Saturn's Return to New York

by Sara Gran

  This one I can’t argue with. She’s right, I tell her, she’s right about almost everything so far, and I can’t thank her enough for pointing out to me what a monster I am. She laughs.

  “At least you’re never bored,” she says. “You know this expression, the high road and the low road? Well, you, you always take the low road But you can change this. Look: Venus trine Pluto Moon conjunct Mars. Chiron in Pisces, square to the Moon and Mars. You have the ability to use those Scorpio emotions for a richer life. I see a lot of Venus here, a lot of Moon. Let Venus balance Scorpio, and you’ll be much happier You’ll do this in your Saturn Return

  “Okay, on to career. Tenth House, empty. Mars in Sagittarius in the Second House So you’re definitely spoiled. You’re lucky, Mary, you’ll always have money, I see this all over the chart. But you don’t care about career I like that. You’re beyond worrying about your hourly wage or the big promotion. You worked that out in your last lifetime, now you don’t have to waste this one chasing after money ”

  She smiles again. I can’t believe that after all she’s said, she—anyone—would like me

  “Now, the spirit life. Jupiter in Gemini in the Eighth House. The Eighth House is ruled by Scorpio. You have no religion. I like this too. You’re open to what the world shows you, or at least you will be someday. Up until now, you’ve subconsciously replaced spiritual connections with sexual bonds You have gifts, but they’re buried. When you have had premonitions, they’ve been about love, right?”

  I nod.

  “You can do better. You can see more than that. You’re single?”

  I nod again.

  “For your love life, you have Venus in Taurus in the Seventh House. Excellent. You have a unique ability for a stable, loving relationship This is a rare gift However, Venus is opposed to the Sun, which is in Scorpio. So you’ll have to fight against this secretive, solitary, Scorpio part of you to achieve this. And Saturn will accomplish this for you. You’re confused?”

  “Hopelessly.”

  “Okay, the key to this is Saturn.”

  She turns the page of the booklet to show a sort of timeline, with more cryptic little symbols at various points on the line

  “Every two and a half years, Saturn moves to a new sign, every seven years it moves to a new quadrant, and every twenty-nine and a half years it returns to the spot it was in when you were born This is the Saturn Return Your Saturn Return is when you become an adult. In this country, they say someone is an adult when he is twenty-one. In my country, as soon as you’re old enough to take care of yourself, you go out and get a job. But this is a different kind of adulthood. This is your spiritual growth, your Saturn Return. Saturn is the father. We take this literally but also metaphorically to mean that which the world wants for you Maybe your father wants you to be a doctor, you want to be a farmer. This is a conflict as old as the hills. Saturn Return is where you reconcile the parts of your life that you’ve chosen with the parts where you’ve let yourself get carried away. Scott Fitzgerald, the writer, he said if you want to write, you have to kill your father This is what Saturn Return is—when you kill your father And you cannot do this until you reach the end of your rope, until you’re desperate Murder is always a desperate act, I think it was Raymond Chandler who said that

  “At birth you had Saturn in Cancer, and it’s back there again now. Again, this indicates an unloving family, a difficult childhood It’s harder for people like you. Once you kill your father, you’ll never be able to fix the relationship You respond to this by giving free reign to those Scorpio emotions. So, you have to love your father before you can kill him. And your mother, and your school, and your childhood, and the city you grew up in. However, here’s something interesting.”

  She points to the top of the chart, where two symbols sit next to each other on the edge of the circle. “Your north Lunar Node is conjunct to Saturn. So this will be hard for you, Saturn Return, but this is also where you have the greatest opportunity for growth. Opposed to Scorpio rising, Venus is in Taurus. If you can be strong, if you can spiral through your Saturn Return, Venus awaits you at the other end. A perfect love. This isn’t necessarily a romantic love, but self-love Life in love.

  “I know you can do this, because you’re a Scorpio. In India, we say Scorpio is represented by the Phoenix. You know this animal, it burns, and then from the ashes it comes back alive. Scorpios have no fear of death. Scorpios are the strongest sign in the Zodiac.

  “So this is your challenge, for your Saturn Return. Love your father, and then kill him.”

  The reading ends there I ask her for more about my future, I want specifics, and she smiles and says, “I don’t do that.” I’m dying—she’s been so good so far, I want to know how the story ends. She laughs and says: “There’s no point. I tell you about your past so you can understand yourself better. This is like a doctor, no? A psychiatrist. You sit on the couch and you talk about the past. But the doctor, he never tells you too much about the future, right, because he wants you to retain your free will. And so do I Now, you know where you’re coming from and what you’re in at the moment, you understand the world a little better That’s all the help you need But I will tell you one more thing, it’s not gonna be an easy year, this Saturn Return. Every loose thread must be tied up now, or wait for the second return when you are fifty-eight. A lot of strange things are going to happen. You’ll see ”

  At home that night I look at the little booklet Kyra Desai made for me. On the last page, behind the charts, is the word SHANAISHWARAYA. Underneath that is written

  SHANAISHWARAYA is the mantra used by Vedic Scholars to assist in problems relating to the Saturn Return The mantra can be repeated aloud or silently in meditation, in periods of quiet contemplation, or to add strength during periods of stress

  Chapter 4

  Saturday I meet my mother for Christmas Eve brunch at a spot she likes in SoHo, but when Evelyn lights up a cigarette it’s as if she pulled out a machine gun and shot the waiter. She’s forgotten that smoking is banned in most restaurants in the city, and she’s pissed as hell. I silently chant shanaishwaraya as we try another restaurant, and then another, and my mother gets angrier and angrier. Finally we walk over to an Italian place on MacDougal Street, Antonio’s, that’s small enough to be exempt from the new laws. My mother has been going to Antonio’s since she first moved to Manhattan and when the owner, Anthony, sees us he gets up from his table by the bar, where he’s flipping through a fat stack of papers and drinking an espresso, to meet us at the door. Anthony is his given name, and he was born on Mulberry Street; Antonio, the happy-go-lucky Italian with his heavy Sicilian accent, is a role he plays for the tourists When I was a girl my mother and I used to come here a lot, and I always hoped that she and Anthony would get married one day. No such luck. He gives Evelyn and me each a peck on the cheek, leads us to a table, and sits down with us

  “What’s new?” he asks my mother

  “This city is going straight to hell,” my mother says, lighting up “You can’t even light a fucking cigarette without getting arrested anymore.”

  “Tell me about it,” says Anthony. “Everything’s different now. Remember that cafe on Greenwich Avenue, the Peacock? Gone It’s an Old Navy now.”

  “Remember the tailor, over on Seventh Avenue, the Chinese guy?” says my mother “Gone. It’s a head shop now ”

  I tell them about the ritzy restaurant Chloe took me to in Chelsea yesterday

  “Nah,” says Anthony. “On that block? What about the hookers?”

  “There are no hookers in Manhattan anymore,” says my mother. “I wonder what happened to those girls?”

  “You should see where Tony lives,” says Anthony.

  “He’s the oldest?” I ask.

  Anthony nods “He’s a little older than you, he’s thirty-five now. He tells me he’s getting an apartment in Green-point, in Brooklyn. I tell him he’s crazy. I actually said to him, if this is the best you can afford, tell me, I’ll he
lp you out. So I go over to visit, they’ve got everything over there! The coffee houses, fancy shops, a big organic market. You wouldn’t believe it Guess what he’s paying?”

  My mother and I look at him, anticipating. Anthony draws out the moment before exploding with the answer.

  “Two thousand dollars a month!”

  “Unbelievable!”

  “That’s nuts!”

  Anthony’s excited now “We used to have neighborhoods in this city,” he says. “Chinatown, Little Italy, Harlem, Carnegie Hill. Each one was like its own little world You could could turn a corner and find yourself in another city. You could walk around and find maybe a cafe, maybe a bookstore, a butcher shop, each one a treasure. Maybe a little park where parents would take the kids, walk the dogs ”

  “Manhattan’s got three neighborhoods left,” says Evelyn, “downtown, uptown, and up above that You got Brooklyn, you got Queens, you got the Bronx, and Staten Island, they should secede already. There’s no surprises left in this city. They’ve got every square inch mapped out and targeted for corporate doggie boutiques. Now neighborhoods have names made up by real-estate agents: NoLita. What the fuck is that? It’s like it happened overnight; one day you had a neighborhood, a place where people knew each other, where they raised their children, where you bought groceries. Now every house in the city has been converted to co-op condominium apartments for NYU graduates. There’s no children in Manhattan anymore. Every square block has a nightclub and one of those Thai restaurants ”

  “When I opened this place,” says Anthony, “people thought I was crazy for asking for one dollar for a cappuccino. This is nineteen sixty-five Last week, I’ve got a day off, I go into one of these coffee bars they’ve got now. What do you think these people want for a regular cup of coffee? What do you think you’re gonna pay?”

  “One-fifty,” guesses Evelyn.

  “Two dollars,” I bet

  Anthony explodes “Two dollars and twenty-five cents! For a regular coffee!”

  “Unbelievable!”

  “That’s nuts!”

  “What do you have in this city now?” Evelyn asks. Her voice rises she’s getting into the spirit now. “A goddamn Gap and a Starfuck on every corner. A bookstore the size of a city block And these people, let me tell you, these people today don’t even read. These people, they get hopped up on Mocha-fucking-chinos and go buy sweatshirts at Old Navy. They run around speed-reading their Jackie Grisham and their John Collins. They read about some asshole who climbed to the top of Mount Everest and took a crap up there. We used to read Nelson Algren, we read Flannery O’Connor Nabokov. Philip Roth, and Henry Roth, too. We read Frederick Exley and Norman Mailer, and if we were lucky we drank with them down in the Village.”

  “This city is shot to shit, now,” says Anthony. “It’s going straight to hell in a handbag. Enough already. I make myself crazy. How’s life, sweetheart?”

  I have the same fantasy of my mother and Anthony getting married. No one else calls her sweetheart A waiter comes over with fresh orange juice, on the house. We both order Eggs Florentine and coffee.

  “Eh. My health isn’t so good,” she tells him. “I’m thinking I might retire soon.”

  It’s like a blow to the head I can’t believe what I’m hearing “Mom, you didn’t tell me ”

  “I’m telling you now,” she says softly, looking straight ahead.

  “What’s wrong with your health?” asks Anthony

  “My memory,” she says “It’s shot.”

  “So, what’s the doctor say?” he asks her.

  Evelyn waves a hand in front of her face. “He doesn’t know anything.”

  “They never know,” says Anthony. “But retire? What are you gonna do with yourself?”

  “I don’t know. Read. Go to movies. See my daughter.” She reaches over and takes my hand. Another shock.

  “You’re never gonna retire,” says Anthony “Never.” He stand up and gives us each another kiss and a “Merry Christmas” before he heads back to his office behind the kitchen. As soon as he leaves the waiter arrives with our brunch as if on cue.

  “So,” I say, cutting into my English muffin, “since when are you retiring?”

  “I don’t know I’m not positive yet. Did I tell you I have an interview next month? It’s for The New York Times Magazine Some hotshot kid is doing it, he wrote that book, Silver something ”

  “Yeah I know it Silver Moon. You’re not going to like him”

  “Why?”

  “He’s an investment banker who wrote a novel They’re really pushing it. I’ve got a stack of Silver Moon coffee mugs on my desk at work ”

  “Anyway, I want you to come to the interview with me. I want someone to, you know In case I forget things. It’s in January sometime. So I want to decide before then.”

  “You’re really going to retire?”

  “It has to happen sometime “ Again she waves her hand in front of her face and that’s the end of the conversation. We spend the rest of brunch talking about work, about books that we’ve read, about people we know “You remember Nancy Sherman, she used to work for GV? You remember her. She’s got a new book coming out, a biography of Oscar Wilde It’s good, you ought to read it.”

  “You remember Carol Kenton, she lived over on Tenth Street? We used to play together when we were kids, you remember. She pushed me off the swing once and I cut my knee She’s in jail now, I saw it in the paper yesterday. She held up a liquor store on the Jersey Turnpike.”

  After brunch we go back to her apartment on Commerce Street and exchange Christmas gifts My mother gives me a black angora cardigan from agnès b. and a bottle of rose bubble bath. I give her a black lambswool cardigan from Macy’s and a bar of lilac soap We each pretend to be surprised and completely, profoundly, thrilled

  Chapter 5

  We used to spend Christmas together. My clearest childhood memories are from the Christmas Eve parties my parents threw every year when we lived on Twelfth Street The parties at Twelfth Street would roar The house would be full and the party would flood into the downstairs tenant’s apartment. Jake, our tenant, would plan for this and open up his doors and invite his own friends over that night Most of my parents’ friends at the Christmas Eve parties didn’t have their own children and they talked to me like I was one of them, an adult, and I always liked that When they needed a child I was their informant into the underage world At one party James Urqhart, the folklorist, spent hours asking me about nursery rhymes—how I learned them, who taught them to me, what I thought they meant He listened carefully to my answers. He knew all the rhymes, some I didn’t know, and all the patty-cake games. I was impressed. He had frizzy hair and wire-rimmed glasses and wore a tweed jacket. I thought maybe I would many him when I grew up. At another party Jane Carrigan, the poet, sneaked me sips of peppermint schnapps and kissed me on the ear. Peter and Maeve Angleton, the critics, had a son around my age who came to our parties sometimes. Joel. Once we found a book of Titian’s nudes and took it upstairs to my room to look at the pictures together. We got in an argument over what sex was: I said it was hugging and kissing, he said it was sleeping together in the same bed.

  It wasn’t only Christmas. There were parties for book releases, the Bicentennial, a new issue of GV People were always over. There was the magazine staff, a core of three which swelled to ten or fifteen in the weeks before a new issue There was Allison and Erica—my mother’s other best friend, who wrote for GV—there was Jake, who came up for drinks after work, there were friends from Columbia, and friends from Connecticut, where my father grew up, and friends from Brooklyn. The house was never empty—except when Michael was sick That’s how my mother explained it to me. No one ever said depression, or mental illness, or nuts or crazy, or suicidal. He was sick, and that was that. When Michael was sick no one came over, except the people who worked on the magazine, and then they worked quietly and left as soon as they were done with only a quick kiss on the top of the head for me. And when
he was in the hospital it was even worse. Erica and Allison would come, but no one was laughing They were worried about my father, I knew that Evelyn would go to visit him in the hospital and leave me with Jake, who on those days would always play tea party with me On those days he would do whatever I wanted.

  When Michael was sick we’d have dinner together, the three of us, and Evelyn and Michael would hardly speak to each other at all Evelyn would ask me about my day and about the other kids at school, but I didn’t know any of the other kids well. I preferred my grown-up friends, and I missed them when they weren’t around After dinner Michael would go back into the office and shut the door, and then Evelyn would talk on the phone to Erica and Allison and Michael’s doctors and her other friends, who used to be my friends too

  Sometimes, on quiet nights when no one had come over for days, he would read to me I could read by myself, of course. With Evelyn and Michael as parents I could read by the age of three, but I still loved it when Michael would read with me We’d sit on the soft velveteen olive-green couch in the living room and open a big picture book across both our laps, half on my legs and half on his He’d put his left arm around me to turn the pages and hold me close. When I was four we read Fido and the Friendly Four, when I was five, and he was sick again, we read Colleen the Cowgirl. When I was six it was the Little Tiger series and when I was seven and he was sick again, for the last time, it was Maurice Sendak’s Higglety Pigglety Pop. Jenny the dog says, “There must be something more to life,” and then she sighs.

  When Michael died, June 24th, I went into shock for about two weeks, and after that I was sent to live with Peter and Maeve Angleton for the rest of the summer All I wanted to do was forget Evelyn came by every afternoon and sometimes I had done so well forgetting that I didn’t know who she was. At the end of August Evelyn came and took me to the new brownstone on Commerce Street The street was curved like a crooked arm and our house was right in the elbow I thought it would be like Twelfthth Street the offices would be in the parlor, we’d live on the top two floors, and Jake would live downstairs. Evelyn explained to me that the house was really an apartment building: We would live only on the top floor and strangers would live on the first, second, and third floors In fact they already lived there. The GV office was someplace else altogether, it was a regular office in a regular office building. In the apartment there was only room for two.