A Beauty (28 page)

“Chop suey for me,” Hermie Kulak had said before he’d balanced himself on the fourth stool in from the door.

“Fee and chee,” Jacob Kulak had shouted from the door. He was holding it open while he scanned Main Street for a distant sight of girls. The brothers ate at the Bluebird every night. They were big-boned heavy eaters, farm boys who worked hard and hadn’t washed behind their ears.

“You let in flies,” Jerry had yelled at Jacob. He’d been feeding the two of them and yelling at them since he and Roy Wah opened the Bluebird in Charlesville. They didn’t mind. They liked him bossing them around. They missed their parents. They still looked stunned whenever they spoke of the car accident. Their parents had been killed in a second-hand rattletrap the brothers had named “Fargo” because they’d had a bet about how far it would go before it would fall apart. Unfortunately for the elder Kulaks, the brakes had died before the engine, and it had happened at a busy intersection with the new Trans-Canada Highway. Jerry stood in for the parental guidance the brothers missed, although he was old enough to be their grandfather. He was old enough to be everyone’s grandfather, now. His own family had remained in China. His wife still wrote almost monthly, and he mailed his letters to her like clockwork, since she remained concerned about his business. She could have joined him in Canada, but their son couldn’t immigrate. He was always too old. When the Exclusion Act was repealed in 1947, allowing children under eighteen to join their parents, he was already twenty-four. The age limit went up over
the years, but so did his son’s age. Now he was teaching at Xi’an Jiaotong University and had his own family. Jerry had visited them once in thirty years and was not resigned to not seeing them again. One of these days, he told Roy, we’re going to get it all repealed. Roy was a shy man and did not belong to the committees Jerry sat on, and he’d never been accused of being overly optimistic, but he’d extended himself to agree with Jerry on that.

“The usual?” Roy asked, stubbing out his cigarette as if it was his only joy when Jerry went back to the kitchen. While Jerry was a bustler, Roy, decades younger, perpetually drooped. His eyes drooped and his shoulders drooped and in the last few years he’d begun to sigh after the slightest effort. It suited him to stay in the kitchen and cook, but he liked to let everyone know he was the one carrying the workload while Jerry flitted around out front, socializing.

Jean Ross arrived right on time that evening, came in the back door grinning all over her flat, freckled face. She tied on her apron, noted the deep fryer releasing steam and stink and the blackened wok heating on top of the stove, and opened the swing door to the café an inch. “Oh God, look at the two of them on them stools,” she muttered. “Like a pair of overfilled ice-cream cones.” She wasn’t exactly svelte herself. She was all horizontal planes, a spread of buck teeth and hips. “Why do they sit on them stools?” she said, but she knew why. It was so they could talk to her and Jerry. They were awkward young farmers, not easy with townsfolk.

Everybody liked Jean. She could get away with murder at the Bluebird and she knew it. Jerry and Roy both indulged her. She didn’t care what anyone thought about her or said about her, a white woman working for Chinese. It was, in fact, against the law in the province, although few people knew that. Jean herself hadn’t known until Jerry informed her the day she’d applied for the job. The Mounties ate in the café regularly. Jerry didn’t know
if they were ignorant of that law or if they’d decided it didn’t concern them. Either way, Jean didn’t give two hoots. She liked her work, and why shouldn’t she? He and Roy were lenient with her, the patrons were grateful for a decent restaurant, and the place was cheerful, exactly what he’d been aiming for when he’d had the walls painted an airy blue and hung a few Chinese pictures among the posters of Elvis and Connie Francis and Sandra Dee and the ads for Coke and Doublemint gum. Cheerful was in his mind when he’d picked shiny turquoise for the Arborite counter and tabletops and the vinyl that covered the stools and chair cushions. The café could seat forty. It could have accommodated more, but people here had a low proximity limit and Jerry wanted them to feel comfortable. He’d had one business failure. (It had been no fault of his own, but tell his wife that.) He couldn’t afford another.

Jean was setting two dripping Cokes in front of the Kulak brothers, and Jerry was polishing the far-end serviette holder when the woman walked in and turned an ordinary Friday into unusual. She was not from these parts, obviously, not in that stylish dress. Even her ash-blonde hair, with its fall and gleam and its casual upward flip, looked foreign to Charlesville, but her face was flushed from the stinging heat of the late-day sun on Main Street, or maybe from the four of them staring at her as she walked in, the brothers with their mouths gaping.

“You want table?” Jerry asked her, but she was already seating herself at the closest table but one, the corner table next to the window. He brought her a menu, battling with himself about asking her to move. She thanked him solemnly, her eyes momentarily looking into his, and he couldn’t do it. She’d instinctively slipped to the most private spot they had, banked by the wall and the window and a row of snake plants in tall Chinese pots. He couldn’t ask her to move. Jean gave him a meaningful look when
he came back to the counter, but he shrugged it off. They didn’t reserve tables at the Bluebird, no matter how regularly customers came, or how important that corner table was to them.

Jerry fussed a bit before he took the woman her water, giving her time to settle and read the menu, and while he was fussing, the Thompsons arrived, bringing with them their usual hubbub, just the two of them and the two little kids, so far, but you’d think there was a dozen of them. “God, don’t tell me that bump in her blouse means another’s on the way,” Jean muttered as she hauled out the high chair for them and they ranged themselves near the back of the room. And then Dr. Pilgrim came in and drifted to his usual table, sitting facing the front so he wouldn’t have to talk constantly to the Thompsons. Jerry watched his surprise when he glanced up to find a strange woman sitting in the corner. The doctor was a thin, tired, nervous man, but not unattractive to women, Jerry had observed. He blinked a lot. He was blinking when Jerry came over with the menu. He was one of the few who pretended he didn’t know it by heart.

In their division of duties, Jean took the orders since she remembered better than Jerry. He didn’t like hearing, “
Not
gravy, this time,” and it made Roy mad to throw out even a scoop of mashed potatoes. Jerry preferred the greeting, the cheering, the delivery of menus and water, the pouring of endless cups of coffee – shuffling back and forth as if he wore slippers and a gown and a pigtail.

Besides the big table at the back that was meant for parties of eight or ten, there were now three tables open, all three in the exposed centre of the café, and when Albert Earle and his wife came in, a little later than their normal time, they stalled by the pop dispenser. Faltering, they made Jerry see them as they were going to look ten or twenty years from now. They were just sixty or so, but the smallest surprise could shock people into a kind of temporary
old age. Jerry had observed that before. He’d noticed it in himself. And for people who relied on every day being much like every other day, maybe this wasn’t such a little surprise. It certainly wasn’t a pleasant one. Betty Earle, after that one look at the occupied corner table, seemed about to turn around and leave, but Albert cupped her elbow and guided her forward. She was a broad-backed woman, thick of shoulder and with almost no neck, and it was odd to see her being led anywhere, even across a room. Jean and Jerry stood back behind the counter and watched to see whether she’d sit beside the Thompsons or by Dr. Pilgrim. Either would pose a problem.

When she finally chose the table next to the doctor, she sat on the chair that faced away from him. She stared up at Jerry for a belligerent moment and then transferred her annoyance to Jean. Well, it wasn’t the best seat in the house. Either side of Albert, she’d be looking at the Kulak brothers’ backs as they bent over their plates, forks in constant motion.

“Betty Earle don’t like it,” Jean hissed in Jerry’s ear as she went by on her way to the kitchen. It was a little joke and on two counts. One, because everyone in Charlesville called Betty Earle by both her names. You never heard her called Mrs. Earle or Betty. It was as if people wanted to impress themselves and everyone else with her identity. And two, because Betty Earle didn’t like much that she came across and didn’t hesitate to let the world know when she didn’t. But it wasn’t a funny joke, because she could scare the pants off you if it was you on the receiving end of her anger.

Jerry went over with the coffee pot. Right away, Albert Earle asked for the roast beef. “And veal cutlets?” Jerry asked Betty Earle. She was staring at the woman in the corner as if she knew her from a long time ago and had never liked her.

“Betty?” Albert said.

She looked down at the coffee in her cup and nodded.

“Hot one, today, Jerry,” Albert said in his apologetic way.

Jerry flinched. He wished Albert wouldn’t talk like that. He hovered over them, looking down on the man’s broad, pitted skull. The scars from the dripping tar had never faded. You could see them through the hair; they’d created odd little whorls in his hair like some people had at the backs of their necks. His head and forehead and nose were sprinkled with the black dots, indented into the flesh like inside-out moles. Couldn’t he see his wife’s scars were just as visible? He didn’t make things better by apologizing in advance for whatever she might do.

“How’s it going?” Jean asked when he came back to the kitchen with the orders. She was catching a smoke while she could, leaning against the sink, watching Roy sling food around.

“Scary,” Jerry said. “Mr. Earle apologizing already.”

Jean popped a few smoke rings and watched them drift over the stove. “He can apologize for every word that comes out of her mouth,” she said. “It don’t make no difference.”

“He’s scared what she might do if anybody say something to set her off.”

“Nobody around here’s ever gonna speak two words to Betty Earle they don’t have to.”

“She hasn’t hurt anybody,” Roy said.

“Huh. You don’t get life in prison for teaching Sunday School.”

“There were extenuating circumstances, with a baby like that,” Roy said. “You don’t know what she was going through.”

Jean blew three perfect, fat doughnuts.

“I gotta get out there,” Jerry said.

“Don’t get your shirt in a knot. I’m going. She likes it, you know. She likes it that we’re scared of her.”

Jerry thought she was right about that. Betty Earle seemed to want to frighten people. Sometimes Jerry thought she did it to
punish Albert for living while she was in prison, or maybe she wanted to punish them all.

Stranded in the open middle of the Bluebird Café, Albert decided coffee must have been invented as a substitute for talking. In their usual corner, sheltered by the snake plants, nobody noticed that he and his wife didn’t talk. They should have gone home, turned around and gone home. Betty had wanted to leave. He could have opened a can of soup (he could see the can opener and feel the key in his right hand; he could feel the tin’s resistance while he twisted it). Why should he care if everyone in the café was staring at them, wondering what they were going to do?

The woman in the corner had his usual chair, facing the other tables, but she wasn’t looking at anyone. She had a calm, composed manner, almost an aura. She’d be a peaceful person to know, he thought. Jean was setting her meal down on her table, now, and the woman was looking up and chatting with her in a friendly way. Dr. Pilgrim was watching them, too, his eyes blinking away. Betty wouldn’t forget the doctor was behind her. He was new in Charlesville; he hadn’t been around back when she went on trial, but just the fact of his being in the medical profession made his presence intolerable to her, and not only because of the baby. Angela. Involuntarily, Albert shook his head. He knew before he looked up he’d find Betty glaring at him. She didn’t like head shaking. But Angela – the very thought of her demanded physical expression, just her name in his mind had to be shaken free, had to be gone as soon as he could make it go. At the trial they’d asked Betty who had chosen the name and why, and she’d said she’d picked it because she’d thought the baby wouldn’t live long. Nothing but the truth, the stupid, stupid truth.

The café had quieted. It was because it had this tension at its centre, the tension Betty created wherever she went. Made it seem like everyone was holding their breath. One of the Thompson kids started chattering. Albert tried to think it was a good thing the young family was here tonight, otherwise the occasional whine from the overhead fan and Jerry’s shuffling would be the only sounds to bridge them all. On the other hand, the children were sure to annoy Betty, and the louder they got, the more irritable she’d become. It wasn’t that kids weren’t afraid of her, but they’d forget she was nearby. Nobody else forgot her presence. He sure as hell didn’t. A day hadn’t gone by since her return that he hadn’t borne her like a burden on his back.

People were staring at them and then trying not to stare. He should say something, anything. But what? Only misery words came to his mind. Drab. Dirty. Dull. Dumb. Well, he was certainly that in every way. He coughed. That earned him a glance of disdain. And then he couldn’t stop coughing. His face was getting red, he could tell, but he had something in his throat and he could not quit hacking. Betty pushed his water glass towards him. He picked it up and put it down again because he was in danger of spilling it, he was coughing so hard. He pulled out his handkerchief and blew his nose. Sometimes that worked. He blew and cleared his throat and coughed. He was sweating now. Everyone was trying not to look at him.

Finally he got himself under control and was able to sip at his water. He coughed a lot lately. He often thought he had something caught in his throat. It reminded him of the days after the fire, when his larynx and bronchial tubes had swelled and he’d wheezed and gasped for breath and coughed up black phlegm full of soot and shreds of flesh from his seared lungs. Sometimes he thought he was losing his voice. He found himself speaking almost
in a whisper, as he’d had to do right after the fire. He was pretty sure these were all symptoms of throat cancer. He did nothing about it, preferring to contemplate what people would say after he died, that he’d left it until it was too late.