by Lydia Netzer
Before the sun was identified as just another star, astrologers had sat cheek by jowl with academics in medicine and physics. Now astrology had long been relegated to the realm of pseudoscience; some even called it a religion. But in Ohio the seers and the predictive astrologers, the psychics and the strangers, taught and learned exacting principles, and apprenticeships were formalized, curricula laid down. No, there was no manual for wise men, no instructional video for understanding the philosophical underpinnings of an astrological practice. People couldn’t even really agree on whether philosophical underpinnings existed or should be set down in writing if they did. Yet as their methods became increasingly scientific and exact, with chicken bones measured in nanometers and tea leaves subjected to mass spectrometers, the star gazers of Toledo worked toward a common disciplinary matrix of theory and application, symbols, interpretations, and tools. And this is why aspiring astrologers came to Toledo. Despite their lack of leadership, hierarchy, or any overt organization, Toledo managed to turn the direction of the art.
There is no evidence or proof of the legitimacy of any theories or principles of astrology. There is no reason to believe that stars and planets or their movement could have any influence whatsoever on the lives of human beings or the countries of the earth. Neither is there any empirical evidence to show that true love is anything but a construct created by humans to solidify a family unit based on monogamy and a strong, diverse lineage for the species. No evidence of any true god. And yet we watch the stars, we fall in love, we pray. Therefore scholars of astrology, love, and religion have been forced to accept that something can be real, even if it is not true. Scientists, obviously, acknowledge no such paradox.
*
Irene came back to Toledo from the south, crossing the Maumee River on Interstate 75. The railroad terminal lay down on her right and beyond that were the glittering spires of the city central. Late afternoon sun slanted across the buildings and towers, sparking a red-orange glow on the shining facets of the “glass city.” She craned her neck toward the west to see the tallest tower of the Toledo Institute of Astronomy rising out of the farmland, safely outside the glow of city lights. Its central spire was crowned with a magnificent observatory. But she couldn’t see it. It was too far.
The house that burned had been in the historic district, but now her mother lived, or had recently lived, in a little house on West Bancroft close to the hospital, where the ambulances went up and down. Every time an ambulance passed, she would say, “Bless him, Mother, for he is your child.” Or she might say “Bless her…” instead. She said she always knew if it was a male or female in the ambulance.
“What if the ambulance is empty?” Irene asked once. “Stands to reason it must be, half the time.”
“There’s always someone driving, Irene,” her mother had argued.
She pulled her little gray Fiat off the freeway on Bancroft Street and joined the flow of traffic. Little had changed in Toledo that she could see. The same minimarts, the same storefronts, the boxy kit houses and the lawns tired from a summer of heat and wind. Her mother hadn’t lived in the good part of Toledo. This was the seedy part.
“It’s OK,” she could hear her mother say. “Seedy is good. Half of my clients are paying me with their rent money. It’s more important to them to know what the stars say than to have a new car.”
“Rent money doesn’t buy a new car,” Irene would challenge. “It buys rent. Do the stars say they will be homeless?”
“Irene, stop,” her mother would have said. “Don’t be so literal. Not every word means what you think it means.”
Irene’s tongue was wide in her mouth, and her lungs felt too large for her chest. Her heart skipped, pushing against her heavy ribs, rapping on the wall of her body. Maybe her mother had a heart condition. Maybe a heart attack pushed her down the stairs. Was Irene cursed with it now? At what point does the mother’s heart beat in the daughter’s body? She was driving and not thinking. She was prickling in her rib cage. The thought of her mother’s house, empty. The thought of her mother, dead.
In a long row of shabby homes, her mother’s house was beautifully kept, and her lawn, among all the drab ones, was emerald green. A tidy rose garden sent shoots up over the porch railing and two urns full of petunias overflowed next to the steps. In the window a sign hung, dark now, that said PSYCHIC and had a wide eye beneath. When her mother was home, the eye was lit and would blink open and shut. Now it was dark. I don’t want to go in, thought Irene. I don’t want to see.
She parked on the street and shimmied out of the car, keeping the door tight to the car to avoid traffic. Keys in hand, she walked up on the porch. The mailbox, nailed to the wall, was full to bursting with flyers, envelopes, catalogs. Irene pulled the stuff out of the box automatically, as she always did for her mother. The box was always overflowing, so this in itself did not mean that someone had died. It was no different from any other day. She looked down at the shoe rack next to the door. No different: flip-flops, sandals, ballet flats, and tennis shoes. Bernice believed that shoes belonged outside the house.
Irene put her key in the lock and stood for a minute. She opened the door, keeping the gap narrow and tight again, shimmied inside. Everything looked the same as she remembered.
Except on the floor at the bottom of the stairs there was a place where her mother had lain down and died. There was no blood, no mark or shocking indentation. There was only smooth linoleum beside a carpeted staircase, and that was it. The house was unbearably silent, smelled of incense, and felt unaccountably damp. Irene drew some long breaths, felt her heart racing. She set her keys down on the banister, as always.
The foyer and the front room were for the clients. Tie-dyed scarves, fringed window treatments, and beaded curtains covered the walls and windows. A tall red shaded lamp stood in the corner. A long dark sofa stretched low under the window, and a red velvet armchair sat near it, where her mother would sit for consultations. On the coffee table Irene saw the accoutrements of Bernice’s trade: the crystal ball, the tarot, bones in a little cup. There were books for consulting sky maps and charts. An old tape recorder in a leather case, which Bernice used to record all of her sessions, just in case she forgot something later. Irene walked across the room and picked up a large wooden box engraved with a picture of a bird with no beak. It was locked. There was a new footstool, embroidered in heavy thread with trees and vines.
Irene sat on the sofa and looked around. She was overwhelmed by the new absence in her mother’s house, yet she was also overwhelmed by the way it was exactly the same.
There was a knock at the door.
Irene went and opened it, and found the neighbor, Mrs. Betty, standing there.
“Oh, honey,” said Mrs. Betty. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks,” said Irene.
“I just miss her so much,” Mrs. Betty went on. “She was an angel, an angel.”
Mrs. Betty reached out one arm as if she was going to hug Irene, but when Irene didn’t come forward, she ended up just patting her on the shoulder.
“Thank you,” said Irene.
“When I saw her, I just cried,” she said. “Your sweet, sweet mother and all the troubles and trials she had in this life, and all the good she did for other people, and all the people who loved her, and—”
“That must have been awful for you—finding her,” said Irene. “Dead.”
“Oh, I’m more sorry for you, honey. With you so far away when it happened.”
“Thank you,” said Irene again. “Well, I’ll be sure and let you know, if there is a funeral. When it is.”
Mrs. Betty hesitated on the threshhold.
“There was something I wanted to tell you,” she said.
“What?” Irene asked.
“She had a client that day.” Mrs. Betty looked at Irene with an eyebrow raised. “Right before.”
“Really?” said Irene. “She must have had clients all the time—”
“Yes, well,” said Mr
s. Betty. “This client would have been the last—to see her. But I don’t know who it was.”
Irene swallowed hard, and frowned at Mrs. Betty. She didn’t care about her mother’s clients. The neighbor caught her mouth in her hand and said, “I’m sorry, I’ve upset you. I’ll go.”
“It’s OK,” Irene started to say, but she was thankful Mrs. Betty was turning to leave.
“And if you need anything else, please—”
“I’ll be sure and call,” said Irene.
“You can come over for dinner,” added Mrs. Betty. “Just come on over; you don’t have to let me know.”
Irene walked back through the beaded curtain and into the kitchen, the area of the house where clients were never invited. Irene stood next to the garbage can looking at dishes in the sink: a large mug with two tea-bag strings wrapped around the handle, tea bags inside. A large spoon. A plate, previous contents unknown. A glass, containing about half an inch of water. Near the faucet was a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste. Apparently her mother had been sleeping downstairs. On the windowsill was a hairbrush, full of hair. She should pull out all that hair and throw it away, or she should keep it forever, in case her mother could be cloned. She should never clone her mother. She should clone her mother, and raise her as her own, parent her right, make things turn out differently for her poor, poor mother. Irene felt her heart scrabbling in her chest like a squirrel climbing around and around one of her ribs. She put her fingers on her wrist and took her pulse. Fast. She didn’t wait to count the beats against her watch. She could feel them pounding behind her eyes. Slow down, heart.
Next to the sink, on the drainer, there was a red bowl and a few pieces of silverware, a frying pan, a couple of small plates, and a cleaned container of cottage cheese, ready to reuse. She should just throw that away. No one reuses cottage cheese containers. The sight of this irritated her, especially since for years she had given her mother Tupperware and other containers to try and get her to stop reusing plastic containers from deli meat, cheeses, yogurts, and more.
“It’s disposable, mother,” she had said.
“Nonsense, it’s perfectly good,” her mother had asked. “Just look at it. Who would throw that away?”
Irene picked up the cottage cheese container and opened the garbage can. It was half full. She considered digging through her mother’s trash to re-create the last few days before she died. What had she eaten? What else had she thrown away? Obviously not any mail. It was scattered all over the dining room table.
Her mother never threw mail away. She never threw anything away. The half-full garbage was probably at least a week’s worth of trash and only things she couldn’t find a way to put in a box, preserve, bag up, or rinse out. Coffee grounds, tea bags, some old lettuce. An empty bag of oatmeal. And something at the bottom that was clunking, clunking. Reaching down through all the trash she pulled out a long shape wrapped in many plastic grocery bags. Irene took her hand away and let the bottle fall back down in.
She shut the lid on the garbage can. She sat down at the table in her mother’s little living area, where her mother had her computer, her television, her own private space. The enormity of the task at hand felt crushing to Irene. The house had to be emptied. Or she could live in it just the way it was. Her mother’s affairs had to be put in order. Or she could wait until someone came knocking at the door, or shut off the gas, or approached the house with a bulldozer.
Maybe she did want Belion to come.
If she said, “Empty the house, Belion,” then Belion would trudge in and out of the house carrying armload after armload of her mother’s possessions, inexorably, into a Dumpster that she could surely call and get, and then all of the stuff would be gone. Belion would do this for her without questioning, without analyzing what he was carrying, without balking at the strain. She should call him. But then she would have to explain about her mother, and she never explained her mother to people. If people couldn’t figure it out on their own, then they were too stupid to know the truth. Really, her whole life she had been wondering, how can people not know? How can they not figure it out? And really, what must they all think of her, the bad daughter, all this time? Because her mother kept everything hidden.
Irene stood up and began to go through the cabinets in the TV stand. She opened every drawer in the kitchen, pulling out piles of dishcloths, many unopened packages of plastic cups, bags of napkins, boxes of plastic silverware, endless saved Cool Whip containers, ant traps, roach spray, extra coffee filters, many cookie cutters, and a thousand plastic grocery bags. She threw phone books on the floor, phone books from every year since they had moved to this house. She dislodged a pile of crime thrillers, and several spiral notebooks.
She knew that what she was looking for would be downstairs, but where? In the powder room she found a drawer full of wine corks. Now we’re getting somewhere, she thought. Then, at the bottom of an antique copper basin full of extra toilet paper, she found the bottle, half full.
“Gin,” she said out loud. “There you are.”
Had she landed at the bottom of the stairs with a bottle in her hand, half empty, half splashed across her legs, then that would be something new. But instead it was the same as it ever had been, not an act of sudden heroism or decision, but a slow and silent death, cup by cup, pint by pint, measured into drinking glasses and nips from under the countertop.
Irene began to cry. She went back to the trash and pulled out the thing that was at the bottom. She tore off the grocery bags in chunks, flung them into the trash, and then she was holding an identical gin bottle, but this one was empty. She sobbed and blinked her eyes, and then she made herself stop sobbing. Each hand held a gin bottle. Irene could feel her face taking its traditional shape to match her place in this house. The face was blank. It had no reaction. Because the other person who lived in this house was too drunk to interpret a face having a reaction, and too drunk to care if it did.
“You did this,” she said. “You did this to me. You are a coward, a coward, a coward.”
She did not say, You left me, and now I am all alone. I should have been young, and happy, and proud, but now I am here with your gin bottle in my hand, and the only choice that matters is if I take a drink or not, if I sleep in your bed or in your chair, if I wear your clothes or burn them.
This was true, but it was not true. Irene was sitting with a gin bottle in her hand. But there was no one to take it away from and no place to hide it. She was lost, and she was alone, but she knew that she would never, ever, ever drink that gin.
7
Three years before Irene came back to Toledo, George had gone to visit an astrologer. As an astronomer, a doctor of science, shuffling down the street after a late dinner on a lonely barstool, he had every reason to sneer and shake his head at the astrologer’s studio, advertised with a neon blinking eye. But instead, George had stopped and stumbled up the sidewalk.
The psychic had met him at the door to her house, a silk skirt swirling around her legs, a silk scarf wrapped around her head, and a crust of rings over her fingers. He felt immediately that she knew him, and was happy to see him. It was a powerful feeling he did not question. George was not a man to question the existence of things that were strange. He had reasons for this. It wasn’t just lunacy.
“George, come in,” she had said. “Your name is George, isn’t it?”
“It is,” said George, impressed. “It is George. I am George.”
She pulled him in by the arm. She seemed excited, and treated him as if he were a marvel. The astrologer’s house from the outside was unremarkable. It wasn’t decked in improbable palm trees, or sporting a gold sidewalk. It had none of the ostentatious decorations commonly found on other astrologers’ places of business in the city. But it had the advantage of being between the office he was returning to and the restaurant where he had just been dining.
George had been a little bit drunk earlier in the evening. He had been a little heartbroken, saying good-bye
to the most recent girl. He was not too heartbroken over this particular girl, but just a little heartbroken about the state of things. It doesn’t really matter, he told himself, walking back to his office, where he’d left his car. She wasn’t the one. So a little drunk and a little sad, he had seen the psychic’s neon light blinking from her window: a brightly lashed eye going open, closed. And he knocked.
The psychic helped him sit. While she was holding onto his elbow, she seemed to wobble on her legs a bit. It struck him, sinking down into the psychic’s sofa, that she might be a little drunk, too. Maybe they were both drunk. Hey, why not? If the other fellows at the institute found out he’d been here, he’d need a good excuse. “I was drunk,” he could say. “It doesn’t mean much. It doesn’t reflect my core beliefs or anything.”
“Tell me what you want to know,” she said to him. “Ask me anything.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what I want to know. I guess I’m looking for someone. A woman.”
“Do you believe in love?” she asked him. She took his hands in hers. Her rings were warm; the metal touched his hands, and she stopped his arms from moving all around.
“Of course,” he said. “I mean, not in a Huey Lewis way, but yes.”
“And are you prepared to give yourself up to love?” said the psychic. She was letting her head knock back and forth in a very convincing fashion, dangly earrings falling against alternating sides of her neck. He felt, in his mild intoxication, that she was pretty rad. Like authentic.
