The Reluctant Psychic

by Suzan Saxman

  A woman had me come over to her house for a reading, and when I arrived, there was a giant boa constrictor on the dining room table. The woman served me dinner, and the snake was coiling around the plates the whole time we were eating. She asked me to do a reading for the snake.

  “The snake?”

  “Please?” she asked. “I want to know what he has to say to me.”

  I put my ear up to him, but he was just a big, black void of nothing. Now, I’ve done readings for lots of animals. Guppies have come through and forgiven their owners for messing up the acidity of their tanks. Guppies! It turns out even feeder fish are capable of forgiveness and affection. But this boa? That snake was really dull. I don’t think he was very smart or very interesting either.

  “I’m sorry,” I told the woman. “Talking doesn’t seem to be his thing.”

  18

  Cruise Ship Suzie

  Bob and I were constantly going on cruises. Bob worked all the time when he was at home; he’d set up an office in our bedroom, and he’d be on the phone yelling and swearing, going at high speed. But then we’d take off on a cruise every month or so, and then he’d turn on the television in our stateroom and relax. We became preferred members with free drinks and special services.

  I loved getting dressed up in pretty clothes and having our portrait taken every night. There were cheesy Broadway shows to go to, and then we’d get off the boat and walk through the streets of Bermuda or Jamaica and the locals would call out, “Is that Tom Cruise?” because Bob, in his movie-star dark glasses, was that handsome.

  Bob liked me blond, so blond it was. I stopped dying my hair any other color, except for one Halloween when I gave it a modest streak of red that amazed Bob’s country music friends. They thought it was wild. They had no idea what wild really was.

  What I liked best about the cruise ships was sleeping on the decks at night under the stars, the water all around me, still and vast. I wanted to be out in the elements, especially when we were in the Bermuda Triangle. It was one night up on deck by myself that I realized that I was still waiting for something to arrive, to happen, to transform me inside, to take me away again like I had begged for that night in the woods when I had run out of my apartment in despair. I had changed the outward appearance of my life, but it was just another game of dress-up, like when I’d been a pirate wench reading the Tarot at the Renaissance Faire.

  One year at Christmas we were at sea and started hearing reports about the tsunami that had hit Indonesia. I was glued to the television, devastated by the death and the tragedy. Bob was standing in front of the mirror, getting dressed in his tux for dinner. “C’mon, Suzie, let’s turn that off,” he said. “We’re on a cruise. We don’t need to let all that negativity in right now. Let’s go enjoy ourselves.”

  I was dumbfounded. How could you forget that something like that was going on? How could you think about anything else?

  Bob sighed, looking at me. “I just want to enjoy this cruise. I want to sleep and I want to eat.”

  Eating was really the main activity on those cruise ships. Sometimes I imagined we were cattle being plumped up before the slaughter. I felt like they were feeding us so they could eat us. It became more and more grotesque to me—the chocolate fountains, the unlimited buffets, the huge quantities of shrimp and meat and pastries.

  When we stopped at ports, I’d always make sure to stuff my pockets with hot dogs and hamburgers to feed to the stray dogs I’d inevitably see roaming in packs through the side streets of these Mexican and Caribbean towns. The lawyer in Bob was frantic that I was going to get caught and in some kind of trouble.

  “They’re gonna lock me up for taking hot dogs? I’ll just say I was hungry. They’ve got food everywhere on this boat. I’m not going to go to jail for feeding strays.” This was the real part of me that hadn’t become someone else.

  Bob was uncomfortable off the boat. Once, we were in the jungle in Bermuda, and we heard this strange clacking noise. We looked down to find giant land crabs scuttling across our feet. Bob nearly climbed a tree.

  “They’re going to bite us!” he cried.

  “No, they’re not,” I knew. There’s very little in nature that you need to be frightened of. Honestly, those buffets of fried food were a lot more dangerous. But Bob didn’t like being off the beaten track—and, well, that was usually where I was most comfortable. Off the beaten track was where I was from.

  At first I’d been very touched when I discovered that Bob said his prayers every night before going to sleep. He’d been raised Catholic but had never gone to church much; still, he was a believer. But I came to understand that religion for him was, just as it is for a lot of people, as much about fear as faith. He wanted to be protected from evil and demons and calamity.

  He worried about work and money. He worried about his good looks and how long they would last. He worried that somebody would break into our house while we were away. He was a typical American—working too hard, worrying too much, buying too much, eating too much, and never, ever thinking about what was really happening in the world.

  No one in front of those buffets of meat was thinking about the blood-splattered slaughterhouses where those pigs and sheep and lambs and cows had died. Those women covered in diamonds weren’t thinking about the people slaving in the mines. No one was really thinking about anything on those boats. They just wanted the best of everything … without realizing that it could only come from the worst of everything.

  I’ve wondered why Bob fell in love with me, and I think it had a lot to do with my fearlessness. He was a worrier, and all of a sudden he had his very own traveling psychic. He liked asking me what I thought was going to happen next. “Should we go to Mexico?” “Do you think we should buy this house?” “Should we do this?” “Should we do that?” He must have thought he had the inside track at last.

  The only person close to me who’s never wanted a reading is David. He didn’t even ask my advice. I used to say to him, “People pay for my advice, so maybe you should listen to me sometime!” but it didn’t make any difference. He was always worrying about things that were never going to happen.

  “But it could happen,” he’d say.

  “No,” I’d answer. “It’s not going to. It can’t.”

  “But it might.”

  He never believed me, and in some ways I began to realize it had been kind of a relief.

  Bob often talked about his wealth, how much he made, how much he was going to make. On our first cruise together he tried to explain to me what commodities were.

  “What do you think, Suzie? Should I buy this stock or that one? Or both?”

  I didn’t have a clue. I had no idea what he should do with his money. I felt like he thought I was some kind of psychic cash cow, but I never get information about that kind of stuff. I don’t really care about it, and I don’t think the spirits do either. Oh, they’ll tell me that someone’s going to weather a financial crisis or lose a job or something like that, but they’re not predicting lottery numbers or the upcoming average of the Dow.

  Bob wanted readings about investments. It began to drive me crazy. All I could say was, “No animal products!” Still, I felt like he thought that I was his hot commodity, his inside secret, his key to wealth and fame.

  But I wasn’t.

  Aboard ship, Bob would spend a lot of time resting in his stateroom. I didn’t want to be on a boat just to fall asleep, so I’d wander the decks under the stars in full regalia. One night I felt very lonely, like I was a ghost haunting that ship full of normal people. I went downstairs and lay in the bed next to Bob, but it was all too dramatic and sad. A single tear rolled out of my eye and down my cheek. Why was I in the middle of the ocean with this man? I didn’t know.

  I didn’t want to be a normal person anymore. I wanted to go home. I wanted to go back to Camelot, to the innocent times in the woods with David. He loved the same movies and stories and myths that I loved. He always knew what I was talking a
bout. I felt like I had failed in the real world; I couldn’t be a real girl. I needed to be Pinocchio again. I didn’t want to be a real girl; I wanted to be back inside of the fairy tale. All the money and financial security in the world doesn’t necessarily make you happy.

  I had some fantasy that Bob was going to impress my mother. I thought that this was what she had always dreamed of for me when she had been criticizing David for not making more money. But she seemed to disapprove of Bob as much as she had of David. “He’s a phony,” she said. “I don’t like his face.” I had some fantasy that Bob was going to impress my mother. I suppose if I’d brought the Pope home—which I wouldn’t do because I’m not a big fan of Popes in general, but I’m just saying that if I had—she would have been disappointed. After all, she’d preferred Erik Jasper.

  And yet Bob was like my mother in some ways. They were both fearful people, and because of that fear they tried to control everything else around them. They were concerned with what other people thought. Bob was constantly worrying about his own appearance and criticizing mine. I was too fat; I wasn’t dressed right; I was behaving strangely. It was all very, very familiar.

  Bob and I were functioning less and less well as a couple. He was increasingly frustrated at how little money I brought in and was much fussier than I was about housecleaning. I no longer wanted to pretend that I enjoyed his country music gigs. I started putting colors back in my hair again. I hid chocolate around the house to binge on when Bob wasn’t there. One day, in a fit of anger, Bob screamed, “Sometimes I think you’re a witch who put a curse on me!” Had it been legal to erect a stake and burn me in New Jersey, I think he would have let them do it that night. I began to suspect that in some other lifetime he’d actually watched me burn. I realized he didn’t feel as protected by me as he once thought he would. Being with a psychic didn’t make the future more predictable; it just made everyday life more chaotic.

  One night back in New Jersey, we had a huge fight about the proper way to close the garage door. We were going out grocery shopping together, and I was loopy from doing readings all day long. Bob didn’t understand what it was like, and I tried to explain to him how hard it was for me to pay attention to details like garage door closing.

  “All I want from life is a normal girlfriend!” screamed Bob. “Why can’t you be normal?”

  I heard the voices of the children on the playground taunting me. “What’s the matter with you? Are you retarded?” I heard my mother losing her temper in frustration. “Why aren’t you normal? Stop being so strange!”

  It was such a familiar, terrible place to be. Undervalued. Unappreciated. Unknown.

  I had tried so hard to fit in. I felt desperate. If I didn’t fit in this time, I never would. I would be on the Island of Misfit Toys for the rest of my life.

  Why can’t you be normal?

  I pictured myself walking the snakes at the Renaissance Faire. I saw myself talking to the dead. I saw the angel before me, an eye on each feather of her wings. I saw Jack.

  “No,” I told Bob. “I can’t be normal. Never.”

  Cruise ship Suzie and Bob in front of a false moonlit ocean

  “Fucker, fucker, motherfucker, shit, shit shit!” I sounded like I had Tourettes, there were so many swear words shooting out of my mouth. It was intense, like machine-gun fire. “Those crap asshole bastards. Fuck them, fuck them, fuck all of you.”

  The young girl opposite me was totally stunned, but her friend who’d come with her was giggling. “Crap asshole bastard,” she snickered. “That’s just what your brother always used to say.”

  “He’s really mad,” I said, as if it needed to be mentioned. “He wants justice about something, wants you to get the case reopened.” It was hard to get more information than that. All I could hear was this torrent of obscenities. I couldn’t see anything about this girl’s life, about her job or her boyfriend. Just this out-of-control boy.

  “Your brother’s dead,” I observed.

  The girl nodded.

  “If you don’t get the case reopened, he’s going to fuck up the boys who did it to him. He wants you know that. He says it’s your responsibility.”

  It came out that a few years ago, the girl’s brother had been at a party, and some kids had given him bad drugs that killed him. They’d gone to court, but gotten off on a technicality because they were under twenty-one.

  The girl’s friend continued to giggle. “That’s Bobby all right. I bet he gets those boys. I’m going to keep an eye on the papers and see what happens to them. I bet he makes them have a car accident.”

  I tried to convince the girl that she was going to have to find some way to calm her brother down, but she was totally overwhelmed. “I couldn’t even do that when he was alive,” she sobbed.

  Now, I’ve seen kids who have died young in my room, and they’re serene and happy. These are kids who had unlucky accidents and stuff, and they want their family to know that they love them and everything’s all right. But this kid? He didn’t get enlightened when he died, no siree. He was still a foulmouthed teenager. And he was pissed. Really pissed.

  19

  The Land of the Freak and the Home of the Vague

  My mother was in her nineties and frighteningly out of it. My sister lived with her, but she had a full-time job and no longer felt up to caring for her. My mother was cruel to her, insulting her all day long, and my sister had had enough. She wanted to put my mother in a nursing home.

  I was adamantly against it and volunteered to stay with my mother during the day, but my sister knew I also wasn’t up to it. Neither of us was. My mother was really difficult. Combative. Violent. Furious.

  But the nursing home only made her worse. It was a terrible place. I walked in and I was overwhelmed by the psychic chaos. The old people were reeling from so many unresolved feelings—loss, abandonment, anger, and fear, such terrible fear. The agony made me want to vomit. It wasn’t a rest home; there was no rest there.

  As for my mother’s soul, it was in torment. She was lost and crazed. All of her anxiety, all of her many fears and contradictions had coalesced into one final mass of terror on the edge of death. I don’t know if she was possessed or if this was her true self emerging at last from beneath the veneer of everyday life, but when I looked into her eyes I saw two searing black holes, bottomless with rage.

  She would slam her wheelchair back and forth against the wall. Bang! Bang! Bang! Or she would sit with her head on the table, refusing to look at us or even speak, defeated by her own fury. “She’s a tough one,” acknowledged the nurses. It was impossible for my mother to have a roommate, and she refused to have anything to do with the other residents. She refused to go to Mass and refused to be blessed by the priest. But every time she saw me, and I went to see her every day, she’d scream at me that I was going to hell.

  “Your sister hates you. She’s jealous of you,” my mother would whisper to me, trying to pit us against each other.

  “Your father never wanted you. He wanted you aborted. He wanted you to be an abortion,” my mother told me again and again. Whenever she’d said this to me as a child, I’d know she was expressing her own feelings. She was the one who had wanted the abortion. I was the child who proclaimed her infidelity, and even now she couldn’t forgive me for it. She looked at me with a pure hatred she had always been able to at least somewhat disguise up until now.

  I don’t know why I went there every day, except, I suppose, that I hoped we’d find some way to reconcile before she died. She was my mother. I brought healing oils blessed by holy people. I brought sacred crystals. I brought my sweet corgi puppy to her, and he ran out of the room. I brought her only grandson. Bob tried to play his banjo for her. I sat with her and tried to love her. Every time I went to see her, I found myself wishing I knew how to perform an exorcism. I thought that if I could reach her through animals or music or life itself, maybe I could push through the darkness, but it seemed to be hopeless.

  Yet I knew from
all my many years as a psychic that nothing was ever hopeless. You had to lend a hand to distraught spirits. I knew that if my mother died like this, the work she had to do on the other side would be only that much harder. I wanted to save her soul. I couldn’t give up on it. The work you’ve got to do is the work you’ve got to do. Death doesn’t really change that much. I couldn’t tell myself the lie that a lot of bliss ninnies do that somehow she’d go from this tortured state to a place of light-filled peace and love. That’s not what I’ve seen. She’d haunt me; that’s what she’d do. I was trying to save us both from that.

  I’ve seen reconciliations happen from the other side. Alcoholics and parents who abandoned their kids and couldn’t own the mistakes they’d made when they were alive will finally see and hear the suffering of their children. But it can take twenty, thirty years. It doesn’t necessarily happen right away. And I’ve also seen dead people so trapped in their anger that it was terrifying.

  I wanted my mother to apologize to me just once before she died.

  I had to stop bringing Gavin to see her; he was too frightened of her. They’d never had much of a relationship anyway. She’d never babysat him, never cuddled him, never even held him on her lap. If I said something about how adorable he was—because he truly was—she’d grimace and tell me to stop making him conceited. In the way she treated him, I saw that she had been honest about not liking children. I wondered if maybe I’d changed my own diapers when I was little.

  Bob patted her on the head and smiled at her, but she insulted him and insisted he leave, and finally he decided that he’d had enough.

  My father, the self-proclaimed atheist who insisted he prayed to Lucifer, had died in a state of peace. My mother, who considered herself a Catholic, didn’t believe in anything at the end.