Lady in the Lake(49)

After the lady leaves—I don’t need my powers to realize she felt dissatisfied—I turn off my light and decide to close up for the day, although I usually do more business in the evenings. Most people, especially churchy ones, prefer to visit me when it’s dark. But I am drained. Even the smallest vibration takes a lot out of me.

I am forty-seven years old. I have been married three times, each time a disaster, but I never talk about it because, again, people would doubt my abilities. How does a psychic pick such bad husbands? By listening to her heart. The heart knows nothing, sees nothing, but it kicks up a ruckus, throws tantrums to get what it wants. No one understands this thing I do, who I am, how my power works. It’s not a machine that can be plugged in and turned on. The gift is sensitive. It prefers dry weather to wet, cold to hot.

Cleo’s mother came to me on a good day, cold and bright and dry. When the air has that thin, hard edge, I can feel things I can’t on other days. I could see inside Mrs. Sherwood’s soul and it was the saddest thing I have ever glimpsed. She loved that girl of hers, she wanted me to see something that would suggest she was alive; maybe that was why I thought it possible. I don’t think she loves her husband or her other children as much as she loves this girl, the one who’s been so much trouble to her. Some mothers are like that. As I stroked that stole, it almost seemed to come to life, like a cat getting its back scratched. And a scent rose from it, sweet and stale, some kind of perfume. It smelled like—yearning. She had wanted something awfully bad, that girl.

I saw yellow, bright, blinding yellow. I saw a woman whose face was turned to the sun, maybe flew too close to it, as that old story goes. We are not meant to fly. We’re not meant to see the things I see. I’m a good woman, a churchgoing woman, and there are Sundays when—I would never tell my preacher this—I pray to God to let me see less. But God says, Suzanne—my real name is Suzanne—I don’t give the gift to people who can’t handle it.

That woman, the one who came asking questions about Cleo Sherwood, she was up to no good. I could smell the yearning on her, too, but there was no sweetness to it. She was like a car engine, revving, revving, revving, making noise, sending sparks out into the world. She wants to get somewhere. Trouble is, she doesn’t know where she wants to go. That’s what makes her dangerous.

I enjoy my supper, a pork chop and string beans, let myself have a little sweet wine, which calms me down. I get ready for bed, for sleep, which I dread. My dreams are a burden because they sometimes come true, but I don’t know which ones will come true and which ones won’t. Have you ever had the sensation of being stuck in an awful dream and then you wake up, experience relief, because it’s not happening? I am denied that release until I can check to make sure that my dreams have not come true. Yes, my vision is a gift, but it’s not one I asked for and I long to return it. Take this from me, God, it’s not right. Make me ordinary, a woman who can live with a man, put her head on the pillow at night without fearing what might visit her in her dreams, what might still be waiting for her after daybreak, when the dreams and nightmares end for everyone else.





Green and yellow, huh?




Green and yellow, huh? You get what you pay for, Maddie Schwartz. You know what was green and yellow? The upholstery on the balcony seats in the theater where I sat, two weeks before I died.

My man had surprised me by taking me to New York, where he had tickets to a musical, Man of La Mancha. They weren’t very good seats and we were the only Negroes in the audience, best I could tell. And the music—well, to me, it was kind of trifling, old-people stuff, but it moved him, I could tell. I watched tears slide down his cheeks, only not during the song that everyone knows, the one that’s on the radio. (Again, that’s only if you listen to old-people radio.) He out-and-out sobbed at the end, when the woman said the dead man in the bed was not the man she knew, that the man she knew and loved still lived somewhere. I thought, in that moment, that he would be mine, that he would choose to be the hero, not the man in the bed. But, no, he was crying because he knew his limitations, knew what he would choose in the end. He was weak.

I watched him watching the show about the show inside the show. It reminded me of that infinity joke we tell each other as kids: I’m painting a picture of myself painting a picture of myself painting a picture. It gets smaller and smaller and smaller until you can’t see anything.

So I decided for myself: I’ll be the one who lives. Not the old man in the bed up onstage, not the wild, beautiful wives of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, and not the last one, the nurse, that no one really talks about, who died pretty soon after he did. I’d be Mary Boleyn, Anne’s sister, who fooled them all and had a good long life. That’s what I would choose.

It was too late. The choice to live had been taken from me and I didn’t even know it.

At three a.m. on January 1, I went to my closet and picked clothes for my date, taking time to make sure that none of Latetia’s clothes were mixed up with mine. We borrowed one another’s clothes, but mine were so much nicer. It wasn’t the first time I’d made a late date and I was always alone on holidays, that’s how it works. The second shift is how I thought of it. My man was generous, but I always needed more and I didn’t make the tips I deserved stuck behind the bar, and whose fault was that? Everybody knew I had late dates. Except him. I hope he never knew, but I’m sure that those who wanted to turn him against me saw to it that he found out.