Let's just say our mother set her heart on stuff our dad couldn't see, never being inclined to 'roll around in his insides like a dog rolling in the grass' the way he claimed Mom did. Life was best kept neatly herded into schedules, routines, and ways things got done. If it couldn't be noted (in block print, all caps, with a Number Two yellow Ticonderoga pencil) and categorized on a legal pad (college ruled, no exception), it wasn't worth thinking about. Those two never fit and when they split, I figured it was just life doing what it did best: Lumping things together that functioned together, separating what would never work. Their separation came in the spring of 1975, when I was ten.

I'll admit it, I'm starting to look like her. Those little creases around my eyes, that trembly pitch in my voice. If I had little kids of my own, I'd be even more like her. We'd spend hours cutting paper dolls from bright, primary colored construction paper, and I'd teach them to read before they got to kindergarten or even preschool. We'd sneak outside on cool summer nights, they'd pad around in orange flannel pajamas with plastic feet in them. I'd point straight up through the trees to the men on the moon. Men who sit patiently waiting for little girls to say their prayers so they can deliver them personally to God himself.

The other stuff, I'd never do. Weird stuff that came later, when it was just the three of us. Stuff Carol's doing with her own kids. Letting them drink herbal tea instead of taking children's aspirin when they're sick, laying out their own Tarot Cards, playing around with a Ouija board. Carol goes too far, if you ask me. My niece is only ten, she tells me her rising sign is Pisces and she wants to change the spelling of her name from T-a-r-e-n to T-a-r-y-n because she needs more numerical power, a stronger life energy.

Sometimes I want to throw Carol into a wall but instead I explain, again, that Mom latched onto the Gotta Finda Guru movement that sucked up so many people in the seventies, astral this and aura that and Baba Ram Baba Ding Dong. Look where she wound up: Dead. If you've got a 'strong life force', I argue, you don't ignore your own diabetes because it's a 'karmic lesson', you don't smoke dope to 'enhance receptivity to inner messages' and later, binge on Hostess Fruit Pies. You don't die so ridiculously young. And Carol shrugs and says Mom's karmic assignments were just completed, that's all. She moved on to her next incarnation, like my students pass from one grade to the next.

Now Carol wants to do the mirror trick. The one from that first summer, when Mom led us into her bedroom, all the lights off and just these two skimpy, melted down candle stubs burning on either side of the massive oak mirror on her vanity. In their pale glow, the blue shag carpeting became waves of gray fur swallowing up the matching fuzzy spread lumped up on her low, narrow bed. "Look!" She commanded, pointing into the mirror. "Concentrate, girls, and you'll see all the lives you've had before. All your incarnations." So I stared until my eyes blurred, and all I saw for the longest time was a gawky ten year old kid with stringy brown hair and fat front teeth. Carol looked much more assured, there beside me in her orange Starsky and Hutch T-shirt. But after a while, there was a Cleopatra face, melted into a bare chested Indian warrior, a pioneer woman speckled with prairie dirt and finally, a very old, very tired face in a blue satin blouse fastened at the neck with a simple ruby pin. Carol never said what she saw, but Mom assured me that I was a 'very old soul', and she was glad we were together in this lifetime.

She instructed me in the seeing of auras, colored light fields flaming around people, advised running from the aura that burned red, or yellow. By the time Dad took us for a summer visit that with the help of his attorney went on for years, I regularly meditated, discerned auras, and was well versed in all my past incarnations. At night I didn't dream but engaged in 'astral travel', safely tucked beneath thick blankets, a copper plate dotted with even rows of pyramids tucked beneath the mattress to assure 'even rejuvenation of my energy'.

As I got older, I resented my vast knowledge of what Dad called "Mystical Mumbo Jumbo". When I was ten, it was a game. But later, I'd wrestle with an inability to scream at Carol when she borrowed my best sweaters without asking, secretly apprehensive about racking up 'bad karma' I'd have to adjust at some later date. When my forehead broke out beneath the feathered bangs I adopted as a junior in high school, I labored under the nagging feeling that my pimpled skin was an outward manifestation of an inward blockage of my third eye and its surrounding area. I couldn't digest Mom's rationale for letting go of sole custody with no questions asked, didn't buy her explanation of 'taking it to the Ouija' and having that little board say it was a good idea.

Carol doesn't think this stuff hurts my nieces one bit, but Carol's still into 'following her energy' and staying on 'the right path'. Never mind that path married the general manager of a resort who makes more in a month than I do all semester. She's got plenty of time to sit around and sop up energy from her crystals, folding herself up and facing east every afternoon under a fabric pyramid she erected in the girls' playroom with duct tape, tent poles, and about nine yards of denim. She swears I have no regard for my life force, that it's all going to trip me up, in the end.

You want tripped up, I say, look at Mom. She worshipped her life force and ignored her doctor, and where did she end up? Dead, last time I looked. Cremated and emptied out into the Pacific Ocean as casually as Carol dumps her ashtrays into the toilet of her yellow and gold guest bathroom. Dead a little too soon, I say, to have fulfilled any 'karmic destiny'. Carol calls me narrow minded, then just shrugs, smug beneath her denim temple.

I'm starting to look more like her every day. But I don't spend a lot of time looking, you know. When my eyes get tired, I'm done standing around in front of that mirror. I've got papers to grade, I've got a life to get back to, I've got a dinner date with that new substitute teacher from Senior Science. I don't waste a lot of 'energy' as Carol calls it, looking back.

There's no big meaning behind it, I tell her. It was just one night, one crazy night in a fuzzy blue bedroom, just a couple of little kids staring hard into a mirror, and in the thin light from cheap candles, trying really hard just to do the right thing.

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