Wendy wanted to visit a fortune-teller. Everyone else had a story of where they came from, she said. Let the psychic tell her a story of where she’s going. Psychics were bullshit, Lizzie said, and the only story she’d get would be whatever story she wanted to hear. A test, then, Wendy proposed. Let’s see if the fortune-teller can tell I don’t have one.
Lizzie had resolved: no more wanting what she could not have. She had always been a little unsettled by how readily she could shut down her own feelings, no matter how extreme, elect not to indulge. It seemed to indicate some lack—of depth, of commitment, of amygdaloid engagement, she wasn’t sure—but now she summoned it as her superpower. She had let some combination of Strauss, Wendy, the simultaneous strangeness and familiarity of present circumstances wake up a sliver of self that had been better left asleep. She would now return it to bed. She would, in other words, focus on her career, her education, her research subject, her future. All emotional dead ends would be officially closed off. This, Wendy, was her only viable future.
Lizzie took her future to South Street, where the psychics were legion. South Street, where the hippies meet, so the song said. South Street, where the cool girls of Lizzie’s youth, the girls who hotboxed their way through high school, who dated boys with hemp necklaces and hacky sacks, acquired provisions for their mysteriously effortless adolescence. She and Gwen had made their own dutiful treks, but South Street would not yield its secrets to the likes of Lizzie. Tacky tourist shops, yes, their shelves lined with glass pipes the use for which Lizzie, naive beyond her years, had not fathomed; a Wiccan outpost that smelled like her mother’s underwear drawer; a dusty record store that only made them feel less like the girls they aspired to be. Once Gwen bought a love potion; once Lizzie bought a leather cuff she never dared wear in public; each time they returned home defeated and deflated by reality. They were, in the end, girls who belonged at the Gap.
Lizzie had picked the psychic out of the phone book. Ever the organizer. They parked a few blocks away. Wendy looked queasy.
“You okay?”
“I don’t know. You didn’t tell me this was where we were going.”
“Do you know this neighborhood? Are you feeling like you’ve been here before?”
Wendy shook her head. “I just… don’t like the feel of it.”
“You want to go back?”
“Fuck it.”
The psychic’s suite was up a narrow staircase. It doubled as her apartment, the living room curtained off by shimmering beads, and smelled like the fried chicken joint downstairs. Madame Harriet, in a purple caftan and several ruby rings as large as her swollen knuckles, faced her customers across a weathered wood table. A pale purple runner sliced down the center: macramé, of course. There was no crystal ball. Lizzie had encountered a fortune-teller only once before, a college girl at a carnival booth, who’d told Lizzie she was destined to marry rich. Madame Harriet took Wendy’s hand and thanked the spirits in advance for their willingness to contribute. When Lizzie made manifest her “negative energy,” Madame Harriet suggested she either open her mind or wait outside. They held hands. They breathed evenly, together, Lizzie through her mouth because Madame Harriet smelled so thickly of lavender.
The tarot cards told Madame Harriet that a great change was imminent in Wendy’s life, one that might present itself as opportunity or disaster, depending. Depending on what, Lizzie wanted to know, but her want was denied. Next, palm reading: Madame Harriet diagnosed Wendy’s lifeline as long. There would be health difficulties, she warned, but these would be overcome, resulting in greater strength. “A hard road, but a worthy one.” After this, Madame Harriet excused herself to take a call on her cell phone, a flashy incongruity that she could somehow afford while Lizzie—gainfully, nonfraudulently employed—could not.
“You hate this.” Wendy seemed delighted by her discomfort.
“You’re not actually buying this shit, are you?”
“I’m not buying this—but the possibility of it? Sure, why not?”
Even as a child, encouraged to believe in magic, Lizzie had not. No fairies, no gremlins, no monsters under the bed. God, on the other hand, she had allowed. It had seemed all too plausible, the idea of an ultimate consciousness judging her worst desires, and even in her atheistic adulthood, she sometimes caught herself in frantic mental revision: I take it back, I would never consider cheating, I do not blame him for living, I do not wish her dead, I’ve committed no sin in my heart. This exhausted her capacity for faith.
Madame Harriet returned with an offer to do a past-lives reading on Wendy for only twenty dollars more. Wendy thanked her politely but said she already had enough lives for one person.
“And you, skeptic?” The psychic took Lizzie’s hand, squeezing too tight for Lizzie to squirm away. “Half off for a second reading.”
“I’d pay not to have a reading.” It was rude; Lizzie could live with being rude.
Madame Harriet walked them to the door, but before they could escape, she snatched Lizzie’s shoulder. “You lost someone, someone important.”
“Who hasn’t?”
“A woman…” She scanned Lizzie’s face, not even subtle in the search for tells. “No, I’m sensing, a man.”
Lizzie pried away the woman’s grip. This required more flesh-to-flesh contact than she would have liked. She was forced to squeeze the psychic’s fingers, and they squeezed back. “You’ve shut yourself off from wonder,” the psychic said, as if claiming this tragedy as her own. “He’s always with you,” she added. “And he doesn’t approve.”
Downstairs, outside, sucking air, heart doing an Irish step dance in her chest, Lizzie fumed, teared, breathed. Let the brick wall hold her up. “Bitch.” She breathed.
It was not a normal reaction. She knew this.
“Bitch.” Wendy leaned beside Lizzie. They watched a woman wheel her shopping cart through the gutter. A scrap of dog rode high on a mountain of bottles and rags. “She was fucking with you.”
“Obviously.”
She did not believe in life after death. She did not believe her father was in a cartoon heaven, or hiding under her bed with the nonexistent monsters and fairies. But after he died, she had made the effort. She looked for him—in skies, in trees, in flame. She spoke to him, and examined herself for faith that someone was listening. She tried to will him into her dreams. He was nowhere; he was gone. There was no spirit, no God, but it was still so easy to believe that someone was watching and did not approve.
From across the street, flickering neon delivered unto them its command: Beer Here. Wendy suggested they obey.
“It’s practically morning.”
“We’re both adults. We’re thirsty.”
The too-high sun beamed bright and judgmental. She should hustle Wendy into the car and back to the Meadowlark. There were notes to transcribe. Another dense Haslovitch and Chen study to shamble through. She needed fresh highlighters. She needed to start on grant proposals for next year. It had been forever since she’d been inside a bar—since LA, she realized, since she had a life, philosophical debates and department gossip soaking in cheap pitchers of PBR, sorry stipends siphoned off for a basket of wings, Lucas’s hand under the table, creeping, warm and needy on her thigh, feuds and futures temporarily truced in favor of a beery fog, the cellar dark of the pub a plausible denial of daylight, of palm trees and ocean breeze and squandered productivity, the longing for someone else to postpone reality, to say, again, just one more round. She was so tired.
Wendy seized her hand, turned her palm over, and scratched it, viciously. Lizzie squeaked in protest, yanked herself free, and checked to see if Wendy had drawn blood. “What the hell?”
“You’re afraid of doing anything that might hurt,” Wendy said. “But was that so bad?”
“You’re insane.”
“Pain is just one more thing to remember.”
“Fuck it,” Lizzie said, the throb already fading. “Let’s go in.”
When Lizzie drank, Lizzie talked.
Lizzie talking: This fucking city. This fucking, fucking city. Everything dirty. Everything broken. Can’t get from here to there because you’d have to go through there, and god knows you probably wouldn’t survive that. So stick to the suburbs, sure, good, safe, sterile, hide in your little boxes behind your aluminum siding with your cul-de-sacs and your strip malls and feel good about yourself that you don’t see color, everyone’s the same, which is easy when everyone you know is the same. My father is buried in this city, but I don’t know where. Don’t know where the cemetery is. Which cemetery it is. Don’t know how to find the grave. Too embarrassed to ask. Have never gone to visit, never put stones on stone, that’s what you do if you’re good, a good Jew, a good daughter.
Wendy had a bourbon. Lizzie had a bourbon. Wendy had a second. Lizzie had a second. Both had tequila with a beer chaser. Wendy got quieter, Lizzie louder.
Lizzie told Wendy about Saint Augustine, whose CliffsNotes she had crammed after Strauss made her feel like an idiot for her ignorance. I am not an idiot, Lizzie told Wendy, or if I am, it’s not because I don’t know some fucking Christian philosopher’s Christian philosophy, and it’s probably anti-Semitic to say so. But anyway, Augustine, the saint. Lizzie had read about his Confessions, then tried to read the actual Confessions, because she was not an idiot, got bored, skipped to the good parts, the part about memory and time travel and God. The saint, Lizzie told Wendy, thinks we remember everything when we’re born. When we’re born, we remember God. Life is a forgetting. Our mortal purpose is to remember back to what we’ve forgotten. You get it? Lizzie said. The saint says we’re all like you, we’re all fractions of ourselves, we’re all emptier than when we began. The saint says the past is as much a dream as the future, and only the present is real. But the present happens too fast for us to notice. Did you know all that?
I did not know that, Wendy said.
Lizzie felt very smart. This, too, tended to happen when she drank.
The first time I got drunk, she told Wendy, I was sixteen, drama camp with Gwen, because Gwen was actually talented and wherever Gwen wanted to go was where I wanted to be. Wendy asked who Gwen was.
Gwen was my best friend, Lizzie said, is my best friend, is supposed to be my best friend, who even knows what tense to use anymore? I’m not thinking about her, Lizzie said, because I promise you she’s not thinking about me. Gwen doesn’t matter, Lizzie said. I’m talking about wine coolers. Lots and lots of wine coolers. I puked. But before that, I thought, why didn’t anyone tell me? I thought it was magic, that you could just be without worrying how you were going to be. It was like being alone when you weren’t alone. And if you wanted to touch someone, you could touch someone.
If you want to touch someone, Wendy said, you should touch someone.
There were only three other customers, beefy guys in baseball caps huddled by the TV. The Eagles fumbled, the men shouted. The whole bar smelled like hoagie. This bar, Lizzie told Wendy, is so Philly.
Is this what you thought it would be like to have a friend? Lizzie asked Wendy, and Wendy said, is that what you are?
Lizzie said, I’m embarrassing myself, aren’t I, and Wendy laughed and said she liked Lizzie better this way.
Which one would you fuck, Wendy whispered, pointing at the Eagles men.
Lizzie raised her Rolling Rock and said, I’d rather fuck the bottle.
Wendy said, we both know who you’d rather fuck. Lizzie said, I don’t know what you’re talking about, Wendy said, whatever. Then said, he wants you, too, I can tell.
Lizzie sealed her lips with her fingers, told herself not to say anything, but her lips moved, and she said that she wouldn’t want to be with the kind of man who would cheat on his wife. Wendy said that was every kind of man, and when Lizzie asked how the hell she could know that, considering, Wendy allowed she could not.
There was too much she had never done, Wendy said. She’d never, for example, picked up a man in a bar. Lizzie laughed and said as far as you know you’ve never picked up a man anywhere. Wendy gave her the finger, then crossed the bar. She stood between the men and their screen. Lizzie thought, I should go over there, but it seemed like effort, and then Wendy was putting her hands on beefy shoulders, lips on lips. She’d picked the one with the most hair, hair sprouting from beneath the cap and hair busy on his upper lip, but also hair matting his chest above the collar of his shirt, hair on his neck where Wendy’s fingers massaged saggy flesh. And then Wendy laughed and strolled back to Lizzie as if nothing had happened.
Lizzie had never done this.
Did you like that, Lizzie asked her, and Wendy said, no. But how could I know until I tried. She took a swig of Lizzie’s beer, because her own bottle was empty and her need to rinse out the taste, she said, was dire.
Lizzie laughed. Someone put Pat Benatar on the jukebox, which sounded right.
They could not drive back to the Meadowlark. They would have to take a taxi, but Lizzie had spent her emergency taxi money on beer. Wendy had no money, was at Lizzie’s mercy. Bought and paid for, Wendy said, so what will you do with me now.
Lizzie could not call Gwen, because Gwen was at a baby birthday party with her baby and all her new baby-breeding friends. She could not call her mother, obviously. She had no one to call.
Wendy said it was not a problem, they would call Strauss. Even though it was a Saturday and Strauss was home, because Wendy had Strauss’s home number. For emergencies, she said, and later Lizzie thought about that, a lot, but now Lizzie punched the number into the pay phone by the bathroom, a dark cubby stinking of shit and blood, and when a woman answered, she said as carefully as she could, hello, is this Mrs. Strauss, stopped herself just in time from saying, can your husband come out and play?
By the time the taxi pulled up to the Meadowlark, Lizzie was feeling slightly more sober. Wendy had fallen asleep on her shoulder.
Strauss was waiting on the curb. She’d never noticed it before, his ursine affect, but noticed now. Nervous system registered hairy and large and growling, read threat, amygdala triggered hypothalamus, activated pituitary and adrenal glands, heart rate increased, pupils dilated, face flushed. Mouth went dry. Hands trembled. He said many angry things. Wendy slept in the back seat.
When Lizzie drank, things seemed like a good idea that were not a good idea. She had the idea that if she and Strauss were in a soap, this fight would escalate until he swept her into his arms and kissed her, because sometimes love tasted like hate. She had the idea that maybe Wendy was right, that maybe he did want her, that it was possible he could want her. That she wanted, so much.
The human brain operates on a delay. It takes one and a half seconds to process what the body experiences. Consequence: there is no such thing as living in the moment.
Lizzie had puzzled over this line from the Confessions more than any other: Any duration is divisible into past and future: the present occupies no space. And yet Augustine also said past and future were only figments. Consequence: there is no now, there are no thens. There is only memory and imagination, no differential of reality wedged between. This made no sense to her, except that she had imagined kissing him, and then, a second and a half later, she had kissed him. The decision already made. She remembered her body making it, remembered hands reaching, skin stubbly, lips hot, eyes wide. She blamed her body. Her brain too slow to stop it.
Strauss said no.
Strauss shoved her away. Paid the driver. Shook Wendy awake, but gently. He was gentle with Wendy. Took her by the hand, helped her out of the car. He was not angry with Wendy. She was a nonperson; she bore no blame. He would not look at Lizzie. Informed her they would not speak of this again. When Strauss ushered Wendy inside, Wendy was the only one who looked back. Then the door closed between them, and Lizzie was alone.
Alone, jealous of Wendy’s will, her mind over her body; Wendy Doe, master of escape. Lizzie willed her own brain: forget. The kiss; the day; the grief, guilt, loneliness, hope, failure, self. Burn it away, let me start again. Her brain did not accommodate.
Lizzie on the curb, throbbing head in hands, waiting for Strauss to return, but Strauss did not return. Lizzie, stumbling alone and unsteady to the SEPTA station, swaying on the platform, dozing on the train, stumbling, again, cold, tired, sick, shamed, toward home that was not a home, where she hid under the same blanket that kept her childhood safe, closed her eyes against the spinning world, woke at dawn, staggered to the toilet, dropped to her knees, remembered.