A Beauty (15 page)

It was the white dust, the same dust that had filled the air outside. Inside the house it sifted down like the powdered chalk that collects at the bottom rim of a blackboard. Viv’s hand went out and dabbed along the lid of the dish Mother had just set down. She didn’t show the results to us; she didn’t have to – we could see the smear she’d left behind. The three of us looked up, but we couldn’t see it falling down on us.

My mother peered at me. “Are you wearing face powder, Ruth?”

Of course I was not. I realized that my lips were dry, and when I licked them they tasted bitter.

Viv put her hand on my arm, in the way you might involuntarily touch royalty if they should stride into your presence. “You’re shining,” she whispered.

“Go and wash your face. And your neck,” my mother said. “And clean those glasses. It’s a wonder you can see a thing.”

“Alkali dust,” my father said when he came home. “It was worse north of town.”

“I was north of town today,” I said, and then regretted speaking. But my mother didn’t say I shouldn’t have wandered away. Sometimes she ignored things she didn’t like.

“It blows in from Old Wives Lake,” my father said, and I imagined witches, withered of face and bent of body, huddled around a steaming cauldron, muttering curses and brewing mischief and misfortune. That’s the picture the words
old wives
stirred in almost everyone, those days. Women who’d been left behind and resented it. They had nothing to do with me.

We had sausages for supper and I knew Viv didn’t like them. I hated it when she had to sit at the table long after the rest of us had left, over a plate of cold food. I put out my hand under the
tablecloth and poked her thigh. She passed me half a sausage. I ate it with my usual finesse when Mother wasn’t looking. Pleased with this bit of benevolence – I was such a good sister – I began to picture my shining self standing in front of Elena Huhtala, and her reaching for my hand.

Although I’d thought of nothing else since I’d left her, I didn’t mention Elena Huhtala to Mother that evening. Dad didn’t say anything about her either. She sat opposite him at the table and likely didn’t know she had a frown on her face the whole time. We were supposed to converse at supper; it was considered rude to bolt your food in silence, so we talked about our day, each of us, and left out the most exciting thing that had happened in Gilroy all year. Hal, who was nine, kept looking from Dad to me. He knew we were deliberately not telling Mother about the fortune teller. He’d grown used to following my lead, especially when Mother had a headache, so I wasn’t surprised he kept quiet. It wasn’t a conspiracy, as I think it may have seemed to her later. I just knew, in a way I wouldn’t have known the year before, how she’d feel hearing about a pretty young woman who’d set the town talking. When I remember she was only thirty herself and could have counted on her own two hands the months she’d gone without washing diapers since she was nineteen, I’m glad I understood at least enough to spare her my enthusiasm. But I was aware of having a secret, of my dad and me having a secret and her being left out – and in some way justifiably left out – because she was the steady one, the stern one, the one who scorned romance.

And romance personified sat on Main Street that evening while the air held its breath, and in the town’s kitchens and backyards the women discussed what to do about her. She sat in the wide
shade thrown by the store, and in front of her, but standing back a bit so as not to crowd her, was a line of eight or ten waiting to hear their fortune. When they were done, more came, some of them from the farms around town. The news of her talent had already spread. And it was one-good-rainfall country. One good rainfall would do wonders, that was the adage. And if she could predict it, maybe they could sleep tonight without visions of wind, drought, hail, and hoppers waking them up. If not, at least they were having fun. Elena Huhtala was as good as a whole town fair. It was a dusty, ragtag line of people that stood in front of her that evening, but they were laughing and joking with one another, guessing one another’s fortune, ensuring everyone knew they didn’t put much stock in anything a palm reader would tell them. When they reached her some of them turned sheepish, worried in case she’d overheard their joshing, or embarrassed (feeling dirty) to think the others might see them taking her seriously after all. Watching them move up one by one, I tried to picture my dad getting his palm read, and couldn’t. He’d have laughed at the idea. I bet he just stood in front of her and chatted her up, charming her as much as she was charming him. It was a question I could never ask either of them, just one of the things I’d never know.

Oh yes, and the sky was still odd, still thickly radiant, the kind of ominous sky, coming near the end of a hot, airless day, that normally would have been the only topic of conversation. But now nobody cared; they’d all decided it was just alkali dust in the air and that when the wind changed they’d have their blue skies again. In fact, they’d completely stopped looking up at all, with Elena Huhtala drawing so much attention. I watched them going to her, saw my best friend Ivy Faulkner in line with most of her family, and my cousins Marion and Ginny Noble with some other teenagers, and among the girls and women there were a few men, they
more than anyone trying to pretend this was just a lark, an evening’s entertainment.

Ivy waited in line behind her mother and her sister, Annie, and her brother, Clifford, who was always called Boy. So by the time Elena got to her, she’d had a chance to understand what Ivy had to put up with. Marybelle Faulkner was not a woman I’d have wanted for a mother, and that’s putting it mildly. The word
slovenly
, when I first encountered it, might have been invented for her. She wore a grimy ring around her fat neck that never got washed away and she never had a stitch of clothing that didn’t strain to cover her and reek of her armpits. The dirty shack they lived in smelled the same. Ivy’s older sister, Annie, was fat, too, and vicious, the family disciplinarian. Boy was the sensitive one; the teasing he endured because of it had turned him into a loner. Just looking at the gang of them, anyone would see the situation was hopeless.

You could buy a can of beans with ten cents. A loaf of bread, a pound of bananas, a container of ketchup. You could buy a pair of cheap stockings, if they were on sale. I had to wonder if the Faulkners were negotiating some kind of family rate. I could imagine what my mother would say if she heard about them all lining up tonight and likely not eating tomorrow.

Ivy came to sit with me after her fortune was told. At twelve she was the smartest student in our school, of any age, but most of the town girls avoided her because of her family. She had a little smirk on her face, of self-amusement. I watched her carry it to me. She was dressed in her brother’s hand-me-downs because that’s what she had, being neat in build and having a mother who never made anything over in her life. Marybelle could have made two dresses for Ivy out of any of her own, but Ivy wouldn’t have wanted to wear them anyway. They went to Annie and likely contributed to her meanness. Ivy managed to make Boy’s wide-leg trousers and
shirts look stylish. She wore a men’s tie with the shirt, an addition that emphasized the new little bumps on her chest and made her look, in every way, anything but boyish. Like the rest of the Faulkners, she was so blond her hair had been white until she was seven or eight and now it was yellow. Her skin and eyes were pale too, and her eyelashes were clear and iridescent.

I asked her what the fortune teller had seen in her hand. She pursed her lips as if to keep the knowledge in. “Come on,” she said, and drew me away down Main Street towards the curling rink.

“Well?” I said when we were so far out of earshot no one in town could have heard her if she’d shouted. Even then she whispered. “I didn’t tell her anything about me, not a thing, and you know what she told me?” She paused here, not for effect, just because what was coming was to her a big thing to say. “She told me she saw white – everything white around me.”

Now, here’s the strange thing; there was white everywhere, around us all. The sky was white, it had been white all day, and in spite of the gold glimmers of the lowering sun, it was still white that evening. But Ivy and I both knew that wasn’t what Elena Huhtala had meant. She had meant a private whiteness.

Ivy grinned, after she told me, and gave me a sympathy push on the arm. She’d seen my face trying to be happy for her. And I was happy for her, seeing her like that, all lit up. But how could it have happened to her and not to me that Elena Huhtala had divined exactly what she wanted? She’d seen Ivy after meeting her family. She’d seen how dirty and coarse they were, and that Ivy was different from them. But this prediction went far beyond the things I’d heard her telling other people that afternoon. What she didn’t know, because I was the only one who knew it, was that Ivy wanted to be a nurse. That’s why the prediction meant so much to her. She took it as a sign it could happen; it was
going
to happen. In truth the likelihood of Ivy Faulkner finishing high school was slim. The dream of nurses’ training was so remote it couldn’t be spoken of after the once she’d confessed it to me. Now here she was, mocking herself a little to cover her embarrassment, but looking more decisive and determined than she’d ever looked before.

Elena couldn’t have known Ivy wanted to be a nurse, but she’d been able to see why she would want that career. It wasn’t just to help people or cure them of their illnesses; it was something more secret than that, something so secret it had almost been forgotten, I think, by Ivy herself. It was to have things clean. She wanted a clean, white room, just like I wanted a cool, dark, quiet room where I could be alone. But Elena hadn’t seen my wish when she’d looked at me. She hadn’t understood my secret desire and made me believe it could ever come true. “I see accidents”; that’s what she said about me. Being flip. As if I was of no consequence at all. As if she’d never looked past my glasses right into my eyes and past my eyes right inside me. She was treating other people seriously. They were still lined up in front of the store, waiting to hear what she would tell them. And she was learning what they really wanted; she was starting to say it out loud.

After she’d told the last fortune, and everyone else had drifted away, Elena Huhtala continued to sit on the bench in front of the store. The store was closed, and Scott had locked up, but she showed no signs of leaving. The women of Gilroy couldn’t allow a young woman to sleep on Main Street overnight. This was not a matter of her safety. The weather was warm and no one would harm her, but it wouldn’t have been decent. There was the hotel; with all those dimes she could have paid for a room, but it wasn’t an appropriate
place for a girl on her own. The women of the town conferred and eventually they consulted Mrs. Knoblauch. Probably Mrs. Knoblauch was the only person in Gilroy who had remained unaware of Elena Huhtala’s presence. She’d picked up her mail and the day’s groceries in the morning, and sat in her backyard at the edge of town, in the shade of her caragana hedge, all the afternoon.

The women of the town liked to ask for Mrs. Knoblauch’s opinions and advice; what she gave them was often unusual but useful. They knew almost nothing about her. She had come to Gilroy alone, in answer to the advertisement in a city newspaper of a house for sale. She’d bought Hugh Barclay’s place, one of fewer than twenty houses in the town and the only one vacant because the town hadn’t started to decline yet back then. They assumed, correctly as it turned out, that Mrs. Knoblauch was a widow. The most they knew of her in the way of biography they’d gleaned when they’d asked her, one morning in the post office, after a particularly philosophical discussion, if she agreed it was true that the difference between a happy woman and an unhappy woman was that the former had married a good man. Mrs. Knoblauch had said she didn’t know how it could be true, when she herself had been happy most of her life.

The women of the town were surprised when Mrs. Knoblauch took the girl in. They were used to Mrs. Knoblauch surprising them, but they felt her offer to share her home was truly out of character. She hadn’t invited any of them into her house for so much as a cup of tea. Although she was quite old, well over seventy, they didn’t think she needed a housekeeper, yet sight unseen, and with no recommendation – because they knew so little to tell her – she welcomed the girl into her house. What they had been able to tell her was hardly enough for even a good churchgoing Christian (which Mrs. Knoblauch was not) to go on, which was one reason
they had hesitated in offering her a place for the night themselves, although one of them would have done so if it had become necessary. The women wanted to fetch Elena and introduce her, but Mrs. Knoblauch said they were to send her along on her own and tell her to wait in the backyard.

That is how it happened that Elena Huhtala stood in a backyard hedged with caraganas, bareheaded in her brown dress, and Mrs. Knoblauch watched her from a kitchen window, her strong old hand gripping the windowsill. The caragana pods were popping. They snapped and flew from the bushes. Elena flinched; one pod had hit her on the cheek. It left a red mark on her cheek.
Crack! Snap!
The pods shot from their branches. She stood still, surrounded on three sides by a hedge that assaulted her. Above her was the unnaturally hazy sky brightened by a setting sun, behind her a house she’d never entered, the house of an old woman she hadn’t met.

Mrs. Knoblauch moved to her door. The screen was loosely tacked and blew a pulse inward every once in a while, although there didn’t seem to be a breeze. A puff of dust rose each time the screen shifted. Elena Huhtala stood in the backyard, waiting for her future to catch up to her. She didn’t realize she was waiting. She thought she was only stopping – here, now, in a strange yard in a strange town. But I was standing by Mrs. Knoblauch’s gate, watching, and I knew better. I was remembering exactly what I’d said when I’d told my father about her. I was remembering saying, “Dad, she’s just like honey,” and how I blushed after I said it, not knowing why.