by Jen Beagin
“But if you’re trying to get me to up my rate, your place is either really clean or really scary. I bet you’re ankle deep in cat hair.”
“No, but I do have several cats,” Betty said, sounding worried. Mona wondered if “several cats” was code for “dozens of strays.”
“I love cats,” Mona lied. She was fond of cats, but love had never entered into it. Still, Betty could live in a litter box, for all Mona cared.
She asked for Betty’s address, but Betty said she didn’t have one. “I live way out on the mesa. There aren’t any street names out here. You take 73 south over the Gorge Bridge. After 8.7 miles, you’ll see a dirt road on the right. Follow that road for exactly 1.4 miles. My place is on the left.”
Mona had trouble understanding why anyone would willingly live on the mesa, but then she’d never been a fan of wide-open spaces. Betty’s double-wide trailer looked like it rolled off the back of a truck and down a ravine, but it was painted casino pink and stuffed with oversized antiques, as if it were a palace, and had an attached makeshift carport on one side, where Betty kept her Caddy. She didn’t have any close neighbors, but a cluster of newly built, wheat-colored houses stood up the road a ways, huddled together with their backs turned, as if conspiring against her.
The inside of the trailer reminded Mona of a flea market after a dust storm. Betty collected walnut furniture, jewelry boxes, antique keys, vintage perfume bottles, printed matchboxes, old photographs of strangers, and snow globes, all of which were coated with brittle red dust. The dust likely blew in through the window screens and the cracks in the walls. It had even made its way into Betty’s kitchen cupboards, leaving a grainy residue on all her dishware. As Mona emptied the cupboards—she planned to wash all the dishes—she wondered if Betty had a healthy collecting impulse or an overactive hoarding instinct. She decided on the latter, especially after finding hidden boxes of menus, stamps, calendars, key chains, bottle caps, dice, playing cards, marbles, and postcards. In the freezer she found not food but a stockpile of angora sweaters neatly stacked in separate ziplock bags. Betty also appeared to collect deaf Persian cats. The cats bellowed every thirty seconds as if being tortured.
While Mona cleaned, Betty stayed in the living room, giving readings to clients over the phone. From what Mona could gather, she required a handwriting sample including their name, date and time of birth, and a couple of questions they wanted answered. Mona didn’t bother trying to eavesdrop; Betty was clearly performing—Mona could hear it in her voice—and live performance made Mona’s skin crawl. She had always preferred a screen between herself and actors.
When Mona was done, Betty followed her outside and thanked her for a job well done. To Mona’s surprise, she asked if Mona could come not once but twice a week. Mona wavered, said she’d have to see what her schedule looked like. Since Betty “worked from home,” she was inclined to say no. She didn’t want to be trapped in a trailer, especially with a so-called psychic (and possible lunatic), twice a week every week. But then she did the math: twice a week equaled $150, which equaled $600 a month, which covered most of her rent. And, if she cleaned the place twice a week, chances were she’d be in and out in no time, possibly in under an hour.
“Actually, I think I can swing it,” Mona said. “I mean, now that I think about it. Monday and Thursday afternoons would work.”
“Are you in a cult, by any chance?” Betty asked then.
“Not that I’m aware of,” Mona said. “Why?”
“You’re giving off cult energy.”
“Really? That’s weird,” Mona said, and shrugged.
“Your aura has lost its pulse.”
“Well, I’m very tired,” Mona said.
Betty shook her head. “It’s beyond that.” She leaned toward Mona, took a dainty sniff, and then wrinkled her nose. “Smells like leather and burned coffee.”
“Auras have an odor?”
Betty nodded. “Sometimes, yes.”
“Well, I drink half a pot of coffee a day,” Mona said. “It’s probably coming out of my pores.”
Betty looked genuinely dubious, and Mona felt a wave of affection for her.
“Another thing I noticed is that you don’t talk much,” Betty said. “I think your throat chakra is blocked. Are you a passive person?”
“Probably,” she said.
“I have some exercises you can do,” Betty said. “Some of them involve screaming. Have you ever just screamed your head off?”
“No,” Mona declared.
“Do you have trouble saying no to people?”
“No,” Mona said. “I mean yes.”
“Then these exercises will be perfect for you.”
“Super,” she said, trying to sound energetic. “Well, it was great talking to you, Betty. See you next week.”
* * *
SEVEN WEEKS LATER, SHE STIFLED a frown as she removed Betty’s hair from the bathtub drain—red pubic hair made her queasy. Betty stood in the doorway, absentmindedly watching her work. That first day was a fluke; Betty turned out to be one of the rare clients who followed her from room to room, ostensibly to “keep her company.”
She finished cleaning the tub and then started in on the hard-water stains in the toilet bowl. Most of her clients would be embarrassed to watch her clean their toilet with a pumice stone, but not Betty.
“Look at you, scrubbing away with that thing!” Betty said, in the voice she used with her cats.
I am not an animal, she wanted to say. She put the pumice stone away and cleaned the toilet rim using the ridiculous potpourri-scented Windex Betty insisted upon, which was hot pink instead of blue.
“I just got a flash of you in a past life.” After a dramatic pause, Betty said, “You were an African woman living in a hut in the middle of the bush.”
She looked over her shoulder. Betty was wearing the solemn expression she reserved for channeling Mona’s past lives, which apparently numbered in the hundreds. In each of these past lives Mona was overweight and destitute, relegated to a life of domestic servitude. She also had a habit of contracting a venereal disease and dying young. Betty appeared to be staring at Mona’s ass crack, her eyes out of focus. She wasn’t wearing her psycho contacts today. Without them, her natural eye color was a lighter shade of blue—less flinty, more forgiving.
“You were walking down this long dusty road with an enormous jug balanced on top of your head,” Betty went on. “A beautiful jug. And you had this big poufy skirt on . . . and your hips were swaying from side to side.” She put her hands on her hips and made a disturbing swaying motion. Mona was still fascinated by Betty’s ability to deliver utter tripe with a straight face.
“So I was poor and fat,” Mona said. “Again.”
“Maura,” Betty said. “I didn’t say you were fat, for God’s sake. And I’ve told you a thousand times: I can’t help what I see.”
Mona flushed the toilet.
“I didn’t ask for this gift, Maura,” she said, and sniffed.
Betty had a habit of punctuating her sentences with people’s names. Too bad she was using the wrong one—she’d been calling Mona “Maura” since the day they’d met. For whatever reason, Mona neglected to correct her and now, almost two months later, felt it was too late. She suspected that only a deeply fucked-up person would allow her client to call her by the wrong name, week in and week out. But she was also delighted by the irony of it, considering Betty’s profession. Betty was apparently gifted enough as a psychic to get away with charging a hundred dollars an hour, and her calendar was fully booked. She also hosted a call-in show on KTAO, where she gave readings on the radio. The show aired at midnight.
Betty was able to detect Mona’s outright lies, however. A few weeks into their arrangement, Mona called at the last minute and said she was having a particularly bad menstrual period. She went on to explain that she’d been to the gynecologist and they’d found polyps on her uterus. But not to worry, she’d said—the polyps were asymptomatic and could b
e treated with medication. Still, she had unusually heavy bleeding and would have to cancel for the week. This was an excuse she’d perfected in high school and had been using to great effect ever since. Bulletproof, as they say.
“Why are you lying?” Betty had asked, in a small voice.
“Pardon?” Mona said.
“Why. Are. You. Lying.”
Her instinct was to hang up and never answer the phone again. Instead she said, “Uh, I don’t know, Betty.” As soon as people heard the word “polyps,” they usually accepted it, no questions asked.
“Well, what’s really wrong with you?”
“I’m just so . . . tired lately. I haven’t been sleeping well and I have this sort of low-grade depression thing going on.”
“That’s all you had to say,” Betty said. “Polyps! Honest to God, Maura. Does that excuse ever really work?”
“Yes, actually,” Mona said. “I’ve been using it for years and it hasn’t failed me once.”
“Well, I’m not your average customer,” Betty said. “So you should know better than to try that stuff with me.”
“Yeah, I’m starting to realize that,” Mona said.
* * *
NOW SHE WAS ON ALL fours, cleaning the bathroom floor with Windex and a damp rag. Betty, still in the doorway, watched her work. Because Betty seemed to think she lived in an Italian villa rather than a trailer, the tiles were porcelain and imported from Rome. As per Betty’s request, Mona cleaned the floor by hand. You couldn’t simply use a mop, no sir.
“Can I make a quick confession?” Betty asked.
Betty’s confessions were precisely the reason she felt so tired lately. She didn’t bother answering; she kept her back turned like a priest, and cleaned around the toilet.
“As a teenager I wanted to poison my mother,” Betty said. “I’d finally worked up the courage to tell her my brother was molesting me. First she didn’t believe me, then she said it was my fault, that I had somehow seduced him—me, an eight-year-old, seducing a thirteen-year-old—can you imagine? So I almost put rat poison in her wine that night. I always regretted not doing it.”
“Is she still alive?”
“Unfortunately.” Betty sighed.
“Say three Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers,” Mona said, and made the sign of the cross.
“I’m not Catholic,” Betty said.
“I know. It was a joke.”
What deserved punishment, in her opinion, was treating your cleaning lady like a garbage disposal, as if the poor chick didn’t have enough of your dirt under her fingernails already. Last week Betty confessed to an intense hatred of both old people and children. She said that sometimes, when she saw a child laugh, she wanted to slap the smile right off its face. The week before, she confessed to a fear of dying alone and to fantasies of being sexually humiliated in public. With each new confession, Mona felt increasingly drained and bloodless.
The bathroom finished, Mona progressed to the bedroom. Betty followed and stretched out on the bed. Mona always had trouble deciding where to start, as the room was crammed with collectibles. In the corner stood a small bookcase filled not with books—Betty read only palms and trashy magazines—but with twelve prominently displayed porcelain dolls. Mona had trouble touching them with her bare hands, so she dusted the doll case only when absolutely necessary and then only while wearing rubber gloves. Betty never seemed to notice. The dolls reminded her of the ones she’d had as a kid; Mickey had bought three for her eighth birthday. Fixed to wooden stands, they had real hair, hand-set glass eyes with long eyelashes, porcelain faces and limbs, embroidered dresses trimmed in lace, and moles painted on their cheeks. Spanish ladies. He’d even gone so far as to buy a display case for them, which he placed near the foot of her bed.
She remembered thinking of the dolls as house guests who had outstayed their welcome. At night her irritation turned to dread because she discovered that the dolls could see her. In fact they were staring at her. They kept a lidless vigil over her, biding their time until she fell asleep, whereupon they would somehow bludgeon her, or strangle her, or smother her with a pillow.
“Why are you sleeping in the closet, honey?” her mother asked one morning. Mona explained her predicament. “They’re not staring at you,” her mother said. “They’re staring into space. They can’t see you.”
“Yeah they can.”
“Can they see you right now?”
“Yeah.”
“But they’re faced the other way. They don’t have eyes in the back of their heads, silly. They’re blind.”
But they were far from blind, and she didn’t have to be in their direct line of vision to be seen. The activities she usually did in her bedroom—dressing and undressing, reading, writing in her diary, sleeping—were no longer private, and the dolls were a hostile audience. She tried putting the damned things in the closet, but she still felt their presence from behind the closet door, even when she buried them under clothes. She remembered waking in the middle of the night and feeling pinned to her mattress, fully conscious yet unable to move, her arms and legs buzzing, her breath shallow, and imagined one of the dolls astride her chest, looking her dead in the face. She wanted to bring the dolls to the garage and smash their faces with a hammer, but she never worked up the nerve.
Unlike the dolls Mona had as a child, Betty’s were all dressed as brides. The bridal theme made sense, given Betty’s obsession with marriage. According to Betty, Mona would one day be married to a man with a goatee and squinty eyes. This man also had a bad knee and sometimes walked with a cane. The cane belonged to his grandfather and happened to pull out into a knife, if needed. “I can see him standing next to you,” Betty sometimes said, when Mona was doing the dishes or dusting. “Every time I see him lately, he has bags under his eyes. I think he has insomnia.”
“He sounds really appealing,” Mona said. “I’m super excited to meet him. He’ll probably stab me to death with his cane.”
“He’s the love of your life,” Betty said.
Mona was supposed to have two children with this mysterious man, one of whom would eventually struggle with addiction. The marriage was supposed to last twenty-three years, which seemed like an awfully long time, after which Mona would meet husband number two. Unfortunately, Betty couldn’t get a good look at her second husband, but knew that he was tall, often wore a hat, and didn’t have facial hair.
Betty herself had been a bride once, fifteen years ago. His name was Johnny, and they’d met in Vegas, where they’d both been living for a number of years, Betty as a professional psychic, Johnny as a professional gambler and alcoholic. Johnny approached Betty at a gas station while she was filling her tank and asked her to dinner. They married two weeks later. The marriage lasted all of three months, which seemed about right to Mona. She could imagine how a person could be initially bewitched by Betty—she had undeniable charisma and a number of physical charms, including a sizable rack and shapely calves—but after a few months, Mona imagined, those bewitching qualities would start to seem . . . just plain witchy.
Mona could only guess as to why it hadn’t worked out. Betty claimed that Johnny left her suddenly, in the middle of the night. He was from New Mexico originally and they’d lived here for the last three weeks of their marriage. Betty stayed, even though she had no friends or family in the area. Mona could plainly see that Betty was still desperately in love with Johnny and wanted to keep an eye on him, make sure he didn’t marry someone else.
She still wore an engagement ring. Not the one Johnny gave her, but a ring she’d purchased herself. It was a vintage ring with a platinum setting and a huge, impossible-to-ignore diamond. “So you’re engaged to yourself,” Mona said when Betty first explained the ring. Betty frowned and said she didn’t like to think of it that way.
Mona cleaned the mirror above Betty’s bureau. She dampened the rag with more Potpourri Windex and started in on Betty’s vintage perfume bottles, which required special attention. They were deli
cate things and had a way of making Mona feel apish, slow-witted, and, now that she thought about it, a little like Lenny in Of Mice and Men. She’d already broken one by accident. She’d had it in her palm and was sort of petting it with the rag—gently, she thought—and it had somehow shattered. Luckily, Betty hadn’t been home at the time. Normally Mona would have left a note about it, but it happened on the same day she found the poem under the nightstand, and she’d been too distracted. The poem was handwritten, untitled, and addressed to no one:
Betty has a machete.
She keeps it in her closet.
Don’t ever scorn her
Or she’ll hunt you down
And hack you
To pieces.
A silly poem, probably a joke, but disturbing nonetheless, particularly the last two lines. She’d actually rooted around in Betty’s closet looking for the damned thing, but found only a disturbing collection of rabbit fur coats from the eighties. She looked under the bed just for the hell of it, and, lo and behold, there it was: the machete, an antique, it looked like, its handle bound in crisscross leather. Mona had finished cleaning and hightailed it out of there. She put the broken perfume bottle in a paper bag and threw it in the trash.
“Maura,” Betty suddenly said from the bed, “let’s call it quits. You’ve done enough for today and everything looks great.”
“Really?” Mona said. “Cool.” She dusted the last perfume bottle and began to gather her things.
“Wait, don’t leave just yet. I want to try something with you,” Betty said. “In the living room.”
Crap, Mona thought. She’s going to read my palm and tell me I’ll always live hand to mouth. Again.
“Don’t give me that look,” Betty said. “I’ll still pay you the full amount.” Betty thought everything was about money.
They went into the living room, a tiny space made even tinier by an enormous red velvet couch, a marble-topped coffee table, and Betty’s psychic throne, an ornate walnut chair upholstered in pinkish-gold brocade with a high, straight back. Betty took the throne, Mona the couch.
“Okay,” Betty said. “I want to do a little experiment with you. I’m going to think of a number between one and twenty. You’re going to first see it, then read it to me. You’re going to have to look me right in the eye and really concentrate.”