"Welcome," Marilyn the Psychic says to me, opening the
screen door to her second floor walk-up. I had found her on my friend's website
for all things hip in Los Angeles.
Most people think hourglass figure
and breathy voice when they hear the name Marilyn; I think of a canasta table
in Queens with glasses of sherry and half eaten potato knishes next to ashtrays
with burning cigarette butts like my mother's best friend, Marilyn Steinberg.
This Marilyn is neither. She looks in her mid-thirties, with straight brown
hair and clear blue eyes. Her outfit is something I call "premeditated LA
effortless." Expensive all-cotton fitted t-shirt and ragged jeans, exposed
manicured toes. Her breasts don't look like any found in nature. That's nothing
special around here; it's just that, in this moment, with me hell-bent on
turning my future over to a psychic, it briefly occurs to me that I could take
my life in a different direction, like say, buying a new pair of boobies!
This is how utterly lost I feel. My
youngest boy is starting preschool in six weeks, which means I will be
completely alone again for three hours a day. All the mundane tasks that for
the last seven years have been filled with hysteria, spit-up, or giggles will
return to what they used to be: quiet, and, dare I write it, lonely. On days
when I feel like I am floating through life without purpose and find myself
wondering what I am going to do when I grow up, looking in my children's faces
tells me that despite my fierce resistance, I have.
So here I sit, taking in Marilyn's
full, perky breasts, looking for I'm not sure what. Solace? Hope? Yes to both.
This is totally worth the two hundred fifty dollars that I won't tell my
husband I'm spending. That I extracted in twenty dollar increments repeatedly
from various accounts so I wouldn't have to write a check that says "psychic"
in the notes line. Psychic is not an expenditure my husband supports.
"So, how did you come to me?"
Marilyn asks, scooping up a grey-haired cat in her doorway and depositing him
in the kitchen, where she drops him and then immediately washes her hands. She
talks while she scrubs. "I do this because I don't want the cat's spirit
confused with yours in the reading," she says over the sound of running water.
"Sure." I say. "Especially since
I'm allergic. Ha!"
Not funny, I think, trying to keep
my face expressionless. I don't want to give Marilyn any clues about who I am.
While she dries her hands, I remember the psychic I went to years before, when
I was single, broke, and sleeping on a futon. The one who told me never to wear
scarves around my neck again and remarked on how hard it must be for me with
all the dead spirits constantly beckoning. I loved her.
"You're funny," Marilyn says,
sizing me up like her cat would if a bird had walked in.
I grunt, determined not to say
another word and feeling skeptical. No great insight so far. People tell me I'm
funny a lot, mostly when I am being dead serious.
Marilyn pulls up a chair and sits
across from me at a table on which a beige stalk of twigs is burning, sending
searing white smoke in to my eyes. I cough and casually set my phone down near
the burning twigs. I'd already hit the record option.
"And you sing. You're a singer, right?"
I don't know if I'm supposed to
answer. Not that I can because I am choking.
"Is that bothering you?" she asks,
pointing to the smoldering shrub.
"Uh, yes, actually it is," I manage
to get out. She shifts it away from me. Now she knows I'm sensitive to smoke,
too. This session is going to be a bust. Everyone knows if you volunteer
information about yourself to psychics, you've screwed your chance of having a
real psychic experience. But how did she know about my singing, I wonder. I
sang in nightclubs all through high school, my signature performance being a
tear-jerking rendition of "Send in the Clowns," but no one in my adult life
knows this. I have started singing again recently while driving my son to and
from surfing two hours a day. I need something to kill the time so I decided to
memorize Broadway soundtracks.
I nod. "Yes, I do sing." For the
next half hour, in a stream-of-consciousness style, she tells me many details
about my kids and my husband that I have no way to verify since they are all
predictions. But apparently I have gifted children, each with his own gifts,
and my marriage is solid. That's good, I think.
"And you're pregnant, right?" she
adds.
"Ha!"
"You're not pregnant?"
"No."
"Weird, because I keep seeing this
baby around you. It's distracting," she says, her hand flying up around the
right side of her head as if trying to swat the baby out of the way. "If you
don't want to be pregnant I'd be very careful."
"Oh, okay," I say, like a teenager
reminded to eat vegetables at dinner. Marilyn swats her hands about in silence.
What a quack, I think, as my eyes wander, landing on an Emmy Award on top of
her armoire. I haven't considered a third child as an option. I'm forty-six.
"This time in your life is really
about you …" Marilyn says with her eyes shut, and then, "Wait a minute." Her
lids pop open; she stops talking and throws her hands up in the air. "The
spirits are telling me something!" She tilts her head up and closes her eyes
again.
"I see you talking in front of
people, big groups of people, telling stories and singing… true, funny stories
about being a mother. Do you do anything like that?"
"Should I answer?" I ask.
"Yes, of course you should answer."
"That's crazy! That's totally what
I already do! How did you know that?"
Before she can respond, her head
snaps to the right, she looks over her shoulder, shrugs it, and then turns her
focus back to me.
"And you're sure you're not having
a baby?" she asks again, narrowing her pretty eyes at me. "Because the spirits
are really trying to send you one. Be careful if you don't want another baby."
"Okay," I say, ninety-nine percent
less cynically than when she first mentioned it.
"Thanks," I say, placing an
envelope of cash next to the burning embers on the ash-covered table, glancing
at the time on my phone.
Feeling
slightly rattled and oddly exposed, I walk out to my car in the hot sun. I
listen to the recording of the session on the way home.
"That was unexpected," my husband says, pulling
up his boxers that night—and the next, and the next, and the next. I
decide if the spirits are that vehemently behind me having another baby, I
should at least give it a shot. Ten days later I start to feel sick. Everything
smells overwhelming, like it's triple scented, always the biggest sign I'm
knocked up. I play the recording of my session with Marilyn while I run
errands, making sure I didn't miss anything vital.
Unable to keep the truth to myself, I break down
and call my friend Christy.
"I'm pretty sure I'm pregnant."
"Really. How far along? Have you taken a test?"
"Not yet, it's still too early, but
I have every symptom and I just know."
"Okay," she says. "Wow." There is a
pause in the conversation,
"Oh! And I went to see a psychic
and she was amazing," I add, as if just remembering this detail.
"Oh. A psychic. Yeah, I'm not into
that."
"Me neither," I lied, "but this one
consults on Medium and she was so
dead on. She asked if I wrote and told stories about being a mother to groups
of people. She just asked me that, out of nowhere."
"Wait, you exchanged e-mails with
this woman to set the appointment, right?"
"Yes."
"Yeah," Christy said, "it's not
hard to Google Dani Klein Modisett and find out what you do."
"Oh" I say, "Right," not believing
that Marilyn had done that. Marilyn is a highly respected psychic with an Emmy
Award; she doesn't need to cheat.
"But the point is, she kept seeing
a baby around me," I said, "and now my temperature is elevated and …"
"Wait, is that why you think you're
pregnant?" Christy asks quietly.
"No," I say.
"Dani …"
"Okay maybe a little, but I also
feel really sick and …"
"I just don't want you being
disappointed."
"I won't be. I'm not that nuts."
We hang up and I head to the
kitchen to eat saltines.
In the next few weeks I feel more and more ill. I
start taking my temperature as soon as I open my eyes in the morning to confirm
that it is up a few degrees. And every morning, it is. I am amazed that Marilyn
could be this fucking psychic.
"I'm pretty sure I'm pregnant," I
finally tell Tod.
"Um. Wow," he says, in the same way
he reacts initially to all life-changing news.
"Are you sure?"
"Yep."
"Have you taken a test?"
"Not yet. But I know." I say.
"Honey, don't you think you should
wait and take a test?" he says two nights later when I crawl in to bed at
seven-thirty.
"You don't believe me. That's
fine."
"Honey, I believe you, I just think
we need to calm down until we know for sure, because if it's true, there are a
lot of things to consider. Number one is the health of the baby, you know …
'cause …"
"My age, right, I know."
"And we'd have to move."
"I know, I know. But wouldn't it be
cool if it were a girl? A little girl for the boys to play with."
"Yeah … and torture," Tod adds.
"Yeah."
We smile and he kisses me on the
forehead. "Take a test, honey, and we'll go from there."
The next day I call my gynecologist. "I'm pretty
sure I'm pregnant."
"Really. Are you late?"
"No, not yet, but I can just tell.
I have all the symptoms."
"Well, anything is possible. Have
you taken a test?"
"No," I say, "it's still a few days
early. My psychic knew before I did, isn't that so cool?"
"Okay… Well, as soon as you take a
test and it's positive, come on in."
"Great. Thanks!"
Days pass. I feel sicker and sicker and more and
more happy. I'm going to be a mother again. I won't have to figure out what to
do with my own life for at least another three years. Sure, I'll be that freaky
grandmother-looking mom you see in preschool classes mostly in Los Angeles and
New York, but so what? I'll be doing what I love most again, and it's not like
I forced this one: The spirits drove this train. A familiar feeling of calm
comes over me, a feeling I've only known witnessing the beginning of life and
the end. Of knowing that in this moment, I am doing exactly what I am supposed
to be doing.
I get in to bed, my thermometer on my nightstand,
home pregnancy test in the bathroom. Tomorrow is the right number of days to
test. I wake up to pee at five a.m. I look down, and, in the morning light of
our bathroom, I see blood on the toilet paper.
"Oh," I say, my heart sinking.
"What a sucker I am, what a stupid sucker." I flush, get back in to bed and
curl myself up. I pull a pillow close to my cheek and let myself cry softly,
muttering, "So stupid, so fucking stupid."
Tod stirs.
"Honey, you okay?"
"Yes," I say. "But I'm not
pregnant. I'm such an idiot."
"Oh," he says, moving his body
toward mine. "It's okay, it's okay," he adds, putting his arms around me.
"I know. We're so lucky," I say,
meaning it with all my heart, but at the same time also wondering how I will
ever make what I have enough. How I will ever quiet my own spirit that is
forever restless.
And just then right on cue, I hear,
"Mom?"
"Yes, honey," I answer, clearing my
throat.
"I have to go dooty. Can you help
me?"
I pull myself out of bed and think,
Please, God, no more psychics.
At least not until the boys leave
for college.
It’s great to read this again a year after writing it. Turns out I have a summertime restlessness in anticipation of the school year, even though I’ve been out of formal education for over twenty years. The great news is that after my hysterical pregnancy, I know this about yself and I don’t let it drive me to psychics. I also now really get that I am a highly suggestible person. It’s part of what made me a good actress and something I need to be very aware of in real life. This summer, instead of consulting Marilyn, I went to see a career counselor who has helped me to set some real goals for myself as my children become more independent. It’s not nearly as funny a story, or dramatic, but I’m plugging away and certainly it feels more solid than relying on “spirits” to shape my future and that of my family.
And I sound very serious now and grown up now, don’t I?
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