I know that everyone thinks they’re a little psychic at times, and I’m no different. Throughout my life I’ve encountered situations in which I’ve had an overwhelming feeling that I knew what was going to happen before it did. Sometimes my premonitions come from dreams, other times from feelings, and still other times from just plain common sense. In my past relationships, for example, I’ve often known what my boyfriend will do before he does it, what he'll say before he says it, and who he’ll cheat on me with before he cheats on me. It’s uncanny sometimes, enough to lead me to question whether I have a bit of psychic power or just a propensity towards the self-fulfilling prophesy. There are times when I’m grateful for the premonitions, such as when I experience a negative situation in a dream before it happens so that it’s not quite so awful once it does. Yet there are also times when I resent them, and those are the moments that constitute what I call the Cassandra Syndrome.
Cassandra was the character from classic Greek mythology who was given the gift of predicting the future by Apollo in an attempt on his part to win her affections. When she rejected him as a lover, he turned the tables on her and added a curse to his gift – that no one would ever believe a word she said. My first Cassandra Syndrome occurrence was a two-parter. It started the day that my parents traded in their Mercury Cougar for a Ford Pinto station wagon. I didn’t like that car from the moment I saw it, and cried all the way home from the dealership, in spite of my parents’ attempt to appease me by allowing me to sit in what they christened the “way back” (they lowered the back seat and gave me full range of the back of the vehicle.) No matter. There was just something I didn’t like about that car – I still remember how upset I felt, even if I didn’t know the reason. I’m sure my tantrum could be attributed to a resistance to change -- at a young age you put a lot of value on things you are able to rely upon, such as being picked up from pre-school in the same vehicle every day. I was about five years old and was already miffed about sharing the spotlight with my new baby brother. First my parents added another person to the house, then they expected me to be happy riding around in a dark blue Mom-mobile with wood paneling. I just wasn’t having it and cried myself to sleep that night.
Nearly two years later I had, out of necessity, learned to accept the Pinto, until one day I had another emotional outburst regarding the car. By this time my brother Greg was a rambunctious toddler still stuck, at three, in a phase my mother had called the “terrible twos”. My brother is a wonderful person and I love him dearly but his early years were tenuous at best. He wore corrective shoes for his pigeon-toed feet and was twice the size of the children his age (therefore very difficult to handle -- there are several family photos in which I am visibly crushed by his body weight while trying to hold him.) When he was very young he suffered from colic, thus relegating us to the “crying section” of church during Sunday mass every week. Not only was I no longer an only child, but I was forced to live with a crooked-footed chubbo that cried a lot. Our early years together were an interesting juxtaposition of unconditional love and extreme resentment. Basically your normal brother-sister dynamic.
On that fated day we were going to deliver girl scout cookies (Stop laughing. Now.) to my cousins' house, who lived about five minutes away by car. As I was readying myself for the ride I overheard my mother yelling at my brother. He’d done something wrong – something not important enough for me to remember now but offensive enough for my mom to have been very angry with him – and his punishment was to stay in the car while my mom and I delivered the cookies. Immediately this struck me as a horrible idea and I pleaded with her not to make Greg stay in the car. “He’ll do something bad,” I repeated again and again while I beseeched my mother to be logical. “Please don’t let him stay in the car.”
My request fell on deaf ears – at least my mother’s deaf ears, who told me I was silly and loaded several boxes of cookies and two sulking children into the Pinto. When we arrived at my cousins’ house we parked in their driveway. Their house was built atop a small hill. That driveway had always frightened me because it was a rather steep upward incline and emptied into a steep downward incline in the driveway of the house across the street. I was always leery when we parked the car there – another fear that my mother on many occasions tried to assuage by assuring me that the emergency brake would prevent the car from rolling down the drive. On that day, like every other time we parked there, the emergency brake was on when we left the car and headed for the house. Only this time my brother was not with us, banished to the innards of the Pinto while we chatted over thin mint cookies inside.
Only about five minutes passed while my mother, grandmother, aunt, cousins and I were inside the house that morning. I don’t remember what propelled us to leave when we did. I can only assume it was my mother’s need to get back to her 3 year old son, who had suffered enough for his crime and would likely be treated to a girl scout cookie or two upon our return home. As we made our way to the door, the screams of someone – my Nana, aunt, or mother, at this point I’m not sure – drew my attention to the Pinto in the driveway.
It’s been over twenty years since that day, and although my memory of the details leading up to and following this event are sketchy, I know exactly what I felt at the moment I saw the car. The Pinto was moving down the driveway, and smoke appeared to be coming out of the tires. In my utter shock, I thought I saw a couple of long-haired heads peeking up over the tops of the seats. I believed at that moment that hippie teenagers had kidnapped my brother.
The seconds that followed passed in an instant yet lasted an eternity. I can still hear the pitch of my aunt's frantic screams as the entire family sprinted after the Pinto. My sixty-five year old grandmother slipped and sprained her ankle so badly that she was on crutches for weeks to follow. It was the super-human prowess of my mother that saved my brother from disaster. She somehow managed to open the driver’s side door while the car was sliding backwards into the driveway across the street. To this day I’m not even sure how she did it, but she stopped the car just as it crashed into the garage of the neighbors’ house. Several layers of bricks smashed into the back of the car, crushing the top of the “way back”, and scaring the living shit out of everyone who was there to witness it. Had the car rolled another 6 inches it would have toppled the support beams and the entire second floor of the house would have flattened the Pinto-- and everyone in it-- like a pancake.
My mother and Greg emerged from the car, unscathed, but visibly shaken. No hippie teenagers followed them out of the crushed station wagon that day – in fact there hadn’t been any hippie teenagers in the first place, it was just the theory I came up with in the milliseconds before the accident. The tire smoke made me think of the squealing tires from cars driven recklessly down our quiet street by, as my father called them, “damn teenagers”. The hippie part I suppose came from the long hair I thought I saw (I saw them in flannel shirts too – as if Wayne and Garth circa 1980 had taken over the car. I appear to be confusing "burn-outs" with "hippies", but I was young, and confused.) I had completely overlooked the possibility that it was my brother who had been driving the car, or at least assisting its descent down the drive. In his boundless curiosity he had released the emergency brake, which had sent the car on its collision course down the hill, in the moments before my mother saved his life.
In the aftermath of the accident, the cops were called, neighbors gathered, and my dad and uncle arrived on the scene to lend support to their freaked out family. At one point someone called the people that lived in the house, who were on vacation, to tell them about the disaster they would be returning to. I learned this from the people traipsing in and out of my aunt's house, and I watched the activity across the street from the front window, in between the comedy routines I was performing for my 2 year old twin cousins. Someone needed to keep them in the house while the adults sorted through the mess outside, and that person was me. I know that Greg now realizes the gravity of the situation that was at hand, but that day I think he was so excited to be talking to a real live police officer that he wasn’t nearly as rattled as he should have been. Even in the moment of high drama, Greg still managed to get something out it. I never even got to leave the damn living room. Although given my questionable perspective on the accident, I’m sure I would have made a lousy witness.
In time, everything affected by that day returned to normal. The Pinto was fixed, the garage was rebuilt, Nana’s ankle healed. To this day I don’t quite know if I had a psychic connection with that car or if my mere insistence that something bad would happen allowed it to be so (am I the one who gave my brother the idea in the first place?) Either way, I have given enough subsequent warnings to people that have gone unheeded for me to still believe I carry the curse of Cassandra. I suppose the predictions seem so absurd that no rational minded individual would believe them -- not even myself, if someone else were to say them to me. Must have been awful to be Cassandra. Take it from someone who knows.
