Anne Tyler - Searching for Caleb

"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 selfconsciously 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 retire 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."

"I can't do that," Justine said sadly. Duncan had tested her once after reading an article on J. B. Rhine.

"No, I doubt very much that you would be psychic."

"Then how come I can tell the future?"

"People who have led very still lives can often sense change before others can," Madame Olita said.

"My life isn't still," said Justine.

Madame Olita only sighed.

At the last lesson, she gave Justine a test. "It's time for you to read my fortune," she said. Justine had been wanting to do that. She settled down happily at the wicker table, while Olita gazed off toward the street. It was one of her irritable days. "Cut the cards," Justine told her, and she said, "Yes, yes, I know," and cut them without looking.

Justine chose a very complicated formation. She wanted to do this thoroughly, not missing a thing. She laid each card out with precision, and then sat back and drummed her ringers on her chair arm. After a moment she moved one card a half inch to the left and resettled herself.

She frowned. She stopped drumming her ringers.

Madame Olita looked over at her with cool interest. Still Justine didn't speak.

"Never mind," said Madame Olita. "You passed."

Then she became full of bustle, issuing last-minute instructions. "Did I tell you that strangers should pay ahead of time? If they don't like their fortunes they tend to walk out, they'll walk right out on you."

Justine only gathered the cards in silence, one by one.

"Watch where you work, too. Some places have license fees, sometimes hundreds of dollars. It isn't worth it. Are you listening?"

"What?"

"Don't go to Calvert County. Don't go to Cecil County, don't go to Charles."

"But we live on a farm, I'm not going anywhere."

"Ha."

Justine wrapped the cards and set them on the table. She came to stand in front of Madame Olita.

"Be a little mysterious, I didn't tell you that," said Madame Olita.

"They'll have more faith. Don't let on where you come from or how you learned what you know. Make a point of ignoring personal questions when you're giving a reading. Will you remember all this? What else should you know?"

Then she gave up. "Well, goodbye, Justine," she said.

"Goodbye," said Justine. "Could I come back for a visit?"

"Oh ... no. No, I'll be going into the hospital for a while, I think. But I wish you luck."

"Thank you," said Justine, She turned to go.

"Oh, and by the way."

Justine turned back. Madame Olita, sagging in her chair, waved one hand toward the cards. "You might as well take those along with you," she said.

When fall came Justine worked up the courage to offer her services at the high school homecoming fair. She donated her fees to the school. After that people began traveling all the way out to the farm, several a week, mostly women, asking if they should get married, or divorced, or sell their land or have a baby or move to California. Justine was astonished.

"Duncan," she said, "I don't want to be responsible for people. For telling them who to marry and all."

"But I sort of thought you believed in this," Duncan said.

She wound a strand of hair around her finger.

"Well, never mind," he told her. "Just don't say anything that would cause somebody harm. But I don't think people take bad advice. They've got intuition too, you know. In fact I'd be surprised if they take any advice at all."

So she continued receiving people in her small, warm kitchen, laying Madame Olita's cards across the surface of Great-Grandma's rosewood table. She became a gatherer of secrets, a keeper of wishes and dreams and plans. Sometimes when people very young or very old came in, full of vague hopes, unable or unwilling to say what they would like to ask, she merely reassured them. But sometimes she was so explicit that her own daring amazed her. "Don't sell any family possessions, particularly jewelry, particularly your mother's," she would say.