Lifelines

by Caroline Leavitt

  “You come tomorrow then. You go to school? After then. I’ll try you out. Don’t look like that, get rid of that look. I told you I was making no promises.”

  The woman’s name was Olya Revnik. She said she was Russian, although she was very blonde, and she said she had come to America when she was just three, and that as soon as she could talk, she was making a greedy living reading palms and tea leaves, learning everything out of books. She never believed one syllable that came out of her own mouth. She got paid well enough, she said, and she liked having all those people come in and out of her house. She had made it a showcase for them and she liked being needed. The Depression had boosted her business. “What a time of palms that was,” she said, shutting her eyes, blinking them open again. “Thousands and thousands, everyone ashamed because they thirsted to know the future, everyone wearing veilings to hide their faces.” She smiled. “I didn’t charge more than anyone could pay. I bartered. I took cakes and breads, I let people do my washing, hang it up outside in the sun. Later, during the war, things got funny. The ones who needed me the most in the Depression now turned their faces when they saw me, they crossed the streets. It was as if they couldn’t need me for two different times—the Depression, the war—it was just too much. I got other customers, though, people wanting to know if their sons were alive, women waiting for their soldier husbands, their careless quick lovers.”

  Olya glanced at Duse. “So what do you think? You want to learn this racket?”

  “Why not,” said Duse.

  Anna didn’t say much when Duse told her she had found work. “It’s kind of theatrical, isn’t it,” Anna said.

  “I’m not an actress,” said Duse.

  Duse walked to Olya’s house every day after school. Her job was to brew the tea, two different kinds, peppermint and camomile, and to pour it into blue china cups. She set the steaming cups on a tray and then hunched down over them, taking quick furtive sips from each cup, slurping away the top layer of tea before she brought the cups into the parlor where Olya did her readings. There were always customers winding in and out of that place, spreading their money out loose onto the table, waiting in one of the chintz chairs by the window. Sometimes one of the men would wink at Duse, and she would frown.

  Duse was almost always ignored, treated as a servant. She placed the tea down before Olya and her client, and then waited until the tea was drained, half listening to their idle chattering, waiting until a finger was prodded in among the murky leaves and a fortune told.

  Duse never really liked the way Olya operated. Someone was always going on a trip, always going to meet someone handsome and rich; no one was ever going to lose an arm or a leg or a lover, no one was going to be forced to marry someone who might beat them half silly with the end of a broom. When the reading was finished, Duse took the cups back to the kitchen and washed them. No one ever thanked her.

  Olya also read palms and Duse liked that. She would sit and watch, although at first she didn’t really see how anyone could tell anything from the simple creases in the flesh. Some of the women customers powdered their hands, and when they pulled their gloves free, the powder would sift up, speckling the air, pink and suspended. There were wealthy women who came to Olya, businessmen, and a few immigrants with accents like crusts on the surface of their speech. Duse never recognized anyone. She was afraid one day she would see a customer on the street outside, and she planned to avert her eyes, to be delicate. She was always expecting a deluded client to return to Olya screaming fake, demanding money back, dragging a policeman inside. But no one ever seemed to wander the same streets Duse did, and no one ever complained. She once asked Olya about that, and Olya said clients never really saw failure as her fault; instead, they blamed themselves. It was their own shortcomings which thwarted a fortune, it was their own doing.

  After Duse had worked for four months, Olya began teaching her, sitting her down in front of four cups of drained tea, explaining over and over again what the clumps of tea leaves meant, what the number signified. Duse tried to follow, but she couldn’t concentrate, all she could do was to inhale the last vestiges of the tea scent. When she had to give a reading, she babbled. She made up anything she could think of, her eyes feverish and wide, and when she was through, Olya sighed. “Maybe no one will know the damned difference,” she said.

  No one did. Not really. Duse never did learn how to read tea leaves; she never did see anything in those damp wads collecting in the base of the cup, but she liked being able to sip a fragrant cup of her own, and she liked the respect people gave her. She was fifteen then, and although she wasn’t beautiful, there was something unnerving about her features, something inescapable and hypnotic.

  Duse told people what she thought they wanted to know, taking her cues from their faces. When a frown deepened, she changed the subject; if someone yawned, she shocked them with a scandal. Olya never rebuked her. Duse was beginning to reel in the clients, to draw in the money.

  Olya began giving Duse lessons in palmistry as well, working from a book, making up pages of diagrams of different palm lines and then demanding that Duse do a reading. Duse loved reading palms, she spent so much time studying the book, memorizing it, that Olya warned her. “Don’t you start believing all this muck,” Olya said. “It’s just a game, that’s all. A good, profitable game, but still a game.”

  Duse, though, treated every palm she held with respect and with curiosity. You could know a person just by their lines, she thought; you wouldn’t have to waste all that time with small talk and dinners and theatre dates. It was a history more personal than any other, and you could see that history change even as the person himself did. You could measure health and money, see the children in a future, the lovers and the marriages, the skills. She was careful to stress to her clients that the left hand was the way things were, the right was the way they could become, and both hands could be influenced, both could change if the person took control and made changes in his life. When she was asked for her advice on what to do, she always said that the answers were already given, that all the person had to do was to look within himself. She had no pity for the ones who just sat there, who let their futures unravel, who let themselves be played upon instead of getting up and doing the playing.

  Her own future enchanted her with possibility. She had happiness, she had health, she saw success. She saw something else, too, a starred marking in her right hand, and she went to Olya with it. “Gifts,” said Olya dryly. “The gifts of more money. You show people that star and they’ll think you’re worth more.” Duse felt the star boring into her, making her different, special, but when she displayed her mark to Anna, she was surprised by Anna’s sardonic smile.

  “But you believe in signs,” Duse said. “I know you do.”

  “Stable signs,” said Anna, “things that you decide upon and that’s that, things that don’t change just because you’ve clenched your hand into a fist and worked some more lines into it, just because the skin there doesn’t go dry and parch right up with wrinkles.”

  Duse turned abruptly from Anna. She went into the kitchen and ran the water, keeping her palm open under the flow, rubbing gently, almost tenderly at the surface, doing anything she could to make that star stand out.

  It was a week later that Richard’s final letter came, the stamp heavily inked over. Duse felt the currents from that paper ride up into her hand as she ripped it open. He said he had found work as a statistician in the army, that he loved the numbers, they were so clean, so true, it was impossible for them to lie. He had been working at an internment camp for the Japanese in California and while there he had fallen in love with a young Japanese woman. She was a simple girl, he wrote, uneducated and very traditional, and at night, he snuck into the camp and she walked on his back, barefooted. She could stop his headaches just by the pressure of her toes, he claimed. He got her out of the camp and now they were traveling, going up north where he could teach math. He was sorry, he wrote, he really was, but
he wanted a divorce now, he had to have one. It was all his fault, he knew that, and he didn’t want Anna to feel any stigma or blame. Anna could tell everyone what a lousy son of a bitch he was if she liked. He would send them money when he could, and they were both welcome to visit. “Don’t be stupid, don’t be brave,” he warned. “Now you can remarry, now you can start up fresh.” Then his letter jumped to a close, his name sputtered in jerky print.

  When Duse read the letter to Anna, Anna sat down heavily and wept. She kept saying over and over again that he would never find anyone like the two of them, that it was madness for him not to want to be with them. Anna looked up at Duse. “Look at you,” she said. “A beautiful talent of a daughter. Goddamn him for leaving that.”

  Duse sat down beside Anna and slung one arm over the cane backing of the chair. She lifted her head up and then her palm and studied it. She had never thought to look for anything about her father in her hand, she had blocked him from her life. “Hey,” she said. “Hey look. A new marking, a star, I think, right here on my fate line. Please look, please.” She held out her hand for Anna to see, but Anna reached out her own hand and took Duse’s in it, she shut her eyes and clung to her daughter.

  2

  Things changed. Anna soaped her wedding band free from her finger and immediately pawned it, putting the money into the bank. She began working furiously, typing more and more envelopes, and she sometimes had dinner with Stan Morgan, who led her up and down the streets by the curve of her elbow, who bought her tiger lilies.

  Anna began to dress to please Stan. She began wearing little circles of rouge on her cheeks, and she shaved her eyebrows clean off her face, creaming them before she penciled in new ones. Her whole expression changed, she looked startled, about to take flight. She began wearing pants and she learned to smoke, to tap the ashes free with a dainty flicker of fingers. She tried very hard to be modern, to know about current crazes, and she was pleased when Stan began calling her his “gal.”

  Anna noticed Duse with disapproval. That one didn’t dress right. Her flopping necklines always seemed to betray a ribbon of chemise, her skirts were much too full, and she was always mending her stockings, pulling them ceaselessly over a darning egg, frowning in concentration to save them when they should be tossed. She had some paint-on-stockings left over from the war that she still liked to wear. She’d spread out newspapers and brush the tan liquid on her legs, waiting for it to dry before she put on a skirt. But when she sat down, some of the tint always sweated free. She insisted on wearing her add-a-pearl necklace with just one pearl, and she pulled the shape of her hats into circles, ruining the lines.

  Anna gave Duse a croque permanent as a birthday gift. She didn’t know why Duse didn’t make her usual fuss, but Duse went to the beauty shop and let herself be seated. The thing was, Duse was curious. She liked the way the attendants dressed, in white like nurses, with stiff caps on their heads. She liked the bowls of water with lemon slices floating on top; it felt good to have someone dunk her hands there to bleach the faint freckles from her skin.

  But when Anna came to pick Duse up, Duse was standing outside the shop, her hair still long and now wet and crazy with curl. “What happened?” said Anna. “I didn’t want them to cut it,” said Duse. “We kept arguing. They kept telling me that without a cut, the perm wouldn’t take. I told them to do it on my length hair or not at all. The girl put this stuff on my head that burned. She kept pushing me around, and she smelled of the solution. It was awful. They wouldn’t let me alone, they kept arguing with me for the whole hour. They kept dumping fan magazines into my lap—as if I cared anything about that.” Duse sighed. “When I saw what my hair looked like when it was dry, I had them shampoo most of the crimp out.”

  “Oh Lord,” said Anna. “You don’t care anything about how you look, how people see you, do you?”

  But Duse did care. It was just that her concern was centered on her hands. She worried about the lines in them, about the texture of her skin. She spent hours creaming and powdering her hands. At night, she coated Vaseline between her fingers, up around her wristbone, and then she pulled on her handsome Sunday gloves. She wore those gloves to bed, and sometimes, too, during the day. When she did the dishes, she dumped oil into the water, and every dish she took out was glistening with grease. “What’s going on here?” Anna demanded, holding up a plate, smearing a line in it with her fingers. “What on earth is the matter with you? Why are you so difficult?”

  They started a new argument, this time about men. Duse had no objections to her mother seeing Stan. She didn’t really know him, she didn’t really see him together with her mother, how they were. And she had no loyalty to her father. Anna, though, wanted Duse to start thinking about men in her own life, to start concentrating on her future. Duse was deaf to that way of thinking. She didn’t trust men because of Richard, and also because of the way they always seemed to act when she read their palms. They’d want to spread their fingers out across her lap, to catch their joints on her knees, to imprison her. Once she felt a hand sliding along the folds of her skirt, animal and alive and restless, feeding on her skin. She said nothing. She continued her reading, and took the money, clenching her pale fingers over the coins, around the stiff paper.

  It irritated her when she tramped home in the rain, her shoes runny with mud, wanting only to soak in the bath, to find some man sitting in the kitchen with Anna, nervous, standing when she stalked into the house. She was rude. She would walk by the two of them, shaking the rain from her hair and skirt, letting her hair pins flicker onto the floor. She slammed the door of her room and she wouldn’t listen to Anna’s voice, to the way it cramped with hard fury. “Fine, be an old maid, be nothing,” Anna shouted. Even Olya advised Duse to marry, but Olya told Duse to choose someone rich, someone who was old and tottering near the grave. She advised Duse to start winnowing out clients, to select a mate from that pack. “Whatever you want, you can tell him you see it in your palm, in his tea leaves, and he’ll believe you. You’ll run your own life—and his.”

  Duse didn’t listen. She sometimes thought the only way she would ever marry would be if she were to find a truly interesting palm. She made the men who courted her hold out their hands to her, open and exposed while she traced the lines with her fingers. She laughed when the men flinched, when they complained that they were being tickled beyond a point which they could possibly stand. She didn’t care. Sometimes she let them kiss her, but she had a feeling they read meaning into that motion, when there was really nothing but curiosity on her part. All she cared about were the lines and sudden swellings of their hands—and of her own.

  She spent a lot of time studying her own hands, seeing how they changed. She drew maps of them which she kept in her top drawer. She rubbed at her skin until it chafed, until the flesh was ribboned with tiny lines that she herself had put there.

  She had even more clients after the war. She read anyone’s palm who planted it there before her. She couldn’t be choosy working for Olya. She read the palms of people hacking with disease, infiltrating her air with their germs. She felt the scent of death moving around her, alive. Sometimes she saw it in a palm. It was the one line she thought you couldn’t do anything about, you couldn’t influence. She didn’t want to tell shy young wives that their husbands weren’t prisoners of war any longer; she couldn’t tell an ill man that he would never get better. She hated it. She despised death for having no hope curling along its seam. She never lied, though, not to the clients who truly wanted to know, who needed. She would have to excuse herself and go and stand in the bathroom, her hands gripping along the edges of the white clawfooted tub. She would gulp her air until she could go outside again. Sometimes those clients cursed her. Sometimes they clung to her sleeve, as if she could give them salvation, as if she had the power to change their fates. They made her hate herself then because she couldn’t. Those kinds of clients never came back, but their faces rode along her sleep, she wore their images, and she became
determined to find some way to make death less unwieldy, less frightening than just that sudden severing of one line.

  In the interim, she continued her readings. She read the palms of widows, of ex-soldiers. One day an ex-marine named Barry Gerdner came in. He had only one palm to read. His right hand had been blown off by a mine in France, replaced by a steel hand. She could only tell him about his past and present, but she couldn’t feel sorry for him, not when that hand read so joyfully. She liked him. He was funny and smart and he didn’t try to hide his steel hand, he set it right out on the table and he didn’t flinch when it scraped on the wood, when it made a noise. He never wore gloves. He was completely unashamed of who he was. He showed Duse how good he was with that steel hand, how he could open doors with it, use a fork, even comb his short black hair. He painted with his left hand, but he would never call it his “good” hand; for him, both hands were truly wonderful, steel and flesh both had merits. He brought her one of his watercolors, of the sun, and she tacked it up over her bed. He was living at home, he said, but only temporarily, until he could get into an art college. Duse told him he had a good substantial palm with a nice solid lifeline to it.

  He came for a reading every day. She thought he was an exception to most men. He didn’t leer, didn’t intimate that a dinner and some wine would soften her thighs, would part them. Barry wasn’t silly or moony, and when he told her that he was in love with her, she said simply that she didn’t love him, that she wasn’t sure she would ever love anyone. “Your father?” he said, knowing her history, but she shook her head. “No, me,” she said. He watched her, his eyes very serious. He made her itchy in her chair, and she wore that itch like a film she needed to slough off. Their relationship took on a loose, easy weave. He never made any moves, never touched her or asked her to dinner or told her again that he loved her. Instead, he waited, he made her laugh at his jokes.