His sensible hands appeared to have done manual labor, each finger had calluses, though only his index and third fingers on his left hand were stained from nicotine. They fluttered and danced over the cards to draw more prophesy. His lopsided mouth was probably his best feature, and I waited to hear my fate from it. He said, alarming me, that the exception proves the rule-these two in the present-coins, worry, and this heart, disappointment, and my handmaidens-heartbreak and worry in the world-they're fives, in the middle-two fives-well balanced-they're probably true for you anyway most of the time-the heart card equals a crush-it could be your work or a person-but it's mastered in the outcome-the queen is a master, so she can handle it, and improve the situation immeasurably-you might not have the problem again-it could be financial disappointment-but you lose something, and get to keep the rest-they follow exactly-you do hard work and some goes to waste-premature excitement of the heart and there's a letdown-just like real life-this is a monkey holding a mirror up to this girl who's doing her toilette-it's a very old image-it may have to do with the mockery of vanity, an opposition to vanity.
My vanity isn't merely useless when it makes me glad, though it does gladly waste my days. The circumspect widow's vanity mostly didn't make her glad, since it allowed her to marry a man who humiliated her and about which she said nothing, so she also cohabited with heartbreak and worry, believing that it's better not to say anything. Leslie Van Houten vainly insisted during the penalty phase of her trial that LSD did not make her follow Manson's orders to murder, to helter skelter, to stab Mrs. LaBianca, or to wipe off her own fingerprints, which, if she hadn't done, might have earned her a lighter sentence, because destroying any evidence, erasing traces of venal acts, though Mrs. LaBianca might have already been dead when she stabbed her, indicated Leslie knew what she was doing was wrong, and that alone distinguishes a person who is legally sane from one who is not. It wasn't LSD, Leslie avowed, "it was the war in Vietnam and TV." Leslie Van Houten's history includes mine, the town's is also mine, since I'm an American, and outside, the kitchen helper's bicycle lies on the ground in front of the cafe, so I could discover what makes him tick, young, gawky, full of piss, longing, and very pretty, and he might be interesting no matter what he says, but I never used to think that everyone young was pretty, but lately I do, and so was I, once. After JFK was assassinated, hippies appeared, and young myself, I observed them, startled, since they came out of nowhere, kids on the street, run aways, they'd left newly broken homes, colleges, jobs, the girls with long, straggling hair, flowers in it, who wore long, cotton dresses, boys with thin, wavy hair, in blue jeans and sprouting ragged tufts of beard, everyone like rag dolls, and I was so very young and pretty then, too, unaware and untouched, bewildered and removed. The girls let hair grow on their legs and carried flowers some days, daffodils, the boys appeared stretched to their limits, so long and skinny, new to sex and redfaced under their uncertain facial hair, awkward, they all were, dumb and eager about life, and everyone was pretty in an insipid, unmenacing way, the way the kitchen helper is now, as youth seems now, when years ago, at that age, I would have noticed their imperfections, and mine, the way I still do. But their flaws don't matter, because like kittens and puppies, the young are adorable, which can protect them from predators, though children and their predators is a vast subject, and also it's debatable what a child is. Kennedy's was the common death of the common father, and after it, the cortege snaking its way home to a national graveyard, the children went wild, loose and suddenly orphaned, wandered around the streets, talking about peace and love, or, in squalid, urban tenements that their parents had fled years before, they stirred tasteless, watery soup in communal pots, and everyone young was for rock music and sex, against war, straining for pleasure, wanting a hit of strange. Everywhere was disarray. I dreamed JFK was my father, my father was an anxious man, he especially feared rats and heights, and years later I still remember the dream vividly, along with my shock at discovering I was JFK's daughter, but now I think I was in some way. Memory is motivated, while the uncontrollable stories people tell themselves during REM sleep reveal unbidden messages experienced with scant awareness of their warnings. Awake, sense memories, like some friendships and all snowflakes, dissolve.
In my version of history in which all are renegade children, I confound memory and dream, or nightmare, the minute with the monumental, private and public. I heard about Malcolm X's murder on the radio. I heard a TV newsman announce that Martin Luther King had been shot. I ran to the set and kneeled in front of it. I watched TV reruns of Robert Kennedy's murder. I wasn't involved in demonstrations or protest marches, I was engaged in a singular battle with the world, and the world kept intruding and winning. I witnessed events and was often sleepwalking, but anyway I opened the door wide, and many singular, deranged people entered, and I thought they were angels. Manson told Leslie he was God, a stranger named Mel told me he was, but I didn't fall under his spell, while others flew into his godlike arms, like my childhood friend Johnny and a girlfriend called Buckle, whose mother had painted abstractions in the suburbs, who was different from other mothers and whose daughter was haughty and knowing, but anyway Buckle fell to Mel and disappeared, while Leslie succumbed to Manson, not totally or not as much as the other girls, who were older, but even though less submissive to him, she has been imprisoned for life. Three years after Buckle and Johnny's god died, possibly murdered by a distraught follower, his band dispersed throughout the land, and I don't know what happened to them, though I wonder, since Johnny and I went to grade school, when everyone was pretty, and he was one of my little boyfriends, with thick, black hair, clear, pink skin that turned scarlet in blushes, and a timorousness about life I could see even when we were twelve. I remember him, small and already wary, hiding behind a tree, but I didn't foresee he'd search for a messiah. I walked out of his life and Buckle's, my brother walked out of mine, and when something I suspected might annihilate me rose to the surface like scum, I vanished or disappeared inside myself, since I thought I knew what could destroy me and, actually, I'd mandated myself to protect my mind, but I didn't know what to do with my body, didn't want to obey its laws, blood, curves, holes, and I didn't care about it, was profligate with it, and still nothing of it could be forgotten, nothing.
The cafe is steamy, its brown wood walls suffocatingly close and similar to most establishments' here, except when their walls are painted glossy white to cover wear and rot. There was hardly any light when I opened the squeaky door with a bell whose annoying tinkle announces all newcomers, but I quickly spotted the kitchen helper and his two buddies and instantly regretted my decision to enter. Yet I enter, having chosen this adventure or outing, and he calls out, embarrassed, "Want to join us?" and I do that also. The TV is radiating like a fire in one corner of the room, the cafe owner, also dressed in 18th century costume with a wide leather belt and clunky, metal buckle pressing comically into his round belly, is in the other, but his traditional vest, adorned with several contemporary metal buttons, announces his green and other tastes. Residents of the eclectic community of strangers I represent, even fleetingly, amuse the local townspeople, who view us as special, obnoxious, or queer, and some desire our business or conversation, which might be why the kitchen helper has beckoned me to his table, to meet his friends, and where, surprisingly, I'm confronted by a comparatively small, light-wood chair, with an oak frame, a seat and back of birch veneer designed by jean Prouve in 1945. It's a chair I love, since it looks and feels right, and I concur with Peter Smithson that "it could be said that when we design a chair we make a society and city in miniature." It's a cozy proposition I also nestle into when I sit on this chair, akin to a school chair, and I'm with schoolboys. Its molded hack holds mine, the way the Eames chairs at home did, so I settle into it with familiarity and smile expectantly at the cafe owner in his historical gear, order an American coffee, and ready myself to listen to the kitchen helper and his two friends, who are, like him, awkward, but one is fat, the other skinny, and their thighs and asses are lost in vast stretches of heavy cotton or denim that swim around their worried bodies. Each drums his foot on the floor. The skinny one's pockmarked face is lean and pointed, arresting in its intensity, while the fat one's is a fiery red presumably from a heat treatment or way too much B6, or niacin, and they're talking about papers and tests, a local band called Killer Crank, and a buddy busted for weed. I watch the pearly face of the kitchen helper whose eyes fasten on mine, half-smiles shyly but inquisitively, but then I withdraw my eyes to gaze upon the warm screen in the corner, since TV is a friendly face, though many frown upon it. Every resident could watch it in a small lounge, off the third floor, in the library, if they desired, though most didn't, or, alone, they could listen to the radio, if the speakers' broadcast-worthy voices didn't become cloying to them as they do me, but everywhere TV can make life more bearable, since it's always the same, and when conditions are not of your making, and there may not even be the appearance of choice, though TV doesn't offer abundant choices, especially if you receive only network programs, a sad or silly problem on the box lets an evening pass in relative tranquility. When I was a child, looking at TV, even as my parents argued about which programs I should watch, I felt invincible, because I threw myself into my mind as if it were a place of protection, and believed it didn't matter what TV programs I watched, and also felt I could visit other bodies or be many people, like those in books, movies, or on TV, mostly female, sometimes male, though from that pretense I was dissuaded by the shadowy presence of my brother, as well as others who encouraged and discouraged me. When my brother vanished, there was nothing to say, I suppose my parents whispered interpretations in their bedroom, where my father's dresser stood on one wall, his coins and cigar humidor on it, taller than my mother's, which spread across another wall of the spacious room, her sewing machine near my father's dresser, there were white cotton and linen shades on the four windows, white fustian, or cotton and linen, curtains, also, but I was too young to understand my brother, they said, and they didn't, either, but this old story of irrationality underwrites any tale of love or hate, since men and women are great, illegible subjects for each other, along with their families, cats and dogs, all of which reach an end, anyway.