The woman frowned, took back the scarf, and gave Duse her palm. It wasn’t such a good reading, Isadora thought, not like the way her own always went. Duse talked mostly about the woman’s past, how she had been an only child growing up on a spindly farm in Wisconsin, how she had come to the city only when her parents died and the farm went to taxes. Isadora prickled at the details. She knows, Isadora thought; she really knows about this woman. Would someone have written all that in an initial letter, just an introduction for a reading?
“Hey,” said the woman, drawing back her palm. “What about the future? How come you’re not saying anything about that? What about those cockamamie spirits?”
Duse was silent for a minute. Isadora could feel the silence taking life, moving and slithering as if it had a belly to it. “Well,” said Duse. “I don’t see any spirits in your hand. You have a long life ahead of you, a good and strong marriage. Some kids. No travel.”
“That’s it?” The woman was angry, incredulous. She said Duse hadn’t told her anything she didn’t already know, and she would be damned if she would pay for things she held inside herself.
“You don’t have to pay me anything,” Duse said. “I didn’t really expect you to.”
Isadora waited until she heard the door shut and then she came into the living room. “You heard that?” Duse said. “You can either sit in on the sessions and participate or not. If you don’t participate, then these things are private. I told you.”
“Something’s wrong with that woman,” Isadora said.
Duse’s mouth flickered. “Well—” she said, drawing out the word, starting to laugh despite herself, and covering that sound, holding it, with her cupped hand.
There were other people coming to the house, people Isadora was both fascinated and repelled by. Duse never made her come into the room, she never told anyone anything about Isadora. “That’s yours to tell,” Duse said. “I was wrong to take that on myself.” Duse changed her mind about Isadora knowing something about what went on in the sessions, too. Oh, she still didn’t want Isadora sitting right there with her and her client, but after each client left, if Isadora liked, Duse would sketch the problem. She said it wasn’t betraying any confidence because her clients really expected her to use any source she could, and you never knew, Isadora might just pick something up that she couldn’t, Isadora might be able to help.
Duse told Isadora how she separated the serious clients from the others. There were more and more people like the first woman, ill-dressed, slangy, spouting all kinds of crazy theories about being from Mars, riding spaceships. They couldn’t hold down jobs and they wanted Duse to tell them that it was because of a past life, because of something they had done back then. One man told Duse that strangers were always coming up to him and saying that they ought to bust his nose, for no reason at all. When he called people on the phone, they always hung up on him, they never called back. He didn’t like it when Duse told him he was just being paranoid, and even though she told him she couldn’t help him, he still came back. “He just wants to talk,” she said. “That’s all these kinds want anyway. I tell them I can’t do much for them, I show them how there isn’t one trace of Mars or spaceships in their palms or their clothes, but they don’t hear.”
The clients she liked to see were also the most disturbing, the most draining for her. They were people who had lost children or lovers, the ones who were stretching out their hands to Duse like suctioned tentacles, grasping for something to root onto, a strength of Duse’s that they could make their own. She had people who had been told they were dying of cancer, people who had tried doctors and special clinics and now, as a last resort, were trying Duse. Duse told Isadora that for these kinds of things she did body readings, she went right over and skimmed her hands over their body, trying to pick something up, something that felt different to her. Sometimes she would try to put herself into a trance to concentrate. Some of these clients were articulate; Isadora saw how good the cut of their clothing was, but, too, she felt the way they were bleeding.
She wasn’t sure exactly how, but Duse did calm those people. Isadora could hear the tensions sliding out of their voices even as Duse just took up their palms to read. She never told them anything especially profound, not that Isadora could see anyway, but sometimes just her saying that it was their destiny, and it could be changed, would brighten them. She never told them how to change anything, though; she always said they had the answer right inside of them, and it was their responsibility to glean it. Once, Duse found someone’s runaway son. The mother brought her one of his shirts and Duse, inhaling it, said he was still in the city. He was, too. The mother phoned Duse at midnight the next day to say he had come home, that he had been staying at a hotel with his girlfriend and they had run out of money. “How did you know he was here?” Isadora asked. But Duse just lifted her shoulders. “I just knew,” she said.
Isadora stayed home less and less. She just never felt really comfortable being in the same house with any of the clients. If she had seen anyone that she thought was like her, she might have stayed; but the more she realized that need, the more it pushed her away. She saw, too, that Duse magnetized, that she drew in every misfit and outcast, every person who could just as easily believe that cats were from Venus as that Duse could tell the future.
Sometimes Isadora misjudged the time. She would come in on the tail end of a session to see Duse soothing someone who was crying hysterically, catching at breath in raw gulps. Duse soothed with words, with the names of places where lost valuables could be found, with a description of the way a fate line lifted and marked the end of a struggle. Duse told Isadora once that people who were that upset sometimes never contacted her again, but that wasn’t a success. It was like all those old times at Olya’s, when Olya told her that people didn’t come back because of failure, not success. They blamed themselves.
All of Duse’s energies were going into her new business. She was sometimes depressed—when she couldn’t sense one damn thing from some kid’s muddy sneaker that a parent had brought to her wrapped in clean linen, when she saw death in a palm. At those times she would slump at dinner, and Martin, without speaking, would wrap himself about her, trying to nuzzle her into good spirits. They never discussed her work, not that Isadora could see, but sometimes Martin would ask Duse how her day went, and although neither one of them mentioned a client, they both knew what she was talking about.
Isadora never got used to seeing all those strange cars bumping up into their drive. She worried that someone she knew would find out, or worse, would show up. There was a craze at school now with Ouija boards, but no one took it seriously, everyone joked around. Kids made the triangle move across the letters on the wood board, forcing names of boys they liked to be spelled out. Kids giggled and played until some teacher would shout at them to leave their foolishness at home and open a book for a change.
Isadora spent a lot of time alone. She wrote a lot, letting all those shapes on the paper lull her. She was secretive about her notepads, and she always hunched her body right over them when she saw anyone approaching. Duse kept trying to get Isadora outside. “You’re too pale,” she said. “Someone’s going to mistake you for a spirit and have a heart attack right here in this house.”
“Redheads are meant to be pale,” Isadora said.
Duse didn’t really know where Isadora got all this writing business. Isadora hadn’t argued for bedtime tales when she was young. Martin used to bring her books, used to lift her up into his lap, but when she curled against him, it wasn’t so much for the story in that book as it was for the way his hands were displayed to her. She liked to look at the lines. And Duse, who had read Isadora’s palm enough times, hadn’t seen any writing talent there, any reason for her girl to be so consumed.
Isadora would walk half an hour down to the Thrift-T-Mart to pick up a special kind of writing pad she liked. They were cheap pads, with coarse yellow lined paper, and backed with a picture of a movie sta
r. Isadora liked Tony Curtis because his hair didn’t look real to her; it was slick and oily and seemed to almost drip. When there wasn’t Tony Curtis, she bought Janet Leigh because of the weighted look of her lipstick, the pout of her eyes. Isadora wrote pages and pages, sometimes sketching pictures in the margins, but she never let Duse see one single syllable. She would cover the whole pad with her arm and wait until Duse had passed by her before she would begin her writing again.
Isadora kept her writing pads between her mattress and her box springs. Sometimes she put one of her flaming hairs between the pages so she would be able to tell if the pads had been tampered with. She wrote everything—stories, factual accounts of things she saw, her own thoughts. Sometimes she wrote about herself, and sometimes she divorced herself from her writing—she thought she was almost creating herself all over again into a new person, and it comforted her.
She stopped noticing Duse’s clients when she was writing. She could stay right in the den, curled into a chair working, and not tense up the way she usually did when she knew someone was talking with Duse. Once a woman came right in and stood over Isadora’s shoulder, and when Isadora looked up, the woman told her to be careful, that there was such a thing as automatic writing, and that she herself had once done it.
“What?” said Isadora, putting the lead sheet over her writing so the woman would stop looking at it.
“You hold the pen, but a spirit does the writing,” the woman said. “Don’t make that face, it’s true. We’re just telephones in a way, a link to the world for them. It got so I couldn’t pick up a pen without skittering obscenities all over the page.” She told Isadora it had only stopped with two years of hypnosis treatments and no writing at all, but even now she couldn’t hold a pen without trepidation, without her blood starting to bubble inside of her.
Isadora thought it was ridiculous, and she was glad when the woman went back to see Duse, but even so, something was taken from her. She could feel it, and when she picked up her pen again and flipped the pages back, she couldn’t concentrate, she was aware of that woman moving inside her cells.
She was irritable that evening. She didn’t want to say anything to Duse because she knew how she was. All she had to hear was Duse telling her that automatic writing was a gift or something. Isadora unfolded her hand under the table and looked at the star. She had used up years yearning for it, more years yearning for the gift it signaled, and now she just yearned for it to disappear. Writing was hers, she thought.
“What is it with you?” Duse said. “You haven’t done anything but play with your food.”
“I’m all right,” said Isadora.
“You’re forcing me to find out what’s wrong, you know,” Duse said. “I don’t like intruding, but I’m worried about you.”
“You can’t see into people’s lives like they were a crystal ball,” said Isadora.
“Oh no?” said Duse.
Isadora got up from the table, pushing away from it with both hands. She felt queer and small inside. When she went to sleep that night, she silenced her body under the sheets. She sweated, thinking all the time, saying in her mind the words, that Duse should go ahead and read her mind, that she should prove right then and there to Isadora that she had the talent. Prove it, prove something.
Isadora was awake for hours. She kept propping herself up on one elbow squinting into the redly lit clock face for the time. Four A.M. She kept repeating phrases in her mind, challenges for Duse to recite back to her. I wish you were ordinary, she thought. Silence was sandwiched in between every phrase. She kept waiting, expecting herself to be violently cracked open, to feel Duse revealing her, peeling at her layers as if she were some fruit. I don’t want to be an outcast, Isadora thought.
The more her body dragged down with sleep, the more her mind seemed to be twitching awake. Her thoughts fumbled. She began seeing shadows in the corners, pieces of clothing that she had carelessly flung from her now took on shape, now seemed to become something. She knew how Duse said she could sense things, but she didn’t want that, she didn’t want anything. What if there were spirits, what if they were vindictive, angry with her for denying Duse’s gift, and her own? Isadora got up and clicked on her desk lamp and took out the compass that she used for math. She idly etched at the star in her palm, pricking herself. She had planned on scarring the star away, but it hurt.
She sat down at her desk. Why were things so dramatic to think about, to imagine yourself doing, but so terrible when you actually did them? She put her hands up to her mouth and carefully bit off every nail she had.
She fell asleep at five, and in the morning her eyes were bagged, the fragile skin beneath them faintly purple. At breakfast she watched how Duse moved, how she held her robe closed in her fist while she bustled about the kitchen. “Why are you looking at me like that?” Duse said, reaching for the juice. “Don’t you feel well?”
“I guess,” said Isadora, shrugging, waiting. But Duse said nothing. She set down plates and cleared them away, and when she was through eating, she told Isadora that she was taking a shower and would Isadora please answer the phone if it rang because it might be a client who needed her.
Isadora felt no victory. Maybe Duse hadn’t even tried to look into her mind last night. Jesus. She got up from the table. This is stupid, she told herself; it has to stop.
She removed herself a little on her sixteenth birthday. She flattened her hands against her thighs and told Duse she didn’t want her palm read. Duse gave her a sharp look; she reminded Isadora that she always did that for her on her birthday, that she always made it a special, detailed reading. “I don’t care,” said Isadora. Duse was silent a moment. “Well, if you change your mind—” she started.
“I won’t,” said Isadora.
She couldn’t stand the way Duse wasn’t moving, the way that woman was just watching her, eyes squinted as if she wanted to see right through to Isadora’s soul. It made Isadora itchy. She got up suddenly, she said she had to go to the university library for something, and it wasn’t until she was half out that door that she glanced back and saw Duse, still thoughtfully standing there.
Isadora liked the university. She usually hung out in the Ratskeller, the gloomy student bar in the union. She called it the Rat the way she heard the students do, and she picked a good clean wood table in the center and bopped the flat of her hands on it in time to the tinny music they piped in. She watched the shaggy-haired boys playing chess. Sometimes she saw them cheating. It was a different world to be in; she forgot about Duse.
Sometimes she wished one of the boys would pick her up, other times she liked feeling invisible, being let alone to simply sit there fiddling with her Coke. When she got up to leave, to go back home, her stomach tensed.
Everything at home made her feel suddenly uncertain. She was aware of beginnings, of endings. She had always thought of Duse as her protector, as someone who knew everything, who had ways to control and order and make everything more magical in the process. Isadora didn’t think that anymore. She couldn’t stand to see Duse prowling in her death files anymore. The whole procedure seemed to underline death, to bring it out instead of control it. For the first time in her life, Isadora began to worry about death, to feel it, like a presence about her. Sometimes she’d be in a crowd of people and she’d think about them all being dead, all being nothing. Duse always said that mediums proved life after death, that spirits did exist, although she herself had no particular desire to have a dealing with one unless she could be in total control. “What do you care what death is like?” Duse once asked her. “It’ll be a surprise.” But Isadora imagined that not all surprises were pleasant.
She tried to get the newspaper before Duse did, to rip out the obituaries. She kept her face innocent. She told Duse that the dogs outside had bitten a page from the paper; she said the paper boy, in his careless speed, had forgotten a section. Duse always narrowed her eyes at Isadora and then she would climb into the car and go down to the Thrift-T-
Mart and buy herself a fresh paper. She would bring it back inside the house and sit, meticulously flipping through every page, all the time aware of how Isadora’s eyes were feeding on her.
They began to have terrible fights, tugs-of-war of the will. Duse wanted to know why Isadora was pulling back; she accused her girl of denying her very self.
“Why do you know about my self?” Isadora said. “You’ve had lucky guesses, that’s all.”
“What?” said Duse. “What?”
“I went to sleep one night doing that stupid telepathy baloney, telling you to read my mind, almost begging you to prove you had the power to do it. You didn’t know that, did you? How could you have—you can’t tell anything.”
Duse made her mouth one tight line. “How do you know?” she said. “How do you know I didn’t listen in, that I didn’t pick up on what you were telling me and decide it was better for you to find out for yourself just what kind of a gift I had? Maybe I just chose not to prove anything. And why in God’s name do I have to prove anything to you?”
“I wish you were ordinary,” Isadora spat out. “All this craziness. Do you ever really take a good look at some of your clients, the kind of people they are? People on the street, average people, laugh at you. I’ve seen it.”
“Who?” said Duse. “Who laughs?” She grabbed at her hair and twisted it into a knot, her fingers violent. “And if they laugh, it’s out of ignorance, out of fear, that’s all. And let me tell you something else, Baby. I’m not ordinary and you’re not ordinary either. You can think you are until the earth splits right open but it won’t change anything.”
“I just want to be left alone,” said Isadora, her anger pulling out of her, draining her.
“You want me out of your life?” said Duse. She looked at Isadora defiantly for a moment, and then she abruptly sat down, the anger washed from her face. “Oh my God, that’s it,” she said. “Everything comes creeping right on back to you, whether you want it to or not, doesn’t it.”
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