A Beauty (30 page)

“You’re not from here,” the woman said. Betty, her husband had called her. “It’s refreshing. And I like that dress you’re wearing.”

Elena thanked her.

“That’s a different kind of dress, kind of a Jackie Kennedy dress, eh? Kind of thing
she
wears, eh? What’s your name?”

Elena told her, putting on her patience, another kind of dress.

“Mine’s Betty. Originally Oksana, Oksana Pawluk, but I changed it.”

“Oksana is a pretty name.”

“Not where I come from. Where’d you find a dress like that?”

“I got it in Finland, this summer. It’s a Marimekko dress.”

“You’re kidding. What the heck is that?”

Elena explained it was a fabric and clothing store where she’d shopped in Helsinki. She told her it was a company run by women. She knew Betty would like that. She could always access useless insights about other people. Or maybe they weren’t useless. Every day they slipped her past situations she wanted to avoid, eased her way.

“You know, you’ve got the craziest way of talking,” Betty said. “You could put me in a trance.”

Jerry approached with the bill. Betty glared at him while Elena paid, and when the transaction was over, she told him to get lost. Elena smiled at him and shook her head to let him know he didn’t need to be concerned. “Okay, missie,” he said, retreating backwards.

“You married?” Betty asked.

“No,” Elena said.

“Why not?”

“Well, for some years I lived with a man who was married to someone else.”

“And now?”

“I’m on my own.”

Betty reached out and fingered the armhole of Elena’s dress. “I’d say that dress would be a cinch to sew, not much to it, a couple of seams, a couple of darts. I worked as a seamstress in prison.”

She turned around and surveyed the room. Everyone evaded her eyes and she turned back to Elena, who was starting to feel as if she was the one in a trance, glued to her chair by a woman who’d worked as a seamstress in prison.

“Just look at this crew, eh?” she said. “I mean, usually I sit here on a Friday night, right here in this chair, with a bird’s eye view of the snake plants. So tonight was a bit different. They trained me as a seamstress. You have to do some kind of work. It turns out to be a useless trade here, where people know me. They don’t want me around them with a pair of scissors. I’m good, I could smarten them up, but they don’t care. My mum used to sew. Had to. She come here at seventeen. My dad brought her here through some ad in the papers. He was a widower with three little girls, eh? And then the two of them made more. She had no sense
of style, poor thing. Style. There ain’t none of that here. Look at them Kulak brothers, for instance. With their waistbands under their armpits. No fly on their pants. Suspenders. In this day and age. Their mother made those pants before she died, ended them above the ankles so they wouldn’t trip. And take a gander at Roxanne Thompson. Look, quick, before she gets out the door. See that godawful excuse for a dress she’s wearing? Thinking she’s all dolled up for a Friday night at the Bluebird. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve overheard her say, “I made this myself.” Hah! She might as well put
that
down the front instead of the fifty tiny buttons. Her husband, he’s from my old district, I knew him when he was a little kid. My sister and me used to babysit him. Used to put his clothes on him backwards. The whole lot of them might as well wear their entire wardrobes like that, it would make no difference.” She had turned a little to watch them go out the door, and set her elbow into her plate. She lifted it and stared at it, at the gravy dripping off of it. “I guess the guy you lived with must’ve been rich,” she said, wiping it off.

“Well, there were a succession of men, and they tended to get richer.”

“Hah! I’m gonna remember that line. I’ve only got the one. And I’m fed up, I gotta tell you. He’s a bully, you know. Nobody realizes that, but he is. He drives me crazy. I mean it. I seen him watching you, ever since we come in. Looking at you with that
chivalrous
look on his face. You know what I mean? If only you had a suitcase he could carry for you, he’d be pleased to lug it anywhere. Or if you’d drop your serviette, he could fly to rescue it. Because here you are, clean and innocent and pretty as all get-out. While me – why, he’s got to hide me as best he can.” She stopped and shrugged her big shoulders.

“I must go,” Elena said.

Betty picked up her purse and set it on her lap, but didn’t rise. When Elena stood up, she said, “Just stand still a minute, will you? I want a look at how that dress is made.”

Elena obliged. The husband watched from his table with the dullness of a man who has drunk enough to kill him.

As soon as she stepped out the door, she had a feeling of escape as visceral as any she’d ever experienced. Even her feet felt light, and she was glad of the few blocks she had to walk to the highway, glad she hadn’t brought the car. It was good to feel cement under her shoes, air on her skin. She passed a drugstore and then a new, low building called Pioneer Villa. She smiled at the word
villa
for such a utilitarian structure. Next door to it was the Old-Timers’ Museum. She laughed out loud. She was forty-six and intended not to grow old.

She didn’t meet the old crone on her way back to the motel. She’d seen her earlier, dragging her clanking wagon behind her, a woman not likely as ancient as she looked, with candy-floss white hair and a sunken mouth where her teeth had once been, a rough old woman dressed in a man’s pants held up with binder twine and a man’s flannelette shirt. She’d released an awful gust of body odour when she’d passed by, and when Elena had turned to look at her, not being able to stop herself, the old bird had said, “Hah!”

When she slid between the strangely damp-feeling sheets on her bed that night, she thought about all the escapes she’d made in her life, and how she would escape that fate, too. She closed her eyes. The motel had installed a yard light, and you couldn’t make the room dark. She tried to keep her eyes closed, but they opened on their own as soon as she forgot about them, and then she could see her clothes thrown over the one chair. She wore nothing to
bed. She wished she could go about naked. Not have clothes at all. “Hah!” she said out loud. She hadn’t been able to sit nude in the sauna, in Hattula, even though she was all by herself.

Why are you here?
They’d all asked her that, in Finland. And Ruth had asked her, too. She thought about arriving at the room, earlier (it seemed a month ago), tired from the long day – the driving and the discoveries – and forcing herself to shower and change and make up her face. She closed her eyes and saw Ruth’s plain face, her anxious eyes behind the thick lenses, and the daughter’s face, glowing with misplaced admiration.
You were just being yourself
, Ruth said.

Clean and innocent and pretty
, the woman at the cafe – Betty – said. Elena could hear the exact way she’d said it, as if every word was fact.

She climbed out of bed and walked around the room, watching her naked feet, feeling the cooling air move against her bare skin. The yard light bloomed behind the drapes. She threw up her arms as if explaining herself or giving up to someone, but all she let herself think was that she hated those goddamn Marimekko dresses – and she’d bought seven of them.

Jerry was so tired after the Earles left, he let Jean send him home. He was dead tired, but once he’d crawled into bed he felt too sorry for himself to fall asleep. At his age he shouldn’t have to watch the kind of suffering nobody wants to see. He shouldn’t have to see people turned inside out. He thought about his hot water bottle, but he was too lazy to get up and fill it. He thought about his old wife, far away across the world, who would seem ancient to him now. Probably, if they were together, she’d want him to look after
her. He’d be dragging himself out of bed to get a hot water bottle for
her
. Then (and he pictured a line of dawn at the bottom of the window he knew would be black) he thought how lucky he was to have been born with a proclivity to find his situation lucky, and he drifted for several minutes on that concept, along the edges of oblivion; but even though he knew it to be true – he was lucky enough to know he was lucky – the space was growing at his forehead, the cavity widening, a vacuum was ballooning. Only someone else’s words could keep grief, once it had been roused (my son, my son), from rushing in and taking over there. He turned on the light. He rummaged in the hutch he used for a bedside table. Where a thunder bowl used to reside was a stack of pocket novels, detective stories, the covers softened with handling, pliable and comforting to his fingers. It didn’t matter which he pulled from the pile. (My son, my son. No one could say what was really happening in China. The letters told nothing; he couldn’t read between the lines.) It didn’t matter where he opened the book. Tonight it was a John Dickson Carr,
The Case of the Chinaman’s Rescue
. No, but they should all be called that.

“That dress she was wearing was made by a women’s company, started by a woman, run by women,” Betty told Albert the next morning. “I’m gonna start my own just like it. I’m gonna make up a bunch of those dresses in a bunch of sizes and start out by selling them at your floozy’s old shop.”

He didn’t doubt she could do it and told her so.

“That’s the first bit of encouragement you ever gave me,” she muttered, and some of her defiance deflated to an almost normal level, and she went on to say she would also start a society. She was
going to call it something like The Society for Reasonable Clothes for Women. She looked almost happy, thinking about it.

For a whole minute after that, he flung thoughts out like a busy little worm arcing into new worlds, how she would make the dresses, how they’d sell at a profit, how she’d bank the money, and when she’d made a pile, how she’d pack up, clear out of here, set out for some bigger centre. But that only reminded him of Peg and the things she’d said to him and about him before she’d left town.

Ever the mind-reader, Betty said, “Maybe I’ll get rich and leave you. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

F
or years after Elena Huhtala dumped herself out of his car, Bill Longmore’s mind turned to her on a regular basis. What had become of her? And was she, in some existential way, still laughing at him? He’d tried to stave off that kind of thinking with much more acceptable anger, told himself she’d taken him for a ride, no doubt about it. What a sucker he’d been; should have had his head examined. But however he framed the discussion with himself in those still-young years, it was her laughing he ended with. He believed she’d ruined his life with her laughing. Every woman he met after her seemed to conceal hidden mirth, no matter how deep within, every one of them like a pump that only had to be primed by him to gush. Even on first dates he watched for the signs of withheld hilarity, and he always thought he saw them: the taut jaws, the twitching lips, the watering eyes, the quick glance away.

He’d always shunned a tendency to be self-conscious. He’d liked knowing that his easiness with people made them happy. But how could he be easy or happy when he was constantly on
guard? When every woman he dated reminded him of his mother in her enigmatic moods?

When he changed, gradually, over the span of a few years, he thought the difference was in the women. He didn’t think he’d altered anything about himself. But the truth was, he’d learned a few things. He’d watched women so closely, he started to think about them as often as he thought about himself. He began to observe emotions that had more to do with them than with him, and to discern quite a few reactions other than enjoyment at his expense. Not long after that, he became interested enough in a serious young woman to try to provoke her to laughter, and she became interested enough in him to laugh with him, and they married and had three children.

On the day Ruth phoned him, he was alone again. His wife had died the year before, and his children, all grown up now, had settled into lives of their own. It had been months since he could recall even smiling.