Revenge of the Paste Eaters (3 page)

My Beloved’s friend Susan returned this summer—for the summer—after having wandered the far edges of the country, and while the two of them were exchanging stories and memories, they determined we should all make a trip to the tiny community of psychics known as Camp Chesterfield in Anderson, Indiana, to have our futures told. A variety of our friends were included in the planning phases of this trip, but when we left it was the four of us.

I am the youngest of the group, for whatever that’s worth. I’m fifty-four. And I am an eldest child, a distinction that seems fairly benign to Mary and me, but which Nancy and Susan claim had not gone unnoticed. Susan has spent most of this summer with her sister/mother, who is seventeen years her senior, and she has already told me the caretaker/charge relationship she had hoped might mellow into sisterhood has remained as rigid and role-defined as it was when she was four. Susan has spots chafed raw by too much exposure to big sisters. Big sisters, Susan maintains, have no concept of what it means to be the baby.

Nor am I younger than any of them by very much. In order of seniority we are Mary and Susan, who are within months of each, then Nancy, then me. Age is not the issue and birth order hardly matters to women our age: like old hens in the yard, we just like to keep the pecking order straight. We are four women packed into Mary’s SUV and headed for a psychic camp for a short weekend.

Nancy loves the SUV. It’s big. It’s white. It commands authority on the road. Drivers who might challenge her little green Toyota hesitate and give way to the SUV. It looks like a man’s vehicle. There is no man in it or anywhere near it, but it muscles us down the road like a bodyguard.
Step aside, step aside.
We feel little and important and protected inside, although it is a proud member of the most dangerous class of vehicles on the road.

I had written an article about fat girls shopping for dress-up clothes that Nancy has me read to the group. She and I are women of size: Mary and Susan are not. Nancy has heard it at least three times by now (she also lived it) and she laughs at my best lines. She and I are in the front and I can’t tell how the women in the back are reacting.

It’s clear to me that appearances are important to Susan. She is a small blond, a configuration of color and appearance I have in the past jokingly referred to as “the enemy.” Susan is not my enemy. My “enemy” is some small, arrogant blond who may or may not have existed back in junior high school or perhaps even further back than that. A stereotype gleaned from after-school soap operas or romance novels. My enemy is a lifetime of total strangers walking up to me to recommend diets their great aunt Sarah tried with amazing results, and she was “almost as big as you are” when she started. My distrust of Susan has nothing to do with Susan, the woman who is my partner’s childhood friend, and it is not Susan’s fault she reminds me of the daughter my mother wished she had or the popular high school cheerleading career I once so desperately wished I had. I have grown confident enough in my writing and angry enough about what presumptions about size and character do to all of us that I can read out loud about being as wide as I am tall to small and exquisitely proportioned women without gritting my teeth or flinching. I always know where they are.

We stop for dinner at a restaurant in downtown Auburn that turns out to be a cafeteria. They advertise “over 50 selections” on the way in. We settle in, order our drinks, drift along the salad bar adding bits of this and that to our composite. By the time I sit down at the table Susan is already talking to Mary, who answers, “I wore them for Bob because he was so curious about them.”

Bob is a friend of ours, a gay man studying the ministry. It is a tribute to my affection for him and his tolerance for different points of view that he and I are even friends. (I have issues with conventional religion as well.) Bob was supposed to come with us on this trip but had to cancel at the last minute.

I study Mary thoughtfully, trying to imagine what she might have worn that my friend Bob would be curious about. I check her clothes, her earrings, I am about to duck discreetly under the table to check her shoes when I realize she has breasts. This gives me an interesting insight into my friend Bob, and I laugh. “You’re wearing boobs,” I note. “I like them—they look very nice.”

Mary had a radical mastectomy four years before. When she was first diagnosed with breast cancer she studied all of the available information about breast cancer, implants, and their accompanying potential problems. She opted not to replace one problem with another. Now, however, she is considering a career change into an industry where conventional physical appearance is more important—she’s decided to become a professional dealer for one of the local casinos, and flat-chested women don’t get as many tips.

“I hate them,” Mary says. They get in her way and make her feel claustrophobic. She is allergic to virtually all adhesives, and the breasts are glued in some fashion to her chest. “I can’t wait to get where we’re going and see what this adhesive has done.”

Right now she works for a heating and cooling company where she is one of perhaps two women—the rest are all plumbers and metal fabricators, all men. She has never made any secret about her breast cancer or the mastectomy required to save her life. For all I know the men she has worked with know all about the $6,000 replacement breasts she bought—they’ve had all day to notice them.

The women in Nancy and Mary’s family are heavy-breasted women, even while the rest of their bodies are, like Mary’s, fairly standard. Her breasts have always embarrassed her and she has told us more than once she is perfectly happy flat-chested.

I don’t know what to say to a woman who has faced down cancer—who is still facing down cancer—but I know that facts are more comfortable for her than emotions, so we talk about size. She tells about walking into a lingerie store and trying on bras, stuffing wads of toilet paper in them to try to decide what size she felt would suit her. She told us the salesclerks were all women our age who looked at her with silent panic in their eyes. They told her they had no idea how to fit her and called their manager, a pert little “twenty-year-old” whose friends were all alive and who therefore saw the whole adventure as a lark.

We are flying through the dark between Fort Wayne and Anderson. Nancy is still driving. She has me tell the group about my desk partner, a redheaded woman of size who was driving off some bottled-up hostility the night she was pulled over by a state trooper for talking on her cell phone while driving.

She saw his flasher in her rearview mirror, but she determined she had done nothing wrong and kept driving.

He pulled up beside her and waved at her with his index finger.

She ignored him.

He started “getting obnoxious,” she told me, which I took to mean he pulled up beside her and edged her toward the side of the road, so she pulled off.

He walked up to her car. He said, through the two-inch crack she made for him, “You were driving down the road and talking on the cell phone at the same time—that’s a very dangerous practice . . .”

“But,” said my cubiclemate, “one that is completely legal in the state of Michigan.”

“Still,” said the trooper, “it’s dangerous.”

“Did I use the proper turn signals when I passed you?” she challenged.

“You did.”

“Was I speeding when I passed you?”

“No.”

“Then why did you stop me?”

“I stopped you to warn you . . .”

“You didn’t have any reason to stop me,” she said.

“Ma’am,” he said, “get out of the car.”

She said, “No.”

He said, “Get out of the car.”

She said, “You go call your supervisor and bring him down here—otherwise I’m not getting out.”

He said, his voice very determined now, “Ma’am—get
out
of the car.”

She said, “You don’t have a leg to stand on and I’m not getting out of this car.”

He stood there. He turned around, walked back to his car, got in, and drove away.

We all agreed we would have been peeing our pants in terror when he told her to get out of the car, and we elected her our honorary queen.

About half of the year, travel in Indiana involves the perpetual question, “Is that their time or ours?” Hoosiers claim the confusion is the fault of Michiganders who go on daylight savings time while Hoosiers stay the same. This is not entirely true, because “their time” depends on what part of Indiana you happen to be in: the northwestern counties match their time to nearby Chicago, which is daylight savings time in the next time zone.

We arrived at Camp Chesterfield at either 8:30 or 9:30, depending on whose time you use. Whatever time it was, the front desk for the dormitory was closed and so we were instructed to just go ahead and pick out our beds.

We stayed in the women’s dorm. The women’s dorm is a huge basement room filled with single beds arranged to make the best use of a big open space. Each single bed has a matching antique dresser. Each bed is made up with the clean linens from an estate sale. Everything is clean, everything has been used a hundred times before. Everything smells faintly of mildew. Almost all of the furniture in Camp Chesterfield reminds me of what my parents or their friends had in their lake cottages when I was in junior high. Lodging in the dorm costs us ten dollars apiece for the night.

Mary is sitting on the edge of her bed. She has a kind of
how stupid is this?
expression on her face. In each hand she is holding a purple satin bag, reminiscent of a Crown Royal bag, with a purple drawstring top.

“How’s it going?” I check with her.

She holds up one bag. “This is what they go in,” she says. Each bag holds a plastic breast. Each breast has a small transparent form-keeper it slides into.

“They’re lovely,” I compliment her.

“She’s a container lover,” Susan reminds Mary.

We come over to admire her breasts, which have not blistered her chest as she thought they had. Now she holds one in each hand. Each has a nipple and a textured areola. Each has a small flap that curves around her rib cage. The side that goes up against her skin is made of a particularly absorbent material that is designed to collect sweat. To wash them, she tells us, she has to let that material absorb as much water as it can, squeeze it out with a towel, and then lay it on the floor and gently but firmly step on it.

She tucks them into their shape-keeper and then their purple drawstring bags, tucks them into her suitcase, and then she just shrugs.

I would have to say, just as an observation, that psychics are not by nature businesspeople. Everyone who works and lives at Camp Chesterfield is a psychic. The desk clerk, the people who run the diner, the groundskeepers, and the clerks in the bookstore—all are psychics. Camp Chesterfield is a big grassy park, around which are a row of cottages two deep in a big U-shape, and in these cottages live the established professional fortune-telling psychics of the community. There are rules and regulations and politics involved in living in and owning these cottages, and in particular, what happens to these cottages when the original owners are no longer able or interested in living there. Since I’ve only set foot on the grounds twice and make no claims whatsoever to their world, they do not share their private workings of the community with me: I only know that there are the established professionals with their tablets out in front of their cottages where guests can sign up for a private reading, and the rest of the community fits itself in wherever it can, doing whatever has to be done while they wait for the acceptance and membership that has drawn them here.

But everyone here wants to practice their calling, not change linens or fry burgers.

We never checked in, and when Nancy and Mary went looking for someone to help them cash out Nancy started to say, “One of our group dropped out,” and the woman said, “I know—your friend Rae couldn’t make it.”

Nancy just stood there, looking at her.

“You forget where I work,” the clerk reminded her.

At 8:30 in the morning of an all-day moneymaking event the restaurant pop machine stopped making ice and was out of four out of the eight selections of pop. The breakfast line was closed at a quarter to ten because the cook ran out of meat, and the lunch line opened with a woman sitting at the cash register who had no idea how much anything cost or how to ring it up. It was all I could do to keep Nancy and Mary from vaulting over the counter and taking charge of the kitchen.

We were attending the first ever Spiritfest, a largely outdoor activity spread around the grounds of Camp Chesterfield where mosquitoes the size of bumblebees sapped the life force out of terrified guests. There were artisans selling their wares, musicians performing, and the grounds themselves, lush and unseasonably green, to roam—but those who ventured outside soon came back to the foodless, drinkless restaurant with giant welts all over their bodies and dark, sickly circles under their eyes. Rumor had it one driver lost his temper and thumped a mosquito and put a big dent in his bumper.

I run into a friend at the Spiritfest who gives me the name of a psychic I should consult. “He’s wonderful,” she assures me, “you’ll love him.”

The psychics who do not have cottages of their own have gathered in the far end of the dining hall, where each has a small table arranged with a clipboard for scheduling appointments, their business cards, and whatever small touch of grace they feel will give us a sense of their gift. One woman has thrown a lovely scarf with a dragonfly in batik over her table. Several other tables have floral arrangements. One psychic does readings based on flower petals, several others read tarot cards.

I sign up for the young man I will “love,” and then I wander the grounds alone for a while to absorb the ambiance. Nancy has told me the entire property hums with the vibrant energies of the people who live there, and for a while I struggle to hear or taste or in any way sense this. I have never seen anyone’s aura. I have never been blessed with any sense of who or what a person is beyond the obvious. My cat, from all appearances, has more insight into the characters who come to visit his house than I do.