MAGIC PARINGS

Fortunetelling game spells out true love.

Louise, my teenage sister, had a visitor— Ina Mae. In the late 1940s, life in Happy Valley, a little community on the Tennessee side of the Great Smoky Mountains, could be dull. But fun always happened when Ina Mae came over.

My sister Tot and I stayed close as Louise and Ina Mae sat at the kitchen table: It was fortune-telling time. Louise lit the kerosene lamp and turned it low. They tied Daddy’s big bandanna handkerchiefs around their heads and stared intently into the lamp, describing in scary voices the people and things they “saw” in the flame. Sometimes they predicted love and fortune. I held my breath—an impressionable 8-year-old believing every word.

Tired of the lamps, the girls sent Tot and me out into the dusk to pick apples for them. They carefully peeled their apples, then flung the long peels onto the floor. The peels formed shapes, which the girls interpreted to see if they formed initials, a hint about future suitors.

The trick intrigued me, so I tried it the next day. I carefully peeled two large apples, one for the first name, and one for the last. The tossed peels clearly formed a B and a W. Beecher and Benny Whitehead came to mind, but they were my first cousins. Billy, from another branch of the Whitehead family, was out of the question—his daddy was a Democrat, and my daddy would never approve. Anyone with the last name Boring, my last name, or Boone was my cousin. Birch and Billy White had the right initials, but we didn’t know them well. I’d exhausted my list without any idea of whom I was going to marry.

Nearly 10 years later, as a junior in a new school a hundred miles from Happy Valley, I noticed a tall, thin, good-looking senior. Wherever I went, Bill went, and I began to like him a lot. When I eventually married him in 1956, friends decorated his car with our initials: BW loves EB. •