A PSYCHIC, A SEIZURE, A CHAIR by Sage Marsters
Lydia has nothing to wear, nothing she wants to wear. What she wants is a purple kimono and a pair of gold slippers. Her roommate, Janet, isn’t home. Hardworking Janet. Janet is an upstanding secretary at a school for slow children. She loves the children, and the parents too. She’s like a fantasy from the 50’s, with knee-length navy blue skirts and a purse. They’ve spoken at length only twice. Once, when Lydia first moved in they drove to a giant discount store on the side of a highway and bought family-sized cleaning products, Comet, bleach, and Formula 409. And once they had a discussion about Lydia’s hair clogging the drain.
Lydia decides she’ll go naked. Like an air bath. Isn’t that what sailors once did on ships? Walked about letting the sea air cleanse their skin? She’s heard that somewhere, or read it. She works at a bookstore and reads too much and never finishes anything. Incomplete information floats about in her head. Or maybe it was queens in the 1400’s, when they were afraid of water. She tosses her clothes aside. She tries to think of the air as water lapping against her skin; she moves to let it get in, let it cool and wash her.
But it’s too quiet, early afternoon, she’s never home at this time. The floor is dusty, she can feel it between her toes. She might be the only one in the building. She wants the radio and television and traffic sounds she’s used to, the pipes groaning, dishes clattering. A bitter taste coats her mouth. She woke from the seizure with it, and it hasn’t left: her first seizure. It’s nothing, she thinks, but when she forgets not to she sees the slippery rivers of her brain, and some strange activity there, nerves crisscrossed and sparking, sending out currents and waves, or a tumor growing, pressing down, the size of maybe a button or an acorn.
That’s what she knows about seizures, that they can be the sign of a tumor, or that the brain may simply have become overwhelmed, for a moment. The taste is like battery acid and coffee. She keeps thinking of that, too, of sipping black coffee from a thick, white restaurant mug and finding a battery at the bottom of the cup, watching the battery slide along the china and clink against her teeth.
She will avoid doctors, hospitals, electrodes and large machines. She doesn’t have money anyway, and she doesn’t even know where the hospital is. She likes the women’s clinic on Haight, potholder mitts on the stirrups to keep the bottoms of your feet warm, the chubby doctor in purple sweatpants. She went once to get tested for everything. She marched herself down and took herself out for a salad afterward to celebrate, at a sunny, spare restaurant famous for serving gigantic salads in wooden bowls, the radishes and the carrots cut beautifully, perfectly, by Buddhist monks or something, but she never went back for the results.
The iron lung, that’s what she thinks of when she thinks of sickness, a machine like an old-fashioned cook stove, sooty black pipes. Her mother used to go on and on about a man she knew as a child, a neighbor, who had been hooked up to the iron lung. Lydia has always pictured an obese man with black curls and soiled pants, trapped in a room with yellow walls, mechanically wheezing. But she has no idea, she’s had to make most of it up herself. Her mother has the ability to talk and talk without giving any information. Maybe she can diagnose herself: a vitamin deficiency, a wheat allergy, a need for more sunlight. Poke herself in a few key spots, behind her knees, in her lower belly. The Chinese have a way of diagnosing based on examining the color and texture of the tongue. She saw a museum exhibit on it once, with mirrors where you could study your own tongue, and plastic models of other tongues sticking out from the wall.
Either way, the day is not a waste. She has a new chair, it waits for her in the corner of her bedroom. She has placed it carefully so that it faces the one window, looking out on a narrow alley, a puzzle of pipes and stairs and back windows that she often finds herself staring into, noting insignificant things – a small black radio and its silver antennae, the cuffs of a pink terry cloth robe, a spider plant rooting in a jar – as though these things hold great meaning. Sometimes she thinks they do; she thinks she sees the simple but most poignant pieces that make up lives, and she thinks she is part of something because she notices these details. Once she saw two hands at an old typewriter, that was all she could see, the movement of lanky fingers and the black and silver body of the typewriter, and she paused in her room, listening for a long time, as though the clack and thwack of the keys was somehow punctuating her, holding her still.
The chair is important; she doesn’t have any furniture. She hasn’t bought a bed, instead she’s made a nest from her old flannel shirts and some sofa pillows she found on the street. Scattered here and there across the floor are the cheap, enticing things she rewards herself with on her days off: black and white postcards – Frida Kahlo, Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin – scented candles that sometimes come with chants or prayers, musky incense, packets of ginseng gum (she loves the shining red wrapper, the ginseng root that looks like a twisted little man), good shoe laces, bright, fruit-flavored lip gloss. She buys this stuff, but she never uses it. Mostly, she likes the packages, the crinkling paper, to have these things to kick aside when she wakes up in the morning. There’s a pile of books she borrowed from The Cellar Muse, the bookstore where she works, some poetry, a few thick novels. Her intention is to read them secretly and then to slip them back onto the store’s shelves, never missed. But she never accomplishes either task. Now Anita, the owner of the store, has her on the lookout for pale thieves in oversized coats. Anita suspects a drug ring that somehow involves literature as collateral.
The seizure happened at the bookstore. Lydia was up front at the cash register, her hands floating over the keys as she eyed the customers. There was a plump woman dressed entirely in red and black, like a checkerboard: black headband, red turtleneck, black skirt, red pumps, the raving queen, after Alice. And another woman, heavily jeweled, looking at the largest and most expensive book in the store, a book about Faberge Eggs, three elaborate eggs decorating the cover. The Faberge Egg woman opened the book and ran her fingers slowly across the glossy pages, and the checkerboard woman rubbed her nyloned thighs belligerently toward the counter, and then the air changed, congealing around Lydia. There was the smell of marzipan and violets coming from the checkerboard. But there’s supposed to be something more, halos and auras, falling down a tunnel.
She should make herself eat, and then sleep. Feed herself and tuck herself into bed. She walks to the kitchen and stands at the kitchen sink: it holds a milky bowl and a spoon. There’s food in the fridge, she knows, and in the cupboards, but most of it isn’t hers. She leans into the fridge and pushes at Janet’s food: a cooked chicken breast in a Ziploc bag, a jar of half-eaten bean dip, a limp bundle of asparagus, a tub of vanilla frosting. These are the edges she knows Janet by, the sound of her shower and then her keys at the door in the morning, the lingering smell of her jojoba shampoo, how Janet cooks chicken breasts and leaves them for herself, sealed and ready in Ziploc bags.
Lydia finds what’s hers, half a lemon and a jar of green olives. In the cupboard, a tall box of Saltines. Saltines are good for sickly children. Saltines for the flu, with flat ginger ale and maybe some TV. You could live off Saltines. You could make a million things with Saltines. Saltines & tuna casserole. Saltines and salty soup. Saltines and ketchup. Saltine and peanut butter sandwiches. You could make a life out of Saltines and a few jars of this and that, the comfort of lids opening. Her mother has always lived off toast and Red Rose tea. She never thinks of her mother without thinking of toast and tea at the kitchen table, the pale green curtains at the window, the slumped tea bag, a few crumbs.
She stands at the counter and cuts the lemon. The silver edge of the counter is cold and hard at her hip. The knife is heavy in her hand, but her fingers are calm, she thinks, watching herself. She’s merely left herself, suddenly, violently, and returned. A fit, a brief moment of possession, and then release, that’s something else she’s heard about seizures. But it’s still light outside and it doesn’t seem right, she’s standing in this moment that is like her life, but isn’t. Usually, now, at the counter, it’s late, her shift at the store and her dawdling walk home behind her, and someone in another apartment is playing jazz, and the night-smell of licorice is coming in through the cracked window, and she shakes her hips at the counter while she makes herself a gin and tonic, Janet in bed like a slumbering child. She misses it and she doubts it will come again, the pattern disrupted now.
She makes herself lemon water and carefully butters the Saltines and arranges them in a circle on a plate with the olives in a pile in the middle. The butter glistens over the crackers. Soon, tomorrow, she’ll buy a tin of smoked oysters and a six-pack of beer and take a bath and then sit eating oysters and drinking cold beer and looking at a magazine. She’ll buy a glossy and frivolous magazine. She’ll study the ads, she’ll rub herself with the perfumed inserts. She’ll read and get drunk, a calm, thick, beery drunk, hearty and belly full. No more gin. A gin drunk is rattling, bones and fingernails, clean and stripping. She loves it. She has an oversized green mug she drinks her gin from, a mug she drank from throughout college and brought with her to the West Coast to continue drinking from. It’s one of her only dishes. She also has a child’s bowl that says Oatmeal that she bought at a yard sale, and a spoon and a fork and good knife. But the gin is doing something to her mind maybe, puckering it up, too much gin. Didn’t her great-grandmother, the one she never met, die from too much gin? Died in a stale home somewhere, bottles of gin rolling around in her underwear drawer? Something about gin and death in the family. Beer and wine will balance her. The bathroom has a clawfoot tub and a window from which she can sometimes see a corner of the moon while she bobs in hot water; she hasn’t taken advantage of it enough. She will begin taking regular baths, she will sip from a glass of wine in the bath, and she will begin eating buttered toast for breakfast. Maybe she’ll buy a cat. Her mother said to get a cat, that getting a pet is a way of taking care of yourself.
She shuts the door to her room and sits naked in her new chair with her plate of olives and crackers, eating methodically. A cracker, an olive, a sip of lemon water, like medicine. Her new chair is not as comfortable as it looked. A broken piece of wicker jabs at her kidney. It’s been a long day. Phil the psychic came in, it feels like a long time ago, she has to reach far back into her mind, but that was today. He found her at the back of the store, crouched, reshelving in Self-Help. Phil says he can smell the East Coast on her, snow and salt and silverware polish, he knows that smell, even though it’s from his other lifetime in Connecticut. She should’ve come sooner, he always says, she would’ve been wined and dined in the 70’s, she would’ve fit in with all the blondes he knew then, pink champagne and Fruit Loops for breakfast.
“What’s the news, Phil?” she remembers asking, looking up at him from the floor, looking up the trunks of his legs in fraying green suit pants, glad to see him, wanting to hear something about herself. He knelt down next to her on the thin carpet, the color of dry leaves, his knees crackling, his fleshy face hovering. She liked his hair, she tried always to look around his face at his hair, it was like a child’s, golden and thin and simple, falling in pleasing slats as though someone, a mother, regularly sat him in a chair and got him to stop wiggling and placed a bowl on his head and snipped.
“Listen,” he whispered, pulling a deck of Tarot cards from his jacket, thinning corduroy, leather patches at the elbows. It was a jacket she remembered her father wearing to work in the 80’s. Phil had never used the cards with her before, though she’d been waiting. He’d promised to read them for her, and to do her chart one day too, the real way, to study the alignment of all the planets at the moment of her birth. She took the deck from his hands, the cards worn soft and leathery. “Shuffle,” he told her. He watched her for a while, the movement of the cards in her hands stirring a moldy breeze between them, and then he reached forward and grabbed a card from her. “This one,” he said, shaking the card. “See, there you are.”
Squinting, she made out a green globe, and a woman’s fleshy legs, maybe a bundle of wheat. He said, “Don’t you even recognize yourself? I can see you pretty clearly.”
“Isn’t it more than one card?” she asked, but he ignored her.
“There you are pure and naked on top,” he announced. “You’re on top of the world.” He was sputtering against his p’s. “I see you bare. You’re bared to the world.”
She looked around the dim aisle as though she might see herself in papery form. “What does it mean?” she asked, but he took the deck back from her and tucked his slats of hair behind his ears. His left cheek had changed, a crimson stain rising and spreading. She heard the click-clicking of Dean, the Vietnam vet, pruning his fingernails in the next aisle. She was very aware of herself under her clothes.
“Why don’t you tell her to stop working for her mother,” Dean called over. Dean spent his days in an old chair, cleaning his fingernails out with the prongs of a tarnished fork. He moved the fork along the tips of his fingers, prowling and digging, collecting flecks of gray skin and dirt. Once a week he clipped his nails, and Lydia vacuumed up the parings before going home, a ring of slivers around the chair. At some point he had decided that Anita was her mother, and Lydia liked to act the dutiful daughter in his presence. She called back, “Hi, Dean.”
“I’m tired,” Phil said. He stood awkwardly, clutching the spines of four books to steady himself, and then he left, striding toward the sunlight at the front of the store as though wearing a cloak.
Now her muscles are sore in odd spots, at her ankles, behind her knees, in her stomach and in her jaw; it’s a soreness that somehow feels familiar though, a pain that is weirdly comfortable, like an old bruise coming again from some recurring misstep, that chair leg, that corner. She wraps herself in an old afghan and then nestles back in her chair. The afghan smells of smoke and hair. She likes to sit in her nest and smoke late at night even though Janet has said No Smoking, and sprays Lysol along the hallway in the morning if Lydia breaks the rule, the sound of the hissing can waking her. Usually Phil told her more helpful things. Once, he had looked at her feet and said that she knew how to be truly feminine. He’d said that she was meant to be taller, which she had always suspected. Another time he said that she would end up in a cold gray city, but not San Francisco, maybe Chicago, or Boston or Pittsburgh. “No,” she told him, and he snapped, “You don’t know a thing about it.”
She’d been annoyed with Phil, but she has the sense that he knows her. She’s started to dress for him, she realizes, and for the other regulars, red lipstick, gauzy shirts, her hair loose, and to think of herself as slightly ethereal, blonde and thin in the dank aisles. Lately she’s been thinking that she could work in the bookstore forever, that maybe that is what she’s capable of and perfectly suited for, spending her days in that sprawling territory, a musty forest. Anita usually commands the front of the store, but the back is for Lydia and the regulars and the books that no one buys, and the thieves, shadowy and cool, the smudgy pine shelves running crooked, the old chairs slumped like bodies, the dark corner-flickers of mice. She has a favorite pair of black velvet pants she wears almost every day, the velvet fits sleekly to her thighs, the pants zip on with one zipper at her hip, like zipping on furred legs. The regulars depend on her, the man with bottle-thick glasses that turn his eyes to fish-slippery flashes of white, and Phil is her friend, and Dean sometimes brings her gifts from the street, tattered flowers, doll’s limbs, dice, marbles.
And she likes shelving. It gives her a rigid satisfaction she can feel in her fingertips and in her teeth, to pull out a book, to line it up right where she wants it, to see what she has done. It reminds her of arranging her doll house, when she was little, leaning her face into the tiny rooms, setting each one in precise order, rugs, chairs, tables, even tea cups, all in place, and of cleaning her desk in the third grade. She used to get out of recess that way, staying behind to clean in the sudden quiet stillness of the abandoned classroom, borrowing a cleanser from the teacher that left her palms burning. She even has a special project at the store, all her own – slowly, secretly she’s been arranging small sections of the store not by alphabet but by color, rearranging the spines of books to span through red and orange, to fade from deep purple into violet and cream. She’s been watching the colors grow, book by book. She likes to imagine Anita perusing the gray corners of the store late some evening, alone, suddenly surrounded by a full spectrum of color.
Lydia remembers coming up from the seizure to the customers craning their necks over the counter to look at her, hugging their books tightly to their chests.
“Is it drugs?” the Faberge Eggs woman asked. “This looks like some kind of overdose to me.”
An older man said, “She’s much too thin,” shaking his head at her, annoyed, breathing like a doctor. She made her body ready for his examination, waiting on the floor for him to hold her wrist, prod her belly with a dry, clean thumb, check her eyes and pull at her tongue.
It was Anita who told her that she’d had a seizure, that she had cried out and fallen to the floor, that it had looked awful, that she had twitched and things. “Oh,” Lydia said, remembering a dog she’d once seen having a seizure in some dirty snow, years before in Massachusetts, a small brown dog, the head cocked and straining, the teeth bared, the furry brown rump jerking stiffly against the mottled snow, an old woman whimpering on the other end of the leash.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Anita said. She held her scarf at her neck. She was always wearing a different scarf, and pointy shoes. “I think I was supposed to reach in and hold your tongue or something. You can choke on your own tongue.”
Lydia told Anita that it had happened before. The lying came easily. “You’re an epileptic?” Anita asked, and Lydia said, “Yes, Yes. I don’t like to tell anyone.” Then she propped herself up on her elbows and assured Anita with an authority she’d never heard from herself before that it was nothing. Even as she realized that she had wet her pants, that she sat in a wet stain that Anita would have to scrub later, on her hands and knees with a wet rag, she was able to fend off Anita’s offers to help, to call an ambulance, at least a taxi. It had felt as though she had woken suddenly from a cramped sleep, curled tightly, her limbs pressed to metal.
She told Anita that she needed to walk, that it always helped to get the muscles moving again, to get a little air, that a taxi ride would only make her sick, and then she trudged up and down Fillmore, and along Geary and then Divisadero, it was the same walk she took most nights, but she moved slowly, watched her feet, rested at all the corners. The light fell in ways she didn’t expect. Open doors surprised her.
When she turned onto her street she saw the chair, wicker, painted pale blue with a high, rounded back, like a rustic, woven throne. She circled it, admiring. She ran a hand over one of its arms. The sidewalk was empty except for her and the chair, there was only a pinkish brick wall near the chair, that fake brick, it looked like painted Styrofoam, like the walls of a flimsy stage set. The chair seemed both to be waiting for her and to have come from nowhere. She stood staring at it, her thighs prickling where they had rubbed against each other, a rash rising. An old green car crept by and a man leaned out and yelled, “It’s my birthday too, honey,” and then the car moved on up the hill. She waited for it to disappear and then she bent and picked up the chair, awkward but surprisingly light, her hands to its arms.
At her doorstep a skinny man appeared, holding his pants up with one hand, waving a finger at her with the other. He looked like a muskrat or a wolverine, his eyes and teeth springing from his narrow face. “Hey man, that’s my chair,” he said. “You’re taking my chair.”
“It’s a free chair,” she told him, hearing the same authority she’d used with Anita. She said, “It was just sitting there.”
“No way man, that’s a chair I’m selling. That chair’s for sale.”
She gripped the arms fiercely. “How much?”
He roved his eyes up and down the long empty street. He lowered his voice and leaned close and said, “For you the price is cheap. A kiss on the cheek and one dollar only.”
His skin was clean enough, no open sores. At the bottom of his left earlobe there was an extra blob of flesh, more like jewelry than a deformity though, the shape and size and color of a small raspberry, dusted lightly in sugar. She said, “Okay.”
She wasn’t afraid of men anymore. Most Sundays she hiked out to the beaches, and in the evening, dazed and thirsty, she wandered the sidewalks until someone offered her a ride home. They were always small men, dressed in only bathing suits and towels. She let them drop her off right at her building. She pointed to where she lived. But no one ever did anything. She often imagined them all lurking in the alley together, talking shyly about ways to kill her.
She placed the chair between her and the man and stepped neatly to the side of it, and the man leaned forward, raising his chin, closing his eyes, as though this was a ritual they both knew well. She kissed him on his cheekbone. He smelled of mustard. She pressed her lips to his skin, pausing there, memorizing the texture of the bone-ridge under her lips, wanting to fully pay for the chair, and then she slipped a wadded up dollar from her pocket into his palm.
“Chair’s yours, fair and square,” the man said, opening his arms, stepping back, a gesture, she thought, of both defeat and generosity.
The chair is hers. She lights a cigarette. It’s something she deserves, to smoke in her room after a seizure, and she’ll do it if she wants to. Janet will be home soon. She’ll smell smoke, and realize Lydia’s presence behind the door, pausing for a minute in the hallway, a brown bag clutched in one of her custardy arms. Janet will look at the door, open just a crack, and perhaps she’ll see Lydia there, in her throne, the smoky afghan falling away, revealing her pale body, and the bruises from where she fell and thrashed against the floor, and Janet’s face will pull back on itself in alarm and curiosity, her bland sugar-and-chicken-features distorting, her upper lip curling back, her front teeth poking out. But she won’t step forward, she won’t ask anything.
Sometimes Janet’s grandmother calls from somewhere in the Midwest, and she always talks to Lydia for a long time before she asks for Janet. Lydia settles in for these conversations. She pictures the old woman standing at a scrubbed sink, watching drab but playful birds in a small backyard, the phone crooked to the soft folds of skin at her neck that smell of canned fruit, pears and peaches, aluminum and syrup. Janet’s doing good, Lydia always tells her. She likes her work. She works hard. They make sure to have fun too. She lets the woman think that she and Janet sit on a bed together at night, playing with each other’s hair.
Lydia crosses her ankles neatly. She points her toes. She likes her feet, she has a fine arch, she has dancing potential. Tomorrow she will buy an abrasive scrub with walnut shells, and scrub until her feet and ankles and calves are raw clean, pink and stinging. Tomorrow she will go to the market on the corner and buy oranges and broccoli and beer. She will buy Woolite and wash her pissy velvet pants. She’s tired, her elbows and her knees seem somehow to bend and strain against themselves. But things almost make sense. Maybe it’s like a nursery rhyme, or a curse. Three things. Things in threes. She knows there’s something about things coming in threes. Does it have something to do with a bird flying into the house? Three things happen and the third is a bird flying into the house, and then it means something. That nothing else will happen. Or that something else will happen? A psychic, a seizure, a chair, she repeats the words to herself. Perhaps the information from Phil overloaded her brain, causing the seizure, which caused her to return home early, to receive the chair. She really does need furniture, and it is a beautiful chair; if she angles herself just right, she can even be comfortable. Maybe her days will continue like this: psychic visions, seizures, furniture. Her brain rerouted, her room transformed.
Sage Marsters’ fiction has appeared in Green Mountains Review, Rosebud, New England Review, and featured in The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.