He had no interest in contemporary music or television. He was always talking about heraldic symbols and falconry. I couldn’t resist it.
“Why are you wearing a cape?” I asked him.
“Is your hair naturally that color?” he parried.
It wasn’t, of course. I had started dying my hair blond, much to my mother’s chagrin.
I walked away from David, but I felt like I knew him deep down inside. I felt like I could say anything to him. And he was carrying a sword. Just like my father.
That first night, I explored the hotel with Father Bob, looking for ghosts, and David joined us, hoping to catch some photos with his infrared camera.
There was a little boy I named Billy who sat in the lobby in a sailor suit. In some rooms I wouldn’t see anything, but would get chills. I also saw a woman in Victorian dress. Father Bob couldn’t see the ghosts, but he could feel them. Bob explained that sprits can’t hurt us. They are just spirits without their physical bodies. There’s no reason to fear them, but they do crave our life force. They sort of charge themselves up on it, and that’s why you can get that prickly feeling when they are around. David took photos with the camera, and we caught some strange-looking orbs, but not much else. He also took a photograph of me in a long red velvet dress in the graveyard, and I knew then that he’d been ignoring me on purpose up until that moment.
We ended up saying good night to Father Bob and walking out along the rocks overlooking the sea. David took off his cape and spread it out for us to sleep on, and we held each other and fell asleep listening to the crash of the surf below us. We didn’t kiss. We just lay beside each other. We’d done this before together. I knew it.
David felt so familiar to me. I felt like we had been together at the edge of the sea for lifetimes and lifetimes. I felt safe with him in a way it’s still hard to describe. That safety has nothing to do with paying the bills or locking the door at night and everything to do with the spiritual realm. I told him about the man in the black hat and David took it in stride. He knew there were strange entities out there, but he didn’t make a big deal about them the way some people do. It was just the way the world worked. The extraordinary was perfectly ordinary to David, and that was deeply reassuring to me.
The day we were getting ready to leave, he asked me if I wanted to drive home with him and stop off at a Renaissance festival in Massachusetts called King Richard’s Faire.
“I’ve got a lot of SCA friends working there,” he told me, clearly expecting me to be impressed.
“SCA?”
“Society for Creative Anachronism. You don’t know about them? We get together to re-create medieval life as accurately as we can. There are groups all over the country. I’m in the House of Burgundy.”
“Oh.”
“So, do you want to come?”
“Okay, sure,” I decided on the spot. I was intrigued that there was actually a whole world of people who chose to live in another era.
When I got in the car, David had changed out of his jeans. In addition to the cape, he was now wearing a floppy hat with a feather, leather shoes, and tights. His outfit made me want to laugh. But again, it reminded me of my father all dressed up as Robin Hood. I had on shorts and an African print shirt. I didn’t feel any need for a long skirt or any other medieval garb.
When we were alone in the car, David started flirting with me. He told me a lot about SCA, about how he did metalwork, making crowns, and also swords, out of PVC piping. He went to a fighting class on the weekends. I told him about my experiences with Father Bob, and David seemed relaxed and open to it all.
We’d left just after sunrise, and we arrived only an hour or two after the fair had started. Already the parking lot was full. Mixed in with ordinary families carrying picnic baskets were all manner of people in costume heading into the woods. There were girls in bodices and low-cut shirts with wreaths of flowers in their hair. There were men dressed up as knights with authentic-looking chain-mail armor. A court jester frolicked past us, jingling with bells.
Booths were set up under the trees of a beautiful pine glade. A dunking booth. A sword shop. A puppet theater with a Punch-and-Judy show. A place to buy mead and fried dough. In a natural amphitheater beyond the woods, knights would soon begin jousting on horseback.
David got us in without having to buy tickets; he seemed to know everyone. But we hadn’t even begun to head over to the jousting when one of David’s friends came over to us, clearly having some kind of freak-out.
“Alice didn’t show up and I can’t reach her anywhere! We don’t have a Gypsy fortune-teller today. What are we going to do? Every day it’s something with this crowd. Who am I going to get to do the Tarot?”
To this day I don’t know what came over me. Maybe I wanted to draw attention to myself in front of David. Maybe it was just because it was almost fall, and you could feel the crispness in the air. I wasn’t usually the kind of person who spoke up at moments like that. But I did. “I can do readings,” I heard myself saying. I guess I thought it would be a lark. I was in a good mood after the drive.
“Really?” David’s friend was eyeing me in my shorts and scruffy shirt.
“Sure,” I said. I wasn’t pretending confidence. I just knew I could.
“With Tarot cards and everything?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, good then. That’s one problem solved. Just make it sound like you know what you’re doing, okay? Make it fun and a little creepy; keep it vague. I see something wonderful in your future, but there’s danger, too. Got it?”
“Yup,” I said as he led me to a small table set up under a large pine tree. There were two seats across from each other and a deck of Tarot cards, the Rider deck, on the table.
I had never done a psychic reading before. I had never talked about prophecy with Father Bob. I had never actively looked at someone and read their future. I had never held a deck of Tarot cards. No one taught me how to do it. I had never read anything about it.
I sat down. David said he was going to get something to eat and check in with some of his other friends. I told him I was fine. I wonder if there was something about the environment, the medieval lute music and troubadour singing drifting through the trees, the women in long skirts, the sense of market day, that triggered something very old and untapped within me. It’s impossible to know.
An older woman, someone’s mother, sat down across from me and smiled.
I lifted my eyes to look into hers and felt like I’d been punched in the back of my head and that an opening had been created. Words started pouring out of me. I think my hands were turning over cards, but I wasn’t even looking at them.
“I see a dog; it’s part bulldog and maybe something else. It’s got a head that looks like a rock. Rock Face. Is that his name? No, it’s Jock, not Rock.”
The woman was white. “How do you know that? You can’t know that. That’s my dog that died last year.”
“He doesn’t blame you for getting run over. He says it was his fault, not yours.”
“But I forgot to shut the gate!”
“Really, he doesn’t blame you. He wants you to know he’s absolutely fine.”
The woman shook her head and got up hastily from the chair. I saw her muttering to someone else as a man sat down.
Again, words started tumbling out of me. Names. Places. It was like a back door had flu
ng open into another mind, vaster than my own. There was rapid-fire ticker tape there, flying past, and I was grabbing words from it, reading the ones I could see before they disappeared. Some psychics hear things, but I’m a clairvoyant. I see words and images. I look into someone’s eyes at first and then gaze over their left shoulder, letting my eyes blur until I can feel the opening. I often wonder, if I got damaged in my head, would it all stop? Would it just shut off?
People have often said to me over the years, “Can you teach me how to do readings?” And I’ve said I have absolutely no idea how I do it. I don’t know what the cards mean. I use them; they facilitate something; they kick something in; they spur new directions sometimes. But it’s no system; it’s no method. It is only something that I surrender to. I can only repeat what Father Bob told me. I fall, and I don’t let myself stop falling.
More and more people were gathering around me.
“Cathy’s sick. You need to call her,” I told a young man with a beard.
An older woman sat down.
“Your husband says he’s never been happier,” I heard myself say.
“My husband died last June.”
“Oh.”
I had no control over what I said, didn’t know what it meant until I opened my mouth.
“He’s happy, though,” I said, certain of it.
The woman snorted. “Good, because he sure wasn’t happy with me.”
David had returned and was listening to what people were saying. He was looking at me in a new way. He looked proud of me.
“Are you going to be here tomorrow?” asked a teenage girl. “I want you to do a reading for my boyfriend. His best friend died last month.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m from New Jersey.”
As far as I remember, no one paid me anything that day. But David’s friend did beg me to stick around for the rest of the season. “You were awesome,” he said. “People were saying you were the real thing.”
On the way home, I was exhilarated. This wasn’t just one or two people recognizing some indefinable spiritual quality of mine, but something I could really do. People had been swarming around me, cheering me on, thanking me. I was good at it. Really, really good at it. And it didn’t even seem to take any effort.
“That was weird,” I told David. “How did I do that?”
It was as if I had always been a radio, but at last someone had turned me on and tuned me in to a channel. But I hadn’t done it. It had happened to me. It’s hard to explain to people how little control I have over all of this. They think I can choose what to broadcast, but I can’t. I can’t change to light FM if you don’t like heavy metal. The music pours through me, and I have no control over it.
David was both accepting of what I’d done and not very interested in it. This strange combination of total belief and complete nonchalance would be the thing about him that would be so reassuring to me throughout our many years together. Never once in over thirty years has he ever asked me for a reading.
“You should come to our SCA events on the weekend,” David suggested. “People would love you. Only you’ll need a new name. We all have special SCA names.”
And that’s when I became Seretta, naming myself for an English actress, Seretta Wilson, who had once been in a very risqué movie with Jack Wild. No one probably knew about her but me.
I told my mother and Aunt Mary about what had happened, and Aunt Mary immediately set to work making me a Gypsy costume I could wear to events. My mother was less enthusiastic. I probably shouldn’t have told her that David’s ex-girlfriend was about to have a baby.
But I started going every weekend to the SCA events with David.
The Society for Creative Anachronism was very weird. Grown men romped through the fields like buffoons playing with swords. And yet everyone was dead serious about the politics and their titles, the lords and the ladies, the counts and the dukes. You could not tread on their houses or make a mockery of their pretend families. There was almost a lack of joy about all of the festivities; it felt almost like an obsession, a compulsion, as if these people had no other choice than to do what they were doing.
David introduced me to his best friend, Richard, and the three of us became completely captivated by The Mists of Avalon. I identified with the main character, Morgan, a seer caught between the disappearing beliefs in the fairy folk and the rising power of Christianity.
Both David and Richard were convinced they had been knights protecting me in ages past. Even more powerful, Richard had seen the man in the black hat. He was sure that in another lifetime he had rescued me from him.
I think a lot of the SCA people might have been seeking out remembered lives, accountants by day and earls on the weekend.
I was accepted as an oracle.
I’d sit under a tree in my outfit on a blanket with my Tarot cards in front of me, and people would come to me from the Realm. That’s what they called whatever field we were in that day—the Realm. I charged two dollars for readings, sometimes five. What made me popular, I think, and always has, is that what I tell people isn’t vague. It’s usually very specific, even when I don’t understand it myself.
I remember telling one woman she was going to make a lot less money at her job.
“Never gonna happen,” said the Countess, who in her day-to-day life had a government job at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
But the next week she came back and, sure enough, they’d taken away her paid furlough.
I was accepted. I was well liked. I was in demand.
Doing the readings was a thrill at first. I was outdoors and in charge of my own schedule. If I didn’t want to do a reading, I didn’t. There was something wholesome and fresh about everyone frolicking around the fields in their tights. These people, strange as a lot of them were, had an old-world respect for my abilities. They knew how to treat the oracle. They brought me gifts—a dagger with a snake for a hilt, necklaces they’d made, homemade food—and thought of me as an integral part of their community. They had a context for me and a kind of innocence and openness to the whole experience. They didn’t expect me to solve all of their problems like a psychiatrist.
In the modern world, people are so lost and spiritually hungry that they become like vampires with me. “You’re not telling me what I want to hear!” they’ll scream. They don’t know how to get what they need. They feel out of control and they want, somehow, for me to make them feel like they instantly understand everything. “I have a busy schedule,” people will say when they call me up. “And I need a reading at once.”
But the buffoons and the misfits at the Society for Creative Anachronism would approach me with gentleness and reverence. They gave me the confidence to quit working at the pizzeria. One day in the middle of a busy lunch while everyone was demanding slices, I walked out. I held up my head and thought, They don’t know who I am. I’m the oracle, whatever that means, but it means something.
My mother was furious. “What are you going to do? Sit around at home?” It was as if she couldn’t imagine me doing anything better than working at that sleazy job for the rest of my life. As if that were all I was good for.
But the next day, I walked into an old-fashioned toy store that I had always loved, and they hired me on the spot.
Malcolm Bleeker carved doll furniture and built ornate Victorian dollhouses. He wore a little bow tie and had the muttonchops of a gentleman from another century. In his shop he sold, in addition to the doll furniture, Steiff teddy bears, Madame Alexander dolls, and old-fashioned mechanical toys. He let me deal with the customers, mostly wizened old ladies, spinsters with cats, I’m guessing. Not a lot of actual kids came into the store. But that was fine by Mr. Bleeker and me.
On the weekend there were tournaments and pig roasts and festivals. I saw less and less of Father Bob as he became busy founding Interweave, an interdenominational healing center. Besides, I had a boyfriend now, although I denied to my mother that David and I were a c
ouple. My mother wouldn’t even let him in the house.
Instead David and Richard, dressed in armor and tights, would pick me up and we’d go camping far out in the woods. We’d swim in lakes and duel, and it reminded me of the best parts of my childhood. They were my knights, my champions, my brothers-in-arms. Mostly they were like my sweet, dear brothers I had never had. At night I would sleep between them in our tent, and it was all a time of a strange kind of innocence. We didn’t get up to any of the usual naughtiness. We walked through graveyards and watched the stars. Everything became a portal to another realm for us. Out in the woods, we could have been living four hundred, six hundred years ago. I wore long skirts, they wore their jerkins and their chain mail, and we were all blissfully happy to have found one another again.
But like most Camelots, it eventually came to an end.
One day, a very wealthy doctor came through the door of the toy shop. Word about me had gotten around to him. He told me that he was throwing an Alexandre Dumas costume ball. Guests were expected to come as musketeers and Milady de Winter, the Count of Monte Cristo, and other characters from the novels. The doctor told me that it would lend an air of authenticity to the evening if he could produce a Gypsy to tell people’s fortunes. He offered me a hundred dollars.
From the moment I walked into his enormous house at eight in the evening until I left at one in the morning, I had not one moment without people in front of me. I did five hours straight of readings, one person after another. I didn’t know how to speak up for myself, to say this was too much, but it was. No one thought to bring me a drink or a bite to eat. I couldn’t even go to the bathroom. No one thought of me as anything but the hired help.
I think this was my first glimpse of how draining doing readings could be. I disappear when I’m doing a reading. I’m gone. People are always coming up to me and saying, “Remember me? You did a reading for me last month.” But I don’t. Because I wasn’t there. I step out of the way to make room for something else, and it takes everything I’ve got.