Authors: Beth Gutcheon
“Thank you.”
“Are you Miss Burrows?”
Jill stopped. “Yes, I am.”
“I am Solange.”
Solange. Solange? Oh—the palm reader.
“The self-defense teacher thinks perhaps there is something I can do for you,” Solange said in a low voice.
“Really?” Jill stood, uncertain, thinking of nights shut up in the linen closet with a flashlight and a Ouija board at Isabelle’s house.
This stuff was a game, right?
Solange took Jill’s schedule from her hand and skimmed it. “I will meet you in your room at five. Your mother will be at yoga, yes?”
Good grief, maybe she
was
psychic. Jill nodded, whether in agreement to the plan or simply assent to the question she hadn’t decided.
Solange, the slim Algerian, watched the very pretty, very fat American girl walk away.
Jill lay on a treatment table in the bathhouse and experienced the 63
64 / Beth Gutcheon
body scrub. It was a great deal like lying in Wheatena. She thought about whether to meet Solange or not, and couldn’t decide. She could hear her father, the Great Pragmatist, the Great Healer, roaring with laughter at the idea.
At the end of the afternoon, Jill went back to her room after the abs class, an experiment she did not wish to repeat (Crunch! Crunch!
Crunch, ladies
hold
that Crunch!). Solange was waiting. She had drawn the curtains, and was sitting quietly in the half dark.
“I’m a little early.”
Jill nodded, wishing she had picked some of her clothes up from the floor when she’d undressed for her massage. She went to stow her gear in the closet, hoping Solange would think, What a tidy young woman, someone else must have messed up this room. She sat down facing Solange and took a deep breath.
Solange, who had turned on the small reading lamp on the table, sat very quietly looking into Jill’s eyes. She didn’t blink, so Jill tried not to either. The minutes stretched. At last, Solange looked down and picked up the girl’s right hand. She looked at it back and front.
She studied the shape of the fingers, the set of the thumb. She turned it palm up.
“You are right-handed.” Jill nodded. Solange sat looking at the hand for what seemed another long time. She nodded her head once or twice, and turned the palm slightly this way and that, as if to catch the light differently. At last she said, “Here is the attack. You were—twelve?”
“Did someone tell you?”
“You can see it here quite clearly, where the health line is disrupted. It’s a wonder you lived—the break is almost complete. And then this line—very deep. A head injury. But look, the life line is strong for most of its length, and long.”
“How long?”
Solange smiled. “Let’s just say it’s long enough. Longer than mine, for example.” She turned Jill’s hand sideways, examined the curve of the fingers and thumb. She took up the left hand, and turned it palm upward.
Five Fortunes / 65
“Interesting.”
“What?”
“Let me think for a minute.” They sat in silence while Solange looked at the hands side by side.
“All right,” she said at last. “Listen. To say that your attacker made everything happen is to give him too much power. The image of him inside you. You don’t have to do that. You can demand that the images inside you—the ones that do not serve life and truth—go away.”
“Demand of who?” Jill was startled.
Solange’s voice was low and warm, hypnotic. “Whoever you pray to. God, Jesus, the god in you. The tiger.
“But you cannot use prayer, or your power, to achieve effects.
You can only use it to help you see. You can ask it to show you who it is who wants you to be entombed, alone, looking out at a world of love. Creatures who want you to hold yourself prisoner. You can make them show you their faces.”
Jill was staring at her, horrified. The rapist was inside her, and she was giving him life and food and power, and she knew it. She absolutely knew it was true, she had made herself into a house for him.
“What if I can’t…?”
“You can,” said Solange. “God is something. Evil is nothing. Evil is only denial of life, of love. Evil feeds on fear and uses people the way a toy uses batteries. Denial has nothing and so will use everything it can. All you have to do to defeat it is to give the power to life instead of to the creatures that have gotten so fat and strong.”
Jill was staring. She was breathing in slow, deep, long breaths, and listening as if she’d been deaf all her life and was suddenly hearing a bell ring.
“Think of yourself not as a girl alone in a haunted house, but as a much-loved child in a house full of loving people. Aunts and brothers and friends and lovers and angels are in there. Find out who’s in there, ask to see their faces. Find out who belongs to you and ask them for help to make the other ones leave.
“Accept your humanity. Spirit chose form for a reason.”
Jill spoke in a tiny voice. “What if it won’t leave?”
66 / Beth Gutcheon
“Find out who put you in jail, looking out at a meadow. Promise yourself the meadow.”
“But how can you know those good things are inside me?”
“They may not be. There may be things in the universe that belong to you, that are not yet inside you. You can still ask them for strength.
You can still ask them to help you get rid of the things that aren’t life.”
“How? How do I ask?”
“Be careful not to inflate. Be careful not to give power to anything that shouldn’t have power.
“If you’re in trouble, you can ask for a ball of light. For yourself, or for anyone who needs it. It cannot intrude, and it cannot take anything it hasn’t been offered. But it can give to you, or the person you send it to, whatever life and truth is appropriate. It can take denial or fear away and fill the empty places back up with life.”
“Will you give me a ball of light?”
Solange smiled. “Do you need one?”
“Yes. Don’t I?”
Solange let go of her hands, and stood up. “It’s time for you to find answers.”
“But how will I know if I have?”
“You’ll know.”
She got up and let herself out quietly, leaving Jill alone in the yellow circle of lamplight.
Jill sat going over the last fifteen minutes, recording them in her brain. She felt she had every word, word for word. She had an intense mental vision of Solange’s yellow-green eyes. They were deep and refracted, as if they were made out of broken glass. She had the sound of Solange’s voice, low and warm, a compelling murmur. She felt she had never been so fully alert and receptive in her life.
She noticed, suddenly anxious, that Solange had said nothing about being paid.
J
ill told no one about Solange.
She had no intention of telling her mother. Her mother was not a spiritual seeker, but a lover of the world as it was. She was fearless, cheerful, alive to the moment. She was also a person with no secrets, who would consequently tell anything to anybody.
If Jill told her that an Algerian Beauty Person had come to her room and shown her God, Amy would certainly believe her, but she might also share this interesting fact with her gynecologist, or the taxi driver, if the subject should come up.
But Jill would have liked to tell
someone
about the rapist inside her. Not Carter, this would not be her sort of thing. But maybe—Laurie Lopez? To see what she’d say?
Maybe after dinner she could suggest a walk to Laurie, or a trip to the Japanese bath. She’d just ask for a reality check. Did it seem plausible that the power to change and protect and heal might be everywhere, like a virtual computer without monitors and keyboards?
But this evening, Babette their hostess announced that after dessert they would have a karaoke machine.
As the machine was wheeled in one door, Jill saw Laurie go out the other. Most of the other ladies stayed, and Jill did too, because she felt too elated to be alone.
First Terri came in and performed a hip-hop song that all the other ladies had to ask Jill to explain. Then Glenna and Carol got up together and sang “I’ve Got a Loverly Bunch of Coconuts,” with suitable gestures, and then Amy seized the mike and belted a most unin-67
68 / Beth Gutcheon
hibited version of “That’s Amore.” Jill was mortified. When she slipped out of the room, Carter and Rae, arm and arm in their sweat clothes, were singing “Sisters…Sisters…Never were there such de-voted sisters…” Apart from the fact that Carter was eight inches taller and thirty years younger than Rae, they were quite convincing.
Thursday was as promised; Jill woke up feeling like a million bucks.
“How are you this morning? How are you?” the ladies asked each other as they arrived, shiny-faced and sleepy-eyed, in Saguaro for their walk.
“Great.”
“I feel marvelous.”
“I’ve been hammering down that oat bran, and it finally worked,”
Carter announced, and the volume of the laughter suggested that she wasn’t the only one.
Jill and Carter decided to do the five-mile mountain hike. Glenna Leisure set off with them.
“God, look at that view!” Carter said when they reached the first plateau. Indeed, the morning seemed preternaturally exquisite. The air was clear with just a hint of bite, and the colors of the mountains were mauve and purple, while below them spread the gardens, many shades of green, set in a band of desert.
“I’m going to miss this,” she added in a tone of surprise.
“Me too,” Jill said, thinking of God, or the tiger, or whatever made stones and plants and hills and color. Color! Think of making color!
Glenna said, “When I get home I get up at this hour and hike, hike, hike around the freezing-cold streets, with the winos in the doorways and the garbage blowing. Then we go to one late dinner party or supper after a play, and bang, that’s the end of that for another year. I love to sleep.”
“Me too,” said Jill. Sleep! Sleep was magic! Full of dreams…
Apparently very few people were studying Zen koans at breakfast, because at lunch everyone seemed to have read the Jimbo Turnbull story in the paper that morning. Senator Turnbull, in the full dignity of his
Five Fortunes / 69
office, had appeared on the Bob Battle show to talk about a bill that the day before had lost in the House by one vote. Bob Battle said he thought it was courageous for a young freshman member to stand against her own party, right or wrong. Turnbull had replied, “Oh, yes, Battle-san, most courageous,” and continued to discuss Con-gresswoman Hong in what he surely thought was a hilarious Japanese accent. Susan Hong was a third-generation Chinese-American from San Diego.
Racist, witless, out of touch was the consensus. Word began to spread from table to table that Turnbull had retired the AHOY
award.
“Ahoy?” Rusty asked.
“Asshole of the Year,” said Glenna.
Laurie, sitting with Rae, quietly smiled at that. Otherwise she kept her eyes down and took no part in the conversation.
“I was talking to a girlfriend who works at the White House last night,” said Carol. “She said the President would do anything to get Jimbo out of his chair at the Finance Committee.”
“Your friend works at the White House?”
Carol named the friend, and sailed on. “Hunt Knox was a mentor to the President, they were both governors of western states.
Everyone remembers the picture of Hunt’s swearing in, with pretty little Laurie beside him in her Mary Janes on the Capitol steps, her hand on her heart. It was in
Life Magazine
.”
“I loved that picture,” said Glenna to Laurie. “That little dress with the smocking? I had one just like it.”
Laurie pushed her feet into her sandals and stood up. “I have my massage,” she said.
The massage woman met her in her room every day at two o’clock.
She set up her table, draped it in sheets, turned up the heat, and closed the curtains. When Laurie came in, she stripped off her bathing suit and lay down without a word; a crisp sheet, still warm from the laundry, was pulled over her. A cassette was clicked into the bedside tape deck and monks began chanting in Latin. She could smell warm oil, scented with almonds. Strong thumbs went to work on the knots in her neck and shoulders.
70 / Beth Gutcheon
Laurie remembered a time when she never had knots of pain in her neck or shoulders. When they were in Boise, and she was maybe eight, and Senator Turnbull came to dinner. Turnbull was a state senator then. She remembered that he smoked a pipe and had a lot of hair in his ears. She remembered that Mrs. Turnbull—Marnie—had been a thin, rabbity woman who looked as if someone had let all the air out of her tires. She stammered slightly, and during the cocktail hour she fretted because her bracelet kept falling off. Laurie remembered wondering why she didn’t just put the thing in her evening bag instead of fussing with the clasp and talking about it.
The massage woman found a recalcitrant block around one of the shoulder blades. She changed the position of Laurie’s arm. She rubbed in warm oil; she leaned into the muscle with her whole forearm. Laurie remembered that when her mother had told her she had to go to bed, although Bliss and Billy were going to eat dinner with the grown-ups, that Senator Turnbull had boomed, “Now, let her stay, Rachel, isn’t going to do her any harm.” Laurie’s mother had said firmly that rules were rules. But Senator Turnbull had said, as Laurie curtseyed and said good night, “Never mind, little miss.
You get into bed and Uncle Jimbo will read you a story.” And he had. He’d arrived at the bedroom door with a copy of the
Just So
Stories
plucked from the library shelf, and he sat beside her and read about “the Elephant’s Child, Oh best beloved, all down the great gray-green greasy Limpopo River.”
She knew, even then, that he was her father’s enemy. But Idaho was too small a state, in population and politics, for the families not to have constantly met. Jimbo and Hunt carried on a certain raillery that they seemed to enjoy. Laurie’s mother enjoyed it less. When poor Mrs. Turnbull finally dried up and blew away, Mrs. Knox sent Laurie in her place to the funeral with Hunt.
The massage woman was working on Laurie’s thighs. They were painful after the mountain hike and a double-strength step class.