Fortunes by Contessa
I’ve never told this to anyone—I don’t just mean to a roomful of strangers, I mean ANYONE, not even my husband, mostly because the whole thing is so completely ridiculous but also—I was scared I might jinx myself, like even whispering the words would screw me in the greater cosmic order.
Okay, here goes: When I was nineteen years old a psychic told me my ovaries were broken. Clearly she was mistaken—the proof is right now kicking me in the bladder and if I can get through this story without stopping to pee than I deserve a standing ovation, people—anyhow, the ridiculous part is: I’ve been walking around for over a decade wondering WHAT IF. What if I can’t have a kid?
It’s a completely irrational assessment—all my goods are in order, medically speaking. In fact, when I was twenty-five and especially poor, the doctor at the free clinic suggested I sell off my eggs. “You’re an ideal candidate, Megan,” she told me. “White, blonde and healthy with a graduate degree, you could ask top dollar.” I was on the table in the paper robe, no idea how to respond ‘cause 1) there were so many things wrong with that comment I didn’t know where to begin 2) I’m never sure how to talk to doctors when I’m naked and 3) I didn’t think my “top dollar” eggs worked because of some two-bit storefront psychic which is so STUPID! I don’t even believe in the paranormal. The astrological. The Universe has a greater plan for us all blah blah take a bath and get a job, that’s what I always thought. Until I sat across from that frizzy-haired bitch of a gypsy who told me I’d never have kids.
I wound up there because of my college roommate, this seventeen-year-old deadhead fuitloop who played Indigo Girls on repeat. Also, she owned a drum. With which she went “drumming,” I’m telling you, the girl was a 3D stereotype: Birkenstocks—check—gauzy skirts—check—homeade beads of femo clay—check—in her dred locks—check check.
“I’m Nancy,” she said the day we met, both of us lugging suitcases into the dorm, “but you can call me Persephone.”
“No I can’t,” I told her, ‘cause if I did I’d asphyxiate on my own vomit. This was a phrase I used often at nineteen, always with a scoff after the “vomit”, like I’m gonna asphixiate on my own vomit SCOFF. I’d learned that word from the movie Heathers, where Winona Ryder is all dark and angsty, with too much eyeliner and Sylvia Plath? I wanted to BE the Heathers Winona Ryder, which meant a girl like me and a girl like Nancy sharing a dorm room was enough to “fuck me gently with a chainsaw.”
For six months I endured her tarot cards and rain sticks, the Celtic runes and power crystals and ying yang balls, dream catchers, hemp African handbags Vegan cookies wheatgrass and alters to Shiva but the absolute WORST was: she had a dirty boyfriend. Not dirty like SEX dirty. Dirty like the man didn’t believe in showering—something about natural human oils and masculine essence—bottom line: he stank, plus he and Nancy had these ridiculous conversations like, “I love you Persephone.” “I love you, too, Dawid”—he’d changed the v in David to a w ‘cause of some Hebrew Sun God or whatever, I don’t know, and he’d say, “Not only do I love you, Persephone, you ARE love,” and she’d say, “because of you,” and I’d puke all over myself ‘cause dorm rooms at BU are like two feet wide so my bed was practically on TOP of them which, it turns out, Da-WEED would’ve actually been down with ‘cause he was one of those dirty Free-Love hippies, like we should all love each other and take off everyone’s pants! Turns out there were all sorts of girls on campus who not only did he love, they WERE love, and when Nancy found out that precious fact, she played Tori Amos for two straight weeks.
Which made me want to die.
This is how I wound up at the psychics. Had I been in my right mind, it never would’ve happened, but I was so brain-dead from the “But what if I’m a mermaid in these jeans of his with her name still on ‘em” that when Nancy lifted her face off the tye-dyed tapestry and said, “I need to know if we’ll still be together in another life!” I said, OKAY FINE!—without knowing what I was getting myself into.
The place was called Spiritual Energy Readings—some Sherpa friend of Nancy’s told her about it —and it was the laaast place I’d expect to connect with the greater power of the Universe. There were no candles. No bead curtains. No crystal balls or black cats or bloody chicken bones, just a second floor storefront not unlike the crack houses on Law and Order: nasty carpet, a couple folding card tables, and a blinking neon sign that said FORTUNES BY CONTESSA.
I shot Nancy my are you fucking kidding me look, but when faith in the Earth Mother’s Taurus was wavering in someone else’s Libra, the hippie requires a guide to again find her spiritual path. The fact that Nancy’s guide was not the Crystal Goddess of the North, but rather a short, fat, forty-something woman with frizzy hair, too much jewelry and a Led Zeppelin T-Shirt was irrelevant. Nancy took one look at Contessa, and burst into tears.
Contessa nodded slowly and lit a Kool. “Ah,” she said. “You have problem.”
Nancy’s red puffy eyes widened in amazement: she actually thought this woman had just stared into the very depths of her soul. “I DO have problem!”
Of COURSE you have problem! I wanted to yell, but was, of course, too busy asphyxiating on my own vomit so instead I watched as Nancy crumbled into a lawn chair, dropped a twenty on the folding table and spent the next half hour feeding this little Orc of a woman all the information necessary to guess her whole life story, as in:
“I just miss him so much!”
“Ah, there is man.”
“There IS man!”
“And this man … he has left?”
“He HAS left!”
“There is other woman?”
There is seven other woman at last count, I thought, but Nancy was crying again, getting snot up in her dredlocks. This went on for a long time: I remember Contessa chain-smoked Menthols. She excused herself twice to answer the phone. She dealt a tarot deck with the same speed and efficiency as my cousin Paul the poker shark, and somehow—in the end—she made my squirrely-ass roommate feel better.
“I don’t know how to thank you!” Nancy gushed, reaching into her free-trade purse for more cash. That’s when Contessa lit another Kool and pointed at me.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“You come,” she said.
“No thank you.”
“I said COME.”
“And I said NO.”
Looking back on it now, I wonder if she DID have some kind of psychic gift—or maybe her other job was bartending and she could just read people really well, whatever the case, she leaned back in her chair and said the one thing in the greater Universe that could’ve made me stay: “I see. You are afraid.”
Had someone told Heathers Winona Ryder she was afraid, she’d of made them drink Draino, and while I was not YET that tough, I was on my way, dammit, no way no how was I afraid. I sat down in the lawn chair and took a Kool out of that pack, I used HER zippo to light it, and dragged deep. I was going to say BRING IT ON CONTESSA but I didn’t smoke so instead I concentrated on not coughing.
She looked at my palms first, and gave me the usual: you’re strong willed, you’ve traveled far, you’ll give the world great things blah blah it was textbook predictable: I kept expecting her to bust pout with, "There is great curse on your family, come back with two thousand dollar and I lift it with the innards of goat." It was when she switched to the tarot cards that things got weird: she spread five out in front of me—cups, wands, knight of something, I don’t remember—she stared at them for a really long time, and then she said—
“Oh.”
It’s those single syllables that’ll kill you: Your dentist says OOPS. Your pregnancy test says PLUS. Your psychic says OH.
“It could be nothing,” she said.
But I looked at her face and I knew it was something.
I thought of Heathers Winona Ryder, at the end of the movie when she’s all strong and tough: she wouldn’t just sit here. She’d grab a switchblade out of her Doc Marten and slam it through this woman’s hand. Then she’d say something very witty and obscene involving household appliances and get the hell out of there, down to the sidewalk and back into the world where free will reigned and fate didn’t reside in some fifty cent novelty store crystal. Stand up, I told myself, stand up and get out of here ‘cause you don’t believe in this stuff anyhow—but the thing is, all of a sudden I did.
I imagined all the things that could be behind that OH—like maybe I’d die tomorrow, maybe I’d kill someone tomorrow, maybe everyone would be killed tomorrow over something I said or did or thought—"TELL ME,” I said to Contessa, and it wasn’t me being tough, it was me being scared.
I don’t remember exactly how she said it—something about my middle or my insides or my “lady parts”—but she did use the word BROKEN. She said, “You are broken.”
Had this woman been my doctor, then the fear I’ve been carrying around for the past decade would be logical. I could understand that panicky WHAT IF feeling as I held my friends’ new baby, or whispered with my husband about our Someday Far off in the Future Children or, seven months ago, taking a pregnancy test in the public restroom at the Uncommon Ground. Maybe some of you have had that experience? Waiting the three minutes between peeing on the stick and your whole life changing?
As the first minute passed, I thought about myself at nineteen: I wore Doc Martens and Fishnets, I lived in a different place every six months and I THOUGHT I knew everything. Now, I have a home, a husband I’m so crazy about I can’t even breathe sometimes and I’m SURE I know… one or two things.
As the second minute passed, I thought about how I wanted this kid so fuckin’ bad I could probably explode this bathroom with the sheer power of my brain: bricks would fly off the wall, plumbing would rip up from the floor and I’d be left sitting on the toilet amidst the rubble and dust, staring at that little plastic stick.
It was after the third minute, though, that I got it—Nancy and Contessa and crystal balls and all of it—because in spite of all my non-belief, there must really be some greater power in the Universe. The proof is right now kicking me in the bladder.