On the Right Side of a Dream

by Sheila Williams

  When the night air is very cool, whether it’s on Kaylin’s Ridge in Montana or in the north central desert of Arizona, you see wonders in the sky. I’d heard that the stars are countless but hadn’t really believed it until now. Without clouds or humidity, they cover the deep navy bowl of sky like polka dots on a summer Sunday dress. There are galaxies out there and planets that blink at me.

  I wouldn’t see this in a city, I couldn’t hear the nighttime stories of the lights in the sky. They’d be hidden, masked by the noise and the clouds and the dirt and the lights. I want to see the great cities of the world but I don’t think I’d stay very long. I’d miss the quiet songs of the stars too much.

  But the dark is lifting. Way off in the distance, east, the first rays of the sun have begun to pierce the inky sky and the glow is like a halo embracing the horizon. Gold and pink, then tangerine, the change happens so slowly, so cleanly that I don’t know where night ends and morning begins. Before I can gasp at the beauty of it all, the star of the new day peeks over the foothills and the frantic sounds of scurrying and scratching fade away and melt into the earth. A night owl flies over with one last “who who” as she returns to her nest from a busy evening. And as the day emerges, the desert dissolves into brown, tan and gold, and heat. And silence.

  “Do you mind a quick side trip?” Peaches asked me later, after clicking off her cell phone. “We’re a little ahead of schedule.”

  Like I’ve always said, heroines must be ready for anything.

  “No, I don’t mind. Where are we going?”

  “Sedona. It’s west of here but not too far out of our way. I want to get a reading and Nina says she’ll squeeze me in.”

  I have described Peaches as a salt-of-the-earth kind of woman who works hard (driving a semitractor pulling a trailer is not for wimps) and plays hard and takes a no-nonsense look at life. She likes beer, Viceroy cigarettes (although she’s trying to quit), football, and ice hockey. But she is superstitious. Very superstitious. She never gets on the road without checking her horoscope, a rabbit’s foot hangs from her mirror, and she collects crystals and will not leave the house on a job without her Saint Christopher medal. And he’s not even a real saint anymore! Now we are headed northwest toward Sedona, Arizona, where energy vortexes charge up the juices of the local mediums and illuminate auras. These are Peaches’s words, not mine. I am just along for the ride.

  The desert gives way to more sparse country, almost like the plains in some places but different, brown and tan with little clumps of green here and there. We are moving into canyon country.

  To tell the truth, at first, it’s not much to look at. In a way, it reminds me of Ohio, where I’m from. The land there is neat and flat. The difference is that in the spring and summer, the fields are green with corn stalks. Out there, the colors are dull and quiet, especially when you compare them to the midday Arizona sky, a sky that’s the color of periwinkle flowers on steroids.

  Then I see them. I’ve seen them in bad westerns and good westerns and in truck commercials. I just didn’t think they were real.

  “Pretty amazing, huh?” My tour guide says as she downshifts.

  Yes, they are.

  They stretch upward from the bottom of the canyons, hard, full of crags and ridges, red in the sunlight, trying to touch the sky. There is a whole city of these stone cathedrals and in the setting sun, they look as the landscape of some place beyond distance and time must look. Not earthbound at all. Not close.

  “People climb ’em,” Peaches comments, slowing the truck to a crawl because of the traffic. “Can’t understand why . . .” In some ways, Peaches is as earthbound as I am.

  But I sure would climb one of those mountains, if I wasn’t afraid of heights.

  They have their own names—Cathedral, Snoppy, and the names given them when the first woman came along and said, “Wow.” A giant took a chisel and hammer and became a sculpting fool. These canyons are her gallery.

  We finally reach the quirky little town that has done its best to be a tourist destination and spiritual haven with its tee-shirt shops and crystals, golf courses and spas. The canyon country and Sedona have blended the sublime (one of my new words) with the . . . whatever. I have already seen the sublime. When we meet Peaches’s friend, Nina Goldman, I see the “whatever.”

  Nina’s outfit is a combination of hot-pink Indian sari with cargo pants and tank top as accessories. She wears the homeliest sandals that you ever saw—looks like she’s walking on straw mats—and has everything pierced that can be. A winding rose bush tattoo curls up her right leg and a labyrinth encircles her navel. She peers at me through glasses that I remember from fifth grade and her bright red hair looks as if someone dropped a large bird nest on it. No one is born with hair this shade of red. Besides Millie Tilson, she is the most original-looking person I’ve ever seen. Unlike Millie, however, Nina is a flake. Or, to put it in metaphysical terms, she has a few crystals loose and a fuzzy aura.

  “Oh, my God!” she exclaims as she ushers us into her pavilion, “I am completely undone today, completely!” She waves her thin arms everywhere, and almost misses my eye. “I can’t believe what’s going on! Oh, my Goddess!” She looks like a refugee from a head shop in the late sixties. Actually, that is exactly what she is.

  “Peaches, darling, I’m happy to see you. I’m so sorry that things are such a mess! I’m drowning, just gasping for a breath! Gasping!” Nina nearly chokes as she races through her words, running her sentences together one right after another without taking a breath. I can’t keep up. She hugs Peaches then steps back to give her a once-over. “Ohhhh . . . your aura is brown with mustard yellow around the perimeter, not good. Not good at all. I’ll do your cards and we’ll see what’s going on.” She smiles at me. Then she nods. “Nice to meet you, Juanita. Make yourself at home, please.” She gestures toward the mounds of huge pillows scattered around the floor. Then she studies me with a squint as if she is looking through a microscope. “Purple, yes, very good. Do you want some tea?”

  Purple what?

  I watch them disappear into the deep red paisley-papered room that Nina uses as her channeling studio. You can’t imagine a bigger contrast: Nina, a retro-fashionista, and laid-back Peaches, who wears tee shirts, baseball caps, and painters pants most of the time. Did I mention the blue Converse All Star sneakers?

  Nina told me to make myself at home, so that’s what I did. Snooped around.

  Nina’s house is one of those modern things with lots of windows and more halls than rooms. It’s built in an architectural style that I probably couldn’t pronounce. Very high eyebrow. Somebody has to explain it to you and make you understand that it’s all that and a bag of corn chips. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s like the emperor and his new clothes. I don’t care what they say; his highness is only wearing a jockstrap.

  One thing about Nina, though. She is an equal opportunity decorator. Her decorating style is, literally, from one extreme to the other. In some of the rooms, the walls are white, the furniture, if there is any, is white, and the floors are tile or slate. The rugs hang on the walls like pictures. Oh, they’re white, too. Not too much you can say about an all-white room, is there?

  In the other rooms, your mind can’t process all of the colors, textures, beadings, paisleys, plaids, and fringes: Japanese nearly nothing to Victorian everything everywhere. Huge colorful beaded pillows in bright greens, blues, reds, and golds are scattered across the Oriental rugs that Nina has used to cover the floors. Beaded curtains jingle when you pass through them—Nina uses them instead of doors—and she’s draped deep rose-colored cloth with gold threads in it across the ceilings so that the material floats along like clouds from one end of the room to the next. Carvings of elephants made out of teak, jade Buddhas set in little grottos, and an interesting brass figure with many arms take up space with brass incense burners, candleholders, and stacks and stacks of books. I guess I like the colorful room better. It reminds me of a book that I read about S
cheherazade. Or was it the book about the Algerian brothel? I can’t remember which.

  It’s a pretty house but you get a little turned around with all of the different levels and the blank walls that all look alike and the angles. If I were a spirit, I wouldn’t like being channeled into a house that you need a road map for. I took a couple of wrong turns before I found my way back to the room where Nina and Peaches had left me. It was good timing because they were just coming out of the “channeling studio” when I walked in.

  “I’m sure it will all work out,” Peaches said.

  “Something wrong?” I asked, being nosy again.

  “Just a life-or-death, heart-stopping crisis,” Nina gasped out in a dramatic voice. “My cousin ran off to get married and she’s honeymooning in the South Pacific. For four weeks!” Nina’s heavily lined eyes blinked. I think they were filled with emotion. “My focus is soooo fractured now!”

  “Nina rents out rooms and the guesthouse on the ridge just behind the house . . .” Peaches started to explain.

  “It helps with the expenses when the energy vortex weakens and my readings fall off,” Nina interrupted.

  Peaches rolled her eyes.

  “Two thousand dollars a week is good help if you can get it.”

  Nina poured pale green liquid into a Chinese teacup and handed it to Peaches.

  “Better get used to this.”

  Peaches took a sip, gulped hard, and made a face. Now she looked as green as the tea. She sat down quickly.

  “My cousin is my partner. Now she’s in Bali or Tahiti or some island in the typhoon belt.” Nina sighed dramatically. “My aura is brown, I just know it.”

  “Maybe you should meditate more,” Peaches volunteered. She set down the cup of tea.

  Nina shook her head.

  “This cooking stuff blocks my energy paths!” Nina exclaimed, waving her navy-blue painted nails in the air. “The spirits do not enter a distracted mind!”

  “Did someone say ‘cooking’?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Nina wailed. But she wasn’t completely distracted. She picked up Peaches’s teacup and passed it back to her. Peaches made another face. “My cousin, who is my business partner, does the cooking. I don’t know what I’m going to do! I can boil tea and pour oatmeal but that’s it!”

  The “New Age” lifestyle is all right for readings, crystals, and music but doesn’t work for cooking. Hard to channel spirits while you’re pouring oatmeal.

  Peaches noticed my expression because she stood up fast.

  “Oh, no you don’t!” She put up her hands as she warned me off. “Put the idea right out of your head! If I leave you here, Jess will fry me up and feed me to the bears! Besides, I thought you wanted to go to the Grand Canyon! What about Mexico?”

  “The Canyon isn’t going anywhere, is it?” I asked. “I’m still going to Mexico. It isn’t that far from here. I’m just taking a little . . . vacation, a . . . sabbatical.” One of my new words had come in handy.

  Peaches groaned. Nina was so happy that she almost wet her sari.

  She hugged the air out of me and gushed in her dramatic, nasally voice.

  “I am soooo relieved! I can feel my aura changing nooow. Namaste, dahling, namaste.” She clasped her hands together and bowed from the waist.

  I seem to attract interesting people.

  Peaches rolled her eyes and sighed loudly.

  “Jess will cook my kidneys for this,” she grumbled.

  But it was a good bargain.

  I was paid a nice little chunk of cash. I got a beautiful room that faced east. The sun woke me up every morning, and off in the distance I could see the foothills and the red rock cathedrals. It was a surprise to me that Nina had decorated the room in a, well, normal way. The furniture was streamlined and beautiful, Mission-style, she called it, and the sheets were so soft.

  “Five hundred thread count or higher, that’s all I buy,” Nina said. Whatever that means—more threads somewhere, I guess.

  I got a discount with some of the other consultants in town (according to Nina, the word “psychic” isn’t used anymore), ten percent off a chakra-balancing clinic, and twenty percent off a past-life regression. My aura cleansings Nina did for free.

  “The color of ripening irises,” she said. “Bee-yoo-ti-full.” She fixed her brown eyes on me. “But you’re coming to a crossroads. You are going to have to make some important decisions really soon.”

  It isn’t easy being purple.

  I got all of these goodies for doing practically nothing.

  Now, I’ve cooked breakfast for forty people or more in two hours: eggs, bacon, sausage, grits, hash browns, pancakes, and French toast. But throwing together wheat toast (unbuttered) and black coffee or a fruit cup and a few “lean” turkey and sprouts sandwiches for executive types who work out at a gym for two hours a day (So, what is the point of a vacation?) or dieting divas who only eat the grapes out of the fruit cup was not what I would call real work. By ten o’clock in the morning, I was finished with all of the cooking and the cleanup. First time I’ve had a vacation in . . . well, it’s the first time I’ve had a vacation!

  But I am not cut out for being a lady of leisure. Not that I didn’t try real hard.

  I’d never had a massage before but I’d seen them on TV and Nina raved about them. So, I took advantage of a fifteen-percent-off coupon and had a massage. That was a big mistake, the discount and the massage. I guess I’m a prude at heart. I don’t mind nakedness and other things but I don’t think you have to parade them around, know what I mean? I don’t feel comfortable showing my backside to just anyone. Jess likes my butt (says I have dimples) but that’s for another paragraph. Anyway, I was trying to be cool about letting everything I usually have covered up hang out but I was no good at it. I felt like I was blushing all over and had to count to a thousand or so to keep from jumping off that table in a panic and covering myself up in the XXXL-sized robe. The other problem? By the time Leilani finished chopping my back and kneading my arms and legs like bread dough that had Silly Putty in it, I felt as if I’d been assaulted. I was so sore that I could barely raise my arm the next morning to grab the cinnamon from the cabinet! Maybe the fifteen percent that I didn’t pay was for the “therapeutic values” of the massage. Sometimes it’s just better to pay full price.

  Another week, I decided to be a pool bunny. Nina’s house has a swimming pool in the back surrounded by little grottoes and decorated with beautiful plants and flowers. Her water bill must be a bitch. It’s away from the road so it’s private and very quiet, just the kind of place that a lady of leisure like me would enjoy. I decided to relive my teenaged years in Columbus. KayRita and I used to go to the Maryland pool (Momma had bought us matching swimsuits) just to see the cute boys and try to catch the eye of the lifeguards. Neither one of us could swim, but that wasn’t the point. Looking cute in a bathing suit was.

  So, I pulled out the black swimsuit I’d bought from Target, a snappy little number with control panels and a support bra built in, and sashayed out to the cabana with a beach towel and a stack of things to read.

  I settled myself on one of the cushioned loungers and tried to relax. I watched the ripples in the pool when one of Arizona’s few breezes blew by. I listened to the birds calling. I flipped through the latest issue of a magazine dedicated to women who can wear Band-Aids for underwear and opened a mystery that I’d bought. I lasted a half hour. Lounging around a pool is not for me: It’s too quiet, too hot, and there’s too little to do.

  My second week in Sedona, I shared poolside with the television actress who was staying in the guesthouse. Since I had fixed her a lunch of romaine lettuce, vinaigrette, and pine nuts and iced green tea, I wasn’t surprised that she was lying around the pool. Romaine lettuce doesn’t give you enough energy to do much else.

  Now she knew how to be a lady of leisure. Jacki Francis was her name and she was an early-thirty-something, the size of a toothpick with cantaloupes for breasts and a flat behin
d. She sunbathed topless. I admired her for being able to do that. If I tried that stunt, there’d be an earthquake. We chitchatted on and off between her browsing the Revlon ads in Vogue and me turning the Arcadia Valley Community and Technical brochures around and around in my hands.

  Jacki had been a little snippy with me at first but once she learned that I got a choice table at Yancey’s on twenty-four hour’s notice without a reservation, she was all smiles and sugar.

  She pulled down her dark pink sunglasses and studied me as if I had just flown in from Jupiter.

  “Cool. Yancey’s. You must really have connections. Only the A-list of celebrities can get a table there without a reservation.”

  I smiled back at her. If you’re on the A-list, you don’t have to say anything.

  After that, Jacki and I got to be as close as fuzz on a peach. She probably wanted me to get her a table at Yancey’s.

  “We’re on hiatus,” she told me after I asked her what she was doing in Sedona. She sighed dramatically. Very well done, I thought. “I needed some head time off. You know, to restore my spirit.”

  I thought of the Belgian waffle with berries that I had made for her for breakfast a few days ago. Jacki had taken two bites of the waffle and picked off four of the blueberries. If I was going to restore my spirit, I’d need a lot more food in my stomach than that.

  I was having enough trouble on a full stomach trying to get through the application packet for the culinary arts program at Arcadia Valley Community and Technical.

  The teachers had initials behind their names. They were “Master Chefs” and “Chefs de Cuisine” and “Culinary Fellows.” They had studied in London and Paris and New York. Not Dave’s Coney Island or Peggy’s Steak and Stop but restaurants that had lots of diamonds and stars below their names, restaurants that were located all over the world. These chefs had won awards for culinary excellence. I could pronounce “excellence” but “culinary” still got me tongue-tied. In the photos, they wore white coats and tall hats. The class list was not what I was expecting, either. I had thought, maybe “Baking 101” or “How to Keep Your Soufflés from Falling Down and Your Pie Crusts from Rising Up.” Instead, there was “Business Mathematics,” “Food and Beverage Cost Control,” and “English Composition.” I closed the booklet. Maybe the admissions office had sent me the wrong course list.