A Beauty (13 page)

“Elena Huhtala,” she said. I remember it as if it were yesterday, exactly how she said it, the most exotic name I’d ever heard. She shook Walter’s hand and he took it back and turned the cup around a few more times.

“I wonder,” she said, and she said it earnestly, emphatically; she said it as if she really did wonder something about him. By this time he’d completely forgotten my existence and Bob Newton’s, too, and he did what I suppose any young man would do faced with a young woman like Elena Huhtala, who seemed for no earthly reason to care about him. He swayed towards her, and his eyes went soft. He looked like Grandpa Hood’s old Shep when you’d stepped on his paw and he had a right to expect you to pat him.

“I wonder,” she repeated, “if you would like your palm read.”

Walter cleared his throat. “You read palms?” he croaked.

She nodded. “Ten cents,” she said.

“Ten cents.” He fished in his pocket and jingled a few coins. That was a habit with Walter; the sound of his money usually kept him from spending it. “I guess you must be pretty good,” he said.

“Well,” she said. “You must be the judge of that.”

He pulled out his change and poked through it and picked out a dime. A dime was quite a bit for a few minutes’ entertainment, in those days. You could get into a movie for thirty-five cents, fifteen cents if you were a kid; a country dance would cost a quarter and last till after midnight. He looked at it for a few seconds before he handed it to her.

She didn’t have a purse with her, and her dress had no pockets. She smiled at him suddenly. It was the first smile anyone in Gilroy had seen, and it was gone before you could blink. She bent down and slipped the dime into her left shoe, on the inside, at the arched instep of her foot. When she straightened she looked, just for a second, into my eyes, right into my eyes. She looked at me as if we shared a secret and as if I would know what the secret was.

That was how it began, the fortune-telling, I mean. I gave her the idea and she ran with it. She read the palms of half the people in town, her first day in Gilroy. The other half didn’t go to her because they were afraid, not so much to know their futures as to have their hands held in hers. They said it was a cheap thing to do, anyway, setting yourself up like a gypsy, and what could a chit of a girl who’d landed in town alone, without a cent to her name, know about them?

It’s true she started out a little rocky, with Walter being the first one. I guess she wanted to impress him with an official kind
of palm-reading instead of following her intuition, and it got her into trouble, the way trying to impress people often does. Besides foretelling a general upsurge in the economy, she predicted a boom for garage owners who’d been smart enough to stick with the business. Then she found out she had the wrong man, that the other fellow lounging across the street owned the garage. Walter was the Rural Municipality administrator and just passed time helping Bob Newton keep an eye on Main Street. But she was a quick learner. She switched to talking about men who were wise enough to get an education, men who earned the respect of others by holding important, responsible public positions.

Mrs. Beggs came up to the bench while Walter was getting his palm read, and pretended she wanted to talk to him. Mrs. Beggs had a fluty British accent that made her one of the town’s premiere ladies. It made her an organizer of teas and wedding showers and excused her from doing any of the actual work. The sun had come out in earnest by then and a lacy pattern of light and shade, thrown down by her straw garden hat, covered Mrs. Beggs’s face and chest like a veil. She handed over a dime, too, which was not at all like her usual self.

Everyone who came to the store that afternoon either stopped to get their palm read or walked by, gawking, on their way in to pick up their groceries. Scott and Leonard watched at the window, arms folded identically, whenever the place was empty.

Like father, like son, that’s what people said about Scott and Leonard, and with good reason. Leonard was twenty-one the summer Elena Huhtala came to Gilroy, and he had the scrubbed good looks and lean, feet-apart stance of a prairie hero. But he didn’t know that, or he didn’t care to know it. Like his father, he was a modest man. Humility was almost a flaw in both their characters, or so I believed in those days. As for Scott, before relief or official
aid of any kind was available, he gave many of the people of our district (and that included my mother) unlimited credit, knowing it was all we had to live on. It was a hardship to him. He carried half the town through the Depression, and he didn’t need a fortune teller to inform him that few would ever pay him back in full.

When I started grade one, a bit late because of eye problems, Leonard was taking his grade twelve; he was the oldest boy in our one-room school. The most wonderful thing he did was carry kids around on his shoulders at recess, and for eons I watched him, waiting for him to scoop me up and set me on high. But for some reason, maybe because I was a girl, or because I was shy in grade one, having to wear an eye patch that I feared made me look like a pirate, he never chose me. Finally one day I went to him and stood at his leg and looked up, kind of like a dog will do, kind of like old Shep, myself. Leonard was talking to some other kids at the time, but I didn’t care; I couldn’t wait another second. I remember he looked down – he’d felt me there beside him – and gave me that lopsided smile of his. You always felt he was smiling in spite of himself and because of you. I put my arms up and the next thing I knew, I was queen of the schoolyard. All the years of my young life, I believed I was going to marry Leonard Dobie one day, if he’d only wait for me.

Not long after Elena finished with Walter Dunn and got going on Mrs. Beggs, I caught sight of Leonard and his dad, the two of them, standing at the store window, and the idea came to me that they’d invented her, or they’d found her somewhere and placed her on their bench, and now they were watching to see how we’d all take it. I suppose that was because she was so foreign, so different from anyone who’d ever stepped into my world, it seemed she had to be a creation rather than a person who’d grown up higgledy-piggledy like the rest of us. But maybe it was more than that. Maybe I was already thinking she was made for Leonard, and
if I couldn’t have him, if he couldn’t wait for me, she’d be just right for him.

As soon as I had her to myself again, I begged her to read my palm more seriously. There had to be more than she’d predicted in my future; she hadn’t spent any time at all thinking about me. And the way she’d looked at me, earlier, when she’d put her first dime into her shoe – I kept thinking about that. She’d looked past the thick lenses of my glasses, right into my eyes. I was sure she meant that look to tell me she recognized we were alike. I was sure she meant it to tell me she saw the potential in me to be just like her.

“No,” she said.

“Why not?”

She didn’t sigh, the usual adult response to that question. She said she couldn’t, I was too young, the lines on my palm would be unformed, and besides, my hand had been damaged and the reading wouldn’t be clear.

“Do my left hand,” I said.

But I wasn’t left-handed. She said it wouldn’t work.

“What if I only had one hand?” I asked.

“Then I’d feel sorry for you,” she said. She didn’t sound sorry, not in the least.

I said I’d get money, but nothing would move her. I had to watch everyone else step up and hear their fortunes. It was unusual and difficult for me to stand to the side. I was the oldest in my family and the caretaker of the six kids who’d been born to my mother and father since my birth, the most recent only weeks before Elena Huhtala came to town. I’d grown used to assuming responsibility and to being treated with some deference, although recently something had been happening to me. It seemed to be
connected to the birth of my new sister, which had meant even more responsibility had fallen on me. In the midst of my busiest moments, which had formerly made me feel proud, my mind would fly away from my brothers and sisters, right out of the house or yard. I’d watch my hands wiping a nose or drying dishes as if they were someone else’s hands and then I’d wish they were someone else’s hands so I could slap that face, break that dish, and run. I’d started slipping away so my mother couldn’t ask me to do the next chore. Instead of making me feel better, though, escaping made me feel worse. It was hard to go back and never be alone. It was hard to go back and find my mother angry because she’d needed me. I wanted to slip back into the house as I’d slipped out, unnoticed, and lie on an unshared bed in a cool, dark, empty room that was mine alone. And lately, more than ever, although I thought it was wrong of me, I wished I could live in that other house, the house at the edge of town, where I was sure I would find the solitude I needed if only I could get invited in.

Whenever I thought no one understood me, my mind went to my father. I didn’t believe he understood me, either, but my mind went to him. My father was working that week for Jack Newton at the Pool grain elevator. I don’t know what he was doing, fixing something maybe. Jack was Bob Newton’s brother and all the time I lived in Gilroy he had the elevator. That’s how people phrased it, and the elevator was a good thing to have. He had the telephone exchange and the post office too, or his wife did, so his kids got the music and elocution lessons, the ice cream, and the picture shows the rest of us didn’t get. My father was a bricklayer, and if I tell you there wasn’t a brick building within a hundred miles of Gilroy you’ll understand what kind of provider he was. I don’t know why
he came to Saskatchewan except that one of his brothers lived nearby. His brother had a farm and my dad had a quarter-section, too, but he let Uncle Sid work it. He did odd jobs in town; people liked him and they had a lot of respect for my mother, so we got by.

While Aunt Lizzy Ridge got her palm read, I took off for the elevator. Aunt Lizzy was at least eighty; I figured I wouldn’t miss much. I wasn’t allowed inside the elevator but I climbed up the ramp and stood at the big open door and peered into the haze of grain dust until my father emerged from it with its ashiness clinging to his hat and his clothes.

“Ruthie,” he said. I didn’t often track him down wherever he was working, and he had a wary look in his eyes, figuring my mother had sent me, I suppose.

“A fortune teller’s come to town,” I blurted.

He scratched his ear and pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. I’d rolled about a hundred of them for him only the night before so he could pluck one out of his shirt pocket like that and light it. I followed him along the platform to the edge, where he crouched down and lit his smoke, and I sat beside him, swinging my legs back and forth so my shoes brushed the tops of the foxtails growing there in clumps.

I told him she was young, she had honey-coloured hair, she was wearing a brown dress made of material so thin you could spit through it, and in my opinion she had nothing on under it. He pretended to be shocked and cross at me for talking like that. I started to explain that I’d sat right beside her and watched her closely. I knew he’d stop me before I could get into details, before I could tell him I’d seen the shadow of a breast through her dress and the round smooth roll of her thighs. He didn’t need to hear the evidence. He listened and smoked, and when I was done and had nothing more to say except the things I couldn’t say, and was
waiting for what he would reply, he tapped me on the nose with his finger and stood up, dropped his cigarette and stepped on it, and went back to work.

I sat on, looking at my scraped right palm and then at my left. They were not quite mirror images of one another and idly I wondered why. The right palm had an extra line branching off from one of the main lines. Was it because my right hand did more work? I hadn’t told my dad Elena Huhtala wouldn’t read my palm; he would have thought I was whining. At least he’d tapped my nose. He never did that with the other kids. Sitting there, knocking the foxtails about, I allowed myself to feel sorry for my siblings, who weren’t as important to him as I knew myself to be.

My father was a restless man, and although he’d said he couldn’t get away just then to hear his fortune, I could see he was intrigued by what I’d told him, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before he’d find an excuse to wander over to the store. He was just the opposite of the people who were afraid to have their hands held by a fortune teller.

I didn’t have long to wait for my dad. I hadn’t been back at my station on the sidewalk more than ten minutes before he showed up on Main Street. I can see him now, when I think of it, walking towards me. Looking like a movie star. My father was on the short side, maybe he was only five feet seven or eight, but he was lean, so he seemed taller. He cut a good figure, as people used to say, and even in dusty work clothes, in his shirt sleeves and suspenders, he walked with an effortless sort of elegance, the kind that can’t be feigned. He wore his old felt fedora tipped back in a way that made him look as if he expected a happy outcome to any day, and he smoked his cigarette, and he looked at Elena Huhtala from way
down the street, careless with the cigarette, careful with the look, like the leading man in a movie bound to bring them together.

Elena was reading Bob Newton’s palm. She’d foretold (more accurately this time) a boom for garage owners who’d had the fortitude and wisdom to stick with the business. Bob Newton had a bright pink smudge across the top of both cheeks by the time my father strolled up and interrupted them. She ignored him, but Bob couldn’t. With my father nearby, he started shuffling his feet and saying “uh.” He hadn’t minded me, sitting right there at his feet. Nobody had minded me, or even seemed to see me once their fortune teller had started making them feel they were part of the universe and its design.

In the few seconds before Bob Newton could mumble thanks and leave, and before Elena could turn her attention our way, I opened my mouth to say something to my father. He was standing over me. He put out his hand to stop my words, and I saw the lines etched in his palm and at the knuckles of his fingers, and I couldn’t wait to hear what she would tell him. I shut my mouth and ducked my head, hoping to disappear from his vision. I didn’t want to miss a word between my father and that girl.