Lacy Arnett Mayberry
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My roommate Christy was deep into a rebellion against her parents, strict people with a list of religious convictions they’d imposed upon her in childhood: no dancing, no Harry Potter, and no swimming in anything more revealing than an ankle-length pioneer dress. At least, this was what I gathered from listening in on her calls with them. She and I shared an apartment before the days of cell phones. We had a landline, and Christy took and made the majority of her calls in her bedroom on a phone that looked like a pair of giant lips. I listened quietly from my room or the kitch- en on a cream-colored phone that came with the apartment, careful not to breathe into the receiver—one of the few practical skills I’d mastered during childhood.
Christy acted out in predictable ways—neon-dyed bangs and short skirts and a boyfriend who chain-smoked. A snoozefest, as far as I was concerned, though these things certainly set her parents in a frenzy. She also bought a copy of the National Enquirer every week. Most afternoons, she’d leave the paper out on the kitchen table, and I’d help myself to a bowlful of her sickly sweet cereal (another thing she’d been denied in childhood) and pore over the news. I knew it was all gossip and photoshop, but the stories drew me in:
RADIOACTIVE BATS DEVOUR BABY LEFT IN DUMPSTER!
JOHN TRAVOLTA’S SECRET IDENTITY AS A WOMAN!
HERMAPHRODITE ALIEN HIVE DISCOVERED IN PLATT, KANSAS!
Christy reported these headlines over the phone to her parents when they called on Sundays.
“If aliens existed, they’d be in the Bible,” her mother argued.
“Look, Mom, all I’m saying is that if the government asks for human surrogates to carry alien babies, I might volunteer.”
Her parents didn’t realize it, but she was testing the waters. I’d seen pamphlets about egg donation in Christy’s purse. One pamphlet was from a clinic that promised to pay a girl up to $20,000 for her eggs—almost as much as I’d taken out in student loans. It was something I hadn’t considered doing myself. What if I ever had a kid of my own? And that kid somehow found its half-sibling without knowing it and they had sex? Or worse, fell in love?
I dropped by the clinic the following week. The woman at the front desk told me that surrogates had to submit their grades and come in almost every day for shots and monitoring and eat certain foods and take certain pills. I didn’t think I was up for it. That, and they wanted girls who were in college.
“I’m taking a gap year,” I told the woman. It was a less embarrassing way of saying that I’d dropped out after my first semester. And it wasn’t a complete lie; I did think I might go back. I was only twenty, so I had plenty of time.
“We’d need to look at your GPA anyway.” She told me this in a way that insinuated she guessed it wasn’t great.
I decided I’d rather make money slowly, over time. I worked at Denny’s. Of course, I never mentioned any of this to Christy. Although we were roommates and I knew a lot about her, we weren’t all that close. I thought it might have something to do with my drinking her milk when she was out of the apartment. For all her insurrection against convention, she took to marking her milk jug so she could see whether I’d gotten into it. But I always added water to make up the difference.
The funny thing is I don’t even like milk. I stopped drinking it altogether after Christy moved out to live with her boyfriend. Still, I missed our passive-aggressive milk jug communications. I missed her parents’ voices. I missed the National Enquirer. I began pulling copies off the shelf each week as I waited in line at the grocery store, buying soda crackers and iced tea, as if it was a spontaneous purchase and not the reason I’d come to the store in the first place.
I saw a job advertised in the back of the paper: Psychic Telephone Operator. $10/hr. No experience necessary. I’d seen it there before. The advertisement had been running for months. But then, for some reason (part curiosity, part loneliness—no one had yet answered my ad for a roommate—part because I was getting sick of Denny’s), I decided to call.
I was hired right away. The interviewer asked only my name and age and whether I’d be willing to work the graveyard shift. “You’ll be paid by the hour,” she said. “So you want to keep the callers on the phone for as long as possible.”
“What if no one calls?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t worry,” she said. “The graveyard is always a busy shift.”
I’d never been able to sleep very well myself. This was why I started working the late shift at Denny’s. I figured if I couldn’t sleep, I may as well make use of the hours. Mostly I took pancake orders from drunk college kids at 3 a.m. I hated these kids. Not because they knocked silverware onto the floor or left lousy tips, but because they reminded me of my failure to make it past my freshman year. To anyone who asked, I said I was taking a break from college. I hadn’t told my parents this. But then, they hadn’t asked.
The interviewer wanted me to start the following evening, which meant I’d miss my shift at Denny’s. I thought of the way Carla, the waitress scheduled with me, would crab about my screwing her over when I didn’t show up.
“No problem,” I said.
She asked if I had any questions.
“Well, I’m not sure how much this matters, but I’m not actually a psychic.”
There was silence on her end. I was worried. Maybe I’d have to see Carla tomorrow night after all.
“Skye,” she said. (This was a tactic I would learn later on—the power in repeating people’s names.) “Have you ever heard of women’s intuition?”
I had.
“Are you a woman?”
“Yes,” I said, even though, truthfully, I thought of myself as more of a girl.
“Then this gives us all the confidence we need in you.”
Even though I realized the whole thing was a scam, a part of me still hoped the interviewer knew something about me that I didn’t.
On my first night, one of the callers challenged my abilities up front.
“What color is my hair?” she asked.
I tried to imagine it. To see whether anything would come to me. It didn’t.
“Dark,” I said.
“I’m a blond!” she shot back.
“A natural blond?”
“Well,” she said, “no.”
“I’m sensing that there’s possibly more you’re trying to hide about yourself.” This I had borrowed from my Psychology 101 class, which, ironically, I had failed. But I didn’t have to rely too much on half-remembered psychology theories. Nearly every caller was a woman and nearly every woman wanted to know only one thing: if her partner was cheating.
I always told them yes. It wasn’t because I was a feminist or because I thought men were genetically predisposed to cheat, or even because my dad had cheated on my mom with her best friend and moved out with her when I was sixteen, but because it seemed to me that if someone already thought their partner was cheating, they probably were.
Sometimes people had questions about money. I advised them about the future of their business venture or their probability of winning the lottery. I was good at making up elaborate stories on the spot. It was something I’d practiced during my last year of high school, fielding evening calls from collection agencies trying to track down my mother.
“She’s recently suffered a brain injury,” I would say to them. “She was up on a ladder trying to shovel the snow off the roof and fell.” I thought this was hilarious because we lived in southern Nevada.
“That’s too bad,” the collection agent would say. “But brain injuries don’t absolve people of their financial responsibilities.”
The creditors doggedly stuck to their scripts, most of them deadpan and ruthless. In a way, I admired them.
The year my dad left, my mom took out a business loan. Like Mary Kay, she explained to me, but for clothes you sold out of your house. She bought racks of patterned leggings and bright-colored tunics, and because her friends felt bad about the divorce they all came over to buy things from her. And since people were shopping at our house, my mom figured she may as well sell other things they might like—jewelry and lip gloss and nail polish and weight-loss shakes. She filled our living room with products and displays and served all the women wine—so much wine that I wondered why she didn’t sell that too. It would have brought in a killing.
She printed out business cards with CEO beneath her name. “I bet you never thought you’d have a mother who was CEO of her own company,” she said to me. I had never thought about it.
After about a year, though, she fell into one of her depressions and stopped getting dressed or putting on false eyelashes—another thing she sold—and going out to places to hand out her card. Boxes continued to arrive at the house. All of her inventory was on automatic shipping plans, and my mom didn’t have the energy to cancel the orders. I would bring the boxes in from the porch when I got home from school and stack them in the front room, already overcrowded with clothing racks and tables strewn with old goods, until there was only a small path visible from the door to the bedroom hallway.
Because she was depressed, she never cleaned, and because I was a teenager, I never cleaned, and then the house became too messy to have people over, even on her good days. Neither of us did the laundry either. Once, out of desperation when there was nothing clean for me to wear in the house, I fought my way through the mess and pulled a shirt off one of the racks to wear to school that day. But the colors were too bright—yellow with orange and pink embroidery at the neck and sleeves—and one of the mean girls in my chemistry class noticed.
“Nice shirt,” she said.
Doing the laundry became the less painful option.
The month before I graduated high school, my mom declared bankruptcy and put the house up for sale.
“Scott thinks it’s the best option for me,” she said. Scott was her online boyfriend. They’d met the week after one of her friends gave us her old computer. “He wants me to fly out to live with him in Australia. Maybe even get married, who knows?”
I actually liked the idea of finishing high school in Australia.
She laughed when I mentioned this. “Oh, Skye, sweetie. Houses take forever to sell. And I wouldn’t leave until after you’re gone to college.”
I hadn’t really given college much thought, let alone applied anywhere. The next day I spoke to the school counselor. She told me the community college had to take basically anyone who graduated high school and that she could help get me a grant to pay for part of it, depending on how poor my parents were. Finally, I thought, my parents are good for something.
My mom flew to Australia the week after graduation. She was right: the house did take forever to sell and she didn’t want to wait. She told me she’d be shutting off the water and electricity and that I wouldn’t be able to live there once she was gone, though she let me keep my key. She asked if I could tidy things up a little or at least move some of the things out of my room so the realtor could stage the place. I never did. In the few emails she sent after arriving in Australia, she assured me that Scott was even dreamier in person, and that she thought the accents were hilarious. She asked if I could check the little desk drawer in her room for that red silk scarf of hers and mail it if it wasn’t too much trouble. She said she’d pay me back for postage, though she omitted the logistics of this transaction. I took the scarf but never sent it. Instead, I wore it around my neck during my psychic shifts as a kind of costume.
One particularly slow night, I was reading an article about the government’s first successful pig-to-human brain transplant, when I got a call from a man. I gave my line: Thank you for calling Psychic Connections. This is Skye, how can I aid you on your journey?
“There she is,” he said, like he’d been trying to get through to me all night. Some clients did that. Called and hung up until they got the girl they liked.
“What’s your name, sir?” I asked.
“You tell me. You’re the goddamn psychic.”
“I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way.”
“Oh, you don’t know my name, don’t have any idea who I am, but you know that I’m cheating on my wife?”
“I’m going to hang up now,” I said. This was the only other training I’d been given: to hang up the phone if we ever felt things were getting out of hand. Though “out of hand” was never explicitly defined.
“You’re going to stay on the phone and tell my wife that you’re a phony little shit who’s talking out of her ass.”
I decided to stay on the phone to teach this man a lesson the only way that would get through to him: his phone bill.
“I’m sensing an aura of hostility—I’m sorry, I still didn’t get your name.”
“You hear that, Sharon? She doesn’t even know whose lives she’s ruining. Probably doesn’t care, either. It’s just how these wackos make their money.”
Now I could hear it, heavy breathing on the line. I tried to remember the name Sharon. To remember talking to her about her husband.
The man started in again.
“So, yeah, I get hostile when some bullshit bitch tries to break up my marriage. What happens between me and my wife is none of your goddamn business.” “Sharon? Are you there?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
“Sharon, I’m sensing a lot of fear. Are you okay?”
“Of course she’s okay,” the man said.
“Is your husband frightening you?”
“A little,” Sharon’s voice came over the line.
“Jesus Christ, Sharon, don’t make me out to be a fucking villain.”
“I’m sorry, Dan. But you are scaring me a little.”
“Did you have a particularly difficult childhood, Dan?”
“Yes, he did!” Sharon said. “His father left them when he was little.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Dan said.
“And now you’re worried Dan will leave you, Sharon?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, so now you’re a phone shrink?”
“I’m just reading the energy here, Dan. Energy doesn’t lie.” That was a line I’d picked up from my old roommate Christy—something from one of her books on the healing power of crystals. It had become one of my signature phrases.
“You don’t know shit. I work in law enforcement. Long, hard shifts six days a week. I’m out at midnight pulling drunk kids off the road, not banging some woman my wife made up because she’s sitting around all day worrying. Too anxious to go to the friggin’ grocery store. Did Sharon tell you that? That I have to bring home the groceries and walk the dog because she’s too scared to leave the house?”
“You told me he was cheating,” Sharon said timidly.
I knew a little about anxiety. I had it as a teenager. Some days it got so bad that I would come home early from school and coil up on my bed for hours. One day, my dad came home in the middle of the day to make a phone call. A woman’s voice was on the phone, my mother’s friend, Connie, flirting. Making plans with my father for the weekend. That moment was never far from me in those days. Even now, so many years later, I wonder how our lives might have unfolded if I had stayed at school. Or if I had actually been asleep and missed hearing him on the phone. Or if Connie had been killed in some kind of awful car accident before that day. The possibilities for another outcome seemed endless, but we’d ended up the way we did, in one of the worst versions. It was something I had in common with all my callers. We were each trapped in a bad version of our lives, desperate for a glimpse of another way things might go. “I’m going to hang up now,” I said again.
“Go ahead,” said Dan. “I had my buddy at the station trace this call. He’ll tell me exactly where you live. I’m going to come out there and fuck you up, Skye. See you soon, sweetheart.”
I hung up. Dan was bluffing. Or, if not, he probably lived in another state and couldn’t get to me right away. Just to be sure, I got a knife out of the kitchen drawer. I turned off the lights and the phone ringer and decided to ride the bus to my mom’s house. I didn’t care if I was fired for abandoning my shift. Denny’s would take me back. They were always desperate for waitresses. At least there if a customer threatened me, my manager would kick him out of the restaurant or call the cops. “Ha!” I thought, “The cops!”
I arrived to a giant dumpster parked in the driveway. My key wouldn’t fit the lock. On the door was a sign from the bank. I looked through the front window. The rooms were empty. I had meant to eventually come and collect a few of my things, but everything was gone. I heard a car approaching and panicked, thinking irrationally that it might be Dan already hunting me down. I climbed up the ladder on the side of the dumpster and dropped in on the contents of our house. My mother’s store: her clothes flung between unopened cases of lip gloss and protein shake powder. My old bike. A chandelier acquired at a yard sale and never hung. My dad’s skis that my mother had been hiding from him since he moved out. Everything she’d hoarded, chucked in a few harried hours by strangers. The dumpster smelled like my childhood, like secondhand cigarette smoke and that sweet apple smell that comes from a certain kind of mold. I crawled over to my old mattress at the top of the heap, still covered with a sheet that I hadn’t washed all through high school, and thought about my dad.
He and Connie had married and moved away to Colorado years ago. We didn’t keep in touch. Connie didn’t like me even before she started sleeping with my dad. It was true that I had outed the affair to my mother. It was true that I hated Connie as much as she hated me. Not necessarily for breaking up our family—that kind of thing happens all the time—but for what she said on the phone the afternoon I listened in.
“She’s technically not even your daughter.”
“Well, yes. She is. I adopted her when I married Bianca.”
“Yes, that’s what I mean: technically. She’s not your blood.”
“She’s still my daughter.”
“I’m not saying she’s not. I’m just pointing out that she’s only in your life because of Bianca.”
“You’re only in my life because of Bianca.”
Connie was quiet a moment and then began to cackle so loud I had to hold the phone away. I’m embarrassed to admit how long it took me to understand what they were saying. That my father was not my father.
I wished he could see me now: the girl who used to believe she was his daughter, curled up on a mattress in a dumpster in what used to be his driveway. I knew that if he could see me, he’d feel bad about it. This thought gave me tremendous comfort. Shortly afterward, I drifted off and slept the whole night, a feat I hadn’t managed in years.
When we were still roommates, Christy told me about her worst nightmare: a vision of herself in twenty years, driving a minivan littered with cracker crumbs and the smell of sour milk from a sippy cup lodged beneath a seat.
“I could see that,” I said.
My response made her angry, and maybe this was another reason why we’d never had much of a friendship. I hadn’t meant to be rude. I had my own nightmare of a future self: awake in the dead of night in a shabby apartment, still unable to sleep, alone with my tabloid headlines and cereal. That was more what I meant. That deep down, we already knew that everything we feared would probably end up happening.
But not all my worries came true.
Dan never found me. The psychic company was sued for fraud and dissolved the next year. My mother came home a month after her house had been emptied, decrying Scott as a slick pervert who’d misrepresented himself on the internet. My dad and Connie had a baby.
And it was me, not Christy, who ended up with the van and the kids, though Christy did have at least one child. I know this because she recently reached out to me. The daughter. Christy had donated her eggs after all and the girl—her name was Mandy—was on a hunt for her genetic mother. Not for the woman herself—Christy had died of a heroin overdose many years before, which was news to me—but to know about her. She had tracked me down. Christy’s former roommate.
“What was she like?” the girl asked me over the phone. Christy’s parents apparently hadn’t been all that helpful.
I had stepped outside to take the call and could hear the muffled sound of two of my children screeching in the living room.
“Mandy,” I told her. “She was prophetic. The kind of person who changed people’s lives.”