Sunday in the park with psychics

We go one by one to see the psychic. It’s a hot Sunday, and the seven of us sit fanning ourselves on the back porch, eating strawberries and cucumber sandwiches. I am curled up in a corner of the couch, observing, which they’re letting me do, and I’m grateful for the stillness. I’ve been talking too much lately. I’ve been giving too much of myself away. It’s made me sensitive as hell.

This house is Maggie’s – dramatic Maggie the Cat, in rivers of fabric, who switches accents every few sentences. Her hands fly around her face like she’s lifting a veil. She leans into you when you speak. She says she’s practicing her empathy. Her shirt drifts towards her navel, and her teenage daughter hands her a sweater.

The psychic is Della. When it’s my turn, I creep into the porch and Della takes my hands. Della has short red hair and the stretched white forehead of a woman who always remembers to wash her face before bed. I am not that woman. Is she going to know this? I’ve taken off my wedding ring, walked gracefully into the room like someone whose inner life resembles a temple. I want to throw her off.

I ask Della my question. I realize later it wasn’t the question I really wanted to ask, but maybe she knew that. (Psychic, right?) She says, so simple! We’ll fix you now! She kneels and puts her hands on my feet. I admit it: I feel something. There’s a sizzling in her fingers, and my entire body feels like a bruised funnybone. She tames me. She finishes with jazz hands. Flair! I am saved. Is this what religion feels like? She says I’ll feel a fullness in my stomach now that schism in my – soul? – is repaired. Well, OK. I go back. I eat cake and mint tea and I slowly burn my shoulders in the afternoon heat. Maggie the Cat talks about Buddhists, astrology, facials, fucking.

At home I read an article about an undiscovered Amazon tribe. Well, they’re discovered now. Of course I draw an analogy. Here is what I think I want: I want to be a lost tribe. I want to be left alone for a while, but only with the knowledge that I’ll eventually be found. It’s the finding I want. Oh, that finding. I chase it. To be sitting on the edge of some dingy river, singing songs in a language only I understand, and then to see the anthropologist’s face in the brush. We will fall in love, this anthropologist and I! What a great love it will be, me the undiscovered tribe and he who discovered. But I bet it’s exhausting being discovered all the time. And I bet the novelty wears off for the finder. Still…

I believed it, you know. I believed that all it took was for a woman with beautiful skin to put her electric hands on my feet.

Posted by: Zosia | 06-02-2008 | 07:06 PM
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