A Beauty Page 10

  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.

  I got to see a look pass between them while Bob Newton was backing off. At first I thought it was a look like a promise, but it wasn’t. It was a recognition look. Neither Elena Huhtala nor my father were people for making promises, which was just as well, I suppose, since neither were people for keeping them. So I saw the look. But as for watching and listening and interpreting further looks, or hearing my father’s future – that was denied me. Without taking his eyes off her, my father said, “Go home, Ruthie, your mother needs you.”

  I knew it would do me no good to wheedle. I inched further down the sidewalk, hoping he’d forget about me. A moment or two passed. Maybe he counted to ten. He once told me that when he got to be ancient and lost all his senses he’d still remember to count to ten if anyone mentioned my name. “Go,” he said, and this time he reached back and picked up my collar. It was too much like being grabbed by the scruff of the neck for me to leave with dignity, but I jerked out of his grip. I was already crying when I started yelling at him for having so many kids and making me look after them. It was so outrageous a thing to say he laughed and shook his head, and for a minute I almost thought he was proud of me. I thought if he was, even Elena Huhtala might be impressed. But he stopped laughing, his face straightened, and he pointed the way home. I had to go.

  I had to imagine what passed between the two of them after I left, and I couldn’t even enjoy that because when I was walking away I heard them both laughing, the way two people laugh together when they think nobody else will get the joke.

  Although he was tolerant of indolence in other areas, my father never liked any laziness in speech. It irritated him when people said “well” when they didn’t know what else to say. Whenever any of us kids said “well,” my father would ask what kind of well we meant. He didn’t interrupt his friends when they used the word, but I could always hear him thinking the question. And his friends said it all the time. They said “Well …” when they slapped their knees or stretched their arms up over their heads to show they’d just realized they’d stayed visiting too long. Or “Well …” with a warning sound after he’d said a thing too impudent or crazy for them to condone, even though they were at the moment laughing at the thought of it.

  I always silently answered his question, whether he’d asked it or not. What kind of well? A wishing well, of course. Wishing is what the word contains. When they said “Well …” my dad’s friends were wishing they could stay longer, or they were wishing they could believe him, wishing they could be carefree like him. They all knew better. He should not have been carefree, with a wife and seven children, but, well, that was the way he was. So I pictured the round stone circle, the ancient rope and wo
oden bucket I’d seen in storybooks, and observed his insouciant self-regard, his certainty that others liked and appreciated him. And I appreciate him, still, when I think about all the things he taught us and tried to teach us. Don’t they show he cared about us?

  It was the bad time of day, when I got home. Four o’clock. People blame it on low blood sugar now. Maybe it’s just that you’re tired; the day has worn thin. To counteract its effects the women of our town changed their clothes after lunch; they peeled off their aprons and old house dresses and put on their second-best, the one or two dresses that used to be for church, and they rolled stockings up their legs and went out to do errands between two and four of an afternoon. They picked up their mail at the post office, stopped in at the store, and, if they had an arm free or an extra kid with them on the way home, detoured to fill the pail they’d left at the town pump. Then they returned to their houses, renewed, and started getting supper ready. With a month-old baby and the rest of us like rungs on a ladder, my mother didn’t get to what they called uptown very often. She didn’t have much time for visiting, either, unless it was to exchange a few words with a neighbour when she was out in the garden. When people use the phrase about working your fingers to the bone, I see her chapped, big-knuckled hands that never were held by a fortune teller. She was a handsome woman, I think. She looked too capable to ever be called pretty. She was, and remained for the rest of her life, a model for the danger inherent, for women, in capability.

  My brother Hal was playing marbles with some other boys in the empty lot by the curling rink when I passed it on the way home, but when I reached our yard none of the other kids was about. The sun was shedding a truly biblical light over Gilroy by then, looking down on us and shuddering. Yes, that’s how it looked if you were fanciful and apt to anthropomorphize forces of nature, imagining the sun, for instance, as an entity that could have compassion for those in its power. But the state of the sky hardly affected me. I’d been banished to the house.

  I smelled scorched cotton and lye soap when I opened the door. I wanted a drink of water and headed for the lean- to behind the kitchen where the crock was kept, but the ironing board blocked my way. The iron still stood upright on it, and the extra sad irons sat on top of the range though they were cool, the fire extinguished long ago. I forgot about my thirst. The dark house drew me in, into the living room where white sheets and pillowcases, freshly pressed, lay across the sofa and tables, drying. Even the wooden high chair, perennially in use, with a yellow rose and a red rose painted on the backboard but nearly scoured off, was draped in tea towels. My father’s spare shirts, the white for Sunday and the blue for work, hung over the backs of the chairs. My mother didn’t believe in omens, but I wonder if she ever thought about their emptiness when she set those shirts on their chairs.

  We were renting the little bungalow; it was too small for all of us, but it had a closed-in porch across the front where the boys slept in the summer. They used the fold-out couch in the living room during the winter. We girls shared one bedroom and the other was for our parents and the baby. That afternoon, as was not uncommon in our house, the door to the porch and the bedroom doors were closed. For a minute as I stood in the hall, I felt I might evaporate, if a person could do that, not disappear exactly but change my constitution, reduce to particles, float away. It was that quiet in the house. But I knew they were there.

  I was an expert at turning our bedroom knob without rattling it. I pushed the door open a crack, fully expecting the heat that hit me. The blinds were pulled but in the south-facing room they only turned the light a murky green, as if the house lay at the bottom of a slough. My sister Vivian was sitting up in bed staring at me with that passive, patient expression she adopted when she wanted my sympathy. Viv was eight that summer, too old for afternoon naps. Marjorie, a year and a half younger, was sleeping beside her, mouth open, cheeks flushed, half-sitting up, and Dorothy, our toddler, lay sprawled across their laps. Sympathy was all I could give Vivian, and she knew it, so I nodded and backed away.

  The floor squeaked when I passed my parents’ room and the baby started up as if I’d jabbed her with a pin. Waaa-waaa. Just screaming, on and on and on, so I went in and plucked her hot little body out of the crib. She cried even harder and stiffened in my arms. Mother lay flat on her back on the bed, over her head a picture of Jesus standing in a dusky light, knocking on an old-fashioned door. It matched the one that hung on the dining room wall showing Jesus sitting in a dusky light, at his table with his disciples.

  My mother didn’t open her eyes. I took the facecloth off her forehead and dipped it into the basin on the washstand. I could have gotten colder water out of the stone crock in the room off the kitchen, but I had the baby wailing over my shoulder so she had to make do, and at least it was cooler than it had been before.

  “Thank you, Ruth,” she said, knowing it was me without opening her eyes, and I said she was welcome.

  When I went out to the hall again, taking Louisa with me, my little brother Neil opened the porch door and waited silently for me to release him, his cheeks all pink and swollen from heat and sleep, his soft brown eyes hopeful. But I shook my head at him and he had to go back and wait. He’d forget, if he wasn’t in his room, and start tearing around outside Mother’s window pretending he was a wild pony or something. He was four years old and couldn’t do a thing without making noise. Neither could Louisa, it appeared. In the few weeks we’d had her, she’d hardly slept. Mother said it was colic that made her draw her scrawny knees up and scream till her face looked about to explode. She told me much later, when she thought the information might be useful, I suppose, that she blamed Lou’s colic on bottle feeding. She’d breastfed the rest of us, but people had started to look down on breastfeeding. It was for the lower classes, those who couldn’t afford formula or milk or didn’t know enough to feel dirty. Feeling dirty was a big deal in those days, in a small town, and we used the expression so often we’d shortened it to F.D. Embarrassment, or the threat of it, kept all of us in line. As for the lower classes, it was possible to be lower than we were and we knew how, in every degree. We might not have had much money, and we had to take relief and whatever else was offered, but our house and all of us were spotless, and our morals and manners were expected to be as immaculate as our faces.

  The name Louisa was my idea. I’d harped on it for months before the baby was born. Mother had said it was too romantic, but then she capitulated; I never knew why. Anyway, she’d already started calling her Lou, this tiny thing. I didn’t mind by that time; she was just one of us: Ruth, Hal (Harold but never called that), Viv, Marj, Neil, Dot, and Lou. I guess it was efficient when you had to call us for supper. My mother’s name was Janet. I never heard it shortened. Dad’s was Davy, as if he was the kid of the bunch. Davy McLaughlin.

  I carried Louisa into the living room. She was still wailing and twisting her body like a fish that wants back in the water. There was nowhere to sit; all the furniture was shrouded in my mother’s ironing. At the southwest window, light streamed in around the edges of the blind. You could imagine Jesus appearing and entering the house right there. I did try to imagine it. Really, I’d been thinking he might come for Louisa; it was hard to love her.

  In the shed I laid her down on the floor and finally I had a long drink from the dipper. She practically had conniptions. I pulled up her nightie and trickled some drips on her chest. She startled and shut right up, and looked at me like a human being. “You’re okay,” I told her. She wasn’t. She started up again.

  I took her outside and sat down with her in the shade of the caragana hedge by the garden. It was too hot holding her. I stuck my legs out in front of me and laid her on them. It was weird to me to think my parents had made her, that she was a one-plus-one of them. She didn’t cry so much as scream. You had to believe she was in torment. And there wasn’t a thing you could do.

  You can try not to think what you’re thinking. It doesn’t work. I was thinking Louisa was the
natural result of my parents’ fighting, that all their anger with one another – or more accurately, all my mother’s anger at my father – was coming out in her little agonized body.

  I grabbed one of her flailing hands and bent over it and examined the palm. The skin was so fine it let the pink flesh glow through as if lit from behind, as if inside Louisa was a clean, clear light, a rosy fire. The lines at her wrist, on her palm and at the knuckles, looked sweet, so new and so expected and unexpected at the same time. Why did she have them already? And so deeply indented. She’d hardly lived. I picked up her other hand. It was the same. Of course it was. But it seemed mysterious, that hands should fold in the same places, that her hands had the same lines as mine, that all our hands should fold almost identically.