Mamie Johnson Comes Undone
“¾Ah, let waves of magic overwhelm me, let the exotic beauty
of an island work at my years, and let the Madness
of an island work at my years, and let the Madness
overcome me, as I can't endure this any more.
Anonymous letter found in a bottle
Anonymous letter found in a bottle
Athens, Greece, 1927
Mamie Johnson got up off her plastic-slip covered settee and flipped of the television set. Talking adamantly out loud to herself, she prattled on while grabbing her empty teacup from the end-table, and headed to the kitchen.
“I am sick-to-death of these scientists and end-times fanatics all over the news in such a dither in anticipation of the ‘approaching celestial events of May, 2011.’ Over and over, that’s all I hear. Astronomers from here to Timbuktu including those at folks at Daddy’s old Nasa company, all wrapped up in following this “rare, impending alignment of six planets including Venus and Jupiter” as those news people call it. La-de-da. My goodness, if you ask me, it’s silly to get worked up over a bunch of tiny ole’ dots in the sky.”
Mamie lived alone in her cherished little stucco & Spanish tiled home on Bougainvillea Drive in Cocoa Beach. She felt close to Mamma and Daddy here, and thanked them every day for the riverfront home she inherited from them years ago. At fifty-six, was often in the habit of holding long solitary conversations. Three cups of “Morning Thunder” tea and she was practically interrupting herself. But she had to be at work in an hour, so she cut the one-way conversation short to brush her teeth and get ready for her day.
From her bathroom window she could see the Eggenhauser’s bedroom window next door. While she brushed and flossed, she remembered the conversation she had with Mr. Eggenhauser last evening. The “event,” her longtime neighbor told her was due to commence in the eastern sky just before sunrise early tomorrow. “The planets,” he said over the fence, “promise constantly changing planetary positions, virtual ‘dancing’ amongst them.” Sounded to her more like a celestial version of grab-your-partner-an’-do-si-do. I guess he should know, she thought, after all, he did work under Daddy all those years at the Cape, and Daddy was, of course, an astronomical genius.
Mr. Eggenhauser continued excitedly, saying it would be visible in the pre-dawn. He planned to get up at 3 a.m. to watch it. Well, Mamie thought to herself, he’s retired now these least few years, and if that occupies his time then what’s it to me? But if I were Doris, sure as God made little green apples, I wouldn’t want my husband stirring in the bed at 3 a.m. just to go look up at the sky in his pajamas. In all the years Daddy worked at the Space Center, he certainly never, ever would have disturbed Mamma before the decent hour of 7 a.m. But, she thought with an unexpected dose of wistfulness, as I have not yet met a single man Daddy would have approved of¾there’s no husband to disturb me. Thinking of Daddy reminded her of her bi-weekly appointment with Madame Traszheka after work.
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The big blue sky above the little town of Cocoa Beach moved its puffs of white across the horizon with the help of coastal breezes, and the scent of orange blossoms were present on the afternoon winds outside the front window of Mitzie Traszheka, known to her customers as “Madame Traszheka.” She kept one eye on the parking lot and the other on the Jerry Springer Show, her afternoon favorite. Her 4 o’clock reading, Mamie Johnson, was a bit late. She’d been reading Mamie’s astrological chart for nearly two decades now.
She thought Mamie was a bit eccentric, but she had her hooked, which is just how she liked it; good for business. To Mitzie, no fashion diva herself, Mamie looked as if she were stuck in the late 60’s: a blonde, teased bouffant hairstyle, frosted lipstick and as far as Mitzie could tell, a wardrobe consisting of vintage beige or black dresses. She only wore dresses which switched from beige to black after Labor Day, then reversed again after Easter. She knew Mamie still wore girdles and slips since Mamie complained not that long ago, that she had to special order them now from a small company in New Jersey since Macy’s stopped special ordering them.
Mamie first started coming for readings just after her parents were killed while driving back from Orlando. Mamie had been devastated. She was easy to work with at first. Mitzie dabbled in séance work too, and at the time she really felt for the thirty-something woman. She learned Mamie was an only child, a seemingly spoiled child of the doting, although now deceased, parents. She told Mamie not to worry, that her parents were in a “happy place” and had felt no pain when they died. She told her they were together spent their days in Heaven golfing and going to luncheons. This seemed to comfort Mamie. Mitzie even did a little channeling number of Mamie’s father by speaking in a low voice and telling Mamie he’d be watching out for her, and that she shouldn’t forget to get the oil changed in the Caddy every three thousand miles. This made Mamie feel better and looked after. Mamie eventually became dependent on Madame Traszheka to hear news from her parents and for guidance. She faithfully kept her weekly appointments, every Tuesday and Friday at 4 o’clock.
Lately, though, Mitzie noticed a change in Mamie. The once opinionated, often self-centered woman sat through her readings with noticeable agitation. Mitzie had begun to worry her most lucrative client might be getting frustrated with the repetitive readings she’d become comfortable offering to Mamie. Maybe she was feeling there was little to look forward to. Mitzie wondered if it was a menopausal thing. She pulled her data chart while waiting for Mamie to arrive¾ June 21st, 1955¾yes, she thought, that’s it. Mitzie, Madame Traszheka, was no amateur, and knew the predictable routine of Mamie’s readings needed spicing up. She needed a special hook for Mamie. She began to concoct a plan.
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After her work shift at the jewelry deppartment at Macy’s, and a stop at home to change, she headed up the walkway to her astrologist. Once inside, she tried to speak over the ear-piercing shrill of barking Yorkshire Terriers. Mamie told Madame Traszheka, “I do apologize for my lack of punctuality, Madame T,” Mamie disliked fiddling with pronunciations of what she deemed foreign names, “but I have accepted an invitation to a birthday celebration this evening at that horrid little place on the beach off Minuteman, and I’m afraid I fussed way too long over what to wear to Arletta’s party.”
She really wasn’t sorry. She’d spent a fortune over the years with Madame T, and all the mysterious, shadowy promises of love and wondrous-changes never manifested, although she did like hearing from Daddy now and then. Her Momma never had much to say. And those awful little dogs! The yapping and jumping, why couldn’t Madame T put them in a closet or something? She knew she was particular about many things: mismatched table linens, scuffed shoes, snowbirds from the north that irritated her every winter season, and uneven window blinds, but little yapping dogs, any dogs for that matter, or cats with their sneakiness and hair! It was just more than she could handle and she didn’t try to hide her irritation.
“No worries, Miss Mamie, no worries!” Here, sit, and I’ll put the girls in the back room, sit down please, calm yourself, you look all flustered, oh but so beautiful! You are going to Coconuts, yes? You’ll outshine the birthday girl!”
Hah! She knew when she was being fussed and feathered to. She glanced in the mirror over the draped reading table as she sat herself. Trim, yes, she acknowledged, but she knew she was getting old. Madame Traszheka was getting old; Arletta was only a year ahead of her and she looked downright matronly! They were all getting old. Then came that awful flush of feverish heat again. She’d been getting them for a while now, another irritant. She’d gotten to popping a Xanax or two whenever she felt the maddening heat waves come over her. She looked at herself again, at her penciled eyebrows knitting together, which, after all these years suddenly looked to her like two upside-down parentheses. Something had to change.
Madame Traszheka came back from settling the dogs, took her chair opposite Mamie and took hold of her client’s hands. This was unusual and took Mamie somewhat by surprise.
“Miss Mamie, dear, your mother, Eldora, has come to me in a dream. Last night. She told me you were going to a party! She knew this and she told me something will happen tonight, but that you must open yourself to change, to possibilities. She also instructed me to tell you that you must have a sign, that there will be a man there tonight, yes Miss Mamie, a man, a special man who is searching for a special love for his heart. He will be seeking a sign from the stars to guide him to the right woman. This is true. This is what she told me in the dream.”
“What? Are you sure Madame T? That doesn’t sound like something Daddy would approve of. Why would Mamma suddenly have such a notion?”
Mamie sat back, astounded. Mother never had much to say; usually it was always Daddy with reminders for her to change the smoke alarm battery, or the filter in the cold-air return. Once he even asked her to her to vote for Clinton instead of the usual Republican Party he’d always favored. But Mamma rarely said anything other than everything was fine and the fried chicken was divine in Heaven.
“I am positive Miss Mamie. Look, here, I’ve re-checked your astrological chart. With the unusual planetary movements, there is a specific event about to happen to you. Tonight! Look, here it all is in your original chart.”
Madame Traszheka unrolled the elaborately drawn scroll with zodiac signs and dates occupying every part of the parchment-like paper. Mamie recognized it as the original grand schematic of her life according to the planets and stars, as interpreted by Madame T, made years ago. She leaned in close as the astrologist began a detailed explanation of vital information she said she’d previously missed all these years.
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Hours later, on her way to Coconuts on the Beach, an open air-type restaurant and bar, usually filled with snowbirds and tourists which she detested, she mulled over Madame T’s advice. Mamie, a Cancer under the ruling sign of the moon, was destined to meet a man, according to Madame T, a foreigner no less, who was born under the sign of Leo, whose ruling planet was the sun. He would be tall and handsome. She’d given Mamie a pin to wear, a small golden brooch, of a lion with cut-glass emerald eyes. The sign, she told her, that your mother mentioned in the dream¾something about a lion. Madame T had talked and talked until Mamie was dizzy from it. Either that, she thought, or the double dose of Xanax taken earlier.
She was nervous, despite the medication, and besides, she didn’t usually attend after-hours co-worker get-togethers. But the invitation had read: “Come celebrate Arletta’s 57th birthday, 7p.m., May 10th ,” and she was genuinley fond of Arletta. Most of other women at work were much younger and really Northern girls anyhow, but Arletta was proper Southern stock, and the closest Mamie had to a person she would consider a friend.
She parked the old Cadillac Daddy had left her and within minutes was seated with the group from work, with Arletta to her immediate left, and ordered a drink with a back-up. She wasn’t sure she was ready for any life-changing experience to occur. She had a 9 a.m. manicure appointment tomorrow, a dentist appointment after that, and was scheduled to work at noon. She was tempted to remove the pin.
Her drinks arrived and she tried to settle into listening to the chatter at the table, but it was loud and hard to hear. The band was playing old surfer tunes as she watched the sun was slip behind potted bottle-neck palms and gardenias on the west side of the deck. As it sank, Mamie felt an unusual flush begin to rise. She grabbed her second daiquiri and sucked long on the straw till little gurgle sounds signaled she’d hit rock-bottom.
“A gin & tonic, with lime, please,” she told the passing waitress, “and a shot of Padron, with lemon.”
Arletta smiled, leaned in close and gave Mamie’s arm a tug. “Mamie, darling’, it does me good to see you here¾we never, ever see you outside of work.”
The hot flash was passing, but Mamie was still feeling a bit odd. She looked around for the waitress and wondered how long she’d have to wait for her drink. It was loud, and still steamy from the heat of the day. The place was packed with noisy people in parrot shits and sundresses and the scent of suntan lotion was everywhere. She tried to relax and be happy for her friend.
“Well, Arletta, now I couldn’t very well let you sit here all alone with these Yankee transplants and miss you’re birthday, now could I? Besides, you’re my closest friend!” She thought her words were beginning to slur just a bit, and where, in God’s name, she wanted to know, were those drinks?
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Now, at this moment Mamie had no idea that Venus and Jupiter were swiftly approaching each other, causing an unusual pull in gravity between the sun and the moon, or that her tightly packed neurons and her closely-coiled double helixes were about to take a wild spin. A permanent unraveling was about to occur. Nor did she know that Mitzie Traszheka had phoned her cousin Yuri as soon as she’d left. Yuri was on a work visa from the Ukraine and worked as a deck hand on the “Miss Canaveral,” a touristy charter fishing boat. He made decent money in tips, much more than back home on the beet farm, but, as he told his cousin, he was always looking for other ways to earn an American dollar. Mitzie figured it was worth the investment of paying her cousin for a few hours of his time. She wanted to keep Mamie a faithful, returning customer.
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After the girls finished clapping and giggling as Arletta opened her gifts, and another round of drinks were brought to the table and empty glasses taken away, Mamie became aware that a dark, swarthy-looking man continued to gaze at her from the bar¾when she’d look his way, he’d grin at her, she felt, like he thought she could be his little piece of chicken for the night¾the audacity! She told Arletta about it.
“So what? Enjoy the attention!” encouraged Arletta, as she followed Mamie’s gaze to the man at the bar. “Oh, now he is a handsome thing, my-oh-my, charm’s runnin’ like sap from a sugar tree outta that man…Mamie, he’s smiling at us…at you I think¾”
“Rude…positively mannerless…and what, handsome? Well…maybe if you like a simian-type of man…” She thought he looked rather hairy and gussied up compared to the other tourists around him.
“Oh Mamie, oh…oh Mamie, he’s getting up…don’t look, oh my…oh Mamie look! Good Lord, he’s walking this way…”
The man approached, smiling and never taking his eyes off Mamie. She thought she was going to hyperventilate. She sat up straight in her chair, and pretended to fiddle with her hair.
“Excuse me, ladies¾” He held the collective attention of the women at the table, Mamie noticed. Why, they look in awe of him! What, she wondered, was that accent? Russian or Greek? She fingered the brooch on her beige dress, remembering Madame T’s dream, and fixated on his pearl-white teeth embedded in a mature, but beautiful, golden face. His hair, she noticed shone like smoothly tarnished silver. He was looking less simian by the minute.
“I’d like the permission of the table to steal away this radiant beauty for a dance¾”
Mamie didn’t miss that some of the girls at the table giggled. She looked across at them and frowned, then at Arletta, who nodded in approval, and finally looked up into the eyes of the well-groomed, but still admittedly hairy, man beside her.
He was looking only at her. She wasn’t sure if she should repudiate such brashness, in her opinion, but when his hand slid around hers she felt a disturbing flutter. He stood just to the left of her seat, and she had to bend a bit backwards to look up at him for he was, she noticed, quite tall. A tingle of the most unconventional sort began in her cupped hand and traveled up her arm, blossoming outward, and then down her suddenly too tightly constricting, and no longer supportive, Hanes Control-Top pantyhose. She felt herself slipping away from her usual self into a state of non-resistance. But, she needed to be sure of something first.
“Tell me,” she asked in a hesitant, near whisper, “if you don’t mind, please, in what month were you born?”
“Beautiful lady, I tell you, I was born in the sunny warmth of summer, under an August moon.”
Mamie visibly gasped. After that confirmation she didn’t think twice as she gave in to the inevitability of obeying her mother’s wishes and the destiny her astrological charts foretold for her. The band was playing a fast surfer tune as they took to the floor. He formally introduced himself, Yuri Chevisky, and he told her about himself in bits and pieces over the next few hours. In his youth he’d traveled from the Ukraine during summers to the Aegean Sea, where he worked as a sponge diver, but the rest of the year he worked at his family’s farm in the Ukraine. He was now in the United States to learn the fishing business.
Mamie was breathless, her thoughts were coming at her from far away…what did he say? He was Ukrainian? Was that in Russia? Sponge diving? What? What did he ask? Her pin? Yes, she said, she couldn’t be sure if she was speaking or was he reading her mind? It’s a lion, for the sign of Leo! He pulled her in close, closer than she’d ever been to a grown man. Mamie felt like a pearl being knotted to her match.
The band under the tiki hut played wild music from the 60’s that worked a kind of magic on Mamie. She felt eruptions of what could only be could be called passion and she was sure the heavens were simultaneously unfolding their own celestial dance in replication. They both shook and shimmied to a beat they made their own, through slow dances, tangos and the twist. Mamie’s hips gyrated to the beat as Yuri snapped his fingers and danced Cossack-style, defying gravity until he grabbed Mamie by the waist and then they danced as one, she felt, slow and filled with a rising rhythm all their own.
She was amazed; she thought he must have surely been sent by the gods. He held her in the way she needed, unloosening her, making her come undone. She felt she was about to unfurl like the frond of a new fern. She was sweating but it was wonderful! She didn’t care about how she looked or what she had to do tomorrow¾she welcomed the sensual, chemical changes occurring in her body as the tension of the chords in the music heightened.
Under the open sky they danced as the moon rose high over the warm Atlantic surf. Mist crept in off the sea and worked at the layers of Aqua Net in Mamie’s hair and she felt it soften, becoming loose and curly; the pancake makeup and Maybelline eyeliner evaporated leaving her skin dewy and her eyes bright and clear. The hooks in her Maidenform support bra gave way, along with the snaps of her Playtex girdle; she let them fall from under her dress, and kicked them off to edge of the dance floor. Her breasts were free to slap and swing as she shook her unbound waist and hips.
The riffs of the music slowed, but her pulse continued to rise. Yuri led her from the dance deck and out to the sand into the dark at water’s edge. The surf lapped at their feet, her own music escalated in her head. He lay her down in a sheltered valley of sand, among the sea oats and beach lettuce, softer than any man-made bed. Without a word she felt he explained the world of the sensual with his roving hands and appreciative eyes, like obsidian in the moonlight.
She would find out later, from her neighbor, that during the night, above them there on there on the beach, in the pre-dawn sky, Jupiter converged onto Venus, within half a degree, as close as one planet could get to another without claiming its orbit for its own.
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Mamie left Yuri slumbering under the arms of a fruited sea grape, and went for a run along the surf; she, at 56, thought that she’d lost something heavy and unnecessary in the early morning hours, something far more relevant than her post-menopausal maidenhood. She was feeling exquisitely, naughtily beautiful as she ran naked under the sinking moon; the surf’s swell at her calves slapped at the Cossack’s milky-way contribution to her transformation as it slipped down her wiggling, blue-veined thighs into the salty seawater that might very well have traveled all the way from the Aegean.
Mamie felt as if she’d been kidnapped from herself by Yuri and reclaimed, then freed again; she didn’t know the words yet to describe the magic, madness and stealing away; but she did know that in that early morning hour, that moment, that final crash and explosion, her life changed with the touch of a hand, and just one plummeting kiss.
