A Beauty (23 page)

She said she needed to buy a handbag. “Perhaps something a bit large.”

“A
bit
large?” Franny said. There was something about Elena Huhtala that made everyone, even other women, flirtatious.

“Oh, yes, that sounds odd, doesn’t it?” she said. Friendly.

Franny took her to the handbags. “Not a big selection, I’m afraid. We don’t sell many. Everyone here has the same handbag they were born with.”

“Ah yes, I know what you mean,” Elena said.

“Here. Five to choose from,” Franny said. “Hmmm. They skip from small to huge, don’t they? And the only one in-between is ugly. Well, I guess they’re all pretty ugly.”

“Pretty ugly?” Elena said.

“Hey, good for you,” Franny said, with a wide grin.

She bought a few more items and Franny tucked them into the handbag for her because they were women’s things, and at the same time whispered something to her that made her laugh. Franny Dobie had fat arms and liked cats, but she had no intention of ending up an old maid, or of ever acting like one.

“You’re a funny girl,” Elena said.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Franny said.

“Of course.”

“We can’t be friends, though,” Franny said. “You’re too beautiful.”

“Oh, go on with you,” Elena Huhtala said, as if she were an ordinary person.

It’s amusing, watching people enjoy themselves. To stand back, watching them. Those first few days that summer, when Elena Huhtala was in her heyday, the people of Gilroy looked different
from the way they’d looked before. The women looked as if they’d pressed their cotton dresses that very morning, and the men looked as if they’d just polished their shoes. You’d have thought a public holiday had been announced for Gilroy and district, you’d have thought they’d gone past individual happiness and were headed for some kind of communal blue ribbon. All up and down that wide street, on the post office steps, at the garage door, down at the corner in the shade of the hotel, people were out chatting with their neighbours. They joked, they laughed out loud, tossing their heads back. In a manner previously unknown on the streets of Gilroy, they flirted with one another.

The sky was still white, those first days, and the alkali dust infiltrated everywhere. Some people found it irritated their eyes and some developed dry coughs, but they stayed happy anyway. Their fortune teller was back on the store bench, looking prettier than ever, and the hail that had threatened us with disaster had struck someplace else.

Ivy and I sat on the butcher shop steps so we could keep an eye on people arriving on Main Street, lining up and handing over their dimes. We were sharp observers, or thought we were, and sat back commenting on the women who arrived wearing lipstick, and the men who turned up freshly shaven. More than once we were asked if we didn’t have something better to do. It pleased us to think we were being obnoxious.

And then the sky cleared, the women wiped down their furniture and swept the ashes-like dust off their floors and out the door, and everyone forgot about the alkaline storm.

One day Anna Quinn came to our house to see how much we knew. Anna Quinn was fair and plump and Scottish. She looked
as if her skin from her hairline down had been scrubbed with Ajax cleanser, and everything she said sounded like indignation. She was sitting in our kitchen complaining about Elena Huhtala. She said, “Why doesn’t she set up shop in Mrs. Knoblauch’s house, and then we wouldn’t have to look at her on Main Street.”

My mother said she didn’t think Mrs. Knoblauch would want people
traipsing
through her house. Traipsing is a word you rarely hear anymore, so I don’t know if it’s usually said with that derogatory slant. My mother often expressed her opinions about other people in that indirect way, allowing herself the pleasure of one critical word.

The days got hotter and windier and drier, but that was all right; it was the weather the farmers wanted. The grain heads were filling out and hope was expanding with them; even the cautious couldn’t help thinking this year there just might be a crop. Hope grew so big in some people’s minds that summer that when a bank of dark clouds came rolling straight for Gilroy, at first almost everyone declared it was only the usual dust, somebody else’s topsoil blowing our way. A minute later we figured on hail, our turn to get flattened. But it was neither, it was hoppers, so many hoppers they blacked out the sun. By the time we knew what they were, they were on us.

You could hear them smack against the outside walls and the windows. We had about a hundred in the house within seconds of their descent. “How are they getting in?” my mother yelled, as if I could give her an answer. They came in through windows we hadn’t had time to close, through the door when the kids who were outside rushed in.

She’d grabbed a broom but she stood paralyzed in the middle of the dining room. “What should I do?” I asked her, peering at her out of the tent I’d made of my hands to protect my face. She didn’t
answer. She stood in the middle of the room and stared at me, and I could only watch while they flew at her. The air was full of them. They hit her. They hit me, too, but it was different, watching them hit her. She didn’t protect herself; she didn’t even flinch. In seconds they were eating the bread on the table, swarming over the spills on the high chair. You could hear them munching. They were eating the tablecloth. Then she started swacking. The broom came down on the table, on the chairs, on the high chair. Half the time she missed. She didn’t care. She worked silently, furiously, her jaws clenched, her hair wet with sweat. Plates cracked and smashed. The loaf of bread bounced up off the table, covered in them, and bounded across the floor. The little kids screamed. They flailed at the hoppers. I picked up a cushion from the couch and started beating the furniture.

I beat those hoppers and stamped on them and nothing I did could kill them. They were just about impossible to finish off. You’d think you’d squashed one, you’d hear it crunch under your shoe – and you’d move your foot and it would jump right at you, those creepy, malevolent eyes glistening. They knew they disgusted us.

Finally, they gave up. If they didn’t die, they crawled about on the floor and on the furniture, crippled and waiting to be dead. The battle was over. I stopped beating and stamping. But my mother didn’t stop. She didn’t slow that frantic broom, not for a second. She raised it again and knocked the high chair over. She raised it again and swept the tablecloth and the remaining dishes on it off the table. Sugar sprayed across the room. The bowl smashed against the wall. The creamer thudded and rolled under the couch. It was the willow pattern set that had been her own mother’s. She swept the thing out from under the couch and brought the broom down on top of it. She darted into the corners and swept the broken china and the sugar up with the corpses, piling them in the middle of the room. We all
stood back now, so quiet that when at last she stopped and leaned on her broom and glared at us, her words rang out. “Of course your father is nowhere to be found.”

They were still hitting the side of the house now and then, with enough force we could hear them. The windowpanes were smeared as if with molasses. We’d never heard her voice her criticism of our dad, not once ever before, although it had for some months been evident. Viv and I exchanged glances. We knew he’d gone to the pool hall to play cards. She saw us. Maybe she thought we knew more than that, way more than we actually knew. She let the broom fall. It crashed to the floor and she turned and went into her room and shut the door.

“What’s wrong?” Viv whispered. The other kids all looked at me.

“Well, what do you think? This mess,” I said. “Come on, let’s get it cleaned up.” I picked up the broom. Hal got the dustpan. As the male representative in the house, his father’s son and heir, he was at a disadvantage. Neil was no help; he was too young and overwhelmed and crouched in the corner, sobbing. Marj held Lou on her lap. Dot was sitting on the floor, where the ruined cloth lay littered with their bodies, taking a hopper apart quite scientifically. I gritted my teeth and started sweeping, then something about the way Hal stooped with the dustpan got to me. I don’t know, maybe he looked like our dad. I started crying. Then we were all wailing, the whole bunch of us. I looked around and there wasn’t one of us who wasn’t making the most godawful fuss until Dot said, “Ruthie? Why are we crying?” So then we all had to laugh.

My father liked to laugh. He had that relaxed kind of laugh, that take-a-minute-to-sit-back-and-enjoy-life kind of laugh, that makes
you feel you’re in the middle of things, in a circle of friends, you’re right where you belong. And he liked to make others laugh. I could find him anywhere in town if I heard people having a good time. He’d be there in the thick of it. We were meant to find pleasure in life, that was my father’s philosophy, and he said our very name proclaimed it.

“Our name has ‘laugh’ in it,” I remember telling Mrs. Knoblauch one day not long after I’d learned to read and had mastered the difficulty of spelling McLaughlin. My father had pointed out the hidden word I could use as a reminder. “But you say it lock,” I added. “Just like your name. Both our names say lock, only yours has the knob too.”

“That’s right,” she said. After that, we were friends. Or she took an interest in me, that would be the better way to put it. But she never invited me into her house.

No one blamed Elena Huhtala for the fact that every crop in the district was eaten to the ground. They didn’t think they had any right to feel disillusioned. It had only been a game, after all, just a way to pass the time, and after the years of drought, disaster was only what they’d expected. But they stopped coming to her to learn any more about their futures. They could see their futures in front of their eyes.

“People are talking,” Ivy said carefully one day. We were lounging on the butcher shop steps. Elena Huhtala was sitting on the store bench, but no one was lining up to get their palm read or even to talk to her.

I said it was because they were ashamed. Feeling dirty. All of them. F.D.ing all over the place. They knew they couldn’t afford to give her their dimes; they should have saved them for
pencils and schoolbooks and shoes for their kids. Ivy looked embarrassed and I rushed on. I wasn’t saying anything that couldn’t be corroborated. Half the population of Gilroy was on relief. They got their groceries with coupons and they put everything else – from kerosene to tobacco – on their tabs with Scott Dobie. I said you had to wonder how he’d felt, watching them line up – and not just once but for a second and third time – and hand her their money.

All the time I was talking, trying to express my utter disdain for every one of those people who’d wasted their time and their money on a palm reader, in the back of my mind was the image of my father coming up to her the first day she appeared on the bench in front of the store. I was seeing them as if they would always be there, like a photograph in an album exists whether you ever open it or not; I was seeing the way the two of them had looked at each other, as if in some other life they’d met before.

Mrs. Beggs went over to Mrs. Knoblauch at the post office and asked her right out in her most garden-party voice what was going on with Elena Huhtala. Mrs. Knoblauch looked taken aback and answered that nothing was going on.

“We’re worried about her,” Mrs. Beggs said. She meant the whole town was worried. She squared her shoulders to carry the weight of the town and to indicate beyond a doubt that her question arose from an impersonal and charitable concern for Elena Huhtala’s welfare.

Old Mrs. Knoblauch had two letters in her hand and she examined the handwriting on them until Mrs. Beggs thought she was being rude. She described the conversation to several others later, putting a British emphasis on the word
rude
.

And one day when Dobies’ store was empty, Leonard asked Franny what she thought was wrong. He’d come into town, although Scott hadn’t asked for him, and he was mostly in Franny’s way. She knew he was there because of Elena. He’d tried to talk to the girl; he’d taken her a Coke and she’d thanked him and then looked at it in her hand as if she wasn’t sure what to do with it. She’d acted so distant, he’d given up.

“You know, Franny,” Leonard said, “that kid looks so down, you’d think she’d discovered some terrible secret about the whole human race.”

“Oh, Leonard,” Franny said. “Don’t you know what’s going on? Can’t you see?”

I didn’t see her looking depressed. That was Leonard’s memory of her last days in Gilroy. I remember something my mother said one morning as I went out the door. She’d overheard me telling Viv about a few minutes I’d managed to spend with Elena. This was earlier, when I still had hope she would come to understand the kind of person I was and befriend me. “I don’t want you hanging around that girl,” Mother said. “She’s pandering to people’s weaknesses.”

My mother didn’t usually give reasons for her decrees; it was a testament to the strength of her disapproval that she couldn’t stop herself from speaking it out loud. Pandering to people’s weaknesses. Did she think I was weak?

A few days later, on my way out of town, taking the back way to avoid meeting people, I saw my father and Elena Huhtala talking beside the lumber office. That office had been closed for a couple of years, and nobody lived nearby, so there was no reason for them to be there. I turned aside before they caught sight of me, and cut across the empty lot behind the Egans’ house.

My mother’s language came back to me with that glimpse of them. It described them as they stood there, laughing. The word
pandering
was Elena Huhtala, up against the lumber office wall, with the heels of her pumps planted in the sod and her calves caressed by the long grass. And weakness was my father, in front of her.

I overheard a conversation, one day, between Marj and Viv. Marj said, “Why is Mum so mad all the time?” and Viv said, “Because Dad’s so stupid.”