by Ron Hansen
She’d lost Opal on that turn. “On him?” she asked. “That’s impossible!”
Iona sighed. “I know it is. But you can dream.”
“Owen and Pierre lurched out of the gas station bungalow with Falstaffs in every hand and failed to notice Natalie as they tilted against each other and howled “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You” in an imitation of Elvis in Blue Hawaii.”
Meanwhile, Mrs. Christiansen was hurrying down from upstairs with a glamorous white Empire dress hanging over both arms. She gushed from the landing, “Won’t she look gorgeous in this?”
Opal frantically waved her hands. She made hushing gestures. She pretended to cut her throat with her thumb.
Iona turned to Mrs. Christiansen. “Who will? When?”
Mrs. Christiansen thought. “Onetta. She so rarely wears dresses.”
And Opal lamely said, “When she goes to the hardware store.”
11
Sunrise in the Main Street Café. Wearing a spare pink waitress dress, Natalie helped Iona serve coffee and farmer’s breakfasts to a crowd of thirty or more fulminating men. She’d found a pair of squarish, dark-framed eyeglasses that made her resemble the singer Nana Mouskouri, so the farmers and truckers were mostly at bay, but still she was a little overwhelmed by the shocking noise of yelled jokes, banging mugs, clacking plates, and the hollered chat of morning larks in overalls who all seemed hard of hearing. Plus, a way-turned-up radio voice was giving farm commodities prices from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
She was surprised by a tip left behind, but folded it into her apron pocket and withdrew with an empty coffeepot to the four-beaker coffee machine behind the counter. The din and commotion had quelled some and Iona took the opportunity for a respite, leaning on the pink Formica countertop and sipping a café au lait as she inspected the various species of maleness in the room. When Natalie rested on her elbows beside her, Iona said, “Look at my choices. Micah’s gotten hitched about twice too often. Orville’s homely and married. And Carlo Bacon is not exactly the sensible image of the Infinite.”
Natalie was taken aback.
“Quote I learned in junior college,” Iona said flatly. She considered a counter stool. “The Reverend’s handsome, but he’s a whatayacallit?”
“Un célibataire?”
“Right, a celebrate.” She sipped some more coffee and panned the room. “Too old. Too fat. Just a kid. Way too ugly. Way too stuck on himself. Blah. Another blah. And him? Maybe if I get drunk enough.” She sighed. “My town, Natalie. Party, party.”
The dull radio voice was saying, “Corn futures down a quarter. Wheat staying even. Soybeans falling fifteen cents . . .” as Owen and Pierre grandly entered.
“Bonjour mes amis!” Owen shouted.
Hearty greetings were exchanged, hands roughly shaken, guffaws forced, and Pierre eyed Natalie in a plum happy way, for he felt spruce and superior in his borrowed motorcycle boots and green mechanic’s coveralls with the name “Harvey” stitched over the pocket. When he noticed Natalie’s forbidding eyeglasses, he gleamed momentarily, then glanced away.
Owen said to Cecil, “Permettez-moi de vous presenter Monsieur Pierre Smith.”
Onlookers were stunned. Cecil asked, “What the hell was that?”
Owen answered, “I could not tell ya. Said it nice though, didn’t I?” Owen slid into a booth and Pierre imitated him just as a good boy might his father. And then Dick nonchalantly sashayed in and the male greeting ritual was repeated until he slid into the booth next to Pierre.
Iona watched her rival watch Dick’s entrance and then she watched the booth as Natalie went over with a handful of hooked cups and a round glass beaker of fresh coffee. Owen and Dick smiled up at the French waitress and seemed to exchange pleasantries, but Pierre stared at the salt and pepper shakers as if they would soon be his food. And Iona found herself transfixed by Pierre, for in those work-man’s clothes the Frenchman did not seem so rich and conceited as he first did to Iona, but like the wrongfully accused fugitive from the jailhouse who in dreams stole into her room at night and smelled of motor oil and sweat as he reclined on the mattress beside her and held his hand to her mouth and whispered, “Don’t scream,” as the sheriff searched the house in vain. And Dick Tupper was the opposite, no outlaw in him, no shame in his past, but upright, respectable, widely admired, a man who would not squander a fortune, lose his head, or fall in love with the little girl who carried Mason jars of lemonade to him way back when he was still married and the September harvest was hot.
She watched Natalie Clairvaux walk into the kitchen.
Carlo hastily hid a Modern Bride magazine under some dish towels and took the breakfast orders Natalie handed him. While perusing them, he said in a nonchalant way, “Quick as weeds are Cupid’s arrows.”
She stalled. “Pardon?”
Carlo swashed corn oil across the griddle with a house-painting brush as he said, “Tender feelings. Infatuation. Some call it love.” The oil sizzled and popped until he poured a ladle of blueberry pancake mix. “We are sooner led by our hearts than our heads.”
“Who?”
His Dick Tracy mustache rocked up on one side in his smirk. “Oh, no one. Empty speculation. And it could be he just wants to make you jealous.”
“Pierre?”
“So you’ve noticed.”
She felt she was being toyed with. “Food for thought,” she said and went out to the dining room, wiping an ice water ring from the Formica counter as she watched a shy and smiling Iona return from Owen’s boisterous booth.
Iona instantly told her, as if she were hiding a secret, “They needed cream,” and then she hurried past Natalie into the kitchen.
Carlo grinned so widely at Iona it seemed insanity was just minutes away.
“Well, I made contact,” she said.
Even as his foot began tapping, Carlo tried to act blithe by flipping a blueberry pancake with his spatula. “Was it like I told you?”
“Well, not really. Dick was a perfect gentleman, and Owen was Owen, but the French guy never said a peep.”
Carlo seemed to ponder that as he flipped another pancake. “And weren’t you just a little more interested in why he wasn’t noticing you?”
She gave it some thought. “I guess.”
“Well, there you go then. The French practically invented seduction; and you, my pretty one, are being seduced.”
“Huh,” Iona said.
Carlo tried to still his jittery leg by holding it firmly against the oven door, but it just made a thumping noise like a happy spaniel’s tail. Iona gave him an inquisitive look. “Tell you what,” he said. “We’ll go out together for fun in the sun. You and me and Owen and him. See if he doesn’t scope you out.”
She was fixing her hair in a toaster’s reflection. “Well, jeez,” she said. “He’s male, isn’t he?”
But Carlo was lost in a prurient stare, confirming her assumptions.
Natalie was wringing out a hand towel in the sink as Iona exited from the kitchen and halted to lean casually on the Formica counter and stare across the dining room. She heard Iona say, “You got yourself a catch, girl.” And though Iona meant Dick Tupper, Natalie presumed she meant Pierre, and she found herself watching her fiancé with other eyes until he and Dick and Owen finally left the café. She was hurt that Pierre ignored her.
12
At noon on Thursday Mrs. Christiansen took Natalie to the fairgrounds. Wearied from the first night of The Revels, Marvyl sportily hummed along beside her on a motorized sort of tricycle as Natalie meandered through the crowds past the various outdoor booths of The Revels: a French Foreign Legion shooting gallery with Algerian rifles and tin camels for targets; a miniature Eiffel Tower ring toss booth; a place where you could dunk a quite dry musketeer in a cow watering tank if you pitched a softball into a tin target with impossible speed and accuracy. Girlish screaming was issuing from a gloomy Bastille that was stocked full of hall-ways that headed nowhere, scarecrows and mannequi
ns that hurled themselves at trespassers, and funhouse mirrors that so horribly misshaped a person that she might think unwillingly of the buttocks on her Aunt Dolly.
Natalie lagged behind to gaze at the “Weird Animals” exhibit where there was a pet spider monkey and a sign that read: “Howdy! My name is Stinky! I will clap my hands if you show me food!” And there was a thoroughly ordinary Afghan dog, quivering with embarrassment in a beret and a striped French sailor’s suit. A marmalade cat with a Captain Video helmet was trapped inside a space suit made from aluminum foil. The owner was holding its front paws in the air, so the cat stood on its hind legs, its tail lashing. Zapping noises were piped in as ray guns feebly strafed the air. The sign around the cat’s neck read: MARTIAN.
Mrs. Christiansen shoved her tricycle in reverse and swerved snakily back, a horn beeping, until Natalie caught up again. Mrs. Christiansen said, “The ladies were so pleased when they heard a cordon bleu from Paris was here to judge their cooking.”
Natalie cautioned, “Madame, I am not a chef.”
But Marvyl wasn’t listening. “Carl Bacon did it once,” she said, “but he’s a tad persnickety. Last year we settled on a fry cook from Ogallala whose Oldsmobile was being fixed.” She turned the tricycle toward a tent and motored inside. At once there were high-pitched cheers and thunderous applause from the many women at folding tables on which a wild assortment of foods were arrayed. Mrs. Christiansen stood up from her vehicle and put a finger to her lips in a teacherly way. Women quieted. “I have the honor of presenting to you the Queen of the Revels, Mademoiselle Natalie Clairvaux,” she said. “Our guest taster. Now remember, she’ll be judging both flavor and presentation. And you’re not allowed to tell her what she’s eating.”
There were a few faint groans and protests.
Mrs. Christiansen shushed them with a hand and formally turned. “Natalie?”
Natalie walked uncertainly toward the first table of pies and pastries. She lifted a smidgen of lemon meringue pie with a plastic fork, put it in her mouth, and evaluated it. “Très bien,” she said.
She shifted sideways and tilted forward to taste a Boston cream pie. She was getting into it, becoming a regular Julia Child. “Intéressant,” she said, “mais . . . agressif.”
“Was it good?” the cook asked Mrs. Christiansen.
She got a pat of condolence on the forearm as they went on.
Lois Tetlow, a full-figured gal, was spilling out of a skimpy French maid’s outfit as she presented a tray of muffins.
Mrs. Christiansen chided, “Lois!”
“Well, last year the judge was a man,” Lois said.
Natalie nibbled some muffin and grew concerned. “Are they raisins?”
“Blueberries,” Lois said, “but they mighta turned.”
Natalie shifted over to Owen’s Aunt Opal, who was humble to the point of unctuousness as she held up a faintly green rhubarb pie. Natalie hesitated with the dab on her fork. She took a full breath and tried the pie. She could not hide a wince.
Opal explained, “What’s the point of a food competition if you don’t get to experiment and be creative?”
Natalie was still masticating while seeking a place to spit.
Opal told Marvyl, “It just occurred to me that a little chili powder and Worcestershire sauce might put a sleepy old pie up on its hind legs.”
“I’m sure it’s unique,” Mrs. Christiansen said, and then she looked ahead. “Oh no. Mrs. Zebrun made her Candied Tree Bark Surprise.”
13
Natalie avoided food poisoning and rewarded herself with an afternoon nap at Mrs. Christiansen’s rooming house. She woke at three to the sounds of cooking in the kitchen and took it upon herself to help out, cracking farm eggs into a great big bowl of cake mix as Opal and Mrs. Christiansen chopped and washed vegetables. Mrs. Christiansen announced, “We’ll have a Waldorf salad first off on Saturday.”
“Oh, I like that idea,” Opal said.
“And then I thought a Châteaubriand would be nice for the main course.”
“Uh huh. Kind of make her feel more at home.”
“With onions and carrots à brun.”
“You know what I think I’d like to try, Marvyl? Potatoes Lyonnaise.”
Mrs. Christiansen frowned. “From a freezer package or from scratch?”
“The grocery freezer.”
Mrs. Christiansen smiled. “Aren’t you a dear?”
Opal whispered, “You don’t think she had her heart set on French fries?”
And Marvyl whispered, “She hasn’t planned a thing.”
“’Cause if she does, those frozen kind you get in cartons are just so quick and easy . . .”
Mrs. Christiansen asked Natalie, “Voulez-vous des pommes frites?” (Would you like fried potatoes?)
She dumped egg shells into the trash compactor and slammed it closed. “Whatever you wish,” she said.
Mrs. Christiansen spun back to Opal. “She’s got a great deal on her mind, if you get my meaning.”
“Oh, I do.”
All three heard a faint rapping on the front screen door and tilted out toward the hallway. Reverend Dante Picarazzi was on the front porch in his black clerics and white Roman collar, his blue Yankees baseball cap in one hand as he shaded his eyes with the other and peered in through the screen. “Afternoon,” he offered.
Opal jumped to the conclusion that he was there for her, though it would have been without precedent. She held a hand with a paring knife to her chest and said, “My word! It’s the Reverend!”
Mrs. Christiansen smiled in a tut-tut way and said with innuendo, “Dante needs to iron out details with Mademoiselle Clairvaux.”
Slowly the meaning dawned upon Opal. “Oh, I see. Oh yes, they really have to talk.”
“Details?” Natalie asked.
Mrs. Christiansen looked to the front porch and called, “Wait there, Reverend. She’ll be right out.”
“Surely you could bend the house rules for a priest,” Opal said.
And Mrs. Christiansen haughtily said, “That would be breaking the rules, not bending them.”
Worriedly, Natalie went out to the front porch, full of mystery about the priest’s visit, and found him swinging his legs like a kid on the glider that hung from the porch ceiling. His Yankees cap was jauntily cocked on his head, his running shoes dangled off the floor, and he was petting a mustache that was still twisted and waxed. With his characteristic torrent of words, the priest said, “Played Toulouse-Lautrec at The Revels. Nailed it.” The Reverend patted a space beside him and as Natalie sat, he rushed on, saying, “I heard the whole megillah from Marvyl.”
And Natalie, whose English, she’d thought, was good, had trouble with his Brooklynese and understood only “heard” and “from Marvyl.”
“Sorry about the royal snafu. Mea culpa. Snail-mail you sent me? Tipping me off? Like a knucklehead I musta lost it.”
She understood “Sorry,” “snail,” “lost.”
“Oy, my desk,” he said. He lifted a hand as high as his ear. “Stacked to here with bubkes.”
With an excess of politeness she said, “I have never heard anyone speak so fast.”
“Well that’s me.” The priest raised his right knee to tie a running shoe that must have been bought in the boy’s department. She wondered if others also had the urge to tousle his hair. “Informed His Eminence about the glitch. Hemmed and hawed, but he’s a mensch; plus he owed me. We got it locked in for Saturday. You cool with that?”
She watched him staring at her and she construed he’d asked a question that required an answer. She nodded her head.
“Right. You shlep up the aisle, deliriously happy, blushing right and left. I greet you and I do the booga-booga. We endure with smiles the fumbling for rings. I say this, I say that; you parrot it back. You know the routine. We need a rehearsal?”
She’d understood hardly a word. She shook her head no.
“Hiya, Dick,” he said.
She glanced out to t
he front yard and saw Dick diffidently standing on the sidewalk in his cattleman’s hat and boots. Shy as a suitor. “Wondered if Mademoiselle Clairvaux would like to go on a horseback ride.”
“Well, that seems highly irregular to me,” Opal said from inside the house.
Natalie tilted and saw that Mrs. Christiansen and Owen’s Aunt Opal were hunched at the front screen door, overhearing.
“Oh, Opal,” Mrs. Christiansen said. “She’ll enjoy it! And he’s a perfect gentleman. Aren’t you, Dick Tupper.”
“Oh, yes, ma’am.”
She turned to Natalie. “You go ahead, dear. We’ll manage the cooking.”
With irritation, Opal reminded the widow, “Many hands make light work.”
Mrs. Christiansen softly flicked at her friend’s wrist and said to Dick, “She’ll be right out.”
The Reverend jumped down from the glider. “You go change. I have to schmooze with the lucky guy.”
She thought, What is schmooze? But she told him, “I have enjoyed talking with you.”
And Dante was already skipping down the steps as he said, “Natch.”
She went upstairs to get into bluejeans, sneakers, and a soft white shirt. When she came out the cattleman was beaming at the foot of the front porch stairs, and she blushed at his happiness.
“What’d the Reverend have to say?” Dick asked.
“I have no idea.”
“He’s a New Yorker,” Dick said, as if much, in such a manner, was explained. Warily looking into the house, he confessed, “I get real skittish around Mrs. Christiansen. She puts me back into high school whenever I’m around her.”
On cue Mrs. Christiansen called, “You be careful with her, Dick Tupper!”
And he was no more than fourteen years old when he called, “Yes, ma’am!”
14
Holding onto the horses’ bridles, Dick escorted a saddled paint-colored mare and sorrel stallion from the cool darkness of his red stables and into the stark August sunshine. Natalie was standing up on the first white board of the paddock fence and was scanning his groomed and handsome ranch property with fascination. Dick just stared at Natalie’s beauty until she turned.