After Life (14 page)

From the benches outside the Forest Temple, which was next door to the grocery store, I had a good view of the front entrance. I sat there, eating a doughnut, until Officer Peterson came out. An old guy came with him, and pointed him down Seneca Street toward Fox. He shook the old guy’s hand and walked off. At Erie Street he turned right, then disappeared into the candle shop. It would look funny if I hung around outside, so I took a slow walk around the block, saying hello to Ron as he jogged by, his wire-rimmed glasses bouncing on his nose.

“You have a message on the answering machine!” he called back to me. “Don’t forget to check it!”

“Thanks!”

I spotted Peterson walking resolutely down Fox Street. He went right past my house, around the cafeteria, and up Rochester Street. He stopped about halfway down, then checked his notes. He walked a few more feet, slowed down, looked both ways, then turned in at my mother’s front gate.

My mother’s!

I went back home. Jenny was nowhere around. The message on the answering machine, it turned out, was from Dave the Alien.

“Naomi! Sorry I missed you. Could you be at work already?” His voice sounded artificially energetic. “I know it’s, ah, short notice, but how would you like to come over to my place for, ah, dinner? You won’t have to bring anything or even give me a reading”—I cringed—“or, well, whatever. You have to eat, right? So you might as well. Give me a call or something.”

Suddenly I noticed that I had a terrible headache. I washed my hands in cold water, which sometimes helped, and thought that maybe I would just lie on the sofa the rest of the day. I could put a sign on the door of the library:
GONE HOME SICK
. I never took sick days.

Then I thought of Officer Peterson, and how he could walk by and see the sign on the library door and think he rattled me so much I just fell to pieces and had to go home. So instead I took four aspirin and a glass of water, went back to the library, and slept at my desk until three-thirty. I only woke up once, when the mailman came with the gross of index cards I’d ordered.

“Thank God it’s Friday, huh?” he said, dropping the box on my desk with a bang.

When I was a child, I believed in everything, without even trying. But in the years after my grandmother died, I found faith to be a trickier thing, something that could wriggle away the minute I had my hands around it, like a wild animal. It wasn’t a sudden transformation. I gradually grew embarrassed of my mother and her clothes and her exotic mediumship. When we first arrived in Train Line, she was exclusively a trance medium: no more trumpet, no more slate, no more gusts of perfume or ghostly voices. She’d fall down on the table with a thump, her mouth hanging open, groaning like a cow with a stomachache. In a minute or two she’d sit up, but it wouldn’t be her—spirits would be controlling her, speaking through her. At first I thought it was scary but important; later I came to see it as gross, indiscreet, and my distaste evolved into skepticism. I sulked in my room when she held home circles and told her I was going to become a news anchor when I grew up. She laughed at me—literally laughed—and said I had to be a blonde. I threw my shoes at her.

At school in Wallamee I wanted clean-cut, wholesome-looking friends. I fell in love with fresh air and tennis shoes and Baptists. I had a friend named Becky Bell, who taught me Sunday school songs. But I was known as the spooky girl, the girl with the spooky mom who wore spooky clothes. In a small town a reputation like this will stay with you for the rest of your life, no matter what you do. They’d never, ever let me on the softball team, even if I could hit the ball, which I couldn’t. By the time I was fourteen I realized I needed to try a new tack: capitalize on what I had. I told my friends—a handful of misfit girls—that I would hold a séance.

After school one afternoon, we met in the cemetery behind Wallamee Junior High. It was March and the grass was still patched with wet gray snow. The sky was clear blue and the wind was cold. Recently, a teacher in our school had died, a man named Mr. McGlynn who taught history and was famous for his meanness. He just didn’t come to school one day, or the next, and when some other teachers went to his house to look for him—he was divorced and lived alone—they found him lying on the floor, dead, surrounded by gin bottles. None of us had had a class with Mr. McGlynn, but the drama of his life and death intrigued us. Other students told us about Mr. McGlynn’s shaky hands, the alcohol on his breath; how the import of these details wasn’t noticed until it was too late. The poor man was buried right out behind the school.

We sat in a circle, about twenty feet from the fresh mound of dirt over Mr. McGlynn. There was no stone there yet, just a small metal sign from the funeral home and piles of flowers from Wallamee Junior High. I realized that I didn’t really think Mr. McGlynn would show up and that I had backed myself into a corner: my friends expected a show. All the tricks I knew—the spying confederates, the books of information on all the regular customers, the universal truths that sound like amazing insights—couldn’t help me now. Still, there was no backing out of it. One of my friends, a chubby girl named Sharon who had a lazy eye, started to cry as soon as we sat down.

“It’s all right, Shar,” said my friends, patting her arm. They were nice girls, sensitive and awkward and benign. We waited until Sharon got herself together. I felt the damp ground soak through my skirt and my underpants. We held hands and closed our eyes.

I knew the lingo. If nothing else, that impressed my impressionable friends. I said my mother’s prayer, And there is no Death, and there are no Dead, etcetera, and asked that we all keep ourselves hospitable to the spirits surrounding us. They liked that, I think—hospitable—as if we were part inn, part hospital, opening our doors to dead Mr. McGlynn. After a few minutes of silence, I threw my head back and started talking.

“He’s with us,” I said.

Sharon began to moan and shake.

I told them that he was glad he was through teaching, that he hated it, and he hated all the kids, too. Just the loud, popular kids, actually; he liked the quiet students. I told them that he said we should be nicer to Miss Ludlum, the frail, frightened young woman who taught us typing, because she’d had a tragic life. I hinted at miscarriages. I went on a long time. I said that Donna, my skinny, odd-looking friend, would find true love before any of us, and that Marie would have a difficult life but would be wildly successful one day. I told them that Mr. McGlynn wanted us to study more in history. They bought it all.

And later, when I went home feeling half-fraudulent, half-brilliant, I thought,
Well, why shouldn’t they buy it?
Had I said anything patently false? Or harmful? And how was I to know whether the thoughts that came to me
weren’t
Mr. McGlynn’s?

For several months I gave readings and held séances at school, after school, at parties, in the pink-and-yellow bedrooms of popular girls, in the basement rec rooms of rich kids. I affected a mysterious look: loose hair, dark clothes, a slow smile. I quit forcing myself to talk to people when I didn’t have to. I made sure, though, that I didn’t go too far.

It wasn’t long before my mother found out about what I was doing. She feigned nonchalance.

“Darva Lawrence told me that you gave Teeny an excellent reading,” she said one day at the beginning of the summer. I’d been flopping around the house, bored out of my skull. “She wouldn’t stop talking about it. Maybe you should try working a message service sometime.”

Teeny was a tough girl, a year or two older than me, and though her mother was a medium, Teeny never took any flak for it. I’d given her a truly inspired reading the week before. We all crouched in an alley behind the Ha-Ha, and I said that a spirit who called herself Nana was telling me how misunderstood Teeny was. You can usually hit some kind of pay dirt by telling people they’re misunderstood, or that they have an undeveloped talent—they’re two of the universal truths of mediumship—but it must have struck a particularly resonant chord in Teeny. I saw in her big mean face how wholly misunderstood she felt, and when I told her about her sensitive side, how it needed to come out before she’d ever find true love, she started crying. So did a couple of her mean, leather-jacketed pals.

I knew, when I gave her the reading, that it would get back to my mother sooner or later, since Mrs. Lawrence was my mother’s best friend. Besides lurking around each other’s kitchens, they met once a week for the lunch special at the Italian Fisherman, on the wharf in Wallamee. When we were younger, Teeny and I went with them—Teeny always ordered french fries and applesauce and coleslaw, and she’d kick me hard under the table if I looked at her—and sometimes we’d be thrown together with the same babysitter if our mothers went out on the town. I hated her, really. And she’d never had a good word to say to me until the reading. Seeing that there was a sensitive side to Teeny Lawrence took more empathy than I’d known I had.

With my new hobby out in the open, and my mother giving no sign that she’d laugh at me, I talked to Troy Versted about working a message service. If he was surprised, he didn’t say so. He just shook my hand, said Welcome, and put me on the schedule for a lunchtime Illumination Stump meeting later in the week.

Summers, there were three message services a day in Train Line, the beginning of each signaled by the clanging of the lecture-hall bell. The first was at the Stump at noon, another at the Forest Temple at four, and the last one was at six-thirty, back at the Stump again.

Illumination Stump was in a clearing in the Violet Woods, accessible only by a short walk under towering maple trees and pines. The original stump had been sealed in concrete in order to preserve it, but it still looked like a stump. It was surrounded by a frilly border of petunias and, on holidays, miniature American flags. Facing it were rows of wooden benches painted gray. A sign nailed high on a tree said
PLEASE OBSERVE SILENCE AS THIS IS A PLACE OF WORSHIP
. During a message service, visitors sat on the benches and mediums gathered in back, behind them. In the old days, the rumor was, mediums stood right up on the stump, but now that was considered dangerous, as many of the mediums were elderly, so these days they stood next to it. They’d take turns going up front, where they pulled messages out of the air until Troy or whoever else was mediating gave them the time’s-up signal: a finger across the eyes.

The morning before the first time I worked the Stump, I sweated and paced and changed my clothes three times. I settled on a black sundress with tiny buttons down the front and put my hair back in two silver clips. My mother had agreed to go after me, so that if I flopped she could flop too, and thereby lessen the effect. She encouraged me to come up with some interesting topics ahead of time (“How about sea travel? I haven’t heard that one in a while. And jewelry! No one ever mentions jewelry, but you know, it’s very important to people…”) but I snootily told her I thought that was cheating.

“Oh, please!” said my mother, rolling her eyes.

We walked together through the dappled shade of the Violet Woods. Here and there alongside the path were marble benches, installed by the Victorians so the weak and consumptive could take a little rest on their way to the Stump. A spring of healing waters on the grounds drew crowds during the early part of the century. I imagined the pale young ladies making their way through the woods, skirts trailing, cheeks pinkening in the fresh air. I tried to feel them. I could not feel them. I was a fraud, a fraud, a fraud.