The woman who would speak to us was older, long brown hair draped over her small shoulders. She sat across from an older man, sparse white hair running in a moat around the castle of his bald spot. They were engaged in fervid one-sided conversation that mostly involved the woman; the man did not look amused.

My family had taken me out to dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant a short walk from our hotel. It was their way of officially saying goodbye to me before leaving me on my own in New York City for four months. The next day they would be flying back home to California.

The restaurant was small and dimly lit—small in this context meaning minimalist, but not cheap. Modern-looking lamps hung from the ceiling, and the chefs could be seen bustling away behind a counter as bussers hurried around the restaurant with plates raised high in the air. Small square tables were placed close together—almost uncomfortably close. So close, in fact, that the older brown-haired woman sitting at the table beside us thought it only natural to join our conversation as my mother was lamenting my gap semester away from home.

“So, what is it that you’re doing here exactly?” the woman asked, pure curiosity written in the way her pupils, ever so awake, expanded from behind her curled eyelashes. Her casual tone implied that we weren’t in fact strangers and that joining our conversation was the most natural thing in the world—perhaps this was a New York thing.

I explained my gap semester, urban planning and activism and all that profound-sounding stuff about “New York City as a classroom.” The woman somehow seemed more excited about this than I did. Her body language practically screamed at me: I have the perfect thing!

What she said was, “What is your sign?” It was more of a demand than a question, the tone of her voice quickly turning to something starving and beastly.

The woman explained that she was some kind of professional horoscope reader. She would do readings for her daughter and her friends at sleepovers, and everything she foretold was so scarily accurate that they would think she was like a prophet or something.

“I’m a scorpio?… Sun?” I managed. I knew—and still know—nothing about astrology. I sort of prided myself on it. It was one of those things that I went about intentionally not knowing, like how I always intentionally mixed up the names of the most popular kids in class just so that I could say “Who?” when partnered with them for group projects because they would always do it to me first.

Well, eventually, as the woman requested, I looked up my birth chart. I had to type in the exact place and time of my birth, down to the second, so that astrology.com could figure out precisely where all the planets were on November 1st, 2006, at three in the morning. I was a Scorpio sun, Pisces moon, and Libra rising.

The woman gasped! It was something about water signs and the balance of the scales and the fire of something else and holding grudges, at which point I laughed, because there are a number of people who I have never forgiven for what they did to me. The woman laughed too because she could tell I had connected with something she said, or maybe it was just the relief that I was buying it.

“And you know, the animal that represents the Scorpio sign is the scorpion. Do you know anything about the nature of scorpions?” the woman asked, in full storytelling mode now, all of us leaning in no matter how much we thought astrology was bullshit. My mom’s actually into that stuff though, so she was leaning in the closest. We all shook our heads. No, we didn’t know shit about the nature of scorpions.

“The predators of scorpions are hyenas, and sometimes, when the scorpion finds itself surrounded by a horde of hyenas, it will be able to tell that it’s in trouble. So, you know what it will do?”

My mom stared into the woman’s eyes; everything faded away except the stranger-turned-seer. The woman held my mom’s son’s fate in her story, and my mom was hanging on her every word.

A beat of heavy silence.

“It will sting itself!” the woman exclaimed.

“No!” my mom wailed, her palm flying to her open mouth.

I chuckled and patted my mom on the arm, knowing that the brown-haired woman was reveling in every second of this. The woman went on about how even though I was a suicidal scorpion, I had the smooth flow of a Pisces and the balance of a Libra, so really, I was all set. My mom finally started breathing again.

Then the conversation turned to “dementia is caused by Red 40” and “you can cure every disease by drinking enough water every day at one in the morning specifically.” My mom was way too polite to tell this wacko to leave us alone, and the whole time, the woman’s date was withering away across from her. He went to the bathroom, at which point the woman took the liberty of letting us know that he had Parkinson’s, but he wouldn’t let her help him with any of her genius advice, which was really a shame. Finally, we left the restaurant, and she followed us outside. Eventually, she departed in an Uber with her date, escorting him into the car, much to his displeasure.

It was snowing. It was my first time being in New York in the wintertime, so the snow still felt magical. The sky was pitch black and it dropped soft white dandelion fuzz from its invisible clouds like a subtle cold baptism. And the sky had turned pitch black because the woman had talked us deep into the night—it was well past ten.

My mom had taken the woman’s business card too, and somehow, they had arranged a Zoom meeting to discuss dementia prevention measures, because dementia runs in my mom’s side of the family, but that was before we found out that this woman worshiped Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

When we arrived back at the hotel, it was as if we could all finally breathe again. I thought of how quickly a wholesome and quirky stranger interaction turned into something that made me feel a tiny bit sick, and I hoped that’s not how these spontaneous New York City conversations usually go.

What stuck with me, though, was the moment when she told me that Libra was the scales, the ability to maintain balance. And despite how unpleasant the woman had seemed to me, I basked in the knowledge that Pisces meant empathy and art. It’s one of those memories that I now see from the third person, how starry my eyes were as I soaked in her every word. For a moment, it was all very enchanting. Only sometimes did I think of her warning about stinging myself. Why did she have to scare my mother like that?

And that conversation was my initiation to the city. The woman wished us a Shabbat Shalom and that night I went to sleep feeling like I had discovered a new part of myself, however made-up, that I could wear like a medal: empathy, art, and balance. It was one of those things that I knew was profound to the point where I was paranoid about letting it slip away, but I also had no idea what to do with it. So, I kept it in the shallowest layer under my skin, always there but not too distracting, the knowledge that I’m screwed if I find myself surrounded by too many hyenas, and the realization that I have more layers than I previously thought, and already I was beginning to unfurl after my first weekend in the city.

***

Vedder Rivard is a writer from Monterey, California. He now lives in Los Angeles and is an undergraduate student at UCLA majoring in English and minoring in Creative Writing.