Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (4 page)

Madame Zoe, for example. “Madame Zoe” was the name under the red palm that was passed almost weekly by Sissy's mama when she rode the bus out to the end of Hull Street Road to visit her friend Mabel Coffee, the plumber's wife. Mrs. Hankshaw must have passed that sign two hundred times. She always looked at that sign as if it were a deer in a meadow, it was that real to her and that elusive. But it was not until Mabel Coffee had a cyst removed from her ovary and nearly croaked—the same week of the same autumn that President Eisenhower's heart went kablooey—that Mrs. Hankshaw (moved, perhaps, by the drama of events) impulsively pulled the buzzer cord and got off the bus at Madame Zoe's. An appointment was made for the following Saturday.

When Mr. Hankshaw was informed of the date with the palmist he snorted and cussed and warned his wife that if she wasted five dollars of his hard-earned money on a goddamned fortuneteller she'd find herself moving in with Mabel, her plumber and her one good ovary. During the week, however, Sissy's mama used the vaginal wrench to slowly, gently turn her husband's objections down to a mere trickle. Mabel's plumber, with his full set of tools, could not have done better.

On Palm Saturday, Sissy was made to dress as if for church. She was coaxed into a plaid wool skirt whose every pleat was as fuzzed as the romantic dreams of its former owners; she was helped into a cousin's hand-me-down long-sleeved sweater (once white as dentures, now smoking three packs a day); she had her fair, naturally wavy hair combed out with tap water and a dab of White Shoulders cologne; her mouth (so full and round in comparison to the rest of her angular features that it seemed a plum on a vine of beans) was smeared lightly with ruby lipstick. Then mother and daughter took the Midlothian bus to Madame Zoe's, Sissy pouting the full distance because she wasn't allowed to hitchhike.

By the time they wobbled their worn heels on the palmist's walk, however, the girl's petulance had given way to curiosity. What an inspiring drill sergeant curiosity can be! They marched straight to the door of the house trailer and gave it a self-conscious thunk. Moments later it opened to them, releasing odors of incense and boiled cauliflower.

From the vortex of competing smells (This was outside the tobacco zone), Madame Zoe, in kimono and wig, asked them in. “I am the enlightened Madame Zoe,” she began, stubbing a cigarette in one of those enlightened little ceramic ashtrays that are shaped like bedpans and inscribed
BUTTS
. The trailer was cluttered, but not one knickknack, chintz curtain or chenille-covered armchair seemed to have come from the Beyond. The floor lamp was powered by electricity, not
prana
; the telephone directory was for Richmond, not Atlantis. Even more disappointing to the girl was the absence of any physical reference to Persia, Tibet or Egypt, those centers of arcane knowledge that Sissy was certain she would hitch to someday, although it should be made clear, here and now, that Sissy never really dreamed of hitching
to
anywhere; it was the
act
of hitching that formed the substance of her vision. It turned out that there was nothing the least bit exotic in that house trailer except for the smoldering incense, and although in the dead air of the Eisenhower Years in Richmond, Virginia, incense seemed exotic enough, that particular stick of jasmine was in the process of being kicked deaf, blind and dumb by a pot of cauliflower.

“I am the enlightened Madame Zoe,” she began, her voice an uninterested monotonous drone. “There is nothing about your past, present or future that your hands do not know, and there is nothing about your hands that Madame Zoe does not know. There is no hocus-pocus involved. I am a scientist, not a magician. The hand is the most wonderful instrument ever created, but it cannot act of its own accord; it is the servant of the brain. (Author's note: Well, that's the brain's story, anyhow.) It reflects the kind of brain behind it by the manner and intelligence with which it performs its duties. The hand is the external reservoir of our most acute sensations. Sensations, when repeated frequently, have the capacity to mold and mark. I, Madame Zoe, chiromancer, lifelong student of the moldings and markings of the human hand; I, Madame Zoe, to whom no facet of your character or destiny is not readily revealed, I am prepared to . . .” Then she noticed the thumbs.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” she gasped (and this in an era when the expressive verb/noun
fuck
did not, like a barnyard orchid, like a meat bubble, like a saline lollipop, did not bloom, as it does today, upon the lips of every maiden in the land).

Mrs. Hankshaw was as shocked by the fortuneteller's epithet as the fortuneteller was startled by the girl's digits. The two women turned pale and uncertain, while Sissy recognized with a faint smile that she was in command. She extended her thumbs to the good madame. She extended them as an ailing aborigine might extend his swollen parts to a medical missionary; madame showed no sign of charity. She extended them as a gentleman spider might extend a gift fly to a black widow of fatal charm; madame exhibited no appetite. She extended them as a brash young hero might extend a crucifix to a vampire; madame recoiled rather nicely. At last, Sissy's mama drew a neatly folded five-dollar bill from her change purse and extended it alongside her smiling daughter's extremities. The palmist returned immediately to her senses. She took Sissy by the elbow and led her to sit at a Formica-topped table of undistinguished design.

Apprehensively, Madame Zoe held Sissy's hands while with closed eyes she appeared to go into trance. Actually, she was trying desperately to remember all that her teachers and books had taught her about thumbs. At one time, as a young woman in Brooklyn, she had been a serious student of chiromancy, but over the years, like those literary critics who are forced to read so many books that they begin to read hurriedly, superficially and with buried resentment, she had become disengaged. And like those same dulled book reviewers, she was most resentful of a subject that did not take
her
values seriously, that was slow to reveal itself or that failed to reveal itself in a predictable manner. Fortunately for her impatience, the hands submitted to her by the rubes of Richmond read easily: their owners were satisfied with the most perfunctory disclosures, and that is what they got. Now here was a skinny fifteen-year-old girl wagging in her face a pair of thumbs that would not accept “You have a strong will” as an analysis.

“You have a strong will,” muttered Madame Zoe. Then she fell back into “trance.”

She grasped the outsized members, first timidly, then tightly, as if they were the handlebars of a flesh motorcycle that she could drive backward down memory lane. She held them up in the light to scrutinize their plump muscles. She placed the right one of them against her heart to register its vibrations. It was then that Sissy, who had never before touched a woman's breast—and Madame Zoe's forty-year-old mammaries were well formed and firm—lost control of the situation. She grew warm and scarlet and retreated into adolescent awkwardness, permitting the enlightened Madame Zoe, who could sense a latent tendency as readily as she could spot a broken life line, to regain some of the gelid composure from behind which she was accustomed to listening condescendingly to those pathetic proletarian palms whose little stories were always aching to be told.

Still, Madame Zoe was awed by the blind babes in her grip, and Sissy, despite a fluster that was doubled by the fact that she feared her mama might notice it, was to leave the house trailer in a sort of triumph.

The palmist began hesitantly. “As d'Arpentigny wrote, 'The higher animal is revealed in the hand but the man is in the thumb.' The thumb cannot be called a finger because it is infinitely more. It is the fulcrum around which all the fingers must revolve, and in proportion to its strength or weakness it will hold up or let down the strength of its owner's character.”

The snake soup of memory was cooking at last. It could almost be smelled above the cauliflower and the incense.

“Will power and determination are indicated by the first phalanx,” she continued. “The second phalanx indicates reason and logic. You obviously have both in large supply. What's your name, dearie?”

“Sissy.”

“Hmmm. Well, Sissy, when a child is born it has no will; it's entirely under the control of others. For the first few weeks of its life it sleeps ninety percent of the day. During this period the thumb is closed in the hand, the fingers concealing it. In other words, the will, represented by the thumb, is dormant—it has not begun to assert itself. As the baby matures, it begins to sleep less, to have some ideas of its own and even to show a temper. When that happens, Sissy, the thumb comes from its hiding place in the palm, the fingers no longer closed over it, for will is beginning to exert itself, and when it does, the thumb—its indicator—appears. Idiots, however, or paranoiacs either never grow out of this thumb-folding stage or revert to it under stress. Epileptics cover their thumbs during fits. Whenever you see a person who habitually folds his thumb under his fingers, you'll recognize that they're very disturbed or sick; disease or weakness has displaced the will. As for you, Sissy, you're healthy, to say the least. Why, I bet even as a baby . . .”

An electric toaster, which shared the table top with the forearms and hands of the palmist and her subject, and whose shiny chrome was dusted with the crumbs from the morning's slices much as cathedrals are dusted with the crumbs from eternity's pigeons, an electric toaster, manufactured in Indiana (for in those days Japan was still flat on her
tatami
), an electric toaster, whose function it was to do to bread what social institutions are designed to do to the human spirit, an electric toaster reflected—like a cynical impersonation of the crystal ball Sissy thought would be there and wasn't—the tremors that ran through this little scene.

“Now, as to the shape of your thumb, it is, I'm not pleased to say, rather primitive. It's broad in both phalanges, attesting to great determination, which can be good; and the skin is smooth, attesting to a certain grace. Because, furthermore, its tip is conic and the nail glossy and pink, I'd say that you have an intelligent, kindly, somewhat artistic nature. However, Sissy,
however
, there is a heavy quality to the second phalanx—the phalanx of logic—that indicates a capacity for foolish or clownish behavior, a refusal to accept responsibility or to take things seriously and a bent to be disrespectful of those who do. Your mama tells me that you're pretty well behaved and shy, but I'd watch out for signs of irrationality. All right?”

“What
are
the signs of irrationality,” asked Sissy, rationally enough.

For reasons known only to her, Madame Zoe chose not to elaborate. She pulled the young girl's thumb to her breast once more, breathing with relief as Sissy sweated and swallowed, unable to pursue her questioning. The palmist's house trailer was neither wide nor tall, but oh it was rich in odors that day.

“Your thumbs are surprisingly supple, flexible . . .”

“I exercise 'em a lot.”

“Yes, well, um. The flexible thumb personifies extravagance and extremism. Such people are never plodders but achieve their goals by brilliant dashes. They are indifferent to money and are always willing to take risks. You, however, have a pretty full Mount of Saturn and, here, let me see your head line; hmmm, yes, it's not too bad. A long sharp head line and a developed Mount of Saturn—that's the little pad of flesh at the base of the middle finger—will often act as a sobering influence on a flexible thumb. In your case, though, I'm just not sure.

“I guess the most important aspect of
your
thumbs is the, ahem, overall size. Uh, what was it, do you know, that caused . . . ?”

“Don't know; doctors don't know,” called Mrs. Hankshaw from the couch, where she'd been listening.

“Just lucky, I guess,” smiled the girl.

“Sissy, dang you, that's what Madam Zoe means when she tells you about 'irrational.'”

Madame Zoe was anxious to get on with it. “Large thumbs denote strength of character and belong to persons who act with great determination and self-reliance. They are natural leaders. Do you study science and history in school? Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Leibnitz had very large thumbs; Voltaire's were enormous, but, heh heh, just pickles compared with yours.”

“What about Crazy Horse?”

“Crazy Horse? You mean the Indian? Nobody that I've ever heard of ever troubled to study the paws of savages.

“Now, I must tell you this. You have the qualities to become a really powerful force in society—God, if you were only a male!—but you may have such an overabundance of those qualities that they . . . well, frankly, it could be frightening. Especially with your primitive phalanx of logic. You could grow up to be a living disaster, a human malfunction of historic proportions.”

What had she said? With some effort—for they seemed to hold her even as she held them—Madame Zoe let go of Sissy's thumbs. She wiped her palms on her kimono: they were red like the sign. It had been years since she'd given such a deep reading. She was more than a little shaken. The toaster, for toasterly reasons, sat with endlessly bowed back, its flank mirroring her wig, which now hung slightly askew.

“So accurate a revealer of personality is the thumb"—she was addressing Mrs. Hankshaw now—"that the Hindu chiromancers base their entire work on it, and the Chinese have a minute and intricate system founded solely on the capillaries of the first phalanx. So, what I've given your daughter amounts to a complete reading. If you want me to consider the palms separately, it'll cost you an extra three-fifty.”

Confusion had the better of Mrs. Hankshaw. She wasn't sure whether too little had been revealed or too much. Her eyes looked like a fire in a Mexican nightclub. She felt she should be outraged but she wanted more information.

“How much for one question?”

“You mean one question answered from the palm?”

“Yes.”

“Well, if it's simple, only a dollar.”