Curtain Number Two

Originally written Saturday, December 24, 2005

Medusa’s reading space was located in a room behind the counter, hidden by a heavy curtain that momentarily reminded me of the ones they had at the Crypt to separate the more public and private areas, privileging the regulars who knew their way around. Indeed, there was something of a speakeasy aura to the arrangement. Aunt Elizabeth spoke in a very low tone to the barefoot, flowy-skirted teenager who was busy stocking racks of Woman-Oriented-Woman-oriented greeting cards, and the young woman dropped her inventory to poke her head behind the curtain. We got the OK to head into the back.

Medusa did indeed wear a turban, but instead of appearing as a pastiche of the stereotypical gypsy fortune-teller, she looked more like a cancer patient hiding her chemotherapy hair loss. Her sun-scorched skin, with a Southern California tan as deep as the crow’s feet around her eyes, only added to the impression by bringing the phrase “skin cancer” to mind. But over the course of our time there, her appearance changed, not so much visually as in the impression it gave, so that by the time it was my turn to receive my reading, she looked less to me like a cancer sufferer than like a Sikh man, the dark skin and turban signs of his heritage and his faith, rather than weakness and disease. Yet when Ian and I talked afterward, he spoke of her as he had before, as if she were fulfilling his expectations of the normative psychic. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

She was thrilled to see Aunt Elizabeth and referred to her by both of her names while we were there (Aunt is her given first name and Elizabeth her middle name, but for understandable reasons, her friends only use the “Aunt” part when we want to be a pain in her butt) and even more excited that she’d brought new customers.

Liz went first and allowed us to sit in on her reading, and we settled in on a couch in a dark corner of the already mood-lit room. Honestly, there was nothing terribly exciting about it—I’ve seen and received “psychic” readings before, though “not lately,” as I had eventually informed my companions—and Medusa did sound like nothing more than a living horoscope.

Ian followed, and he too asked me and Liz to stick around during his session, though in his case it was probably so that we’d know what he was talking about when it was time to make fun of her later. His reading seemed fairly straightforward, but he made jovial and sarcastic eye contact with me surprisingly little over the next twenty minutes, considerably less than he had during Liz’s. When Medusa had asked him about what he’d like to focus on, he chose his family. He’d be spending Christmas with them—mother, brother, stepfather, and stepsister. When she told him to pass a message along to his brother, something having to do with quitting something he was in the middle of, it was sufficiently vague to fly right over my head and Liz’s. However, it seemed to hit Ian right in the gut. When he rose from his seat, he seemed to be forcing himself back into bouyancy to do his Regis Philbin impression and direct me toward the “hot seat.”

Since the others had received their readings with me in the room, I of course was not going to eject them. But when I sat down across from Medusa, she asked, “Are you sure you don’t want them to wait outside? This might get kind of personal.”

She hadn’t provided the same disclaimer for the others, but I didn’t think to wonder about it for long. “No, that’s OK. They’re close friends. I trust them.”

“That may be so, but… never mind. You want them here, that’s up to you.” She managed to say this in a tone of voice both brusque and grandmotherly, as if I had just turned down a third helping of her best lasagna.

We went through the process of mixing, cutting, and laying out the tarot cards, and she began her interpretation. “I know you asked me to focus on your job, hon, but I’m seeing all sorts of elements conjoining in one dense energy cluster for you, and what you need to do in the next few weeks is to get all those threads unraveled. If it all stays wrapped up in this little bundle when the energy collapses, everything else will collapse, too—job, love, history, even your, um, personal ties.” She paused as if to see whether I understood whom she was talking about, but I could only guess. “All you’ll have left is your life. But… you’ll have that for a while yet, won’t you?” Every part of her face suggested a smirk except for her lips. I suddenly felt very vulnerable, very known; her words could have meant any number of things, but her visage implied that she had joined my wavelength.

The events of this day to be continued