Spirit Guide Tantrums

I pound on the medium’s door, a bag of un-husked corn in my free hand. “Let me in! You owe us!” I shout, making her placard rattle as I continue to hammer.

She slides open her peephole and scowls at me. “Madame Zelda does not do mornings.” The thick kohl around her eyes is smeared into her crow’s feet. “Go away.” She slams the opening shut.

A few kicks to the unsteady wood and she opens the small window again, her eyeballs jaundiced, with a scattering of blood shot through them, face creased with fury. “Please,” I say sweetly, showing all my teeth. “I’d like to speak to my grandmother.” I lean close to her. “Or perhaps I could go talk to Pastor Bill, tell him that you’re thinking of converting. How would you like to spend the next five hours listening to him talk about Presbyterian history and tactfully tell you that you’re technically a heathen and a terrible sinner before urging you not to make any decisions in haste?”

“You nosy, bossy—fine. Talk to your damned grandmother.” Closing the slit, Madame Zelda yanks open the door. She is wearing her day clothes, dirt-stained khakis and a sweatshirt from her daughter’s Ivy League college. “I’m beginning to wish that I had never gone to that retreat in New Mexico. You and your grandmother are more trouble than you are worth.” Grumbling, she rubs her eyes. “You are being rude, but I shouldn’t emulate you.” She nods toward the kitchen. “Go ahead and sit down. Do you want some coffee?”

I shake my head. “I don’t do well with caffeine. I wouldn’t say no to some hot water, though.” Fishing in my left pocket, I pull out a bag of peppermint tea. “She makes fun of me when I have the non-native plants, anyway.”

“Don’t I know it.” Pulling a battered teapot out of the cupboard, she jams it under the faucet. She jerks her head at my burden while she’s filling it. “What’s with the corn?”

Unexpectedly, I blush. “I thought it would make me feel closer to her. Y’know, a bit of shared culture.”

Zelda laughs. “You’ll probably cook it wrong and she’ll just mock you again.” Teapot full, she plunks it on the stove, spilling some of the water. She fiddles with the knob to turn it on. “I suppose you’ll want to cook it?”

I nod. “You can keep it when we’re done. My granddad got a huge load of the stuff and my granny and I been trying to work through it for days.”

She makes a non-committal noise, getting out an ancient coffeemaker and a can of the cheapest brand. “Alright. I’ve got a pot that should be big enough for five ears, and I wouldn’t mind a nice meal of corn on the cob tonight.”

“Thanks.” I play with the tea bag, easing the perforated edges apart and smiling at the wafting scent. “Uh, and I’m sorry for barging in, Madame Zelda.”

“That apology would mean more to me if I didn’t know that you’ll probably do it again next time you’re in a rush. Ay, you young things! You’ve got more years of youth than I probably have to live; I don’t know why you feel the need to hurry.” She measures out her ground beans into a filter. The smell mixes with my peppermint and I wrinkle my nose. It’s not the most appealing combination. “But your apology is accepted.”

To occupy myself while my water boils and her coffee percolates—I’ve pushed her as far as I really should, and I know better than to make her work before she’s had her drink—I look around the room. Usually I visit later and Zelda bustles me straight into what she calls “the room of mysteries,” a curtained and incensed room that I suspect looks cheesy in sunlight. Zelda means well, but she tends to go overboard when she doesn’t need to; I’m not really one to be impressed by velvet and mysticism. Oddly practical for a girl who communicates with her decades-dead great-grandmother on a regular basis, but both the stubbornness and the contradiction run in my family.

It’s a baking kitchen, of which I approve. I base my evaluation on the heavy double-rack of spices, the tea towels with burn holes in them, and the stack of dirty cookie sheets in the sink. There is a scent of bread in the air, which I sniff with appreciation. I wonder if I’ll be able to con her into giving me a slice.

“So, what was the urgency?”

I flinch, startled out of my staring with a pang of guilt; did she think I was judging her room? “Sorry, what?”

Zelda pulls a mug out of the cupboard in the same instant that the tea kettle starts to screech. “Avery, you banged on my door at seven in the morning, to talk to a woman who will be just as dead later in the evening as she is now. What’s going on?”

I squirm in my seat, reaching out as she hands me the filled mug. “I, uh, want to get some advice.”

She stares at me. “Advice. From your great-grandmother. The woman who, in a fit of pique, started howling about the Trail of Tears and William Henry Harrison in the middle of my séance when I tried to ask her to talk to Mrs. Peterson’s husband, never mind the fact that she was born after both of those events and on the other side of the country.” Zelda emits a dirty chuckle that rolls into a heaving laugh, tears rolling down her cheeks. “The—the—the woman who makes me call her ‘She-Who-Is-Bothered-By-White-People’ for her spirit name if she thinks I’m not appreciating her enough? You came here all in a bother, with a bagful of corn that is probably the wrong variety, because you want to ask her for advice?” Howling now, she bends over to support herself against the stove.

Annoyed, I drop the teabag into the water, releasing a grey cloud. “Yes.”

“Oh—oh my. Wow.” Wiping tears from her face, Zelda finally calms down, though a few stray laughs shake her in amused aftershocks. She grins, her missing top right incisor lending an extra smirk to her expression. “Honey, I always considered you to be the sensible type, but I take it all back.”

I glare at her. “Yeah, yeah, it’s all very funny.” Sipping at my tea, I stare at the calendar next to the fridge. From a local realtor’s office, it’s three months behind and my fingers itch to fix it. “Glad you’re enjoying yourself.”

The coffee boils and Zelda grabs for it with a happy sigh. “Thank goodness.” She pours her drink and dumps three teaspoons of sugar in it. Taking a gulp, she frowns. “Still bitter.” Setting it down, she rummages in the fridge, pulling out a carton of cream. A quick pour, another experimental drink, and she smiles. “That’s the good stuff.” Sitting across from me, she sips slowly, taking her time just to annoy me.

Made thirsty by her actions, I get back to my tea. Peppermint’s the only kind of tea that I like without sweetener, and even when it’s hot, it cools my mouth. Plus my great-grandmother doesn’t make snarky remarks about white girls and their Chinese tea when she smells it.

Getting impatient, I tap my finger against the mug and go back to studying the room. Zelda’s barely started her coffee and there’s no point in rushing her.

It’s really stunning, the difference between this room and the séance area. The walls here are painted buttercup yellow, and wavy glass windows let a lot of light in. She’s tacked some fancy plates up and the cabinets are a pretty, antique-looking white with open doors. I like it much better in here than in the mediation place—I wonder if I could convince her to let me talk to my great-grandmother here. Then again, for a Zuni farming ghost she’s a terrible snob. She likes the trappings and likes criticizing them even more.

“Alright, Avery, let’s get this over with.”

I look up at Zelda with surprise. “Aren’t you going to finish your coffee first?”

She rolls her eyes. “Avery, I have to admit that you are the least annoying of my customers, even though you don’t really pay me in anything but your grandmother’s temporary cooperation, but I have other things to do today.”

“Oh. Okay.” I am appalled to realize that I’m a little hurt by her frank admission of wanting to get rid of me. I must be going soft. “Works for me.” I grab my bag of corn and hoist it over my shoulder.

Squatting, she opens a lower cupboard and pulls out a large pot. “Husk the corn into this. You’d better make sure you don’t leave a single thread of silk in the room; I shudder to think of the abuse your great-grandmother would heap on me if I didn’t have a spotless place for her to manifest.”

I take it from her and follow her into her séance room. As always, I choke at first on the thick scent of whatever herb she was burning this week. She used to favor sandalwood, which I actually liked, but my great-grandmother griped about it so much that she switched to more natural grasses, which smolder and make my eyes water. For a woman with no corporeal body, she has a ridiculously sensitive nose, and the pickiness to back it up. I don’t know how Madame Zelda puts up with her all the time, I really don’t.

We sit at her smaller table, which only has room for two or three people. The other one seats up to ten, but it’s really awkward with just the two of us. This table is nicer, anyway, made like a puzzle out of many different kinds of wood. I like running my fingers over it; it feels like pebbles.

Madame Zelda lights some of the red candles that she has placed around the room. I put the pot on the table and pull out the first ear of corn. She shakes her head as she sits back down. “You know we have to hold hands for the first part and I’m not touching you if you’re all sticky.” She slides her hands across the table, palms up.

I put my fingertips in her grasp and she folds her fingers back to grip them.

She starts humming and rolling her eyes around. The lights grow dimmer and a whispering noise starts up in the room.

I fidget. She has a light switch and a stereo remote stashed under the table. “C’mon, Madame Zelda, can we skip all the mumbo-jumbo voodoo crap? I thought this sort of stuff was for when you don’t actually have a ghost to summon, so you have to distract people.”

Returning to normal, she glares at me. “Avery. You are here to summon the ghost of your great-grandmother. You know, the dead woman. So if you make one more rude comment about the mystic arts, I will shove that corn up your nose and ban you from my house.”

“Fine.” Grumbling, I try to stay still as she goes back to her conjuring. I snort under my breath when a crystal ball is lowered from the ceiling, but she’s humming so loud at this point that she doesn’t hear me. To keep quiet, I count the pillows scattered everywhere. Thirty-seven, and that’s without turning around. At least they match the purple curtains she hung over all the walls.

Releasing my hands, Madame Zelda makes esoteric passes over the crystal ball, then raises her fingers toward the ceiling. “Oh spirit, hear my plea. I beseech you to honor us with your presence and answer the questions of this humble petitioner.”

“Great-grandmother, can you please hurry up? I wanna ask you a question.” Humble petitioner, ha! I’m blood to this woman, the only descendent she’s got who has any interest in Zuni culture and doesn’t go around doing the “woo-woo” thing.

I hate my cousins.

Madame Zelda hushes me fiercely, but a blue glow is already forming around the crystal ball, a small smoky portion inside of the thing and the rest coalescing outside of it. The smoky substance swirls for a minute before shaping itself into an eagle feather. “How, pale folk!” says a deep voice, the color of the spirit gliding through darker shades of blue, heading into one almost black before running backwards through the tint. “Me Chief Redman Talks-to-the-Earth. You have questions for Chief Redman Talks-to-the-Earth? Me answer with my great Injun know-how.”

I roll my eyes. “Great-grandmother, that’s not funny. Knock it off.”

The feather blurs and becomes that familiar broad face with amused eyes. “Ha, white girl! I should have known it was you again.”

“I will help you communicate with this young woman,” says Madame Zelda. “Spirit, how fare you in the Afterlife?”

I sigh. And this is why I don’t feel too bad about waking the woman up to let me talk to my great-grandmother. Outside of being a medium, she’s fine, but something about the atmosphere turns her into a hippie-dippy loony, and it drives me up the wall. No wonder my great-grandmother likes to needle the woman sometimes during her commercial séances. “Madame Zelda, we can hear each other just fine without your help, thank you.”

“Why I ever latched onto you I’ll never know,” my great grandmother taunts. “I should’ve just kept haunting that souvenir shop, making tourists feel nasty chills and buy too much jewelry for luck. There were only Hopi running it, but at least they knew better than to drag me all the way to the other side of the country, where it’s too cold and wet all the time.”

“Perhaps you sensed my connection with Avery,” says the medium, gritting her teeth. “Or knew that I would be able to help you pass your great wisdom onto—”

“To be honest,” said my great-grandmother in a more serious voice, “I was commanded to come with you, by the voices of Father Sky and Grandmother Spider.”

Madame Zelda perks up. “Really?”

“Hell no.” Forming a small bag out of nothing, Great-grandmother picks something out of it and pops it in her mouth. “Ha! Why on earth would the Great Ones care anything about a fifty-seven year old white wiccan? Nah, I was just bored and moved on an impulse.”

For all her talkativeness, my great-grandmother prefers to lie rather than give any real answers about where she lives. She does admit that there are other spirits there with her, though she won’t give any information on them unless somebody specifically asks, and I’ve always suspected that half of the time it’s just her playing dress-up and disguising her voice. But other than that, she’s closed-mouthed about the whole situation and won’t even answer the most basic questions about what it’s like.

One month, to amuse herself, she pretended to be in the Christian Hell, spending the whole time screaming about demons and fire. Then an old woman said “It’s just what she deserves” one night when Madame Zelda was called in as a fun addition to a wedding shower and Great-grandmother started in on her brimstone act. Apparently the bride hadn’t considered what her aunt might think of the “occult” goings-on. Indignant, my great-grandmother told the aunt that her beloved son was the one killing all her cats, exposed the affair that the maid-of-honor was having with the groom, and poured twenty gallons of red punch on the presents.

Madame Zelda doesn’t do showers anymore, though she can be prevailed upon for a bachelorette party.

I am distracted by her actions. “Hey, what did you just eat?”

The bag disappears. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Great-grandmother. . .”

She grins and her smoke starts to drift apart so that her features stretch and distort. “The spirits of some dried peyote buttons.” Sticking her tongue out, she giggles. “Woo, they pack quite a kick! I’m going to be seeing stars for a few days, that’s for sure.”

I stare at her, open-mouthed. “How—how does that even work?”

Great-grandmother shrugs. “Dunno.” Then she giggles. “You two look like lizards. You have pretty scales, white girl.”

“Can’t you ever call me by my name?” I whine. I get enough mockery for not “being brown enough” to claim my heritage by alive people without her calling me “white girl” or “gringa” all the time.

“I’ll call you by your name when you get a real one,” Great-Grandmother retorts. It’s an old argument that I’m not going to win. Avery means “elf counsel,” which is the sort of thing that happens when your parents meet at a Lord of the Rings fan club.

I push out my lip and fold my arms. “It’s not my fault! Blame my parents.”

“I do! I haunted their dreams for three weeks straight when I found out about it. They’re just stubborn.” She sniffs. “I blame your mother.”

I stand up. “You shut up about my mother! Just because she’s not Zuni is no reason to assume it was her idea, and it’s no reason to say mean things about her either.”

“Gringa!”

“Corpse!”

“Enough!” Madame Zelda slaps the table, making the crystal ball shake in place. “You’re like little children. I thought you were supposed to have the wisdom of the ages, Mrs. Quintana. You claimed to be surrounded by great thinkers and spirits!”

My great-grandmother shrugs. “I lied.”

Madame Zelda leans forward and bangs her head several times on the table. “I should just go back to rapping and magnet controlled Ouija boards. At least fake séances are reliable ones, and nobody starts telling a bereaved widow that she’s thinking of having sex with the deceased husband that she’s been interpreting for.”

“It was funny!”

“You said what?” I ask, mouth gaping in shock. “Okay, you never get to make fun of my tank tops again, d’you hear me?”

From the table, Madame Zelda mumbles “Please just ask the damn question so I can get rid of her. I am too tired to deal with either of you this early in the morning.” She must have thumbed a few switches, because the crystal ball retracted back into the ceiling and the lights returned to a more normal level.

I’m tempted to point out that my great-grandmother started it, but I don’t want her to yell again. I take a deep breath. “Should I just let it go?”

“Let what go?” asks Madame Zelda, curious.

Both my great-grandmother and I turn to glare at her, with what I’m sure is the same expression. “None of your business,” Great-grandmother snaps.

Silence stretches on for a full minute before she sighs. “White—Avery. Do you know much about the Zuni way?”

I’m not sure what the answer I’m expected to have here is, so I shake my head.

“I didn’t think so. Nor should you, really; you weren’t raised near it. More my fault than yours; I should have made more of an effort to teach your grandpa about his own heritage, and I should have convinced him to come back before I died.” She runs a hand through her thick braid, turning the threads of it smoky for a moment before they reform in its absence. “The Zuni way is to be easy-going. Friendly. We try not to let things bother us, and move through life with as little inconvenience to others as we can. Suspicion, grudges. . . are considered to be, um, bad. Un-people-like.”

I wrinkle my nose in confusion. “But you are the least easy-going person I’ve ever met.”

“I’m dead! I can act however I want now, and there are lots of bad influences. Besides, you’d be amazed how people change once their society’s expectations are gone.” She laughs. “You think George Washington is as sober dead as he was when he was alive?”

Madame Zelda perks up. “You know George Washington? I’d love to have him at a séance.”

“No. I heard it from Crazy Horse, who heard it from Pocahontas—did you know you’re related to her, too, Avery?—who heard it from Benjamin Franklin. There are a lot of dead people, you know. I can only find those new ones you pester me about because they’re hanging around the very edge between life and death.”

“So you want me to let it go?” I ask, still processing the information about Pocahontas.

My great-grandmother shakes her head.

“But—”

She sits down. “I said it was the Zuni way, and that’s a statement that is not intended to mean anything about you. It’s about that boyfriend of yours. He is about as far from Zuni as you can get, and that’s not his fault, and it may not even be a bad thing, but the Zuni way and his do not meet in a manner that’s healthy for you.” Reaching out with an abnormally long arm, she pats my head. “You’re a good kid, even for a white girl. I don’t want you to make choices you’ll regret just because you think it would make other people happy.”

I smile at her, and she grins back. “Thanks, Great-grandmother.”

Madame Zelda coughs.

I look at her, and am stunned to see that her face is greenish-white, and she is slumped over the table. “Not to be rude, but I really need to let go now,” she says, even her voice sounding exhausted. “You are a draining woman.”

Great-grandmother nods. “I thought as much.” She smoothes my hair. “Seeya, white girl.”

“Yeah, yeah. Bye.”

The blue smoke grows paler until it is finally white. A wind comes from nowhere and blows it apart.

A little color returns to Madame Zelda’s complexion. “Thank goodness. I couldn’t have held out for much longer.”

I run to the kitchen and grab her cup of coffee. It’s lukewarm, but better than nothing. As an afterthought, I pull out the bread, which is smoking. Cutting off the least burnt part, I smear some butter on and return to her with both items.

“Thank you, Avery.” She eats and drinks, dunking the bread in the coffee. I’m not sure if she was trying to warm up the coffee or cool the bread, but it looks disgusting to me.

Then I see my bag. “Dang-it! I completely forget about the corn. Can I just leave it with you?” I pout. “I really wanted to get some recipes off of her.”

Madame Zelda jerks and drops her bread onto the table. Her eyes lock in place and her mouth opens. My great-grandmother’s voice comes out. “It’s. . . the wrong. . . kind. . . anyway. . . white girl.”

Then Zelda wobbles, her eyes focus on me again, and the possession is over. She scowls at me and shakes her fist. “Your grandmother is the worst spirit guide.”

This time the voice comes out of nowhere. “I’m still right.”

Laughing, I stick my tongue out to the empty air. “Yeah, but my corn is better, old woman.”

I may be a white girl, but I’m still her great-granddaughter, and I don’t take crap from anybody.