A Beauty

by Connie Gault

  It occurred to him, while time stretched and no one in the café moved or even breathed, and some part of him sat outside himself, ready to mock, that Betty’s second trial would cause less public consternation than the first. The murder of a spouse would surely be at least understandable to most people. Just the experience of living with another person and putting up with their irritating peculiarities would be enough to elicit some basic comprehension of the act, and Betty had endured way more than that. People who knew them – or rather knew of them, because no one really knew them – would come up with all kinds of reasons for her behaviour, although they wouldn’t be considered excuses. His betrayal of their marriage while she was incarcerated would form the dominant theory, and would be enough, in most minds, to explain her homicidal rage.

  He found himself smiling over the phrase, actually smiling down at his plate, tenderly, as if one of his slabs of beef had sat up, separating itself from its gravy, and whispered the words aloud to amuse him. Homicidal rage – it sounded pretty grand for a stabbing at the Bluebird. But it didn’t take a huge leap to think he might be able to provoke her to it. He’d seen anger close to it flare in her eyes after he’d done something as seemingly innocent as asking her to pass the salt when he could easily reach it himself, and nothing irritated her more than his attempts to smooth over her roughness with others. Funny, in her early life she’d wanted her edges smoothed; she’d wanted to be someone she wasn’t. She’d tried to hide her background. She’d been ashamed of being Ukrainian, of coming from a big, rough, unhappy Ukrainian family. In fact, he figured it was entirely possible she’d married him to get a legal right to his solid Anglo-Saxon name, thinking Earle had an upper-class sound, too. He’d known her last name, of course, but he hadn’t realized until the day of their wedding that her first name wasn’t Betty. People in the Charlesville area hadn’t known her identity until the newspapers published her birth name after her arraignment, and her old classmates, from the one-room country school she’d attended up to grade nine, realized that it was Oksana Pawluk – who’d been nicknamed (predictably if not affectionately) Ox – who was notorious.

  She’d put her head down and was steadily eating. For a big woman, she ate with little enjoyment, the same way she drank herself most evenings into a stupor. A fly was buzzing around her head, but she didn’t notice it. Of course she would plead insanity. Her lawyer would insist on it. Self-defence would be no defence in this case, given the number of witnesses to the act. At her trial for Angela’s death, she’d refused a plea of temporary insanity, although people might have understood you could go crazy watching your child’s constant, excruciating pain. She maintained it had been a sane thing to do, to end that suffering, the only sane thing to do. That got her some of the wrong kind of sympathy, from people who supported eugenics and viewed children like Angela as a drain on society. She’d hated that. Her own sister, who had been “a little slow” (especially, Betty said, when it came to running away from the boys who wanted to take advantage of her), had been institutionalized and sterilized after giving birth to an illegitimate baby.

  He set his fork down. All this time he’d been holding it without eating. He wanted to put his head in his hands. Just that. Nothing more. But he couldn’t do even that, sitting as he was in the middle of the café. If only he could believe she would pick up that knife and finish him off, end it all, here and now.

  Little Tammy Thompson, seeing her parents absorbed in their burgers, slithered down from her high chair and toddled over to the Earles’ table to see what they were having for supper. Albert saw her – and everything was still happening in slow motion – set her hand on Betty’s knee. He saw Betty look down, not at the child but at the hand. He did a rehearsal in his mind, as Peg used to say she did when she got anxious about something she was going to do. With a mental pang, he saw, in a brief flash, her sharp-featured face and her dark, knowing eyes. At the same time, he was seeing what he was going to do. He was going to bend over – quickly – and pick up that little body in his two big hands before Betty could give her a shove or a slap or whatever would occur to her demented mind. And then he was doing it. He swooped down, he swooped up, and before he knew it, he was holding little Tammy Thompson in front of his face. He was watching her tiny face crumple, her eyes close, her mouth open. He was seeing all the way past her pearly little teeth to her spongy, rosy tonsils and uvula (he knew the right name from his research on throat cancer, and watched it vibrate with particular horror before a sound came out). It was a long moment, and then she wailed, she sobbed, she screamed for her mother. She screamed so loud, he held her out at arm’s length, and that’s when he noticed everyone in the café was staring at him, with shock on their faces. He scanned them all. They were all absolutely stunned. Of course they were. What in the world was he doing? And how could he be stopped?

  He was grateful when her parents jumped to their feet. He was grateful when her dad crossed the room in two bounds and snatched her out of his hands. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Earle?” he said. But he didn’t wait to hear what Albert thought he was doing. He took Tammy – still screaming as if she’d been defiled by Satan or one of his minions – back to her mother. Albert turned to Betty to tell her they should go home. He could see himself flapping around her like an old man, plucking at her sleeve. She wasn’t there.

  Elena had forgotten time; she’d been halfway between now and next. When the child toddled across the floor, she realized she probably didn’t need the bill, that in a small place like this you just walked up to the cash register at the end of the counter when you finished your meal, and she was about to do that when the man in the centre of the café scooped the little girl up and set her screaming. Then the woman with him took up her purse from the floor by their table and stood. Elena thought she meant to leave, but she slid the purse to her forearm and picked up her plate and her cutlery and carried them over to Elena’s table. She said, “You won’t mind if I finish my supper here? This is my usual table.” And when Elena said she would go, the woman asked her to stay.

  Albert was still standing by their table, his feeble “Betty!” echoing in his own head. He wasn’t sure whether or not he’d said it out loud. His life had gone from slow motion to stop, but he could see that others were carrying on. Betty was chatting with the woman in the corner. The Kulak brothers remained turned towards the rest of the café, both of them sucking on toothpicks. The Thompsons were packing up. Jean was helping them gather up all the bits and pieces they’d dropped. Tammy was hiccupping with the same dedication she’d given to screaming. Dr. Pilgrim had gone back to his omelette, and was chewing in a manner that implied professional dignity. Jerry came sliding up to Albert’s elbow. “I get lady’s bill,” he whispered. Albert sank down onto his chair.

  “You’re not from here,” the woman said. Betty, her husband had called her. “It’s refreshing. And I like that dress you’re wearing.”

  Elena thanked her.

  “That’s a different kind of dress, kind of a Jackie Kennedy dress, eh? Kind of thing she wears, eh? What’s your name?”

  Elena told her, putting on her patience, another kind of dress.

  “Mine’s Betty. Originally Oksana, Oksana Pawluk, but I changed it.”

  “Oksana is a pretty name.”

  “Not where I come from. Where’d you find a dress like that?”

  “I got it in Finland, this summer. It’s a Marimekko dress.”

  “You’re kidding. What the heck is that?”

  Elena explained it was a fabric and clothing store where she’d shopped in Helsinki. She told her it was a company run by women. She knew Betty would like that. She could always access useless insights about other people. Or maybe they weren’t useless. Every day they slipped her past situations she wanted to avoid, eased her way.

  “You know, you’ve got the craziest way of talking,” Betty said. “You could put me in a trance.”

  Jerry approached with the bill. Betty gl
ared at him while Elena paid, and when the transaction was over, she told him to get lost. Elena smiled at him and shook her head to let him know he didn’t need to be concerned. “Okay, missie,” he said, retreating backwards.

  “You married?” Betty asked.

  “No,” Elena said.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for some years I lived with a man who was married to someone else.”

  “And now?”

  “I’m on my own.”

  Betty reached out and fingered the armhole of Elena’s dress. “I’d say that dress would be a cinch to sew, not much to it, a couple of seams, a couple of darts. I worked as a seamstress in prison.”

  She turned around and surveyed the room. Everyone evaded her eyes and she turned back to Elena, who was starting to feel as if she was the one in a trance, glued to her chair by a woman who’d worked as a seamstress in prison.

  “Just look at this crew, eh?” she said. “I mean, usually I sit here on a Friday night, right here in this chair, with a bird’s eye view of the snake plants. So tonight was a bit different. They trained me as a seamstress. You have to do some kind of work. It turns out to be a useless trade here, where people know me. They don’t want me around them with a pair of scissors. I’m good, I could smarten them up, but they don’t care. My mum used to sew. Had to. She come here at seventeen. My dad brought her here through some ad in the papers. He was a widower with three little girls, eh? And then the two of them made more. She had no sense of style, poor thing. Style. There ain’t none of that here. Look at them Kulak brothers, for instance. With their waistbands under their armpits. No fly on their pants. Suspenders. In this day and age. Their mother made those pants before she died, ended them above the ankles so they wouldn’t trip. And take a gander at Roxanne Thompson. Look, quick, before she gets out the door. See that godawful excuse for a dress she’s wearing? Thinking she’s all dolled up for a Friday night at the Bluebird. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve overheard her say, “I made this myself.” Hah! She might as well put that down the front instead of the fifty tiny buttons. Her husband, he’s from my old district, I knew him when he was a little kid. My sister and me used to babysit him. Used to put his clothes on him backwards. The whole lot of them might as well wear their entire wardrobes like that, it would make no difference.” She had turned a little to watch them go out the door, and set her elbow into her plate. She lifted it and stared at it, at the gravy dripping off of it. “I guess the guy you lived with must’ve been rich,” she said, wiping it off.

  “Well, there were a succession of men, and they tended to get richer.”

  “Hah! I’m gonna remember that line. I’ve only got the one. And I’m fed up, I gotta tell you. He’s a bully, you know. Nobody realizes that, but he is. He drives me crazy. I mean it. I seen him watching you, ever since we come in. Looking at you with that chivalrous look on his face. You know what I mean? If only you had a suitcase he could carry for you, he’d be pleased to lug it anywhere. Or if you’d drop your serviette, he could fly to rescue it. Because here you are, clean and innocent and pretty as all get-out. While me – why, he’s got to hide me as best he can.” She stopped and shrugged her big shoulders.

  “I must go,” Elena said.

  Betty picked up her purse and set it on her lap, but didn’t rise. When Elena stood up, she said, “Just stand still a minute, will you? I want a look at how that dress is made.”

  Elena obliged. The husband watched from his table with the dullness of a man who has drunk enough to kill him.

  As soon as she stepped out the door, she had a feeling of escape as visceral as any she’d ever experienced. Even her feet felt light, and she was glad of the few blocks she had to walk to the highway, glad she hadn’t brought the car. It was good to feel cement under her shoes, air on her skin. She passed a drugstore and then a new, low building called Pioneer Villa. She smiled at the word villa for such a utilitarian structure. Next door to it was the Old-Timers’ Museum. She laughed out loud. She was forty-six and intended not to grow old.

  She didn’t meet the old crone on her way back to the motel. She’d seen her earlier, dragging her clanking wagon behind her, a woman not likely as ancient as she looked, with candy-floss white hair and a sunken mouth where her teeth had once been, a rough old woman dressed in a man’s pants held up with binder twine and a man’s flannelette shirt. She’d released an awful gust of body odour when she’d passed by, and when Elena had turned to look at her, not being able to stop herself, the old bird had said, “Hah!”

  When she slid between the strangely damp-feeling sheets on her bed that night, she thought about all the escapes she’d made in her life, and how she would escape that fate, too. She closed her eyes. The motel had installed a yard light, and you couldn’t make the room dark. She tried to keep her eyes closed, but they opened on their own as soon as she forgot about them, and then she could see her clothes thrown over the one chair. She wore nothing to bed. She wished she could go about naked. Not have clothes at all. “Hah!” she said out loud. She hadn’t been able to sit nude in the sauna, in Hattula, even though she was all by herself.

  Why are you here? They’d all asked her that, in Finland. And Ruth had asked her, too. She thought about arriving at the room, earlier (it seemed a month ago), tired from the long day – the driving and the discoveries – and forcing herself to shower and change and make up her face. She closed her eyes and saw Ruth’s plain face, her anxious eyes behind the thick lenses, and the daughter’s face, glowing with misplaced admiration. You were just being yourself, Ruth said.

  Clean and innocent and pretty, the woman at the cafe – Betty – said. Elena could hear the exact way she’d said it, as if every word was fact.

  She climbed out of bed and walked around the room, watching her naked feet, feeling the cooling air move against her bare skin. The yard light bloomed behind the drapes. She threw up her arms as if explaining herself or giving up to someone, but all she let herself think was that she hated those goddamn Marimekko dresses – and she’d bought seven of them.

  Jerry was so tired after the Earles left, he let Jean send him home. He was dead tired, but once he’d crawled into bed he felt too sorry for himself to fall asleep. At his age he shouldn’t have to watch the kind of suffering nobody wants to see. He shouldn’t have to see people turned inside out. He thought about his hot water bottle, but he was too lazy to get up and fill it. He thought about his old wife, far away across the world, who would seem ancient to him now. Probably, if they were together, she’d want him to look after her. He’d be dragging himself out of bed to get a hot water bottle for her. Then (and he pictured a line of dawn at the bottom of the window he knew would be black) he thought how lucky he was to have been born with a proclivity to find his situation lucky, and he drifted for several minutes on that concept, along the edges of oblivion; but even though he knew it to be true – he was lucky enough to know he was lucky – the space was growing at his forehead, the cavity widening, a vacuum was ballooning. Only someone else’s words could keep grief, once it had been roused (my son, my son), from rushing in and taking over there. He turned on the light. He rummaged in the hutch he used for a bedside table. Where a thunder bowl used to reside was a stack of pocket novels, detective stories, the covers softened with handling, pliable and comforting to his fingers. It didn’t matter which he pulled from the pile. (My son, my son. No one could say what was really happening in China. The letters told nothing; he couldn’t read between the lines.) It didn’t matter where he opened the book. Tonight it was a John Dickson Carr, The Case of the Chinaman’s Rescue. No, but they should all be called that.

  “That dress she was wearing was made by a women’s company, started by a woman, run by women,” Betty told Albert the next morning. “I’m gonna start my own just like it. I’m gonna make up a bunch of those dresses in a bunch of sizes and start out by selling them at your floozy’s old shop.”

  He didn’t doubt she could do it and told her so.r />
  “That’s the first bit of encouragement you ever gave me,” she muttered, and some of her defiance deflated to an almost normal level, and she went on to say she would also start a society. She was going to call it something like The Society for Reasonable Clothes for Women. She looked almost happy, thinking about it.

  For a whole minute after that, he flung thoughts out like a busy little worm arcing into new worlds, how she would make the dresses, how they’d sell at a profit, how she’d bank the money, and when she’d made a pile, how she’d pack up, clear out of here, set out for some bigger centre. But that only reminded him of Peg and the things she’d said to him and about him before she’d left town.

  Ever the mind-reader, Betty said, “Maybe I’ll get rich and leave you. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  CALGARY

  For years after Elena Huhtala dumped herself out of his car, Bill Longmore’s mind turned to her on a regular basis. What had become of her? And was she, in some existential way, still laughing at him? He’d tried to stave off that kind of thinking with much more acceptable anger, told himself she’d taken him for a ride, no doubt about it. What a sucker he’d been; should have had his head examined. But however he framed the discussion with himself in those still-young years, it was her laughing he ended with. He believed she’d ruined his life with her laughing. Every woman he met after her seemed to conceal hidden mirth, no matter how deep within, every one of them like a pump that only had to be primed by him to gush. Even on first dates he watched for the signs of withheld hilarity, and he always thought he saw them: the taut jaws, the twitching lips, the watering eyes, the quick glance away.