Revenge of the Paste Eaters Read online

  We arrived at Camp Chesterfield at either 8:30 or 9:30, depending on whose time you use. Whatever time it was, the front desk for the dormitory was closed and so we were instructed to just go ahead and pick out our beds.

  We stayed in the women’s dorm. The women’s dorm is a huge basement room filled with single beds arranged to make the best use of a big open space. Each single bed has a matching antique dresser. Each bed is made up with the clean linens from an estate sale. Everything is clean, everything has been used a hundred times before. Everything smells faintly of mildew. Almost all of the furniture in Camp Chesterfield reminds me of what my parents or their friends had in their lake cottages when I was in junior high. Lodging in the dorm costs us ten dollars apiece for the night.

  Mary is sitting on the edge of her bed. She has a kind of how stupid is this? expression on her face. In each hand she is holding a purple satin bag, reminiscent of a Crown Royal bag, with a purple drawstring top.

  “How’s it going?” I check with her.

  She holds up one bag. “This is what they go in,” she says. Each bag holds a plastic breast. Each breast has a small transparent form-keeper it slides into.

  “They’re lovely,” I compliment her.

  “She’s a container lover,” Susan reminds Mary.

  We come over to admire her breasts, which have not blistered her chest as she thought they had. Now she holds one in each hand. Each has a nipple and a textured areola. Each has a small flap that curves around her rib cage. The side that goes up against her skin is made of a particularly absorbent material that is designed to collect sweat. To wash them, she tells us, she has to let that material absorb as much water as it can, squeeze it out with a towel, and then lay it on the floor and gently but firmly step on it.

  She tucks them into their shape-keeper and then their purple drawstring bags, tucks them into her suitcase, and then she just shrugs.

  I would have to say, just as an observation, that psychics are not by nature businesspeople. Everyone who works and lives at Camp Chesterfield is a psychic. The desk clerk, the people who run the diner, the groundskeepers, and the clerks in the bookstore—all are psychics. Camp Chesterfield is a big grassy park, around which are a row of cottages two deep in a big U-shape, and in these cottages live the established professional fortune-telling psychics of the community. There are rules and regulations and politics involved in living in and owning these cottages, and in particular, what happens to these cottages when the original owners are no longer able or interested in living there. Since I’ve only set foot on the grounds twice and make no claims whatsoever to their world, they do not share their private workings of the community with me: I only know that there are the established professionals with their tablets out in front of their cottages where guests can sign up for a private reading, and the rest of the community fits itself in wherever it can, doing whatever has to be done while they wait for the acceptance and membership that has drawn them here.

  But everyone here wants to practice their calling, not change linens or fry burgers.

  We never checked in, and when Nancy and Mary went looking for someone to help them cash out Nancy started to say, “One of our group dropped out,” and the woman said, “I know—your friend Rae couldn’t make it.”

  Nancy just stood there, looking at her.

  “You forget where I work,” the clerk reminded her.

  At 8:30 in the morning of an all-day moneymaking event the restaurant pop machine stopped making ice and was out of four out of the eight selections of pop. The breakfast line was closed at a quarter to ten because the cook ran out of meat, and the lunch line opened with a woman sitting at the cash register who had no idea how much anything cost or how to ring it up. It was all I could do to keep Nancy and Mary from vaulting over the counter and taking charge of the kitchen.

  We were attending the first ever Spiritfest, a largely outdoor activity spread around the grounds of Camp Chesterfield where mosquitoes the size of bumblebees sapped the life force out of terrified guests. There were artisans selling their wares, musicians performing, and the grounds themselves, lush and unseasonably green, to roam—but those who ventured outside soon came back to the foodless, drinkless restaurant with giant welts all over their bodies and dark, sickly circles under their eyes. Rumor had it one driver lost his temper and thumped a mosquito and put a big dent in his bumper.

  I run into a friend at the Spiritfest who gives me the name of a psychic I should consult. “He’s wonderful,” she assures me, “you’ll love him.”

  The psychics who do not have cottages of their own have gathered in the far end of the dining hall, where each has a small table arranged with a clipboard for scheduling appointments, their business cards, and whatever small touch of grace they feel will give us a sense of their gift. One woman has thrown a lovely scarf with a dragonfly in batik over her table. Several other tables have floral arrangements. One psychic does readings based on flower petals, several others read tarot cards.

  I sign up for the young man I will “love,” and then I wander the grounds alone for a while to absorb the ambiance. Nancy has told me the entire property hums with the vibrant energies of the people who live there, and for a while I struggle to hear or taste or in any way sense this. I have never seen anyone’s aura. I have never been blessed with any sense of who or what a person is beyond the obvious. My cat, from all appearances, has more insight into the characters who come to visit his house than I do.

  It is more than wanting to know about the future or wishing I had more information about the present than I have. I want desperately to believe that the earth is one giant living organism bound by rules and interactions of nature both seen and unseen. I was trained to believe in nature as a machine, for every action there being an equal and opposite reaction, cold, bloodless, and utterly devoid of feeling: all of my life I have been drawn to those who believe in fairies or the earth as a sentient being, people who believe that animals, like us, have souls and feelings and significance that is inherent and undeniable. When I look into the eyes of my cat I see more than instincts and blood, I see a being, a thinking, intelligent personality that speaks and thinks in a language different from mine. I want and need to believe that life is about something more than the relentless production of crude oil.

  What I find is Mary sitting on one of the many benches in the shade. She is people watching, perhaps. We talk briefly about Nancy, who is our common bond, and we talk about the flutes one of the artisans is selling and how Nancy wants one but will probably never spend the money for something so frivolous. I would spend money that frivolously, but I don’t know enough about flutes or what draws Nancy to them to presume to make the selection for her, and Mary agrees. She would buy the flute: she does not know which flute would be appropriate, and she thinks the decision of which flute she wants may be that place where Nancy herself is undecided.

  Susan consults a pet psychic to contact the spirit of her recently deceased horse, but balks when he starts giving her financial advice.

  I consult the same psychic to have my dead cat tell me why my living cat is losing weight.

  We go to the chapel and listen to a seventy-eight-year-old woman tell us about living with religion and spirituality. (My favorite part: “If you decide to take up meditation and you tell yourself, ‘I’m going to meditate for half an hour every day,’ I can guarantee you you won’t be doing it by the end of the week. You need to set reasonable goals . . .”)

  We stayed for a lecture on how to contact our spirit guides. (We all agreed we liked the speaker. So far none of us have contacted our spirit guide.)

  I consulted the same speaker to have him tell me my grandfathers both love me, I have a lovely crystal blue aura, and I am on the verge of doing something wonderful and amazing I haven’t even thought of yet. I should open the door by taking a drawing class. I am to “embrace all sorts of opportunities” and keep myself open. I am a woman with a wonderful spirit—very balanced. I need to
start looking to the East for inspiration.

  Mary spoke to him as well. Ever practical, she summed up his message as, “Oh, you know . . .”

  Nancy consulted a psychic who told her not to quit her job, to take kind care of her mother, and to stand up for herself more often.

  Susan spoke to a psychic who told her to put her writing away and take out her brushes and start painting. She spoke briefly to the spirit of a lost relationship.

  We sat in the pop-free, iceless restaurant and drank tea, compared our fortunes, remembered the lessons of the Midwest, and eventually talked ourselves out of all of it. The one bit of psychic advice we followed was directions to a Chinese restaurant.

  Susan is temporarily broke. She came “home” for the summer to heal herself and to touch noses with her family and friends and historical home. I have never been anything but a coward, and I find the idea of being sixty, broke, and unemployed terrifying beyond all reason, and I suspect that fear—which is mine—colors my vision of Susan. Which is ironic: my own life is on the upswing. For the first time in a long time, more than the one same grim possibility shimmers on the horizon. Whether my career as a writer comes to fruition or dies on the vine, at this moment in my life I can entertain the fantasy of leaving my day job and writing full-time. I am inspired by hope, and galvanized by the knowledge that the worst that could happen is that I continue doing what I have been doing all along. The choices I would make would not do for Susan. There is nothing I can do for her but smile, make a fist, and murmur, “Go for it.” And watch her go. My left foot will be planted firmly on the Big Sister instinct that continues to busily solve everyone’s problems with the solutions that would work best for me.

  On the way home at ten o’clock at night on the expressways around Fort Wayne we are pulled over by a patrolman for failure to yield right of way to an emergency vehicle. On three lanes of traffic he chose the middle lane to cruise to his next emergency and we failed to notice him and pull off into either of the other empty lanes.

  “Didn’t you see me?” the patrolman demands through the window. “I’ve been following you for over a mile. It’s probably good luck for you that I’ve been called to a shooting because I don’t have the time to write you a ticket.”

  We murmur apologies—all four of us—and thank him for his patience.

  Once he’s back in his patrol car Mary comments, “I don’t think he wants to go to that shooting very bad.”

  Later I will learn that our newly elected queen, my cubiclemate, rethought her behavior and called the offending/offended officer’s precinct and offered an apology. “His job is hard enough,” she explained. Manners, which struck me when I was young as time-wasting exercises in the superfluous, have become the grease that helps us all slide through life more comfortably.

  I never expected to be fifty. I’m not sure what I thought would happen. I think about my age from time to time much as children must stop and look at their bodies, noticing suddenly how quickly they have grown, how differently they move and follow thoughtless commands than they did the last time they gave it any thought. I keep looking for some logical explanation for my surprise. It’s not as if I’ve been in a coma for the past twenty years . . . It’s just that I’m the same person I’ve always been.

  I expected something to change.

  I remember when I was about ten or so I might spend a weekend with my grandmother and she and one or two of her friends would take me on one of their outings. They rarely went far—certainly never for overnight—but we would all jump in the car and drive away on some adventure. My grandmother and her friend Gertrude were avid indoor and outdoor gardeners and most of their field trips involved visiting nurseries or private gardeners who sold or swapped plants with friends. While I squirmed impatiently in the backseat they drove and talked about friends of theirs who had cancer, or whose husband had left or whose children were proving troublesome. Their conversations, even their destinations, all seemed so incredibly inconsequential to me. It was as if their lives had gone on and left them behind and they hadn’t even noticed.

  Now that I am my grandmother’s age I catch myself wondering what would have seemed “interesting” to my childself. I shop for more plants for my garden every spring. I have friends—too many friends—who have stared eye-to-eye with cancer.

  Now that I am my grandmother’s age, I can see that there are advantages to aging that come on so gracefully we sometimes forget to stop and weigh their consequences. Aging people—aging women, in particular—vanish around the age of fifty. It’s as if we begin to lose our very substance, as if the younger, allegedly more vibrant people around us can no longer see us as clearly as they see each other. We are like soap bubbles, fine and delicate and shimmering with rainbow colors around our shells until, SNAP, we’re gone. Behavior that was once seen as a social crime, a misdeed that needed commentary and sanction, is now seen as harmless idiosyncrasy. We haven’t gone anywhere, of course, but the young no longer see us as a threat and many of us have gotten over our need to actively police each other.

  It is inordinately freeing to be beyond the critical scope of the young. I have no one I have to impress anymore. No one is even looking at me. What I once thought would be a terrifying transition—the loss of my sense of substance as a person—has turned out to be the time of my life.

  waiting

  when we were kids our parents bought something. I have no idea what—a house, perhaps. Whatever it was, it was Extremely Important and it Affected Us All, and the three of us—the Wee One, the UnWee, and I myself, the Least Wee—were stacked like stair steps on a bench in some incredibly boring person’s office and told not to make any noise.

  For hours.

  Heath bars, brussels sprouts, and sharp cheese change over time from stuff guaranteed to make you gag to things that are actually pretty good by the time you grow up—but nothing, absolutely nothing changes like time. Elephants walked by, conceived children, carried them full term, and deposited them on the rug in front of us while we waited—not making any noise—for our parents to each sign their names twice. I was kicked eleven times by the UnWee, who complained she was hair-flicked twice and snot-blown seven times by the Wee One. Our butts fell asleep, all feeling left our legs, and the Wee One succumbed to whole-body bonemelt. There was nothing left of her but a small gooey pile in a yellow dress.

  The Wee One always wore yellow, like the UnWee always wore blue and I always wore pink. We were color-coded. We could have withered up and died sitting there without making any noise on that bench and our bereaved parents would have identified us by the few remaining strips of faded—but still color-coded—clothing fluttering in the breeze around our dust.

  I remember this event quite vividly because I remember small explosions going off in my chest, not unlike Fourth of July fireworks, and banners started running behind my eyes:

  CANNOT STAY QUIET ANYMORE

  DANGER DANGER

  CONTENTS ABOUT TO BURST

  “Shut UP,” I hissed to the UnWee, who promptly retaliated by jabbing her pointed little elbow into the pile of goo that once had been the Wee One.

  The Wee One screamed as only youngest sisters can scream, an ear-piercing, nerve-shattering, end-of-life-as-we-know-it scream she reserved for kicks, punches, bites, and the occasional ground collisions accidentally incurred from older sisters.

  Our mother came stalking out of the inner office (leaving our father to the endless paperwork of ownership), hauled the goo-pile off the bench and into her arms, and, thumping the traitor reassuringly on the back, glared at the UnWee and me. “I can’t take you kids anywhere,” she hissed, and stalked off to the car.

  We followed, of course, because even though our lives had been utterly ruined by the arrival of the Wee One, they were at least lives we knew.

  We all crept silently into the car, each one hiding under our own window.

  “I just don’t understand why you can’t watch your sisters for ten minutes without some
kind of war breaking out,” my mother snarled at me, establishing, of course, that it was all my fault.

  In the backseat the Wee One was re-forming her bones and using them to idly kick the UnWee.

  “When do you think we’ll be able to go home?” I inquired politely of my mother.

  “Please stop whining,” my mother snapped. For years I walked around my mother as an attendant might a particularly unpredictable mental patient—one sensed that she was just not emotionally equipped to deal with three children under the age of six, although, I will add, it was not my fault that she had us.

  Crushed by her constant criticism, I started to cry.

  An expression crossed my mother’s face—frustration, aggravation, embarrassment, perhaps even the desire to cry herself—and then she inhaled a deep breath through her nose, fixed her attention on something in the distance, and sat there in the car, idly tapping her fingers on the steering wheel while she stared off into space.

  I wanted to hug her, or to apologize, or to snuggle up in her arms and let her gently finger my hair. I wanted us all to be a happy, loving family waiting in the car like movie children while our all-knowing dad bought our house. I wanted a clear, consistent set of directions for how mothers and daughters learn how to talk to each other and families learn how to experience life events as one organic whole. But someone had failed to issue my directions set and I had no idea what made families work together, so I slunk down underneath my window, tried to make as little noise as possible, and waited.

  the vole hole

  i work in an office building that has four windows to let in light for two hundred people. We are the Agency of Last Resort and our job is to supplement the welfare of society’s most fragile members, so everything in my building is blue. The walls are blue, the cubicles are blue. When I first started the carpet was blue (it is now a sort of purpley/maroony/speckledy blue). Half of my coworkers are on Prozac. The building where I work has specially piped-in white noise so it always sounds vaguely like the wind is blowing. (This is to drown out the screams of dissatisfied children.) From the time I report to work in the morning to the time I leave in the evening, I have no idea whether it’s snowing, the sun is shining, or the sky has turned green and is full of big, black, angry funnels bearing down on me. I can tell when it’s raining because I can hear it on the roof. The roof is flat and has been known to gather several gallons of cold rainwater and dump them unceremoniously on poorly placed workers.