A Beauty Read online

  She stopped as she was about to turn onto the shortcut to the Knutsons’ place, and pondered going the long way. Grit stung the backs of her calves while she stood there, hesitating, and her skirt belled, cooling her thighs. She’d caught sight of the Huhtala farm, the narrow, unpainted house, the glittering mud of the dugout, and the swing – actually swinging, lifting and twisting, all by itself in the wild wind, and making her feel so many sudden ways at once, she wasn’t firmly sure she was herself.

  She stopped again at the driveway and held her hair back off her face. The windows of the house glared at her. The Huhtalas had curtains, she knew (she’d been invited inside a couple of times), but no one had drawn them decently across, no one had seen the need. But the house wasn’t Aggie’s goal. She trudged down the long drive, at a cross purpose to the wind, to sit on Elena’s swing, to sit where she’d sat and see what she’d seen. She settled herself on the old board and gripped the ropes and grinned out at the world. Dust swirled, the grass in the ditches rippled, the stubble shook, every single stalk of it. The wind wailed in her ears and filled her head as if it would scatter any wits she ever had, but she held on tight to them and peered forward, seeing herself like a figurehead on a ship, heading inspiringly into a storm.

  Something moved at the upper edge of her vision. She turned to look at the house, at the upstairs window. It might have been just the play of the light. She stared and stared, keeping as motionless as she could in case one movement could cancel another. Nothing happened; she didn’t see it again. She stood up and walked around to the door that faced the driveway, stepped up to the wooden stoop and tried the doorknob and it turned.

  No one was in the kitchen and it was neat and bare; it was a kitchen no one had used for a while. Over by the window was the table, where everyone said Mr. Huhtala had left a note for Elena. Aggie stared at it, waiting, straining to block out the wind and hear the inside sounds of the house. She swallowed, cleared her throat. “Elena?” she called. And then she called again, louder.

  There were two chairs at the table. When she sat at the far one in the corner, she could see the whole small kitchen and the entrance to the living room. She had only ever been on the main floor, which was the two rooms. The girls would have called them mean if they’d seen them, to say they were not just poor but dirt poor, and that was exactly why none of them had ever been asked in, except for Aggie, because she didn’t have to tell everything she knew.

  Elena and her father had what they needed and no more. Besides the plain, handmade table and chairs, they had a wood stove, a cupboard, hooks for their coats and to hang up an axe, the dishpan, a towel, and a fly swatter. They had the one coal oil lamp, not lit, likely, until it was too dark to see your own hand in front of your face. The towel and the kitchen curtains were made from flour sacks that hadn’t been dyed or embroidered. Nowhere was there what Aggie would have called a woman’s touch. In the living room she remembered just two chairs and bookshelves, not many books. The stairs to the second floor. And the trap door leading to the cellar. Peter Gustafson’s story came to her, the one about Elena pulling the chesterfield over the trap door and keeping her dad down there – and that was how much he knew. The Huhtalas didn’t even have a chesterfield.

  She couldn’t tell, even listening hard, whether or not the place was inhabited. She looked up at the ceiling and felt none the wiser, but she began to imagine Elena up there in her room, staying as still as possible, waiting for whoever was lurking in her kitchen to leave her house. She wondered if Elena would think of it as her house, now, rather than as her father’s; it would be such a different way to think of it.

  Bang! She jumped to her feet. Almost immediately she decided it was only the wind throwing some loose board or something against the side of the house, but her heart thumped. She gripped the back of the chair, listening twice as hard as before and gauging the distance across the linoleum to the door. Someone was upstairs. She was sure of it. She would go. Doris and Lillian were waiting for her at the Knutsons’.

  She let go of the chair and stood marooned, trying not to be a coward. She had to think about Elena; if it was her upstairs, think about the way she was, the way she’d always kept herself apart from the other girls. And beyond that was the sadness. Aggie had seen it at the dance, that sadness like a shadow living inside her; it had been stronger in her that night, her father being gone. Maybe she’d come back home because she had nowhere else to go, because she was broke and alone and there was no one to help her. Maybe she was like her father, and right now she was lying on her bed in her room, thinking suicidal thoughts that went around and around in her head and would not stop until something put a stop to them.

  Oh Aggie, she told herself in the tone the girls used when she was being stupid; but even so, at the bottom of the stairs, her voice all quavery, she called, “Elena? It’s me. Aggie.” She couldn’t make herself call again. Slowly, she mounted the steps. Every one of them creaked. She waited on the top landing, feeling her heart beating. Nothing, no sound, no sign of life. She was at the window where she’d thought she’d seen movement; there was the swing, below, but she only glanced down, not wanting to turn her back on the two open doors. From the hallway she could peer only partway into the bedrooms; she would have to go in.

  At the doorway of the nearest room she could see the bed, covered with a multicoloured fan quilt, and she felt better, recognizing the familiar, feminine pattern. The Ladies’ Aid had given it to Elena, telling her she’d won it in a raffle, that somebody anonymous had entered her name. They thought saying that would save her pride. They gave her clothes, too, once in a while, over the years. She never wore them except for Thelma Svenson’s old winter coat that Thelma had grown out of. She’d had to wear that, that and the rag pads Maria Gustafson had made her for her monthlies, that everyone knew about because Maria had come upon her one day, crying, not knowing what was happening to her, having no mother to prepare her. “How did she know that’s why she was crying?” Aggie had asked when she heard about it. “Elena didn’t tell her that, did she?” Oh, it was her age, the girls said. That’s what you cry about, at that age.

  The house was empty; Aggie sensed that now. She didn’t have to be afraid. She thought about lying down on the bed, gazing up at the ceiling, as Elena would have done more times than you could count. She didn’t lie down on the bed. She turned to the bookshelf, ran a hand along the dozen or so spines. Among the books written by men everyone had heard of were two by Charlotte Brontë and one by Edith Wharton, so she was right; it had to be Elena’s room. Mr. Huhtala wouldn’t have bothered reading books by women. The other bedroom would be his.

  What if it was him? Him she’d seen at the window and thought she’d heard when she was downstairs. Him, waiting all this time for her to leave. What if he hadn’t killed himself? She didn’t know him; she didn’t know at all what kind of man he was. She hadn’t met him when she was here visiting Elena; he’d stayed outside, working. People said he was distant, unfriendly; they said he’d been desperate, at the end. He must have been desperate, to go off with his rifle like that.

  She stepped into the hall and told herself, the way her mother would have, to be sensible. She stayed there a few moments, weighing the air, and then she crossed the hall to the open door. The second room was unoccupied, as she’d assured herself it would be, but she went all trembly because the bed was unmade. She felt like she was floating, floating in the silence in the room, even though she could hear the wind outside, battling its way past the walls of the house. She tried to calm herself, to think whether or not Elena would have left the bed like that, him being gone those weeks before she took off. The rest of the house was tidy. She didn’t think Elena would have left it unmade. And there – propped in the corner by his washstand – was his rifle, that everyone said he’d taken with him.

  The stairs were steep and every one of them cracked with a sound like a gunshot as she plunged down. She was out the door so fast she couldn’t remember how s
he’d got there or whether she’d shut it behind her, and then she was wading across the wind. Dust surged around her and obscured the road, but she squinted her eyes and kept going. Not until she’d turned out of the driveway and backtracked to the shortcut and felt certain she was out of sight of that upstairs hall window did she slow down and catch her breath, and even then it wasn’t long before she picked up her pace again, her mind racing faster than her feet.

  By the time she reached the Knutsons’ farm, so much excitement filled her chest, it was as if the wind had inflated her. He was alive, he was back – and she was the first to know. But he didn’t have to worry; she hoped he knew that. His secret would be safe with her.

  You couldn’t make Doris Knutson look like Greta Garbo; it might have been a mistake to try. Her hair was dark and bushy, her eyebrows like caterpillars, and a slight moustache shadowed the corners of her mouth. Aggie found the lip hair sexy but said nothing and Lillian went after it first. To her mind it must have been the most offensive. Doris winced a lot and occasionally jerked in her chair, but she didn’t ask Lillian to stop or go easy with the tweezers. Whichever spot Lillian had finished with swelled and flamed turkey-wattle red and Aggie began to worry Doris would be mad when she saw her face in the mirror.

  Aggie was operating on the sidelines; Doris didn’t trust her with this kind of delicate procedure, so she had time to muse on Mr. Huhtala’s return. She was going to call him the prodigal father, after the bible story of the son who came back and was fed the fatted calf. She didn’t suppose he’d been prodigal and there wouldn’t have been any feast on his return, but he was the kind of person who belonged in that kind of story. Maybe it was a different one she was really thinking of, where someone went into the desert for many days and was changed when he returned. She wondered if Mr. Huhtala had come back changed. She wondered what he’d thought when he found his house empty. He must have thought his daughter would be there with open arms to greet him, the father that was dead and then alive again, was lost and then was found.

  “Aggie,” Lillian said for the second time. She had her hand held out and she wasn’t pleased when Aggie didn’t know what she wanted and she had to scrabble for it herself. On the table were their pooled powder, rouge, eyebrow pencil, mascara, and lipstick, most of it supplied by Doris. It was their idea of a beauty makeover. They were guided by a Modern Screen that Lillian had bought ages ago and usually didn’t take out of her house, the April issue with Garbo on the cover, her face slantwise across the page and that multiplication-table look in her eyes. Aggie still suspected Doris of swiping her Photoplay, but she couldn’t accuse her and remain friends.

  Her parents being absent – her father off to town on an errand and her mother out feeding the chickens or weeding the garden or husking old corn for the pigs, because she was shy even of Doris’s friends – Doris was telling the girls about dancing with Henrik Gustafson at Liberty Hall the night Elena took off with the stranger. “Right away,” Doris said, “he tries out the grope.”

  “Really?” Lillian said, with an air of one concentrating on bigger things. She had moved up to an eyebrow.

  “Really?” said Aggie, sounding even to herself like one who has no idea what a grope could be, although she could remember very well the stroking she’d received from Henrik.

  “Oh, yeah. Christ, he had his hand on my bum.” Doris liked to swear when her parents weren’t around, and she was forgetting to whisper.

  Lillian stopped tweezing. “What did you do?”

  “Well, at first I ignored it,” Doris said. “But finally I said, ‘Mr. Gustafson!’ ”

  “It was Elena Huhtala,” Aggie said.

  “What? What are you talking about? This has nothing to do with her.”

  “Oh yes it does,” Aggie said, and she knew she was right. “The Gustafsons were the ones who brought her to the dance. She rode with them all the way in the wagon and I bet you anything she got him all hot and bothered.”

  “Aggie, really,” Lillian said. She applied herself to Doris’s eyebrow once more.

  “You think everything is about Elena Huhtala,” Doris said, darting out from behind Lillian and the tweezers. “Well, it’s not. The rest of us have lives, too, you know. And I could get Mr. Gustafson hot and bothered on my own, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Of course you could,” Lillian said soothingly.

  “I expect anyone could,” Aggie said. “Did you dance with him again?”

  “A few times.”

  “Doris. Did you really?” Lillian asked.

  “Why not? Most of the men around here are limp if you ask me. I met him out behind the hall, too.”

  “What?” Lillian stood back and looked right into Doris’s face, thus getting her first clear picture of her eyes. The left one appeared to have migrated to a lower plane on her face. The brow swelled in a red lump above it, like a fleshy king’s-ransom ruby, with only a wavering line of hair remaining that still wasn’t arched anywhere near high enough.

  It was in that still moment that Olie Knutson barged in, yelling, “I heard enough!” He’d returned from town without them noticing and had been listening for a few minutes in the shed off the kitchen. He strode over to the girls – and he was a round little man with short little peg legs who found striding difficult except in times of high emotion. When he got to them, he raised his fist. Aggie and Lillian fell back. But he didn’t hit his daughter. Wonder hit him first.

  “Why, you look like –”

  Aggie could have told him she looked like a painting by Picasso – her Photoplay issue had offered a full two-page spread on Art and its effect on Hollywood – but Olie Knutson hadn’t ever read Photoplay and he had no comparison ready. In the pause that occurred while he sputtered, Lillian tried to slide the tweezers into her pocket, but ignorant as he might be on art, he was up on girls and their sly movements, and he grabbed them from her hand and flung them across the room. He was aiming at the window. As it was closed, they clattered against the pane and fell to the counter where they lay looking less than lethal but also leggily less than innocent. One sweep of his hand had the makeup on the floor. “Out!” he bawled, and Aggie and Lillian scattered.

  At the roadside, as they parted, Aggie said, “You’ll never see that Modern Screen again.”

  Lillian said she didn’t care. She was still shaking. Her own father didn’t use violence, but she had an imagination.

  “He’d better not pitch my lipstick,” Aggie said. That was as much bravado as she could muster as she set out to walk the hour home. The lipstick was all she’d had to contribute to the pile, all her parents allowed her to buy. She didn’t believe Doris had really gone behind the hall with Henrik Gustafson. That was just showing off. Wasn’t it?

  The incident with Olie Knutson had rubbed the gloss off the secret about Mr. Huhtala. When Aggie came to the shortcut she took it, although she was picturing the empty swing at the farm and could almost feel herself sitting on it.

  Some days even the shortcut seemed a long way to walk. The wind had moderated and the sky had turned sulky and stretched out all over the place. Was the world showing its bigness, its lack of ends and edges, or was it just the opposite – was she too big and pushed and bumped out corners? Whichever, the fit was wrong now.

  She wondered if he’d seen her there, earlier, from the house or from the yard somewhere, seen her sitting on the swing and for a moment thought it was Elena. How his heart would have leapt, to think it was her sitting there.

  Maria Gustafson didn’t drop the jelly bag when she heard the authoritarian knock at her door; it didn’t plummet to the floor and splat open, spraying pink crabapple mush up the cupboards and the legs of the table and chairs. But she was caught, incapacitated, her hands to the wrists rosy red and slick with syrup. She’d just wrung the juice out of the bag, not having the patience to let it drip until it could drip no more. A strand of her hair, impatient, too, fell over her nose and stuck there. That morning she’d made up a batch of setting lot
ion from flax seed and with her head saturated, she’d dragged her comb back and forth, pinching each ridge with a metal clamp. So here she was, in the middle of swinging the jelly bag over to the sink, with a sweating head that looked as if it could electrify the nation, and someone who felt important was banging on her door.

  “Come in,” she yelled. “It’s open, yeah.”

  In walked Olie Knutson and Mrs. Knutson, dragging Doris between them. Doris had been crying. Her eyes were little pink holes in her swollen face. One look at that face and Maria knew why they were here. It had come, at last, as she’d always known it would: a reckoning, judgement and punishment rolled into one. She pursed her lips and turned her back on them. She stood at the sink with her hands dripping onto the jelly bag, and thought how much like a breast or a cow’s udder the bag was, so soft and warm and female – and now vulnerable-looking flattened against the unforgiving porcelain.

  “Sit down,” she sighed, not turning around. No need for politeness when it came to this kind of conversation. Perspiration ran down her neck into her limp collar. Well, it was hot in the kitchen. The sink was next to the wood stove and the roast was already in the oven because men need meat, even on the hottest days. She wasn’t sure where Henrik was. He’d taken Peter and Ingrid to the Svensons, to a birthday party for one of their children. If she was lucky, he was still there and would remain for an hour or two. Best if she handled this herself.

  One of the wave clamps slid down the back of her head and landed on the floor. She looked down to where it lay on the linoleum by her foot. She nudged at the pump with her forearm and forced a trickle of water to rinse her hands. She shoved the coffee pot onto the fire – reheated would be good enough for this little visit – and then she was out of tasks because the cream and sugar were already sitting on the table along with a glass full of spoons. She turned to look at the Knutsons. “Well,” she said. All three of them stared at her hands. A bright, almost shocking stain still extended well over the drape of flesh at her wrists; the nails were rimmed in red and all the wrinkles at her knuckles were outlined, too.