Lover's Tarot

Coming of Age in the 1950s, what I knew of family came from Ozzie and Harriet's television household. I watched as an outsider, wondering what that life might feel like.Fatherless, labeled a bastard by one school official whose aggressive advances to my mother were resoundingly rejected, I was able to maintain but one friendship, a classmate whose father died in the war.To all others, I was a threat by virtue of my mother, Eve, whose gravitational beauty and mystical sensuality...
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Coming of Age in the 1950s, what I knew of family came from Ozzie and Harriet's television household. I watched as an outsider, wondering what that life might feel like.Fatherless, labeled a bastard by one school official whose aggressive advances to my mother were resoundingly rejected, I was able to maintain but one friendship, a classmate whose father died in the war.To all others, I was a threat by virtue of my mother, Eve, whose gravitational beauty and mystical sensuality distracted men in a way that they'd act cartoonish in her presence.Eve attended but one parent-teacher meeting at my school, "To prove a point," she wrote in her diary. When she entered the room, every eye was on her, accompanied by an eerie cessation of conversation. To avoid having their husbands cross paths with Eve, the mothers of girls in my class manufactured excuses for us not to be friends. We were labeled unholy, gypsies, even casters-of-spells because we used the Tarot, something I naïvely made known by bringing my cards to class.It made Eve an outsider, too. She wrote, "The women who invent rumors about me and my daughter as retaliation to how my appearance distracts their husbands, should, instead, expend their energy chastising their husbands for being so affected. As a measure of marital devotion, it is a test these men fail."None of this detracts from how wonderful a mother Eve was, always addressing the smallest of my needs before her own, or the demands of her men: lovers she'd keep to satisfy her pleasures for a few weeks or months at a time.She failed me only by dying, leaving me to write the final chapters of my adolescence alone. I precariously stumbled onto the thin ice of life with only the memory of her diary as a guide-a journal stolen from me at the time of her death. I tried to be the mature-for-my-years daughter Eve admired. My efforts led me to times of joy, periods of loneliness, and moments of abject horror.This is how I remember it.Sasha KidmanOctober 6, 1962New York City