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By Darren Kaminsky
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Darren Kaminsky's novel, Sugar Spun Sisters, appears in serialized form every Monday right here on Me Three. The story follows the lives of five twenty-somethings living in Washington D.C. As far as the editors are currently aware, none of these characters work in politics.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
July 16
“So you can’t see my future?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“I don’t know girl, something’s blocking it.”
“What?”
“Something cold. It’s like a curtain.”
Imogen sat at the small table for another minute and stared at Mrs. Susan, whose head was bent down exposing her peroxide blond hair’s brown grey roots.
Mrs. Susan had a large head with very large cheeks that hung off her face in the same way that a bulldog’s do. Her nose was short and stubby and did nothing to distract anyone from staring at her jowls. Her eyes were big and green and very canny so that if she looked at you, even for a few seconds, you felt like you’d finally been looked at for the first time, like someone had seen through everything that’s usually hidden by being in the your own private skull.
“Why are you still sitting here? That’s it. That’s all I have to say,” she said and this time her Russian accent was much more pronounced so that it sounded like she said, “Vi are vu sthill seeting dare?”
“But I paid you 30 dollars,” Imogen said.
“Yes, for your future. It’s dark and there’s a curtain of cold. I told you. What else do you want to know?”
Imogen had a shocked expression on her face, like she’d been slapped, then she got red.
“That’s not a fortune or a future. I want my money back. Either that or I’ll report you.”
“To who? The National Association of Fortune Tellers, Psychics and Seers? Believe me, they’ve gotten all they can have of me. I write letters to them complaining about me. But I also pay my association fee on time so they don’t mind.”
“But, how can you just give me a single sentence? That’s not worth $30.”
“You want more kid?...OK...you will try homosexuality and it won’t work out for you. You’ll become a Yoga instructor and meet a young hard-working Jewish lawyer who will say, ‘Finally a blond WASP of my very own.’ You will marry him and move to the suburbs where you’ll have 3 children, two girls and a boy, who will all get into universities ranked in the high second tier. You’ll get a Mercedes station wagon and your husband will have a large blue BMW. You’ll give money to the World Wildlife Foundation and contribute burned chocolate chip cookies to the bake sale at your children’s Quaker-run elementary school...”
“You’re just making that up,” Imogen said.
“Have I given you $30 worth?”
“No, because I don’t feel like you mean it.”
“Well, that’s because your future is obscured by a giant cold veil.”
Imogen suddenly burst into tears and Bella, who was standing next to me went over and put her arms around her.
The room was covered in red silk with various “magical” looking symbols worked in some cheap metal hanging from the ceiling. There was a giant crystal ball on a bronze stand on the table where Imogen and Mrs. Susan were sitting.
The table was placed at a window and down below was 18th street, the main drag of Adams Morgan. Couples and groups of friends sat at, or strolled towards, outdoor cafes. The ones already at the cafes talked and laughed and the women threw their hair in little tosses and the men -- very gentlemenly -- poured from pitchers. There was flirting and drinking and even stuff that looked like dancing and making idle chit chat.
Because of the way Imogen was crying it all felt very far from us and very alien. We were surrounded by a veil of seriousness. We were caught behind the veil and were serious ourselves.
Mrs. Susan looked at Bella and I and said, “Do either of you want...”
We looked at Imogen, then back at each other, then shook our heads in a very definite “NO,” and backed up a step so that I almost tripped over my camera bag.
“Fine. Fine. Perfectly understandable,” Mrs. Susan said and she lifted herself with what seemed like a lot of effort. Her body didn’t so much move as slosh as she walked to the wall opposite me. It shocked me when there was a click and it turned out that it wasn’t a wall at all, but a door into what must have been the rest of her apartment. She started to disappear through, but her head and upper body popped back out of the darkness and looked at Bella and me.
“You two really wouldn’t have worked, but it was pretty shitty of you to date her friend,” Mrs. Susan said with her green eyes settling on me. This time I did trip over my camera bag and only caught myself by grabbing a gold painted pillar that an obviously fake plant rested on. The plant nearly fell and I caught it right in time.
We went downstairs with all the happy people and sat in a restaurant called Cities, which, very Disney-like, was redecorated every 6 months as a different world city. The menu changed with the city. Currently, it was Tokyo and the menu was full of Sushi and noodles. We ordered several bottles of saki and after toast three Imogen started smiling and talking like the crying fit upstairs had never happened.
“My dad is pretty pissed that I still don’t have a job or a decoration yet.”
“Do you mean direction?"
“Yeah, I have no direction,” Imogen said.
We were sitting at a booth and Bella and Imogen were sitting across from me and I was feeling the warm-at-the-center feeling you get with saki.
Imogen got up to excuse herself and Bella looked at me with her own version of Mrs. Susan’s hard stare. “Her Dad’s pissed that she put up part of her allowance for your bond.”
“Did she get it back yet?”
“No, even though the charges were dropped she has to wait until the end of the month to cash it. She had to call her father and get a whole other month’s allowance to tide her over.”
“You’d think that with as much money as he has it just wouldn’t matter.”
“He did earn it. He can act like he wants to with it.”
“If I were her, I wouldn’t let him use it to control me.”
“Easy for you to say. Where would you be if she didn’t take his money?” Bella said and clipped the last bit of the phrase tartly.
I looked up and Imogen was back, standing at the end of the table expectantly. I had no idea how much of the conversation she’d heard. Both Bella and I stopped talking, making it excruciatingly obvious that we’d been talking about her. I tried to think of something to say that would sound like it’d been part of some other conversation that Bel and I had been having, but I didn’t come up with anything.
Things were sort of sedate after that and the conversation lulled, then dropped off entirely. I think that Imogen felt insulted and Bella had decided that it was my fault that she was caught talking about Imogen’s relationship with her father.
After dinner, with all the awkwardness, I was grateful to be able to say goodbye to them.
I slung my camera bag across my front and walked down the hill to U street and the police station. I went in the front door to find myself in an all-white room with white walls and a white floor and red plastic chairs. Two old homeless men slept in two of the chairs. And the reek of dried urine emanating from them was so strong that I almost threw up.
I held my breath as I crossed the room to the window where a policewoman sat. I told her that I was there to see Officer Tytis and showed her the letter that the City Press had written describing my assignment.
I’d never met Officer Tytis and I was scared that he’d be in some way connected to the cops who’d broken Tiny’s arm. At least it couldn’t actually be the two who’d done it because they’d been put on paid administrative leave.
It was a couple of minutes later, when I’d almost passed out from inhaling dried urine that Officer Tytis came out, shook my hand and guided me back out the door I’d come in through, to the street where his partner Officer Renyolds was already in their car. Both of them were in plainclothes and looked almost intentionally scruffy.
“OK,” Officer Tytis said, “Ground rules: First, do what I tell you. If I say get down, get down. If I tell you to stay in the car then stay in the car. If I tell you to shut up, then shut up. Got it?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
“Now, we’ve got a house on V street, around the corner, that we suspect is being used by bootlegger’s and drug stoolies as a depot for mules.”
“Now, we’re just going to go over, talk to the officers on the stakeout and get a picture of what’s going on over there. Got it?”
I said nothing because I didn’t think I needed to.
“Hey, photographer? I asked if you got it?”
“Yes.”
“Good, I don’t want to have to pull your ass out of anything. It’ll get me in trouble.”
We drove three blocks and made a familiar turn and stopped next to another unmarked car and I asked which house it was and, of course, Officer Tytis points at Teddy’s house.
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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.
© 2005 Me Three
