Cosmina was right when she suggested I had no psychic ability. But I believe these cards and other tools help me to understand myself in some deeper way. I have used them for guidance on important matters far more often than I would admit to just anyone. Penny knew, of course; she was my partner in mystical inquiry and in interpretation. We always went out on my porch for our readings, regardless of the season. Porch Tellers, I called us.
Now I take my box to the front porch and pull out my favorite deck of cards. They still carry the scent of the incense sold in the store where I bought them, a little place in New Orleans that I found when I gave a talk there. It was a dark and narrow place, both peaceful and charged. Just walking in there made you feel enlivened in a particular way, as though you were outlined by something that glowed.
I sit down in one of the chairs, try to ignore the other one, which Penny always sat in. I spread the cards out in my hand, close my eyes, and pose this question: Should I really sell my house and move in with those other women?
I sit still and wait for the pull. There. I feel it. I reach to the right, put my hand on a card, hesitate, and then pull the one beneath it. I open my eyes and see that I’ve gotten the fertility card. I don’t ever recall having pulled it before. The application says, You are being asked to rebirth yourself, to bring new life to an old and stagnant place. Then, toward the end, If you are considering beginning something new, the time is right. It is in you to succeed, if you choose to. Leave behind what has held you back, and move forward with confidence and joy.
I sit thinking for a moment. Then I consult the Book of Runes to see if I get the same kind of answer. This method uses three Runes that you pull from the velvet pouch with your eyes closed and lay in a row before you. For most Runes, the meaning changes depending on whether you lay the stone right side up or upside down; very few read the same both ways. The stones address three things: the situation as it is, the challenge, and the outcome.
The first Rune I draw is Gebo, which signifies two things: partnership and a gift. The text says, Drawing this Rune is an indication that union, uniting, and partnership in some form is at hand. Further on, it says, This counsel applies at all levels: in love relationships, in business affairs, in partnering of every kind. It is particularly appropriate when entering into partnership with what some call your Higher Self.
Finally, I pull one of my “women” cards, which shows someone looking upward, as if in entreaty, with roses cascading from her hair. There is a clock below her, and the statement is Time is making her decision for her.
Well, that’s enough for me. I return my things to the box, carry it upstairs, and put it on the floor beside my bed. I don’t want to forget it when I move.
I put on jeans and a sweatshirt, and I give the house a good cleaning. Scrubbing behind the toilet, I think of my co-worker, Mike Adams. When he and his wife put their house on the market, they cleaned in a way they never had before. And he said, “Man, if I’d known it could look this good, I’d have kept it like this all the time. Betsy even put fresh flowers in the bathrooms!”
At precisely four o’clock, just after I’ve changed into decent clothes, the doorbell rings. The realtor’s name is Marilyn Watson, and she has a great reputation for selling houses quickly. Her face is on bus stop benches, which I’ve always thought of as superstardom for real estate agents. She’s wearing a bright red power suit with big gold buttons, and her blond hair is sprayed into a formidable updo.
“I just love this block,” she says. “And what a garden you have out front!”
“Wait till you see the back.”
I take Marilyn for a tour of the house, and in doing so I fully realize that what is here is not just things: good-size rooms, furniture, draperies, rugs, books, dishes. What’s here are the selves I’ve been since I moved here when I was thirty years old. So many intentions and aspirations I had, moving in. Many were realized, some were not.
As Marilyn inspects the bedroom, I lean against the wall, my hands flat on the surface. There is something that many carpenters do when they put up new walls: they nestle things into the insulation. It could be a page from a newspaper, a beer bottle, a new penny. Seamus, my carpenter, used to put poems there. He had an Irishman’s love for the form, and he used to read poems to me in bed. Sometimes I would fall asleep to them, and I still recommend it as the best way to enter into your dreams, to mount the black horse for the deep ride, Seamus used to call going to sleep. It was typical of him to say something like that, something half sarcastic and half sincere. In the end, when our times together became less about poetry and more about argument, I accused him of being someone who was afraid to stand behind his own convictions. He accused me of the same thing.
I slept with him many times in this room. The last time he stayed with me, I held him in my arms and looked up at the ceiling, wondering who would be the first to say it was over. It was a rainy night and we’d made meatballs and spaghetti for dinner in our pajamas and there’d hung over our gay preparation a knowing pall.
That night he’d read me a poem that he was going to put behind the wall of a remodeled bedroom of a couple who’d been married for sixty-seven years. They needed their doorway widened to accommodate the wheelchair the man was now in. They hired an architect of great renown and redid the whole bedroom beautifully. I loved the poem Seamus used for them so much that I made a copy of it, and I’ve practically memorized it. It’s by Ellen Bass, and it’s called “Gate C22.” It’s about an older man kissing an older woman who is just off a plane. The ending goes:
you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
But that night when Seamus read it to me, I’d asked if he would find a way to put it in one of my walls. He’d smiled and said it was a beautiful poem, wasn’t it? And then he’d said no, he couldn’t use it for me, only one wall per poem, that was the rule. That was the magic. He’d find another one for me, he said. Somewhere. And he kissed the top of my head and turned over for sleep.
That was how he said it was over. Morning came, and as he was leaving to go to work, he turned to face me, pain in his eyes, and I said, “I know.”
Someone told me recently that he’s with a woman he just got engaged to. At first I thought, Boy, that was fast. Then I remembered the many nights he hadn’t come to my house toward the end because he was meeting with a “demanding client,” and I thought, Oh.
“Cecilia?”
Marilyn is talking from the closet.
“Yes?”
“Is it California Closets who did this? It’s so well organized!”
“No, actually my best friend, Penny, and I designed that closet, and I had a carpenter friend build it.”
“Well, it’s wonderful. My goodness. You’ll have to give me his name. I love the little ironing board built into the wall. And the jewelry display cases on the wall, what a brilliant idea! I buy so much jewelry and then I never wear it because I forget about it!”
I show her the rest of the house, and she tells me what she thinks it will sell for and that she has a client right now whom she thinks will be perfect for it. He’s a very wealthy man getting a divorce, and he’ll need some furniture—any chance I’d want to sell some of mine?
I almost laugh out loud. I can’t count the number of times I’ve said, “Once you’ve made up your mind to do a good and true thing, the universe will go out of its way to help you.” I tell Marilyn I’ll sell everything but my bedroom furniture, artwork, books, and quilts. I probably should sell some of my quilts; with the seven Penny’s codicil provided me with after she died, I now have far more than I’ll ever use. But I can’t part with a single one of them; they are like children to me. How could I sell something made in a pattern called Amish Shadow, or Evening Star, or even Broken Dishes? As for the one of Penny’s called a Friendship quilt, well.
“Think of what you want to charge per piece
of furniture, and collectively,” Marilyn says. I see her out the door and then I call for help moving my bedroom furniture and clothes and the few other things that will be enough for now. When I dial the house’s number, it’s Renie who answers. “I’m ready,” I say. I guess it’s true.
RENIE BACKS HER TRUCK UP IN MY DRIVEWAY CROOKEDLY ENOUGH that she takes a few lilac branches with her. The blossoms have gone by now, thank goodness. “Sorry!” she yells, as she comes up the front porch steps.
“No problem. Come in.”
She crosses the threshold and stops dead in the living room. “Whoa! You’ll never fit all this stuff into our house.”
“I’m not bringing most of it.”
She runs her hand along the top of the antique Parisian gaming table I bought a few years ago. “Why not?”
“I’m selling it. I’m selling just about everything.”
She looks around the room. “How much for the chaise lounge?”
“You want it? You can have it.”
“For how much?”
“For helping me move.”
She goes and stretches out on it, puts her hands behind her head. “Deal.”
“I’m just taking my bedroom furniture and a few boxes of miscellaneous stuff,” I tell her. “I don’t think any of it will be too heavy for us.”
“Won’t be too heavy for me,” Renie says. “And if we need help, we’ll ask Riley.”
“You brought the dog?” Bad idea, I think.
“He wanted to come. I told him he could come if he behaved. He will.”
She stands, looks around again. “Wow. You’re leaving a lot behind. Are you sure you aren’t going to regret this?”
“You must have left a lot behind when you moved in.”
“I didn’t have much.”
“I’m bringing the things that really matter to me. The rest … I don’t know, I guess I’ve gotten to a point in my life where it’s time to start shedding. And I’ll tell you something: I’ve never regretted doing anything in my life as much as I’ve regretted not doing it. There were a few times when in my heart I knew the right thing to do, but I listened to other people, or I didn’t have the guts, or it didn’t make sense, or I don’t know.… There was some false voice inside posing as logic when it was really just my own fear talking. The times I didn’t stay true, didn’t stay congruent, I paid the price.”
“Yeah, well … That’s hard to do, sometimes,” Renie says.
She follows me upstairs and we take the mattress off my stripped bed and carry it down to the truck. Riley’s in the cab of the truck, his head out the window, his tail wagging madly.
AFTER MY THINGS ARE moved into the house, I put fresh sheets and the Friendship quilt on my bed, then spend a couple of hours placing things where I think they should go. I put my desk in front of the window that looks out onto the backyard, and I sit there for a while, imagining the contours I could create for the garden, the bluestone chip paths, the location of the birdbath I’d like to have. For one minute, the memory of my old garden grabs hold, and I get a rush of fear thinking that I actually did this; there’s no going back.
I jump when I hear a knock on the door, then go to open it.
Lise is standing there with a bouquet of apricot-colored roses in a green vase. “I just wanted to say welcome,” she says.
“Thank you!”
She looks around the room. “It looks really nice in here, already. A lot different than when Sandy lived here. Then, you couldn’t see the floor for the clothes all over it. And she covered the walls with pages ripped out of magazines. Floor to ceiling. It was interesting, I’ll give her that. But this … this is really pretty. I love that quilt on your bed. Vintage, right?”
“At least one hundred years old. I can’t resist old quilts. I’ve got a bunch of them.”
She looks at her watch. “I’ve got to make some pre-op phone calls to a couple of my patients who are having surgery tomorrow. You’d be surprised how much people forget about what they were told. Or how they misinterpret what’s in the handouts. Nerves, you know.”
“I’d be the same way.”
“Me, too. So I like to call, settle them down a bit, let them know that someone’s in this with them, at least to the extent I can be. I’ll see you at dinner.” She leans forward, lowers her voice. “Renie’s cooking, so don’t expect a Joni meal.”
She goes to her room, which is at the front of the house, over the porch, and closes the door. I put the flowers on my desk, loosen the arrangement, cross my arms, and stand back to regard it. The roses are lovely, just opening; they’ll last for a long while. I still have books and clothes to unpack, but I’ll do it later. For now, I’ll go down and see if Renie needs any help.
When I start down the hall, I hear Lise on the phone. She’s angry, shouting. “Well, I’m sorry that I bothered you. I haven’t heard from you for a while and so I thought I’d check in. I won’t keep you.”
Silence.
I’m pretty sure that wasn’t one of Lise’s patients. I’m pretty sure that was her daughter.
I move quietly past and go downstairs and into the kitchen.
It’s a mess—bowls and measuring cups and spoons out, bags of groceries half unpacked, onion peels on the floor.
“Can I help?” I ask Renie.
She looks up. “What are you going to do?”
“Well, I can peel. Chop. Dice.”
“Really! Can you baste and blend?”
“Baste and blend? I can sauté and puree. I can flambé, toss, and skewer!”
Renie pulls a head of lettuce from the grocery bag, hands it to me. “How about broast? Can you broast?”
“Broasted lettuce?”
She shrugs. “I actually don’t even know what ‘broasted’ means.”
“I’m a little vague on that myself.”
“Make a salad,” she says. “And pour us both a glass of wine. There’s some Chardonnay left over from last night in the fridge. God, I hate to cook.”
I pour us glasses of wine, then move to the sink and start washing lettuce leaves. “I’m not crazy about it, either.”
“Well, get used to it—we all have to take turns making dinner. It’s one of Lise’s rules of the house. Got to have a homemade meal for dinner. Got to keep the bathrooms clean, and there are no dishes allowed in the sink. No cutting things out of the newspaper until everyone’s read it. If you take something from the first aid kit, replace it.”
“You have a first aid kit?”
“A major first aid kit. There’s stuff in there to start IVs! That’s what happens when you live with a doctor. It’s in the last bottom cupboard on the left. Oh, and here’s a really important rule: No men can stay over. Or women, in my case.”
“Really. Why can’t anyone stay over?”
“Well, do the math. Could get crowded. But mostly Lise had a bad experience with one woman who lived here and had her boyfriend over all the time. He practically lived here. So she just made a hard-and-fast rule. It’s a little fascist, but it works. Most people have their own place that we can go to. Here, wash these two carrots.”
“You want them peeled, too?”
“We don’t peel.”
“You don’t peel?”
“What is this, Seinfeld? No, we don’t peel. Hardly ever. Too many nutrients in the peel, Lise says.”
“What are we having besides salad?”
“Spaghetti and marinara sauce.”
I wash the carrots, then ask if I should slice them.
“One sliced for the salad. One shredded, for the sauce.”
I turn around. “Carrot in marinara sauce?”
“Yeah. It sweetens it.”
“Really? I didn’t know that.”
We work companionably in the kitchen, Renie and I, and I have a sudden memory of working this way with Penny and Brice. To move myself away from that, I ask Renie what questions she answered in her advice column today.
“Oh, I had one that just made me nuts.
This woman writes in that her mother-in-law criticizes her all the time. All the time, in front of her husband, and her husband never defends her. So I told her to take her mother-in-law out to lunch and give her a taste of her own medicine. I gave her a little list of things she might say. Interesting outfit you’re wearing; do you like that color against your face? Do you really want to sit facing out? Are you sure you want to order that? A spoon might work better for that. You put salt on that? Could you lower your voice a bit? I’m right here. Is that … is that lettuce in your teeth? You know. And then I amped it up a bit for the big finish, where she points a fork at the mother-in-law’s chest and says, Listen. Whatever you think of me or what I’m doing, I don’t want or need or expect any longer to hear. You managed to raise a spineless son by being judge and jury of everything, but I’ve got a long line of vertebrae running down my back and I’m going to tell you what he should have said a long time ago: Back off and butt out.”
“Well,” I say. “That ought to do it.”
“Taste this,” Renie says, holding out a spoon with salad dressing she just made.
“Wow,” I say.
“Good?”
“Interesting!”
She stands there. Then she says, “Well. It won’t kill us.”
That night, just after we’ve finished eating, there’s a phone call for me. Marilyn Watson got a full-price cash offer on my house from the man who just got divorced and he wants everything. All the furniture. The dishes and pots and pans. The garden hose, the mop and broom, the cans of soup in the cupboard, everything. “I think he just wants the thing to be over with,” Marilyn says. “So tell me a day when you want to come over and get your personal things, and we’ll be all set.”