Talk Before Sleep (21 page)

The woman sat in the chair on her side of the table. “Now,” she said. “For five dollars I can read your palm. But what
you
really need is the Tarot cards.”

“Is that right?” I asked.

She nodded, lit up a cigarette from a mint-green pack, exhaled courteously up into the air.

“How much does that cost?”

She frowned deeply, her mouth like an upside-down smile. “Okay. For you, I make it cheap. Fifteen dollars. Usually it’s twenty-five.”

I nodded agreement, and she shuffled a well-worn Tarot deck, then put it down before me and told me to cut it. I did and she made an arrangement of cards, faced the drawings toward me. She tapped a long fingernail against a card showing a man in armor seated on a horse. Then she drew in on her cigarette, exhaled. “This is your husband,” she said. “He don’t get along with the ladies so well. He is of the practical nature.”

I smiled.

“Sometimes you want to leave him, but …” She shrugged. “You don’t.” She looked up at me. “You are right to stay. Divorce is no good for children, you understand me? And anyway, you love this man. You got a red-haired girl, right?”

I stopped smiling.

“She is a lot like you.”

“I think so.”

“Yes,” she said, agreeing with herself. “That is true.” She turned another card over, and her forehead wrinkled. “Someone is sick,” she said. “Who?”

“I … my friend. I have a friend who is sick.”

“I don’t see no cure,” the woman said, turning over two more cards. She looked up again. “You must pray for your friend to accept this.”

I said nothing. But then, when the silence became uncomfortable, I said, “Well, I’m … I don’t pray, really.”

She raised her eyebrows. “No?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t exactly believe in God. I mean, I believe in something, but not a Being who’s interested in me. Aware of me. I believe … I think what I believe in is a Great Spirit.”

The woman leaned back in her chair. She was a mix of incredulity and weariness. “Don’t you know,” she asks, “that God
is
a spirit?”

“Well … yes,” I said. “Right.”

“So you will pray for your friend?”

“Yes.”

Let her think she has made an easy convert, I thought. This is too hard to explain.

On the way back to Ruth’s, I passed a small Catholic church. I went in and lit a candle, put my head down on my arms at the kneeler, opened with, “Dear God.” You try, sometimes, in spite of yourself.

I’d meant to tell Ruth what happened. I thought she’d enjoy the story, with certain omissions. But I never did.

A
fter I die, you guys have really got to go on a diet,” Ruth says. We are eating dinner: angel hair with a sauce Helen made that called for two sticks of butter; crusty rolls, Caesar salad. Brownies and ice cream are for dessert.

“You’re supposed to gain weight in your forties,” Helen says. “It’s actually sexy.”

“Oh, bullshit.” Sarah can afford to say that. She’s the only one of us who hasn’t gained a lot. She sits now with her irritatingly small portions before her, with her stomach flat under her napkin. She probably belts her nightgown.

“You’d look a far sight better if you gained a few,” L.D. tells her. “Way it is now, you look like an asshole. All women as skinny as you look like assholes.”

Sarah looks up at her, considers saying something in response, but then changes her mind. She winds pasta around her fork, lifts a tidy bundle up to her mouth.

“You’re like one of those insects, look like a stick, what are they called, walkingsticks?”

A thin silence.

“Yo, Sarah,” L.D. says, “isn’t that what they’re called? Come on, you know everything, right?”

Ruth puts her napkin over her plate. She hasn’t eaten a bite. “L.D.,” she says.

“I can take care of myself,” Sarah says. Then, to L.D., “What’s your problem, anyway?”

L.D. points to herself in mock surprise. “I have a problem?”

“Let’s have the brownies,” I say, but it is as useless as though I’d said nothing.

L.D. says, “I’ll tell you the problem, Sarah. I’m sick of your grim predictions. I’m sick of your CEOing Ruth’s life. I think we need a new boss here. Someone who believes in Ruth’s strength to goddamn overcome this. Because she has it. She has it. If people will just stop taking it away from her, she has it. I think we should plan on her getting better, not burying her!”

“It sounds to me,” Sarah says, “as if you’re the one trying to run things, L.D. I only did what Ruth asked me to.”

“You made her ask you!”

“Please,” Ruth says.

Helen stands up, grabs the pan of brownies off the counter, slams them down in front of L.D., hands her a knife. “Here,” she says. “Cut these. Make them all even so we won’t fight.”

L.D. hesitates, then takes the knife, cuts down the center of the pan and looks up. “Who knows higher math?” she asks. “Where do I cut to make them all come out even?”

“The last time I ate really a lot of brownies, I’d taken LSD,” Helen says. “It was in the Rocky Mountains, in Colorado, in 1969. I thought the brownies were alive, but I ate them anyway.”

“I loved acid,” Sarah says. “I could speak different languages on it. I don’t mean Italian, I mean dog. I mean wind.”

We are all of us stunned, and we stare at her.

“You never took acid,” L.D. says, finally.

Sarah smiles, a lovely thing, brushes an invisible crumb off her lap. “It was on the back of a stamp. The first time I took it, I spent all my time looking into the center of a flower. I kept saying over and over, ‘It’s all right
here.”

L.D. grunts. “You were one of those hippies in dresses that cost three hundred dollars.”

“Skirts,” Sarah says. “And gauzy tops, with tassels and all those shiny things on them—sequins, rhinestones.”

“Fine, three-hundred-dollar skirts and tops,” L.D. says.

“Is it that you’re
attracted
to me?” Sarah asks suddenly. “Is that it?”

L.D. lets air out of one side of her face. “Sorry.”

“What’s your girlfriend like?” Sarah asks.

“She’s real little and blond and pretty,” Helen says.

“And sexy,” Ruth adds.

Sarah nods thoughtfully. “L.D., do you think if you’re a woman you have to be a lesbian to be truly political?”

L.D. looks up sharply.

“I mean it,” Sarah says. “This is a real question. I’ve thought that. I’ve often thought that.”

L.D. pushes back from the table and crosses her legs man-style, booted ankle up on one knee. “Door’s open,” she says. “Come on in.”

“I’m being serious,” Sarah says.

Silence.

“If there’s a heaven,” Ruth says, “do you think you have to come there as you died? I mean, all beat up and stuff?”

T
hat night, when we are alone, Ruth asks me to make oatmeal. “Don’t use water, use milk. And put in a whole lot of brown sugar and butter. And some raisins.”

When I carry the bowl into her bedroom, she sighs. “Put it on a tray, with one of those cut-lace placemats. Put the spoon on a napkin. There’s a bud vase in the cupboard.”

I carry the bowl out to the kitchen, prepare the tray in the way she asked me to, add a small glass of orange juice. I feel as though my hurt feelings are standing behind me, tapping me hard on the shoulder. When I set the tray beside her, I say, “You’re so picky. You’re kind of a bitch.”

“I know. I always was. I’m spoiled.” She inspects the tray, then looks up at me. “Go ahead and eat it.”

“This is for you!”

“I know. But I can’t … I think I’m hungry, but then I just can’t eat. You eat it. Just let me watch, do you mind?”

I pick up the tray, look at it. I realize that I would never prepare such a thing for myself, but that I should. It’s a good thing to occasionally lie back and wiggle your toes at the pleasure you’ve created for yourself. “You really want me to eat this?” I ask Ruth.

“Is it too weird? Is it sexual or something?
Is
it weird?”

Actually, I’m not sure. But I say, “No, it’s okay. But don’t start criticizing my manners or anything like that.”

“I won’t.”

“No … you know, smiles, or anything.”

“I won’t!”

I eat the oatmeal and when I’m finished, she asks, “Isn’t it good?”

I show her the empty bowl, scraped clean.

“On cold mornings in Montana,” Ruth says, “my mother always made me that. And she’d wrap a scarf all around my head till only my eyes stuck out. I had red boots, with fur on the top. I walked to school, and it hurt, when I got there, getting defrosted. I’d gotten used to the cold.”

“I remember that, too,” I said. “Your fingers would feel fat around the pencil.”

“Yes.” She sighs, closes her eyes. “I suppose it’s gross to say so, but I actually had a very happy childhood.”

“Did you?”

“Yes. So this cancer, it didn’t come from that.”

“Oh, who knows where it comes from? It just comes.”

“I really hope so,” she says. “I’m so tired of digging around in my head, trying to figure out all I did wrong.”

I
have trouble going to sleep that night. I can feel the mild ache of fatigue in my body, but my mind is overly alert, as though it is waiting for evil to creep up on it. I change positions, turn the pillow over, then over again. And then I close my eyes and ask my brain to show me something that will make me feel comfortable and safe. I envision a gigantic nest, lodged into the high branches of a tree. Light filters in gently through the leaves; the sun is setting; a veiled moon waits off to one side of the sky. There is a thick white quilt in the nest, and a pillow. I climb in, put my head on the pillow, wrap the quilt around me. It smells like air and sunshine. I am high up and comfortable, but I need something else to feel safe. I look up at the edge of the nest and sitting there, looking down at me, are Joe and Meggie. I can’t make out their features, but I know who it is from the outline of their bodies. Meggie is swinging her legs, and I see the shoelace from one of her sneakers hanging down and following the loopy pattern of her movements. The light is a rich golden color; it seems to push as strongly as a hand at their backs but they stay steady, they stay sitting there and watching over me; suddenly, thick bands of light from the last of the day’s
sun spread like peacock feathers all around them. They could be the center of the universe. I open my eyes, say I understand, and then close them again to sleep.