With every loss I found myself more profoundly attracted to him. He seemed so happy to lose. Mort would have stormed off four quarters ago, making it clear to everyone within earshot that the whole thing was rigged and nobody could win no matter how good they were. He would be demanding to speak to the manager about now. Mort could manage to wheedle a refund from even the scariest guy in the park.
Romeo gave me the quarters. “Go to work,” he said.
I picked up the rubber ball and sank it in the middle square.
“Oh my God,” he said. “You’re a ringer. I’ve brought a ringer to Canobie Lake.”
“I have good hand-eye coordination.” I sank the next one in the upper left-hand hole. Actually, I don’t know what I
had—dumb luck maybe. In all honesty the game just didn’t seem that complicated.
“So tell me about Nora. She sounds like a tough girl.”
“Very tough.” Ball three.
“So how’d she turn out?”
“She married an incredibly nice tax attorney and makes a fortune selling real estate. She drives a Lexus and wears good jewelry.”
“I always wondered what happened to the tough girls,” he said.
“Number Seven!” the caller said. “Number Seven wins the prize.”
I had to check my seat to see if I was seven. When did I get to be so lucky? I told Romeo he had to pick the prize. After all, if he had won, he would have given it to me. He chose a stuffed cat with a small stuffed fish in its mouth. The fish had a huge smile on its face, as if it was thrilled to be devoured alive. “My granddaughter will like this,” he said. “She has a thing for cats.”
“Does she have a cat?”
Romeo shook his head. “That’s one of my mother’s primary rules—no cats.” Should I worry about a man who lived with his mother? What difference did it make. I was never going to get anywhere near the old woman. Whatever relationship we had in the future would surely consist of long car drives and sneaking around. All around us people ate caramel apples and held hands. They took pictures of one another in front of rides. They screamed for their children and laughed outrageously at nothing. They wore long, thin balloons wrapped around their heads and walked invisible dogs on quivering, empty leashes. Romeo had
one arm around my shoulder and one arm around the stuffed cat he called Tiger. This was a wonderful day, but it was as little like anything in my real life as I could possibly imagine. We went to a stand and bought clam fritters and Cokes. We ate standing up and when we were finished, we went back and ordered fried clam rolls and ate them, too.
“Hey,” I said, wiping the fine coating of seafood from my mouth with a paper napkin. “Not to spoil the mood or anything, but do you have any thoughts on, you know, this? Us? I keep going over it and I keep coming up empty. The only really logical thing to do is quit before we get started, but then I think we’ve already started.”
He tightened his grip on me. I could feel the muscles in his arm go hard against the back of my neck. His kissed the top of my head. “Part of me says my family comes first,” he said. “That’s the primary law with the Cacciamanis and I believe in it. I can’t stay with you because I don’t want to hurt my mother and I especially don’t want to hurt my children. The other part of me says to hell with that. I’ve been a good guy all these years, a team player, and I want to do what I want to do. Anyway, we’re not hurting them. You’re not a bad person. You’re not going to tear my family apart.”
“I don’t think Nora is speaking to me, and Sandy is speaking to me, but she’s profoundly disappointed in my actions. I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to hold up under that kind of pressure. I mean, you and I aren’t going to run off to Belize. We’re not going to ditch our kids, never see our grandkids again.”
“Maybe, over time, they’d get used to us together.”
But neither one of us said anything to that. Every interaction I had with Cacciamanis, other than Romeo, only made things worse. Instead of coming to the conclusion that this was all a silly tradition, I was starting to think my mother and father were right. It wasn’t just that his sons thought I was a monster, I was beginning to think they were monsters, too. I’m sure they were perfectly decent to other people, but to me they were little more than a looming mafia.
“Look,” I said, pointing to a tent up ahead. “That’s what we need, spiritual guidance.” That’s what the tent said,
PSYCHIC READINGS AND SPIRITUAL GUIDANCE. PALMS, TAROT, CRYSTAL BALL
.
“Oh, Al loves to give sermons on those things.”
“I suppose he’s against them.”
“Al thinks you should take your spiritual guidance from God.”
“Al gets a vote in this?”
“He is my best friend and my priest. It gives him a kind of double authority.”
“Well, Al doesn’t have sex and he doesn’t have children. We need extra help.”
I was a great reader of horoscopes, if not a great believer in them. I loved the idea of being assessed. All I wanted was a second opinion from an unbiased third party. The unseen person in the tent seemed as good a shot as any.
“I don’t know,” Romeo said, eyeing the tent like it was a center for some cult religion that snatched up teenaged runaways and forced them into saffron robes.
“Hey, I rode the Zipper,” I said. “I’ve made my leap of faith for the day. You need to make yours.”
We walked over, and after a moment’s indecision about how to proceed, I rapped on the wooden sign. A woman in her sixties who looked like every woman in my neighborhood stuck her head out from the flap. She had short salt-and-pepper hair, a light-blue pullover, a little pink lipstick. She smiled at us. “One minute,” she said, then disappeared again.
So we waited, not saying anything, kissing to pass the time, until a skinny blond girl about fourteen years old ducked out from under the tarp and flew off like a bird to find her friends.
“Think of all the future she had to hear about,” Romeo said. “At least we won’t take long.”
A hand with short nails and no rings shot out from under the flap and waved us in. It was cramped and dark inside. We had to stoop or our heads would have lifted up the center of the tent. There were two dozen candles and a little electric fan. The fortune-teller was wearing jeans and gardening clogs. I was disappointed. I was hoping for something a little more exotic.
“You wanted Mata Hari,” she said brightly. “I’m Ellen. I used to be Madame Zikestra, but the wig and the robes drove me insane. It gets very hot in here in the summer.”
“No, you’re fine,” I said. “I mean, I’m sure you’re fine.” Did she read minds or did everybody ask her the same question?
“I only do one at a time,” she said pleasantly.
I shook my head. “This is a joint deal,” I told her. “What we need to find out, we need to find out together.”
She thought it over for a minute. “Okay,” Ellen said. “But for the two of you it’s going to be twenty bucks.”
“Really?” Romeo said.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Ellen said.
I reached into my purse and put a twenty down on the table.
“There’s only one chair,” she said.
So Romeo and I split the chair, each of us hanging one leg off the side. We were no closer than we had been on any of the rides.
“All right, let’s get something for your money here. Let me see those hands.” She appeared to be a distant cousin of the older Doris Day, all button-nosed and bright-eyed.
“Don’t you want to hear the problem first?” I said.
She shook her head. “Hands.”
We put both of our hands faceup on the table, four palms turned up to the dim light. Romeo had on his wedding ring and Ellen tapped it once. “You’re not married,” she said.
“Not to her,” Romeo said.
“Not to anybody,” Ellen said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Not to anybody alive, and we can’t be married to the dead. That’s the first thing I have to tell you.”
Romeo looked more interested then.
She traced her nail lightly across my palms and then went to Romeo’s, then back to mine. “Most days are very boring,” she said. I thought she was talking about our lives, in which case she would have been right about that, too. “I sit in this tent and all these little girls come in. ‘How many babies will I have?’ ‘Does he really love me?’ ‘Am I going to get a car for my birthday?’ On and on and on. The things I see I could never tell them, anyway. They’re only children, after all. They don’t need to know anything. They should have their happiness. For example, if you had come in here at fourteen,” she said to Romeo, “you wouldn’t have wanted to hear that you were going to fall in love with a very kind woman and that you’ll have seven children together
and one of those children will die when she is a little baby. No boy at fourteen could make sense of that. Marriage, children, death—what would it even mean? I couldn’t tell you that later on your wife was going to get breast cancer and die. To know all of that before would be unbearable.” She shook her head in sympathy for it all. “If you had heard it and believed me, you would have thought it would be impossible to survive. But people survive terrible things. Now all those facts are history. Now I can tell you the truth. But if I had told you then, it would have been cruel.”
Romeo closed his hands together like a book.
“Oh, come on. Don’t do that,” she said, and patted his hands. “Don’t make me feel bad for talking. It’s already happened, I didn’t do it. It’s good to see people who’ve had some life, people who want to know true things.”
But I wasn’t sure I did want to know. I wanted the carnival act, the fashion magazine horoscope: long life, true love, a bundle of money. I wanted Madame Zikestra. I wanted twenty dollars’ worth of reassurance that everything was going to be fine. I knew I was going to die, that my girls would die, Tony and Sarah, all of us eventually. I had a general understanding of the order of life. That didn’t mean I wanted the details.
“I think we should go,” I said, but I didn’t even try to stand up.
She ignored me. “Open your hands again,” she said to Romeo.
He did what she told him.
“There are so many funny things here, the two of you. It’s like a hall of mirrors. When I see your hands, I get the strongest sense of memory, like I’ve seen these two sets of hands before. You’re
not in any hurry, right? I want to tell you a story. A long time ago, years ago, two children came into my tent, very young. I was still doing the whole magic fortune-teller thing then. They said they had to come in together. I set their hands up just this way and I saw an amazing thing: The two of them had the same lines. Not the little ones, not the details, but in the big things they were twined together. But they were young, and so on their lines they were way up here”—she touched the pad beneath the base of my finger—“just at the beginning. I felt very sorry for them because I could see that, unlike other young people, they really were in love but that this love would separate them and whip them all across the world before they came together again. Their lines were so much together. In their hands there was so much love and hate. Never underestimate the hate. It can lock you just as tightly. But I didn’t tell them anything. I said what they wanted to hear—their parents would forgive them, there would be joy in their families, blah, blah, blah. It was true, in a manner of speaking, but it was so far away. They never could have stood the pain if I had explained it to them.”
Ellen had the careful, cheerful tone of someone who was giving you very complex directions to the expressway.
“And now I see the same two hands. You were right to say you had to come together. You were right to wait until now. If I had seen the two of you at fourteen, it would have been the same story and I would have told you the same lie. But this is where you are, right down here.” She touched my hand again, closer to the base of my palm. I still had a good inch, inch and a quarter of life left, but it chilled me to see how much of the line was gone. “All the storms are clearing now and the world is bringing
you together again, as it should be. You know what Shakespeare said, ‘A brawling love, a loving hate’? That’s the two of you. Just don’t ever regret the past. It was all for a reason. You loved your wife,” she said to Romeo, and then she turned to me. “And you, so you had to wait longer for love, but you had your girls and so the waiting became another kind of love.” Ellen looked so pleased to be telling us all of this.
I nodded. I felt physically ill. Maybe the rides were catching up with me. Mostly it was the awful and completely impossible notion of Sandy and Tony sitting in this tent some fifteen years ago.
“So what do we do?” I said. “About the brawl?”
“It’s been a hell of a storm, but every storm in the world runs its course sooner or later. Two hands like these don’t happen very often, if I can count from personal experience.” She scooped up our hands and made them into a pile. “Love each other madly, do you understand what I’m saying?”
I suppose it was clear enough. At any rate, I would have agreed to anything if it meant getting out of there. Romeo picked up the stuffed cat. We said good-bye and stumbled out of the tent. The sudden shot of sunlight made my head ache instantly, like leaving a movie theater at two in the afternoon in July.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Romeo. “I’m so sorry about that.”
“Come on.” He took my hand and we began to walk away from the tent and the midway at a brisk pace.
“Where are we going?”
“We’re leaving.”
I followed him to the car. I wanted to ask him about the baby he and Camille had lost. I wanted to ask him if he thought it was
possible she was talking about our children, but I felt so awful about dragging him in there in the first place that I couldn’t bring a single word to my mouth. I felt like I wanted to go to a dark place and sleep for a week. I felt that in exchange for information Ellen had taken every ounce of energy I had.
Five miles outside of Canobie Lake, we came to a little green-and-white motel called the Sylvan Park. Romeo pulled into the parking lot and told me to wait for a minute. I stared at the bushes, the cracked asphalt, and tried not to think about anything at all. After the minute was up, he came back with a key and got behind the wheel again. “Twenty-three,” he said. He drove to the end of the row and parked the car. We went into the room and fell down on the bed without turning on the lights. I didn’t think it was strange we had wound up here. I think it was the only place for us to go. He rolled over and held me close to him. “I found you,” he whispered into my hair. “I found you.”