Five Fortunes (4 page)

“And you’re successful? Well, you must be successful if DeeAnne could afford such a birthday present.”

“She’s married to a plastic surgeon, he may have had something to do with it. But we have an agency in L.A., and one in San Diego.

We’re thinking about a third one, maybe San Francisco.”

“Do you have a specialty?”

“No, we do everything. But we only hire women.”

“Really!”

“Of course. They’re more curious, and more patient. As a matter of fact, we only hire big fat women.”

Rae shouted with delight.

“I’m serious,” said Carter. “Nobody looks at fat women, they can go anywhere. They can sit for hours in a hotel lobby, nobody hits on them. Nobody wonders what they’re doing there.”

“And how on earth do you locate big fat women detectives?”

24 / Beth Gutcheon

“We train them. We’re beating the applicants off with sticks.

Everyone wants to work for us, and nobody ever quits.”

“Have you ever hired men?”

“We did at first. But the women are so good at it. Also, I don’t like my people to carry guns. Lot of men have a problem with that.”

“But isn’t it dangerous? To do what you do, without a gun?”

“I think it’s more dangerous with one. But no one has to agree with us. If they don’t, they can work for someone else.”

“I think I’d like to apply for a job,” said Rae, “if you open an office in San Francisco.”

“You’re not really fat enough, but I can use a good operative in your age range,” said Carter. “For instance, can you tell me—what’s going on with this one?”

“Which one?” asked Rae. She was on board immediately, ready to be trained.

“This one right ahead of us, on the left.” She indicated Laurie.

They both watched as the redhead talked and gestured with her hands. Laurie listened, nodding from time to time. Once she laughed.

Sometimes she shook her head and clucked in sympathy.

“Something terrible has happened to her,” said Carter.

“You don’t mean the redhead?” Rae wanted her to mean the redhead, because she knew the answer, at least partly; she’d heard it last night in the steam room. It started with an alleged fibroid tumor the size of a cantaloupe.

“No, the other one. There’s something in the way she holds her shoulders, and something around the eyes…and besides, she looks familiar to me. Not to you?”

“I don’t think so…”

They walked in silence, both now watching Laurie. They were approaching The Cloisters again, coming in from a new direction, one that took them across a parched arroyo. It made a striking con-trast with the green of the lawns and a lettuce field in the distance.

It gave the place the look not so much of an oasis, which it was, but of a wizard zone like the Emerald City.

They’d caught up with Laurie and the redhead. The redhead was
Five Fortunes / 25

exclaiming “Diverticulitis! Excuse me? And I was about to have a hysterectomy?” Laurie shook her head as if to say, What a world.

“Can you believe this?” Glenna Leisure (as her tag said) turned to provide Rae and Carter with an update on the conversation. “Hysterectomy, said the first one, drugs, said the second one, diverticu-litis, said the third. Know what it was?”

“What?”

“Ruptured appendix. Ruptured, fucking, excuse my Latin, appendix! I was in the hospital for a month. My husband wanted to sue, but I said, forget it, give the money to me, not the lawyers, I’m going to The Cloisters.”

“I hope they paid for your hospital bill,” said Carter.

“You bet the farm they paid, and you should have seen the bill.

This
thick…I could have died. I almost did.” As Glenna went on, Rae and Carter both noted Laurie pulling quietly away from them.

She came to a divergent path leading across a courtyard and toward the bedrooms instead of back to Saguaro, and with a little apologetic wave, she left them. Rae glanced at Carter, and saw that this was exactly what Carter had expected. Carter watched Laurie go with a professional curiosity. Something was going on, and she wondered what it was. Rae watched Laurie go with a mother’s heart. That kind young woman was in great grief or trouble. Was there any way to help?

A
my had finished her breakfast, which had been served to her in her room overlooking the koi pond. Having decided to forgo the healing silence of Zen koans in her solitude, she was reading Ann Landers when Jill came in.

“It’s pouring rain in New York,” Jill said.

“Is it?”

“Yes. They have a page where they tell the weather all over the country.”

Jill wasn’t used to eating breakfast alone. She had read her paper with great thoroughness, the better to distract herself from how hungry she was. Breakfast had been a little dish of oatmeal, a spoonful of maple sugar, skim milk, and a couple of slices of papaya.

She’d dispatched it in about a minute and a half, and now she noticed that her mother had not eaten the squash blossom that decorated her plate. Jill had eaten hers.

“Eight-thirty to nine, I have stretch class, or T’ai Chi. What do you?”

“I always go to Stretch.”

“I think I’ll try T’ai Chi.”

Amy looked surprised.

“Do you know what it is?”

“No. But, why not? What do you do at nine?”

“I have Step or Dance.”

“I hate Step.”

26

Five Fortunes / 27

“I know,” said Amy.

When Jill had gone, Amy sat, remembering her lithe little girl in her tutu, dancing a sugarplum fairy in
The Nutcracker
. How she had loved it. When she’d started taking toe, Amy would often see after class that Jill’s little feet were bloody and the wads of lamb’s wool packed into the hard toes of her shoes were soaked red. Jill never minded. Her teachers had believed she could dance for Peter Martins.

Amy wondered now if Jill the elephant even remembered having once been a hummingbird.

Stretch class was very soothing, except that the poor giant woman called Carter, who hadn’t brought the right things and was trying to work out in her tennis clothes, split the center seam of her shorts open. The whole class lay on their backs with their feet in the air as New Age music twanged and tinkled, and pretty little Abby cried out instructions with merry zeal.

“Now drop those feet out wide apart, as w-i-i-i-de as you can, and str-e-e-e-tch those inner thighs…” and the whole class heard the unmistakable rip. Carter began to laugh helplessly.

“Hold your tuck, ladies, and stretch—hold that tuck…” cried Abby as she sprang upright like a cat and tripped to Carter’s side.

“Are you all right?”

“Oh, perfect,” Carter said. “This is my idea of a vacation,” and her laughter became uncontrollable. It proved contagious, and all over the room, poses collapsed as glamour girls, rich wives, doctors, lawyers, and captains of industry in their violet and navy sweat suits flopped over giggling.

Amy, prone on the exercise carpet, said to Carter, “You know, my daughter has some sweats that would fit you.”

Carter, valiantly stifling her snorts of laughter, rolled over and looked at Amy. She recognized the New York Blonde from last night, the mother-daughter team at the first table. The rest of the class was being exhorted to scissor its legs in the air at a rapid beat, impossibly fast, it would have seemed, except that Abby was doing it with no trouble, and calling instructions at the same time.

28 / Beth Gutcheon

“They’ve sent the shopping fairy to the mall for me,” said Carter.

“I’m sure, but in the meantime. They’ll be too short, but…”

“Well, thanks,” said Carter, accepting. She and Amy scrambled to their feet and crept out of the class.

Outside, the morning was growing warm. As they hurried along, Carter still couldn’t completely stifle the odd giggle.

“Please excuse me,” she said. “I seem to be hysterical. I think it might be nicotine deprivation.”

“Makes sense to me,” said Amy. “When I quit smoking, I had the most lurid erotic fantasies for about two weeks. It was definitely an altered state.”

“That hasn’t happened to me yet,” said Carter, and she began to laugh again. “Oh god…”

Amy began to giggle too. “Yes, this would not be the ideal spot; you don’t want to start waylaying the gardeners. Fortunately, when it happened to me, my husband was at home and I managed to channel it into legal behavior.”

“Did he know why he got lucky?”

“Heavens, no, he hadn’t even noticed the cigarettes were gone.

Thank god. Meanwhile I dreamed about the punk who fixes our Volvo…”

Carter laughed.

“Here, this is Jill’s room.
Is
this it? B12, yes, like the vitamin, we don’t want to be found stealing someone
else’s
clothes.” Amy pushed the door to Jill’s room open and they went in.

“Pardon the fact that we hang all our clothes on the floor,” she said. “I assume you know that’s correct procedure for Generation X. Or Y, or whatever Jill is. Do you have children?”

“No,” said Carter. The room had not yet been seen to by the maid, and there were towels and panty hose and shoes strewn around wherever Jill had finished with them.

Amy was rummaging in Jill’s suitcase, still full on the luggage rack. She produced a quite enormous pair of green sweatpants and handed them to Carter. Carter held them against herself. Both could see that they were wide enough, but would barely reach below the knees.

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“Wait, wait,” said Amy. “She has half the Capezio store in here…”

She produced two sets of leg warmers which, when worn one above the other, would fill in the gap between the ankles of the sweatpants and the ankles of Carter. Amy explained the theory and practice of this, and Carter obediently took off her torn shorts and donned Jill’s clothes.

“I think this is rather fetching,” she said, surveying herself in the mirror. “Thank you.”

“You’re quite welcome.”

“I think we’ve managed to miss the rest of stretch class. What are you doing next?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Carter. “What is ‘Step’?”

“It’s like running up and down stairs waving your arms around.”

The two were out in the sunshine again, on the path to the exercise studios.

“That sounds horrible. What’s the other one?”

“Dancercise. Better music, harder routines.”

Carter decided to start with dance, in honor of her unaccustomed leg warmers. “At the end of the week I look like Margot Fonteyn, right?”

“Exactly,” said Amy.

Jill was already in the dance classroom when Carter came in.

“If you think these clothes look familiar,” she said to Jill, “there’s a reason.”

Before Jill could answer, Babette, a young woman with a blond ponytail and a bare midriff, pranced in and socked her cassette into the tape machine. “All right, ladies—everyone to the barre, please!

We’re going to warm up!” In a moment twelve ladies were doing deep-knee bends while trying to follow Babette’s balletic arms. Only Jill could do it. Jill could move as if her joints were made of liquid.

Carter was fascinated watching her. As the music got faster, she began to pant and blow. Other ladies were moving their feet while their arms dangled. But Jill seemed to inhale the music through her ears and let it out through her limbs. Babette clapped her hands and 30 / Beth Gutcheon

shouted, “Whooo!” Behind her, eleven ladies turned red in the face, lost track of the sequence of steps, and reached for towels to blot sweat from their eyes. Jill could move as fast as Babette, and if it hadn’t been for her great size, Carter could see you’d have given her points past Babette for grace. This girl was a dancer.

Carter liked the Fred Astaire music best. She dipped and swayed and twirled around the room, quite forgetting, herself, that she didn’t exactly embody America’s idea of feminine beauty. A little woman in the back row whose tag said RUSTY HAINES changed direction at the wrong moment, causing an entire line of exercisers to pile up in the corner. But Jill, in front, missed the mess and kept dancing. She whirled, she cocked her head, she clicked her fingers off the beat as Babette did.

Babette got a round of applause at the end of the class. She turned and applauded Jill, and so did the rest. Jill blushed, but her smile was radiant.

At eleven, there was a break in the schedule, and everyone gathered outside at the pool. Trays of raw vegetables and fruit had been brought, and cups of hot, spicy, vegetable broth that was said to be rich in potassium, whatever good that was. Carter found Amy and Jill at a shaded table eating carrot sticks.

“May I join you?”

“Please.”

“Where have you been this hour?” she asked them.

“I took another Dance,” said Jill.

“I’ve been at Body Shaping,” said Amy. “Can’t you tell?”

“I did think there was something about you,” said Carter.

“I want to hear about T’ai Chi,” Amy said to Jill.

“Laurie and I were wave and kelp.”

“The lady from the hot tub?”

Jill nodded. “You choose a partner, and one of you is kelp, and the other moves around you sort of bumping or pushing against your shoulder, or your hip, or behind your knee. Like the action of water, making the kelp bend and sway. Then you trade.”

Five Fortunes / 31

“Is this one of those horrible New Age things where you have to fall backward into someone’s arms?” Carter asked.

“No, wait. When you’re kelp, you keep your eyes closed, because kelp can’t see, and you have to wait for the water to move you. What Laurie said is, you realize that the current can move you but after it moves on, you go back to standing. You bend with it, but you never break. You’re never defeated. Want me to show you?” Neither Carter nor Amy made any move to get up.

“And who was it, who was your partner?”

“You know—the one from the Japanese bath. The one from Idaho.”

“Do you know her?” Amy asked Carter. “The tall woman, with the eyes?”

“She’s down at the end of the pool, under the clock,” said Jill, and Carter looked and saw that it was the woman who had interested her, last night and this morning.

“I’ve been thinking she looked familiar.”