Lady Oracle (2 page)

You can’t change the past, Aunt Lou used to say. Oh, but I wanted to; that was the one thing I really wanted to do. Nostalgia convulsed me. The sky was blue, the sun was shining, to the left a puddle of glass fragments shimmered like water; a small green lizard with iridescent blue eyes warmed its cool blood on the railing; from the valley came a tinkling sound, a soothing moo, the lull of alien voices. I was safe, I could begin again, but instead I sat on my balcony, beside the remains of a kitchen window broken before my time, in
a chair made of aluminum tubes and yellow plastic strips, and made choking noises.

The chair belonged to Mr. Vitroni, the landlord, who was fond of felt-tipped pens with different colors of ink, red, pink, purple, orange, a taste I shared. He used his to show the other people in the town that he could write. I used mine for lists and love letters, sometimes both at once:
Have gone to pick up some coffee
, XXX. The thought of these abandoned shopping trips intensified my sorrow … no more grapefruits, cut in half for two, with a red maraschino cherry like a navel boss, which Arthur habitually rolled to the side of the plate; no more oatmeal porridge, loathed by me, extolled by Arthur, lumping and burning because I hadn’t taken his advice and done it in a double boiler.… Years of breakfasts, inept, forsaken, never to be recovered.… Years of murdered breakfasts, why had I done it?

I realized I’d come to the worst place in the entire world. I should have gone somewhere fresh and clean, somewhere I’d never been before. Instead I’d returned to the same town, the same house even, where we’d spent the summer the year before. And nothing had changed: I’d have to cook on the same two-burner stove with the gas cylinder,
bombola
, that ran out always in the middle of a half-done meal; eat at the same table, which still had the white rings on the varnish from my former carelessness with hot cups; sleep in the same bed, its mattress furrowed with age and the anxieties of many tenants. The wraith of Arthur would pursue me; already I could hear faint gargling noises from the bathroom, the crunch of glass as he scraped back his chair on the balcony, waiting for me to pass his cup of coffee out to him through the kitchen window. If I opened my eyes and turned my head, surely he would be there, newspaper held six inches from his face, pocket dictionary on one knee, left index finger inserted (perhaps) in his ear, an unconscious gesture he denied performing.

It was my own stupidity, my own fault. I should have gone to Tunisia or the Canary Islands or even Miami Beach, on the Greyhound Bus, hotel included, but I didn’t have the willpower; I needed something more familiar. A place with no handholds, no landmarks, no past at all: that would have been too much like dying.

By this time I was weeping spasmodically into one of the landlord’s bath towels and I’d thrown another one over my head, an old habit: I used to cry under pillows so as not to be found out. But through the towel I could now hear an odd clicking sound. It must’ve been going on for a while. I listened, and it stopped. I raised the towel. There, at the level of my ankles and only three feet away, floated a head, an old man’s head, topped by a raveling straw hat. The whitish eyes stared at me with either alarm or disapproval; the mouth, caved in over the gums, was open at one side. He must’ve heard me. Perhaps he thought I was having an attack of some kind, in my underwear, towel-covered on a balcony. Perhaps he thought I was drunk.

I smiled damply, to reassure him, clutched my towels around me and tried to get out of the aluminum chair, remembering too late its trick of folding up if you struggled. I lost several of the towels before I was able to back in through the door.

I’d recognized the old man. It was the same old man who used to come one or two afternoons a week to tend the artichokes on the arid terrace below the house, cutting the larger weeds with a pair of rusty shears and snipping off the leathery artichoke heads when they were ready. Unlike the other people in the town, he never said anything to me or returned a word of greeting. He gave me the creeps. I put on my dress (out of sight of the picture window, behind the door) and went into the bathroom to swab my face with a dampened washcloth and blow my nose on some of Mr. Vitroni’s scratchy toilet paper; then to the kitchen to make a cup of tea.

For the first time since arriving, I began to feel afraid. It was more than depressing to have returned to this town, it was dangerous. It’s no good thinking you’re invisible if you aren’t, and the problem was: if I had recognized the old man, perhaps he had recognized me.

I
sat down at the table to drink my tea. Tea was consoling and it would help me think; though this tea wasn’t very good, it came in bags and smelled of Band-Aids. I’d bought it at the main grocery store, along with a package of Peek Frean biscuits, imported from England. The store had laid in a large supply of these, anticipating a wave of English tourists which so far hadn’t arrived.
By Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen, Biscuit Manufacturers
, it said on the box, which I found morale-building. The Queen would not snivel: regret is gauche.
Pull yourself together
, said a stern royal voice. I sat straighter in my chair and considered what I should do.

I’d taken precautions, of course. I was using my other name, and when I’d gone to see if Mr. Vitroni’s flat was available I’d worn my sunglasses and covered my head with the scarf I’d bought at the Toronto airport, printed with pink Mounted Policemen performing a musical ride against a background of purple Rocky Mountains, made in Japan. I shrouded my body in one of the sacklike print dresses, also pink, with baby-blue flowers, that I’d bought off a street rack in Rome. I would’ve preferred the big red roses or the orange
dahlias: this dress made me look like an expanse of wallpaper. But I wanted something inconspicuous. Mr. Vitroni hadn’t remembered me, I was sure of that. However, the old man had caught me without my disguise, and, worse still, with my hair showing. Waist-length red hair was very noticeable in that part of the country.

The biscuits were hard as plaster and tasted of shelf. I ate the last one, dipping it into the tea and chewing it up mechanically before I realized I’d finished the package. That was a bad sign, I’d have to watch that.

I decided I’d have to do something about my hair. It was evidence, its length and color had been a sort of trademark. Every newspaper clipping, friendly or hostile, had mentioned it, in fact a lot of space had been devoted to it: hair in the female was regarded as more important than either talent or the lack of it.
Joan Foster; celebrated author
of
Lady Oracle,
looking like a lush Rossetti portrait, radiating intensity, hypnotized the audience with her unearthly …
(The Toronto Star).
Prose-poetess Joan Foster looked impressively junoesque in her flowing red hair and green robe; unfortunately she was largely inaudible
 … (The Globe and Mail). They could trace my hair much more easily than they could ever trace me. I would have to cut it off and dye the rest, though I wasn’t sure where I’d be able to get the hair dye. Certainly not in this town. I might have to go back to Rome for it. I should’ve bought a wig, I thought; that was an oversight.

I went into the bathroom and dug the nail scissors out of my zippered makeup bag. They were too small, but it was a choice between that and one of Mr. Vitroni’s dull paring knives. It took me quite a while to saw the hair off, strand by strand. I tried shaping what remained, but it got shorter and shorter, though no less uneven, until I saw that I’d cropped my head like a concentration camp inmate’s. My face looked quite different, though: I could pass for a secretary on vacation.

The hair lay in mounds and coils in the bathroom sink. I wanted to save it; I thought briefly of stowing it in a bureau drawer. But how could I explain if it were found? They’d start looking for the arms and legs and the rest of the body. I’d have to get rid of it. I considered flushing it down the toilet, but there was too much of it, and the septic tank had already begun to act up, burping swamp gas and shreds of decomposing toilet paper.

I took it into the kitchen and lit one of the gas burners. Then, strand by strand, I began to sacrifice my hair. It shrivelled, blackened, writhed like a handful of pinworms, melted and finally burned, sputtering like a fuse. The smell of singed turkey was overpowering.

Tears ran down my cheeks; I was a sentimentalist without doubt, of the sloppiest kind. The thing was: Arthur used to like brushing my hair for me, and that small image dissolved me; though he never learned not to pull at the tangles and it hurt like hell. Too late, too late.… I could never manage the right emotions at the right times, anger when I should have been angry, tears when I should have cried; everything was mismatched.

When I was halfway through the pile of hair I heard footsteps coming down the gravel path. My heart clumped together, I stood frozen: the path led to nowhere but the house, there was no one in the house but me, the other two flats were empty. How could Arthur have found me so soon? Perhaps I had been right about him after all. Or it wasn’t Arthur, it was one of the others.… The panic I hadn’t allowed myself to feel for the past week rolled in an ice-gray wave back over my head, carrying with it the shapes of my fear, a dead animal, the telephone breathing menace, killer’s notes cut from the Yellow Pages, a revolver, anger.… Faces formed and disintegrated in my head, I didn’t know who to expect, what did they want? The question I could never answer. I felt like screaming, rushing into the bathroom, there was a high square window I might be able to squeeze through; then I could run up the hill and drive
away in my car. Another fast getaway. I tried to remember where I’d put the keys.

There was a knock at the door, a stolid confident knock. A voice called, “Hello? You are within?”

I could breathe again. It was only Mr. Vitroni, Signor Vitroni, Reno Vitroni of the broad smile, inspecting his property. It was his sole piece of property, as far as I knew; nevertheless he was supposed to be one of the richest men in the town. What if he wanted to check the kitchen, what would he think of the sacrificial hair? I turned off the burner and stuffed the hair into the paper bag I used for garbage.

“Coming,” I called, “just a minute.” I didn’t want him walking in: my bed was unmade, my clothes and underwear were draped over chairbacks and strewn on the floor, there were dirty dishes on the table and in the sink. I hooded myself with one of the towels and snatched my dark glasses from the table as I went past.

“I was just washing my hair,” I said to him when I’d opened the door.

He was puzzled by the dark glasses: a little, but not much. Foreign ladies, for all he knew, had strange beauty rituals. He beamed and held out his hand. I held out my own hand, he lifted it as though to kiss it, then shook it instead.

“I am most pleasant to see you,” he said, bringing his heels together in a curiously military bow. The colored felt pens were lined up across his chest like medals. He’d made his fortune in the war, somehow; no one questioned these things now that they were all over. At the same time he’d learned a bit of English, and scraps of several other languages as well. Why had he come to my flat in the early evening, surely not the right time for him to visit a young foreign woman, this respectable middle-aged man with the right kind of barrel-shaped wife and numerous grandchildren? He was carrying something under his arm. He looked past my shoulder as if he wanted to go in.

“You are possibly cooking your meal?” he said. He’d picked up the smell of burning hair. God knew what these people ate, I could hear him thinking. “I wish I do not disturb?”

“No, not at all,” I said heartily. I stood squarely in the doorway.

“Everything with you is fine? The light is going on again?”

“Yes, yes,” I said, nodding more than was necessary. There was no electricity when I moved in, as the last tenant hadn’t paid the bill. But Mr. Vitroni had pulled strings.

“There is much of the sunshine, no?”

“Very much,” I said, trying not to show impatience. He was standing too close.

“This is good.” Now he got to the point. “I have something here for you. So you will find yourself more” – he lifted his free arm, palm up, expansive, welcoming, ushering me in – “so you will be at home with us.”

How embarrassing, I thought, he was giving me a housewarming present. Was this customary, what should I say? “That’s terribly kind of you,” I said, “but.…”

Mr. Vitroni dismissed my gratitude with a wave of the hand. From under his arm he produced his square bundle, set it on the plastic chair, and began to untie the strings. He paused at the last knot, for suspense, like a magician. Then the brown wrapping paper fell open, revealing five or six pictures, paintings, done – O lord! – on black velvet, with gilded plaster frames. He lifted them out and displayed them to me one by one. They were all of historical sites in Rome, each done in an overall color tone. The Colosseum was a feverish red, the Pantheon mauve, the Arch of Constantine a vaporous yellow, St. Peter’s pink as a cake. I frowned at them like an adjudicator.

“You like?” he asked commandingly. I was a foreigner, this was the sort of thing I was supposed to like and he’d brought them as a gift, to please me. Dutifully I was pleased; I couldn’t bear to hurt his feelings.

“Very nice,” I said. I didn’t mean the paintings but the gesture.

“My, how you say,” he said. “The son of my brother, he has a genius.”

We both looked silently at the pictures, lined up now on the window ledge and glowing like highway signs in the light of the low golden sun. As I stared at them they began to take on, or give off, a certain horrible energy, like the closed doors of furnaces or tombs.

It wasn’t going fast enough for him. “Who you like?” he said. “This one?”

How could I choose without knowing what the choice would mean? The language was only one problem; there was also that other language, what is done and what isn’t done. If I accepted a picture, would I have to become his mistress? Was the choice of picture significant, was it a test?