A Beauty Page 9

  The storekeeper in Gilroy was a tall man who stooped as much as he could to make up for having to look down on others. His name was Scott Dobie. He had a wife and two daughters, one of whom worked in the store, and a son named Leonard who farmed just out of town and helped him with any heavy jobs. Leonard happened to be stacking egg crates in the storeroom the day of Elena Huhtala’s arrival, and when he heard the screen door squawk and then slam shut – a sound that was hardly unusual – he put his thumb through a shell. Usually a towel hung by his father’s butchering apron, but his father had walked off with it less than a minute before, so Leonard came out, into the store, at the moment she walked in, blinking the way everyone did in the sudden dimness.

  The Dobies’ store was much like other stores of its kind. It had an oiled wood floor, and the penetrating smell of that oil mingled with the smell of the round of cheddar on the counter and the smell of brown paper and string. For a place designed to sell merchandise, it was subdued, and nothing about Elena Huhtala looked subdued. Her brown dress might have appeared modest on the hanger, but it didn’t look modest now. Her hair might have been combed that morning, but it was messy in a most alluring manner now. No matter what she wore, or how she presented herself, Elena Huhtala was made to stand out in that store, and Leonard’s eyes went right to her.

  As soon as she saw him, she blushed. Her hand went up to her cheek and she lay the hot flesh against the cooler backs of her fingers. As if she’d read his mind. Because just looking at him, anyone could tell he was a serious person. He was a person whose regard you would want, whose esteem you would crave before you even thought about it. As for Leonard, he waited for some guy to follow her in, some city guy who was kicking his tires outside, or getting refuelled, or just sitting back in his car being glad he didn’t live in this town, while she came in for whatever it was she needed. But he was wrong. When she reached the counter she asked if they might need a clerk.

  Scott thought she looked about fifteen and he felt sorry for her. He had nothing for her, and there were no other businesses in the town that employed women except the café that was run by the Chows and the hotel that was run by the Ridges. Neither needed staff. He told her he didn’t think she’d find work in Gilroy. She didn’t say a word, just bowed her head.

  Later, much later, Leonard admitted he would have crossed the store and knelt at her feet at that moment, if he could have acted according to his desire. He would have stroked the film of dust from her shoes. He would have laid his head against the modest brown dress and asked for her hand in marriage. He was the district’s most eligible bachelor, the best pitcher in southern Saskatchewan, and one of the nicest guys you’d ever meet, and he would have knelt on the oiled boards in front of his father and declared his love and given all his worldly possessions to touch those shoes, that dress. In fact, he did nothing. Self-preservation kept him standing back, immobile, while she walked to the door.

  Scott opened the flap that blocked off the counter from the rest of the store, and went to the window to look out. Leonard took up the towel and wiped off his thumb. He had to rub at the nail to get the clinging egg yolk off. He thought about going back to the storeroom and getting back to work, but he set the towel down where he’d found it, and went to join his father at the window. They stood there together with their arms crossed, the way they often did, waiting for something unusual to happen on Main Street. Now that something unusual had happened, they didn’t know what they were waiting for.

  Elena sat on the bench outside the store and wondered what she could possibly do next. The two men who’d been watching her from the garage across the street were still standing there. They didn’t have much else to do, hardly anyone bought gas anymore. Most people who still owned a car had put it up on blocks. So they held up the walls except when one or the other of them went inside and brought out a mug of coffee or a dripping cup of water. Elena was thinking she’d have to go over and ask for some when one of the men, Walter Dunn, it was, started across the street with a cup in his hand, one of those shallow old speckled enamel cups that makes coffee cool quickly and water taste colder than it does in anything else. It was a wide, unevenly graded street that Walter Dunn had to cross, and it was quite a feat for him to get to her without spilling the water. He concentrated on doing it, partly because it wasn’t easy and partly to keep from looking too anxious to make Elena Huhtala’s acquaintance.

  If you were making a huge meringue and had gone overboard and beaten the egg whites dry, and then walked into the bowl – that would have been like the air that day, all glossy-dusty around us. Up above, the sun pulsed and pointed its long fingers down. It appeared to be trying to reach us and not with the intention of doing good. I wasn’t the only one to notice that sun and find it scary. I passed Sammy Appleby’s shack and the old bugger, as we always called him, was lying on his back on the sofa he’d dragged out into his front yard, staring up, and down the lane Aunt Lizzy Ridge was on her knees in her garden, looking up. Once you saw that sun trying to eat its way towards you, it was hard to stop looking at it. You couldn’t see that sun without thinking something was going to happen.

  Then I spied the stilts. I knew who they belonged to, Dutch Egan, and he’d dropped them in front of Jack Newton’s house while he went in to see Harold. He wouldn’t care if I used them. I’d have them back before he missed them, anyway. I grabbed the wooden poles in both hands and stepped up onto the blocks, first one foot, then the other, and then I teetered off wildly down the road. Well, who wouldn’t? I’d had no opportunity to learn how to use them, and it was like having someone else’s long legs grown under mine. And no feet to balance, either. I started at great speed and went faster as I went further. The little houses rocketed past, looking smaller than ever because I was taller. I fell off when I reached the corner.

  I was doing better by the time I turned onto Main Street. I had the stilts almost under control and wasn’t travelling quite so fast. I saw Walter Dunn a ways in front of me walking like an old man with a cup in his two hands, but then the sun broke all the way through the cloud cover and flared right into my eyes.

  Walter saw me, too, coming straight for him, but he just naturally assumed I’d stop for him. And I would have stopped or at least swerved aside if the sun hadn’t struck me in the face. There wasn’t a kid in Gilroy who hadn’t been taught to make way for an adult. And Walter was a man on a mission. He was also just about as solid as thirty years could make him, and I was an eleven-year-old girl. I flew off the stilts in one direction and my glasses flew in the other. The first thing I thought of was my glasses. If I knew anything for certain, it was that those glasses of mine were expensive. Not as expensive as the operation the doctor wanted me to have on my bad eye, but way more than my parents could afford to replace.

  Walter made a big fuss. After all, he’d spilled the entire cup of water. If I’d been a boy, he’d have sworn at me. Since I wasn’t, he bit his tongue, picked up my glasses, and helped me to my feet. My glasses were okay. They weren’t even scratched. Walter didn’t care. He started dusting me off, a bit roughly it seemed to me. I thought I might mention it to my mother; my mother wouldn’t put up with anyone bothering her girls. But I forgot. I stopped thinking about Walter Dunn and my glasses and the stinging parts of me that had hit the gravel when I fell. Even the idea of my own importance, which was fairly constantly on my mind, fled right out of it, because just then I saw Elena Huhtala sitting on the bench in front of the store.

  Shining. Oh yes, shining. Light curled in the waves of her hair; her bare limbs gleamed. I could hear Walter Dunn hustling back to the garage, behind me, for more water, and I could hear Bob Newton laughing at him. She didn’t so much as smile. She acted as if none of it had anything to do with her, as if she was only sitting there as the first step to getting someplace else. But I’d grown up expecting maternal solicitude from anyone who’d graduated to womanhood, and I went to her, holding out the hand I’d scraped when I fell, nursing the wound and tr
ying to squeeze out a tear or two.

  “Yes?” she said. She glanced from my hand to my face. Her eyes were the lightest hazel, with golden flecks that made them almost the same colour as her hair.

  Walter came out of the garage then. I knew I didn’t have much time. I shoved my hand at her. She took it lightly in both of her hands. She turned it this way and that and pulled the fingers back so the drops of blood swelled at the base of my palm and the stone chips embedded in the flesh stood up.

  “I see accidents,” she said. And she rose to receive Walter and his cup. I plunked myself down on the sidewalk at her feet, looking up in time to see her pass the cup back to him and wipe her mouth with the back of her wrist.

  “You looked thirsty,” Walter said. He looked gormless. That was an expression of my dad’s, meaning dumb, and Walter surely fit the bill. Utterly besotted, and forgetful of the fact that he was overweight and still unmarried at thirty. Well, maybe not forgetful of that.

  “Thank you,” she said, like she might have been the Queen, or Wallis Simpson, even better. “I was thirsty.” She had a charming way of talking, breaking up the words almost like she was singing.

  “Well,” Walter said. He looked down at the cup and turned it round and round. Suddenly he thrust out his hand. “Walter Dunn,” he said.

  “Elena Huhtala,” she said. I remember it as if it were yesterday, exactly how she said it, the most exotic name I’d ever heard. She shook Walter’s hand and he took it back and turned the cup around a few more times.

  “I wonder,” she said, and she said it earnestly, emphatically; she said it as if she really did wonder something about him. By this time he’d completely forgotten my existence and Bob Newton’s, too, and he did what I suppose any young man would do faced with a young woman like Elena Huhtala, who seemed for no earthly reason to care about him. He swayed towards her, and his eyes went soft. He looked like Grandpa Hood’s old Shep when you’d stepped on his paw and he had a right to expect you to pat him.

  “I wonder,” she repeated, “if you would like your palm read.”

  Walter cleared his throat. “You read palms?” he croaked.

  She nodded. “Ten cents,” she said.

  “Ten cents.” He fished in his pocket and jingled a few coins. That was a habit with Walter; the sound of his money usually kept him from spending it. “I guess you must be pretty good,” he said.

  “Well,” she said. “You must be the judge of that.”

  He pulled out his change and poked through it and picked out a dime. A dime was quite a bit for a few minutes’ entertainment, in those days. You could get into a movie for thirty-five cents, fifteen cents if you were a kid; a country dance would cost a quarter and last till after midnight. He looked at it for a few seconds before he handed it to her.

  She didn’t have a purse with her, and her dress had no pockets. She smiled at him suddenly. It was the first smile anyone in Gilroy had seen, and it was gone before you could blink. She bent down and slipped the dime into her left shoe, on the inside, at the arched instep of her foot. When she straightened she looked, just for a second, into my eyes, right into my eyes. She looked at me as if we shared a secret and as if I would know what the secret was.

  That was how it began, the fortune-telling, I mean. I gave her the idea and she ran with it. She read the palms of half the people in town, her first day in Gilroy. The other half didn’t go to her because they were afraid, not so much to know their futures as to have their hands held in hers. They said it was a cheap thing to do, anyway, setting yourself up like a gypsy, and what could a chit of a girl who’d landed in town alone, without a cent to her name, know about them?

  It’s true she started out a little rocky, with Walter being the first one. I guess she wanted to impress him with an official kind of palm-reading instead of following her intuition, and it got her into trouble, the way trying to impress people often does. Besides foretelling a general upsurge in the economy, she predicted a boom for garage owners who’d been smart enough to stick with the business. Then she found out she had the wrong man, that the other fellow lounging across the street owned the garage. Walter was the Rural Municipality administrator and just passed time helping Bob Newton keep an eye on Main Street. But she was a quick learner. She switched to talking about men who were wise enough to get an education, men who earned the respect of others by holding important, responsible public positions.

  Mrs. Beggs came up to the bench while Walter was getting his palm read, and pretended she wanted to talk to him. Mrs. Beggs had a fluty British accent that made her one of the town’s premiere ladies. It made her an organizer of teas and wedding showers and excused her from doing any of the actual work. The sun had come out in earnest by then and a lacy pattern of light and shade, thrown down by her straw garden hat, covered Mrs. Beggs’s face and chest like a veil. She handed over a dime, too, which was not at all like her usual self.

  Everyone who came to the store that afternoon either stopped to get their palm read or walked by, gawking, on their way in to pick up their groceries. Scott and Leonard watched at the window, arms folded identically, whenever the place was empty.

  Like father, like son, that’s what people said about Scott and Leonard, and with good reason. Leonard was twenty-one the summer Elena Huhtala came to Gilroy, and he had the scrubbed good looks and lean, feet-apart stance of a prairie hero. But he didn’t know that, or he didn’t care to know it. Like his father, he was a modest man. Humility was almost a flaw in both their characters, or so I believed in those days. As for Scott, before relief or official aid of any kind was available, he gave many of the people of our district (and that included my mother) unlimited credit, knowing it was all we had to live on. It was a hardship to him. He carried half the town through the Depression, and he didn’t need a fortune teller to inform him that few would ever pay him back in full.

  When I started grade one, a bit late because of eye problems, Leonard was taking his grade twelve; he was the oldest boy in our one-room school. The most wonderful thing he did was carry kids around on his shoulders at recess, and for eons I watched him, waiting for him to scoop me up and set me on high. But for some reason, maybe because I was a girl, or because I was shy in grade one, having to wear an eye patch that I feared made me look like a pirate, he never chose me. Finally one day I went to him and stood at his leg and looked up, kind of like a dog will do, kind of like old Shep, myself. Leonard was talking to some other kids at the time, but I didn’t care; I couldn’t wait another second. I remember he looked down – he’d felt me there beside him – and gave me that lopsided smile of his. You always felt he was smiling in spite of himself and because of you. I put my arms up and the next thing I knew, I was queen of the schoolyard. All the years of my young life, I believed I was going to marry Leonard Dobie one day, if he’d only wait for me.

  Not long after Elena finished with Walter Dunn and got going on Mrs. Beggs, I caught sight of Leonard and his dad, the two of them, standing at the store window, and the idea came to me that they’d invented her, or they’d found her somewhere and placed her on their bench, and now they were watching to see how we’d all take it. I suppose that was because she was so foreign, so different from anyone who’d ever stepped into my world, it seemed she had to be a creation rather than a person who’d grown up higgledy-piggledy like the rest of us. But maybe it was more than that. Maybe I was already thinking she was made for Leonard, and if I couldn’t have him, if he couldn’t wait for me, she’d be just right for him.

  As soon as I had her to myself again, I begged her to read my palm more seriously. There had to be more than she’d predicted in my future; she hadn’t spent any time at all thinking about me. And the way she’d looked at me, earlier, when she’d put her first dime into her shoe – I kept thinking about that. She’d looked past the thick lenses of my glasses, right into my eyes. I was sure she meant that look to tell me she recognized we were alike. I was sure she meant it to tell me she saw the potential in
me to be just like her.

  “No,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  She didn’t sigh, the usual adult response to that question. She said she couldn’t, I was too young, the lines on my palm would be unformed, and besides, my hand had been damaged and the reading wouldn’t be clear.

  “Do my left hand,” I said.

  But I wasn’t left-handed. She said it wouldn’t work.

  “What if I only had one hand?” I asked.

  “Then I’d feel sorry for you,” she said. She didn’t sound sorry, not in the least.

  I said I’d get money, but nothing would move her. I had to watch everyone else step up and hear their fortunes. It was unusual and difficult for me to stand to the side. I was the oldest in my family and the caretaker of the six kids who’d been born to my mother and father since my birth, the most recent only weeks before Elena Huhtala came to town. I’d grown used to assuming responsibility and to being treated with some deference, although recently something had been happening to me. It seemed to be connected to the birth of my new sister, which had meant even more responsibility had fallen on me. In the midst of my busiest moments, which had formerly made me feel proud, my mind would fly away from my brothers and sisters, right out of the house or yard. I’d watch my hands wiping a nose or drying dishes as if they were someone else’s hands and then I’d wish they were someone else’s hands so I could slap that face, break that dish, and run. I’d started slipping away so my mother couldn’t ask me to do the next chore. Instead of making me feel better, though, escaping made me feel worse. It was hard to go back and never be alone. It was hard to go back and find my mother angry because she’d needed me. I wanted to slip back into the house as I’d slipped out, unnoticed, and lie on an unshared bed in a cool, dark, empty room that was mine alone. And lately, more than ever, although I thought it was wrong of me, I wished I could live in that other house, the house at the edge of town, where I was sure I would find the solitude I needed if only I could get invited in.