A Beauty (16 page)

A quiet feeling came over me as I stood there, knowing they couldn’t see me. It was almost as if no other time or place had ever existed. Or ever would. It was as close as I have come to the recollection of being unborn. Then the screened door opened with a squawk. She turned and faced the house – and colour. A row of hollyhocks grew against the back of the house, their
leaves a luminous green, their flowers pink, wine red, maroon. Mrs. Knoblauch stood in front of the hollyhocks; the blossoms rose two feet higher than her white head.

In the west, the sky was mauve. The sun was falling fast. It happened to be sitting on Elena’s head when she turned to the house, to the hollyhocks and the old woman standing in the doorway, and they were all brighter than life, lit to their very centres because the sun was sitting on her head. But for me, the sun turned into a blinding hole in the sky and I had to look away. For several seconds I saw green spots wherever I looked, and then the spots turned pink, and finally they faded when she came towards the house to find the cool, quiet room where she could be alone.

The sky turned wild with colour when that girl stepped up to meet Mrs. Knoblauch; it flared violet and apricot and cherry red and gold. They say nothing makes a better sunset than a lot of dust in the air and that evening proved it true. All the colours flushed upwards all around, and when the sun was about to slip under the horizon, the full bowl of the sky turned iridescent. It became a more tender sky than anyone in Gilroy had seen before. I always thought it was the coincidence of Mrs. Knoblauch inviting her and the sky being so tender that made Elena Huhtala decide to stay a while.

That sky. People talked about it the next day. How from morning on they’d thought we were sure to get hail, the biggest hailstorm we’d had in years, and nothing had come of it, nothing at all.

2

A
transformation was scheduled to happen in the Knutsons’ kitchen, and Aggie Lindquist had been invited to take part. Aggie was sixteen that summer but she felt younger than the other girls in more than years, and looked forward to anything that would change her. She headed out from her parents’ house with a lipstick in the pocket of her skirt and a hot wind at her back that she owned too in a way that she would never admit to anyone, it would sound so dumb. Luckily, nobody else was around for miles, and that meant she could think of it as hers, her personal tempestuous wind. And the best part was that it was tireless; it would blow and blow and never give up. This was nine or ten days after Elena Huhtala had left Trevna for parts unknown, and the romance of her going was still crowding Aggie’s mind and encouraging her to think more than usually interesting thoughts. A big gust shoved her along and she trotted easily for a few moments, like a colt towards some held-out carrot. Down the road the sky sagged in front of her, promising nothing, but the world in turmoil suited Aggie; she felt in her bones that at any moment – just give her the chance – she could do something heroic.

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 she’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.