Lifelines

by Caroline Leavitt

  “I used to want my father dead,” said Duse. “Did you know that? In a way, I sometimes thought I even made that death happen, I created it. I made it so he couldn’t flicker through my thoughts, so that there wasn’t room. He just stopped existing for me. That’s the same as death, isn’t it? You know, it’s kind of funny, I don’t even know if he’s alive anymore. I stopped caring.” She washed her hands over her face. “You see this hand?” She held up her right palm. “You see where the lifeline wobbles to a close? That’s when I’ll be out of your life, but even then there’re spirits.” She put her hand down, she settled it into her lap. “What are you doing to yourself? I love you, Baby. All I want to do is just make it so nothing can hurt you, so nothing can ever touch you unless you want it to. I want you to be strong.”

  “You want me to be you,” said Isadora.

  “You’re wrong, Baby,” said Duse. “That isn’t what I want at all.” She bent toward Isadora, she tried to push away some of the red tendrils that were fluttering over Isadora’s face. “I want you to be you, and me to be me,” she said. Then she said that there were lots of kinds of deaths, not just the one riding in your palm. Then she turned and left the room, her eyes unfocused, curious.

  Duse would never let Isadora see her predict a death again. She was casual about picking up the paper when it flopped in through the screen door, and she moved her death files into her room.

  She studied Isadora. She’d finger her own red hair and see it mirrored back to her in the girl. Sometimes she had to hold herself back from just striding over to her and grabbing that clenched fist of hers and unballing it so she could read the lines, so she could see what was going on with her. But Isadora never let her close. “Do you know why she’s so moody?” Duse asked Martin, but he said it was just adolescence, that it would pass, like everything else.

  She didn’t like the way Isadora’s face changed whenever Duse read a client’s palm or held up a piece of their clothing to inhale it, to make it a part of her. She would look up and see Isadora just standing there, frowning at her. When she tried to tell Isadora things she was picking up from a school friend she had seen Isadora with, Isadora said that no one believed that sort of stuff anymore, and then was silent.

  “What sort of stuff—” began Duse. “Why are you all of a sudden so resistant?”

  It hurt Duse a little, she didn’t understand why Isadora would doubt her. Oh, it didn’t change the things Duse was, it didn’t make her any less sure of herself. She was used to people disparaging her, ignoring her. What bothered her was that, in refusing to see gifts in Duse, Isadora was refusing to see them in herself as well. She saw how Isadora was, how she did nothing more now than sit alone and write and write until her eyes began hurting her. Duse could see her rubbing them, getting up to dribble ice water on them.

  “Your star might fade, you know,” she told Isadora, and when Isadora brightened, Duse told her that never mind, she would want that gift someday, and she would be sorry. “It’s like a muscle,” she told Isadora. “You use it or it goes right to flab. It’ll disappear right from under you and you won’t know it until it’s too late.”

  “What do I need a star for—” Isadora said.

  “Because it’s who you are,” said Duse.

  “It’s a birthmark,” said Isadora.

  “You know,” said Duse slowly, “I won’t be around forever. You’ll want that gift.”

  “I’ll never want it,” said Isadora.

  PART TWO

  Isadora

  9

  In turning away from Duse, Isadora rediscovered her father. At first she centered on him because of his seemingly snagless relationship with Duse. She couldn’t figure out how someone so different from Duse could still be so sanely and successfully bonded to her. He didn’t have a star in his palm, he didn’t allow Duse to work with his clothing, to pull any information from his crumpled socks and worn ties. Anything else she wanted from him, he would tell her, he would give. He didn’t really believe Duse had any gifts—Duse knew that—but he believed in Duse, and somehow, for Duse that was enough.

  Isadora wondered how the two of them managed to work. They loved each other, the rhythm of their life seemed to carry them. They went to dinner, they took walks, they sat outside and talked. There were only a few places that he wanted to take Duse where she would refuse outright to go. She didn’t like the theatre. She wouldn’t take one step inside the door, no matter who was starring, because she would always sense Anna’s influence, Anna’s having named her after an actress—that very first sin of identity.

  Their lovemaking colored Isadora’s first impressions about sex. She would sometimes wake up in the night and hear all those glassy breaking noises, the rushing tears of fabric, the shape of her mother’s voice in the hall as it traveled and skipped. She was always curious about what they did, and she watched the expressions that filmed over their eyes in the morning, but she couldn’t figure it out. She thought sex was violent, but there was never a mark on them that she could see.

  Martin was delighted by Isadora’s sudden attention. At first, all they did was talk, and when that happened, conversation centered, as usual, on Duse. Isadora wanted to know if it bothered him that he couldn’t share Duse’s beliefs, if he felt shut out. It made Martin feel funny hearing her talk like that. He had always seen her as more Duse’s girl than his own; in his worst moments he sometimes imagined the two of them bonded together, leaving him out. She’s coming into her own, he thought, and then, “she’s disparaging her mother.” He couldn’t stand that. He had once refused to work on someone’s teeth because he asked him, right in the chair with the bib around his neck, if Martin was really hitched up with some lulu of a wife. He said that he had heard about it from a friend of his wife, and to tell the truth, that was why he had made the appointment. “Women,” said the man. “They’re all winners. Don’t feel bad.” Martin was so angry he had strode out of the office; he had made his receptionist go back inside and lie about a dental emergency. He’d never give that man another appointment.

  “What are you talking about?” he said. “I believe in your mother. I love her.”

  “No, you don’t,” said Isadora. “You won’t let her read your palm or anything.”

  He looked carefully at her, he repositioned his hands on his knees. “You think I shouldn’t love her because I can’t believe in some of the things she does? Things that make her happy, that carry her? You think I should try and knock that out from her? Listen, lots of people have religion, go to church and worship statues. So what if I can’t believe half of what Duse does? I can’t refute it either, can I?”

  “What if you could?” said Isadora.

  “I wouldn’t,” he said. “Why should I? She’s happy. I wish she didn’t believe a lot of that, but she does.”

  “You think it’s crazy, too.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I don’t understand—” said Isadora. “She’s not like the way she is with me when she’s with you. She doesn’t nag you. She doesn’t make you feel like you’re being impossible, like you’re deficient.”

  “Jesus, she’d hate hearing that,” he said. “She thinks that gift you have—whatever the hell it is—is identity, that it will keep you from ever being deficient. It matters more with you than with me because you’re blood. Me, I was choice.”

  “Destiny,” began Isadora.

  “Oh, come on now,” he said. “You know, she thinks something in you, maybe even while she was carrying you, started up one of her talents—that reading from clothing thing. Maybe she just wants to repay the favor.”

  “I don’t want her thinking I started anything in her. I don’t want the responsibility.”

  “Responsibility?” he said, puzzled.

  Isadora fretted with the ends of her hair. “Do you think I have a gift?”

  “I always thought you were special. Right from the moment I realized you were mine.” He leaned forward and tilted her chin towa
rd him.

  He watched her. When she was outside, he sometimes wandered into her room and looked at the titles on the spines of the books she was reading. She was obsessed with peculiarities. She read Carson McCullers; she had an illustrated text on Rasputin the Mad Monk. It was curious to him, though, that he never once saw a book on anything having to do with psychic phenomena, on anything related directly to Duse.

  He didn’t like her having doubts about Duse. It made him feel heated inside, uncomfortable. Every time he saw the wistful way Duse made herself available to that girl, the way she sat in the living room where Isadora could see her and approach and ask anything—something—he felt his insides folding up and halving right within him. “She talks to you, doesn’t she?” Duse kept asking him. “What does she say? What’s hurting her?” He never knew what to tell her. He felt that he was a tottering fulcrum balancing the two of them, and that at any moment he could topple.

  He tried different approaches. He told Isadora that the real world was crazy, violently so, that the things that went on outside made Duse’s palms quite tame, her readings almost boring. Isadora just shook her head and said that she wouldn’t be caged that easily, that she thought he was just trying to convince himself of that, and that she couldn’t really be expected to think he believed that at all.

  He wouldn’t give up. He thought that maybe her view of life just needed some stretch to it, that that might give her a more tolerant view of her mother and an understanding of his own position. It was too bad his mother wasn’t still around. He wondered idly how all of them would get on, what Duse would say about his mother’s speaking in tongues.

  Well, if he didn’t have his mother, he did have something: one patient, a large fleshy man called Bill Ordman, who was a tattooer. Martin had spent weeks making a new bridge for him, making it as perfect as possible because Bill had told him how fussy his customers were, how they would never let him prick their skin with his needles and inks if his teeth suddenly flipped out and clattered to the floor. Martin liked Bill. Bill’s own tattoos were discreet, small, and evenly placed. They were all of birds. He worshiped birds, he told Martin, and he always thought that the very worst of all God’s sins was to let people cage those creatures up. If you wanted them around, he said, then you could just do it with a nice tattoo. He had offered to put sparrows along Martin’s arms, but Martin had respectfully declined. He said he had a thing about needles.

  Bill didn’t look like a tattoo artist. He always came to Martin’s office in a clean fresh suit and a tie, and he said he worked out of his house, a huge two-story white building that he had bought cheaply and fixed up. He didn’t need to work, he said; he had lots of money, but he loved tattoos, he considered it a real art. “I don’t give a damn what anyone else says,” Bill had added, his mouth pursing, growing smaller. His business was in the yellow pages, but he wouldn’t put any advertising on his property, no signs, and he was careful about his clientele. He wanted only those who appreciated his art—and he said, proudly, that he really had more clients than he had time for.

  Martin wanted Isadora to meet this man. He really thought it might ease some of her tightness if she saw someone else living in a way people thought was strange, someone who was so obviously adjusted, so appreciated as Bill said he was. When he told Isadora he wanted her to meet someone interesting, she said all right, that she wanted to get out of the house anyway.

  He was right. They did like each other. Isadora roamed the house, staring at all the framed color photographs of birds that he had blown up. “Every one of those beauties is life-sized,” he told her. He showed her the bird on his arm, the tiny canaries on his feet, how he could make them flutter when he arched his feet. He had mostly small breeds on his body because he insisted everything be life-sized. He touched her hair and said that he wished there were a color like that that he could use, because that shade of fire deserved to be duplicated in a tattoo.

  She was fascinated by the tattoos. He took her upstairs to his studio and showed her all of his inks, his needles. Martin rested on the heels of his hands and let the two of them talk. Bill told her about some of the botched tattoos that he’d had to remove, the work of second-rate artists, he figured. “Kids sometimes even try to do their own,” he said. “They butcher the hell out of themselves. They take these sewing needles and wrap them up tight with white thread. Then they dunk them in India ink. The thread acts like a wick, keeping the ink in. The designs are horrible—inked-in names of girls they’ll wish they never met in two weeks’ time, ships and hearts, everything you can think of. They sketch the designs on their skin first with a plain old Bic pen, and then they prick them in with the needles. The ink always turns green, no matter what color they use. They sometimes try to prick the designs out—give themselves a nice stiff dose of blood poisoning if you ask me.” It unnerved him, he said, when a woman would come in and ask for something disfiguring or indiscreet. “You can’t talk people out of anything they really want,” he said.

  Martin and Isadora left around three. When they were driving home, Martin, seeing the loose, easy way Isadora was leaning against the seat, asked her if she didn’t think Bill was fabulous.

  “I liked him,” Isadora said. Then she turned her face toward the window. She rolled the window all the way down and let the wind frisk up her hair. “But he wasn’t married, was he? He didn’t have any kids.”

  Martin gave up trying to convince Isadora of anything. It still bothered him when he saw how she would shy away from Duse, but he rationalized; he kept saying it was just a stage. Duse, frowning, said only that she was Isadora’s ally, not her enemy.

  They both tried to give Isadora room. Duse never criticized any of the clothing Isadora suddenly took to wearing—the skirts so short Isadora could almost grip the hems with her finger tips, the shirts she made out of white sheets that she tinted with Rit. She never complained about the way she braided her hair with gold thread. It made Duse wince, too, to see the way Isadora did the dishes, plunging her hands deep into the hot water, ignoring the clean glassy bottles of hand cream Duse kept by the sink, but still Duse said nothing. She walked right out of the kitchen, willing herself not to see. It bothered her, too, to see the secretive way Isadora scribbled in those notebooks of hers, the way she hid the pages, the time she had even placed a locked red diary in the center of her bed, inviting and forbidden.

  The school called Duse once, insisting that she do something about Isadora’s short skimps of skirts. Isadora had been sitting at the kitchen table making herself a peanut butter sandwich, and she listened to Duse telling the school that they had no right at all to impinge on Isadora’s freedom of choice, that she didn’t care how much of Isadora’s eyes were covered by those English-cut bangs of hers, she didn’t even care if you could see a pale flicker of panties under that girl’s skirts. When Duse hung up, Isadora, embarrassed, almost shy, handed Duse half her sandwich. “Thank you,” she told Duse and Duse just said that there was nothing to thank her for, that she would have done it for anyone, and that she had never liked people interfering with anyone’s sense of self.

  The only thing Duse couldn’t keep herself from making a comment about were the leotards Isadora wore. Isadora had gone through grammar school wearing brilliant discordant colors, yellow and purples and blacks, checks and dots. Even her underwear back then was flaming with color. This past year though, she had taken to wearing black, even in the muggy summer swelter. Duse didn’t know what exactly precipitated the leotards. One day that month Isadora had come home from shopping, her arms circled about a large bag. She had twelve different long-sleeved leotards, all round-necked, all black. Some of them she sewed tucks into, others she embroidered flowers or stars across; there were even a few leotards that she didn’t doctor up, that she didn’t put her own stamp on. She layered those things under sleeveless blouses, she wore them with jeans and her best skirts. She was so slender, so small-breasted, that Duse, watching her, saw with a start that Isadora looked like a
dancer.

  “I knew it,” she said.

  “Knew what?” said Isadora.

  “Your naming. Isadora Duncan was a modern dancer. Maybe you never stuck with dance, but your name’s coming out now just the same.”

  “Duncan didn’t wear leotards,” said Isadora. “She just wore tunics. And anyway, I just like leotards. They’re comfortable. I don’t have to iron them or anything. They don’t wrinkle and they fit. That’s all there is to it.”

  “I don’t know. How comfortable can they be when you have to go to the bathroom? All those layers to unpeel.”

  “I’m used to it,” said Isadora.

  Duse watched Isadora stand and leave the kitchen, her shoulder blades moving under the nylon of her leotard. Duse would always see the connection between Isadora’s name and her leotard, and Isadora—well, Isadora wouldn’t.

  Isadora might have balked at the gifts Duse wanted to give her, but she would accept things from Martin. The thing Martin would do for Isadora, the gift he had to give her, had to do with Isadora’s relationships. She was solitary. She almost never brought anyone home to dinner or went to someone else’s for a meal. Isadora knew how Duse could be with company. She had seen how Duse could casually motion someone into the other room and whisper to them that she sensed something in them. Duse always thought that people really wanted to know those things; it inevitably surprised her when faces turned cross right in front of her. She told baffled women where to find their glasses and how to diet; she told men they were prone to heart failures. Martin always stayed in the background, but Isadora always felt vaguely tortured, responsible.

  Isadora did have one close friend, a girl named Teddy Wilson. Teddy had a thug of a boyfriend who attended the University of Wisconsin, and who was always offering to set Isadora up with his roommate so he and Teddy could have the room to themselves. It made Isadora uncomfortable and restless to hear Teddy talk about sex, but it made Isadora feel heated to hear Teddy’s boyfriend, to see the way his hands roamed across Teddy’s body, how they insolently traveled over every hollow. Isadora always put this bit of matchmaking to the back of her mind, but she told Teddy to stop pushing her, to just stop.