Searching for Caleb (17 page)

   "What are you trying to do to me?" she said.

   He looked surprised.

   "Are you trying to get me angry on purpose?" she asked him.

   "Well, not on purpose, no-"

   "Why are you acting this way?"

   "Justine, I'm not acting any way."

   "How can you play around with little pieces of wire when both my parents are dead, and you're the one that took me far off and cut the telephone cord and laughed at Mama's letters and wouldn't bring me to visit?"

   "Justine."

   "Daddy warned me," she said. "He told me straight out you were marrying me to torment me."

   "Oh, did he?"

   "Either that, he said, or to lean on me, but I don't picture that ever happening."

   "Well, he certainly thought of everything, didn't he," Duncan said.

   He went back to bending his wire. He adjusted a peg on the jig and turned a right angle.

   "I'm sorry," Justine said finally.

   "That's all right."

   "I just feel so-"

   "It's all right."

   "Duncan, couldn't we just stay here a while?"

   He looked up at her.

   "We could live in Great-Grandma's house," she said. "Wouldn't that be nice?"

   "No, it wouldn't."

   "Please?"

   "I should have known," he told her. "I didn't really believe you would come away with me in the first place."

   "But I feel I'm getting pulled. I hate to just go away and leave them.

   And I can't stay here without you, but you wouldn't say a word against it when they brought it up."

   "I don't want to pull you, Justine."

   "But then they're the only ones doing it, and they'll win."

   "Is that the only way you go anywhere? Being pulled?"

   She was silent.

   "All right," said Duncan. "I'd like you to come with me. It's important.

   It's more important than they are."

   But she went on watching his face.

   "Well, how am I supposed to do this?" he asked her. "I was too well trained, I don't feel comfortable saying things straight out. They got to me a little too, you know."

   "Oh, Duncan," Justine said. "You've said everything straight out since you were four years old and told Aunt Bea she had hair like broccoli."

   "No," said Duncan. "I a Peck. I not talk so good but I give swell presents."

   Then he handed her his wire, a stick figure wearing Justine's flat hat and triangular dress, looking so straight-backed and light-hearted that even a tribesman in darkest Africa could tell that someone cared for her.

   The family lined up to see them off, their faces papery in the morning sun. "I can't believe that you would be going like this," Aunt Lucy said.

   Justine kissed her. She kissed Aunt Sarah, who said, "Do you think your parents would have understood? Rushing off as if all that mattered was a pack of billy goats?" Justine kissed her way down the entire row, not skipping even Richard, who ducked and blushed, and when she came to her grandfather she hung onto him hard for a moment as if this, not the wedding, were her real leavetaking. "Oh, um, now, Justine," her grandfather said.

   "Goodbye, Grandfather."

   Duncan opened the car door and she climbed in. The seat covers had a fish-oil smell from the sunlight, and when she leaned out the window to wave the metal was pleasantly hot on her arm. In the trees above them, mockingbirds were singing. Even when the car roared up they didn't hush, "Scientists," said Duncan, "have been investigating the stimuli that cause birds to vocalize in the morning. So far they have determined only one. They sing because they're happy."

   7

   Duncan bought a dozen copper-colored hens and installed them in a shed he had built himself, complete with a box of oyster shells to assist in egg production and a zinc watering trough in which they all immediately drowned. But the goats flourished, and since only two customers had answered the newspaper ad there were quarts of surplus milk every day. Justine made butter and hand-cranked ice cream. Duncan boiled up kettles of Norwegian cheese. But no sooner had they finished one batch of milk than the goats gave more, and Justine dreamed at night of a white tide rising all around them. "Maybe we should cut down on the blackstrap molasses," she told Duncan.

   "Well, I don't know if that would do much good. We seem to have started something we can't stop, here."

   In the mornings Justine walked the gravel road with a basket of cheeses, peddling them to the neighbors, who bought them because they had grown to like her. Seeing her trudge up the driveway, in her country-looking hat and her plain cotton dress that was becoming a little faded, Mrs. Jordan would lumber out on her front steps and beam. "Why, it's Justine Peck!

   How are you, honey?" Justine smiled trustingly, holding out her basket.

   It was hard for her to ask people' to buy things, but she did enjoy the visits. At each house she stopped for a few minutes to sit in the kitchen and talk, and gradually the smells of kerosene and fatback stopped seeming strange to her and she began to feel comfortable with the stooped, prematurely aged women who offered her buttermilk and ginger cake to put some meat on her bones.

   Sometimes, though, alone at home, she felt a gust of sorrow blow through her like a wind and she would stop whatever she was doing, hands stilled, face stunned, and gaze into space for several minutes. Once when she was trimming the weeds that drained the fence's current the smell of cut grass swung her back over years and years and she found herself sitting on a twilit lawn, nestled between her parents, listening to the murmur of her family all around her. She dropped the clippers and reached for the nearest object; she gripped the fence until her knuckles turned shiny.

   The throb of electricity caused a distant, dull ache. Duncan had to pry her fingers loose and say her name several times before she would look up.

   They had not been back to Baltimore after that first visit, but she did write home weekly and one or another of the aunts would answer.

   Occasionally her grandfather composed a solemn, formal, nineteenth-century note saying that everyone was well and sent best regards. If only she could reach out and touch his knobby hand, as if by accident! But all she said in her own letters back was that Duncan was fine, the weather was fine, the goats were doing nicely.

   If the sorrow went on too long she drove to Buskville, where she walked the streets for hours. She had been raised to believe that the best cure for grief was shopping, especially for things to wear. But there wasn't that much money and anyway, she discovered she was incapable of purchasing clothes for herself. Putting on a dress that her mother had not picked out was a betrayal. She was reduced to buying little domestic articles in the dimestore: teaballs, lemon reamers, parsley choppers. It seemed very important to have everything that would make her house perfect.

   One day in August, having exhausted all the dimestore's possibilities, she walked down a side street and discovered a hand-lettered cardboard sign reading MAGIC MARCIA, LOVE PROBLEMS. ADVICE. She swooped back through time and found herself on Madame Olita's doorstep, Duncan watching her teasingly with one arm hooked around Glorietta de Merino.

   After a moment she switched her Woolworth's bag to the other hand and rang Magic Marcia's bell.

   The woman who answered was thin and dark, with a crimson slash of lipstick. She was not much older than Justine, but there were two little boys with runny noses hanging onto her skirt. Gray straps slid out from her scoop-necked blouse. Justine was sorry she had come, but it was too late to back out.

   Then when she was settled at the kitchen table, over the remains of breakfast, it seemed she was expected to ask some specific question. She hadn't known that. "What is it?" the woman asked, flattening Justine's hand like a letter. "Husband? Boyfriend?"

   "No, I-just general things, I wanted to know."

   The woman sighed. She scratched her head and frowned at Justine's palm.

   Apparently she saw nothing unusual. "Well," she said finally, "you're going to live a long time, that's for sure."

   "Yes," Justine said, bored. Really she had no particular interest in her future, which seemed certain to be happy and uneventful from here on out.

   "Good marriage. Probably travel a little. Health is good. Probably have a lot of kids."

   "I will?" Justine asked. Duncan didn't seem to want any children. But the woman said, "Oh yes."

   A question began to tug at the edges of Justine's mind. She stared into space, not listening to the rest of her fortune. "Um, Magic Marcia," she said finally. "Could you tell me something? If your palm predicts a certain future, is there any way you can change it?"

   "Huh?"

   "If your future is having children, could you deliberately not have children? If your future is to cause someone pain, for instance, isn't there some way you could be very careful and not cause pain? Can't you escape your fortune?"

   "What is written is written," said Magic Marcia, yawning.

   "Oh," Justine said.

   On Friday she went to Blainestown, having checked the yellow pages beforehand. She climbed the stairs to SERENA, MISTRESS OF THE OCCULT.

   This time, she knew exactly what she wanted to ask.

   "Could I have avoided my future if my future was to do somebody harm?"

   "Man does not avoid the future," Serena said.

   On Monday she went back to Blainestown, this time to MADAME

   AZUKI, ALL QUESTIONS ANSWERED.

   "It's in the stars. There is no escape," said Madame Azuki.

   "I see."

   On Wednesday she went to Baltimore. Duncan was inventing an automatic bean stringer and he only nodded when she told him she would be out for a while. She drove directly to a cluttered section on the east side of town. She found the dry cleaner's, which was exactly the same even to its fly-specked, faded posters showing women in 1940's suits. But Madame Olita's sign on the window above had become a few flecks of paint, and there was a padlock on her door. Justine went into the cleaner's. A large gray man was lining up laundry tags on the counter. "Can you tell me anything about Madame Olita?" she asked him.

   "Ah, Madame Olita. She's gone."

   "What, is she dead?"

   "No, retired. She's not feeling so well, you know? But was she a fortune teller! I don't mind telling you, I used to go to her myself. Okay, so it's mumbo-jumbo. You know why I went? Say you got a problem, some decision to make. You ask your minister. You ask your psychiatrist, psychologist, marriage counselor, lawyer-they all say, 'Well of course I can't decide for you and we want to look at all the angles here and I wouldn't want to be responsible for-' They hedge their bets, you see. But not Madame Olita. Not any good fortune teller. 'Do X,' they say. 'Forget Y.' 'Stop seeing Z.' It's wonderful, they take full responsibility. What more could we ask?"

   "Well, do you know where she is now? Could I just visit her?"

   "Sure, she's right down the block. But I don't know how much she's up to.

   Well, tell her I sent you, Joe sent you. Maybe she could use the company.

   Five eight three, apartment A."

   "Thank you very much," Justine told him.

   "Hope you get the answer you want."

   She let the door tinkle shut and walked on down the street, passing more cleaners and cut-rate pharmacies and pawnshops. At the end of the block was a large Victorian frame house surrounded by a veranda, and on the veranda sat Madame Olita in a Polynesian wicker chair. Although it was hot, she wore a crocheted shawl. She still had her stubby haircut, but she had lost an enormous amount of weight. Her clothes flopped and her neck was so scrawny that her face appeared to be lunging forward, vulture-like. She looked hollowed out. While Justine climbed the steps she watched without interest, perhaps assuming this was somebody else's visitor. "Hello, Madame Olita," Justine said.

   "Hmmm?"

   Madame Olita pulled herself together, wrapping the shawl more tightly around her shoulders.

   "Joe sent me," Justine said.

   "Oh? Joe."

   "There's a question I wanted to ask. Would you mind?"

   "Well, I'm feeling poorly these days, you see. I don't look into the future much."

   "No, it wasn't about the future."

   Madame Olita sighed. "Sit down," she said, pointing to the wicker chair beside her. She reached for Justine's hand, as if she hadn't understood.

   "But I didn't want-"

   Madame Olita bent Justine's palm back and frowned. "Oh, it's you," she said.

   Justine felt pleased and shy, as if her unusual lines were her own accomplishment.

   "Yes, I see," said Madame Olita, nodding and tapping her teeth with one finger.

   "You said my marriage was going to disrupt everything," Justine reminded her.

   "Did I."

   "You said I would break my parents' hearts. How did you know that?"

   "Oh, my dear," said Madame Olita, leaning back suddenly and dropping her hand. "Really, I don't remember. You were young and arrogant, and uncomfortable in my rooms, perhaps I just-"

   "But it all came true!"

   "Sometimes it does."

   "Was that just luck?"

   "It may have been. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. Are you asking if I can truly see the future? I can. But more and more it seems to me that people are resisting change, digging in their heels against it. Which does make their futures easy to predict, but why bother? Fortune telling is only good when you forecast a happening. It falls flat when you say, 'Never fear, your life will continue in its present course forever . . ."

   She closed her eyes and then opened them and looked puzzled. "But I tend to go on and on," she said. "You had some question you wanted to ask."

   Justine sat up straight and placed her hands together. "Madame Olita," she said, "if my fortune was to break my parents' hearts, is it true then that I had no way of avoiding it?"

   "Oh, no."