This is who Esther is: The Queen of Swords, Nut (pronounced like ‘root’), she who gave
birth to all the Egyptian Gods including Ra, if she had tattoos she’d have six-shooters
inked at her hips. If Esther’s mother Zosha were alive and asked to describe Esther, she
would probably say: “Who is Esther?” This is because sixty-one years ago Zosha had a
daughter named Natalia, and she held this little girl’s hand as they boarded a ship
headed for America with burlap sacks of not-much tossed over their shoulders. They left
Poland so Zosha could stop eating ash for breakfast with Death seated to her right
(always eating with elbows on the table and never asking anyone to pass anything), the
end result of a trip to Auschwitz that left numbers tattooed on her inner arm. This tattoo
didn’t fade with age, and neither did the every-nightmare Zosha had about why she lived
when nobody else in her family did. Natalia’s mother raised her alone with money she
made working in Grabowski’s pierogi shop, and she never said a word about who father
might be other than to note he was dead. She taught Natalia how to flute the edges of
pierogi with her first finger and thumb, how long hair is beautiful on a woman at any age,
and how to bury a child’s shoe in the front and back yards to keep evil spirits an ocean’s
length away.
Natalia read everything and was first in line at the Women’s Center when it finally opened
in Cleveland in 1965, and the same day her birth control prescription was filled she met
Frank when he was still Josef. She chose the name Esther to match Frank because to
her Esther was as “American as the nuclear bomb” and only later she learned it was a
Jewish name and laughed loudly while kicking her legs in the air. Natalia and Esther
share a laugh to shatter glass and legs that don’t go on forever but hold your attention
where they do.
This is what Esther is thinking right now, sitting in the You-Lucky-Dog lottery diner: That
boy across the room is worth sleeping with. Sweat from his thrusting body must be a
magic elixir of eternal life, the contents of the fountain Juan Ponce de Leon and
Alexander the Great sought so desperately. This boy is far from Florida and full of
secrets Esther wants to know, and she thinks the only solution is to peel back his
wrapper and find the whispers. She swallows as he runs his finger over and over the rim
of a water glass, willing it to sing, an alchemist one ecstatic step away from pure gold.
Esther’s imagination grabs his hand and runs them back thirty years, to woods and
summer and not enough clothing to enter gas stations without arrest, and Esther’s
standing at a bonfire topless, a mango in her hand. In this lost long ago Frank’s no where
to be found, and Esther is Natalia again, holding the mango too tightly as she peels with
the same knife she used to flick out a bee sting earlier that day. Juice bursts from fruit
and aims for eyes before settling on a slow drip down her arm. Natalia examines the boy
across the fire, a wolf looking for a brand new sheepskin coat, and once she knows he’s
really looking she wipes the sticky juice across her bare chest and asks with a zipper-
popping purr: “Did you want some?”
“What are you smiling at?” Frank asks his wife, who is staring off into some bubble he
can’t help but burst.
“You burst my bubble,” Esther responds. He smiles a little, and signals his hand to the
waitress so they can order. The waitress wears flip-flops and it’s not even summer and
for God’s sake, this is a restaurant. Her hair is short and pixie and Frank wishes she had
a ponytail.
“Hi,” she says and almost smiles. “Our special today is custard French toast. Are you
ready to order?”
Yes, I’ll have the city breakfast with bacon, eggs over-medium.
“Should I come back later?” she looks at Frank, confused.
“He’ll have the city breakfast with bacon. Eggs over medium,” Esther says quickly. “I'll
have the same, but make the eggs over-easy. I like ‘em runny.”
Esther waits for the inevitable, “I guess you know your husband pretty well,” but it doesn’t
come.
“So, aren’t you going to ask me?” Frank wants to know. She always asks him: So Frank,
is anyone worth musing over today?
“No. Not today,” she responds, staring out the front window at the claustrophobic
Portland street. “You always answer the same.”
He does. He always says: I don’t fancy anyone but you, Esther. Then Esther responds:
You’re so simple.
“Today I fancy someone.”
Esther stares deeply into her coffee cup, reading the grounds or scrying through her
reflection into the beyond of the black mirror. She breaks trance to look Frank full in the
face with the smile of Cheshire cat to Alice. A similar smile dragged him from his lane at
Uncle Pin’s Bowl and Roll and into their first awkward conversation forty some years ago.
“Well I think I might faint,” she says.
“Don’t do that. They’ll call an ambulance. Those are expensive.”
“Maybe someone will perform mouth to mouth.”
“Hussy.”
“I suppose.” Esther’s eyes do an inventory of the diner. Two waitresses, one younger,
one older, neither wearing uniforms, one wearing flip-flops…she might be a crush-
contender if she only had a ponytail. Then there’s the couple in the corner booth,
featuring her fine young man not even trying to brush the hair out of his eyes, dumping
one packet of sugar after the other into a poor defenseless cup of coffee. At another
table, a college-aged boy with a shaggy haircut and a furiously moving pen, inevitably
writing about how sad the old couple not saying much is. Esther decides to imagine
instead that he's writing of a heroine with a face like hers and a patch of Nirvana between
her legs, just for the pleasure of sliding onto his page in an unexpected way. The counter
is cluttered with bent-back blue collars working lottery scratchers that double as
keychains across tickets pulled from heavy endless rolls behind the counter, the pixie-
haired girl flopping back and forth between rolls as the men and women grunt requests
for 2 of number 5, one of the $10 BINGO! Card, and let out little groans and whoops and
hot-damns depending on the outcome. A computer print-out menu is taped to the front
door with nothing special as specials, the tables are pieces of glass over wood, and
(thank God) someone dug around in whatever dumpster they hide all the color in around
this grey city and found some fresh violets to place in water glasses. The smell of bacon
and pancakes and custard French toast fills the air, and Esther wonders if Frank’s just
daydreaming about the unseen wonder responsible for creating edible perfume—
otherwise she’s out of ideas. “Okay, who is it?” she gives. “Gimme gimme.”
“Them,” Frank points to the couple sitting in the corner booth, hands wrapping around
hands, feet wrapping around feet, and tongues wrapping around tongues. “They’re all
over each other and I half hate it.”
“Why? I love that.”
“You don’t find their display a little much?” He raises his eyebrows and wonders why he
kids himself.
“I remember participating in such displays.”
“It was the sixties. All of America was that display.”
“Oh God. Don’t become one of those old men convinced that the world was born in 1963
and everything was invented, properly credited, and fucked silly before dying in 1970.”
Esther thinks this would be a good point to stab out a cigarette and light another. How
does one express emotion after quitting smoking? She unrolls her silverware instead. “I’d
be offended if they were fighting. I’d be offended if they were shitting on the floor. I’m
jealous that they’re making out.”
He smiles a soft old-man smile that irritates her all the more. “Don’t you ever act old?”
“Why are Cleveland Pollacks so into being old? If old means I forget I’m a woman, I hope
not. I’m a juicy kind of old. That’s what keeps my skin looking good.”
“Well Esther I’m a stale old fart, and I’m dead jealous of them, and they are my muses of
the day.”
“Tell me why.”
“Because in addition to being wonderfully young and dumb, they’re on drugs that neither
you nor I can get a prescription for, not even after a car accident, and that is exactly how
I’d like to feel this morning.”
“Hung over?”
“High.”
“Oh.”
“Exactly.”
“Well Frankie you’ve thoroughly surprised me, and once again you’ve become the most
attractive man in this room.” She leans across the table and takes his hand lightly,
knowing she has about ten minutes before this forward leaning position sets her lower
back on fire.
“I do aim to please,” he says, running his thumb across her fingers. “And really, I just
want to be high.”
This is who Frank is: the Prince of Pentacles, the provider, the naïve and “everything will
be okay,” even his darkest cynicism seems a little like kidding, and he’d be great in the
sack if he could just quit worrying about whether or not the door is closed or poised to
pop open around the third groan. His grandfather was his first family to arrive in America
from Poland, and he worked hard and broke hearts and managed to erect a building
dead center in Cleveland’s Slavic Village with the family name screaming from the seams.
This screaming proved so loud that it broke free and adhesived to the back of Frank’s
neck, and thus he was born Josef and not Frank at all. At twenty Josef used his inherited
business sense to calculate that blue suits plus big smiles equals a lot of vacuum
cleaners sold, and because Josef added so well, he realized that the people owning the
houses and the doors he rapped his knuckles on most wanted to buy from fellow
Americans. It didn’t matter that he was a guns-God-glory American citizen with the paper
work to prove it, the sum remained: folks are more likely to buy from Frank than Josef
with an F. Still, he kept the last name Sczcepanski (pronounced she’-pan-ski) and when
Esther laughed and kicked her legs in the air he said: “What?”
Twenties gave way to thirties and then forties and fifties and he remained tall and thin,
though his skin began to feel like water sliding down his face, and his dark eyes turned
soft and softer brown to reflect each additional grey hair. He waited for Natalia’s skin to
turn serpentine, for her hair to feel coarse and pubic, but some women are always
beautiful. Or, as Natalia would say, he put on rose-colored glasses sometime around
hello and hasn’t had the guts to remove them since.
This is what he’s thinking right now: Esther wants to sleep with that boy across the room.
It smells like shoe polish in here. This water tastes dirty. He inventories the room and
wonders who amongst the men could really clean his clock in a fist fight. There’s a man
sitting at the counter, 200 pounds of trucker’s cap and mustache, elbows-deep in scratch-
lottery, and Frank thinks that man could knock him sterile if he wanted to, though
probably not before someone poured water over his head or grabbed his punching arm.
Frank thinks he’d use the temporary advantage to sucker-punch the guy, one clean blow
to the jaw before running out of the diner flapping his hands and squealing like a school
girl. Frank thinks it would be satisfying to land a blow, even if the man ended up taken
away by the police for a single night of jail-cell stewing in his juices, before he busts out
and runs full-tilt and venom-filled back to the diner to find out where the hell he can find
some asshole named Frank or Josef or whatever-the-fuck. Frank thinks he wouldn’t
press charges, not even after the man showed up outside his house with a baseball bat,
a mouthful of chaw, and a “Come out and fight like a man!” Frank thinks that maybe if he
doesn’t, he and the burly trucker with tattoos hiding somewhere up his sleeves will
become friends. They’ll eat at the counter together and scratch lottery tickets and talk
about broads and guns and booze and whatever else men talk about when they sit
together in diners, before Frank sells him a vacuum cleaner and the guy gives him a ride
in his big rig and lets him pull the horn.
Everyone else in the restaurant Frank could probably beat down, not because of
strength or coordination, but because he’s fear driven and doesn’t care about looking
gnashing-teeth crazy with pinwheel arms and kicks to the testicles if that’s what it takes to
come out not-dead. But he’s not so sure about the kid in the corner, the one Esther’s
been mind-fucking since they first walked through the door. Frank knows from a couple
of acid observations and (let’s be honest) experiments of his own that it’s real easy to
feel immortal and impossible and super-heroic in the cloudy headspace of down the
rabbit hole and over the rainbow, but he hears that acid isn’t as strong as it used to be,
in the sixties. If that kid in the corner is on acid the super-juice of the drug could lead him
to beat Frank senseless, but really, it doesn’t seem like acid, or at the very least, just
acid. Crystal meth? That drug has always worried Frank, a drug can’t be good if it’s
cooked in hotel rooms with equipment bought from Home Depot by men in wife-beater t-
shirts who clean out the allergy section of a drug store and have no plans of touching the
junk themselves. No, it can’t be that, because he can’t imagine kids “tweaking” as they
say, sitting still in a diner and not running laps around it. Ecstasy? He wonders, as he
notices how wrapped around body parts they are, what annoyed him in the first place, all
the wrapping, wrapping, wrapping of them, and suddenly he’s annoyed all over again.
A couple of years ago a co-worker (Phil. It’s always Phil) busted his kid doing drugs in his
bedroom and confiscated the whole lot. Then Phil and his wife proceeded to ingest every
piece of contraband, “just to see what the kid was into.” This apparently included a
couple of tablets of Ecstasy, and so Phil and his wife took them one evening, and:
“Frank, all I can say is holy…fucking…shit. Wow. I was feeling so honest and pure that I
actually went and found Jimmy, and I said, ‘You know, this is fucking amazing.’ Do you
believe I said that to the kid? And he laughed and told me he thought about stuffing the
Thanksgiving turkey with that shit if that’s what it took to get us to lighten the fuck up, and
I said, “I never imagined this,” and then I started crying—literally crying—because we didn’
t have this shit in the sixties and because I love my son. Do you believe that?”
No, Frank couldn’t believe it.
Phil had gone on: “And Frank, they really do a messed-up job on the drug commercials.
It’s pointless to warn a kid against ecstasy because it damages your brain or something,
because if that’s all it did, it would be worth it. It’s like ten hits of Prozac without feeling
tired or bored. I was happy for weeks after that. But you know what they should warn you
against? Grinding your teeth like someone from a freakin’ horror movie. I cracked three
teeth and knocked out a filling, and Gladys? She chewed the insides of her cheeks so
bad she’s on a yogurt and pudding diet for the next few weeks until they heal. Ha!” And
he said it just like that, too: Ha!
Frank shakes Phil from his mind (he never liked him anyway) and returns to the boy and
then notices (for the first time) the girl, and he kicks himself for always noticing the boy
first, just to see who Esther’s looking at. The girl’s a little funny looking the way a lot of
girls are around Slavic Village these days, girls coming out of families that have been
bone Polish since the Cro-Magnon’s started picking teams. Polish, that is, until someone
got a hard-on for a white-haired blue-eyed Swede, or a fire-headed Irishmen, or a
Korean with a thicker bank account than accent, and *poof*, funny-looking children with
ethnic confusion. Frank thinks this girl still manages to be beautiful, the same way his
daughter is some kind of beautiful, big eyes and thin-lips and high-cheekbones not
looking at all like anyone. He thinks that, just like this other girl, his daughter’s out of her
element in Portland, because no one looks like that here. His daughter should be back in
Cleveland.
“Stop thinking about Willameena. You’ll get indigestion.” Esther always knows.
“I’m thinking about them,” he gestures his head towards the two. “Besides, we haven’t
gotten our food yet.”
“Are you thinking about them, or what they’re on?” Yeah, Esther always knows.
Now Frank and Esther are both looking with the subtlety of experience, and they watch
as the maybe-tripping girl wishes herself inside a water glass, and Frank wonders if
she’s got anything left in her wallet or pocket or shoe, and if she’d give him some if he
asked—and how exactly would he ask? He’s not young anymore so she’d probably be
afraid of accidentally killing him, and it’s not the sixties and no one is going to react
positively to a dad-aged man reeking of undercover cop asking: “Hey man, spot a little
extra? Far out.” At the same time, Frank thinks that if he asked and they did and they
charged him some ridiculous amount of money he’d happily pay and then he’d wash a
couple down with a little water and crossed fingers, and Esther would probably join him.
At their old and unwise age they might still have something to lose, but he thinks
they’re much more likely to lose it and not get it back if they stay sober.
“What are you thinking, bubble-burster?” Esther asks to do exactly that.
“Drugs.”
“Still? We need to get you a magazine or something.”
“I’ve got to know what they’re on,” Frank ignores the jab and his mounting obsession.
“You’re talking about the couple over there, right? Your muse-duo of the day, the some-
girl and the boy I want to sleep with?” He’s right. She’s barely noticed the girl. Esther
stares off dreamily and this makes their food come, the same way her smoking used to.
“He’s got that far-away, barely-one-toe-on-the-planet look,” Esther says as she stabs her
yolks runny and then whips the eggs into an angry yellow frenzy. “Gets me every time.”
She pauses to add salt and pepper to her massacre. “You, of all people, should know,”
she adds with her trademark half-smile, more a semi-colon than anything, and his heart
starts pounding like he’s 18 and she’s 20 and they’re meeting for the first time all over
again. Even then she was the “let’s do it” to his “okay then”, the water-balloon-fight to his
water-the-lawn. Frank remembers their meeting as a moment of water turning into wine
and suddenly feeling very thirsty but remaining star-struck sober. Esther remembers that
she started laughing because he was across the bowling alley doing a little dance in his
socks with his bowling shoes tied together at the laces and tossed over his shoulder, a
beer in his hand like a microphone, singing in a booming voice to a too-tired friend who
just wanted to go home and sleep:
Ev….ry…party has a pooper
And I knew it would be you
Party pooper! Hey! Party pooper!
She calls it “their song” every time he sings it to her or any other deserving party.
He slouches down in his seat so his knees get closer to hers, and he touches hers,
lightly, barely. His only move, then and now. “So what do you think they’re on?”
“Good God,” Esther ignores the question, knife in conductor’s pose, chewing. “She looks
like Willameena.”
“I think so. A little bit.”
They’re both liars. She looks nothing like her.
This is who crosses them: the Queen of Wands, Kali (creator/destroyer) a little bit of fire
sprung from Natalia’s womb and the tip of Josef’s penis to try and comprehend a
universe of Esther and Frank. Recently this card reversed and who was once a rock-em,
sock-em thunderclap of original and inimitable code has been reduced to a barely
detectable vibration. Willameena doesn’t live at home anymore or even in Cleveland, and
this morning Frank and Esther deboarded a plane with pasty film at the edges of their
mouths and crust in their eyes, tired but determined, because it was beyond time to take
the long and expensive trip to Portland--invited or not. The tickets were purchased when
both entered a state of quiet open-mouthed panic in response to a letter from their
daughter which consisted of a single shotgun blast line: “Everything is fine.”
Prior to this letter the latest news from Willameena was that she was being forced by a
judge to attend group “meetings” because of an incident vaguely described as one
involving the subway and screaming, followed by an arrest, to which Esther responded,
“Who doesn’t want to scream on the subway?” and then she laughed a little and avoided
eye contact and cleared her throat.
Immediately following this incident Willameena ended a relationship with Tre, a man
Frank hoped would function as his daughter’s lifetime anchor, and Frank took the phone
from his ash-white “oh shit” muttering wife to say: “You win some, you lose some. There’s
other fish in the sea, right?” Then he remembered that the doorknob to the bathroom
was a little loose, and he should tend to it “before someone gets locked in.”
Now, sitting in this diner, Frank’s over-food internal prayer is a soft recital of “The Itsy-
Bitsy Spider,” which he sung to Willa when she was younger, complete with hand
gestures and tippy-toe dance steps to make her laugh, and he almost whispers aloud to
anyone or thing listening with time for human neediness: “Get her up the spout again,
please.”
Esther stops eating. “Damn it,” she says. “I knew it. Indigestion. I can’t swallow this shit.”
“You didn’t try,” Frank responds, and conjures an image of himself with a spoon shaped
like an airplane, making engine noises in the direction of Esther’s mouth. The thought
makes him smile so loudly Esther hears it, and raises an eyebrow.
“Forget it. It’s not going to happen,” he looks up and she adds: “Eating.” Esther roots
through her pockets for the cigarettes that aren’t there and haven’t been for almost
twenty years. “Jesus Christ, why did I quit smoking? What the hell do I do with myself
now?” and she loses herself inside her coffee cup reflection all over again.
This is the root: The Moon, bringing confusion and illusion, a questioning of what is or is
not real. Esther can’t forget the numbers tattooed on the inside of her mother’s arm, or
the day she yelled, “Good morning mommy!” and her mother responded wild-eyed, “get
your fucking hands off me!” Zosha never told Natalia why her entire family ended up in
Auschwitz when they were not Jewish. Statistics and stories and hundreds of books
cluttering the shelves of libraries tell her that three million Poles died there, but they don’t
reveal what made her family amongst the three million, and when Natalia was nineteen
her mother died suddenly as rain and with her any hope of knowing.
There was, of course, a rumor. She heard it first when she was seven in Mosinski’s
butcher shop, as her mother held her mitten-covered fingers in one hand and an
umbrella in the other. Natalia allowed herself to be hypnotized by the infinity rings of
freshly stuffed sausage hanging from hooks stuck to the ceiling, the expert hands of
women weighing meat and bundling packages like white-paper presents while shouting
numbers and taking bills and giving change. The woman standing in front of Natalia
wasn’t wearing a coat and had a number tattoo herself. In Slavic Village numbers weren’t
as common as babushkas and woolen socks, but her mother was far from alone. As
Natalia leaned forward to challenge her mother’s grip and get a little closer to a small
basket of penny candy calling her name, the woman turned to stare at Zosha, and her
eyes cast a grave-changing curse before she spit over her left shoulder. Natalia gasped
and crossed her fingers and held them over her heart to counter the curse as she was
taught, and the woman hissed “Nazi whore.” Before air had absorbed words and the spit
from such forcibly spoken words had a chance to consider venturing a little too close to
Zosha’s face, she ripped her hand away from her Natalia’s, taking the mitten with her,
and it sailed over the meat counter, landing with a smack to lie limp and dead on a
freshly torn slice of white paper. Wild-eyed mother needed both hands to double-grip the
umbrella, and she clubbed the woman with everything she had, over and over, body
shots first and then (fuck it) aiming for her babushka’d head, while the woman threw her
arms up to cower and sunk to her knees and started wailing. Then all the women in the
butcher shop started wailing at once, and a couple of them knocked Natalia aside and
into a bread stand so they could pull her mother’s arms back (they hadn’t counted on her
feet), and Zosha kicked like a chorus girl, using the other women’s bodies as support not
restraint, and screamed over and over: “You miserable cipa ! I survived! Me! I survived!
Me! Odpierdol sie! ” With no better part to play Natalia started crying in a loud, open-
mouthed way, and every head turned to look in the direction of the new mournful chorus
serving as kick-stand to their panic, and once all eyes were on Natalia she stopped and
said: “My mitten!”
Simple math places Zosha at pregnant as she escaped the camps in 1943, (Natalia
doesn’t know how she escaped or managed to get pregnant), and if she spends too
much time on this equation the end result is a sum that can neither be verified nor
disputed.
Frank tried to quiet Natalia’s every-nightmare of her mother fucking Nazis, nightmares
filled with images of Zosha distracting one Nazi with her felatio skills before biting his cock
off and spitting it back in his face, escaping while he screams; or images of mother
staring off into the distance or turning the pages of a magazine or greedily chomping
down a crust of bread while one Nazi after the other takes turns on her before slapping
her on the fanny as a thank you, get out. Frank reminded Esther that Hitler imprisoned
and killed a whole lot of people for no reason at all; and a whole lot of people lived
through the camps by luck or survival-inspired decisions, like dodging gas by climbing on
top of bodies or stealing bread another poor sucker was stupid enough to hoard. When
that had no effect he tried a different tactic, insisting that “whore” is such a generic insult
for women that it’s not to be taken literally, maybe her mother was a capo or an informant
of some kind, maybe she was part of a tragic and forbidden love affair misinterpreted by
her peers, maybe (really) there’s some romantic truth waiting to be discovered
underneath the insults. Frank tried so hard and so many different ways to imagine a truth
that turned nightmares into dreams that Natalia’s cat-smile just for him dissolved first into
a semi-wounded smirk, then into a straight line, and finally stuck grimace-solid with the
final unwavering statement of: “Frank, shut your mouth.”
Then one night after rubbing Lubriderm into her skin to avoid the alligator scales that
made her mother seem so fragile in her coffin, Natalia fell into sleep and dream and when
she woke she turned to Frank and said: “I bet my family was killed because they were
Gypsies.”
“What?” Frank responded, rubbing his eyes and glancing at the clock. 4:13 AM.
“Gypsies. My family.”
“Honey, that doesn’t make sense.” Frank regretted this statement the moment he said it.
“And my mother having a love affair with one of the pigs who killed her whole family
makes sense to you? My mother being a goddamned capo and turning on her friends for
a cleaner uniform makes sense to you?”
“Well no, but…” He trailed off. Sometimes it’s best to just trail off.
“I know this if I know anything, I know it.”
Natalia slept soundly after that.
Now: Esther can’t stop fidgeting.
“We should go to a restaurant with activities on the placemats,” Frank suggests. “One
where they keep a basket of crayons behind the counter. That’ll keep you busy.” The
eggs are good, but different from Cleveland good. In Cleveland they cook everything that
comes out of a diner in bacon fat, and you can smell it, taste it, and feel it in your
arteries. In Portland, the eggs taste…clean. Frank’s thinking he’s going to eat Esther’s
too.
“This is what you suggest when I have both a fork and a knife within reaching distance?”
“No, I just want a crayon myself.” He smiles and Esther sighs.
“It’s this damned ulcer.” Esther doesn’t have an ulcer.
“Maybe too much coffee?”
“Stop. I don’t know. I’m just not eating.” Esther crosses her legs and her long skirt hikes
up barely high enough to reveal calves, and she’s suddenly really aware of the long wool
striped socks pulled just above her knees, almost like garters but without the clips or belt
or sexiness.
“How do you feel about being old?” she asks Frank, as she often does, while thinking
that in Slavic Village, people can’t wait to be old.
“I don’t have a problem with being old. Sometimes I just wish I could move a little faster.”
Frank is definitely going to eat her eggs. She pushes her plate in his direction before
turning her eyes to the tripping guy in the corner.
“Do you remember the John Lennon clause?”
“The clause of the whole faithfulness aspect of our marriage, where if John Lennon asks
you out, all bets are off and I can’t hold it against you?” He stacks her plate on top of his
empty one. “Of course.”
“Well, since John is dead and gone I think I get to replace him.”
“That boy in the corner? What do you think he’s going to do with you, other than drive
you to the emergency room after you throw out your back?”
Esther smiles wickedly. “All the things to cause the injury, my dear.”
The root is also the past: If you ask Esther the most important lesson of the Tarot, she
will say this: Card #16, the Tower, because it always comes down. Always. What begins
as fire eventually become screaming flames, until an audience gathers and eats popcorn
and waits for the phoenix to rise so everyone can feel good about the ending. Then all
the kids cheer and rise to their feet with the appearance of the Star, the card immediately
following the Tower, which promises that all this destruction happens just to fertilize the
soil. When Esther says “the Tower before the Star” in a reading or conversation or as a
counter-curse, what she means is: “You’re wading through shit to get to the Holy Grail.”
After her dream and her very first good night’s sleep Natalia told everyone standing
around doing nothing long enough to listen that she was a Gypsy. Since she’s got the
same black eyes, dark hair, and scrappy reputation of her umbrella-toting mother, no
one bothered to argue. Natalia also told them she read cards. “It’s a natural gift,” she
said with a dismissive wave of her hands, “But also a skill. And the cards? Well, they pass
from one family member to the next and develop something of a spirit. That spirit speaks
to me and then,” she paused for dramatic effect, “I just see.”
Frank soon discovered that as inevitable as a dial tone or door slamming in the face of a
salesman, people will ask a fortune teller to read their cards. “Come on, read my cards
Natty,” the most bored of the bored housewives whined, standing on a street corner with
a pre-dinner cocktail in one hand and second-in-a-row cigarette in the other. Women,
waiting for husbands to return from steel mills with bad moods and hungry bellies and
nothing interesting to say, while they tried to collectively ignore war casualties and boys
emptied from the Village and four dead in Ohio. So Esther went out and bought a three
dollar deck of Rider Waite Tarot cards from a shop that sold incense and smelled more
like pot than anything, along with a book, some kind of do-it-yourself Tarot in ten minutes
for dummies. She mixed dirt and pig’s blood and spread it on the sides of the cards to
make them look old and worn and blessed in a mysterious, mildly-nauseating way, she
waved a sprig of sandalwood around them because that seemed sort of holy and
something to bind it all together, and then she shuffled and shuffled the cards over and
over until they felt loose and worn, if not by a hundred years, by the hands of a more
productive two or three.
“Wow, you really take your lying seriously,” Frank commented as Natalia’s hands
cramped up and she asked him to massage them for a second before she got back to
shuffling. This was the closest Frank came to criticizing her actions. How could he?
Esther was sleeping. That was really something.
“This is who I am, I know it,” She insisted. “If I know anything, I know this.”
A few days of shuffling later Natalia announced to the women standing outside of
Michael’s bakery waiting for the day’s first and freshest loaves to be pulled from the oven
that she had a dream, and this dream told her she was ready to read their cards. There
was a moment of heart-stop silence and exchange of skeptical glances before Julia
reluctantly stuck out her chin and said: “I’ll go first” before fingering the cross around her
neck and remembering all the get-out-of-jail-free cards the Catholic church gave the
Poles for the sake of converting them. Julia would burn a candle for a saint or something,
and everything would be fine. Natalia told her to come by at 1:00 PM, the 13th hour, and
then she waved goodbye and walked slowly down the street with a confident, purposeful
stride she was certain would one day evolve to floating.
That afternoon the cards said: Julia, let’s be honest here: you don’t love your children.
Unless you try to know them as little people and not garden ornaments, you’ll be buried
in a shallow, shit-filled grave following a funeral your children will yawn through before
they fight over the three or four things in your will of any value. Julia turned white, didn’t
argue, and was seen later that day, pushing her startled-looking five-year-old daughter
on a newly installed swing set, recently advertised in the Sears catalogue.
When Frank asked Natalia how it went, she laughed a new laugh of told-you-so wisdom
and vengeance percolating from Zosha’s grave. She said: “I’m not a fortune teller, Frank.
I’m a master of the obvious.” From that day forward every afternoon between the hours
of 1 and 3 Natalia fashioned a black scarf with flecks of silver thread around her head
and dealt cards before dispensing advice to her pins-and-needles fans: If your husband
beats you, leave…if you don’t have any money, stop spending it….just because your
husband doesn’t work, that doesn’t mean you have to work two jobs to compensate. Tell
him to bring in money or bring up children…if he’s cheating on you while you slave away,
and I think he is, and you still don’t want to leave him, then my dear, cheat on him back.
They hired a new boy at Michael’s Bakery, you know. He’s got a tattoo of a snake
slithering out of a skull on his right arm, which is a little tacky—but he’s got eyes for you.
And to everyone: I won’t tell. It’s just between you and me. She didn’t say, but she meant:
and Frank.
“She’s amazing,” all the women in the neighborhood said to each other, before
Genevieve took the kids to her mother’s house and Kasia ended her affair with the priest
and started one with Jimmy, the new boy at Michael’s Bakery.
“Thank God she stepped in,” they said after the priest went to confession and Genevieve
found happiness drinking ginger-spice tea in the living room with her sickly mother. It was
in that very living room that the two women dreamt up their gift basket business—a
business that lead to a paid-off mortgage and a return of good health, and more than a
little pocket money for the women in the neighborhood smart enough to contribute their
hand-dipped beeswax candles and home-fluted pierogi and pastries.
Then one Fall day when the leaves were at the peak of turning and the wind was blowing
dead, Natalia was floating down the street to pick up some kielbasa for dinner before her
afternoon appointments when she heard someone say, “There goes Natalia the Gypsy,”
and then laughter, and another said, “No, there goes Natalia, Zjebcoki daughter of a
Nazi fucker.” Then the laughter got louder, gleeful hyena-shriek laughter, the kind that
falls from the mouths of children when they no longer care whether or not the teacher
tacks on yet another detention. Natalia couldn’t say a word, in an instant she didn’t speak
Polish, and her gliding pace stiffened to march, and when she came home she decided
she would tell her husband: “I think I’ll go by Esther now. Just Esther,” but instead she
said: “What happened to you?”
At the exact same time Natalia was forgetting Polish and naming herself Esther, Frank
was being beaten in the street. His route that day was Murray Hill, the neighborhood also
known as Little Italy, where none of the other salesmen wanted to sell. He spoke no
Italian but was confident all the same (why wouldn’t they need vacuums?), and within a
few minutes of getting out of his car he heard, “Excuse me,” and before he could respond
or even fully turn his body into the voice his test vacuum was gone, along with his sale’s
kit and money, and his nose was broken and the blue of his suit had turned crimson, and
an ancient slug of a scream was leech-creeping out of his mouth, sounding like a siren,
and he didn’t think himself capable of that.
Frank lay on the ground for a good long time, repeating to himself over and over again,
“my name is Frank” which he realized just then could very well be an Italian name, or a
German name, so for clarity he mumbled, “I’m American,” but he was still beaten.
And he couldn’t understand why he didn’t swing back, he always imagined instinct telling
him to swing instead of play possum, but all he could think about was what he’d heard
about Italians, and then he began to wonder why he ever thought he could wander into
this neighborhood unarmed and alone, and how (how?) was he going to tell Natalia?
When he shuffled back to their home with their mortgage in their village with his shirt torn
and covered in blood, he decided not to call the police because how far should
humiliation spread, and these were Italians and this was Cleveland and they were cops,
and Esther got an eyeful of him and said, “oh my God” and at that exact moment he
realized (and she realized) that her lips weren’t moving.
And their lips are not moving now, in the diner, though the conversation flows like toilet
water.
House of
Cards
An Excerpt from
Part 2 of the
Novel
Unscrewing
Mt St
Helens
(Psychopomp)
Sledz
one
express
emotion
after
quitting
smoking?"
Amanda what
you think of this
story? Email
gasp@zori3.org
she was the
let’s do it to
his okay
then, the
water-
balloon-fight
to his water-
the-lawn."
were
purchased
when both
entered a
state of quiet
open-mouthed
panic in
response to a
letter from
their daughter
which
consisted of a
single shotgun
blast line:
Everything is
fine.”
ZORI3
of Amanda having
more time to finish
this:
