The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,55
Sue and I both knew there was an incredibly high likelihood that it would be bogus, although I was secretly hoping against reason that we might actually encounter the real thing, and I guess so was Sue, since she agreed.
I dialed the 976 number, punching the little white buttons of my bright blue plastic phone, which looked more like a toy with which my baby cousins might play than something that could serve as a bridge to the psychic forces of the universe. A machine asked me to punch in my credit card number. I punched. Then a click.
“Thank you for calling the Psychic Hotline, where all the secrets of your future will be revealed,” said the guy on the other end of the line. He sounded like he was either half asleep or stoned out of his mind. I could tell then that this was not going to go well. When he told me that based on my aura I was going to be pregnant within the year, if I wasn’t already, I rolled my eyes and wordlessly handed the phone over to Sue. She hung up on the guy after he told her she had a tilted uterus, which was why she suffered severe cramps every month. Today we still laugh and cringe at that idiotic waste of twenty dollars.
Still, the Psychic Hotline experience did not deter us. During spring break of that year, which we spent in L.A., Sue and I were lured into a tiny store on Melrose Avenue, its window adorned with the pink flashing neon message PALM READING $5. The gypsy woman inside—at least that was how she was dressed—with the Transylvanian accent foretold over a crystal ball that I would find my true love in six months (which I did not) and that Sue would find much professional success in some way that the woman could not specify. Sue stopped seeing alleged psychics with me after that experience, and I went on alone in my search.
After the Psychic Hotline and the Melrose Avenue palm reader was the Tibetan Buddhist palm-reading monk, whom I encountered during my junior year abroad in western China; he declared that I was incredibly intelligent. After him came the palm-reading fisherman I found along the Yangzi River, who predicted that I would have a long, successful life. Next was the Chinese astrologer of Taipei, who said nothing memorable. Then there was the Turkish tea-leaves reader of Sierra Madre, California, who said I would have a great time on my next vacation. And of course, there was Clairvoyant Mark of New York City, the aura and palm reader at the drunken company holiday party at the Rainbow Room, who also said I was smart.
Yet among this parade of unremarkable, if not altogether bad, readings and observations, there was one woman who was quite unforgettable, not because she could predict my future but because she could see into my past.
She was a palm reader. I met her five years before my mother told me about what she and the rest of them had tried to do to me. After I learned that, this woman’s words would come back to me with greater impact; it was almost like she knew before I knew.
We had met in her high-rise apartment on the east side of midtown Manhattan. Daylight streamed into the giant windows that overlooked Third Avenue. The apartment was not what I had come to expect. There were no candles, no chairs or sofas covered in red velour, no plastic beads hanging in the doorway between her living room and her inner sanctum, no gold-tasseled tablecloths and cushions, no crystal ball. Instead, the apartment was decorated in muted tans and browns with carefully coordinated splashes of color in the throw pillows on the sofa and in the lush rugs. I wouldn’t have minded living in such a space. The woman herself was an extension of the apartment. Dressed in cream-colored pants and a white sweater with a clean, barely made-up face, this middle-aged woman did not look to me like someone able to see what the rest of us could not.
I had really come to her apartment to hire her services for a big bash my roommates and I were throwing that coming weekend. As part of our commitment to live fully our never-again-to-be-experienced carefree postcollege years in New York City, we had decided to invite everyone we could think of to invade our seven-hundred-square-foot, three-bedroom apartment on the Upper