The Apportioner's Counsel – Saying I Do (or I Don't) with Your Eyes Open

By Susanne M. Dutton

A uniquely accessible invitation to a depth psychology of love―to lessons by story―begins as three women of three eras (one still in the present day) find themselves in a cramped apartment somewhere between heaven and earth. With little jargon, the author explores both conscious and unconscious energies behind everyday experiences in the lives of normal people in love. What is love at first sight? What is it to fall in love? Is there such a thing as a soul mate? Why is it this person and not another? What if I fall out of love? Is it time to say good-bye? What's happening to marriage, anyway? What does "I Do" mean anymore?

This title is published by Susanne M. Dutton and is distributed worldwide by Untreed Reads.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Untreed Reads
• Release date: Jun 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781611879605

Book preview

Author

Introduction—The New Tenant

Gone, both of them. Just like that. I sensed it as I arrived home last night after a late class and even later rehearsal. But I made sure, creeping around the apartment, creeping myself out. Beginning in the sitting room, I went on to the dinky kitchen, the bedroom barely big enough for my double bed, the bath. The six hundred square feet didn’t take long. Even those strange, negative image imprints the ladies sometimes left on rooms had disappeared. Last, I pulled the drapes and scanned the balcony that overhangs Ditmars Boulevard and the funky wooden domes of St. Luke’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral and Hellenic Academy. Not a sign of either woman, anywhere.

I admit something inside me stood on a knife-edge as I searched, feeling relieved and disappointed both, as I moved from room to room. The search was a game I played for myself, wanting the definite and final finding out to take awhile. The truth is I guessed Attie and Cass had left as soon as I opened the front door. The clunky furnishings that came with the place—much of it Cass’s old stuff—were the same, but I knew my home was no longer haunted, if that’s the right term. The place just felt bigger.

I knew what the absence meant. It was the end of what had begun over a year before on a sweet spring evening following one of the lousiest days ever. After plenty of consideration, Sam and I met and decided our relationship was doomed. He needed time. I needed space. My father yelled and his mother cried. Our relatives and friends avoided each other in the aisles of the Pathmark. For the second time the wedding was off. Off the calendar for sure, but I figured off in other ways, too, as in off-kilter, off-color and offed, as in flat on its back and not getting up again.

Sam and I stood across the street from the apartment we had just rented—the one I planned to move into right away, the one we had once planned to share. As usual when it was too late, when it would do no good, we were both taking responsibility for the mess we’d created, singing our No—it’s not you, it’s me theme song. I happened to glance up and noticed two women, one very elderly and one middle-aged, gazing down on Astoria from the little ironwork balcony of that same apartment. In spite of the age difference, they looked alike to me until I realized it was a sameness of another kind. There was something else shared, a majesty—as if they were queens of bordering countries. Did you ever look at a stranger and know right away how much that person would mean? I’m not talking about an idea in my head or a guess, but an instinct, a gut thing—as if a part of me already in the future sat behind my belly button smiling and glad and thankful in a way that reached back through time. I had the key to the new place in my pocket, the neon green address tag still attached—171 Ditmars Boulevard, Second Floor Front. So I told Sam I was going over there to check something out. We agreed to meet later—to continue agreeing to split up. He headed for the gym. I swear I crossed Ditmars Boulevard in three leaps and shot up the staircase two steps at a time, like I was running into the arms of missing sisters. But nada. No one in the apartment. Had they left? Or maybe I was mistaken. Maybe it was another apartment, another balcony? I didn’t understand and I didn’t try too hard to explain it to myself. I moved in the next day—by myself, of course.

One afternoon not long after my clothes hung in the closet and my books stood along the shelves, the older one, Attie Stickley, appeared. I’d climbed onto the raised hearth to examine the damaged frame of the immense mirror on the mantelpiece. I stopped to look into the cloudy glass, hoping to catch myself at an angle from which I don’t look like such a Muppet and I mistook her for my own shadow, cast on the bookcase behind me. I spun around to see a fuzzy woman-shape gradually getting more real, like she was downloading her own pixels. Up close, I could see she was at least seventy-five, but no Miss Marple or Miss Daisy. No Lady Bracknell, either—no violets or talcum powder. Her figure was what I call medium perfect, not too fragile, not thin, but no extra. She reminded me of Helen Mirren as the Queen, but happy. She smiled at me as if I was kingdom come and suddenly I felt beyond all my own shit, the total opposite of what people call spooked. I’m less myself, shrunk down and meaner when I’m frightened, but Attie had a de-spooking consequence. She encouraged. She heartened. It felt crazy, but not a bit scary.

What can I tell you? I came in from classes for days after, letting my backpack and purse drop inside the door, hoping she’d be there. We’d stand in front of the fridge, eating cherry chocolate ice cream right out of the carton with long-handled teaspoons. Carrot cake with our fingers. Spiced popcorn heaped into napkins on our knees. Iced tea with real mint. Red wine in bell-shaped glasses. Coffee from the French press. I figure this was how it worked:the more welcoming I was, the more we ate and drank, the more definitely present she appeared to me and me to her. I don’t mean we gorged, but Attie was an ace cook. We ate and drank and talked ourselves real. This thing wasn’t foolproof, though. She might disappear for days. Or she showed up, but in a low-grade version. I’m not sure why. Then Attie’s sleeve would seem indistinguishable from the hand that extended beyond it, the turquoise stones in her necklace dimmed to gray. Her hair faded to an out-of-focus mass surrounding her head and her eyes to flat, dark dollops of color in a pale disk of a face.

Early on, I asked her about this, wondering if I, too, came in different versions. It was a late June evening. We sat in the wooden rockers on the balcony. This was before the other lady, the middle-aged one named Cass Lott, showed up. It was the first time Attie made the granitas. I tasted mine.

Peach or melon? I asked. I shoveled a medium-sized snowball of the fruity ice into my mouth with the help of a ginger snap.

Attie spooned a ladylike mound from the side of her dish and said, Both.

I nodded my approval and looked out across the street at the broad, blank sidewalks and the darkened hulk of the church flanked by narrow brick buildings, mostly small businesses and apartments.

So. Ms. Stickley? I ventured. She swiveled in my direction, her eyes expectantly wide open as they locked on my face. Normally, I called her Attie, but I tend to ramp up my language when I’m serious. How do I seem to you? I mean, am I kind of, well … unclear-looking …or even two-dimensional on some days?

She considered for a minute. I think I know what you’re referring to, Chloe. But no. You are always quite as sharp as you are now. You are five feet and five and a quarter inches, one hundred and thirty pounds, four ounces—a delicate frame in an olive-toned skin, courtesy of your Greek and Turkish heritage. You have what we used to call dishwater blonde hair, dyed to a color sold as ‘Arctic Ice,’ tied in a rakish knot under your thrice-pierced left ear. Your brown-hazel eyes are still twenty twenty. Your gracious red-purple heart pump, which has never been injured by too much or too little anything, is working in magnificent harmony with all of your exquisitely efficient organs. I can see, too, the fine squirts and sparks and tunneling liquids that seem to drink in Earth-life itself from the very air you breathe. I see spring and summer in you, Chloe, all your presumption and hope, lassitude and desperation. The aura around your head and shoulders is vibrant, almost an assault on the spaces you walk through—red, lavender and yellow. I wonder you can sit still.

Was Attie a ghost? Was Cass? I don’t know for sure. What’s required? If I ever meet a verifiable ghost, I’ll compare. I’m pretty sure neither thought of herself as a ghost. After I’d been living at 171 for a while longer, Cass showed up. Or maybe I simply began to see her, as she seemed to believe she’d been living there all along. I’d been working with yarn, making a wall hanging, a shimmery, silvery-blue web to hang in a window. I thought it was going well and I put it down to have a cup of coffee. Attie came in, sat next to me on the hearth and began to interfere, reaching for the needles and the yarn that hung between them.

Hey! I grabbed for my work.

But you’ve slipped a stitch, she said.

No. I didn’t slip a stitch because I’m not knitting.

Attie let go and poured her own cup of coffee. What do you call it then?

"Knitting is