Lunch With Oneg

She had to be loopy. No one comes and sits at your table, uninvited, in Burger King. Not unless it’s very crowded, but it wasn’t crowded at all.

I’d just opened a copy of Piers Anthony’s latest Xanth novel. But here she was, sliding her tray onto the table, asking me if I liked the book. I thought she was a flake, and I held the book out in front of me, trying to retrieve my place.

“Oh, you’re reading,” she said, and I couldn’t pretend. I put the book face down on the table. My teachers would have been appalled.

“Do you like Piers Anthony?” she asked. Startled, I answered, “Yes, he writes good fantasy.”

“I used to read a lot of Piers Anthony,” she told me. “I liked science fiction. But then my life became like science fiction.”

Yup, had to be loopy. But her eyes twinkled and she was too happy to be complaining.

“Are you interested in energy healing?” she asked me. At the same time she dug into her fried onion rings. Not a health food nut, then.

“What kind?”

She mentioned chakras; she mentioned meridians. I thought she was talking about longitude. In England in 1982, I traveled to Greenwich and stood on the Prime Meridian line that runs through the town, one foot in one time zone and the other in a different hour. Only standing on the International Date Line would have been more exciting. So what were these meridians?

She didn’t explain. Instead, she told me about going to the Learning Annex to hear some author who’d written a book on energy healing. Skeptical, I asked her what the classes would cost.

“Oh, they’re free,” she assured me. “She’sdoing it because she wants everyone to know about energy healing,” she insisted, smiling broadly. Those hazel eyes were sparkling again. Oddly, they matched the color of her curling hair.

“I used to go to the Learning Annex,” I said. “I saw a couple of mediums there. One was a phony but another one..no, she was at the Seminar Center – the other one was for real.”

“How did you know the first one was phony?”

“She was too interested in money. She came in with audio tapes and right away she was selling them. Then she had these vitamin supplements that were supposed to help you get in touch with the other side.”

“Vitamin supplements?”

“Right. And she asked people to come up and put photos of loved ones they wanted to contact out ona table, and then she parked her vitamin supplements right t here on the table, on top of the photos. So right away I knew she was a phony and only cared about the money, not about people or their loved ones on the other side.”

“But the other one,” I continued, “she was good. She gave everyone in the room a five minute reading and she was very accurate. She got my mother: she knew what my mother died of, when she died, and a lot of details about her that were absolutely true. And she didn’t know a thing about me. She didn’t even know my name.”

My companion agreed there was no other way the medium could have known anything about me.

“Sometimes they get your name ahead of time and they go on the internet and find out about you. But she knew nothing.”

She nodded and introduced herself as Oneg. I grinned as we shook hands. “I’m Celeste,” I said. I told her I liked her name. It’s the Hebrew word for a festive meal, like “Oneg Shabbat.” She said her original name was Noga, and in Hebrew it was spelled with the letter Hay at the end. Noga, she told me, means “bright light,” and she said the concept was important in the Kabbalah.

Oneg told me that when she got married the rabbi did not listen to her and spelled her name Nun Gimel Ayin instead of Nun Gimel Hay. This changed the meaning from “bright light” to “plague.”

“And my marriage was a plague,” she added, “until I was able to divorce him.” She spoke of it so cheerfully that it must have happened many years before.

Oneg told me she felt she must have been meant to come over and sit with me and hear me tell her something. We speculated it was the part about the afterlife.

“I had experiences, too,” she told me after I told her about my mother’s predictive dreams and some of my signs. “But my mother would have called me crazy if I’d told her any of them. We didn’t have much money but she would have spent it dragging me to psychiatrists to prove I was crazy!”

“One time,” Oneg began, “when I was seventeen, I went to visit a girl in Williamsburg. She was a friend from high school. I had never been to her house before. When I got off the train, I looked up and down the street where she lived over and over but I could not find the number of her house.”

“Finally I knocked on the door of a brownstone, to ask directions. The people were European immigrants and they didn’t speak English, but the man of the house indicated that he could take me to a man who did speak English. He led me up a dark staircase – it was so dark! They must have had a two watt lightbulb!”

“As we went up I could see into a room at the landing, which was lit up. There was an ark with a Torah in there so I knew they prayed in that room. As I stood on those stairs I saw a boy in the European style of dress, the long coat and so on, coming up the stairs. He didn’t seem to be floating but he seemed to be walking normally. But his whole face was lit up, as if he were a lightbulb.”

“He didn’t speak to me but he passed me, went onto the landing and rounded the corner to go up to the next landing. Then, the man who spoke English came out, and he told me he didn’t know the family I was looking for. I went back outside and crossed the street, and there, on a doorway below street level that I’d overlooked the first time, was the number of my friend’s house. So I knew I was meant to go inside that house and see that boy.”

“He was filled with a bright light and that matches your birth name,” I pointed out to her. She nodded but I couldn’t tell whether that thought had occurred to her before. She began talking about meridians again, and about her son who lived in Israel. She asked whether going to Israel was a good idea for her and of course, I had no clue. So she held out her arm and asked me to push down on it. I pushed down hard but could not budge her arm.

“That means it’s a good idea for me to go,” she said, pleased. She told me about her son’s life in Israel, that he was married to a Burmese Jewish girl and the prejudices she faced, being considered a domestic worker by the Westernized Jews who made up most of the Israeli population. Then she decided to test whether a food I was eating (my onion rings) was good for me. I could have told her the answer to that!

She had me hold out my arm and she pressed down lightly and I couldn’t resist. She said she was barely touching me and it meant I was “homolateral” instead of “heterolateral.” I should go home and do exercises, she told me, to become “heterolateral.” Oneg stood up and did her “exercises” right there in Burger King, marching up and down and swinging the opposite arm from the knee she was lifting. She looked peppy and delighted with herself, and also, I have to say it, loopy.

But even if she was loopy, she livened my afternoon. She’d come to my neighborhood by mistake that day, thinking it was a Wednesday instead of Tuesday. “So I was meant to come into Burger King and meet you,” she told me.

I’ll buy that. I don’t believe in accidents either. We traded emails, but we haven’t gotten in touch. I may never see Oneg again but she made an impression on me that lingers long after we said goodbye. I think she should have kept her name, Noga, because whatever else she is all about, she does indeed radiate a bright and cheery light.