Mrs. Laurie

I stood behind Mrs. Laurie at the local Starbucks yesterday.

Mrs. Laurie is the local palm and tarot reader and actually there are several of her – the franchise is doing well in these uncertain times, a studio on Wave Street, another nook on Cannery Row. When you peer in through the beaded curtains, the waiting room is always filled with people reading ancient copies of People Magazine exactly as though they were patients in a doctor's office waiting for their definitive diagnosis of colon cancer.

This Mrs. Laurie was an older model, brisk, unsmiling. No pleasant banter about the relative merits of soy versus 2% from her – I guess she's worried about leaking freebies. You have to wonder about the job description, and how they recruit potential Mrs. Lauries, whether there's a Mrs. Laurie union and what the benefits are like – if Mrs. Laurie corporate gives matching contributions to a 401K, for example, how is it invested?

I've been in a punk mood since I've been back from New Mexico. Peggy Lee track on stuck mode in the cerebellar iPod: Is That All There Is?

First trickle of estate cash came in yesterday, all bespoke for bills, bills, bills. I had several panic attacks around this, one of which was so severe I had actual somatic symptoms, and so took to my bed, spent an afternoon reading Donald Spoto's biography of Audrey Hepburn which I'd checked out of the library. (No bonbons, though. Couldn't afford them.) The physical symptoms were strange: a wooziness like I was wearing the wrong strength eyeglass prescription or something, and, very oddly, the smell of cigar smoke.

Ben swears he hasn't been smoking cigars in the house but you can't really believe Ben about anything.

Audrey Hepburn suffered all her life from depressive bouts so incapacitating she literally took to her bed for weeks at a time, sleeping twenty hours a day. Almost certainly she suffered from severe post-traumatic stress syndrome – a diagnosis that had not yet been invented and so even a Mrs. Laurie would not have been able to help her shake. Hepburn had a really, really dreadful childhood in Holland during the German occupation, surviving on tulip bulbs and one moldy potato a day, watching her neighbors get lined up against buildings to be randomly shot. There are some childhood traumas that are impossible to overcome even if you go on to dance with Fred Astaire.

I wonder about my own childhood traumas sometimes…

My mother was a pathological liar – rather like Ben.

I remember one time I took Max to visit her – he would have been about six. There was a lamp on a bookcase and for some reason, she started talking about it. "I got that lamp from Jack and Lola," she told Max. Jack was the downstairs neighbor whom my mother carried on with from time to time. (My mother was something of a slut.) Lola was his live-in girlfriend. "Jack gave me the keys to their apartment so I could feed their cat while they were out of town. I liked the lamp, and I figured the bastard owed me, so I just took it."

"You just took it," I echoed.

"Well, it's a great lamp, isn't it?"

"It's okay," I said. "It's a lamp. Didn't they notice it was gone?"

"Well, yeah," said my mother. "Sure. But I'm not stupid. I stashed it in a closet. Told them someone must have broken into the house. I mean, I didn't start using it until I moved into this place." She smiled broadly. "I still have the keys. I wonder who's living there now?"

Mrs. Laurie probably knows!