Read Online What I Had Before I Had You by Sarah Cornwell - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Sarah Cornwell
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listening is so inviting, so polished. She is a professional. When Kandy says, “If I don’t find my soul mate by the time I’m thirty, I think I’ll fucking shoot myself,” and my mother laughs musically, a smile of acceptance on her lips, I know she is playing for the win. There is nothing about this statement that, if I said it, wouldn’t send her into a desperate lecture. The concept of a soul mate. The selfishness of suicide. I can see the devious clockwork beneath this friendly normal-mom act.
Pam pipes up, “Mrs. Olivia?”
“Myla.”
“Can you tell our fortunes?”
“Sure.”
Kandy hoots with a monkeylike excitement. I roll my eyes and excuse myself to the bathroom, where I hunch on the toilet, half-listening to my mother’s opening ritual. I dawdle. I pinch the baby-fat ring around my belly. The floor creaks. She is going to the sideboard to pull out a deck of tarot cards—probably the standard Rider deck, but the hippie-dippie Morgan’s deck if she thinks that Pam would be impressed. She will hand Pam the deck so her question can pass through her fingertips into the vinyl coating of the cards and on into the spirit world, where ghost babies float above us and everyone’s just-dead fathers wait patiently to forgive them, granted my mother has been paid forty dollars up front.
When I come back, I see that she is using the Rider deck. I used to play the role of the seeker when my mother practiced. We would lie on our bellies on the loose-looped green carpet, and I would ask ridiculous questions ( Will you buy me a pony? Will there be root beer flavor at the water ice place this week? ), and she would give me wildly inaccurate readings just to practice her facial expressions and her pacing. She noted the implications of the cards with an inclination of her head, a sympathetic wrinkling of her brow, or a curl of the lip. This is her forte, the buildup of tension—the moment when her client watches her face with perfect attention for a smile or a tic that might mean she knows what will happen to him tomorrow or the next day, that she knows how to satisfy his most secret longings. We would play our roles as seriously as possible until we couldn’t keep it together, and then we would fling ourselves on the carpet and whole-body laugh.
I used to love watching her read, but now the performance seems showy and false. “You have come through a rough time, but you are very strong,” she is telling Pam. “You are in love with a dark-haired person.”
“What was the question?” I ask.
Nobody answers me. Pam stands up and hoists her backpack on. “I gotta get home.”
Kandy whines: “But it’s my turn!” Pam is the only one with a driver’s license, so Kandy trails out after her, looking wistfully back toward my mother. My mother is calm and radiant, waving my friends off with a condescension they don’t pick up on, pitying their valuation of love. I know how she must see them—innocents baring their jugulars to the pacing tiger. So young ,I imagine her saying, and shaking her head.
Later, when I can’t sleep, I pick the glass shards out of the dirt by flashlight, bleeding from a cut fingertip, and over the next few days, tomatoes ripen furiously and in record numbers. Is it the tannins? The iron from my blood? We roast them and braise them and slice them fresh into salads. We eat them whole, like peaches.
5
C ARRIE AND I walk until we are in the shadow of the Emerald. A roll of toilet paper rots in a gray puddle. I lead us around to the back and down the stairwell to the basement door. I know just how to jiggle the handle.
Carrie grabs my arm. “This is crazy,” she says. “This building is, like, falling down.”
There’s still light to see by. I check myself; I should capitalize on Carrie’s prudence. She could fall through a rotten floor. “You stay outside,” I tell her. “I’ll be quick.” I hand her the beach bag.
“Why would he even come here?”
“It’s just a
Pam pipes up, “Mrs. Olivia?”
“Myla.”
“Can you tell our fortunes?”
“Sure.”
Kandy hoots with a monkeylike excitement. I roll my eyes and excuse myself to the bathroom, where I hunch on the toilet, half-listening to my mother’s opening ritual. I dawdle. I pinch the baby-fat ring around my belly. The floor creaks. She is going to the sideboard to pull out a deck of tarot cards—probably the standard Rider deck, but the hippie-dippie Morgan’s deck if she thinks that Pam would be impressed. She will hand Pam the deck so her question can pass through her fingertips into the vinyl coating of the cards and on into the spirit world, where ghost babies float above us and everyone’s just-dead fathers wait patiently to forgive them, granted my mother has been paid forty dollars up front.
When I come back, I see that she is using the Rider deck. I used to play the role of the seeker when my mother practiced. We would lie on our bellies on the loose-looped green carpet, and I would ask ridiculous questions ( Will you buy me a pony? Will there be root beer flavor at the water ice place this week? ), and she would give me wildly inaccurate readings just to practice her facial expressions and her pacing. She noted the implications of the cards with an inclination of her head, a sympathetic wrinkling of her brow, or a curl of the lip. This is her forte, the buildup of tension—the moment when her client watches her face with perfect attention for a smile or a tic that might mean she knows what will happen to him tomorrow or the next day, that she knows how to satisfy his most secret longings. We would play our roles as seriously as possible until we couldn’t keep it together, and then we would fling ourselves on the carpet and whole-body laugh.
I used to love watching her read, but now the performance seems showy and false. “You have come through a rough time, but you are very strong,” she is telling Pam. “You are in love with a dark-haired person.”
“What was the question?” I ask.
Nobody answers me. Pam stands up and hoists her backpack on. “I gotta get home.”
Kandy whines: “But it’s my turn!” Pam is the only one with a driver’s license, so Kandy trails out after her, looking wistfully back toward my mother. My mother is calm and radiant, waving my friends off with a condescension they don’t pick up on, pitying their valuation of love. I know how she must see them—innocents baring their jugulars to the pacing tiger. So young ,I imagine her saying, and shaking her head.
Later, when I can’t sleep, I pick the glass shards out of the dirt by flashlight, bleeding from a cut fingertip, and over the next few days, tomatoes ripen furiously and in record numbers. Is it the tannins? The iron from my blood? We roast them and braise them and slice them fresh into salads. We eat them whole, like peaches.
5
C ARRIE AND I walk until we are in the shadow of the Emerald. A roll of toilet paper rots in a gray puddle. I lead us around to the back and down the stairwell to the basement door. I know just how to jiggle the handle.
Carrie grabs my arm. “This is crazy,” she says. “This building is, like, falling down.”
There’s still light to see by. I check myself; I should capitalize on Carrie’s prudence. She could fall through a rotten floor. “You stay outside,” I tell her. “I’ll be quick.” I hand her the beach bag.
“Why would he even come here?”
“It’s just a
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