Julia's Chocolates. Cathy Lamb

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СКАЧАТЬ tumbled in deep waves down her back, clean and shiny. She could have been in one of those shampoo ads.

      But I felt like an idiot. The poor woman probably thought I was gay. I wasn’t gay, but neither did I particularly like men at this point in my life.

      “Oh! Well, I…” it was hard to tell in the darkened room, but I think Katie blushed a little, then looked enormously pleased, and huge tears formed in her eyes, giant, perfectly shaped tears. If eyes had to breathe for us, she would have drowned.

      I stumbled about for something else to say. Good Lord. I’d been invited to Breast Power Psychic Night, and already I had one of the women in tears. I was a classless, chubby, socially inept cow, who often couldn’t breathe and who was going to be chased down by an obsessive fiancé at any moment.

      Katie wiped the tears away with her fingers. “Thank you.” She sighed, the sigh a little shaky.

      The thank-you was so heartfelt, I felt hot tears spring to my own eyes. “You’re welcome. I’ve always wanted red hair, long hair. I always thought…I saw this mermaid in a book with long red hair once, and I never forgot it. Compared to a mop of dirty-blond curls, well—”

      “I remember a mermaid just like that, too—the Little Mermaid.” Her brown eyes pooled again. “I can’t believe I’m crying about a mermaid!”

      I couldn’t believe she cried about mermaids, either. “What a loon,” I said, shaking my head, and Katie laughed.

      But I knew I didn’t really think she was a loon. About a month ago, I had stood in line at the library and cried because it was so wonderful I could check out books without paying for them. I didn’t have any money that day because I had taken Robert out to an expensive meal the night before, which he had complained about being tasteless, and I thought to myself, “I love Thomas Jefferson.” And then I had cried, right there in line.

      Katie and I were two of a pathetic kind.

      To her left sat the psychic, Caroline Harper, and there was not a woman on the planet who looked less like a psychic than she. Petite and willowy, wearing a loose flowered skirt and a black tank top, she looked more like a model for tiny women. High cheekbones plunged to a full mouth, her murky, sea-green eyes slanting in her face.

      The only remarkable thing was the constant twitching of her right eye, which she now and then raised a hand to rub, to hold, as if willing the twitch away. When she’d walked into the house, I’d instantly reached up to tuck my wayward curls behind my ears, feeling like a mammoth, worm-eating buffalo as I towered over her. One wrong step and I’d crush the woman.

      Caroline was the frugal one. The woman who lived off pennies and made the best pineapple upside-down cake ever. The one who sold produce at the farmer’s market each week and did readings on the side and barely made it month to month with the help of her neighbors, those who dropped off eggs and meals and were then treated the next day to one of Caroline’s perfect baked goods.

      Caroline smiled at me over the candlelight, her smile huge, her teeth large and brilliant white, her eyes crinkling just a bit in the corners. I judged her to be about five years older than myself.

      She peered into my eyes, bruised and otherwise, and I waited for her to recognize the quaking, ridiculous woman with a yucky past and a strange disease that I am. She would foresee my future and turn pale and sickly-looking.

      But she didn’t. In fact, she just kept smiling at me. Cheerful-like. Open. For some reason she reminded me of Cheerios.

      “Welcome to Golden.” Caroline’s eye kept winking, but the rest of her face was peaceful, tranquil. “Did Lydia tell you that she calls this Psychic Night each week?”

      I nodded my assent, kneading the edge of my blue sweater in my lap, hoping it would hide my hips. Had I gotten even fatter since tiny Caroline walked through the door?

      “Lydia!” she laughed, as Aunt Lydia walked back into the room, her bladder apparently having expelled all poisonous yellow liquids from her body. Caroline’s laughter bubbled right there at the surface, even as that eye kept twitching. Twitch. Twitch.

      “Well, it is, Caroline! I always call it Psychic Night. After each session, you do our readings for us.” Lydia then glared at her. “I did not like my reading last week, Car-o-line. Not at all.”

      “But I was right, wasn’t I?” Caroline laughed, pushing her long brown hair away from her finely carved face. She looked like a queen, not a near-poverty stricken neighbor living off her backyard’s vegetables.

      “You planned it with Stash,” Lydia declared, hands on hips.

      “I did nothing of the sort. I merely told you that I saw a bit of red in your reading. Soft red for love. For passion. It was all around you, Lydia. Red, red, red.” Caroline smiled, and two dimples flashed in her cheeks.

      “And then Stash brought me this!” Lydia stood with righteous anger and opened a drawer of a nearby armoire and yanked out a red negligee with black furry trim.

      I tried not to laugh.

      “He is a bad-mannered old fool. Comes by, parks his tractor in front of my house, hands me the box, forces a kiss on me, and drives off. I’m going to get another pig and name him Stash Two, that I am.”

      Aunt Lydia dropped onto the floor with me and Katie and Caroline, fluffing out the negligee. “Stash thinks that because he owns all the land surrounding my place that he can do what he wants. Really! As if I’d get in something like that!”

      “Be glad you get negligees.”

      The words, soft, with a tinge of bitterness, dropped from Katie’s lips like tiny ballistic missiles. When we turned to look at her, she covered her mouth with both hands. “Oh dear. Dear, dear. I didn’t mean to sound so pitiful. Of course, my husband and I are past that stage, and look at me. I’d hardly fit in one, anyhow!” She laughed, hollow and embarrassed.

      Lydia tossed the negligee over her shoulder, and it landed in a silky pile on the floor. “I am glad we’re having Breast Power Psychic Night tonight! A negligee is really a gift to the man. To the man!” She leaned over and shook Katie’s shoulders, the flame from the candle only inches away from her swinging gray braids. I reached out and lifted them away before her hair turned into a flaming mass, but Aunt Lydia hardly noticed.

      “Do you think women, real women, want to be dressed up like hooker dolls? Lace isn’t comfortable. It itches my crotch. It causes me to break out in an emotional rash! These negligees go straight up your butt, and no woman should be showing the backs of her thighs to any man when she’s passed the age of sixteen. See? This is what men do to us! They make us feel like sexual objects who are there to please them, listen to them, cater to them!”

      “Right,” said Katie. Her brown eyes darted to the negligee, and I saw her swallow hard. “We don’t need that. It’s ridiculous, really. We’re not toys. It’s ridiculous that women would want to wear them in the first place.”

      “Of course it is!” We all looked at our fearless leader with more than a little fear as she raised both fists in the air. “They drive up in tractors, toss us lingerie that we’re supposed to model for them, making us feel downright cheap, with our breasts yanked to our throats, then we’re to tickle their teensies, and they drive off! Leaving our breasts spiritually unawakened. Dead!”

      “Amen to that. Dead СКАЧАТЬ