Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [6]
Crinkly, lifeless grey curls floated up and across Mrs. Hill’s grey-brown scalp, winging out over her ears. What must have been round, brown eyes had become opaque beige slits, like two additional spots of smooth skin in her dark puckered face. She had seven housedresses, and her doctor daughter came home twice a year from the great, safe distance of California and replaced them all. Mrs. Hill did not rotate them as Dr. Hill intended; she wore the pink one all week, and when it was stiff with sweat and moisturizer and medicated cream for her eczema, she threw it in the hamper for me to wash. On Saturdays she wore the purple housedress, and I didn’t blame her a bit. It was the least practical of them; instead of a cotton-poly mix, it was soft velour, and the pull on the end of the zipper was a purple and yellow sunflower, as though van Gogh had gotten loose in the Sears catalog. In her purple sunflower robe, Mrs. Hill told my fortune.
“Long life here,” she said, one thick, twisted finger digging into the middle of my palm. “Love affairs here. Did you bring Mrs. Hill some pork rinds?”
Dr. Hill had sent a note that Mrs. Hill had all sorts of things wrong with her heart and that salt and fat were out of the question. Mrs. Hill and I had a deal: one palm reading for a bag of Salty Jims Pork Rinds. Mrs. Hill told me that Salty Jim was really Jim Buckton, who played trumpet with Duke Ellington in the fifties and had gone to high school with Mrs. Hill. Out of respect and school loyalty, we usually ate Salty Jim’s, but when the Red Owl Supermarket carried Li’l Pig Bar-B-Que Pork Rinds, we had to give old Jim the heave-ho and stock up on orange-speckled, amber clouds of pork fat.
“Open up that bag and set it right here. Let’s have that hand.” I popped open two cans of grape soda.
Mrs. Hill bent over my palm, and I could smell the greasy fruit smell of her hair pomade and the piercing eucalyptus of Vicks VapoRub, which she used prophylactically.
“The love affairs startin’ early.” She jabbed my palm and then held my own hand up to me, showing me the point at which the love line joined the life line.
“Really?” I said. I didn’t think of Mr. Klein or Mr. Canetti as love affairs. I knew that they had loved me and I had loved them back, but there wasn’t any sex, and you couldn’t have an affair without sex. When I was in fifth grade I had had a little sex with Seth Stern, but it wasn’t what I thought a love affair should be. We were playing James Bond, and he pulled down my underpants and stuck his hand between my legs. He was only in sixth grade, but he was shaving already, and I found the red nicks on his throat and chin mysterious, alluring tribal scars. He stuck one long finger inside me and rocked me roughly on his hand until we heard our parents gathering coats in the front hall. He pushed me back onto the bed and yanked up my panties while running his thumb along the inside of my thigh. My parents called for me, and we went downstairs, all my attention on my bruised, wet center and on Seth, who insisted on shaking my fathers hand as we said good-bye. The tension and excitement and shame I felt were terrible and vivid. This was life. Out of remorse, or indifference, he wouldn’t answer my phone calls, and my parents had just about dropped the Sterns anyway, so I kept my virginity quite a while longer. I dreamt of his hands.
Mrs. Hill leaned back in her recliner and twisted her face away to watch me.
“In my closet there’s a hatbox, an old red hatbox. Bring it to me, sugar.”
Mrs. Hill only used endearments when she was asking me a favor or criticizing me.
The closet would have been my mother’s worst nightmare: blouses lying on the floor in their own wrinkled, dusty puddles, single shoes turned heel up, sticking into piles of sweaters and pants. On the top shelf were three hatboxes, one faded red, one with green and white stripes, and a yellowed one with grimy ivory tassels hanging from the sides. Mrs. Hill was much shorter than I was and could