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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
'I left my wedding dress hanging in a tree somewhere in North Dakota. I don't know why that particular tree appealed to me. Perhaps it was because it looked as if it had given up and died years ago and was still standing because it didn't know what else to do...' From the moment Julia Bennett leaves her abusive Boston fiance at the altar and her ugly wedding dress hanging from a tree, she knows she's driving away from the old Julia, but what she's driving toward is as messy and undefined as her own wounded soul. The old Julia dug her way out of a tortured, trailer park childhood with a monster of a mother. The new Julia will be found at her Aunt Lydia's rambling, hundred-year-old farmhouse outside Golden, Oregon. There, among uppity chickens and toilet bowl planters, Julia is welcomed by an eccentric, warm, and often wise clan of women, including a psychic, a minister's unhappy wife, an abused mother of four, and Aunt Lydia herself - a woman who is as fierce and independent as they come. Meeting once a week for drinks and the baring of souls, it becomes clear that every woman holds secrets that keep her from happiness. But what will it take for them to brave becoming their true selves?
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Seitenzahl: 645
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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Julia’s Chocolates
CATHY LAMB
For my parents:
Bette Jean (Thornburgh) Straight 1941–2002 and James Stewart Straight 1936–2007
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
I left my wedding dress hanging in a tree somewhere in North Dakota.
I don’t know why that particular tree appealed to me. Perhaps it was because it looked as if it had given up and died years ago and was still standing because it didn’t know what else to do. It was all by itself, the branches gnarled and rough, like the top of someone’s knuckles I knew.
I didn’t even bother to pull over as there were no other cars on that dusty two-lane road, which was surely an example of what hell looked like: you came from nowhere; you’re going nowhere. And here is your only decoration: a dead tree. Enjoy your punishment.
The radio died, and the silence rattled through my brain. I flipped up the trunk and was soon covered with the white fluff and lace and flounce of what was my wedding dress. I had hated it from the start, but he had loved it.
Loved it because it was high-collared and demure and innocent. Lord, I looked like a stuffed white cake when I put it on.
The sun beat down on my head as I stumbled to the tree and peered through the branches to the blue sky tunnelling down at me in triangular rays. The labyrinth of branches formed a maze that had no exit. If you were a bug that couldn’t fly, you’d be stuck. You’d keep crawling and crawling, desperate to find your way out, but you never would. You’d gasp your last tortured breath in a state of utter confusion and frustration, and that would be that.
Yes, another representation of hell.
The first time I heaved the dress up in the air, it landed right back on my head. And the second time, and the third, which simply increased my fury. I couldn’t even get rid of my own wedding dress.
My breath caught in my throat, my heart suddenly started to race, and it felt like the air had been sucked right out of the universe, a sensation I had become more and more familiar with in the last six months. I was under the sneaking suspicion that I had some dreadful disease, but I was too scared to find out what it was, and too busy convincing myself I wasn’t suicidal to address something as pesky as that.
My arms were weakened from my Herculean efforts and the fact that I could hardly breathe and my freezing-cold hands started to shake. I thought the dress was going to suffocate me, the silk cloying, clinging to my face. I finally gave up and lay face-down in the dirt. Someone, years down the road, would stop their car and lift up the pile of white fluff and find my skeleton. That is, if the buzzards didn’t gnaw away at me first. Were there buzzards in North Dakota?
Fear of the buzzards, not of death, made me roll over. I shoved the dress aside and screamed at it, using all the creative swear words I knew. Yes, I thought, my body shaking, I am losing my mind.
Correction: mind already gone.
Sweat poured off my body as I slammed my dress repeatedly into the ground, maybe to punish it for not getting caught in one of the branches. Maybe to punish it for even existing. I finally slung the dress around my neck like a noose and started climbing the dead tree, sweat droplets teetering off my eyelashes.
The bark peeled and crumbled, but I managed to get up a few feet, and then I gave the white monstrosity a final toss. It hooked on a tiny branch sticking out like a witch’s finger. The oversized bodice twisted and turned; the long train, now sporting famous North Dakota dirt, hung towards the parched earth like a snake.
I tried to catch my breath, my heart hammering on high speed as tears scalded my cheeks, no doubt trekking through lines of dirt.
I could still hear the dressmaker. ‘Why on earth do you want such a high neckline?’ she had asked, her voice sharp. ‘With a chest like that, my dear, you should show it off, not cover up!’
I had looked at my big bosoms in her fancy workroom, mirrors all around. They heaved up and down under the white silk as if they wanted to run. The bosoms were as big as my buttocks, I knew, but at least the skirt would cover those.
Robert Stanfield III had been clear. ‘Make sure you get a wide skirt. I don’t want you in one of those slinky dresses that’ll show every curve. You don’t have the body for that, Turtle.’
He always called me Turtle. Or Possum. Or Ferret Eyes. If he was mad he called me Cannonball Butt.
Although I can understand the size of my butt – that came from chocolate-eating binges – I had never understood my bosoms. They had sprouted out, starting in fifth grade and had kept growing and growing. By eighth grade I had begged my mother for breast-reduction surgery. She was actually all for it, but that was because all of her boyfriends kept staring at me. Or touching. Or worse.
The doctor, of course, was appalled and said no. And here I was, thirty-four years old, with these heaving melons still on me. Note to self: one, get money. Two, get rid of the melons.
But the seamstress couldn’t let go of them. ‘It’s your wedding day!’ she snapped, her greying hair electrified. ‘Why do you want to hide yourself?’
I hemmed and hawed standing there, drowning in material so heavy I could hardly walk, and said something really sickening about loving old-fashioned dresses, but I could tell she didn’t believe me.
She stuck three pins in her mouth, her huge eyes gaping at me behind her pink-framed glasses. ‘Humph,’ she said. ‘Humph. Well! I’ve met your fiancé.’ Her tone was accusatory. As if he were a criminal.
‘Yes, well, then, you know his family is a very old Boston family, and they have a certain way.’ I tried to sound confident, slightly superior. Robert’s mother was brilliant at that. Brilliant at making people feel like slugs.
‘Very old, snobby family,’ the dressmaker muttered. ‘And that mother! Talk about a woman with a stick up her butt!’ She tried to say that last part quietly, but I heard her. ‘Well, fine, dear. That’s the way you want it, then?’
Again, she pierced me with those sharp owl eyes, and I couldn’t move, caught like a trapped mouse who knew she would soon be eaten, one bite at a time.
She dropped her hands. ‘You’re sure?’ The words came out muffled through all those pins. ‘Very sure?’
‘Yes, of course.’ And inside me, that’s when the real screaming started. Long, high-pitched, raw. It had been quieter for months before then – smothered – but, sometimes I could almost hear my insides crying. I had ignored it. I had a fiancé, finally, and I was keeping him.
I had dug my way out of trailer life and scrambled through school while working full time and battling recurring nightmares of my childhood. I had a decent job in an art museum. People actually thought – and this was the hilarious part – that I was normal. The rancid smell of poverty and low-class living had become but a whiff around me.
I tried to be proud of that.
At that point, the day the dressmaker fitted me, the wedding was exactly two weeks away. Exactly two weeks later I was on the fly.
I bent again to the cracked earth and caught up a handful of dirt, heaving it straight up at the dress, sputtering when some of it landed back on my head.
I spat on the ground, wiping the tears off my face with my dirty hands, flinching when I pressed my left eye too hard, the skin still swollen. Damn. That had been the last straw. I was not going to walk down the aisle with a swollen, purple, bloodied eye.
Then everyone would know how desperate I was.
I whipped around on my heel to the car, then floored the accelerator, the old engine creaking in protest. My wedding dress flapped its goodbye like a ghost. Sickening.
Goodbye, dress, I thought, wiping another flood of tears away. I’m broke. I’m scared shitless. Inhaling is often difficult for me because of my Dread Disease. But I have no use for you, other than as a decoration on a dead tree in hell.
I was now headed for the home of my Aunt Lydia in Oregon. Everyone else in our cracked family (cousins and aunts and uncles) thinks she’s crazy, which means that she is the only sane one in the bunch.
Robert would come after me, but it would take him a while to find me, as my mother had run off again last week – with her latest boyfriend, to Minnesota – and would not be able to give him Aunt Lydia’s address. I almost laughed. Robert would feel so inconvenienced.
But he would come. Burning with fury and humiliation, he would come to eke out some sick, twisted punishment. My hands shook. I gripped the steering wheel tighter.
Aunt Lydia is my mother’s older half-sister. Although my mother decided to marry no less than five times, and have only one (unplanned) child, my aunt has never married or had children. She lives on a farm outside the small town of Golden, Oregon, in a rambling hundred-year-old farmhouse.
When I was a child, Lydia would pay for my plane ticket to come and see her during the summer for six weeks. It was the highlight of my life, a pocket of peace next to my mother’s rages and her boyfriends’ wandering hands and bunched fists.
Two years ago, before I met Robert, I visited Aunt Lydia. When I arrived she was standing in front of her home, hands on her hips, with that determined look on her face.
When I got close, she engulfed me in a huge hug, then another, and another. ‘The house is depressed, Julia!’ she bellowed, which is the way she always talks. She never speaks at a normal volume; it’s always at full speed, full blast. Her long grey hair floated about her face in the light breeze. ‘It’s anxious. On edge. Sad. It needs cheering up!’
My suitcases were piled around me, and I was still clutching my gift to her, a large yellow piggy bank shaped like a pig. I knew she would love it.
‘This house should be pink!’ She jabbed a finger in the air. ‘Like a camellia. Like a vagina!’
That week we painted the house pink, like a camellia and a vagina, and the shutters white. ‘The door to this house must be black,’ Aunt Lydia announced, her loud voice chasing birds from the tree. ‘It will ward off evil spirits, disease, and seedy men, and we certainly don’t need any of that, now, do we, darlin’?’
‘No, Aunt Lydia,’ I replied, nudging my glasses back up my nose. At the time I hadn’t had a date in four years, so even a seedy man might be interesting to me, but I did not say that aloud. My last date had asked me, in a sneaky sort of way, if I had any family money to speak of. When I said I didn’t, he excused himself to the bathroom, and I had picked up the bill and left when it was clear he was gone for good.
We painted the front door black.
During my visit, people would come to a screeching halt in front of Aunt Lydia’s house, as usual. Not because it looked like a pink marshmallow, burnt in the centre, and not just because she has eight toilets in her front yard.
But let me tell you about the toilets. Two toilets are tucked under a fir tree, two are by the front porch, and the rest are scattered about on the grass. All of them are white, and during every season of the year Aunt Lydia fills them with flowers. Geraniums in the summer, mums in the fall, pansies in the winter, and petunias in the spring. The flowers burst out of those toilets like you wouldn’t believe, spilling over the sides.
She also built, with her farmer friend Stash, a huge, arched wooden bridge smack in the middle of her green lawn. The floor of the bridge is painted with black and white checks, and the rails are purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. Yes, just like a rainbow.
But I think it’s what is under the trellises that has drivers screeching to a halt. Four trellises, to be exact, lined up like sentinels in the front yard, which are all covered with climbing, blooming roses during the summer. The roses pile one on top of another, dripping down the sides and over the top in soft pink, deep red, and virginal white. And underneath each of the trellises sits a giant concrete pig. Yes, a pig. Each about five feet tall. Aunt Lydia loves pigs. Around the neck of each pig she has hung a sign with the pig’s name. Little Dick. Peter Harris. Micah. Stash.
These are the names of men who have made her mad for one reason or another. Little Dick refers to my mother’s first husband and my father. His real name was Richard and he decided to leave when I was three.
It is my earliest memory. I am running down the street as fast as I can, crying, wetting my pants, the urine hot as it streams down my legs. My father is tearing down the street on his motorcycle after fighting again with my mother. The plate she threw at him cracked above his head on the wall, missing him by about an inch.
The dish was the last straw, I guess.
Within a week, another man was spending the night in our home. Soon he was Daddy Kevin. Followed by Daddy Fred. Daddy Cuzz. Daddy Max. Daddy Spike, and numerous other daddies. I have not seen my father since then, although I have heard that he was invited to be a guest in the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
The pig named Peter Harris is named after Peter Harris. He is a snobby bank teller in town who refused to take a four-dollar service charge off Aunt Lydia’s bank account and then explained the situation to her in a loud and slow voice as if she were a confused and dottery old woman. For her revenge, she simply asked her friend Janice, a concrete artist, to make her another giant pig and then hung the Peter Harris sign around his neck.
When the pigs were featured in a local newspaper, Peter Harris was plenty embarrassed and came out to the farm in his prissy bank suit and told Aunt Lydia to take down the sign.
‘I…CAN’T…DO…THAT!’ she said, nice and slow, at full volume, as he had done to her. ‘THE PIG LIKES HIS NAME AND WON’T ALLOW ME TO CHANGE IT.’
When Peter started to argue with her, she said, ‘YOU OBVIOUSLY DON’T UNDERSTAND THE SITUATION. DO YOU HAVE A RELATIVE WHO COULD EXPLAIN THIS TO YOU?’
He kept arguing, stupid man, and even reached for the sign around the five-foot-tall pig’s neck, but Aunt Lydia said again, ‘THERE ARE A LOT OF PEOPLE IN LINE TODAY. PLEASE, MOVE ALONG.’
Peter Harris got a little more peeved then and told Lydia he was going to sue her from this side of Wednesday to the next. His anger didn’t faze Aunt Lydia.
He was only about three feet away from her when she yelled, ‘I’LL BE RIGHT BACK,’ and went inside and grabbed not one, but two rifles, and came out shooting. Peter Harris left. He went straight to the sheriff, but as the sheriff is one of Stash and Aunt Lydia’s best friends, he walked Peter Harris to the bar and bought him a few stiff ones, and that was that.
The pig named Micah was named after a skinny, gangly cousin of hers who had a penchant for Jack Daniels and loose women. He was a belligerent drunk who never worked but always had time to pester Aunt Lydia for money. One night when he’d been at the local bar too long, he accidentally crashed his car into her front porch. As she had just painted the front porch yellow with orange railings, that was the last straw.
Lydia dragged his body out of that beater, his head lolling to the side, and stripped him naked. Next she drew a short red négligée over his unconscious head, then hauled him into her own truck. She dumped him off in the middle of a field right behind the town.
The gossip in town over gangly Micah in the red négligée didn’t subside for two weeks, and the little girls who found him and ran and got their mothers will never forget the sight. Micah woke up surrounded by giggling women, rough and tough farmers and townspeople who looked at him with disgust and pointed their guns at his personal jewels.
‘We don’t need your type here, Micah,’ Old Daniel said, who owned the gasoline station and had regular poker games in the back room.
‘You’re disgustin’,’ said Stace Grammar, who worked in a factory and had biceps the size of tree stumps. ‘Get out of this town. Next thing you know, you and your boyfriend will be demanding equal rights.’ He shot off his gun six inches over Micah’s head. ‘Take it to the city, boy!’
Micah turned and ran as fast as he could through town to Aunt Lydia’s, his bottom jiggling out the back of that red négligée. He ignored people’s hoots, hollers, and another gunshot, revved up his truck, and zoomed out of town.
We have never seen Micah again.
Stash is the only man in town who can ever beat Aunt Lydia at poker – that’s why a pig has been named after him. No one will play with Aunt Lydia anymore unless she agrees to play for pennies only, except Stash.
Aunt Lydia says he cheats. Stash is a grizzled man with a white beard and a bald head who’s built like an ox. His eyes are always laughing, and every time he’s come over when I’ve been there, he brings me fruit or candy and gives Aunt Lydia a plant or a new herb for her windowsill. Twice now he’s brought her perfume.
One time during my visit, he brought her a little box with something silky inside. Aunt Lydia shoved it back in the box real quick, tied the ribbon up tight, and threw it at his head. I’ve never seen Stash laugh so hard. He left the box on the dining room table.
Stash owns hundreds of acres of farmland, all of it surrounding Lydia’s five acres. He has a company called Oregon’s Natural Products, and he sells his goods all over the nation. He has farmhands and ‘business hands’, as he likes to call them, who help him run ‘The Biz’.
I remembered that Aunt Lydia pretended to get angry every time he came over. ‘Would you quit staring at me, Stash?’ she’d snap, and he would laugh. ‘Can’t look away from a beacon of light,’ he’d always say. Then he would settle back in a chair and watch my Aunt Lydia as she pottered around the kitchen or talked to her plants.
Whenever Stash could, he’d run his fingers through her thick, greying hair or hug her slender body to his. Now and then she’d allow it, but most of the time she slapped his hands away and told him to behave because there was a child in the house. The last time this happened, I was thirty-two.
He always kissed her right on the lips before he left and then told her what he was going to do. ‘I’m gonna plough your back acres tomorrow, Lydia Jean,’ or, ‘I’m sending the guys out to harvest your corn on Thursday,’ or, ‘If you make some more of that jam, I’ll sell it for you at the Saturday market.’
‘Stay off of my land,’ Aunt Lydia always yelled as the screen door slammed behind him. I could tell she didn’t mean it, because she had to try hard to hide her smile. Stash always left with one of Lydia’s jars of jelly or freshly baked bread.
I don’t really know why Aunt Lydia has named a pig after Stash except that she really does take her poker seriously and is not a good sport about losing.
But the pigs do gather a lot of attention from anyone driving by her farm. ‘No sense having a boring front yard,’ Aunt Lydia has told me on several occasions during our talks. ‘Life is too short for boredom, and pigs are never boring.’
Aunt Lydia also has a real, live pig she calls Melissa Lynn and a multitude of parakeets and lovebirds she lets out of their cages twice a day so they can stretch their wings in the house. Remarkably, they will usually agree to go back into the cages.
She cleans her gun every day after target shooting, loves to do crafts of any type, and grows a little pot in her basement. ‘For my colitis,’ she tells me, although she hasn’t been to a doctor in decades.
Aunt Lydia, I reflected, was the one stable person in my life, and within about three days, driving almost straight through, I would arrive at her home. I wiped the tears from my face, tears I had no idea had sprung from my eyes, and floored the accelerator, even as fear gnawed at the insides of my stomach like giant claws.
No need to worry about the size of my butt anymore. Robert was gone, and I had no use for men. None. I wiped my eyes again. Stupid men. Stupid and mean and beastly and selfish. With all the men running the world it is a damn miracle we have not blown ourselves to smithereens. Yet.
The wind whipped around my head, and on impulse, I ripped the rubber band out of my brownish-blondish curls and let them whip around my face for the first time in two years. Robert had had no use for ‘wild-looking women’.
Sweating, dirty, and exhausted, I knew the only cure: chocolate. I drove with my knees and peered through the red bag on the passenger seat, grabbing a packet full of chocolate squares I had made myself. The first bit of chocolate hit my tongue like a slice of heaven. The second had my tears drying up. The third had me laughing, in a pathetic sort of way, about my hapless wedding dress.
I dropped two chocolates into my mouth. I had failed in almost every aspect of my life, I thought in a burst of disgusting self-pity, but the one thing I was good at was melting in my mouth right at that moment. I knew chocolate. And, Lord, no one anywhere made chocolate as good as I did.
Golden reminded me a bit of the tree where my wedding dress was probably still flapping. It had at one time been a thriving little town, but the logging boom was over, the endangered species had won, and many of the residents had moved on. There was one rather long Main Street, lined by the requisite trees; spring flowers hung from the lampposts. The flowers were the only things that looked alive.
Several of the shops were simply gaping black holes of businesses that had come and gone. But there was a corner drugstore with a broken sign that read S MS DRU STORE. There was also a movie theatre, a cosy-looking coffee shop with red tablecloths, a grocery, an auto repair shop, a hardware store, and several other stores one would expect to see. There were people out on the streets – coming home, I thought, from one of the town’s two restaurants or a board meeting at school.
I suddenly felt my heart lighten a bit. I didn’t feel like I was going to vomit in fear, the way I did when I was packing up my suitcases in Boston over a week ago, leaving my tight white heels behind.
‘For God’s sake, Possum, your feet are huge!’ I could still hear the sneer in Robert’s voice a month ago. ‘Shit, bitch, don’t look at me like that! I’m just stating a fact. You always take things so personally.’
He had picked up my foot and then shoved it off his lap as if he couldn’t bear to have it touching him for a moment longer.
And still, I tried to appease him, briefly wondering if I could get my feet surgically shortened. But Robert had wanted me. Me – with my frizzy curls and large butt and a family history that could make your blood curdle in your veins and a past I couldn’t share for fear of the revulsion I’d see on people’s faces. I wanted out of my past before it became my present, and Robert offered me a new type of life, light years from apartments with rats the size of possums and cockroaches that knew no fear.
He had been so charming, so possessive at first, wanting to spend all his time with me, sweeping me off my very big feet. He wanted to know where I was all the time, who I had talked to at the art museum, had any men talked to me? Who?
He had discouraged me from going out with any friends. Not that I had a lot. OK, I had only two women friends, but he soon thought I shouldn’t see them anymore and I had caved in and agreed.
At first I was almost sickeningly dizzy with delight. Robert wanted me all to himself! He loved me! That was why he didn’t want other people in my life.
But then I had started to irritate him, and I felt his scorn like a sledgehammer. He would upset me, I would cry, he would pin me down on the bed and badger me until I sobbed, but then he would so sweetly apologise, blaming his bad behaviour on a fight with his high-profile father or the cashier at the supermarket.
Later Robert sometimes lost his cool and sometimes cracked me in the face with his palm or shoved me against the wall, or leant me over a chair and stripped off my pants even though I protested. Well…later he would beg me to come back to him, to forgive him, and I did.
And soon I had my ring. I had slept with him, and come hell or high water, I was going to get married. I was going to leave my wasted mother and jailbird father behind. I was going to be proper and respected in a proper and respected family.
Even though Robert’s violent behaviour escalated and scared the living shit out of me more and more as time went on.
I shook my head, blowing thoughts out of my mind, and rolled down my window, the mountain air cool. I inhaled the familiar scent of pine trees as I paused at the town’s one and only stop light. I thought I could hear the river rushing by, although I knew that was unlikely because it was too far out of town.
After running my fingers through my hair, I switched on the overhead light and stared in the rear-view mirror. Yep. Looking lovely again. My eyes were swollen, my face a lovely shade of death, my lips puffy and chapped.
Gorgeous. No wonder the men were breaking down my door. I ate more chocolate.
I turned right, went past a few other small businesses, and then through a tiny neighbourhood where big wheels and bikes were scattered in the front lawns. Taking a turn into the country, I drove about two miles straight out, then took a left at the mailbox with a giant wooden pig attached to the top with his tongue hanging out.
Like I said earlier, you can’t miss Aunt Lydia’s house, and when I turned into the gravel drive and saw the giant pigs, the toilets, and the rainbow bridge, all freshly painted, just like I remembered from years ago, I parked the car, bent my head against the steering wheel, and cried.
And that’s how Aunt Lydia found me.
CHAPTER TWO
‘Men are pricks!’ Lydia whacked a wooden spoon against the giant pan, the strawberries melting into a thick goo that would turn out to be the most delicious jam you have ever tasted in your life. I remember drinking the jam right from the jar as a child.
It was Aunt Lydia who had turned me on to cooking and, particularly, baking chocolate desserts and cookies when I was a kid. We had spent hundreds of hours right here among her plants and books and birds. It was the happiest time of my life.
‘Big pricks. Little pricks. They are all’ – she slammed the wooden spoon against the rim of the pot for the umpteenth time – ‘pricks!’
I sipped the herbal tea she had thrust at me the instant I arrived. It was laced with a good deal of rum, so I figured I would have at least three or four teas tonight. Maybe five. I took a shuddery breath. The wood stove she’d settled me by in the kitchen was blowing out heat like a fire-breathing dragon.
‘But,’ Aunt Lydia declared, her green eyes flashing, her thick grey hair dancing around her face as if all the energy packed into her was flying through the follicles, ‘I am so glad you didn’t marry the King Prick, Robert.’
I ignored the stab of pain that shot right through my heart. ‘You never even met him.’ Why was I defending him? Geez. I am a sick, wimpy woman. And my eye had looked like hard purple and green vomit today, too.
‘I knew by the way you talked, by what you didn’t say. By how I could never call you at your apartment because he would tell you to get off the phone.’ Her eyes flew open so I saw all the white. ‘I didn’t want to spend any time with King Prick. Do you think I should have Janice make me another pig and name him King Prick?’
I opened and closed my mouth. A giant pig named after my ex-fiancé. There was some appeal.
‘No!’ Lydia shouted, arguing aloud with herself as she stomped her tiny foot. ‘I won’t. I don’t want any piece of him near my property. Oh, Good Lord.’ She sorted through the cabinets above her head. ‘I am ALMOST out of cinnamon! I can’t BELIEVE it!’ This last part she yelled so loud the multitude of birds in three giant cages went crazy.
‘I’ll go get you some cinnamon—’
‘No! Heavens, no, Julia. I’ll get some tomorrow. But I JUST CAN’T BELIEVE IT!’
This is classic Lydia. The smallest problems leave her totally exasperated, even furious. Astounded. And yet, the big problems, the terrible things in her life that had happened, like losing her father and brother as a child in a car accident and being stuck in that car with two dead people for hours while the police dismantled the car, she rarely talked about, and when she did it was with strength and courage and acceptance.
And she never talked about being raped by a stranger when she was twenty-five. That was about five years after she had a miscarriage and a drunk doctor slipped with the knife and made Aunt Lydia forever infertile, and then her husband left her. My mother had told me about that.
Aunt Lydia’s phone rang again, but she didn’t answer it. In the other room I could hear her birds singing to each other. ‘Cinnamon. Well, I don’t need it for the jam. But I was going to make cinnamon rolls for the girls tonight. It’s Psychic Night, and we’re having it here, I did tell you, didn’t I?’
‘Psychic Night?’ I choked a bit on my tea, but I could feel the rum floating through my body, and it felt like a river of pure warmth. Or maybe that was the wood stove that was so hot my back felt as if it were on fire.
She pushed her grey hair out of her eyes and peered at me. ‘We’re discussing the power of breasts.’
My mug dropped onto the table. ‘The power of what?’
‘The power of our BREASTS!’ Aunt Lydia held two fingers in the air, then pointed at her own breasts. ‘You know what they are! Your mother and I and you’ – she glared with indignant accusation at my chest – ‘all have the same big boobs. And there’s power there. We have to rein it in and use it for our own benefit.’
‘Absolutely,’ I muttered. ‘I need to rein in my Breast Power.’
‘That’s right! Rein in your Breast Power!’ Lydia rolled the words in her mouth. ‘Brrreeeassstt Power! Perfect! We’ll call it Breast Power Psychic Night. Every week we have a new title. I’m so glad you’re here, honey. Here, come and stir the jam for me.’
I brought my big breasts with me as I got up obediently and started stirring, watching the strawberries getting smaller and smaller, the colour a brilliant burgundy and soft red. It fascinated me, and I couldn’t look away as Lydia picked up the phone and called her friends.
I heard her talk to a Katie, a Caroline, and a Lara. It was only on the last phone call that I really listened in.
‘No, no, don’t bring a thing, Lara,’ Lydia tossed a dish towel from one hand to another like a ball juggler. ‘I’m making The Brownies. I ran out of cinnamon! Can you BELIEVE IT? No cinnamon!’ She tsked herself deep in her throat. ‘So a little pot would be OK? Right, just enough to take the edge off of life, that’s a good way of putting it, dear. And good luck with that infernal Bible study. Oh, for God’s sakes, you know as sure as hell I don’t want to go to anything like that! You know what happened the last time… I don’t care if Linda still talks about it, she needed to hear that God doesn’t like self-righteous, sanctimonious prissies who tell everyone they’re going to burn in hell!’
Aunt Lydia listened again, then laughed. ‘Oh, heckles! Tell them to pray for my poor soul and that I’m hoping to get saved by next Tuesday at eight o’clock, right before I outdrink Stash before our next poker game. See you tonight, love.’
‘Who was that?’ I finally looked up from my stirring and took another sip of tea. Aunt Lydia tipped a bit more rum into my cup.
‘That was the minister’s wife, Lara Keene. Dear girl. She’ll be here tonight.’
I stopped stirring, my jaw falling open. If there had been a fly in that room, it could have flown straight in, making several circles around my molars. ‘The minister’s wife is coming to Breast Power Psychic Night?’
‘Of course! Lara is a splendid person. Very religious. Very kind and holy.’ Aunt Lydia tightened her lips. ‘I had to agree to only put a bit of pot in the brownies, though. Lord knows, after Bible study with that group of Bible-thumping losers, she’s going to need more than a bit of pot!’
‘I can’t—’
‘What is it?’ Aunt Lydia, in a whirl as usual, started dumping the ingredients for brownies all over the huge wooden farm table that sat in the middle of the kitchen. Windows surrounding the room and two sets of French doors brought in the spring sunshine in golden columns, their rays settling on the ingredients as if in blessing.
‘I’m surprised, that’s all, that a minister’s wife would be coming.’
‘Well, she is. She comes every week. She needs a break from the preaching and screeching and likes to hang out with people who don’t use Jesus as a weapon to make others feel inferior. God. One time she dragged me to one of those Bible studies, and I swear all those women wanted to do was stand around and see who could say, “I’ve been blessed… I’ve been praying… The Lord has been good to me… It’s His will…” the most number of times. It was pathetic. I’m positive God is sick to shit of them.’
‘Do…do other people in the town know that Lara comes to the Psychic Night meetings?’ Sheesh. A minister’s wife at a meeting like this? In a small town?
‘Heck, no. Are you kidding?’ Aunt Lydia started melting chocolate. She’s good at her chocolate desserts, but not as good as me, although she is better at every other type of dessert. ‘Four people know. Me, you, Katie, and Caroline. And all of us took an oath over a bottle of brandy and a cigar and swore to keep it secret. Lara needs a place where she can be herself without someone talking about all the souls in Golden who will not be saved and will be thrown into hell to burn there for ever like hot dogs on a stick.’
I contemplated burning in hell for ever like a hot dog on a stick. The rum wound its way down my body. ‘So, what do you do in these meetings?’
‘Caroline is psychic, like I told you, and she tells us what’s going to happen to us, which makes it an official Psychic Night. Caroline only charges the women of this town a few dollars to do their readings.’ Aunt Lydia, a true businesswoman, shook her head. ‘Although she did it for Mrs Guzman for homemade tequila and for Dr Tims for some of his salsa. Come to think of it, she also does readings for Terri, the postmistress, in exchange for Terri’s pies, which I think are terrible, and she does readings for Chad Whitmore, whose wife died. He takes care of their four kids and works. In exchange he gives her bacon every year from one of their pigs.
‘I have no idea how that woman makes it. She owns a tiny little home, about the size of a dollhouse, not far from here, and drives a car I swear will break down any second. Stash has had to go and get her on three different occasions.’ Aunt Lydia froze for a minute. ‘I should tell Caroline to paint her door black to ward off diseases and seedy men. I can’t BELIEVE I forgot to tell her that. Next time she goes to the city I’ll whip on over there and paint it for her. She’ll appreciate that.’
I imagined a woman leaving her home with a maroon-coloured door and coming home to a black door. ‘She makes a living as a psychic?’ I imagined tea leaves and cards and a woman whose face looked as if it had been shoved through a strainer, the wrinkles hardened and grooved on her cheeks. A cigarette would burn aimlessly, and I’d reach to share one short drag, then stop myself. No more smoking. I had smoked for a year, then quit. And the lust for nicotine could still turn my head.
‘I wouldn’t call it a living, my dear Julia. She ekes out a life. Barely, I think. She sells her vegetables and fruits at the farmer’s market, and she also bakes bread. Delicious bread. Bread that can almost bring you to orgasm, it’s so good. I told her to call it Orgasmic Bread, but she didn’t think that would work. She does the readings on the side. I have never met anyone as frugal as Caroline. Oh, she’s generous with a capital G, but if you gave her a piece of sackcloth, she would whip out her sewing machine and make the most beautiful curtains out of it you’ve ever seen.’
I started to chuckle, and Aunt Lydia narrowed her eyes, but I could see a smile tugging at those full lips of hers. Sixty-three years old and her mouth was one that many a starlet had paid thousands and thousands of dollars to achieve.
‘You don’t believe she’s a real psychic, do you?’ Aunt Lydia put her hands on her hips, as if ready to draw her guns.
I didn’t roll my eyes and prided myself on that. I was back to staring at the reds swirling hotly in the pan.
‘I’m telling you, Julia, that woman has been right on the button so many times – for all of us. And she doesn’t charge for her services on Psychic Night. We try to pay her, but she won’t take a dime, so all of us, just to keep her going, drop off eggs and cookies and dinners.’ Lydia shook her head back and forth like a bowling ball gone crazy. ‘She’s a proud one, though. Proud as a stallion who can flip all the cowboys off his back.
‘And it’s her upside-down pineapple pound cake and her carrot bread with cream cheese frosting that brings in the most money every year at the church’s auction. Every year. Sweetest woman you ever did want to meet, that’s dear Caroline. Doesn’t open up and tell us much about herself, but she is as straight and honest as my cornstalks.’
‘I’ll look forward to meeting her.’ Unexpectedly, my eyes filled with tears. ‘Thanks for letting me come, Aunt Lydia.’
‘You’re welcome. You’ll love Psychic Night.’ She had misinterpreted what I said. She walked over and gave me a big hug, smelling like vanilla and lavender and chocolate, and I buried my face in her shoulder. ‘Don’t cry, love! You’ve escaped a life’s prison sentence with King Prick. Prison! You might as well have worn a shirt that said “Inmate” on the back. “Inmate of King Prick”! Aren’t you happy you’re not an inmate?’
‘I am,’ I cried. ‘I am.’ I ached. My face hurt. I’m fat. No one would marry me. Robert had wanted to, but as I didn't want my face to become his punching bag for the next forty years, I’d bolted. Finally. And I didn’t regret it, did I? I wanted a husband, but not that much. Right?
I pulled away from Lydia, sniffing. She went back to her brownies, extolling the virtues of feminine freedom from men, how they and they alone were responsible for the turmoil of our hormones. Then she made up a song about men with little penises.
My stomach gnawed again at my insides as if anxiety were eating it alive, and my heart suddenly started to palpitate, seemingly bent on cruising me right into a coronary.
I coughed, coughed again, knowing what was coming. The Dread Disease was back. I instantly felt as if I couldn’t drag enough air into my deflated lungs. My hands froze into little clenched blocks of ice while at the same time my body trembled as if a giant hand were shaking it.
I closed my eyes in defeat, knowing I could easier stop a speeding train with my ample buttocks than stop this. Death was after my sorry hide; I knew it. I had some horrible, currently unnamed disease that would torture me for months, probably devour my insides until they collapsed into their own wormholes, and then I’d die. That was why my heart often raced as if I’d been running a marathon and why I would feel cold, then burning hot, and my hands shook like leaves on speed and I couldn’t breathe.
I listened to Aunt Lydia’s penis song half-heartedly, trying to hide the fact that, at least to me, the air had been siphoned from the room, every last molecule of it. I rode the ‘wave of fear,’ as I’d dubbed it, the best I could. The air was already gone, and then a familiar feeling of overwhelming panic flooded my body. This happened because my body knew it was dying, I surmised.
I clenched my teeth together and tried to breathe through my nose as dizziness struck. I was going crazy. Losing my mind. Hello, sanatorium!
And then, after what seemed like hours, my heartbeat started to slow, the air whooshed back into the room, and my body stopped trembling. It was replaced by a familiar bone-racking exhaustion, but it was better than suffocating – much better.
I have so come to appreciate air these last months. Air, glorious air.
I pushed my frizzy curls off my damp forehead with a shaky hand, desperate to get my mind away from my imminent death and on to another subject. I inhaled, ragged and low. ‘What are we doing at Breast Power Psychic Night, then?’ I choked out, amazed that Aunt Lydia hadn’t noticed that I was temporarily dying, though I prided myself on my ability to hide this peculiar aspect of my life from others.
‘Why, we’re going to be talking about our breasts. What else did you think we were going to do?’ She blinked at me, her huge eyes round and curious as she used both hands to crack six eggs at once with great force against the rim of a pan. ‘Breasts have a lot to say, Julia! You simply have to listen to them.’
I looked at my breasts, still heaving. They had nothing to say, I surmised. They were simply happy they weren’t attached to a corpse.
Breast Power Psychic Night had begun in Aunt Lydia’s living room. The lights were turned down low, windows opened to let in the freshness of a spring evening in the mountains. The furniture might be old, but it was plush and worn and plentiful. A red couch and two purple loveseats were covered with pillows Aunt Lydia had embroidered and two quilts she had sewn. Stacks of books competed for space with herbs growing in huge trays, a forest of plants and an abundance of vanilla-scented candles.
A huge wreath decorated with dried roses, purple and sage-coloured ribbons, raffia, pinecones, and tiny birdhouses hung on the fireplace hearth. As much as my Aunt Lydia likes her guns and her chickens, she loves a good craft project. Martha Stewart would love her.
‘We’re here to find the power within our breasts,’ Aunt Lydia semi-shouted, cupping her boobs, her tie-dyed T-shirt bunching up under her hands. ‘Men have objectified us long enough, judged us by the size of our breasts. Our worth summed up with a look at our top half.’
The darkened room flickered with candlelight, alighting on each of the women’s faces as Lydia led the group. I laced my fingers together, almost surprised I wasn’t having another coronary.
Here I was, sitting on an overstuffed pillow, in the dark, on the floor, about to flip off my shirt in front of three women I didn’t know, and I felt perfectly calm. As if I disrobed and swung my boobs around and about all the time in front of people.
‘It’s so nice to meet you,’ Katie Margold said quietly over the candlelight when Aunt Lydia made a quick trip to the bathroom to expel ‘the earth’s yellow poisons’ from her bladder.
Katie’s brown eyes were soft, like chocolate, but they looked tired, defeated. They skirted about as if she were waiting for me to quickly move on and talk to someone else more interesting. But then she examined my cheek and my eye, both still a lovely shade of purple with puke-green thrown in. Her lips pursed, though not in judgment.
‘It’s nice to meet you, too,’ I said. ‘I love your hair. It’s so bouncy. It reminds me of mermaid hair.’
Oh, I am strange, I thought instantly, my shoulders slumping. I was searching for something to say, and there it was.
Tall, no make-up, and heavy, Katie wore an old green T-shirt with a couple of stains and baggy blue jeans. But her hair was her crowning glory. A reddish auburn colour, it tumbled in deep waves down her back, clean and shiny. She could have been in one of those shampoo ads.
But I felt like an idiot. The poor woman probably thought I was gay. I wasn’t gay, but neither did I particularly like men at this point in my life.
‘Oh! Well, I…’ it was hard to tell in the darkened room, but I think Katie blushed a little, then looked enormously pleased, and huge tears formed in her eyes, giant, perfectly shaped tears. If eyes had to breathe for us, she would have drowned.
I stumbled about for something else to say. Good Lord. I’d been invited to Breast Power Psychic Night, and already I had one of the women in tears. I was a classless, chubby, socially inept cow, who often couldn’t breathe and who was going to be chased down by an obsessive fiancé at any moment.
Katie wiped the tears away with her fingers. ‘Thank you.’ She sighed, the sigh a little shaky.
The ‘thank you’ was so heartfelt, I felt hot tears spring to my own eyes. ‘You’re welcome. I’ve always wanted red hair, long hair. I always thought… I saw this mermaid in a book with long red hair once, and I never forgot it. Compared to a mop of dirty-blonde curls, well—’
‘I remember a mermaid just like that, too – the Little Mermaid.’ Her brown eyes pooled again. ‘I can’t believe I’m crying about a mermaid!’
I couldn’t believe she cried about mermaids, either. ‘What a loon,’ I said, shaking my head, and Katie laughed.
But I knew I didn’t really think she was a loon. About a month ago, I had stood in line at the library and cried because it was so wonderful I could check out books without paying for them. I didn’t have any money that day because I had taken Robert out to an expensive meal the night before, which he had complained about being tasteless, and I thought to myself, ‘I love Thomas Jefferson.’ And then I had cried, right there in line.
Katie and I were two of a pathetic kind.
To her left sat the psychic, Caroline Harper, and there was not a woman on the planet who looked less like a psychic than she. Petite and willowy, wearing a loose flowered skirt and a black tank top, she looked more like a model for tiny women. High cheekbones plunged to a full mouth, her murky, sea-green eyes slanting in her face.
The only remarkable thing was the constant twitching of her right eye, which she now and then raised a hand to rub, to hold, as if willing the twitch away. When she’d walked into the house, I’d instantly reached up to tuck my wayward curls behind my ears, feeling like a mammoth, worm-eating buffalo as I towered over her. One wrong step and I’d crush the woman.
Caroline was the frugal one. The woman who lived off pennies and made the best pineapple upside-down cake ever. The one who sold produce at the farmer’s market each week and did readings on the side and barely made it month to month with the help of her neighbours, those who dropped off eggs and meals and were then treated the next day to one of Caroline’s perfect baked goods.
Caroline smiled at me over the candlelight, her smile huge, her teeth large and brilliant white, her eyes crinkling just a bit in the corners. I judged her to be about five years older than myself.
She peered into my eyes, bruised and otherwise, and I waited for her to recognise the quaking, ridiculous woman with a yucky past and a strange disease that I am. She would foresee my future and turn pale and sickly looking.
But she didn’t. In fact, she just kept smiling at me. Cheerful-like. Open. For some reason she reminded me of Cheerios.
‘Welcome to Golden.’ Caroline’s eye kept winking, but the rest of her face was peaceful, tranquil. ‘Did Lydia tell you that she calls this Psychic Night each week?’
I nodded my assent, kneading the edge of my blue sweater in my lap, hoping it would hide my hips. Had I got even fatter since tiny Caroline walked through the door?
‘Lydia!’ she laughed, as Aunt Lydia walked back into the room, her bladder apparently having expelled all poisonous yellow liquids from her body. Caroline’s laughter bubbled right there at the surface, even as that eye kept twitching. Twitch. Twitch.
‘Well, it is, Caroline! I always call it Psychic Night. After each session, you do our readings for us.’ Lydia then glared at her. ‘I did not like my reading last week, Caroline. Not at all.’
‘But I was right, wasn’t I?’ Caroline laughed, pushing her long brown hair away from her finely carved face. She looked like a queen, not a near poverty-stricken neighbour living off her backyard’s vegetables.
‘You planned it with Stash,’ Lydia declared, hands on hips.
‘I did nothing of the sort. I merely told you that I saw a bit of red in your reading. Soft red for love. For passion. It was all around you, Lydia. Red, red, red.’ Caroline smiled, and two dimples flashed in her cheeks.
‘And then Stash brought me this!’ Lydia stood with righteous anger and opened a drawer of a nearby armoire and yanked out a red négligée with black furry trim.
I tried not to laugh.
‘He is a bad-mannered old fool. Comes by, parks his tractor in front of my house, hands me the box, forces a kiss on me, and drives off. I’m going to get another pig and name him Stash Two, that I am.’
Aunt Lydia dropped onto the floor with me and Katie and Caroline, fluffing out the négligée. ‘Stash thinks that because he owns all the land surrounding my place that he can do what he wants. Really! As if I’d get in something like that!’
‘Be glad you get négligées.’
The words, soft, with a tinge of bitterness, dropped from Katie’s lips like tiny ballistic missiles. When we turned to look at her, she covered her mouth with both hands. ‘Oh dear. Dear, dear. I didn’t mean to sound so pitiful. Of course, my husband and I are past that stage, and look at me. I’d hardly fit in one, anyhow!’ She laughed, hollow and embarrassed.
Lydia tossed the négligée over her shoulder, and it landed in a silky pile on the floor. ‘I am glad we’re having Breast Power Psychic Night tonight! A négligée is really a gift to the man. To the man!’ She leant over and shook Katie’s shoulders, the flame from the candle only inches away from her swinging grey braids. I reached out and lifted them away before her hair turned into a flaming mass, but Aunt Lydia hardly noticed.
‘Do you think women, real women, want to be dressed up like hooker dolls? Lace isn’t comfortable. It itches my crotch. It causes me to break out in an emotional rash! These négligées go straight up your butt, and no woman should be showing the backs of her thighs to any man when she’s passed the age of sixteen. See? This is what men do to us! They make us feel like sexual objects who are there to please them, listen to them, cater to them!’
‘Right,’ said Katie. Her brown eyes darted to the négligée, and I saw her swallow hard. ‘We don’t need that. It’s ridiculous, really. We’re not toys. It’s ridiculous that women would want to wear them in the first place.’
‘Of course it is!’ We all looked at our fearless leader with more than a little fear as she raised both fists in the air. ‘They drive up in tractors, toss us lingerie that we’re supposed to model for them, making us feel downright cheap, with our breasts yanked to our throats, then we’re to tickle their teensies, and they drive off! Leaving our breasts spiritually unawakened. Dead!’
‘Amen to that. Dead breasts, I mean.’ The door slammed as another woman walked in, dropping three bottles of wine on the kitchen counter, then expertly opening each one of them. I could only assume it was Lara Keene, the minister’s wife.
Lara grabbed five huge goblets from the cupboards. The goblets were in the shapes of ogres. She filled each ogre goblet to the top. ‘Praise be to God that I did not kill Mrs Ellensby.’
Praise be to God that she didn’t kill Mrs Ellensby?
Lara distributed the wine to all of us, with a nod and a perfunctory smile in my direction. ‘She called me over, supposedly to study the Bible, then left the room “for a wee minute” to spend five thousand four hundred and eighty-nine dollars online at Pottery Avenue. Then, in the midst of my reading Psalms to her, at her request, she informed me that she sees no reason to have a fund-raiser for a new roof for the church even though there’s an enormous hole over the preschoolers’ classroom.’
Lara imitated the woman’s voice by pitching hers at the highest level, then pinching her throat and waggling it back and forth. ‘“We don’t need another roof. We need to pray to God and ask Him what He feels we need. God will provide what needs to be provided. That’s His will, and I know that God will say that the church is fine. I know how God works! People have no money in this town!”’ Lara’s voice rose several octaves, shrill like a fish wife’s. ‘“We’re scraping by, Lara. Really. You young ministers. You need everything. You want everything. Immediately.”’
Lara settled herself to my left and took a very long drink of wine. The ogre goblet was half empty when she finally put it down. ‘I told her that it was difficult for the children to concentrate on their Bible verses when there was water trickling down a wall, and she said, “I am going to pray for you, Mrs Keene. Pray that you will grow with the Lord and not against Him. Suffering is what makes us better people. Suffering is what makes us sacrifice for others. Jesus suffered for us, and we must suffer for Him, and those young children need to learn at an early age that not everything in life is perfect. Now, let’s hurry up and pray. I need to get my manicure.”
‘Damn.’ Lara slumped into the circle beside us. ‘Damn and damnation.’
The silence was complete as all of us women, preparing for Breast Power Psychic Night, contemplated damn and damnation.
After several quiet minutes, Lydia spoke up, ‘Lara, this is my niece, Julia.’
Lara and I shook hands. ‘A pleasure,’ I said. ‘What did she buy?’
‘Sorry?’ Lara looked confused.
‘The woman who talks to God, who knows what He wants. Perhaps God told her what to buy at Pottery Avenue?’
Lara smiled, then sagged. ‘Well. He told her to buy three different sets of dishes, a chair, tablecloths, a new set of pans… I listened to her arguing with the saleswoman about the bill. “No” to the roof for the preschoolers, but “yes” to a set of striped picnic basket plates for five hundred and thirty-five dollars.’
Lara’s blonde hair was pulled back tight into a bun. Bright blue eyes summed me up pretty quickly. I knew that she was taller than me, but almost as thin as the twitchy-eyed but beautiful psychic.
She was wearing proper beige pants. Proper, boring flat shoes. A sweater and a dull blue blouse that was buttoned straight up. A medium-sized gold cross hung around her neck.
‘Nice black eye,’ she observed. ‘Who did that to you?’
I was not surprised by her bluntness. ‘My ex-fiancé. Fine family. Fine old, respected Bostonian family,’ I muttered. ‘Fine, proper, respected men dot the family, and they all take fine, old potshots at their wives. Apparently they don’t beat up on their girlfriends – no, scratch that. Those scandals are covered up. Who wants to argue with a fine, old respected family, especially when they imply that the woman, the hittee in question, is clearly an addict and a slut and after the family money by filing frivolous lawsuits?’
