Mrs. Louderback uses tarot cards. It’s the first time I ever knew about them, and I found them very strange indeed. What she does is put them down and turn them up and consider. She’s more likely to tell you what’s going on with you now than what you’ll do in the future. That is not very clear, but then Mrs. Louderback tends to be kind of murky herself. Yet a lot of people, mostly women, go to her, and probably because she is so nice and honest. Also, she’s the only fortune-teller in town.
The cards she turned up for me that first time were the Hanged Man and the orphans-in-a-storm cards, which seemed about right for me. But she told me these were actually good cards, and said a lot about what kind of person I am. When I looked at the orphans-in-a-storm card I wondered what she saw good about it. It reminded me of the way adults tell you when you’re drowning in a ditch that it’s much better than the ditch on the other side of the road.
Mrs. Louderback sees her customers in her house for a couple of hours most days of the week. She has all of her housework to do, after all, and can hardly give her whole life over to other people’s fortunes. Her house is as neat as a pin and as clean as the last time I’d been there. Another woman, whose name I don’t know, opened the door and went before me into the parlor (a “common” word, my mother says, for living room, meaning language has a lot to do with breeding in my mother’s book). Here there was a row of chairs, as in a doctor’s office. A woman I don’t remember ever seeing in Spirit Lake was waiting for her appointment.
The appointments are usually for a half hour, and if this lady was going in to have her fortune told, I knew I would have to wait for a half hour. This didn’t really bother me as I had plenty of time between lunch and dinner. Maybe the person in with Mrs. Louderback right now was really in big trouble and took more time.
The woman who had let me in (and who also lived there) nodded silently toward the straight chair next to the customer. The lady now sitting beside me was wearing a hat with berries and gave me one of those smiles reserved for kids, as if it were every grown-up’s duty to try and make kids feel they can go on living, at least for now.
She looked down at me with that simper and asked, “Is that your mother in there now? Are you waiting for your mother?”
I suppose it would have upset her whole world to find out a twelve-year-old kid was having the same problems she was, or made her suspicious of Mrs. Louderback for allowing a kid my age even to enter her parlor. I calculated that the woman in the kitchen (which was where Mrs. Louderback did her “readings”) would come out and the woman sitting here now would get up and go in, all done in pretty much one fell swoop. I made an uh-huh sound that could also be taken as nu-huh, and that covered me in case the woman in there now disclaimed me. I accompanied this yes-no answer with a dopey smile and twined a lock of hair around my finger the way Ree-Jane does, usually with her mouth open a little. It makes her look really dumb. But, then, she is.
The door between parlor and kitchen opened, and another unfamiliar lady walked out. (Where did these people come from?) She smiled at the other one self-consciously. The lady beside me then got up to go into the kitchen and I, of course, got up also to greet the woman who’d just come out. “Hi! Did she tell you interesting stuff?”
The lady going in for her appointment said to the one who was now frowning at me, “She’s cute.”
When the door closed, I re-sat myself as if I hadn’t spoken to her, pretending not to notice the woman was giving me the once-over, perhaps trying to place me. She gave me then a disregarding look. There was no longer any pressure on her to be nice in case some god might be tempted to strike her down. She was free of her fortune and of any obligation to strangers.
I was glad when she left so I could relax. Which I did, sloping down in the chair, oozing down like a snake until my shoulders were almost on the seat. I had a half hour to kill, so I did this for a few minutes and then got up and walked around, looking at things.
I turned to look at some bookshelves behind glass doors. I was very surprised to see a row of Nancy Drew books, my favorites. They looked really old, much older than mine, and I wondered if they were Mrs. Louderback’s childhood books. I would have to ask her. I really like Mrs. Louderback and am pleased to think we have Nancy Drew in common. I walked around, picking up and inspecting a strange little carving of three monkeys. The thing they were carved from was a dull brownish-red, and wasn’t wood or china or anything like that, more like some sort of stone. I didn’t care for it. I also looked the grandfather clock over; I liked its soft chime, which came every fifteen minutes.
There was no sign of the woman who had let me in. She was birdlike and bony, her arms like bats’ wings, the skin loose and hanging down from bone, as if the flesh had gone. My own arms and elbows are round and smooth, one of my best features. Opening the door for people seemed scary to her, as if strangers made her nervous. Or perhaps she was being sensible; after all, what kind of people would believe what a deck of cards told them? People—she might think—who weren’t much in touch with reality.
I was making all these thoughts up while I leaned back against the narrow case of the clock because I was bored. I don’t have any patience and get bored easily. At least that’s what my mother and Mrs. Davidow are always telling me. Don’t fidget, Emma; stop your fidgeting. I think it would make a good name for a bird, “fidget.”
As the clock chimed duuum duuum, the door to the kitchen was opening. I came to crisp attention.
The lady in the berry hat stood in the doorway saying good-bye, good-bye to Mrs. Louderback (sounding pleased with her future, or her present), and turned and looked at me, puzzled I was still hanging around. Momentarily, I had forgotten I was supposed to have left with my “mother.” My thoughts raced around like crazy mice trying to come up with something and what they came up with was, “Hi, Mrs. Louderback. My mom forgot something.”
I should have realized that now I would have to come up with something else to explain my queer behavior to Mrs. Louderback, but at least the lady on her way out looked satisfied that the world wasn’t standing on its head. She nodded and left.
Mrs. Louderback smiled at me, but you could see she was wondering. What could my “mom,” who was definitely not a Louderback customer and who likely hadn’t seen her in months if not years, have forgotten?
As I breezed past her, too tired mentally to come up with a truly convincing answer, I said, “My mother was going to give me one of her Angel Pies to bring along, but then she forgot.” The Angel Pies were famous, as were a number of my mother’s dishes.
Mrs. Louderback smiled and said that was very nicely intended, knowing how busy Jen Graham was over at the hotel. She said really nice things about my mother, as she got a pitcher of lemonade from the refrigerator. She poured out two glasses and added some not-so-nice things about the Davidows.
“They’re not real Spirit Lakers—”
(I agreed.)
“And Regina Jane Davidow walks around as if she’s queen of something.”
“She wants to be a duchess. She wants to be either that or the countess of Kent. Or a model, or a star reporter.”
Mrs. Louderback rooted through the box where she kept her tarot cards and also odds and ends of pencil stubs and paper. Then she swept the cards across the table like one of those casino dealers, saying, “Well, she’s in for a big shock, then. There are no duchesses in that one’s future. Far from it—”
She cut this wonderful news short by apologizing for coming close to breaking a professional confidence. But I tried to keep her going about Ree-Jane’s noncountess future. “Jane Davidow says if she was a countess, that made her husband an earl, not a count. There aren’t any counts, she says.”
Mrs. Louderback pursed her mouth. “There certainly are. In Russia, for instance. The writer Tolstoy was a count, I’m pretty sure.”
I wouldn’t know about him, not being up on my Russians.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I got us off the subject—”
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Putting down Ree-Jane was never off the subject.
“—and I think we should go back and finish your last visit because—remember?—you had to leave when we were only half finished.”
Inwardly, I groaned. That meant the Hanged Man and the orphans.
“Your cards were the Hanged Man, the Queen of Cups, and—” She was searching for it.
“Orphans,” I said, in a dead voice.
“Orphans?”
“A boy and girl in a snowstorm. They looked like orphans to me.” One of my favorite books was David Copperfield.
“Ah. Of course. But they’re not ‘orphans.’ ”
You could have fooled me, I thought, propping my chin in my hands. She turned the three cards face up. I was not happy to see their faces again. Then she placed a finger on the Queen of Cups, whom I’d forgotten about.
She said, “There’s a woman who’s had a hard life.” That could probably be any female in Spirit Lake, except Lola Davidow and Ree-Jane.
“This woman presents a danger to you. Be careful of her.” Mrs. Louderback had her eyes closed when she said this. She is not supposed to be one of those mediums, nor is she supposed to “see things.” Whatever information she gives a person comes through the cards. But I wondered about this. For she raised her head and opened her eyes and gave me a blank look and then seemed to be looking not at me, but past me. Her expression was strange.
I remembered then that the one other time I had been here, she had been looking past me in this way, looking at something that must have been outside the window. She was facing the kitchen window and I was sitting with my back to it. And now she made that gesture as she had the last time, with her large-palmed hand, a sort of scrubbing motion.
I could only follow her line of vision by turning around, which I did. All I could see through the window was a spindly top of a mountain laurel or rhododendron, which grew all around her house. It was tapping lightly in the wind. There was no sun, only an even gray paste of light, a blank backdrop for the rhododendron bush. Then in the silence that seemed to get thicker and closer, the 3:05 bore down on us, its whistle wailing.
There are times when life just thunders down like that train, or like one of those waves formed by a tropical hurricane that pushes everything before it—palm trees, huts, people——and leaves behind nothing but stumps and sticks. I felt like that now, two sticks where clothes hung, and the wind whistling through.
But her head was down as if she was afraid to look at me, as if her expression might give something away that she didn’t want given. “The Queen of Cups,” she said again, as if the card had newly sprung from the deck.
It was making me nervous; the whole visit was making me nervous.
She laid out a row of cards, stopping to riffle the deck again and again as she studied them. The Hanged Man she had placed below the row.
The cards in her hands made tiny splatters as she ran her thumb back and forth over them. “I guess that’s a pretty bad card,” I said, pointing to the Hanged Man
She shook her head. “No, it’s a good one.”
I frowned. He was hanging by his foot upside down from a tree branch. It didn’t look too good to me. I determined to find a book about tarot cards in the library. They were queer.
“It means rebirth. Regeneration.”
I was still waiting for the “good” part. I doubled my fists and rested my chin on them, waiting.
“In your case, though ...”
I knew it. I was the exception and the Hanged Man was putting a curse on me.
“... well, this is all very peculiar. I don’t remember coming up with this before....”
It’s my opinion that somebody who’s supposed to be a specialist should not be telling you about the uncertainties of what they’re doing. It would be dumb for my mother, for instance, to say about her Angel Pie, “There I go putting in too much lime juice,” or, “Oh dear, I’m baking the meringue crust too long.” That’s a sure way of not holding onto your reputation. I slid down in my chair so that only my eyes remained above table level. I wondered if they were mocking her. Emma, sit up, sit up straight, that’s why your shoulders are humped, I heard the voices of Lola Davidow and Ree-Jane. Mrs. Louderback looked across at my eyes and did not say this. I immediately sat up, probably out of gratitude.
Mrs. Louderback said, “The peculiar thing is that some of these people just don’t seem real.”
Hadn’t she ever been to the Hotel Paradise? “Some of what people?”
Her hand flashed out and shoved the cards around as quick as Aurora Paradise cheating at solitaire. Then she stared at them again. “You are going to be with somebody in a difficult situation.”
“That’s kind of vague.” I permitted myself this criticism.
She nodded. “I know. It’s because of this clouded area. We are all in each other’s magnetic field.” She swept up the cards again.
At that I sat bolt upright. Was Ree-Jane rubbing off on me like the hotel cat leaving dander around? “What’s that mean?”
“It only means we attract and repel without being conscious of it—”
As long as I could repel.
“—for much of our life goes on without us knowing it.”
I frowned. “Then what good is it?”
Mrs. Louderback smiled. “Well, it affects things we are conscious of.”
This was getting too airy, too “clouded” for me. I’m basically practical. “Do I get to ask a different question this time? Or should I stay with the old one?”
Mrs. Louderback pursed her lips again. “That depends, I expect, on whether you think it was answered.”
I thought. “In a way it was ... no. No, it was.” My question had been whether I should tell the Sheriff I’d seen Ben Queen. I didn’t tell him; that brought down a lot of woe on my head, for I think he felt swindled. Both of them—the Sheriff and Ben Queen—had entered my “magnetic field” or I had theirs, and they were pulling on me. Ben Queen’s pull had been the strongest at that point. I suppose he could have gone by now, but I don’t think so. I think he might still be at the Devereau place; it might be a good hideout.
“All right, then ask another.”
I closed my eyes, thinking hard. Then what I asked in my mind was, Will the Sheriff ever be my friend again? I opened my eyes.
Mrs. Louderback fanned out the cards, looked at them, then at me. “I don’t think the question was put right. It looks like there was no reason for it, really. Can you ask it aloud?”
Aloud? I shook my head. “Nu-huh.”
5
News
I still had almost two hours until it was time to be in the kitchen fixing salads (and that wouldn’t take long, as we had only three dinner guests). I decided to walk the two miles from Spirit Lake to La Porte, which was bigger and had more “amenities.” I learned this word listening to people complain about the Hotel Paradise’s lack of them.
Peering into the future tells on a person’s nerves. There was Mrs. Louderback’s queer answer to my question about the Sheriff and there was that moment of seeming to see past me and through the kitchen window. This was so strange that it made me think Mrs. Louderback might be a medium, even though she says she’s not. For she seemed to leave herself while something else took over. What did she mean saying my question about the Sheriff was put wrong? That the question didn’t matter?
What I needed right now was peace and quiet. I chose the Abigail Butte County Library. I always feel comfortable in it, and Miss Babbit, the librarian, never suggests I go to the children’s room. She is smart enough to see that if I like the main reading room, that’s my business. Probably, she is so glad to see someone my age come in of her own accord that she wants to make sure I keep doing it.
And of course there’s the quiet, broken only by the rustles of newspapers and magazines, or the gentle thud of book on book, or the closing of the file drawers, or the muted voices of people up at the checkout desk.
I alway
s begin by burrowing in among the shelves and have nearly memorized the section numbers on the cards at their ends. This time I went to the travel section, looking for some place far from where I was. There was a big book, mainly of photographs, about China and Japan. That was about as far as I could get from Spirit Lake and La Porte, so I hauled it over to one of the readers’ tables.
I rested my head against one hand and with the other turned the pages, lazily looking at pictures of Mt. Fuji. In the chapter about Tokyo, I was surprised to see so much tumult in the streets and so much neon. It was all so quick and bright. I’d always pictured Japan (when I thought about it at all, which was almost never) as being slow, with workers standing up to their shinbones in rice paddies, or pulling rickshaws. Or was that China? I flipped to the China section and there I did see some rice paddies, where women were working with their skirts pulled up and knotted and with faces hidden by those immense platelike straw hats.
My eyelids were heavy, threatening to shut on me. I had been known to doze off in this position, jerking awake and finding that my head was still leaning against my hand. I hadn’t fallen from the chair; my head hadn’t even dropped from my hand to the book. I was intact. That did not make me feel good. It meant my mind wasn’t free to take a vacation. My sentries, upon seeing me asleep, hadn’t even gone out for coffee and a doughnut. I was always on guard. It was a strain. Maybe I was the same, asleep or awake.
I shook myself a little to get things going again and turned more pages and came to one of a long undulating wall. This was the Great Wall of China, the text said, so incredibly long that it was the only thing on earth that could be seen from outer space. I guess they forgot about Ree-Jane.
When I was tired of looking at the travel book, I got up and went to the newspapers. I liked the library’s way of displaying them, each one afixed to a long pole, which was the way they were handled in France and Germany. I’d seen this in books too, pictures of people sitting in the sidewalk cafés of Paris or Berlin, reading papers on poles. It lent the library a pleasant foreignness. You felt you were sitting in one of those Parisian cafés, sitting at a table in the sun, in dark glasses and very rich clothes with maybe a little dog on a leash lying peacefully under the table. The waiters slipped silently about, very efficient in their movements, as Vera is.
Cold Flat Junction Page 3
