The Thin Pink Line

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  She swatted my hand away with one hand. Then, with the other, she began massaging the red mark that my pulling had left in the area where I had endeavored to remove what I now recognized to be a very real wart.

  “Whatsamatta with you, missy?” She glared at me. “Are you crazy?” Then her eyes traveled downwards to my protruding belly, a gleamingly satisfied look coming over them, not dissimilar to the one that I imagined I had worn when I’d first passed judgment on her hairy wart.

  She didn’t wait for me to answer her rhetorical question. “Never mind that,” she said. “Sit, sit,” she instructed, indicating a folding chair at the card table she’d set up to ply her trade from and taking a seat across from me when I’d done so.

  “For you,” she said, pulling out the smallest deck of cards I’d ever seen in my life from some pocket that was hidden among the folds of her skirt, “for you I will read the future for free.”

  I couldn’t contain myself. “What the hell are these?” I demanded, referring to the insultingly miniature cards that she’d handed me so that I might shuffle my own fortune. “You can’t be serious.”

  “It’s called the Connolly Mini Tarot Deck,” she huffed.

  “The mini what?”

  “Look,” she sighed, growing exasperated, “even I get the shit scared out of me whenever I try to use the Aleister Crowley Deck. Trust me on this. If you don’t mess with the Dark Arts, the Dark Arts won’t mess with you. Still—” and here she waved her hand in the direction of a heavily bearded and sinister-looking gentleman that I hadn’t noticed before “—if you insist on courting the possibility of dead goats left hanging from your wrought-iron fence, I’m sure Hector will be only too glad to assist you.”

  I shrank from Hector’s menacing gaze, which came at me from beneath the kind of bushy eyebrows which were really just one long unit, and turned back to my dwarfish friend. “Fine,” I relented, “I’ll take my chances with the mini.”

  “While you shuffle the cards,” she instructed, “concentrate on the question you most want them to answer.”

  I thought to myself that what I wanted to know was what the future would bring. Isn’t that what everyone wanted to know?

  I finished shuffling the cards, handing them back to her.

  With no more ado, she began to turn over the first of the ten cards that would form the Celtic Cross Spread. “This card covers you,” she announced, a tarot phrase I’d never quite understood, as she placed the card in the center of the table. “Ah! Missy!” She looked delighted. “The Nine of Cups!”

  I studied the tiny card. On it was a picture of a man who looked an awful lot like portraits of Jesus at the Last Supper. Before him were nine gold cups, one with a flower in it, while above his head, strung between two Ionic columns, was a length of flowering vine.

  “And that’s good,” I prompted, “the Nine of Cups?”

  “Oh, ye-ess!” She dragged out the words. “It is known as the Wish Card and can mean that your wish will come true.” But then she began to qualify her remarks. “Of course that’s most especially true when it falls in the tenth position. When it falls anywhere else, you have to wait for the rest of the reading to see what it all means.”

  She then turned over the second card, laying it crossways over the first and saying, “This card crosses you for good or bad.”

  There were two dark-haired men in long robes who were facing each other. David and Christopher, perhaps? One was rubbing his chin and looking away while the other carried a drum and wore a red-colored cap of a shape similar to that which Scrooge wore with his pajamas. Behind him was a tent, while beside him was a tree stump with two swords stuck into it.

  “The Two of Swords,” she intoned. Then she shook her hand from side to side, making an AC-DC gesture as she shrugged in an almost Gallic fashion. “It means that the choice is between six of one, half a dozen of the other. You must grab your sword of individuality and march to the beat of your own drummer.”

  Wasn’t that what I’d been doing all along? Who else in London had a fake pregnancy scam going on so that they could get a publishable book out of the deal? Still, I thought, maybe she was referring to the monkey-see, monkey-do path that I’d been trodding upon for most of my life.

  She turned the third card up, placing it directly beneath the first card. “This card is the basis, it is the root of your present situation. It is the Two of Pentacles.”

  This one looked somewhat like a harlequin standing between the parted curtains at center stage on a black-and-white tiled floor. In each of his hands he held a purple disc upon which there was a five-pointed golden star, while above his head there was a glowing pink infinity sign.

  “This card symbolizes trying to cope with two situations. If you make a decision, more will be achieved. This can be accomplished.”

  Two situations. Could she be talking about the way that, for a time, I had been pretending to be pregnant with everyone else while with Tolkien I had appeared as myself, creating a situation in which it was impossible for the two areas of my life to be reconciled? But how could I ever bring the fake baby and Tolkien situations together by making a decision?

  She placed the fourth card to the left of the first, only this card came out upside down and I had to crane my neck a bit to make out the picture. Depicted was an elderly gentleman with buttons on the side of his pants who looked not unlike the solemn grandfather in the Swiss Alps in Heidi. On the half-opened door to his rustic hut were eight of the discs with the five-pointed stars in them that I now knew to be pentacles.

  “This card is behind you,” she said, “or in the process of leaving. It is the Eight of Pentacles. In the reversed position, it means that you are going about things in the wrong way and have a need for guidance.”

  “But that’s good!” I crowed. “I mean, if I’m leaving this ‘going about things in the wrong way’ behind me, that’s got to be a good thing, doesn’t it? It must mean that, in the future, I’ll go about things in the right way.”

  She pursed her lips at me, the wart twitching in her irritation. “The fourth card is only indicative of what is behind you, in the past. It predicts nothing about the future.”

  Before I could say anything further, she placed the fifth card, which also came out upside down, above the first.

  “The fifth card crowns you and could come into being.”

  My crane’s-eye view revealed a fair-haired young man, a feather sticking out of his cap and a golden cup in his hand. A flower was at his feet and behind him a fish jumped out of the water.

  “The Page of Cups in reversed position means that you will be offered help in the future, possibly by a young person.”

  Odd. I didn’t really know any young people, since I tried very hard not to, not unless one included all of the babies I’d been meeting lately.

  She placed the sixth card to the right of the first, this time right side up.

  “The sixth card is before you. In this case, The Tower.”

  “Does it have to be?” I asked fearfully, as I stared at the picture of a monolithic structure being struck by lightning, causing flames to burst from it as two people fell from its height. The woman, for there was a man and a woman, looked oddly as I might have done had I never dyed my hair.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” she eased my fears although I sensed reluctantly. “It merely means that you must take a good long look at your life. Your situation will change rapidly and you must be prepared.”

  To the right of the base of the Celtic Cross, she placed another upside-down card, showing a man in a gray stone tower. In one hand he held a wand, while in the other he held a small globe of the Earth. In the air floated a second wand with two birds perched on top.

  “The seventh card represents your own apprehensions, in your case the Two of Wands reversed. This indicates that the foundations that you have laid will not yield your desired results.”

  That certainly sounded ominous.

  The eighth card al
so came out reversed as she placed it above the seventh. This one was also a wand card, only this time, among the reeds, the rowboat, the two men and the sailboat in the distance, there was one more wand than in the last.

  “Hey!” I said. “I recognize that! It’s the Three of Wands, the card right after the last. Are you sure you haven’t fixed this somehow?”

  “You shuffled them yourself.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “This card represents the feelings of those around you. In this position, the card indicates that your talents, skills and efforts are being wasted, that a new direction is needed.”

  “Oh. That’s a real comfort, knowing that that’s what others secretly think of one.”

  She shrugged again.

  The ninth card, as she placed it above the eighth, looked rather attractive compared to what had gone before. It was a regal-looking woman seated on a throne among flowers with a tiara on her head, a scepter in her grasp and a butterfly floating around a fountain in the background.

  “The ninth card, in this case The Empress, represents your own positive feelings. The Empress offers the promise of growth, prosperity and fertility. She symbolizes needs fulfilled with joy and satisfaction.”

  Well, that was a big improvement. Maybe this fortune-telling stuff had something of substance to it after all.

  But then she turned over the tenth card, my final outcome card.

  Even I, with my limited tarot experience, could recognize that silly-looking male with his ridiculous yellow stockings and a dog that looked oddly like a pitbull at his feet as he stood at a four-way intersection at a flowered path not far from a cliff. The fact that the legend underneath the photo bore the number zero (all Major Arcana cards have a Roman numeral attached to them), followed by the prophetic words The Fool, only served to bring it home to me.

  “How dare you!” I cried, rising, the awkwardness of my cloth baby nearly overturning her card table. “I will not be called a fool by you!”

  “I do not say it, the cards say it. And they do not call you a fool. They merely depict The Fool. What this means is that you will find yourself at a crossroads. Your decision, once you arrive there, may be very important, so you must think carefully.”

  “I don’t care what you say about the cards. I’ve never been so insulted in my life. The Fool? The Fool as my final outcome?”

  She spread her hands open. “The cards…”

  “I demand my money back.”

  “Well—” she shrugged, gathering up the cards of my fortune and putting them back in her deck “—you never paid me anything, so we’re even. Anyway, the cards don’t lie,” she added, looking with that meaningful gleam upon my belly again, “not like people do.”

  Fat was being deposited on my fetus. For all I knew, at any given moment, it might be sucking its thumb, hiccupping or crying. It could definitely distinguish sweet and sour. It was capable of responding to light, sound, pain, and other stimuli. Placental function was beginning to diminish—whatever the hell that might mean—and the volume of amniotic fluid was diminishing as well, what with the three-pound fetus filling the uterus. The bottom line was that were I to give birth to my baby as early as this, at the end of the seventh month, there was a good chance it would survive.

  As for the mother, she was having plenty of difficulty sleeping, although not at all from any reason that any reputable obstetrician might guess.

  The Eighth Month

  “What are you planning on doing about the pain?”

  “Excuse me?”

  I was seated in my office, mild-manneredly reading through the London Review of Books and wondering why certain publishers’ books always seemed to garner favorable review attention no matter how abstruse the topic while the rest of us continually fought an uphill battle merely not to be treated as fish-in-a-barrel sport, when Dodo’d burst in upon my ruminating with her strident question about pain.

  “Why, when you go into labor, of course,” she said now as though I were the most obtuse person in the world. “I realize how inexplicably attached you’ve become to the advice of your Madame Zither person, but even you must recognize the possibility of your having one of these multiday labor periods that you sometimes hear about happening to first-timers—you know, the ones where, no matter how Pollyannaishly one has determined to go without artificial assistance ahead of time, the expectant mother finds herself screaming for drugs from anyone she thinks might listen. You’ve mentioned before that Madame Zygote doesn’t even believe in pain control and, anyway, I doubt any reputable medical community would allow the woman you describe to come close even to touching a bandage.” I took it as a small blessing when I realized that her shortness of breath meant that we were nearing the end of her diatribe. “So what, Jane, do you plan to do if the pain gets to be too much?”

  “Well,” I answered calmly, “I’m going to let her perform hypnosis on me, aren’t I?”

  “What? Do you mean—” and here she adopted a remarkably good imitation of an Austrian accent “—‘Look very closely at my pocket watch’ and ‘You are getting very sleepy’ and ‘When you wake up you won’t even remember making a complete arse out of yourself in front of all of these people’?” She continued in her own voice, “Just like those charlatans on variety television programs and the ones who try to convince you that they can help you quit smoking?”

  I sniffed. “You don’t have to make it sound so much like a scam or like cannibals in the jungle, you know. Suggestion and the power of the mind over matter are taught in every good parentcraft class. With hypnosis, it’s merely a matter of a higher level of suggestion being achieved. Madame Ziggurat says that, despite the fact that only about twenty-five percent of adults are hypnotizable to some degree, I’m more susceptible to suggestion than anyone she’s ever encountered and that she should be able to completely eliminate any awareness I might have of pain. We’ve been practicing. You know,” I concluded, “despite what you might think, Madame Ziggurat is a very well respected professional in her field.”

  A puzzled frown came over Dodo’s face. “I thought her name was Madame Zora.”

  I shot her a look. “Yes,” I replied dryly, “and isn’t it a good thing that this pregnancy’s nearly over, so you won’t have to worry about running out of Z names to call her before it comes time for me to deliver?”

  And I suddenly realized that it was a good thing that my pregnancy was nearly over.

  Lately, I’d been of two minds. On the one hand, I was experiencing an increase in apprehension, not dissimilar to what a real mother might feel when faced with the prospect of labor and delivery, and experiencing long periods of solitude when I worried about what kind of mother I would make, as if that might matter somehow. On the other hand, even though I knew that the end of my so-called pregnancy would also mean the end to life as I knew it, there were times when I just wanted it all to be over.

  Knowing that the restaurant was closed because it was Tuesday, and knowing that David had gone out for once to pick up takeaway, I cornered Christopher in their flat. It was high time we two had a showdown.

  “Why don’t you like me?” I demanded to know, hands on hips.

  He didn’t even bother to look up from his place on the floor, where he was selecting an evening’s worth of CDs. “Whoever said I don’t like you?”

  “Oh, come on,” I said, exasperated. “David loves me, always has done, while you…you…you barely tolerate me.”

  “Yes, well…”

  I moved closer until I was standing over him. “I want to know,” I said, “and I’m not leaving until you tell me.”

  “You really want to know, Jane?” Now he finally looked up and it was startling to see features so similar to David’s looking up at me with such hostility.

  I thought about it. “Yes,” I decided, “I really do.”

  “Fine.” He rose to his feet, so that now we were more than evenly matched with the nearly one-foot advantage all his. “I’ll tell you. It’s
because you’re a self-absorbed, self-involved, self-centered woman—and believe me, all of those self- words do mean slightly different things—who is demanding, unreasonable, and pigheaded.”

  “Oh, is that all?” I asked, trying for blithe but not quite hitting it.

  “No. No, Jane, that isn’t all.”

  “What else then?”

  “You behave terribly to David.”

  My voice rose enough octaves to create its own stratospheric scale. “I—?”

  “You ring him up at all hours, with no regard for his schedule, you burden him with your problems, without ever bothering to enquire into his.”

  “I—?”

  “For chrissakes, Jane, you don’t even pronounce his name right!”

  “What?” Okay, maybe he’d a point with some of the other things he’d said, but this?

  “His name, Jane. His name is pronounced Duh-veed, accent on the second element.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “No. I’m not.”

  “And what do I say?”

  “Duh-veed, as if the duh part is the most important part to you.”

  “Ahem,” I heard behind me, whirling to find David standing there with a takeaway sack in his hand. From the look on his face, he had to have been there for a moment or two.

  I looked at my best friend. “He’s joking, right?”

  David, for no apparent reason, reddened. “No,” he said. “I’m afraid he’s right.”

  I was bewildered. “Why didn’t you ever correct me?”

  He put down the sack. “Because it truly never mattered.”

  “But I’ve been a dreadful friend to you.”

  He shrugged it off.

  I swallowed. “I could try to do better.”

  He hugged me. “If you do, that’s fine. If you don’t, it still doesn’t matter.”

  I pulled back from his embrace. “Why doesn’t it matter? What is it you see in me?”