A Beauty Read online

  “I don’t think anything,” she said. And it was almost true. She’d come home tired after a long, restless walk to nowhere, and found both yard and house deserted. And the note on the table, nothing else. She hadn’t done any real thinking or feeling (which was what they really meant) since. If she thought about him, she stopped herself before she got all the way to “How could you do this to me?” She didn’t know that most people feel numb when they’ve had a shock, or that most find anger easier than grief, if they can see a choice.

  You must make some plans, Mrs. Gustafson had said.

  In all the time since he’d left, all the days she’d sat out in the yard on the swing, not moving, at first waiting and then not waiting any more, she hadn’t considered what to do next.

  Nils was looking at her from across the hall. She supposed he’d earned the right.

  You can’t go on like this, was what Mrs. Gustafson said.

  The stranger hadn’t asked Doris to dance with him yet, and she was trying to pretend she didn’t care. She was trying to pretend he wasn’t a person you wanted to smile on you, or a person you watched after he’d turned away from you. And now here was Nils, making a beeline for Elena through the crowd, his face stern above the other heads. “Look out,” Doris said, without thinking. He was stiff when he reached Elena, too. He didn’t speak, just stuck his arm out to indicate his need to take her out on the floor in front of everyone. She looked up at him and smiled the thin, shadowy smile that Doris thought she must have rehearsed in her mirror.

  Doris caught Aggie Lindquist watching her. You never knew what Aggie was thinking; she acted so dumb at times you could see why some people said she was half-witted. She made Doris wonder what kind of expression she’d had on her face that Aggie had picked up on. And then Aggie started laughing. Doris glared at her, but Aggie just threw back her head and growled, “I’m loving nobody,” and Doris had to laugh with her. It was a line from Anna Christie that the girls had been repeating ever since they’d seen the movie. They could all picture the haughty, defiant, pathetic expression on Garbo’s face when she said it, her eyebrows all peaky. “I’m loving nobody.” How silly it had sounded even when she said it. And they made it sound more ridiculous when they mocked it, rumbling it, roaring it, rolling their heads like the mgm lion. It made them laugh and laugh. Gales of laughter doubled them over. They almost wet their pants. They only had to pull that face, any one of them, and another would shout it out. “I’m loving nobody.” Hah! Tell that to the marines, sister.

  She did Nils’s little boxes with him, she made her body calm in his arms, but it wasn’t long before she was searching through the crowd for the stranger, and when she found him he was already looking right at her.

  “Elena,” Nils said.

  “Oh. Yes?”

  Mr. and Mrs. Gustafson pounded by with Mr. Gustafson’s beard between them. Mrs. Gustafson reached out and gave Elena’s arm a damp, approving pat.

  “Where were you?” Nils asked.

  “Here,” she said.

  “I don’t think so. You looked like you were across the room.”

  She squeezed his hand. “No, no.”

  He said her name again when the music ended, with the same tone of impatience and frustration. He was, although half-unconsciously, a proprietary young man. He believed he had it in him to command others if only they would listen. But the orchestra, hardly taking a breath, started up, and Elena was already swaying. The lady at the piano was already bawling out “Shine On, Harvest Moon.” About a guy and his gal. Okay, Nils thought. If it was going to be that kind of night – and all the songs were going to be prophetic – victory would go to the decisive one. He already had his hand on her arm. He opened his mouth to take charge, and then – as if nothing in the world had meaning – the stranger cut in, cut in and took her, just like that, out from under him, swept her away and danced her off to the middle of the room. And Elena didn’t look back.

  “You haven’t asked my name,” he said.

  She said, “Nor have you asked mine.”

  He took her coolness for the light form of mockery he recognized as a prelude to flirtation. He dipped her and twirled her. He pulled her in close and murmured in her ear, “Can I take you home tonight?” He expected something arch in return, as arch as her previous response had seemed to him. But she stopped dancing and turned, wordless, towards the open door. She actually left him behind and he had to quicken his step to catch up to her. He hadn’t meant they should leave at that very moment. The night was still early. But what the hell. Country girls, he thought; their naïveté was refreshing.

  In a corner at the back of the hall, lolling with some other kids on a heap of sweaters and light coats – because an August evening can get chilly – Ingrid Gustafson sighed. At that masculine arm at that slender waist. At those wide, manly shoulders and beside them that wavy, honey-coloured hair. And at the sky past the door, that glassy, cobalt blue. One of the girls said, “I want hair just like that when I grow up.” Ingrid ignored her. She bent her head and held her hands up close to her face with the thumbnails facing towards her. She whispered the things they would say to one another. Slowly she turned both thumbs so they faced each other, touching all the way down. Peter went looking for some boys he could tell his story to.

  The band went on playing, but no one was dancing. The men were leaving, following Nils. The married women flocked to Maria Gustafson and told her they’d always considered Elena Huhtala a modest girl, becomingly willing to hide her physical attributes. The girls who’d gathered around her earlier followed Lillian to the open door to see Nils stalk across the yard and down the road towards the fancy gold convertible. Lillian said she pitied the guy when Nils caught up to them, but nothing came of it. The stranger opened the door and Elena sat herself inside and they drove away before Nils reached them. Everyone stood watching their dust boil up and trail behind them. It was that clear navy-blue time of evening you’d like to bottle up and keep, it’s so beautiful, and the dust looked white against it – like a wedding veil, Aggie thought, but she didn’t mention it to anyone.

  At least the girls still had Lillian to gather around. They still had Nils’s broken heart to discuss, and after a while they dredged up a few practical suggestions for how it could be mended. Doris Knutson volunteered to take Elena’s place that very night, but Lillian thought it could wait. They tutted over Elena a bit, too, but not much more than they usually did. Hadn’t they always figured she was headed for disaster?

  Lillian had once said that if only Elena Huhtala could be seen in black and white, her face sculpted by shadows as Garbo’s was on the screen, they would all have to hold their breath in her presence. Until that Saturday night, Lillian had always said kind things about Elena. She was plain, herself, with a nose she considered to belong on a bigger person, and therefore she was in no danger of disgracing herself the way Elena had begun to do, and when she’d talked about the likeness, she’d meant the Garbo they liked best, not so much the one who’d shown that rangy body and rough side in Anna Christie, although they all knew even beautiful women could have their off days, times when they got tired of their beauty and sneered at it and looked as if they’d toss it in a trash can if they could.

  Aggie didn’t know exactly what Elena Huhtala was up to, but she knew she had it in her to do something the rest of them wouldn’t. Doris Knutson said, “I can’t imagine what she’ll do next.” But she could. They all could when they thought about it. They fell silent and imagined her grainy, flickery, all sleepy-eyed and music-laden, like someone who had forgotten who she was or didn’t care, a girl slipping like a length of live silk from the arms of one man to another, looking sadder and sadder as she went on. None of the girls said a thing about it. None of them admitted they yearned to be her, physically yearned, the blood thrumming through their bodies at the very thought.

  In the Lincoln, he reached his arm out and she slid over the leather seat to nestle close to him. “Bill Longmore,” h
e said, glancing down at her. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Elena Huhtala,” she said. El-ena Hooh-ta-la was the way she pronounced it, with the accent on the first syllables and making a lot more of the h’s than he would ever be able to do.

  The stars weren’t out yet although the sky was clear. The air was as warm as bathwater flowing over their skin. She never said she was hungry and he didn’t have food on his mind. He stayed outside while she went into the house. That was her idea; she said she wouldn’t be long and she wasn’t. She came out with one small bag, an old black leather thing, the size and style of a doctor’s bag, and threw it in the back. He gave her a last look at what she was leaving behind, sweeping the big headlights in a full circle so the homestead flashed by, the puny windbreak poplars, the unpainted farmhouse, the weed-riddled, drought-starved garden, the empty barn, the granaries that held no grain, and the dugout that had dried to crackled, khaki-coloured mud.

  When they got to the road, he stopped the car and turned to her. “So, Elena Huhtala,” he said, exaggerating her pronunciation, “Where do you want to go?”

  She didn’t comment, just gave him a look that seemed to say he wasn’t as tall as she’d first thought. “Anywhere,” was what she said.

  Nils Larson got drunk for the first time in his life that night, but he was such a nice young man drink didn’t affect him much. He only made some rash statements about following Elena and bringing her back where she belonged, and then forgot why he was alive and stared stupidly at nothing for a while and then passed out.

  Peter Gustafson told the boys more details about Mr. Huhtala’s final days in the cellar of his own home with his daughter walking around above him while he yelled and swore and banged on the trap door. Quite a few people older than Peter, but no wiser, cobbled inventive stories together from the few discernible facts they could garner, and went around saying they’d heard she’d as good as confessed on the way to the dance. Their speculations were so enjoyable, they didn’t ask Henrik or Maria Gustafson to verify them. They were just entertaining themselves, saying you could believe anything of her after the brazen way she’d waltzed out the door with that fellow’s arm around her.

  Aggie Lindquist decided that whatever Mr. Huhtala had done with himself, Elena was better off without him. On her own, now, she didn’t have to care what she did. A father’s what ties you down, Aggie thought. Without one, you’d be free. And then she had to stop thinking because Henrik Gustafson asked her to dance, feeling sorry for her, she figured – she’d known him since she was five – but as it turned out that wasn’t the reason.

  “Little Agatha,” he said in a hot gust into her ear while they stomped out some tune or other. None of the music was memorable now, and everything irritated her, even though you could say she’d got her wish, what with Elena Huhtala going off with the stranger and thereby escaping the expected.

  “I hate my name,” she said.

  “Oh you must not,” Mr. Gustafson said. His yellow beard puffed up against her chin and that was irritating, too, all dry and scratchy. “It’s a good name,” he said. “Why, don’t you know it’s the name of a famous author?”

  “Is it?” she said. Mr. Gustafson was known for being a reader of the kinds of books others didn’t have time for. Some people mocked him – behind his back, of course – for growing a beard to look like Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman was a famous author; they’d had his poems in their school readers. Aggie had never memorized any of his; some of them seemed just nonsense. She had heard of this Agatha. People told her about her every chance they got, as if the idea of them having the same name would impress her and she’d give up living and take up writing books instead. She’d learned it was more flattering to a man if he thought he was original, though, so she didn’t let on he wasn’t the first to mention it. “There’s no movie stars with the name,” she said. And for good reason, she was thinking, because it has a throat-clearing kind of sound. Agatha.

  “I have several of her books,” he said, hot in her ear.

  “You don’t say?”

  He squeezed her waist and let his hand drift down to graze her bum. A thrill went through her and she thought: You old goat, what are you up to? He’d always looked to her as if he’d been caught in the act of teaching Sunday School and had just said something nice about Jesus to the children. But she kept the polite look on her face, and in the meantime they were stomping away at the dance floor as much as he ever did with his wife.

  “Say, how be I bring you one sometime and you can have a read of it, yeah?” He panted into her ear. “They’re detective stories, you know. Light reading.” He ran his hand down her spine, all the way to the bottom, though he didn’t linger there. Right away he put it back where it belonged, and Aggie had to wish she had the guts to ask him to do it again. But the dance was over. He gave her a push on the waist as they trotted off that she figured was meant to be a reminder, in case she had liked the stroking and wished for more.

  “I’d like to read one of those books,” she said with a bold look into his eyes before they parted. It felt as if she was practising. An old fellow like him – as old as her father – he’d be safe to practise on. Safe but exciting, too, in a way that was too dirty to think about. She leaned against the wall again and bent to pick up her Photoplay. It should have been on the floor among the shoes that had been kicked off, but it was nowhere to be seen. She scanned the hall for a sight of Doris – she was sure Doris stole things – and saw Henrik (she thought she’d call him that, now) over by the door. She tried to catch his eye, but he didn’t look her way again, and then he was asking Doris to dance. She remembered the odd expression she’d caught on Doris’s face earlier. That was a guilty look if she’d ever seen one. Doris had probably hidden the magazine away somewhere safe where she could retrieve it later. She’d never admit it, though. That Photoplay was gone for good.

  The whole time Doris danced with Henrik, Aggie leaned against the wall, watching. After a while she recalled what he’d said about Elena Huhtala at the last church social. If she told the girls they’d laugh and laugh. But she wasn’t going to tell them. “A face to launch ships,” he’d said. And him a thousand miles from any ocean.

  Ten minutes out of Trevna the children fell asleep on the wagon floor, and before long Maria’s head was nodding. Henrik half-dozed, too, until Bess and Basket picked up their pace, knowing they were nearing home, and then he sat up, blinking, in time to see the black shapes of the Huhtala farm pass by, the swing barely visible, hanging lifeless. No sign of the Lincoln roadster. He figured she’d sent the fellow packing and was sleeping as they passed, safe in her bed. But perhaps no longer a virgin.

  They creaked and clopped along. The night was beautiful with stars and cool air and grassy smells. No one whistled. A breeze rippled over them and behind them the swing moved. He was sure it moved. The ropes groaned against the wood. Ahead, the road shimmered in the weak starlight. The fields Henrik owned went on and on until they melted into the darkness. He groped under Maria’s dress for her knee, for the feel of naked flesh in his hand. When he found it, however, some reproof from the vast yielding softness of her inner thigh travelled through his fingers, and he was shocked by a gust of remorse, and worse than remorse, dread.

  Aggie Lindquist dreamed the writer woman came to supper at their house, Agatha What’s-her-name. She looked like a writer, with glasses worn low on her nose, and she sat down opposite Aggie at the table, but right away Aggie thought there was something funny about her. She couldn’t settle properly on her chair; she kept on slipping and sliding to one side or the other. Aggie didn’t like to draw attention to it by asking what was wrong, so she stood up and peered over the table, and then she saw what it was. The woman was a mermaid. Her whole bottom half was a fish’s tail and couldn’t stop squirming.

  ADDISON

  Merv Badger, proprietor of the Addison Hotel of Addison, Saskatchewan, was petting the cat. Under the terms of his marriage contract (some thirty years ol
d this summer), he was allowed to pet the cat, but the contract was unwritten, unspoken, and changed more often than the weather – way more often than the recent weather, which had been nothing but hot and dry. Merv cringed when Pansy entered the bedroom, in case it was a stupid thing to be doing this late in the evening before bed, sitting in his underwear indulging an animal that responded to him with indifference unless he was actively giving it pleasure. The cat took the moment of Pansy’s arrival to begin purring like a lawn mower, sending vibrations down Merv’s knees all the way to his bony bare feet. Involuntarily, he shivered and his toes splayed against the floor boards. Pansy ignored him and the cat. She sat down on her side of the bed, facing him as if facing the wall, and unbuttoned her blouse.

  Pansy Badger was built to be a laundress; she’d said that to Merv the first time he’d watched her undress. It was her idea of a joke, but it was true. Her ribs were what you noticed. “You could use me for a scrub board,” she said. Her tiny breasts the size of walnuts. She tossed her blouse to the rocking chair beside Merv and raised her arms to let down her hair. She’d cut it the year before, but every night she raised her arms the same, right after throwing her blouse on the chair. Merv glanced up through his eyelashes to her armpits.

  She stretched her back. “Christ, I’m tired,” she said.

  “You’re tired,” he said.

  “Oh, you,” she said and yawned big enough to swallow him and the cat.

  He’d never told her the sight of her underarms, with their own version of her fine, straight hair, aroused him. He could feel the old worm stir, although they rarely had sex anymore, it was too much work.

  Pansy rummaged under her pillow for her nightgown. “This place’ll be the death of me,” she said.

  “We should’ve bought fire insurance.”