by Lesley Wheeler
It felt like a warning. Later I speculated that the ban encompassed other kinds of obsession and intimacy.
Some girls play light-as-a-feather-stiff-as-a-board. Others compare intelligence about boys. Paper-doll girls loll on the basement shag of the Womack split-level, held aloft by artificial fibers, but there are also curvy girls, fleshed with foresight, and sleepy girls, and cuticle-chewers, and midnight gigglers hopped up on cola. Danya is my kind of girl. She and I withdraw to the bar to continue our research into psychic phenomena.
In our eleventh year, Danya Brown and I are scholars of extrasensory power. We try to hypnotize one another then take long walks analyzing our trances. Every Sunday night at seven, we practice automatic drawing. At 7:15, we spin the rotary dial, stretch the spiral telephone cord to its fullest length, and compare pages. I sense Danya’s eyes fastened on my back whenever she walks into the tiny town library, a repurposed church shingled with cedar, where we devour every book about telekinesis, clairvoyance, and poltergeists. One day I will edge away from the parapsychology shelf toward the bin of rock and roll records, but that’s the future, when our friendship dissolves because Danya fantasizes about killing herself. I tell my mother. My mother invites Danya’s mother to our house for an awkward conversation over coffee. Somebody’s overactive imagination, Mrs. Brown says, and Danya and I stop examining each other’s dreams. Decades later, a search will reveal that my middle-school collaborator remains perfectly alive, a homeowner, married to a man. Like me. Adolescence, a hallucination.
But at the slumber party, we shiver alertly. Danya lectures me about Zener cards: circle, cross, wave, square, star. One person sends and the other receives. We are using a normal deck, and when I stare at the hearts and spades and numbers, trying to beam an answer into Danya’s skull, she rarely guesses correctly. Shadows deepen around the glossy basement bar and its chrome fittings. Across the den, sex-talk becomes soft and drowsy.
Maybe we should switch positions.
Once Danya begins sending images, I predict card after card after card. She becomes so excited she throws off sparks like a radio tower or a galaxy being born. The charge between us mounts until my skin prickles. I am light-headed, queasy, but I keep calling numbers and suits until two things happen at once.
The birthday girl’s beagle, Happy, waddles down the stairs and breaks out howling.
A smoky shape coalesces around me, and I register the pressure of a forbidding hand knocking me off the barstool. Too close, it says.
Spilled to the floor, I am too unhinged to soothe the dog, but other girls stir. A sleep-deprived Mrs. Womack, wild-haired in a floral nightgown, materializes to silence us: it’s very late, settle down. But who are you talking to, Mrs. Womack? I am one girl blurring into another.
Hold up, the invisible hand seemed to say. For years I thought it meant that Danya and I were approaching real power, cracking open the secrets of the universe through our psychic experiments. It felt like a warning. Later I speculated that the ban encompassed other kinds of obsession and intimacy.
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Lesley Wheeler’s new books are The State She’s In, her fifth poetry collection, and Unbecoming, her first novel. Her essay collection Poetry’s Possible Worlds is forthcoming in 2021. Her poems and essays appear in Kenyon Review, Ecotone, Massachusetts Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Poetry Editor of Shenandoah, she lives in Virginia and posts at @LesleyMWheeler.