There Will Be Lobster

by Sara Arnell

  She told me that I was going to make a lot of money in the next few years. She told me that there was a man coming into my life, but he’s not the “one” and not to fall for him. She wanted me to wait for another man who was coming a bit later. During the reading I learned that I needed to be careful in my decision-making; a creative period was coming, and I should trust myself. She asked if I had any final questions. I said no and thanked her for the reading. She thought I should come back again. She looked worried. I wiped away a tear and pushed past the curtains into the store. I bought a quartz crystal on the way out and put it in my pocket. She said I needed to connect with the earth more. She said I wasn’t grounded. I wanted a second opinion.

  Ann Marie was in her private room at the back of a store in the town where I lived. I had booked a thirty-minute tarot reading with her. She jiggled the bracelets adorning her wrist and, with a sweeping motion in the air over her bowed head, she snapped her fingers and asked for my angels and ancestors to let the cards show me the way. I cut the tarot deck in three with my non-dominant hand and put it back together.

  “So what’s going on?” she asked.

  I told her about a dream: “A man named Giovanni and I are at a nondescript bar someplace having a beer with a group of friends. I don’t know anyone named Giovanni. I’m wearing something strapless. I don’t own anything strapless. I can’t really remember what Giovanni looks like. He’s dark-haired. He seems short. Giovanni’s kissing me in a loving way and telling me I smell good. That’s it.”

  She listened, nodded, and said, “Well, let’s see what the cards say.” She flipped four cards on her table, stopped, and looked at them. She asked me if I knew his sign.

  I told her I didn’t even know any Giovanni.

  “His name might not be Giovanni,” she said, “but you know him. There is definitely a man coming into your life.” Four more cards flipped down on the table. “He’s right here,” she said, pointing to the Two of Cups, which is a relationship card. By the end of the reading, I had seven Major Arcana cards turn up. “You’re going through a highly charged time in your life,” Ann Marie told me. “And Giovanni is out there somewhere, so keep your heart and eyes open. You know him. Find out his sign and his birthdate when you figure out who he is. Then come back.”

  I felt elated at this news. The idea of having to look out for a man who I might know, who might be Giovanni, felt exciting. I wanted the reading, the cards, to give me answers. I wanted to believe that I was destined for something. I wanted to be prepared for what might happen. I knew I could get stuck in a story that might never be written, but I wanted to try. So I called Y, someone I dated a few times, to see if he was my Giovanni.

  We were sitting at a small table at the back of a neighborhood bar. It was a weeknight, after dinner, and we met for a drink. I could tell Y was trying to appear to be listening to my story. “The legend goes like this,” I said over a glass of Sancerre. “My great-grandmother got very, very sick and went to the hospital. Back then, you only went to the hospital when you were going to die. It was 1969. So everyone knew when the doctor said she had to go to the hospital, things were bad. She was there for about a week and then she died. My great-grandfather came home from her funeral, got into bed, and never got up again. He died a year later, almost to the day of his wife’s death. And then, when their son—my grandfather—came home from his father’s funeral, he cleaned up dishes, threw out all the food that would go bad, and locked up the house for good. It’s like he wanted them to be able to go back to their home in death, like it was in life. Their clothes were still in their closets. My great-grandmother’s hair brush was still on the dresser where she left it the day she went to the hospital, her hair still in it. And my great-grandfather’s hat was still on the hook where he hung it when he came home from his wife’s funeral. Isn’t this the most beautiful love story you have ever heard? When it’s your time to die, don’t you want someone that loves you so much that they give up their body to travel through space and time to be with you?”

  Y nodded and ordered two margaritas. “The best I can do is make love to you all night.”

  “I’m good for about thirty minutes,” I replied.

  “Drink up,” he said.

  When I slithered into bed at his place, I got on all fours and buried my head in the pillow. I couldn’t look him in the face.

  “Wow,” he said while unzipping. “Most girls hate this position.”

  When I rolled back over, it was 1:30 a.m. He was already snoring. There were six texts and three missed calls from my daughter.

  “Shit,” I whispered. “The one night she decides to call me, and I’m somewhere on all fours.” I threw on my clothes and left.

  My phone rang early the next morning.

  “Mom. Are you okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve been worried.”

  “Sorry. I had a dinner that went late.” I tried to act like nothing was wrong.

  “I was really scared.”

  “I’m sorry. I should have texted you, but I just got caught up.”

  I wanted to tell her that I got caught up in trying to feel alive and loved. That I got caught up in wanting to be touched and hugged and kissed. That I didn’t return her calls because I was dreaming of a life that wasn’t fueled with margaritas and wine and lying to her and rolling over on my stomach to have sex because it was as meaningless to me as it was desired. But what I actually said was that we could talk later because I still wasn’t fully awake.

  I messaged Y and asked him for his astrological sign.

  Chapter 18

  Crying at the Gym

  Unsuccessful attempts at doing things that I should have succeeded at made me feel broken. I couldn’t even get the simplest things right. My daughter asked me what I got my mother for Christmas. “A box of really nice chocolates,” I told her.

  “Grandma has diabetes,” she reminded me. I ate the chocolates for dinner over the next several days, almost as punishment for how careless and thoughtless I was. The word “Mom” was crossed off my Christmas list. I added her back on.

  No one knew what was happening to me because I disguised my depression under baggy clothes, excuses, and my new fake smile. No one knew how I felt or what I was doing when I was alone. No one knew that what I said I was doing was not the truth. I realized that when I told a few people what I had actually been up to—the medium, the psychics, having visions of my dead grandfather—they winced, then whimpered in sadness for what I had become. So I hid my turmoil, regrets, and depression from everyone. I put on a stiff upper lip when I needed to emerge into the world to shop for food or things I needed around the house, then retreated back home, under the covers. I didn’t want to feel this way. I didn’t want to live one life in the world and the opposite at home. I felt torn by who I was and who I wanted to be. I wondered how the imposter Christian Gerhartsreiter, alias Clark Rockefeller, had successfully managed his competing personas. I wondered how he reconciled being a rich Rockefeller by day with his former-German-exchange-student and wanna-be-actor reality. He used murderer David Berkowitz’s social security number to get a job. He lived the life of a wealthy scion. He married a successful, intelligent woman. He faked who he was and fooled a lot of smart people. I faked it every day too.

  I dreamed time and time again about being someone I wasn’t.

  I wanted to be the person that people talked about as having it all.

  “Some people have all the luck,” they would gush!

  I wanted to be the one who thinks everything is going to work out, and it does. I wanted to feel like the construction worker on a broken scaffold who cheated death, or the kid that fell seven stories and lived. I wanted to be the woman who escaped her attacker, or the drug addict that was found in time and lived to shoot up another day. I wanted to be gung ho with positivity and optimism, able to make things happen out of sh
eer willpower, energy, and stamina. I wanted to feel triumphant. Instead, I sat on the floor of Equinox gym and tried to hold together the façade that was me. My trainer asked me to get into a plank position and hold it for fifteen seconds. I held it for three and collapsed. Then I burst into tears.

  “I can’t,” I wept.

  “It’s OK,” he said as he joined me on the floor. Another trainer came over, thinking I was hurt. My trainer waved him away.

  “I’m so sorry. This is so embarrassing.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, trying to lighten things up. “This is nothing. You should see the stuff that happens here.”

  I wiped my nose with my sleeve, and he pulled me up.

  “How was your day?” my daughter asked when we next spoke.

  “I sat on the gym floor and cried because I couldn’t do a plank. I act like a workout buff to everyone, talk about going to the gym, getting fit, eating healthy, but none of it’s true.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” I confessed. “That is the best summation of how I’m doing. And I cried loudly too. It was not a whimper. It was full-on wailing. People were looking at me like I was hurt or crazy. Trainers came over to help. I looked up at one sobbing and told him I couldn’t do a plank. He backed away like he was retreating from a rabid animal.”

  “Sorry, Mama.”

  “Do you know how many times you say ‘Sorry, Mama’ to me? Too many. I’m sorry. I’m the sorry one. I am so sorry that I make you say that to me. I’m sorry that that’s all you can say to me.” My tone was frantic. I was ending my sentences in a high-shrieked pitch. I sounded angry. And I was. But not at her.

  I wondered if this was how alias Clark Rockefeller felt when he got found out.

  I made an appointment with a psychic named Wanda who specialized in messages from angels. When I sat across from her, she told me that I had angels surrounding me. She said that they were there to help me. She said I was going through a highly charged time. I’ve heard this before, I thought. Wanda said that I needed to ask the angels for help. She said they needed my permission to intervene.

  “Should I pray to them?” I asked her.

  “Just ask them to help you,” she said. “Tell them what you need and want.”

  “So it is like praying,” I pressed on.

  “If asking is like praying to you, then yes.”

  Was asking like praying for me? I knew I was often praying for things that weren’t likely to happen. I decided that my angels weren’t intervening because my requests must have been just as unanswerable as my prayers.

  I prayed that the pile of clothes on the floor would get up and put themselves in the laundry basket. Or better yet, in the washing machine.

  It did not.

  I prayed that time would move in reverse because there was so much I missed the first time that I could now make right.

  It did not.

  I prayed that I could get up and function like a person who has much to be thankful for.

  I did not.

  I prayed to be saved but didn’t specify what from. I wondered if my angels could at least figure out that much without my asking.

  They did not.

  Chapter 19

  Cat’s Out of the Bag

  I met someone for lunch at an Italian restaurant with an outdoor seating area. It was a nice spring day. I didn’t know her very well and can’t remember how we met. I decided to accept her invite to get together. Why not, I thought. My son did tell me to make friends. Next to our table were two men trying to sell the restaurant owner a new brand of vodka to serve at the bar. I was on my third glass of rosé. The owner was walking back and forth between talking with the men, making sure food was coming out the right way, and seating people in the restaurant. One of the salesmen leaned over our table and asked if we wanted to try the vodka. He signaled the waiter for two shot glasses.

  “Tell the owner if you like it. It’s the best vodka on the market today,” he said.

  We each did a shot. It tasted like any other vodka to me.

  We did two more shots each and ordered two more glasses of rosé.

  The owner brought us his special limoncello at the end of our long lunch, which lasted until about 4:00.

  I don’t remember getting home.

  I do remember that when I woke up about 10:00 to use the bathroom, I saw my purse on the bathroom floor. I thought it was weird that it was there and not in my closet. I picked it up. It was filled with my puke.

  The next morning, my mother posted a comic on her Facebook page. It was a photo of a cat at a bar drinking. The caption read, “Who is this Moderation person everyone says I should drink with?” She tagged me. I decided it wasn’t just a coincidence, that she must know how much I was drinking. She’d been asking too many questions about what I had been up to, how I had been spending my days. She made too many comments about how late I was sleeping in.

  I liked her post.

  Chapter 20

  You Must Change Your Life

  I lacked concentration. I couldn’t focus. My mind wandered between reality and fantasy scenarios. One moment I daydreamed that I was giving a TED Talk in front of an applauding audience and felt hopeful. The next minute I blinked it away to see an image of myself in bed watching TV and felt sad. I needed to get a hold of my thoughts and fears. I wanted to be productive and feel mindlessly busy to help quiet the emotional roller coaster I was on. I decided to clean out rooms and closets and get rid of things that were no longer used or needed. I could deal with a garbage bag of clothes in the corner of my closet that needed to go to Goodwill. I could open my mail and throw away the old newspapers that sat in a pile on a kitchen credenza. I could tear through my children’s abandoned rooms and get rid of things I thought they no longer needed. I emptied drawer after drawer, shelf after shelf.

  I decided to have a yard sale and get rid of the pieces of furniture that held sadness and regret in their fabric. I couldn’t look at the couch where my daughter had once sat crying over something. Or the chair my son always used to sit in to watch TV. The bed I’d snuggled in night after night with my kids when one of them was sick or couldn’t sleep had to go. I replaced these things with new pieces devoid of wear and memory. I wiped the slate clean. It helped a bit. Instead of saying, “That’s the chair my son always used to sit in,” I said, “That’s where the chair that my son always sat in used to be.” It was an arm’s length removed from my grief.

  I found a photo of my older daughter from high school graduation. She’s standing under a tree with her friends. They’re all wearing white wedding gowns. I wished I remembered that day in more detail. I don’t know why I didn’t. I felt like my memory was slipping away. I thought about a day not very long ago, when I’d gotten in the car to drive to the store and somewhere along the way completely blanked out as to where I was going. I didn’t know what lane to get in or where I needed to turn. I kept driving straight ahead until, all of a sudden, I remembered that I was supposed to be picking up dinner.

  I pulled a small book of poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke from a shelf that I was in the process of reorganizing. I’d bought it for one of my graduate school classes. There was a poem I loved: “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” I opened to it and read it again. I had read it many times before. It’s now about me, I thought. Or it could be about me. I felt like the old statue Rilke was describing. I was headless, blind, and broken. I felt like something had happened to me and that I didn’t even know what that something was. I didn’t know what had caused me to end up in this damaged condition.

  The last line of the poem seemed to come out of nowhere.

  You must change your life.

  This has to be a sign, I thought. Would it be bad luck to ignore it? So far, none of the things I’d thought were signs had gotten me anywhere, but maybe this was different? There was no one to run this thou
ght by. I couldn’t ask my daughter who already saw me as untethered. I knew she was tired of lifting me up when I collapsed in tears for no reason or many reasons. I couldn’t tell her that I thought this poem was an omen of some sort. I couldn’t tell her that it was the first thing that had given me hope in a long time. I wanted to tell her that a billowing curtain is not always because of the wind and that I needed to pay attention to what crossed my path. I realized that I had been walking through my waking hours not really seeing or hearing anything. I heard this message loud and clear. There is nothing worse than a missed sign or signal, I concluded.

  You must change your life.

  Yes, I thought. I must change my life.

  The tattoo parlor was up a long flight of stairs on West Fourteenth Street in New York City.

  I told the woman at the desk I wanted a line of text down my arm and asked if there was anyone available. “Yes,” she said, and told me to write the line down on a piece of paper.

  You Must Change Your Life.

  I handed it to her with a big smile.

  “This is what I want.”

  “OK. Do you know what type of lettering?”

  “It’s from a poem,” I said.

  She handed me two binders.

  “You can choose from anything in these books. Here are some forms, and it’s cash only.”

  I asked her if I could discuss the font with the tattoo artist. I wanted confirmation, not procedural efficiency. I wanted joy and delight in my decision to have these words etched into my skin. I told the tattoo artist I wanted it to look like something I just scribbled, frantically, in haste—like an idea that just came to me and that I had to write down before I forgot it. He suggested we do it in red to indicate urgency and passion. “Yes,” I said. “I love that idea.”