Julia's Chocolates. Cathy Lamb

at least to me, the air had been siphoned from the room, every last molecule of it. I rode the “wave of fear,” as I’d dubbed it, the best I could. The air was already gone, and then a familiar feeling of overwhelming panic flooded my body. This happened because my body knew it was dying, I surmised.

      I clenched my teeth together and tried to breathe through my nose as dizziness struck. I was going crazy. Losing my mind. Hello, sanitarium!

      And then, after what seemed like hours, my heartbeat started to slow, the air whooshed back into the room, and my body stopped trembling. It was replaced by a familiar bone-racking exhaustion, but it was better than suffocating—much better.

      I have so come to appreciate air these last months. Air, glorious air.

      I pushed my frizzy curls off my damp forehead with a shaky hand, desperate to get my mind away from my imminent death and on to another subject. I inhaled, ragged and low. “What are we doing at Breast Power Psychic Night, then?” I choked out, amazed that Aunt Lydia hadn’t noticed that I was temporarily dying, though I prided myself on my ability to hide this peculiar aspect of my life from others.

      “Why, we’re going to be talking about our breasts. What else did you think we were going to do?” She blinked at me, her huge eyes round and curious as she used both hands to crack six eggs at once with great force against the rim of a pan. “Breasts have a lot to say, Julia! You simply have to listen to them.”

      I looked at my breasts, still heaving. They had nothing to say, I surmised. They were simply happy they weren’t attached to a corpse.

      Breast Power Psychic Night had begun in Aunt Lydia’s living room. The lights were turned down low, windows opened to let in the freshness of a spring evening in the mountains. The furniture might be old, but it was plush and worn and plentiful. A red couch and two purple loveseats were covered with pillows Aunt Lydia had embroidered and two quilts she had sewn. Stacks of books competed for space with herbs growing in huge trays, a forest of plants, and an abundance of vanilla-scented candles.

      A huge wreath decorated with dried roses, purple and sage-colored ribbons, raffia, pinecones, and tiny birdhouses hung on the fireplace hearth. As much as my Aunt Lydia likes her guns and her chickens, she loves a good craft project. Martha Stewart would love her.

      “We’re here to find the power within our breasts,” Aunt Lydia semi-shouted, cupping her boobs, her tie-dyed T-shirt bunching up under her hands. “Men have objectified us long enough, judged us by the size of our breasts. Our worth summed up with a look at our top half.”

      The darkened room flickered with candlelight, alighting on each of the women’s faces as Lydia led the group. I laced my fingers together, almost surprised I wasn’t having another coronary.

      Here I was, sitting on an overstuffed pillow, in the dark, on the floor, about to flip off my shirt in front of three women I didn’t know, and I felt perfectly calm. As if I disrobed and swung my boobs around and about all the time in front of people.

      “It’s so nice to meet you,” Katie Margold said quietly over the candlelight when Aunt Lydia made a quick trip to the bathroom to expel “the earth’s yellow poisons” from her bladder.

      Katie’s brown eyes were soft, like chocolate, but they looked tired, defeated. They skirted about as if she were waiting for me to quickly move on and talk to someone else more interesting. But then she examined my cheek and my eye, both still a lovely shade of purple with puke-green thrown in. Her lips pursed, though not in judgment.

      “It’s nice to meet you, too,” I said. “I love your hair. It’s so bouncy. It reminds me of mermaid hair.”

      Oh, I am strange, I thought instantly, my shoulders slumping. I was searching for something to say, and there it was.

      Tall, no makeup, and heavy, Katie wore an old green T-shirt with a couple of stains and baggy blue jeans. But her hair was her crowning glory. A reddish auburn color, it tumbled in deep waves down her back, clean and shiny. She could have been in one of those shampoo ads.

      But I felt like an idiot. The poor woman probably thought I was gay. I wasn’t gay, but neither did I particularly like men at this point in my life.

      “Oh! Well, I…” it was hard to tell in the darkened room, but I think Katie blushed a little, then looked enormously pleased, and huge tears formed in her eyes, giant, perfectly shaped tears. If eyes had to breathe for us, she would have drowned.

      I stumbled about for something else to say. Good Lord. I’d been invited to Breast Power Psychic Night, and already I had one of the women in tears. I was a classless, chubby, socially inept cow, who often couldn’t breathe and who was going to be chased down by an obsessive fiancé at any moment.

      Katie wiped the tears away with her fingers. “Thank you.” She sighed, the sigh a little shaky.

      The thank-you was so heartfelt, I felt hot tears spring to my own eyes. “You’re welcome. I’ve always wanted red hair, long hair. I always thought…I saw this mermaid in a book with long red hair once, and I never forgot it. Compared to a mop of dirty-blond curls, well—”

      “I remember a mermaid just like that, too—the Little Mermaid.” Her brown eyes pooled again. “I can’t believe I’m crying about a mermaid!”

      I couldn’t believe she cried about mermaids, either. “What a loon,” I said, shaking my head, and Katie laughed.

      But I knew I didn’t really think she was a loon. About a month ago, I had stood in line at the library and cried because it was so wonderful I could check out books without paying for them. I didn’t have any money that day because I had taken Robert out to an expensive meal the night before, which he had complained about being tasteless, and I thought to myself, “I love Thomas Jefferson.” And then I had cried, right there in line.

      Katie and I were two of a pathetic kind.

      To her left sat the psychic, Caroline Harper, and there was not a woman on the planet who looked less like a psychic than she. Petite and willowy, wearing a loose flowered skirt and a black tank top, she looked more like a model for tiny women. High cheekbones plunged to a full mouth, her murky, sea-green eyes slanting in her face.

      The only remarkable thing was the constant twitching of her right eye, which she now and then raised a hand to rub, to hold, as if willing the twitch away. When she’d walked into the house, I’d instantly reached up to tuck my wayward curls behind my ears, feeling like a mammoth, worm-eating buffalo as I towered over her. One wrong step and I’d crush the woman.

      Caroline was the frugal one. The woman who lived off pennies and made the best pineapple upside-down cake ever. The one who sold produce at the farmer’s market each week and did readings on the side and barely made it month to month with the help of her neighbors, those who dropped off eggs and meals and were then treated the next day to one of Caroline’s perfect baked goods.

      Caroline smiled at me over the candlelight, her smile huge, her teeth large and brilliant white, her eyes crinkling just a bit in the corners. I judged her to be about five years older than myself.

      She peered into my eyes, bruised and otherwise, and I waited for her to recognize the quaking, ridiculous woman with a yucky past and a strange disease that I am. She would foresee my future and turn pale and sickly-looking.

      But she didn’t. In fact, she just kept smiling at me. Cheerful-like. Open. For some reason she reminded me of Cheerios.

      “Welcome to Golden.” Caroline’s eye kept winking, but the rest of her face was peaceful, tranquil. “Did Lydia tell you that she calls this Psychic Night each week?”

      I nodded my assent, kneading the edge of my blue sweater in my lap, hoping it would hide my hips. Had I gotten even fatter since tiny Caroline walked through the door?

      “Lydia!” she laughed, as Aunt Lydia walked back into the room, her bladder apparently having expelled all poisonous yellow liquids from her body. Caroline’s laughter bubbled right there at the surface, even as that eye kept twitching. Twitch. Twitch.