Bedside Manner

By the time I was eighteen, my mother was charging people fifteen dollars to come and see her. The Navy had moved us to Virginia Beach, and Mom worked out of her upstairs bedroom. After a very brief attempt at trance mediumship—mother was always one for being in control, and she didn’t like snoozing off while others spoke through her—she developed her own ritual of holding people’s jewelry or looking at photographs of their family and friends, while illuminated by a single candle. The phone rang at all hours of the day and night with needy people looking for answers. I became a sort of quasi-secretary and started protecting Mom from her desperate clients; no one had answering machines in those days.

Virginia Beach was a fortunate place to live because it had an established subculture of believers in the occult. The Edgar Cayce Foundation had made a metaphysical mecca out of the area, as popular in its own way as San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. People burned incense and smoked marijuana, ate health food and searched for past lives, gave up the material for the spiritual. The smell of patchouli still reminds me of the second-hand clothes my friends wore. My particular concession to the trend was to wear Mom’s twenty-year-old fringed suede jacket and moccasins. I alternated this with very short skirts and a vinyl raincoat.

The advantage of the Beach was that we could share our psychic experiences without being considered insane. You still couldn’t tell everyone—this was the South, not Southern California—but there were plenty who understood. Mom, with her bloodline of Texas cowboys and tenacious Celts, and her background of Navy pilots, public relations, and modeling schools, brought a unique earthiness to the task. This would evolve into a clinical detachment later on, one that served her well when working murder and missing persons cases with the police.

Like Tonto, I was her faithful companion on this part of the paranormal journey. I attended lectures at the Cayce foundation, discussed reincarnation over seafood dinners and sat in on Mom’s sessions with friends and clients. I believed in her ability because I knew the person it stemmed from, and I had watched it grow over the years. But I also knew that I never wanted to be inundated with all these people coming to me for help. I was not going to follow in her footsteps, even though she often urged me to try. The responsibility of steering someone else's life through my own intuition felt like a heavy stone crushing my chest. What if I was wrong? What if they made bad choices—or worse, wasted their lives in futile dreaming—because of what I predicted?

One of the many who wandered into our path was Nick, a lantern-jawed young navy lieutenant who favored cowboy boots with almost any attire and drove a Volkswagen bug named Lambchop (after the Shari Lewis hand puppet of the time). I liked Nick, he was cheerful, funny, and a gentleman. We went out a few times, and while my heart wasn’t deeply committed, I enjoyed his company, especially on the weekends. So I was rather wistful when I told Mom that Nick wouldn’t be around one weekend because he was spending it in Washington, D.C.

Mother looked up from washing dishes in the sink (water is a great conductor of intuitive insights) and said, “Yeah, and I know who he’s spending it with! She likes to sleep on the left side of the bed.” I goggled at this intimate information (sex was always a subject of frankness and humor in our house) but it didn't cause me any significant pain. I was amused—and apprehensive; my mother was way too delighted with her insight and that probably meant she was going to needle Nick with it the next time we saw him.

Sure enough, when Nick came around for dinner two weeks later, she plopped that little clairvoyant tidbit right on the table. He went white to the eyebrows and choked on his spoonbread; when he finally cleared his windpipe,  he admitted she was right. We went out a couple times after that, but Nick was never the same. One evening, we were sitting on the living room couch, snogging just below a portrait of my mother done by a local artist. It was an ephemeral rather than realistic representation, but the thoughtful expression in her green eyes followed you wherever you went. Between kisses, Nick would glance up at the portrait—and every time he did, he became more distracted. Finally he just stopped.

“I can’t,” he said, “I’m sorry, I’ve really tried, but I just can’t do this anymore. When I sit here, I feel like your mom knows what we’re doing. And her room is right above above us. For all I know, she’s watching us right now.”

I tried to explain that it didn’t work that way—although, in all honesty, it nearly did; I can’t tell you the number of times I tried to creep into the house after curfew, only to have Mom shoot out of her room and confront me from the top of the stairs. Her eyes were so piercing and angry, it felt like a rifle trained on my forehead. I could never argue any sort of innocence with her, either, because she always had a sense of what I’d really been up to. My brothers and I were probably saved from a lot of dangerous experimentation that way. Why bother, we’d say, when you know she’s going to catch you?

As for Nick, he pulled on his boots, saddled up Lambchop and putt-putted off into the sunset. He came by once or twice after that, before he was transferred, but he never kissed me like anything but a brother.