Women of Fox Way #1
Maura, Calla, and Persephone arrived in Henrietta, Virginia quite exhausted from a trip across the country in the cars of strangers and with means that might be called modest if you were in a generous mood. They stayed the first few nights in the very cheapest and seediest motel the town had to offer, whose mattresses, Calla insisted long after, should have been burned. They began their search for a place to live immediately. While they had known each other for under a month, they never even discussed the possibility of living separately. Of course they would share a house. It seemed the natural solution.
At first, they looked for small places. They entertained the idea of splitting an apartment. The possibility of a mobile home was investigated. But all of their financially sensible solutions fled their minds as soon as they found 300 Fox Way. It was big and colorful and rickety and had a beautiful beech tree in the backyard. It was fairly cheap as houses go (a bit of a fixer-upper, the real estate agent had said) and it was clear that many Saturday afternoons would have to be spent stripping and replacing carpets, painting rooms, doing something with a toolkit so that the kitchen faucet wouldn’t spray water in every direction when turned on, but they were all three of them enchanted by it. They also had nowhere near enough money for it. They were close to giving up on it.
“I have no interest in being deeply in debt,” Calla said.
“Besides, there are far more rooms than there are of us,” Persephone said.
“That,” Maura said, “Gives me an idea.” And so Calla and Maura spent the rest of the day on the phone with various relatives, trying to convince them to come down to this strange little town with its strange powerful energy and this strange marvelous house. Persephone did not seem to have any relatives to call. By the time they went to bed, they’d secured promises from five women to wire money for the house and to come live with them at 300 Fox Way. Maura thought it was a miracle. Calla thought it was fated. Persephone did not seem at all surprised that it had worked this way.
They finalized the deal for the house in record time. The real estate agent seemed a little stunned. Standing in the front hall of their new house, Maura, Calla, and Persephone regarded the various things in their direct line of sight that would need to be tended to with supplies from the Home Depot. The banister of the staircase was splintering. One window was covered not with glass but with a stretch of tarp. In the room that the hall opened out into, the only apparent light source was a single bulb hanging from the ceiling.
“Definitely a fixer-upper,” Maura said.
“I know,” Calla said. “I love it.”
With the small amount of money left from their relatives and the even smaller amount of money they had between the three of them, they bought tools and paint, carpeting and curtains. When they’d crossed everything of their list, they were absolutely broke. They spent a week living essentially off of peanut butter and splitting their time between working on the house and finding locals who would pay to have the energy of their houses cleansed. They certainly weren’t ready to do readings in their own house. Over the next months, 300 Fox Way began more and more to resemble the kind of place where people would actually like to live and relatives began to arrive and stake their claims to various rooms around the house. They brought with them sufficient funds to upgrade from peanut butter to macaroni and cheese as well as several children. They learned that eight women painting a room can finish the job considerably more quickly than three. Light fixtures were purchased, floors were scrubbed, tiling was replaced. Maura predicted, correctly, that the maintenance of the house would be an ongoing project, but by the time they celebrated their first New Year in Henrietta, they felt ready to open the house up to clients. They would never be rich, but actually being able to do tarot readings in their own living room made things considerably easier, financially. Meals became easier to come by and making payments on the mortgage stopped requiring all night debates among the women of the house to figure out where sacrifices could be made to scrounge up the money. They were settled.
In those early years, Maura, Calla, and Persephone shared a room. Since they’d been the first arrivals, they’d gotten first pick of the rooms, and they took the one at the end of the hallway with the biggest windows and a ramshackle plastic chandelier hanging from the ceiling. They eventually got a bed frame, but that first summer it was just a king size mattress on the floor onto which they’d collapse on warm nights after days spent working on the house and looking for any work in town that involved their psychic talents. Calla would moan about her back hurting and Persephone would quietly say something about how her dissertation was languishing while, as she said, her body was busy, and Maura would close her eyes and think about how very much she loved them and how very much she loved this house and how very much she loved this town. She had not expected, when she first began hitch hiking, to end up this happy. She had stumbled into it, ended up by pure chance with these women and in this place. No, she told herself. Not chance. Something bigger. Something more powerful. Fate. That was what had brought her this happiness. She wasn’t sure how long she’d be able to hold onto it, but she was glad to have it for now. As the other women fell asleep around her, she opened her eyes to the darkness, listening to the cicadas screaming in the night, and thought to herself don’t throw it away.