the hint of a curve, no matter how old that curve is, he’s practicing on you. It’s almost cute. He has grown tall and strong and brown over this Indian summer, but the baby, the boy straining underneath the skin of the man, is all up in his face. I hear Katherine’s little knock-kneed girls giggle as he struts by. His long arm waves as he gives them his back. Still wearing pigtails and bright bobos, they are too young to be kee-keeing in the manboy’s face, but it’s summer, such as it is, the ice cream man hasn’t crawled by yet, and young hearts are for flirting, for loving, if nothing else. Or so I am told.
I stand in the shade of the fire escape, breathe in the scent of spices and my struggle herbs as the manboy disappears around a corner, down the brownstoned street. Aunt Dissy had the gift of green. Me, a different story. My rosemary looks dry, the peppermint and basil wilted, and the yarrow won’t bloom. With my back to the kitchen, I can feel the spirits pulling the huge sky over me. The air feels heavy, humid with the weight of rain. Sheltered from the wind, my skin feels like ripe fruit about to burst. I haven’t slept for nearly two days. A dry spell. Haven’t had dream the first. Aunt Dissy’s book sits on the kitchen table, atop its golden stand, its pages closed, judging me.
A lone black sock from the rough and tumblers upstairs just barely misses my head. That couple is always fighting. Everyone on the block already knows how that dream ends. I watch the sock sail down to the dirty street below, like a fuzzy feather, a sign or a warning. It falls in slow motion, a sign surely, but I don’t know what it means. It’s too early in the day and I can’t tell which. The inside of my head itches. My eyes probably look like teabags. I’m afraid to look. In my mind I am two thousand miles away. My Sight is shaded up from the hot sun. Like a rainbow-tailed serpent, it won’t budge until it’s cool.
I close my eyes. Right now I don’t want to see anything, don’t want to hear, don’t even want to feel. But I know he is standing outside the door before the bell rings.
“Come, sit down,” I tell him and wave at the piano stool set up before my table. He sits as if the weight of his burdens has just sat down on the stool with him. His face and his thin shoulders worn down with worry, the remnants of his dreams linger in the wrinkles of a loose shirt that is too big for him. The man looks not much older than me, but I’m a Dissy—got more years than the stories in my skin can tell. I don’t offer him a drink or a cool glass of water, don’t want him to get too comfortable here. The hard, backless stool is perfect, uncomfortable by design. When I had that old cushy armchair, fools asked me questions late into the night. The frightened and the lonely. The vengeful and the resigned. My head hurt, my eyes stung, and my mind was weary with their dreams. I couldn’t get them out of that seat.
You don’t get what you want because you want it. The waxy skin of my palm, the faded scars, remnants of a jagged river, was proof that not everything is meant for you. No, not love or riches, health or success. With Aunt Dissy’s words in mind, I enjoyed the comforts of flesh, the mysteries of skin. Pleasure came easy because I never expected more. While others gnashed their teeth and wept at the comings and goings of lovers, my heart drifted above dry land, tumbled into dark caverns like water, slumbered in the shadows. Intimacy gave the vastness of my loneliness a sheltering look. His is the face of a man who might turn on you at any time. As if he was just born, already wary of the world.
“If I ask a question, will you tell a lie or answer me true?” he asks.
“Depends on the question.”
He leans on my table—I hate when they do that—presses his palms into the indigo Adire cloth so hard, that I can see the dark lines on his knuckles, the veins running along the top of his hand to his wrist.
“Do you have the Sight or do you just need money?”
I stare into his black pool eyes, unblinking.
“‘Cuz if it’s the latter, I can pay you for your trouble and save us both the time.”
He’s got an accent I can’t quite place. Something with a river in it, deep and Southern.
Can he see my discomfort or am I invisible? What is the right answer?
A lie or the truth?
He is not the first to sit in my chair, nor the first to ignore the signs, to will the impossible. Trying to change one’s fate is a lifelong Sisyphean task, but to change another’s is like trying to move a brick wall by hitting it with your fists. In the center of this knotted thought, your desire, is the belief that if you will it, change will be. Rest assured, the people who come to me have bloody fists. They sit in my chair, much like him, with disappointment or hope or both peering from the shadows beneath their eyes. And they expect me to move the wall for them, expect me to make a lie a truth.
I watch his hands, now cupped in his lap as if they hold a message. The remnants of his dream waft off him like invisible smoke, snaking through the air over to me. I don’t want to be bothered but my utilities are due. Mama may have left me the house but she left plenty of bills, too. Utilities and property taxes so high, I had to break down and take on worrisome tenants. The sock puppets upstairs.
“Yes and yes,” I say. He thrusts five folded bills in my open hand. I slip them in my trusted bank, adjust my bra strap, pat my breast.
Listen, telling lies is easier than reading, and reading is harder than telling the truth. It had been hard even with Aunt Dissy at my side. She greedily watched me as I slept, combed through every detail of my most mundane dream. It became even more challenging without her, because I never thought I would be. Of all the Dissys who came to me, it’s odd that Aunt Dissy never did. I waited for her those first weeks, but all I received from her defiant portrait was silence. And yet when she lived, I studied the ways and means, the art and the craft of reading dreams. And make no mistake, it is an art, the delicate task of mixing the truth with half-truths, but she joined Mama and the line of Dissys before she could tell me all her secrets. Before she died I wondered if she ever would. Her death was a final sign of disapproval. The signs and symbols of the old policy dream book remained a mystery to me.
Truth be told, mistakes were made. After one mother came, her belly hanging low, her forehead riven with anxiety, that night I dreamed of a large sumptuous table. Luscious fruit, sweets, and bread were piled high around two bright brass candelabras with candles. I was so relieved to see the fresh fruit, the loaves of bread. I didn’t notice that while one of the candles was bright, the other flickered in the dark, almost spent. I told the woman she had nothing to fear. Her son, would be healthy, safe. So when she gave birth to twins, one who wailed in her arms, the other who shed no tears but was still warm, I counted her loss as my own. I grieved, for all I could see and for all I did not.
It was with her, that first mournful young mother, that I learned the power of nuance, the strength in ambiguity. Neither was for charlatans to hide, but for professionals to appreciate. Every square-toed soothsayer and two-boots traveler knew the universal sign for the conception of a boy, but I’d failed to see that the pair of candles in my dream meant that she would give birth to twins. A novice, I could see all the signs but I misread the symbols. Instead I’d spoken to the mother as if her child’s fate was assured. A jackleg error is what Aunt Dissy would have said, a rookie rushing toward the finale instead of redreaming and working the scene.
Long after that mother buried her child, I wondered if he might have lived or if I could have better prepared her for the loss. But even if I had known, and told her that her son would die, she would have hated me still. Never to return. Each day I woke with that mother’s grief running down my face. But tears wouldn’t help me. They never did. I had learned the hard way, the danger in misinterpreting a dream. It was almost as painful as refusing to see a dream at all, and I wanted nothing more than to be rid of Aunt Dissy’s burden, my ‘best luck.’ I tried every drug and remedy I could find, lost myself in the forgetfulness of flesh, hoping something or someone would grant me the release of a dreamless sleep. But still they came, surrounded me. Dreaming awake, the Dissys watched from their gilded portraits, silent on the wall, the dream book waiting, as always, on its stand.
“A