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May.19
6:29 PM ET
Monday, 19 May 2008
Excerpt: Yes, You're Pregnant, But What About Me?
As is the case for most first-time fathers, my journey to child rearing began in Atlantic City during a chance visit to a gypsy palm reader. This was several winters ago, and at the time I
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Maybe if I were to walk this same stretch in a few months the Miss America pageant would be taking place. Maybe as I walked by the venue, Miss Idaho or Miss New Jersey would be outside on a break smoking a butt or sticking a finger down their throat. Maybe they would ask me if I had a light or a mint and then maybe we would have struck up a conversation about world peace. Maybe I would have impressed them with my worldliness by flashing the ten Euro Dollars I had in my wallet from a trip to Euro Disney two years earlier. Maybe we would have talked about teeth whiteners and the merits of flossing.
But it wasn’t July. It was February. And in Atlantic City in February there’s none of that. Instead of summer sand blowing across the sun baked, wooden planks of the boardwalk it was now dry snow and sleet whipped into a frenzy by an off shore gale. Most of the small, crappy tourist shops that sold the summer crap food and crappy t-shirts were boarded up for the season and the wooden walk way was now covered with a thin sheet of dark ice. In hindsight, I guess I should have told someone I was venturing off on this bleak and ominous excursion, so that they could have stopped me, but I didn’t and so here I was.
This may have been why I ducked into a hole in the wall with a rickety old sign outside that said “Miss Edana’s Palm Reading,” but to tell you the truth, I really have no idea what made me go in there. Perhaps it was just to have someone to talk to. Someone to tell me some good news, someone to give me hope and encouragement, that I would meet someone else and be happy again. And if none of that, maybe just someone to assure me (that my swayback could be corrected with yoga) my hands weren’t frostbitten.
In retrospect, I’m not entirely sure why I thought a gypsy would bring me good news. Movies, which form the bulk of my preconceived notions about things and the basis for all of my cultural stereotypes, always seem to portray gypsies as the bearers of bad news. They are the soothsayers and prophets whose visions are always the grimmest and least pleasant. Not to mention the fact that they steal babies and con unsuspecting tourists (or so I’ve heard).
From Miss Edana’s demeanor I assumed she might be an Irish gypsy. She was wearing a lot of ‘wrapped’ garments—stuff you would normally find draped over the back of a couch at your grandmothers: an afghan, a shawl, a half-knitted sweater, two cats, and various other laundry that was not put away. Her looped earrings were so big I expected a Cirque Du Soleil performer to land on one at anytime, and makeup covered every inch of her face. With an eyebrow pencil she had colored on a fake beauty mark just off the left side of her nose and above the corner or her mouth. It’s really the only good place for a beauty mark. One would not look good placed directly under the eye or on the chin.
As I was sizing her up she was doing the same to me. I shut the door behind me, and she peered out into the blackness, almost as if she was checking to see if anyone had followed me. When she spoke there was a husk to her voice that sounded as though she had been smoking cigarettes for quite some time, a practice which no doubt created quite the unfit environment for her latest crop of stolen babies.
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