Five of Cups, Reversed

As I straggled back from the morning's speedwalk (the perfect chaser to groggy a.m. yoga), sneezing rocked my body, a mucus Vesuvius. And when the saline stopped leaking from my lids, I noticed the Brain.

The large Brain was attached to the side of the worn wooden planter where I grew the catnip. Brown and wrinkled, it shed the unseen yet eminently creepy aura that marks a fungus. The feeling it emanated wrinkled and pounced in waves on my chest and neck nape, under my sweaty ponytail. Its brownness absorbed light, playing off the cheerful childish green of the catnip. Ants swarmed beneath it, scurrying from a metropolitan complex of anthills.

"Hello, Brain," I said in my normal lilt, and reached out with my mind. The Brain absorbed the vibrations, a black hole disguised as a brown cerebrum. The attempt at communication had failed.

Perhaps this was no mere fungus, the mystical mind mused. Perhaps this was, indeed, an alien lifeform, or the group mind controlling the army of black ants.

Breathing softly, I reached out to the garden deva, the spirit of place. "It's eating my planter box. Can I...?" The unspoken words rose into the panoply of oak and hosta and blue sky smeared with white, rose and faded like mist, incense smoke, a prayer. It returned a feeling of softness, a rose quartz feeling, but no words. A warmth in the innards communicated. And so the Avenger of the Violated Planter Box sprang into action.

My sneaker connected with the Brain, which simply absorbed the kinetic energy with a nondescript thud. (Did it just grow larger, or are my eyes fooling me?) I kept kicking the solid, blow-absorbing mass until I dislodged it from the wood. My eyes ran over it: quite a heavy, dense object for all those delicate-seeming labia-like folds. The scene of the crime caused my stomach to feel mildly hummingbird-like, so I left the mutilated brain on top of the vinca near the stoop. Feeling vindictive, I gave it one last ineffective punt.

And then I looked up to see Jill, morning-groggy with a cup of steaming joe in her hand, sitting on the brick stoop. My blood raced to my head. How long had she been there? More importantly, had she heard me talking to myself?

"Wow," she said, looking at the Brain. "That looks really weird." She made no effort to move from the stoop.

"Well, it must be some kind of wood fungus, after all the rain we've had."

She gingerly sipped from the mug.

"I heard you talk to it before you kicked it," she said. "You remind me so much of mom."

Blood rushed to my face and my eyes dropped to the dirt as my sneakers shuffled. She waved her hand, its red-painted nails gleaming with rhinestones.

"No, don't be embarrassed. I mean, I grew up doing that shit too, talking to plants and squirrels," she said, her voice oddly wistful. "I mean, I know what you're doing and all."

"It was never your thing though," I said, taking a seat on the step below, careful not to brush her leg.

"No, I guess I wasn't much into religion." Her laugh ricocheted off the brick. "More into boys, I guess. I never liked the whole rules and ritual thing that goes with religion. I mean, why? Why do you have to ask a fungus before you kick it? What if it's all make-believe?"

"It shows respect for life," I replied simply. "Whether you believe that all life is sentient or not. You can never really know, so it's best to err on the side of caution, I think." Absentmindedly, I twirled a thin oak-twig with my hand, noticing the budded end. "It makes you feel connected to something. It makes you act like a better person. And if it makes you a better person, what does it matter if it's made up, or if there's really a plant deva out there listening to me?"

Her dark eyes drifted outward to some horizon only she could see. And then she began to thread words, beads on a necklace. Ira had made her convert to Judaism and go sometimes to the synagogue, where the congregants gleamed with their just-for-show jewelry and called God in some incomprehensible tongue punctuated by throat-gurgling coughs, or so it seemed. And the askance stares pricked her like thorns.

"They knew just from my face that I wasn't one of them," she said. More than religion: a bloodline, woven through millennia of shackles and pogroms. The damn skullcap seemed like the most ridiculous article of human adornment ever invented; it wasn't even positioned correctly to cover a bald spot. The rituals seemed foreign, not like the old holidays at home, when mom used to bake cookies in the shapes of sun and moon, and we used to decorate them with sprinkles as offerings to the Gods. Jill had already edged into her teens when mom came out of the broom closet, but she remembered drinking bitter tea before drumming and singing to the Goddess.

Mom had wanted to give her a menstrual passage, the same that she later held for me. Jill slipped out through the door and gave herself her own: a pack of Marlboros filched from a friend's dad and a quarter-bottle of Wild Turkey. Her impromptu "Coming of Age" rite ended with a belt-to-ass invocation by my mom. Frankly, I had thought at the time that Option A, a coming of age ritual with mom's menopausal gal-pals, seemed a better option. Pomegranates, female nudity and even a new garnet necklace ("symbolizes the moon-blood," mom said during a rite for me some years later) � what else could a teen girl want?

Apparently, some Wild Turkey and a pack of smokes. Jill and I were always night and day. Or, more than that. Maybe Dionysus and Hestia, that silent shadowy goddess who gave up her seat to the vine-wreathed drunk and sat by the hearth, poker in hand. Perhaps she, too, fantasized bloody murder.

I didn't know what to say to Jill's revelations; Judaism seemed boring to me. Blankly, I told her so. She smiled.

"Has some good food, though," she replied. I slipped past to the kitchen, where I snatched the last drops of murky brown liquid and fled into the shower.

***

The story seemed fine, emblazoned in its usual large-font on the front page. The editorial made me twitch, and the words ran like ants over my skin. It's the Wilsons' fault that their son died; children must be watched at all times. Would you want someone that irresponsible to operate a daycare center?

Trembling, I balled the rustling newsprint and flung it forcefully in the recycling. Tanisha's carnation-pink dress, the half-disassembled pool, the smiling boy in the photograph with the red firetruck unraveled behind my eyes with each blink, a loose roll of film spooling onto the floor as the light destroyed the negative. The editorial page editor (a redundancy in more than title) sauntered past, shaking his dockered ass. He stopped, his mouth-corners turning upwards, a goofy banana of a smile.

"What did you think of my editorial today, Jasmine?" his voice oozed.

Breathe. Count backward. Three, two...

"I think it's a sack of shit," I growled.

His eyes widened a millimeter, and then settled into their customary coldness. Distantly, I wondered why virtually every editor, save for Brenda, had pale skin and a penis. Even Brenda was suspect, for that matter.

"Well, she wasn't watching the kid," he said.

"She sat down for a moment. Kids are slippery. They get away."

"She wasn't watching the kid," he repeated. "If you have kids, you need to watch them. The whole thing seemed like damage control."

Or maybe they are tired of being judged, tired of the world hounding them, my heart whispered hoarsely. But my lips stayed a thin cold line until he wiggled his ass back to his office and shut the door.

The angry red light blinked on the phone, and my fingers reluctantly dialed the code. A panoply of voices squealed and accused, old chainsmoking women, gravelly-toned middle-agers, cussing teenage girls. A few praised the story, saying that their heart bled for the family. Many condemned, saying that the other children should be snatched and put into "responsible homes." I'd never let a child die, they sniffed.

And somewhere, a glass castle rose on a green hill, green as in fairytales, and fairytale banners waved from its turrets. In the center stood a beautiful princess in a gown woven of rose petals, her hair catching the sunlight. But outside, peasants waved pitchforks and assorted farm implements. Some bore torches in work-roughened fingers with dirt under the nails. They boomed and roared, deafening in their approach. And the peasants, with brown streaks on their cheeks, grabbed the white rounded stones lining the walk and pelted the glass house. The princess cowered, secretly muttering curses at her Realtor. "It's secure. It even has a moat," he promised. And all I could hope was that over the ridge, the peasants' own thatched huts were being torched by the princess's hobnailed army, all garbed in the best gladiator wear.

This is what happened when you embroider your heart in a story. Someone � usually an editor, but sometimes the hoi polloi � will see the hidden pattern, and unceremoniously shit on it. In Western culture, you see, hearts are contraband items, blaspheming the holy god of Blame. And maybe I shouldn't think or feel this way; I've pressed my forehead to the foot of Blame's altar too many times to tell. It's a ritual, like smoking or a vodka chaser, and rituals are difficult to break.

Anger fled, pursued by hatchet-wielding fear. I shouldn't have used scatological terms in front of an editor. Great Mother. My eyes scurried across the desk, looking for a facade of hardworking responsibility to hide behind. Luckily, the mayor supplied one with a well-timed phone call. After a moment, I walked over to the photo department and watched Russ gesticulate wildly as I put in a request. Luckily, I was not struck by a flailing spasmodic limb.

***

Gulls drifted over the blue surface of the bay as I stood with sandaled feet, scribbling frantically in a green-leafed notebook. My eyes drifted back to a green mountain, hiding its landfill nature with distance and beauty. I looked past the suits to a white sail unfurling, the barque of the sun overhead, and a clanging green buoy dissecting a boat's wake. Sunlight danced warmly on my half-closed eyes and burned my hair part.

The suits had donned decorated hardhats and plastic smiles as they paused before a placard with the colorful plans for a housing development, all multicolored blocks and watercolored renderings. The mayor's aide, a short woman with stiletto heels, snapped shots with a handheld digital camera. The inevitable gold-tinted shovels were dusted off and handed over to the suits for a pose. It took a moment for a passing fireman to realize that the shovels were poised to groundbreak concrete.

"Guess they're Polish shovels!" one of the suits quipped. Since they were all in gray, I had to look at the tie-color to ferret out some shred of official identity. I scribbled the comment, feeling the eyes of one or two drift over to me. The goddamned Pollock of a reporter. The mayor's aide glanced over with worry on her rouged cheeks. I waved my hand carelessly. I can take a joke. Hell, there's a 150-year tradition of bashing the Poles. Nothing personal.

Nothing personal when I stick a sandal up your rectum either, folks, I scribbled in my eligible handwriting. And then I smiled, my random dose of bile having been expunged.

As they talked � builder and investor and mayor � I jotted. A seamless transmission of information from mouth to pen to professional mind, no real thought involved. Me, I, my, I, me, my, the suits chanted as I scribbled. Gobbledygook, punctuated by the stroke of the I. But that's uncharitable. The facts glittered clear and cold: so many units, this many amenities, to be completed by this calendar date and to bring this amount of cold hard cash to city coffers.

Heavy equipment rumbled, and we skittered back.. A yellow machine bashed the side of an old apartment house that stood on the bayside, sending a shower of gray concrete onto the pavement. Payatt, who had previously sat on the hood of his car grumbling at the suits, sprang into photographic action. Dreadlocks dancing, he maneuvered around the roaring construction vehicles to catch the bashing arm of the backhoe in action, snapping and, at points, crawling for some unfathomable reason.

I slipped past the silver mesh fence and nodded at the mayor's aide, who seemed to come up to my armpit. Under her pit, she had wedged the white cardboard rendering while she toted the folded-up stand with a free hand.

"When's this going to appear?" she yelled over the roar.

"Tomorrow!" I yelled back passionlessly.

My eyes glanced up to an ornate green trim on the building, shaped and painting like oak leaves. Old terracotta work, I mused numbly. The industry had once thrived here along this bay: turning the good brown dirt into painted ornament. The bucket of the backhoe slammed against the wall beneath, and the faux green leaves fell to the flat expanse of the pavement, shattering into dust as they struck.

I turned to the owner, a tiny white-haired woman who had sold the building for an undisclosed wad of currency.

"I was the landlady here for fifty years," she said. "There was a bakery, and a pharmacy there at one time. An upholstery shop. And then we rented to telemarketer firms."

"Pity they weren't still in the building," I joked.

Unsmiling, she lit a cigarette, not seeing the humor. Chewing my pen, I asked her if it was difficult to watch that bucket bang the building into dust. She swabbed a tear from her lined face.

"Yeah, I guess it is," she said, barely audible over the roar and bang. "I guess it is."

The gulls had fled from the shore; they circled the green trash mountain in the distance. I waved to the mayor, who was wearing a navy suit, on the way to my car, and swabbed the beads of sweat that clung to my temples.

***

After filing, Brenda beckoned me over to her desk with a jerky hand-movement. My feet dragged as I made my way across the mile of carpet to the rock of Andromeda, where I awaited the divinely-sent monster. (And the hero.... where the hell's my hero?) The rock was strewn with numberless white styrofoam coffee cups, all reeking of old java and decorated with pink lipstick stains. She pointed one chewed fingernail at the screen although her hand shook so badly I couldn't figure out what she was pointed at.

"Here! This lede says nothing to me. You're just describing �the bucket of a backhoe crashing into the side of an old building with terracotta trim.'"

"Did you read the next sentence? It's a two-sentence introduction."

She paused, scarfing down chocolate-covered coffee beans as she stared at the screen. "Luxury apartments for �empty-nesters' will rise on the site of the former office building, which had recently been home to several telemarketing firms."

She bit down on a bean.

"Oh. Well, you could have got into it quicker." She paused, and then jabbed a half-bitten nail at the screen. "And here! Here! You dropped a word."

I squinted, and then supplied the word: "approved." She typed, misspelled and then retyped the word. And then she turned to me.

"We need someone to do night cops. We'll pay OT."

"You should've asked me earlier," I countered. "I have plans tonight."

"Can you cancel them?"

"No!" I retorted, a tad too loudly. A frousy copy-editor glanced up with a frown, and then returned to his perusal of commas and semicolons.

She leaned back in the chair, which complained with a squeal.

"You better ask yourself if you're dedicated to this job."

Breathe. Count backward. Three, two, one. Imagine a calm lake.

"I am dedicated to the job," I breathed, aiming for Socratic reason. Imagine a toga and a cup of wine. "I think the quality of my work over the four years I've spent here is indicative of that. I just can't drop plans on a moment's notice. If you told me yesterday, or even earlier, I could have rearranged my schedule."

She narrowed her icy eyes as I turned back to my desk.

"Dumb pollock," she muttered, loud enough for me to hear every goddamned consonant, even the silent B and the redundant K.

My ponytail hit my cheek as I turned back, a rare decision to poke the tigress with a stick.

"What did you say?" my voice dropped an octave.

"Nothing. I didn't say anything," she stacattoed back, her volume edging upward. "What are you accusing me of?"

"You called me a dumb pollack."

"I said no such thing!" she replied, a tad too animated. Her face glared crimson.

"Besides, that's pretty much an old cliche," I soothed. "Being an editor, you know that cliches are verboten."

The chair squealed as I turned back to my trajectory. "Bitch," I hissed as I skipped back to my desk.

"What did you say?" she howled, and my chin peeked back over my shoulder.

"Absolutely nothing," my voice echoed across the newsroom floor as I slammed my ass into the chair.

***

My blood percolated like a coffeepot at the thought of him, but I hadn't dared. On Midsummer, the girl with the striped socks had vanished, and Silvermoon rushed in to fill the inevitable void since, after all, nature abhors a vacuum, particularly a sexual one. And as the priestess-of-the-day explained the significance of the sunwheel, he tousled her carrot-orange hair and kissed a freckled goth-pale cheek. And the red-haired Goth woman chattered happily, white teeth flashing in the June haze. Peripherally glancing, I resigned myself to the children's table, where I painted faces for a variety of squat gnome-like beings that may have been called children.

"That doesn't look like a dragon!" squealed one boy, who rather resembled that fat laughing Buddha with the gut, except this Buddha wasn't laughing. He began to wail. "That doesn't look like a dragon!"

I hurt my neck shaking off the memory. Well. No dragons tonight. Although I was baffled; during the day, he yet again sent me pictures of vanilla porn, sans the commentary. I wrote back: "Fatten your johnson! Get free Viagra!" He sent back a smiley-face with the tongue out, no pornographic explanation included. Perhaps he's some sort of secret fetishist, drooling over the prospect of e-mailing unsolicited porn featured women with poor dye-jobs and even worse tattoos.

James was at work and my sister had hightailed it to someplace unfathomable. Plucking my harp strings, I settled on the parlor sofa, my pale green dress brushing the carpet. My fingers worked an air until I heard the knock. And there he stood, popped out of a navy blue SUV in black pressed pants. As I punted Squashblossom away from the front door, he took three steps and then circled me with his arms, nosing for my lips like an amorous racehorse. As we snogged, I kicked the door closed with one sandaled foot, a feat of coordination.

A thousand thoughts commuted through my brain: minarets and desert sand, platinum wedding bands, glow-in-the-dark sex toys, the random possibility of Squashblossom darting down the night-shrouded street, Brenda's half-audible insult, the terracotta leaves crashing on the sidewalk, that garlic-flavored cheese with the walnuts on the side. If we dropped to the floor right then and there and engaged in The Sex, would that make me as cheap as a WalMart t-shirt? Should I play the polyamorous Pagan, or should I be coy and bat my lashes a bit and twitch the fringe of my skirt? What if he wants to look at porn or expects me to get a labial piercing? Does he remember to change toilet paper rolls?

And then, he asked where we were headed for dinner. I had decided on the microbrew place, and so I clambered into his navy blue SUV and off we went, twisting down suburban streets under the gleaming orange suns of streetlamps. He had the beer sampler, with various small glasses of dark viscous fluid arranged on his paper placemat. My lips sucked down two large glasses of raspberry wheat as I chattered about politics, economics and intergroup dynamics, all while barely stifling the urge to rip off his black shirt and have him right there on the table, amid the tequila chicken enchiladas and coconut shrimp.

Oh, Mighty Aphrodite, it's been a loooong time. Two and a half years of drought, enough sere dryness to wither the most hardy cactus. Pass the tequila chicken.

Joining him in the sampling, we decided that the dark varieties were the best. A miniature train chugged along the brick wall, far above our heads, and I craned my long neck toward the shining silver beer vats. The periodots around my neck glittered, march hares and spring caught in their facets. A handsome man, but his words slid off me, the smooth tones of a pop singer, trilling without depth. A certain disappointment needled, a drop of dye spreading slowly through water in a glass. He keeps his cards smack up against his nipples, I realized, knowing that I didn't do the same.

The words bubble like beer foam, or Aphrodite's garment. My harp-playing, my years of chorale and the madrigals in college and grad school. "I was a chorus geek," I giggled over the raspberry wheat. He talks about Amy, the striped-sock girl, and their constant fights, her grasping possessiveness, and the Ecstasy she popped before sex until the little white pills stopped doing good. "She was just so miserable much of the time," he said in his smiling lilt. "That's why the kids nowadays take them with a Prozac chaser. It's a shame, though. She was one of the first people I met when I moved here."

We dance around and within the virtues of easy-going attitudes and the lack of jealousy, rejecting the concept of dating anyone with little gnomes known as children (although garden gnomes are acceptable). And I wondered why he didn't just look across that small veneered table and see whatever he's seeking reflected there, in a pair of slate gray eyes, whatever he saw at Yule when I curled next to the tree and fussed with the decorations, talking about multivalent oppressions and saran wrap clothes.

"Here," the Goddess whispered. "I give you what you asked. Can you not recognize it?" But did she say it to you or to me? I'll pretend it's the former.

Have faith. Have faith. I was not said, for the Gods will give me what I ask, wrapped in red satin, as they always have. Even when my question was half-voiced, my face hidden in the confines of my pillow the night after he played with Silvermoon's hair on Midsummer, they listen and they will grant. I was not sad then, staring across the table, only the face of water reflecting back, waiting for the stone to be cast, or the rain to patter or the fish to peek up from below.

"See you tomorrow," he said on the walk. He embraced me, tongue to tonsils and stroking my bare back. Squashblossom peered from the window.

Today was my past, and tomorrow is my future.

***

"Paralysis by analysis," Robin said at Midsummer, tapping the card on her fold-out table. The five of cups: a frequent visitor, a bit like the IRS.

Standing on a riverside, a figure hides his face in the folds of a black cloak. He does not see an aqueduct branching over a nearby stream, or the glorious ruin of a gray stone castle in the distance. He sees nothing but the black wool folds. In front of him, three heavy chalices lie prone, spilling their good vintage into the dirt. Behind him, two stand tall and full. A quick movement could topple them. A quick movement could also let the fold fall from his face, and sweep a glass in the hand, downing the liquor. And with an ah, he would smack his lips and exclaim, "A good year!"

The lesson, of course, is perspective. If he dropped the dark cape, he would see the spilt wine, yes. But he would also see the vista ahead of him, and the bridge arching over the river. With a careful turn, he could see the cups behind him, almost as much as he inadvertently spilled, and all ready for the taking. But he doesn't; he's blind to regret.

And me? I'm the opposite: the mindless Fool coming in to wreck the scene. I shrug off the black cloak and the clothes underneath, cavorting in the green as naked as my birthday, downing the two cups and draining the drops still caught in the bowls of the spilled. And then I run to the stream and jump in, not caring for the possibility of both cold and hangover. I swim for the bridge. Maybe I drown, lost in the sensation of wine and water on skin.

Oh Mighty Aphrodite, that's what I feel when I look at him.

***