After Christmas, as she tries to swim up from her sadness, things which had always seemed laughable to Helen become comforting: Fate, for example. The possibility of divine intervention.
Before this, she always put her faith in ambition, effort, careful choices—things she was raised to to believe in. Things that may just be myths, the trappings of so many systems at work. And at the coffee shop, this other barista, Rory, is going through a weird time too, which seems to affirm that life is not like what Helen thought. One day the two of them unload the dishwasher together in a warm cloud of steam, lifting mugs one by one from the rack. Rory explains that she’s been saving for an appointment with a $200-dollar-an-hour psychic, in an effort to get some perspective. Sometimes, says Rory, you just have to get beyond yourself, you know? The psychic’s credentials include predicting a well-known helicopter crash Helen’s never heard of. It was a big deal at the time, Rory tells her.
Winter break is ending: Evan is back at college, rehearsing for the play, and Grace has one more week at home. Their father says to Helen, Maybe you’d feel better if you got some exercise. You and your sister could play a round of squash. Grace is sitting on the kitchen counter, scrolling on her phone, wearing athletic shorts and one of Helen’s sweaters. She says, pointedly: I can make my own plans, thank you Dad.
Helen’s behavior strikes their mother as an overreaction. Life is change, she tells Helen one afternoon. Analyzing so much can’t change what’s already happened to you. And Helen says, Do you think I don’t know that? That, obviously, is the whole problem right now.
That afternoon, Helen and her mother wrap up in scarves and winter coats and go walking. Across town to the East River, then south and further south. Her mother moves her gloved hand in circles on Helen’s back. This fanatic grief—like a baby, Helen thinks, mortified and grateful. The mother walks her daughter up and down the East River while she cries and cries.
That night, on the internet, Helen identifies a more affordable point of divine access than Rory’s: a tarot reader working out of an occult bookstore in Bushwick. The tarot reader has many effusive Yelp reviews. According to her website, a decade of formal dance training preceded her spiritual awakening. In her photograph, she has beautiful, intricately tattooed hands: scarlet, yellow, blue, and violet.
Grace can hardly believe it. Welcome to the New Age, she says, when Helen comes into the kitchen and explains, tentatively, that to feel better or get unstuck or whatever, she has just paid forty dollars via PayPal to reserve a reading. Their parents are out to dinner, and Helen and Grace eat pesto on pasta, leaning against the kitchen counter. Grace twirls spaghetti around her fork. She says, Does this mean you’ll drink kale smoothies with me now? Since you’re a hippie?
Evan finds it an impossibly funny development. On their group text, to which Grace has assigned the ironic title Siblings, he sends them a string of laughing-crying emojis—then sends more a few hours later when, apparently, the whole thing hits him again with fresh hilarity. Their parents, however, are surprisingly nonplussed. Whatever will help, says their mother, putting restaurant leftovers in the fridge. Their father says, But do try to get some exercise, Helen, like I keep saying. Go for a run. It clears the mind.
That night Helen can’t sleep at all. In the morning she calls out sick from the coffee shop and lies on the couch feeling foggy and pulverized. Eventually her mother, who has been running errands, comes home and unpacks farmers market produce into the fridge. She says, This is not what people do in life, Helen. The way you’re being is not how people are. Not everyone has the privilege of sitting on the couch being sad.
That night, her father takes her to dinner so they can talk, just the two of them. It’s time to pick yourself up, he says over dessert. Please try to feel better. Helen is crying a little. These past few months have been like the crying saturation-point of her life. He says: Is there something more that we can do to help you out here? Helen says she can’t explain it, but lately she just feels so selfish, like a lot of trouble, like not a good person. She says he should please just hold her to a high standard going forward.
The candle between them on the tablecloth wavers. Her father regards her with a level, concerned expression and says, Okay, I can do that. Later, at home, brushing her teeth, Helen realizes with a fresh current of self-loathing how this sounded, maybe, like she blames him. Downstairs, Grace is asleep on the couch, so Helen texts Evan instead: I think I just said something awful to Dad. Evan texts back: Can’t talk now Helen, but I’m sure it’s not actually a problem. Take it easy.
That night, she can’t sleep again. In the dark the memory comes to her of another dinner with her father: home from college, she tells him she’s been turned down for a small grant she’d applied for from the university, to put on a play. People hate giving things to women, she’d said, and surprised herself by voicing this thought that had been resurfacing in her mind for days like a curious recurring dream of thwartedness and limitation, a clear intuition unless it was an excuse, entitlement, failure to admit defeat—she couldn’t tell. How could you tell your own failure from having been failed? She could only point out that her college had chosen a man, like last year and the year before. Anyway, her father was encouraging. He said, This isn’t something your generation has to worry about, it’s all on the upswing, I hire lots of women. And she had said to him, her temper leaping like a flame: You have no idea what you’re talking about.
I think I’m not really a great person, she confides to the same co-worker, Rory, when they’re on shift together later that week. She says, I think I do more harm than good. Or I expect more than I deserve. Rory laughs and says, I doubt it, dude, but I get it—sometimes I beat myself up too. Wiping down the espresso machine, Rory says: I don’t see you as a bad person, but it does seem like you’re super, super upset. I hope it’s not weird for me to say that. I know you don’t really know me.
Rory suggests the two of them go out for dinner after they close up the coffee shop. She says they clearly both need to have fun, get out of their heads, try to feel better, just chill. She mentions a hip Asian Fusion place on the Lower East Side: The food is so fucking good you will die, she tells Helen. It takes them forever to walk there from the F train, and they laugh, and gripe about how cold they are, and lower their heads against the wind. At dinner, Rory visibly annoys the waitstaff by ordering only an appetizer and eating it more slowly than it seems possible anyone has ever consumed a single pork bun. Helen, she says, flagging the waiter for another glass of water, Here is what I do when I’m depressed: I write in my journal. I go to therapy. I get serious about the gym. I read. I watch funny videos on the internet. I will send you my list of funny videos—it is an awesome fucking list, you’ll be uplifted. You’re not a bad person Helen, she says. You’re sad. Or I don’t know, angry? I mean of course you are, so I am I, of course we’re sad.
Helen is not prepared to absolve herself but promises to try the funny videos. Afterward, outside, she types her number into Rory’s phone, and then Rory calls an Uber—she’s been crashing with friends, she explains, ever since moving out of her stupid ex’s place last month. And suddenly Helen is explaining about Catherine. My oldest friend, she hears herself saying. We had this fight, we stopped speaking. The thing is, I probably deserve this. I expect too much. I hold people to a ridiculous standard. Lately it’s like I’m seeing myself clearly for the first time in my life.
Rory crosses her arms, the wind blows her hair across her face. She says, I don’t know Helen, this girl sounds like a flake. You really don’t need that dragging you down. Give me your phone. We could block her number. Do you want to?
Once, in high school, Helen directed Evan in the school play, opposite Catherine as his love interest. After rehearsals, driving home together down the quiet highway, Helen liked the three of them cocooned in the dark. Catherine beside her, cycling through radio stations for the songs she liked best, and Evan in the backseat, singing and commenting on her choices. You’re so completely unoriginal, Catherine would tell him if he disliked what she played. You have so much to learn.
Ah, Catherine, Evan liked to joke, long after the play had ended. Catherine my lost love. Catherine who can really, really kiss.
Their parents are driving to Vermont to see Evan in his play next week, and they ask does Helen want to come? Grace can’t, because of her squash tournament, and Helen considers lying that the coffee shop won’t give her time off. Is that bad? she asks Grace, who’s folding laundry on the couch, while Helen lies on the floor and looks up at the ceiling. The overhead lights form bright elastic orbs in her vision, as the laugh track from the television crests and ebbs and crests again. Well, she hears Grace saying, You’re kind of flipping out in life, but Evan is like, thriving. So it makes sense to me that you would want to bail.
A little while later, without any real hope, Helen tries Catherine once more and gets the inevitable voicemail, serene and gracious. This is Catherine, leave a message. Grace says, getting up to make herself toast: This is all fairly shitty of Catherine, you have to admit.
People at the coffee shop misunderstand, and fair enough. I live here with my family, but I’m not from here, Helen explains to Rory, while they mop, respectively, around the tables and behind the counter. She says, My parents moved away to raise us, and recently they came back. She adds, affecting an ironic tone: I myself grew up in some nearby suburbs. Rory for her part is from a town near Minneapolis. She asks, over the hissing emissions of the milk steamer: But so Helen, where do you think of yourself as coming from, exactly?
That night, when she gets home from work, Helen finds Grace and her mother on the floor, sorting through a box that for some reason they never unpacked. Grace says, Look at these squash trophies I didn’t even know were missing. Their mother shows them a number of grayscale snapshots from their father’s childhood, and one or two from her own. She lays them one by one along the rug. Their mother’s mother died very young, when their mother was only two, and on a few occasions Helen’s tried to ask: Don’t you want to find out more about her? But their mother would rather not. She says it’s easier not knowing. Now Helen holds a photo to the light and says, Mom, does it make you sad to think about her? Grace says, Let me see it, can I? Helen. Let me see. Their mother says, Be careful with your fingers on that, both of you, listen to me.
Helen can remember being a very young age. She remembers for example a dream from before Evan was born: she is tucked beneath her mother’s arm, and the two of them make pancakes. After breakfast they leave home in search of her father, whom they locate playing in a kind of country-fair band. It seems to be an origin story. They are choosing out a father for their family: this one waves, and they bring him home. For a short time Helen really thought it went that way. First it was only she and her mother. Followed by the addition of a father, then Evan, then Grace. Finally Cinnamon the dog. She can remember her feeling of complete belief. She can remember telling her father: Before you Dad, there was me.
On the afternoon of Helen’s tarot reading, the temperature is unseasonably warm. Along the paving stones, in Union Square, dry brown leaves skitter and turn over in wind. As she descends into the subway station, Helen hears a father at street level say to his small children: No one ever listens to me. One of them responds: I listen, Dad, I listen. In the station, Helen tries to get the machine to read her MetroCard. She swipes it again, and again, and again.
She takes the L train across Manhattan, through its dark tunnel beneath the East River. In Brooklyn she navigates blocks of mostly warehouses, following the map on her phone, its pulsating blue dot directing her way. A bell over the front door rings when Helen enters the bookstore, and from a picture online she recognizes the tarot reader right away: leaning against a display of crystals, talking to a girl at the register, long hair pulled back from her face.
In the curtained-off area between numerology and past lives—a space so small Helen has to shove her backpack under the table—the tarot reader lights a stick of incense, her dance training evident in the exquisite precision of her gestures.
It’s up to you, she tells Helen, Whether you want to channel a higher energy from your angels and guides, by turning up your palms, or more of a grounding energy by touching the tops of your knees. Hesitantly, Helen chooses: knees. The tarot reader shuffles the cards in the smoke from the incense, which billows in a thin plume between them. From a small bit of exploratory reading Helen has done, she knows this has something to do with dispersing old energy.
The reader says, I’d like to invite you to close your eyes. We’ll just do a brief clearing meditation, to sort out some of the gunk. The last thing Helen sees is the tarot reader draw a breath so deep her eyelids flutter. Then comes a pause, silent except for the ruffling of cards, soft and fluid like wings. Presently the tarot reader hazards that Helen has been learning some difficult karmic lessons lately. She says that she can sense this clearly—the spirit guides are telling her as much. The bell over the door to the bookstore jingles, as Helen’s eyes fill up with tears. The tarot reader keeps hers closed, and listens.
You have to get rid of the clutter, is one thing she advises. Her expression is concerned and analytic. Clean house, she says. Throw things away. Let go of dead weight. This is an essential practice. If not, she says, you’ll be looking at a spiritual situation sort of like this—and she shows Helen a card with burning castle on it, and bereft-looking people falling out of it headfirst. But if you do clean house, she says—and then she stops, closes her eyes again, and lets out a soft, delighted laugh. Listening to this other plane, apparently. She says, They’re saying you won’t like the change at first, but later, you’ll be so happy you did it. They’re showing you to me as, like, a cloud: you are lighter than air.
On her way home from the reading, at the corner of 17th Street, Helen runs into Grace coming back from the racquet club. The wind runs down Park Avenue—it’s dark now, colder, and Helen dips her face into the folds of her scarf. Grace lets her racquet case hit a lamppost, a trashcan, a newspaper kiosk, and she says over her shoulder, Can we walk faster please?
Inside, upstairs, their parents are taking ornaments off the Christmas tree. Grace will not participate: I hate this part, she says, as their mother wraps a silver bell in newspaper, then a crystal bird with a chipped wing. Their father asks, gamely, How was the tarot reading? But Helen says, I’m not sure I’m prepared to discuss this, I think I need to think the whole thing over.
Upstairs, Helen says to Grace: Sometimes life is so extremely strange. Grace says, turning her face into her pillow, I’m sorry you feel that way.
That weekend, they drop Grace off at college on their way to Evan’s play. Bye Helen, says Grace when they hug each other in the parking lot. I hope everything becomes the way you want. From the backseat, for the rest of the drive, Helen watches snow-crowned hills flash past the window. Cows stand, stoic and congregated, in fenced-in fields. By the time it’s dark, her parents are arguing about why they were sure the play began at 7:30, not 7. Whether this means they’re going to be late, and whose fault this might be, and the consequences. Rory texts, Pro tip: psychic says self-pity will only impede the activities of fate, haha. Helen writes back, You went?! Rory says, So much to tell you.
In the play, Evan is charismatic, moving, wonderful. Helen is jealous, jealous, jealous. After the play they go to dinner, and after dinner is a cast party, and while their father signs the check Evan says to Helen: If you want, you can come. The party will be at someone’s off-campus apartment, and on their way they stop to buy a six-pack from a fluorescent-lit minimart. At the party, the dark-haired girl who’s playing Viola keeps saying, Wow, Evan’s sister, I totally see it!
She and Helen end up talking in the kitchen, and every time someone passes through the girl says, Come over here and come meet Helen, Evan’s sister, can’t you see it? Look. As children, they were often mistaken for twins. No, their mother was always saying, Helen is small but Helen is older. In time Helen learned to pre-empt the inquiry: I’m Helen, she’d say, and our parents had me first. Then Evan would add, But I am just tall and could be taller in the end. That’s just a true thing about boys.
Tell us something about baby-Evan, says the girl who plays Viola, hopefully, as she pries open another beer. Helen offers up a memory from elementary school: Evan finally learned to tie his shoes, and then he said, solemnly, Now I know everything. Coming to stand in the doorway, Evan says, The part she’s not telling you is where she said to me, You’re stupid, you’re so stupid. He says: Talk about a psychic wound.
Then, sort of wincing, he peels at the label on his beer. So Helen says, dismissive: He’s acting, he’s fucking with us. Which Evan concedes with a small grin, taking a long draw on his beer. But seriously, Helen says, It’s true I’m trying to become someone better, someone kinder. I’m not always a good sister.
Evan says, irritable, Oh can’t we stop with this already? Stop. No one thinks that you’re so terrible. It’s kind of indulgent to keep putting us all through this. But the castmate, Laura, says to Helen, You’re braver than I am, I don’t like to look at me too closely. She toasts Helen with her drink, but Evan is almost sneering—he says, You have to stop talking this way, you were, are, totally acceptable. The castmate says, High praise! and suddenly Helen can’t stop laughing. She reaches to steady herself with a hand on the other girl’s shoulder. Without me, she says, These past few weeks, my brother could not once remember the line where “savage jealousy sometimes savors nobly.” So in a sense, I saved your play.
The girl starts laughing too, but Evan says, Don’t be an idiot Helen. Helen says, You don’t be an idiot, I’m obviously kidding. The castmate looks between them and says, Sibling rivalry, I love it, is it just the two of you? Helen says, No there’s also Grace, but she’s younger and an athlete. The castmate fishes for a corn chip from a nearby bowl—Oh right, she says, the tennis champion. No, says Helen, but Evan cuts in: Any time you say ‘athlete,’ Helen, you say it as if she were another species.
Helen says to the other girl, like this explains it: Grace has these arms that he and I will never have. She’s very disciplined. But Evan pushes back the sleeve of his t-shirt—Speak for yourself, he says, and raises his eyebrows for the castmate’s benefit.
When they leave the party Evan says he’ll walk her to the inn. Good, says Helen, I don’t know how to get there. Down the stairway, out into the yard, they pick their way over snowbanks, step out into the empty gutter of the clean, plowed street. Helen breathes cold air, feels the snow press underfoot, when suddenly both their phones chime from their pockets: Grace. Guess what, Catherine just followed me on Instagram.
Evan shouts into the empty street, Catherine you bitch! Fucking brazen! I can’t think of any greater offense ever perpetrated!
Helen is still looking at her phone. Don’t make fun, she tells him vaguely.
Helen, he says, I’m finding the humor. Lighten the fuck up please.
They’re saying good night on the steps of the inn when he remembers about her tarot reading. She says, I’ll tell you in the morning. No Helen, he says gravely, If you’ve had interventions from the universe, I need to know about them now. She says, Shut up, good night, I’ll see you at breakfast. Set your alarm, I don’t want to wait around like last time.
Across the vacant lobby, she’s halfway upstairs when her phone goes off again: But I really want to know, says Evan. She relents, stopping on the darkened staircase to respond. For real: the future holds cleaning my room. Not kidding. This is my destiny. Haha. She sends him a moon emoji, a crystal ball, some stars. He sends back more laughing-crying emojis, with tears flying off their faces.
Later that week, back in New York, she relates it all to Rory while they walk from the coffee shop to a bar nearby, in the blue light of early evening. Rory has just described her experience with the psychic, sounding almost pleased: He said my ex and I are not optimally compatible—and I said to him, it’s a bit fucking late for “optimal” okay? I mean at a certain point you love who you love.
Someone’s dog, on a leash, gives them a bright, passing, anticipatory glance. Rory lights a cigarette and says, Fuck, I’m so nostalgic sometimes Helen, I don’t know if I could do what you’re describing : throw out all my stuff.
Helen reaches into the pocket of her coat and finds her receipt from the mini-mart in Vermont. Look, she says, and crumples it experimentally, admiring the crushed feel of it in her hand before she abandons it to the depths of a green metal trash can at the corner of 18th and Park.
Rory cackles appreciatively. She says, Do you feel lighter already?
Helen says, I feel uplifted. She raises her arms in the air, an unexpectedly beautiful sensation—as though she were afloat over lower Manhattan on a cold, dry wind.
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Excerpted from I Meant It Once (Algonquin Books, July 2023)