My mom went to the dog psychic because she was in a season of impasse, and she was afraid that it was not just one season but all of them. She had done this to herself: she’d cultivated a dead-end marriage; she had chosen a profession with no chance of promotion; she had moved herself into a nice house at the end of a cul-de-sac for comfort and yes, perhaps a little bit for gluttony, for sin, and now she was terrified that she would atone for it.
Our black lab, Lucy, had died with tumors in her lungs and her stomach and in the end no air or food could get through. For weeks after her death, Mom dreamed that it was her own stomach that was exploding, her own lungs. She’d feel an unnatural force reaching through her intestines; then she’d be constipated for days. She went to the doctor, who gave her a laxative and said she was fine; she went to a psychologist, who gave her a sleeping pill and said she would be fine. It must be Lucy, Mom thought, wondering if her beloved dog of ten years was trying to communicate with her or perhaps get the better of her.
She’d been to two psychics before. The first told her she’d die at 29. “I’m 31,” Mom had said, to which the psychic said: “I’m sorry, I got the numbers wrong I meant 92.” My mother, a respected high school math teacher and seven months pregnant with me, thought this improbable and excused herself.
The second experience restored her faith: I had broken my jaw after flying over the handlebars of my bike while racing my brother down the hill near our house, and she wanted to know if my face would ever be the same after the doctors wired my skull. The psychic, a man this time, said yes, of course, I’d be fine, but also her husband would leave her in two years, if not sooner, and when she got home she confirmed what she’d already known, that my dad was sleeping around. Technically, I later pointed out, she had been the one to do the leaving, and had it maybe occurred to her that this psychic guy was just trying to get in her pants? She dismissed this idea: in any case there was a separation, and that was proof enough for her.
When she went to Madame Lefeuvre it was the end of January and it was as though someone had turned the lights out in the whole goddamn world. My mom, too, had fallen into the practice of turning everything off before she left the house, and she’d already stuffed the Christmas lights in a box and put them in the basement. We can only stand our own joy for a moment, Mom thought, and then it’s over, and most of our lives are spent pulling into a dark driveway in the cold.
As she did with all her students whose names she didn’t know how to pronounce, my mom had googled the pronunciation of “Lefeuvre” so she could get it perfect on the first try. “Lefeuvre, Lefeuvre, Lefeuvre,” she muttered under her breath as though it were a spell, rounding out the r as she parked her car in the empty lot, as she trekked past the closed Thai restaurant and shuttered drug store. The door that her Google maps had marked was completely inconspicuous, aside from a small business card taped above the handle: “Madame Lefeuvre’s Canine Communication Service,” arched above a winged beagle. Mom knocked.
The young man who answered looked suspiciously like a former student. Mom studied him as he led her up the rickety set of stairs. Had he been one of the hundreds of faces who had blinked up at her over the years? Had he watched her in her suspended dance between the two blanknesses — that of her pupils’ faces, and that of the whiteboard? She enjoyed filling that second blankness with numbers, equations, patterns, if only to make sense of it, if only for her own self-assurance that the world contained some kind of order. No matter what sort of chaos happened behind her back in the classroom, no matter if her students were doomed to be forever vacant, at least she had that.
The incense hit her first. Before she could focus on the room, Mom coughed through the cloud that greeted her, “Hello, Madame Lefeuvre.”
“It’s Le-foo.”
“Oh.” Mom shook the outstretched arthritic hand. “I’m sorry. Le-foo.”
“Shall we sit?”
They sat at a circular table; Madame Lefeuvre shuffled the cards in front of her (which seemed to be just for show, because she never ended up using them). To Mom’s surprise, the man, introduced as Madame Lefeuvre’s son, stayed in the room. He was lounging in that way that seems particular to men, a way that had always made my mother equal parts embarrassed and jealous, with his legs wide open and his arms sprawling out on a leather couch in the corner. It was as though, when men did this, they were flaunting the fact that they could be vulnerable and nothing could touch them, and usually nothing ever did. He had to stay there, Madame Lefeuvre explained, for protection: there had been an incident that need not be repeated, she hoped my mother didn’t mind. Mom, unable to fathom what sort of incident could have happened to a dog psychic, nervously adjusted her chair so that her back faced the man, praying that he wouldn’t recognize her profile.
“Let’s get down to it,” Lefeuvre said. “Your dog loves you very much.”
Mom burst into tears.
After patiently waiting for this release of negative energy to subside, Lefeuvre said: “I do have some news from her that may be of interest to you. It’s something she wants you to know. But you have to be ready, dear.”
Mom wiped her eyes and nodded. “Yes, yes, I’m ready.”
“Your dog,” Madame Lefeuvre said, “she’s gay.”
Mom blinked. “Do you mean my daughter is gay?” (This made a lot more sense to her — and in fact, a few weeks later I would introduce her to my girlfriend. Call it mother’s intuition.)
“No. Lucy. Your dog. She’s a lesbian.”
“She was a lesbian.”
“Is. Her spirit lives on.”
“As a lesbian?”
“This can be hard for some people to accept.”
My mom suddenly felt defensive. “No, no — of course I accept it.” She blushed under the heat lamp. “I just didn’t know dogs could be lesbians.”
“My dear! We can all be lesbians!”
My mother couldn’t help but gasp at the force of this statement. But — she asked — in Lucy’s case, how could that be possible? Had she, when she’d spayed Lucy as a puppy, unknowingly stifled her sexuality? Had Lucy had sexual experiences without Mom realizing? Had she had desires that were oppressed her whole life? Had she fallen in love? It was the neighbor’s German Shepherd, wasn’t it, she was gorgeous, and Lucy always spent so much time by that fence….
“It’s all right,” Lefeuvre said. “She does not resent you for it.”
But what did that mean? Had Mom actually done something that could be resented? She began to feel nauseous. Oh, how horrible to be a dog, she thought. How horrible to be a gay dog, all your life caged away from your love, which was silent and beautiful and pure, like a secret Niagara perpetually falling inside you.
At the end of the session, the young man led her down the stairs. He shook her hand.
“Thank you for your business,” he said. Mom searched his eyes, but instead of recognition she saw only that haunting blankness stalking there, as though ready to pounce on her.
She released his massive hand. He could easily kill me, Mom thought as she got into her car. In her day-to-day life, she could fool herself into assuming authority over her tiny subsection of the world. She could give her students a grade that would determine their future; some of them would actually come to her office, pleading at the end of the marking period — some of the toughest boys, even, in tears. She could decide if they were worthy of extra credit assignments or not, if they had tried hard enough in her class to earn the chance to boost their measly grade by a few points.
But then, whenever she encountered a student in the wild years later, she felt overwhelmed, humbled, submissive. She would bump into them with their wives or husbands at baseball games, or at the bar she liked to go to near her house, and the power she’d had would cease to exist. She was just that math teacher they’d had once, shrunken by the passage of time to the size of a yearbook photo.
The session with Madame Lefeuvre had ended rather abruptly after the postmortem coming out. The dog medium had said that Lucy was still with us, that she loved Mom (despite, Mom thought bitterly, how repressed she had been). Everything would be all right, Madame Lefeuvre had said, as long as Mom was open to all that was to come her way. “But that’s the problem,” Mom frowned. “I’m stuck. I don’t feel open at all.”
The snow was falling heavily now, and Mom thought about how she would not be able to pull into her driveway because she had not shoveled in over ten years. She preferred being snowed in or snowed out. Clearing a path for herself seemed too easy a solution, and Mom never liked anything easy, did she — that’s why she found herself in her current position, wasn’t it. Her main companion over the last decade was gone, and now things were even less easy. On top of that, Mom couldn’t shake the feeling that she had done Lucy wrong — Lucy, who had accompanied her through divorce and her father’s death and her two children going off to college. Lucy had been there through it all — and Mom had all but stifled her. Of course Lucy was gay. How had Mom never seen that before?
“We can all be lesbians,” she said out loud in the car, slowly at first. “We can all be…lesbians?” There was something about the femininity of the phrase, the suggestive power of the word can, that seemed to ring out in the dark. My mother no longer believed in God. But, she realized, she did believe in lesbians — and for some reason, she believed Madame Lefeuvre. Not only in the matter of Lucy’s sexuality, but in the sentiment that the phrase encompassed. Though Mom knew she was personally not a lesbian (confirmed by firsthand experience both in the ’70s and in a more recent exploratory phase post-divorce), the word lesbian, after saying it so many times, began to grow. It took on new shapes and possibilities; it absorbed the shadows on the salted road. She felt it levitating on her tongue; the more she said it, the higher it flew, and it seemed to take her doubt, her fear, her stuckness with it.
Mom parked her car beside the snowdrift in front of her house. She gazed across the snow, a blank sheet from here to the front door. She loved it, she thought — she loved how clean it was, how perfect. She wanted to preserve it forever. Instead, she ran, laughing, ripping through it, tumbling, soaked and shivering, into the front door. Swathed in the darkness of her husbandless, childless, dogless house, she called me. “Honey,” she said, her voice trembling as she whispered her revelation into the phone. “We can all be lesbians!” She turned the lights on.
Image by Les Taylor on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- The Dog Psychic - June 6, 2026