Past the beads, Clara found herself alone in a small psychic reading room. Bean bag chairs, curtains with tassels, a folding card table with a scarf on it and some tarot cards. Plus a big, gold turban tossed on the floor.
Dumbly, she picked it up and placed it onto her head. Fit like a glove. And felt about as stupid as a glove on her head.
“I’m so needing to see you today!” A young woman entered into the room with a dramatic sweep of the beaded divider. She wore an oversized purple shirt, purple leggings and a big, floppy hat with a large, fake purple flower bobbing on it. “Two guys, one day. And it’s all going down tomorrow.” She looked at Clara significantly.
“Ah, I see,” Clara said in a wise professor voice. She stroked her chin as if she had a beard. How did psychics act, exactly? Ply their craft? And end their sessions as soon as possible? “Please, make yourself comfortable.” She lamely gestured at the bean bag where the girl was already seated comfortably.
“You remember last time?” the girl began. “When I told you about the guy from yoga?”
Clara sank awkwardly into the beanbag opposite and nodded her turbaned head in an attempt to signify sage wisdom. The girl continued on in an excited rush, reminding her of the details of how she’d met a guy at her yoga class, shared significant eye contact with him, then—bang—a chance encounter at the coffee shop and before you knew it they’d agreed to meet up at the farmer’s market that weekend.
Clara clasped her hands under her chin but felt too posed, so she leaned her head into one hand only it felt too much like she was going to sleep. Settling on folding her arms across her ample chest, she nodded and said again, “I see.” What in the world would she do once this girl asked her to predict something about the future?
“Anyway,” the girl continued, oblivious to Clara’s lack of clairvoyance. “Of course then I’m like,” she smacked herself on the forehead, “Hello! Tomato guy!” She continued in a torrent about how the guy she always saw selling tomatoes at the farmer’s market was, like, her dream guy. The type of guy she’d always seen herself with. “You know, he lives up in Sebastapol,” she explained.
“On an organic farm,” Clara nodded, picturing the type of guy she meant.
“I can’t believe you knew that!” the girl exclaimed, “Wow!” Clara nodded meaningfully, not pointing out that it was a pretty safe guess for a farmer’s market guy who lived in a small, rural hippie town. “Anyway,” the girl continued, “it’s been, like, forever we’ve been flirting and I can totally see this life where I move up there with him and we’d be together on the farm.”
“And he’d make you eggs in the morning from the cage-free chickens,” Clara agreed, getting invested in the storyline despite herself. If anyone knew how to cook up outrageous fantasies based on a mere scrap of information, it was Clara. Maybe psychic was actually her perfect career fit?
“You see what I mean?” the girl asked, nodding. “It’s, like, perfect. Tomato guy and I belong together. But now, this yoga guy.” She gave a dreamy sigh. “The connection is so intense.”
Clara could see that the girl was facing the age-old ‘guy you thought you belonged with vs. guy you felt an unexpected connection with’ dilemma. She knew something about that.
“So, here’s my question.” The girl sat up, or at least perched herself as upright at the bean bag would allow. Clara felt a nervous pit form in her stomach; here it came. The moment when she was supposed to know the answer, tell this girl exactly what happened in her future as if she had perfect clarity and certainty.
The girl looked at her intently. “What color dress do I wear?”
“Color dress?” Clara repeated.
“You know, on Saturday? To draw out their auroras?”
Clara looked at the purple flower resting atop the girl’s hat, perched above her purple tunic and purple leggings. “Purple,” she offered in a decisive voice.
The girl broke out in a smile. “Awesome. I was totally hoping you’d say that!” She popped up out of the bean bag with five times the agility of Clara, who struggled to disengage with the soft, lumpy cushion and join her standing. Once she’d finally managed it, the girl gave her a quick hug. “You’re the best!” She nearly skipped out of the room and out the side door.
Clara watched her, wondering how exactly that had gone as well as it did and also how Clara/Tif made any money since it didn’t seem as if payment followed the readings.
“Dude!” Brad/Trey called into the kitchen. “Grab me a dime for the Dweeze.”
“A dime?” Clara called back. Patting her mumu, she didn’t feel any pockets. “I don’t think I have any change.” She padded through the kitchen and poked her head into the living room. Brad sat on the futon with The Dweeze, whose Fu Man Chu mustache hung down in two long braids. “What do you need it for?” she asked. “A parking meter or something?”
The Dweeze gave her a confused look.
“Funny, broham,” Brad said without looking amused. “Now would you go grab us a dime bag?”
“Oh.” The puzzle pieces clicked together. She remembered now, from her few stoner acquaintances in college. “You mean a small bag of marijuana.”
The Dweeze looked sharply at Brad. “Dude, is she cool?”
“She’s cool. She’s my homie,” he reassured him. Looking up, he asked with something of an edge, “You need to chillax, Tif? Spark one up?”
“Brad could you—?” He winced. “Sorry, Trey,” she corrected herself. “Can you come here for a sec?” She beckoned him into the kitchen. When he arrived, she asked in a tense voice, “Are you selling marijuana?”
“What are you a narc?”
“Is that what you do? For a living?” Her voice rose with each question.
“What are you my Dad?”
“You’re a drug dealer?” She definitely hit a high soprano note with that one.
“What are you going to call the cops?” Brad. Not so creative with his turns of phrase.
“But…” Clara shook her head, still with such a vivid picture of her Titan of Industry Facebook Brad, tanned, rested and ready to take over the world. “You could be so much more! You have such a head for finance and business.”
“I am in business, bro!” He shook his head. “Why don’t you go spark up? Take that stick out of your ass and chill out.”
Awash in the many, many things she could say in response, Clara found herself standing, eyes wide, absolutely mute. And wondering if her middle school health teacher had had it right. She remembered an old, grainy movie the much-beleaguered teacher had shown to the group of unruly 6th graders: The Dangers of Drugs. The message had been clear: one puff and that was it, you’d end up locked in the slammer or shakin’ it out on the streets for spare change. Now, teachers could skip the movie and simply invite Clara in as a guest speaker. ‘You wanna end up like me?’ she’d ask, up on stage in her mumu. She’d scare them straight. On the bright side, guest speaking would generate some nice extra income.
Starlight walked back into the kitchen, like a drop of rain in the desert. Brad looked her up and down, real thirsty.
“How you doin’?” Brad treated Starlight to a lecherous look. Clara could almost see the lacrosse helmet on his head.
Starlight licked her lips and murmured, “Hey.”
Clara didn’t need to walk in on them in a room to figure out what was going on. And yet, the enormity of it caused her to lean back against the countertop. Again with the cheating? Or, who knew, maybe she and Brad/Trey kept it open? Maybe their fearless Leader had run a free love cult and they’d both partnered up at random?
And yet, really? To go through all the trouble of time travel and end up, again, with Brad with another woman? It had to be in every reality?
“Really?” Whoops. Apparently that last thought had made it into spoken word.
Sensing the negative vibe, Starlight slipped out of the room. Brad/Trey looked over at Clara and he looked pissed. Or at least more rumpled and out of sorts than usual.
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“We cool, bra?” he asked.
“You know you’re from New Jersey, right?” Clara couldn’t help but ask.
“What?”
“All this ‘dude’ and ‘bra’? It’s not like you grew up on the beaches of So Cal.”
“Dude, you suck today. You’re like…” The wheels in his brain creaked and groaned, straining with the effort of trying to find a good analogy. Any simple simile would do. Clara almost wanted to root for him. You can do it, big guy.
Unsuccessful, he shook his head back and forth, communicating grave disappointment. Or grooving along to his favorite Grateful Dead song on his own internal soundtrack. Either way, he returned to the other room and the awaiting Dweeze.
With a sigh of frustration, Clara brought a hand to her wild mane of hair. But something caught. One of her snake rings tangled in one of the many large hoops dangling from her ear. As she struggled to free herself, a figure appeared once again at the side door.
“Dude,” the dreadlocked head popped in. “Can I borrow 20 dollars and an umbrella?” In his hands he cradled a plastic bowl with a fruit salad. It heavily featured pineapple. He took a bite of it from the fork Clara recognized from her own counter top.
“You going to return that pineapple?” she had to ask. After all, he’d only asked to borrow it.
Sensing an opportunity, Boner the dog ran into the kitchen and began humping her leg.
Clara couldn’t help it. She closed her eyes and did her best impression of Stanley in Streetcar Named Desire. Only she wasn’t yelling for Stella. When she opened her mouth and bellowed, she called the name, “Jeanie!!!!”
CHAPTER 15
MICK JAGGER GOES SOLAR
No Jeanie appeared.
Just Clara, yelling in her god-awful, stinky kitchen with a humping dog and a hippie trying to borrow stuff.
The good thing was, both the hippie and the dog cleared out. Standing in the middle of the room and yelling a random person’s name at the top of your lungs tended to have that effect.
And Clara had to agree. It was time to flee the scene.
She grabbed a baseball cap lying strewn on the kitchen table amidst a pile of random junk and jammed it down over her frizzy mass of witch hair. Rummaging around, she found an iPhone in there as well. It had a cracked case with a picture of a snake on it; she claimed it as her own. The up-side of clutter: everything you needed was right in front of you. If you could find it. After adding a large amount of snake jewelry to the heap, she headed out the side door.
Outside in the early afternoon, the morning Bay Area fog had burned off and the sun shone bright. But not in Clara’s heart. Fuming, grumbling, limping along, Clara wondered how the hell she’d been so wrong. Brad? Her perfect match? What had she been thinking? They were so far from the perfect combo; they weren’t peanut butter and chocolate, they were anchovies and orange juice. Oatmeal and soy sauce. Or what did you add together to make the volcano in preschool? Baking soda and vinegar? Whatever it was, she and Brad belched up crazy together.
They were so bad together that they turned everything around them into an afterschool special. The Dangers of Drugs! The Perils of Money! It wasn’t the drugs or the money, it was them as a couple. No matter what setting, no matter what scenario, they brought out the worst in each other. Together, they had the opposite of the Midas touch: everything around them turned to crap.
Clara headed up the street, then turned left with a vague sense that she was headed toward UC Berkeley’s campus. She didn’t have a plan or any sort of a destination or rationale that propelled her on, just a sense that moving forward had to be better than staying behind. And heading somewhere with lots of people seemed like it might up her chances of running into Jeanie. Because she needed to go back. One more time. Her last chance.
She passed blooming shrubs and flowering trees, was passed by young students in bright sneakers and power-walking moms in baggy black pants, but she noticed none of it. She needed to figure out what to do next. She had to go back again, that much was clear. She couldn’t stay in this reality any more than she could the last one in New Jersey.
But what next? What other future plan could she cook up? Convince Brad to join the Peace Corps in sub-Saharan Africa? With their track record she’d probably lie there dying of Malaria while he hooked up with a young, fresh-faced relief worker whose eyes shone of promise and hope. Or how about signing up for Clown College where she could lose her tongue in a fire-eating accident while Brad got busy with a tightrope walker in a spangly leotard?
She shook her head as she crossed another street and made her way into the great mosh of humanity on UC Berkeley’s campus. “Nothing’s going to work,” she said to herself. Thankfully, a large woman in an African Dashiki mumu limping along and talking to herself didn’t garner any attention amidst the backpacked undergrads riding skateboards, bearded homeless men kicking hackysacks and bespectacled professors pedaling bikes.
Her right leg killed. Almost like she’d broken it in six places after falling out of a redwood tree. Seeing a wooden bench up ahead, she headed that way and landed down on it with a loud grunt.
She followed it with a groan, head in her hands. All that time she’d wasted, pouring over Brad’s Facebook photos. Studying the details of his life like a detective at a crime scene. Only she’d missed the most important fact: he was happy in his life—with Ashley! You couldn’t cut him out of the photo like a paper doll and paste him into another one. She could picture all those Facebook pics, this time without the artful crop close-hugging Brad alone. Hanging out with family and friends at a beach bonfire. All dressed up for a couple’s night out on the town. Brad and Ashley were the right match.
Looking up, she rested her chin into the palm of her hands, elbows on her knees. People passed this way and that on the path before her, heading off to class, out to grab a bite, off to meet someone to study. A woman about her age passed by, hair up in a scrunchie, wearing the type of old sweatshirt she, herself, used to favor.
Ah, couch Clara. How good she’d had it, nasty hair scrunchie, wine-stained stained sweatshirt and all. No bum leg she’d broken in multiple places. No drug-dealer boyfriend. Jedi the high-maintenance, angry cat looked like a dream pet in comparison to Boner the hump machine. And CAHWCFC, well, it wasn’t as if she’d been chained permanently to that job. She could have found something better.
With the faintest glimmer of an idea, Clara stood and began to slowly walk again. Everything in the Northern California landscape shouted of abundance. Flowers blossomed, buds opened, leaves and grass and shrubs all stretched forth brilliant shades of glossy green. She pulled back her shoulders, tilted her head up to the sunshine and breathed it all in.
She passed a bright, happy patch of begonias. Back in Rockridge, she’d lived near a drug store that always had begonias for sale in clay pots for about $8 a piece. They’d sat, arranged on plastic shelves outside the automatic sliding glass doors, splashy little spots of color asking to be taken home. But she never had, even though they would have looked great out on her tiny patch of patio.
Why hadn’t she ever bought a pot of flowers? That was her own tiny patch of patio, after all. A spot where she could sit outside with red and purple and pink begonias and drink some coffee and not be in a failing loveless marriage, not be having an affair with a cheesy realtor, not be crippled in pain from a tree-related accident—just be.
Clara stopped still with the surprise of the realization. How simple her old, real life had been. How lovely.
But still she’d sunken into such a deep quagmire of depression. Why, exactly? Because her life was boring? One order of boring, please, with an extra helping of boring on the side. Clara wanted to tuck in like a road-weary traveler finally arriving at a warmly-lit diner.
Or maybe she’d gotten so down because she didn’t like her job? But, really, take out the world’s tiniest violin and play it sweetly for her in sympathy. As Cat had pointed out back when they’d had dinner together, everyo
ne hated their jobs. And what, exactly, had been holding her back from finding another one? It wasn’t as if she were a desperate single mom with a boatload of kids and unpaid medical bills. Back then she’d felt her single, childless status like a brand on her forehead, labeling her a colossal failure. But, really, she had nothing tying her down. Nothing holding her back.
Could she go back to her old life? With a slight laugh of disbelief, Clara realized: that’s what she wanted. She brought a hand to her chest with the force of the epiphany. She wanted to go back to her old life! She shook her head and hugged herself, again drawing no notice. At the moment a tall, thin barefoot man dressed in robes with a long, Gandalf-style beard and walking stick was passing along, deflecting any stray attention. A happy woman in a mumu, baseball cap and psychedelic leggings didn’t afford a second look.
The path ahead beckoned to her. Moving forward, she filled her lungs with air, feeling like she’d just woken up to a perfect spring day. Or, even better, an outdoor shower. Back when she’d been growing up her family had rented a rustic cabin in the wilderness around Tahoe. It had an outdoor shower and as a kid Clara had liked nothing better. It had felt like a secret treat and she’d giggled, looking up at the sky in the crisp sunlight with the hot water filtering down overhead. Now she felt like she’d just stepped out of that shower, beads of water sliding down to her toes as she wrapped up in a towel, refreshed and invigorated for the day ahead.
Ready to launch Plan B—or was it Plan C? or technically Plan A?—Clara scanned the path, the campus greens, the entrances to the buildings around her. Somewhere she knew she’d spot that familiar flash of pink. Jeanie had to be close, she could almost feel it. Jeanie always checked on her, didn’t she? Last time as the interior decorator. And now Clara needed to find her and tell her—there’s no place like home! She needed to hit the reset button and this time return back to her former life.
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