“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: 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, MISSTRESS 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, vulturelike. 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, point
ing 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.”
“No?”
“Goodness, no. You can change your future. I have seen lines alter in a hand overnight. I have seen cards fall suddenly into places where they refused to appear at any earlier reading.”
“I see,” said Justine, and then she sank back. It was the first answer that sounded right to her, but now she couldn’t think why she had wanted to hear it. She felt limp and drained.
“Otherwise,” said Madame Olita, “why take any action at all? No, you can always choose to some extent. You can change your future a great deal. Also your past.”
“My past?”
“Not what’s happened, no,” Madame Olita said gently, “but what hold it has on you.”
“Oh.”
“If you are so interested, I will teach you the art yourself if you like.”
“The—oh, well, I—”
“Cards would be your skill, I think.”
“Thank you anyway,” Justine said.
“Never mind. You’ll be back. I sit here every day of the week, taking the air. You can always find me. Shut the front gate going out, if you will.”
On Monday, Justine told Duncan that she was thinking of becoming a fortune teller. “Oh, really?” he said.
“Aren’t you going to laugh?”
“Not yet,” he said. “First I have to see how good you are.”
So she drove off to Baltimore again, to the white frame house where Madame Olita nodded dimly in her Polynesian chair.
“These are ordinary playing cards,” said Madame Olita, but to Justine they looked anything but. They were very old and the back of each was different: antique circus scenes of clowns, trapeze artists, dancing dogs, and bareback riders. “They once belonged to my mother. Who, though you wouldn’t believe it to look at me, was a genuine gypsy lady with seven ruffled petticoats and tiny brass cymbals that attached to her fingers for keeping time while she danced. She was raised in an abandoned candy store on Gay Street. Not exactly a painted wagon, but still … unfortunately she married my father, a high school civics teacher. She left her old life entirely, she cut off her long black hair, she had two daughters whom she sent to Radcliffe. However, I would rather have been raised a gypsy.”
She cut the cards. Justine sat across from her with her mouth open.
“It was my plan, after I graduated from Radcliffe, to join a caravan and marry a man with one gold earring. But it didn’t work out that way. I looked then more or less as I do today. I never married anyone, let alone a gypsy. So I had to get a job in my father’s high school, teaching algebra, but meanwhile I had learned fortune telling from my mother. Dancing I never mastered. I tried, though. My sister was quite good at it. But I bettered her at fortune telling. How I coveted these cards! My mother refused to give them to me. Cards like these are passed on only when the owner is dying, you see, and has no further use for them. Naturally I didn’t want my mother to die. But shall I tell you? When she failed to wake from surgery at the age of fifty-seven, the first thing I thought was, ‘Now I can have the cards.’ I went home and got them out of her wooden chest, then I walked over to the school and resigned my position. I set up shop in east Baltimore, above the cleaner’s. I have never laid eyes upon a caravan.”
She laid the cards out in concentric circles on a wicker table.
“My sister,” she said, “got the cymbals.”
Then she frowned and stabbed a card with her forefinger. “But pay attention! These cards are not read like books, you know. They have meanings assigned that you can memorize in half an hour, but ambiguous meanings. The death card, for instance. So called. But whose death? The client’s or someone’s close to him? And when? Is it real or metaphorical? No, you must think of these cards as tags.”
“Tags,” Justine said blankly.
“Tags with strings attached, like those surprise boxes at parties. The strings lead into your mind. These cards will pull out what you already know, but have failed to admit or recognize. Which is why palmistry works as well, or tea leaves or the Tarot or crystal ball. They all have validity, yes, but only when coupled with your own intuitions. You could take up astrology, even, but I already know: you haven’t the scholarly mind for it.”
“I prefer cards,” said Justine.
“Yes, yes, I know. But pay attention to everything. Watch your clients carefully. There will only be two kinds. Most are bored and merely hope to be told that something will happen. A very few lead eventful lives but cannot make decisions, which may be why they lead eventful lives; they will ask you to decide.”
“Which am I?” said Justine.
“Hmm? I don’t know. Maybe neither. You have never asked me to read your fortune, after all.”
“Oh. I guess not,” Justine said.
“You’re still looking backward, anyway,” Madame Olita told her.
“No, I’m not!”
“Suit yourself.”
After her lessons Justine drove straight home, but threads, strings, ropes pulled her in the direction of Roland Park and although she never gave in she had the feeling she was bleeding somewhere inside. “Well, you could go over for lunch,” Duncan said, but she thought from the way he spoke that he dreaded her agreeing to it. And she knew that her family would be distressed if they heard about Madame Olita. Then her new accomplishment, which was still as thin and fragile as a freshly hatched egg, would never seem right to her again; that was the way her mind worked. She didn’t go.
Did she believe in fortune telling herself? At Madame Olita’s she did. She was drawn in, impressed and fascinated by those no-nonsense hands dealing out the future. But then at home she felt compelled to test her faith with Duncan. She laid out her Bicycle playing cards self-consciously in front of him. “Today,” she told him, “I learned the formation used by Mademoiselle Le Normand, back in Napoleon’s time.”
“Le Normand,” he said, interested, cataloguing the name in his mind.
“We practiced on Madame Olita’s landlady, who is eighty-four years old. I predicted she was going to get married.”
He grinned.
“But!” said Justine. “She is! She told me afterward.”
“Good for you. Good for her.”
“Madame Olita says just a little longer and I can set up in business.”
“We’ll retir
e and live on your earnings,” he said.
She was relieved that he didn’t laugh. This was the only special skill she had ever possessed, the only thing she knew that he did not. Once he started memorizing her list of significations, but he got sidetracked while shuffling the cards and worked out a proof for Bernoulli’s Law of Averages instead.
There were days when Madame Olita was sharp-tempered and nothing would satisfy her. “Really, Justine, I despair of you!” she said. “Your mind! You have every qualification to be a good fortune teller but you will never be great, you’re mentally lazy. You coast along in intuition.”
“You said intuition was everything.”
“Never! I never said it was everything. You have to know a few facts as well, after all. These cards are like a doctor’s instruments. A good doctor has intuition too but he would never throw his instruments away on the strength of it.”
“But you said they were just tags, you said—”
“Enough!” And Madame Olita would fling up her hands and then slump in her chair. “You’ll spend your life doing readings for housewives and lovesick schoolgirls,” she said. “I don’t know why I bother.”
But other days she was as mild as milk. Then she would tell stories about her clients. “Will I ever forget that first year? All the Negroes came for clues on how to play the numbers. ‘Madame Olita I dreamed of handcuffs last night, which is number five nine eight in my Eye of Egypt Dream Book, but also razors, there was a cutting, eight seven three. So which do I play?’ ‘My dear,’ I told them, ‘you leave those numbers alone,’ and after a while they gave up on me and never came back. But how I tried! I wanted to have some influence, you see, on their lives. I would give them demonstrations of my psychic ability. I would have them choose a card and sight unseen I would tell them what it was.”