Authors: Mary Chase Comstock
"That's how they want you to feel. Don't. So they
got a few strands of hair. Big deal. They didn't get
you
."
Deirdre shrugged, but she pulled her journal from her
satchel and scrawled again:
Settle me in the attic eaves
Sift me into floorboards
Swallow my heart beneath the bed
A shadow child from nowhere.
IV.
As Panda drove
them back through the rain-washed city, Deirdre rested her face against the
cold window and willed herself to be calm. She felt as if she had been
whiplashed, spun from elation to fear in mere seconds. Her high spirits were
tainted now. She was suspicious of her good fortune.
The Dovinger Prize and the tenure offer had been bolts
from the blue, as shocking and unexpected as that hand in her hair. What did it
mean? Poets and prophets always looked for signs and symbols—it was their
nature—and this sign had been as malevolent as a wasp in a lily.
"We're almost home," Panda said. "You'll
feel better when we get there."
Deirdre nodded. The streets
of her neighborhood shimmered in the rain. Coming home always helped. She
needed to be by herself to recover her equanimity.
The
Queen Anne district was Seattle's answer to San Francisco–a better answer most
locals would insist. It combined cosmopolitan with community. One could go to
the beauty parlor, pick up film, go to the dentist, attend live theatre and buy
an espresso within only a few blocks—and not get mugged.
Deirdre rented the top floor of a former timber baron's
mansion, built in ornate fashion over a hundred years ago. From her airy
watchtower, she was able to observe the city, as well as the water and
mountains beyond it. The living room window opened on a view of ferries, which
continuously traced and retraced their paths through the waterways of Puget
Sound. Across the water, the occasional clear day afforded a breathtaking view
of Hurricane Ridge, a spectacular, saw-toothed crest of the Olympic Mountain
Range.
When Deirdre first discovered the place, she had been so
taken with the panorama she had given only cursory attention to the actual
rooms.
Others might see the former
servants' quarters as cramped and dingy, lacking the magnificence of the rooms
below, but the room arrangement appealed to Deirdre. Its layout reminded her of
a rabbit's warren, low ceilinged and secure. Every time she looked out over the
city and sea, such mundane concerns faded.
The
rain continued, hard now, carrying with it the last yellow leaves of autumn.
Threading a path down the narrow street, Panda squeezed her beetle into the
breathing space between a Mercedes and a Volvo. "Guard the car," she
told the pink dogs.
Deirdre knew it was
too much to expect that Panda would merely drop her off— not after what had
happened.
Panda was too good a soul for
that, but still, Deirdre hoped she wouldn't stay long. She raced up the
zigzagging wooden fire escape that clung to the side of the Victorian era
building and led to her apartment's entrance. By the time Panda caught up with
her, Deirdre was trying to extricate her keys from the tangled depths of her
satchel. At last the telltale jingle revealed their whereabouts and, in another
minute, she and Panda were safe inside.
"I'd forgotten Mrs. Ruiz was coming in today,"
D
eirdre
said when she heard the hum of a vacuum cleaner coming from the bedroom.
She flung her satchel onto the couch and shrugged out of
her damp coat. It seemed she would have to wait for her solitude.
Rosa Ruiz had been cleaning for her once every other week
for the last three years. In that time they had developed an easy-going,
friendly relationship. It had been astoundingly difficult to find someone she
could afford on an assistant professor's salary who would also refrain from tossing
out the dozens of odd pieces of paper she accumulated during the week. To the
unschooled eye, they might look like ordinary trash, but on each was recorded a
line or image, the starting point of a poem or a story that might be
irreplaceable.
After
a series of disastrous episodes with cleaning agencies that sent in a different
crew each time, she had finally interviewed Mrs. Ruiz.
"I'm a writer," she had explained, "and
it's important that nothing with writing on it is ever thrown out, no matter
how meaningless it looks."
"'Diamonds in the dust heap,' eh, Senorita?"
Mrs. Ruiz had smiled knowingly.
"You've read Virginia Woolf?" Deirdre had
asked, a little surprised.
"Sure," Mrs. Ruiz told her. "Anaïs Nin,
Sei Shonagon, Charlotte Brontë. I read all women. Men, they no good."
"What about Mr. Ruiz?"
Mrs. Ruiz had sniffed disparagingly. "Him? Worse
than Hemingway! Don't worry. I pick up the paper and dust underneath."
Deirdre later learned that Mrs. Ruiz had, from time to
time, sat in the back of classrooms and listened in on a variety of lectures
during the years she had worked on the custodial staff of a college. In this
way, she had accumulated an impressive, if inconsistent, store of knowledge.
Eventually, though, one of the professors had complained. Her supervisor had
immediately called her in and told her to take her lunch break in the student
union snack bar like everyone else.
"So, I think about it maybe a minute and then I
quit," Mrs. Ruiz told her with an eloquent shrug. "Can't be much of a
school where they don't want people to learn."
In a few minutes the vacuum whined to a stop and Mrs.
Ruiz emerged from the back of the apartment. She was a tiny woman whose dark
eyes sparkled like a wren's. Her purple velour jogging suit was covered with a
crisp apron, and her frizzy black hair was pulled back with a pair of
mother-of-pearl combs.
"Ah! I thought I hear you two out here," she
nodded to them. "Haven't seen you in a long time, Panda. You ever get a
real job?"
Panda grinned. "Nope, Mrs. Ruiz. I've found another
fake job – I'm collecting urban legends this time." Panda, a folklorist by
training and profession, sustained herself with grant money from the National
Endowment for the Humanities. "You know what I mean," she went on,
"the 'vanishing hitchhiker, dead grandma in the sleeping bag, slugs in the
pop bottle.' Slumber party stories."
Mrs. Ruiz clucked and shook her head. "Can't believe
they pay good money for you just to write down stories everybody knows already.
They gonna catch onto you," she said darkly.
"Could be," Panda agreed with a grin.
Mrs. Ruiz looked over at Deirdre who was standing in
front of a small mirror.
"What's the matter?" Mrs. Ruiz demanded.
"Nothing," Deirdre told her quickly.
"Don't look like nothing." Her eyes narrowed.
"What happened? Why you so scared?"
Deirdre didn't say anything.
"It's just one of those weird things, Mrs.
Ruiz," Panda answered for her. "We were down at the Market for lunch
and someone in the crowd came up behind Deirdre and cut off some of her hair.
See?" she said, pointing out the spot high on the back of Deirdre’s head.
Mrs. Ruiz crossed herself. "I don't like that.
Taking somebody's hair. It's no good." The housekeeper stood a moment,
frowning as she seemed to deliberate. "You sit down, Deirdre."
She stepped across the room to her purse and pulled out a
packet wrapped in
a silk scarf.
"I'm going to read your cards."
"Wow!" Panda sad. "You read tarot cards?
You are a woman of infinite talents, Mrs. Ruiz. Do you mind if I take notes?"
The woman snorted. "Part of your job?"
"You might say that. Tarot has always been a
sub-specialty of mine. I've been tinkering with a paper on variant interpretive
systems for years."
Mrs. Ruiz shrugged. "Just don't interrupt."
She cleared a spot on Deirdre's coffee table, untied the scarf
and ruffled through the deck. After another moment, she pulled out one card and
placed it face up on the table. The Queen of Cups—a crowned woman with flowing
hair sat on a dais above a green ocean. One hand held a glowing cup, the other
a book.
"It looks just like you, Deirdre," Panda
whispered.
Mrs. Ruiz nodded. "It is her. Now hush, Panda. You
sit down here by me, Deirdre," she said, patting the spot next to her on
the sofa. "I want you to shuffle the cards.
Keep on shuffling until you feel like part of
the cards. You'll know when it's time to stop. Then cut the deck. Use your left
hand, and then make two wishes."
Obediently,
Deirdre picked up the deck and began to shuffle almost hypnotically. It had
been an odd day already, almost like a dream. Having her fortune told seemed to
be a part of the same fabric.
Although the cards were larger than those in a normal
deck, they felt smooth and comfortable in her hands. They were beautiful, too.
The images ruffled by—the Lovers, the Magus, the Hanged Man. They fascinated
her, even as they frightened her. Cups, pentacles, wands and swords reminded
her of poems, each with its own symbols and hidden meanings.
Finally,
she stopped, rested her fingertips on the deck and shut her eyes for a long
moment. Two wishes, Mrs. Ruiz had said.
I
want my happiness back.
That one was easy. But the second? She was already
beginning to feel that she had over-reacted to the incident at the market.
Still, a wish did no harm.
I wish no harm
will come from this day.
Then she sat back and waited.
Mrs. Ruiz turned up the top card and frowned. It was the
Tower. She placed it on the Queen of Cups. "Strange things happen all
‘round you," she said.
She turned a second, the five of cups, and placed it
across the other two, "Love crosses, gets in the way."
She turned the third, the Devil. "Lies. All kinds of
lies. Someone wants your power."
She pursed her lips for a moment, then slowly began to
lay the cards out in an asymmetrical pattern around the original three. When
she had finished, she studied the configuration for a long time.
Panda leaned over. "What do you see?"
Mrs. Ruiz leaned forward on her elbows and continued to
contemplate the cards as the minutes ticked by.
Deirdre found herself looking at the symbols
in the layout, trying to interpret it herself, like a text written in a vaguely
familiar but forgotten language.
"I never seen nothing like this before," Mrs.
Ruiz said eventually. "Most times I know what to say, but today I don't
see nothing clear. You see the Queen of Cups, Deirdre. See? This is you. Dreams
and poems in your head. Just like a mirror—everything 'round you reflects. But,
don't forget, everything in the mirror's backwards. Hard to know what you see.
"You gotta be careful," she warned. "Don't
trust nobody. There's all kind of danger 'round you, and bad will. But I think
I see some angels, too."
Mrs. Ruiz stared at the cards a few minutes longer,
shaking her head. “There’s something I want to see,”
she said and
fanned the remainder of the deck across the table.
“Pick one card, Deirdre.”
Deirdre let her hand hover over the array of cards. She
felt a prickling in her fingertips—Just like the witch in Macbeth. She chose
the card nearest her and turned it up.
The Fool
.
Mrs. Ruiz said nothing, but pressed her lips into a thin
line as she swept the cards together into a neat pile.
Panda let her breath go. "I'm going to make a pot of
tea."