I wasn’t in love with my gym teacher, a stringy woman with a chicken neck who was given to hectoring, but I couldn’t picture her gathering toxic mushrooms by the light of the full moon, as I knew they ought to be gathered. She definitely had an evil eye—the left one, which wasn’t entirely in sync with the right—but she lacked the heft of my mother. As for flying, that was bonkers. “Miss Scace! That old biddy! She’s not even . . . She couldn’t even . . . You’re so crazy!” I said. It was something I’d overheard at school: Her mother’s so crazy.
“Crazy is as crazy does,” she replied, unperturbed. “Let’s not duck the subject. Brian must go. If not off the planet, out of your life.”
“But I like him,” I said plaintively. The truth: I was besotted with him. I had his picture in my wallet, taken in a train-station photo booth, with a lipstick kiss covering his tiny, surly black-and-white face.
“I dare say,” said my mother. “But the Universe doesn’t care who we like. He was dealt the Tower. You know what that means: catastrophe!” My mother had read Brian’s tarot cards, though not with him present, of course. She’d made one of her pressure-cooker pot roasts and invited him to dinner—a suspect act in itself, which he must have known since he frowned the whole time and answered her perky inquiries in monosyllables—and saved an uneaten corner of his apple pie crust as the link between him and the Invisible World. The pie-crust corner was placed beneath an overturned tray; she’d laid out the cards on the tray bottom. “He’s going to be in a car accident, and I don’t want you in the death seat at the time. You need to cut him off.”
“Can’t you stop it? The car accident?” I asked hopefully. She’d stopped a couple of other looming disasters that had been threatening me, including an algebra test. The teacher had thrown his back out just in time. He was absent for three whole weeks, during which I’d actually studied.
“Not this time,” said my mother. “It’s too strong. The Tower plus the Moon and the Ten of Swords. It’s very clear.”
“Maybe you could mess up his car,” I said. Brian’s car was a mess anyway: thirdhand and no muffler, plus it made strange clanks and bangs for no reason. Couldn’t she just cause the car to fall apart? “Then he’d have to borrow another car.”
“Did I say it has to be his own car?” She handed me the glass of milk she’d poured, sat down at the kitchen table, placed both her hands on it, palms down—drawing energy from the Earth, as I knew—and gave me the benefit of her direct green-eyed stare. “I don’t know which car it will be. Maybe a rental. Now do as I tell you. The long and short of it is, if you dump Brian he won’t die, but if you don’t then he will, and most likely so will you. Or else you’ll end up in a wheelchair.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Queen of Hearts. That’s you. You wouldn’t want his blood on your hands. The lifelong guilt.”
“This is nuts!”
“Go ahead, ignore my advice,” she said placidly. She stood up, snapped her fingers to release the excess Earth energy, then took some hamburger out of the fridge along with a plate of mushrooms she’d already chopped. “Your choice.” She spooned the garlic mixture into the meat, broke an egg into it, added dried bread crumbs and the mushrooms: meatloaf, it would become. I wish now that I’d got the recipe. Then she began mixing in everything with her hands—the only proper way to do it, according to her. She made biscuit dough like that, too.
“There is absolutely no way of proving any of this!” I said. I’d been on the high school debating team that year, until Brian had said it was a brainy thing to do. For a girl, he meant. Now I pretended to disdain it, though I’d secretly taken up the study of logic and was keen on the scientific method. Did I hope for an antidote to my mother? Probably.
“You wanted that pink angora sweater, did you not?” she said.
“So?”
“And then it appeared.”
“You probably just bought it,” I said.
“Don’t be silly. I never just buy things.”
“Bet you did! You’re not the Easter Bunny,” I said rudely.
“This conversation is over,” she said with chilling calm. “Change the sheets on your bed, they’re practically crawling, and pick those dirty clothes up off the floor before they fester. Panties are not carpets.”