Charles Baxter - The Feast of Love

I mean, most cities have got their own Twilight Zones, right? Where the old wrecked factories and warehouses live? ’Cause East Ypsi has got these ancient car assembly plants, these old humping kickass grounds of steel and scrapyards, and the scrapyards sort of find their way next to topless bars and tattoo parlors, and these freakazoidal video stores where you don’t want to know what or who they’re renting in there, and outside on the curb the underfed cats and dogs are staring at you and begging for puppy chow when you drive past, and then there’s razor wire around most of the warehouses, so you just know the karma’s really complicated there. It’s like the future has already happened, and it’s all past by now? Like that?

Anyway, you gotta drive over there on a sunny day. Otherwise it doesn’t work. You get bad head colds in your psyche if you go there on a cloudy day. Then your psyche sneezes your good karma out into the ozone layer, where, of course, it burns away.

And that’s how come I was driving the Matador in the sunshine past Odd Lots Supermart and a pawn shop and a gun shop and then a vacant patch of struggling grass, with a thing in the middle of it you couldn’t identify except it was metal, and no one had ever found out how to work it, and it was ultra-dead. Rust never sleeps, said the bard. I’m bummed. Where’s the professional psychic whose office I thought was here? I saw it once last time I found myself located in this locale. In this hyper-slum there were, like, shoes everywhere, shoes without anybody standing in them, old shoes. On the sidewalk here and there, brown leather shoes. Very Plan 9 from Outer Space. So how come people, such as men, leave their shoes out here? What’s going on with these shoes out on the pavement? My advice is: Guys, find a wastebasket.

And now I’m near Willow Run, where they made the big World War Two bombers back when life still had a purpose in this area and people knew what their work was good for, and I’m seeing more pawn shops with iron bars on the front, and bunched-up tallboy-beer-in-the-brown-bag guys standing but mostly sitting on the sidewalk doing their smiling openmouthed but no teeth chickenshit thing, har har har, hey man, there’s a girl in that big ol’ Matador, is that door on the driver’s side unlocked, and then I see the place I was looking for, that I’d seen the last time I was over here. And which I knew was here. Which had to be here.

Professional Psychic

Fortunes Told

Tarot or Palm Reading

Walk-in

I park the Matador out front, which is a dangerous move to start with, but I figure the psychic has got to have some control over what goes on outside her store and in the neighborhood — she’s psychic, after all, right? — and I go inside.

It’s dark. No crystal balls. She’s in possession of this gross corduroy sofa that smells of spilled meatloaf and cat food, and over to the side there’s a partially assembled table and two chairs, and a church rummage sale table lamp with birds and bunnies painted on it, and over on the walls there’s a Laurel and Hardy clock, with their eyes moving back and forth, like pendulums except not quite. There’s other Laurel and Hardy stuff in the room: L&H porcelain cups, and a souvenir L&H dinner plate mounted on the wall, and a one-foot-high L&H statue set in the corner. On the other wall is a picture of down-by-the-old-mill-stream that you’d buy at Woolworth’s. By my ankles a black vampire-cat is stroking against my legs and purring. God, I hate cats. I’m the only girl my age I know who hates cats.

Meanwhile, country-western, moron music if you ask me, Tricia Yearwood or somebody, your-cheatin’-this-and-your-cheatin’-that, is playing off some staticky AM radio in the back. I hear this voice, “I’ll be right with you,” and then the sound of a toilet flushing and somebody gargling.

In comes Mrs. Maggaroulian, which I know is her name because her business card is out on the table, and her name is also in little print on the front window, and she says, “Hi, I’ll be with you in a minute, honey.”

I look at the wall. She’s posted the prices. Tarot readings are twelve dollars, and palm readings are twelve dollars, and the guaranteed predictions of the future based on psychic determinism, which she happens to know how to do, are also twelve dollars. It’s all twelve dollars each. If I get everything she’s offering, one from column A and one from column B, plus dessert on column C, this is going to cost me a full day’s salary.

But! you can’t get your hands on the future for free, fuck and alas, so I shell out almost every piece of folded money I have, and I give them to Mrs. Maggaroulian, and she puts on her reading glasses that she has on a beaded chain around her neck, and she locks the front door and puts my money in a little steel box underneath the table, where it’s hiding. By this time I am noticing that Mrs. Maggaroulian is big, I mean she is really big, the way a giant is big, at least compared to the way women usually are shaped and sized, and she has a mohair wig, it looks like, and something there on her jaw that looks like facial hair. Her nose looks like it’s made out of modeling clay. Her dress didn’t even come off the rack, ’cause it’s a tablecloth fastened together with safety pins. She wears black nail polish, not the sexy black but the scary black. She’s got big hands and feet, big hoppers and big choppers. This Ypsi chick is not the Better Business Bureau’s idea of a respectable psychic. But, duh, if she were prettier she’d be broadcasting on the Dionne Warwick psychic network at forty dollars per minute and she’d be whispering predictions to Oprah. Hey, I don’t give a shit if she is a drag queen, I’m cool with that, she could be the fucking Queen of the May for all I care, I just want the future out of her, provided it’s one hundred percent accurate.

She sits me down at her table and says, Honey, whatcha want to know about? So I say that I’ve got this boyfriend, Oscar… and Mrs. Maggaroulian nods, ’cause of course she knows what I want to know, being able to read my mind. She says we’ll do a palm reading first.

She takes my hand, opens up the fingers and studies my palm like a road map. She frowns. “This is your love line,” she says, tracing her finger along a crease. “Notice this.”

I look at it. “What?”

“You have a relationship with this Oscar? This Oscar relationship,” Mrs. Maggaroulian says, “is soon going to be over, it would appear.”

“How do you mean, ‘over’? You sure about that?”

“We could ask the cards,” Mrs. Maggaroulian informs me, as if she really doesn’t like my hand at all and doesn’t want to read it anymore, and she takes out her tarot cards, which, get this, she kisses first, on the box. Me, I would never do that. I would never kiss a deck of cards. She tells the cards in painful detail the questions she wants to ask and she proceeds to lay them out on the table. I will not tell about the cards that came up — that is such bad luck — but it was, like, a magical mystery train wreck.

“Well,” says Mrs. Maggaroulian, in a sort of guy-imitating-a-woman Monty Python bagpipe drag queen voice, “I’ve certainly seen better cards, I’ll say that.”

“Is there any hope?” I asked. “For the two of us, Oscar and me? ’Cause I love him and everything.”

“Did you bring any item of his?” Mrs. Maggaroulian asks, emphasizing the word item like it was word-candy. “Any of his possessions? That he’s touched often?”

“Besides me, you mean? Yeah. This sock,” I say, plopping it down on the table, “and this track team baton.” I wait for a moment, and I do my very best to grin. “And this knife.”