Cora immediately recognized her new neighbor, Shirley,
standing on the porch, huffing and puffing, wearing a green caftan and holding
a pug.
“Are you going to this Ladies Pot Luck thingy?”
she asked without any other greeting. Cora half smiled, which Shirley seemed to
think meant yes. She turned, her green garb flowing with her large body. “See
you later then!”
Cora, straining to hold her grocery bags, responded
with only speechlessness and dread.
***
Shirley arrived with her face sweating beneath a
shield of makeup, a pasta salad in her hands. Cora forced a smile, turned to
close the door, felt Shirley examining her.
“I’m on a deadline-I didn’t have time to make
anything,” she said, explaining the bag of Oreos.
“So - you’re
in there all alone all day-doing what-typing?”
“Sometimes,” Cora said, a flash of a sexy
rendezvous in her bed after the last neighborhood event emerged and
receded.
“That’s why you’re so pale,” Shirley said.
***
The Steins' door opened and Shirley was
swallowed up by a throng of curious ladies. Cora, having sworn off drinking
with the neighbors, avoided the wine bar, receded to the background with a
plastic cup of water and a sagging paper plate full of ziti.
“Hey, neighbor.”
Linda
Goodson. The one who kept white lit candles in her windows all year
long.
“How’s Jamie?” she asked.
“He left. We’re divorced,” Cora said, looking
around the room at all the other women laughing, sipping glasses of white wine.
Linda scurried off.
***
“Anyone like a reading?” Shirley
called out, holding court at the main
table, hands shuffling a deck of tarot cards, eyebrows raised.
Amy McFarland, the unofficial queen of the
neighborhood, approached, her lips clamped in what Cora read as general
dismay.
“I’ll give it a go,” she said approaching while
all the other women crowded around.
Shirley
explained how the cards were not a prediction, they were a reflection, just
something to think about. And that with every truth the cards might show they
also can present the reversal of that truth.
. “Do you have a question in your heart?” she
asked Amy.
Cora’s breath
caught.
“Yeah, will Kevin empty the dishwasher tomorrow?”
she said, causing a roar of laughter. Shirley laid out three cards
before Amy.
“Your past, your present, your future,” she said
solemnly.
One
by one, Shirley turned the cards.
“The lovers! A force binding two entities together.
This card suggests unity in relationships, harmony, but it can also touch on
imbalance, conflict, disconnection.”
The
circle of ladies tightened around Shirley and Amy.
Cora stepped backward, drawing further into the
shadows.
“The present. The three of swords,” Shirley’s
voice diminished. “Associated with power and conflict.”
Cora laser focused on Amy’s face, glowing
beneath the crystal chandelier, gripped in a flat smirk.
Finally, for the future, Shirley turned the
death card, causing an Oh! rose up from the hush.
“I guess I don’t need to go to the gym
tomorrow!” Amy broke through, triggering a wave of giggles.
“Shirley, put those cards away! We don’t need
that hocus pocus when we have good old fashioned gossip to attend to!” Marylou
Stein, the hostess, scolded.
That was Cora’s cue to leave. She did not wait
for Shirley. She did not collect her bag of untouched Oreos. She grabbed her
purse and passed through the front door, unseen.
***
Cora walked quickly, too fast for the hot summer
evening. Her legs and arms pumping in tandem, she began to sweat, to pant, the
energy within her at the party diminishing with each step. Tempting fate,
she hesitated at Kevin (and Amy) McFarland’s house.
Butterflies shot up from her core, she looked
up, fists clenched, wished for him to be there, and he was, in his
bedroom window, gazing down at her.
An invitation?
Her body prickled with desire for this more-than-middle-aged
insurance salesman. When they first met at the fall welcome party, when
he shared the last beer with her that unseasonably cold night, he told her he
used to write poetry, have long hair, that he always wanted a motorcycle. He
was sweet and sad, and, like Cora, drunk.
She thought of the Tarot, of reversals, of her
ex, now remarried to another, more interesting woman. He reversed, so could
she.
She turned away from the beckoning window,
followed the straight path home, through the door, the rooms of her dark house,
to bed, peeling back the white duvet, sliding in, to sleep, to dream.
About the author
Maggie Nerz Iribarne is a 52 year old late bloomer, living her writing dream in a yellow house in Syracuse, New York. She writes about teenagers, witches, priests/nuns, cleaning ladies, runaways, struggling teachers, and ghosts, among other things. She keeps a portfolio of her published work at https://www.maggienerziribarne.com.
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