Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories (31 page)

“Well,” I say modestly. “Ma didn't realise.”

“Ma didn't …!” He splutters, rolling in the grass, and we laugh and laugh and laugh.

Queen of Pentacles, Nine of Swords

First I noticed her condition, then her startling nose-jewel (a diamond teardrop), and only after that her remarkable face. This was years ago, the first time she came into my ratty apartment on Earl Street. She was eight months pregnant and nineteen years old at the time, and still wearing
salwar-chemeez;
but the pantaloons were giving her trouble in the snow and she had tucked them into boots that a local pig farmer must have given to the Sally Ann. A vinyl stamp on the uppers said:
Thurston Farms, Kingston, Ont.
The parka was another cast-off, bilious green, its hood ringed with mangy fake fur. Inside it, she had the eyes of a tiger.

On the sofa that served as my waiting room she sat next to a housewife who edged discreetly away. My customers were uneasy with foreigners. They stared. The girl opened her bag (a drawstring sack, beaded and brocaded with elephants and little mirrors) and began to work: fingers flying, a cream silk streamer of crochet snaking out of her hands, twitching, growing, curling under the sofa like some live nervy creature.

Perhaps it was simply that we didn't know Indian women crocheted. I suppose we thought of it as something our grandmothers once did, as something that went out with lavender pomanders and maiden aunts.

(Months later she was to tell me sardonically that ever since 1851, ever since the Great Exhibition and the Crystal Palace, when all the prizes for crochet went to the corners of the empire, it has been Kenyans, Trinidadians, Tamils – whomever the missionaries taught – who have been keeping the lace-making arts alive.)

But back then we knew nothing of that. We stared.

She ignored us, and crocheted as if she were under a curse.

That was seventeen years ago, but it is the first image that comes back to me when Decker calls.

“Metro Toronto Police,” he says. “I'm calling in connection with a woman named Sita Ramshankar.”

“Oh,” I say faintly, bracing myself.

“I know it's a long way, but we'd appreciate it if you could come on into the city, ma'am. Bloor Street station.”

“Right now?”

“We'd appreciate it.”

In the car, disoriented, I half turn around to see if the boys are safely strapped into the back seat – Sita's son and my son, our little boys who have part-time jobs and are almost through high school now.

I try to remember why the children are not in the car. I stare vaguely at the bunch of keys in my hand and just sit there in my garage.

She is still and always coming into my room with her swollen belly and the diamond blister in her nostril. Something powerful, some strong animal sense, warns me: Don't read her cards. But I am cornered, when it's her turn, by the way she holds out the five-dollar bill and by her eyes. Or perhaps it has something to do with the ribbon of crochet that twitches as she loops it up and stuffs it into her bag. She's the last for the day; there are just the two of us.

“I have seen your advertisement,” she says, and the English is sterling, crisp as a new pound note, discordant. She smells of poverty in spite of the diamond teardrop, and her eyes unnerve me.

Listen, I want to say, I don't read for True Believers. I put on this gypsy smock and my dangling earrings (the crescent moon on my left ear, the star on my right), and presto: desolate suburban wives are able to unburden themselves. In the cards they see little Markey who is having trouble at school, and Darlene, who is nubile and recently divorced and always borrowing someone's husband on account of engine trouble, and Mr Dunlap the electrician who didn't install the baseboard heater properly but won't come back to fix it. I promise a letter from Winnipeg, an unexpected visitor from Montreal. I throw in a bit of solemnity, a little closing of the eyes and deep breathing, a pinch of hope, and they go away happy. The housewife's therapist. I'm cheaper, after all, than a night of bingo or a Sears catalogue binge.

I ignore her five dollars and pour her a cup of tea. “What's your name?”

“Sita.” She points to the Tarot pack, implying urgency. Between her palms, the money is rolled back and forth, back and forth; it furls itself tighter, becomes a reefer, a taper, a skewer. She looks at it, puzzled, then places it delicately on my saucer.

There are some people … I don't know what it is … they give off the same kind of hum as high tension cables. You know from the start that if you get too close you'll be singed. And yet they're the very ones – don't you find this? – who make you understand the moths.

Still, I make an effort to resist.

“I can't take your money,” I tell her. “Listen, your husband is a graduate student, right? So is mine. This is how I manage, that's all.” I show her the crib in the other room, my baby asleep. “This pays a few bills,” I say. “But I can't read your cards. I'm a fraud.”

For a moment she stares at me, eyebrows raised, then she laughs – a short harsh incredulous sound. “It's the cards,” she says, as if to the village idiot. “The cards themselves. Don't you understand?” Under her breath she murmurs “Canadians!” and shakes her head. Without asking, she picks up the deck and begins to shuffle. She shuffles vertically, cards fluttering between her hands, descending, then rising mysteriously like geese in formation. “Read,” she says, placing the pack in front of me. And as an afterthought: “Please.”

She's intense as a junkie, desperate; but also used to power and accustomed to giving orders. Nothing fits. Stalling, I ask: “How long have you been in Canada?”

Eye to eye over the cards, we breathe each other's breath. I can smell coriander and something else, something musky and irresistible and dangerous.

“I have been here six months. There was the marriage, and then I came. It was arranged.” She taps the Tarot impatiently. “You are reading the cards now, isn't it?”

There's a certain peremptory tone I've never cared for. “Read them yourself,” I say evenly. “I'm not your servant.”

Her knuckles turn white and crack like tiny silver pistols. “Please.” The fingers are rigid now – the strain of politeness, of supplication. “The importance is very great.”

I don't understand why I do it. I cut three times to the left and draw ten cards.

“Ah,” I say flippantly, relieved. “Here, in your current situation, we have the Page of Cups, which means the birth of a child is imminent. And he's crossed by the Knight of Cups, who is your husband. But who's this in your past, in the Seven of Swords? This trickster making off with stolen goods?”

She is holding her head in her hands like the ravaged woman in the Nine of Swords who dominates the spread. “Again,” she says. “Again, again, again.” As though she can feel the prick of the nine deadly swords poised above her.

When was the next time?

Quattrochi's, just a week or so later. Quattrochi's, which is such an unlikely store to find in a small Ontario town, that I've always half suspected it vanishes when I'm not shopping there to believe in it. Quattrochi's smells of cinnamon and saffron; loops of chili peppers, squash flowers, the mysterious ingredients of
garam masala,
all hang from the walls; there are baskets of mangoes, passionfruit, papayas, guavas. I was not surprised, somehow, to see Sita there.

She was stroking the purple bellies of eggplants, prodding their curves with a finger. On the basket, a crayonned sign said:
Spoiled vegetables. Prices reduced.

“Any day now, I expect,” I greeted her politely, leaning across melons and pineapples.

“No,” she said, feeling and poking. “It is too late, but they will have to do.”

“I meant your baby.”

Her eyes widened, then she flashed me that withering look: of scorn? of disbelief? “But I will lose the baby,” she said.

I suppose she found me slow, or perhaps wilfully obtuse. The need to explain exasperated her.
(“Canadians!”)

“The Nine of Swords.” Her fingers drummed on the handle of the shopping cart. “India, England, Canada, it makes no difference.”

I blinked. “You're not suggesting … ?”

“For me, the predictions are always very bad.”

“You're just nervous,” I assure her, patting her hand. “I was too, this close. It's normal.”

“You know nothing.” She pinched the skin of an eggplant savagely, and amethyst rind came away in her hand. “My father got a second opinion. An astrologer was brought from Madras. It was the same.”

“I can't believe … I mean, you're educated, you're married to a …”

“Oh yes, I know,” she snapped. “I'm
Canadian
now. The cautious people, the safe people.”

“There's no need to be –”

“I will show you. You will read for me again.”

“I most certainly will not.”

And when I did, back in my Earl Street apartment, it was there again: the Nine of Swords. “You cheated,” I accused. “It was the way you shuffled.”

She ignored me.

Without, I think, being aware of what she was doing, she fiddled in her drawstring bag and pulled out the ivory hook and began to crochet. Faster, faster, the silken thread creamy and skittish. She never took her eyes off the cards. “Look: the Queen of Staves. She's the headmistress at Finchley Academy for Girls.”

“Finchley?”

“In England. I hated England. She shipped me straight back to Tanjore after Mr Timkins … He was the history master …” She patted her stomach, to indicate the nature of homework for Mr Timkins, who would have been helpless, I imagine, from the moment she tossed her black mane and fluttered her slow heavy lashes. I remember feeling a spasm of sympathy for him, fellow fly in a web.

“What happened to Mr Timkins?”

She paused momentarily, puckered her brows, shrugged. “He was fired, I think.”

She might have been discussing Mr Dunlap of unsatisfactory electrical installations, or wanton Darlene. “Anyway, Daddy flew to Bombay to meet me. He didn't want me seen in Tanjore. Poor Daddy. But he couldn't say he wasn't warned.” The family astrologer had told them over and over: nothing could be done to offset such an inauspicious time of birth.

The snake of crochet jumped and twitched and lay still.

“So what else could Daddy do? In Canada, Daddy said, they don't even have shame.” Add to Canada –
Canada!
– a student husband, a family with no money: it was what they could salvage, she said. She was married by proxy. Her husband met her in Montreal. She said wistfully: “My sister lives in Paris. She is married to an executive of Burma Shell.”

“I imagine Daddy will take care of everything,” I said tartly. “Here's the Queen of Pentacles. You're going to be rich and famous.”

“Rich.” Her lip curled. “My family has great wealth.” She made a gesture with her fingers, as of flicking away a dandelion puffball, to show how much great wealth meant. “I'm off Daddy's hands now. I'm Ramshankar's problem. I'll lose the baby,” she said.

She did lose the baby, but then there was another, her husband's this time. And then another.

Here's a fresh picture, fallen suddenly into focus:

We are sifting through a table of children's snowsuits at the Salvation Army Thrift Store. Sita is feeling the padding of a powder blue suit, assessing the thin spots. She tugs at the jammed zipper, which comes away in her hands like a tear along a dotted line.

“You can stitch it,” I say.

She says:”Ramshankar is leaving me.”

“What?”

“He is suing for custody of the children.”

“What?”

“On account of my affair.”

I stare at her, dumbfounded.

“You know Professor Parkinson?” she asks.

“In the Business School?”

“That one. It's him.”

I smooth out the tattered lining of a snowsuit that is covered with blips of mildew, and with larger black blotches. Car grease, perhaps. The table stinks of recycled odours. A
lover,
I think. I see bodies gliding and writhing like swans in the quilted tangle of hollow arms and legs. I push my hand down the inside of a sleeve and think hungrily:
another man's skin.
“I had no idea,” I mumble. “I've never seen you with –”

“Oh,
seen!
I'm not for being seen with. I'm for hot fucking and sly bragging.”

“Well,” I say, nervously. “The mother always gets the children.”

“Ramshankar knows how to do these things, from Law School. It's interesting, what stirs a man to life.” She is racing the broken zipper head up and down its aimless track, up and down. “Ramshankar is so … you wouldn't believe how poor! I don't mean money; it has nothing to do with money. But he is a poor man, a poor man.” She is spitting the words. “There is no spirit, there is nothing.” She pays for the blue snowsuit with her Family Allowance cheque. Her hand is trembling slightly as she signs her name. “Anyway, before I became a little too hot for comfort, Parkie had me write that Admissions thing.” She laughs, and says sardonically: “Apparently I'm brilliant.” She makes a mistake with her address on the back of the cheque and has to initial it. “It will be simpler without the children for a few years, actually. I'm starting a business degree.”

In the car, we strap the toddlers into their safety seats. “Anyway,” she begins, but suddenly buries her face in the zipperless blue snowsuit and holds it there all the way to the Co-op Nursery School. The boys – my Joey and her Ravi – come running to the car with their playdough airplanes and fingerpainted pictures of happy families. “Anyway, if I'm destitute, I can always sell crochet. You wouldn't believe what the Yorkville boutiques are beginning to pay for that stuff.”

This strikes her as funny. She begins to laugh and can't seem to stop. She scoops up her son and tries to stifle her hilarity by nuzzling the hollow of his neck. She stuffs one of his mismatched mittens into her mouth. Whoops of laughter escape like bubbles under pressure.