The Reluctant Bride

Julia’s disappearance ended in a dark, airless room two thousand miles south of the border with a proclamation delivered by an old Mexican woman—a psychic named La Señora—who sat hunched over a glass ball, murmuring to herself in Spanish. Julia stared in shocked silence at the ball, as La Señora, the mouthpiece of celestial wisdom, revealed the latest twist in the plot of Julia’s life.

"Can you double check?" Julia asked hopefully. She had a right to ask. After all, she had just been informed, in no uncertain terms, that within a matter of months her life would be drastically and forever changed.

"No checks. You will marry." To Julia these words were not cookies on a plate to be graciously accepted or declined, they were tablets of stone. La Señora was the one person Julia trusted with her future, for she had been dead-on accurate in the past and Julia was convinced that the gray-haired Mexican woman could decipher all the lines on the palm of Fate. That didn’t stop Julia, however, from trying to talk her out of it.

"You’re kidding, right?" she asked, breaking into a cold sweat. "This is not at all what I had in mind for myself. It doesn’t fit with my plan,"she explained. She held her hands out to La Señora, fingers splayed to support the load of her imaginary plan.

La Señora stared at Julia’s empty palms. "Plan? What plan, Julia (who-lee-uh)?" The old woman dabbed at her face with an embroidered handkerchief. This prompted Julia to raise the back of her hand to test her own forehead. It was hot and moist—a fever maybe. She had no actual plan, nothing more than what she’d been doing for the last two years since her husband Turner’s death—running.

"No, Julia," she said wagging an arthritic finger at her, "Is true." She had that written- in-cement look on her face. Julia had seen that look before and knew there would be no concessions. La Señora was certain, as certain as a summer day in Mexico is long, hot and sticky. Julia turned her face up to the ceiling fan for reprieve from the heat, to collect her thoughts, to find a way out. As if to emphasize the futility of escape, the fan chose that very moment to stop working, the blades slowing to stillness as the small room in which the two women sat began to surrender to the heat of the day. Julia stared at the blades of the traitorous fan until it was motionless and her neck ached. It was at that moment Julia felt the full weight of La Señora’s prediction and understood that the Fates had intervened once again in her life. Like it or not she would be getting married some time this year. It was a done deal.

We were, both of us in her turn, robbed of our childhoods. It was sucked out of us smoothly, effortlessly, like the meat of a shelled oyster, swallowed up in one easy motion, leaving behind the shell, its iridescence vulnerable and exposed, with nothing to latch onto. No center, no core, and certainly no pearl.

We watched other children playing carefree. When their playtime concluded, we saw them run to their mothers and walk off hand-in-hand, chatting and skipping by their sides. We watched a father’s hand smooth the hair on the beloved head that rested in his arms. Because of her tucked-in, storytime nights, we knew her dreams would be sweeter than ours.

I guess you could say there were advantages. The dangers lurking in the dark didn’t frighten us compared to what we endured in daylight hours. And if some boogeyman beneath our beds wanted to crawl out and snatch us away in the night, so be it. Maybe life was better in boogeyville.

Shelly, in her childish attempt to deal with her daily ration of cruelty, tried her best to melt seamlessly into the kitchen walls. She couldn’t quite disappear, but she did manage to grow flatter and flatter as the years went by. She is forever stalked by nameless fears and faceless terrors. A part of her remains to this day, caught in the carousel wallpaper above the kitchen table. The house is still there; nothing much has changed. If you visit, and look closely, you can see her there, eyes wide, her mouth in a perpetual ‘O’ of protestation. Look for a child atop a raging black plastic horse, endlessly circling what might have been her life.

"I’ve always felt directed," she said, taking an unexpected right-hand turn. We were on our way to lunch at Randolph’s. Had I been driving we would have continued on straight ahead for another half mile before turning off the main road. I said nothing, knowing that we’d get there eventually and not wanting to interrupt the flow of her thoughts. I had learned over the years not to question her meanderings—either of thought or of auto—for things usually turned out OK, the point or the destination being reached sooner or later.

"I’ve learned to trust my intuition and just be spontaneous with life. That’s where most people get bogged down. They just think things to death," she said as we bounced our way through a construction zone. "They refuse to let life hold any mystery for them. Everything is planned out in advance." Her Miata bottomed out in a pot hole. "Nothing left to chance."

A young boy on roller blades momentarily lost his balance, as we watched him swing around a bus stop sign at the intersection we were approaching. He steadied himself, then as the light changed he skated off the curb and landed plunk on his fanny a few feet into the crosswalk. We smiled at each other as we cautiously skirted around him.

"You know," she went on, "only young kids really know what they want. Unlike adults who syphon every bit of information through the filter of years and the neuronal synapses that are woven into and around every event, regardless of how insignificant. ‘Shall I get out of bed?’ we ask ourselves, and the brain springs into action supplying reams of data based on previous experience and precedents. Our cerebral computers, sophisticated as they are, not only run through our emotional software to guide us, but call out sensorial reckonings, like tactile sensations, aromas and creative visuals to guide our decision making process. It’s no wonder spontaneity slips from our vocabulary the more seasoned we become. Hmm," she mused, "seasoned, an interesting word to describe the latter years. Our seasoning depends on the current life recipe we’ve chosen."

"Personally, I would have preferred a little more lemon zest," I offered.

"There you go!," she said nodding her approval, "And Shelly, for example, could have done with a lot less pepper."