Chapter 13 Clara
CLARA
“What the hell, Des? Shouldn’t we be caught up on rent now?
That’s why I was going on those dates!” I waved the notice in front of her face.
She rubbed her eyes, and one of her false eyelashes clung to the back of her hand like an insect.
“Bill is evicting us, Des. We have ten days to pay the rent we owe, plus this month, or else we get kicked out. Where will we live? Where can we go?”
“Darling, it’s not as bad as that.”
“Don’t darling me! I’m not one of those dupes from the club or a dumb tourist. I’m not just another person you can con.”
“Let me see this.” Des took the notice from my hands. The money I’d saved was enough to cover some of the back rent, but I didn’t know where we’d get the rest. By my math, we needed almost two thousand bucks.
“How much do you have saved? Des? Tell me.”
“Three hundred, maybe. Could be a little less than that.” I figured she had $100, tops.
“Where did it go, Des? I thought that was the whole reason I was going out with those guys. So we could pay our bills.”
Her voice rose to match mine. “So I bought some new clothes. So I went out a few nights. Poor little Clara had to eat fancy dinners with a few rich men, giggle a little bit. Boo-hoo. Such suffering. Well, you know what? I’m sick of living here, where everything feels like half of what I used to have, then half of that, then half of that.
So sue me if I want to find a little joy in the tiny little bit of my life that I have left. ”
Des had been unhappy for a long time, but she hadn’t always been like this, with the drinking, the pills.
I remembered her smiling more when I was a kid, when she was still slinging cocktails at the Showboat.
Some nights before her shift she would dress me up, too, and we’d dance in the living room, singing into our hairbrushes.
Then her shifts started getting cut. Then business at the shop started to falter.
Then we started plucking wallets and billfolds from people as they bent over the craps tables or fed money into the slots.
I had that $450 and was tempted to just pick up and leave, but I knew I wouldn’t go.
Not until things were a little steadier for Des.
She was far from perfect, but she had never wanted a kid.
She could have left me a long time ago. I felt the anger surge through me, an anger that I tried, most of the time, not to let myself feel.
The way her need sucked up everything else.
If I looked at that anger head-on, it would swallow me whole.
“You’ve found a lot of fucking joy in that money, by the looks of things. I hear that joy rattling around in your purse, you know. I’m not stupid, okay?”
If we hadn’t heard the knocking, I think she would have slapped me. She wasn’t used to me talking back, to me being outside her control. We looked at each other, then at the eviction notice, which I had dropped facedown onto the floor.
“It said ten days, didn’t it?” I asked.
“Leave it to that bastard Bill to give us ten minutes.” She pushed her hair away from her face and looked up at me.
“You need to go answer it. He’ll have more pity on you.
He can’t do anything to a minor. Tell him I’m out.
Or better yet, try to butter him up a little.
” She ran her fingers through my hair, pinched my cheeks to give them color. “You know the drill.”
I sighed and made my way down the stairs, into the shop. Des crept behind me so she could listen from the hall.
The beaded curtain at the front door divided the figure into strips, but right away I knew it wasn’t Bill. I could see a woman’s feet.
“False alarm,” I called to Des. “Someone for a reading, I think.” I hated that this surprised me, someone showing up at our door because they thought we had something to offer.
The woman had on a pair of those Chinese mesh slippers with the sequined flowers across the toe. I unlocked the door, pushed the curtain aside. She had long blonde hair, dark at the roots, and a small mouth that she tried to press into a smile, but it didn’t really get there.
“Can I help you?”
“Hey. I’m here to see the psychic? Clara Voyant or whatever?”
“Hello, that’s me.” I was flustered. Where had she come from? Why did she need a reading so badly? “Please, have a seat. Sorry, we usually don’t open until eleven on Saturdays.” The crawling feeling started again, and I scratched my nails along my arms.
“Cool,” she said, watching me itch. I dropped my hands to my sides.
Her eyes roved over the counter, which was crowded with statues of saints Des had bought from the dollar store a few blocks down, plus a single jade Buddha she stole from the Eastern Delights Massage Parlor—payment, she explained, for them giving her a mediocre foot rub.
“Just give me a minute.” I pulled the curtains open, tied them back, and the shop flooded with sunlight so suddenly that the woman winced.
I made my way over to the shelf, took the satin bag of tarot cards down, and wondered if I should choose a crystal.
Sometimes I brought one over just for show, but she didn’t seem like the kind of person who would go for that kind of thing.
She seemed a little embarrassed to be here at all, which didn’t make sense to me yet, given the way she had pounded on our door.
I carried the tarot cards back to the table and started to shuffle. She kept her eyes on my hands.
“I usually start readings with a question. Is there something you came here to find out?”
She stared down at her fingernails, picked at her cuticle.
“You don’t just … see shit and tell me about it?”
“Not exactly. It helps to have a focus. Something you care about.”
She blew her bangs away from her forehead. “Something I care about. Ha.”
“You can think about it for a minute. No rush.”
She looked out at the boardwalk again. It seemed like she was watching for something, someone, but I couldn’t tell what.
The seconds beaded into minutes. I didn’t mind the silence, unless it meant that she was going to change her mind about the reading entirely—like that other woman had.
She shifted in her chair, continued to pick at her nails.
Then, just as I was starting to get worried she might get up and leave, she spoke.
“I want to know what’s going to happen to me …
like, what’s next? Like, is this just my life?
” When she faced me again, I realized that she was younger than I had first thought.
Probably only five or six years older than me.
But her skin was bad underneath the makeup, and she had that hollow stare of someone who’d seen too much.
“Okay, so you want to know about money? Your job prospects?”
She snorted. “Job prospects. Christ, that’s rich. Seriously? So many fucking questions. Aren’t you the psychic?”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“How does it work, then?” She switched the crossing of her legs and her sweatshirt fell off her shoulder, revealing a tattoo on her chest: a peach, with a bright green leaf hanging from its stem, Peaches written in complicated, scrolling cursive above it.
She noticed me staring. “A nickname,” she said.
“No one’s used my real name for years.” I waited for her to say more.
She sighed. “Fine, you wanna know about me? I left home three years ago,” she said, huffing at her bangs again.
“I never thought it would be permanent. I told myself I was in love. So much for that. Or I was in love, him … well. If he was, he had a weird way of showing it. Like leaving me on the side of a highway after we got in a fight. Didn’t even have my shoes on.
” I let her talk. The more she told me, the more I’d have to work with when I read her cards, in case a vision didn’t come through clearly, and I didn’t trust that one would.
All of those other images and sounds were still spilling into my brain, interfering like radio static. Another fly tickled down my spine.
“I guess I never really thought about the future before at all. I don’t even know what I want to know.
I’ve never really believed in anything before …
but now … now I think about the future keeping up like this and I can’t picture it.
Can’t stand it—is more like it. I want to know if things will change. When. How.”
I thought of telling her that I felt the same way. That if I didn’t have my dreams of California, the thought of staying here, with Des, stealing, doing readings, meeting men, would kill me.
I turned the first card over: the Fool. The next was the Five of Wands, and the third was the Tower.
My breath caught in my chest. All of the readings I had done lately—this one, Julie Zale’s uncle with the bandana, the woman with the locket, the one I had given Lily—were full of darkness, warnings, bad omens. But this was the worst one yet.
“What?” she said. “What does it mean?” I took a breath and tried to think about how I could spin things, how I could approach the cards and not feel afraid.
“This is the Fool.”
“What, is that me? Shit, man.”
“People make that mistake a lot. The cards aren’t you—they represent elements of your life.
There’s a difference.” She raised her eyebrows, which were over-plucked, and the skin around them was still pale where the hair used to be.
“The Fool represents a journey. Maybe you are about to go on a trip, about to leave town. It can be a real journey or a metaphorical one. That you’ll start something new, a project, or start thinking in a new way. ”
“I like the literal journey. Wanna get outta this dried-up town as soon as I can.”
“Me too,” I said, before I could help myself.
“All right, babes. We’ll carpool, then.” She smiled. At first, I thought she might be mocking me, but then I realized she was just being nice.