Cheapskate in Love (15 page)

Catherine, another stylist in the salon, stood next to
Donna. She was working on Helen, who was a regular customer there. Like Donna,
Catherine could see what was happening outside without being seen. They were
both in the habit of gazing out the window frequently during work. There was
little of interest outdoors in that town—the commercial street in front
of them had intermittent pedestrian and vehicle traffic—but they had been
working in the salon for so many years that the wonders of hairstyling, chair
massages, and facials had been exhausted for them. Although the chance was
small that they would see something new in front of the shop, they kept
looking. The other way they had of passing their day was talking. They indulged
in that liberally. They kept almost a constant banter going amongst themselves
or with customers. They had talked so much over the years that they had an
intimate knowledge of each other’s life. Neither woman was secretive. However,
although the two women were good friends, entrusting personal secrets to each
other and spending time together outside of work, they were quite different in
several ways. Catherine didn’t have the voluptuous beauty of Donna. She was
plain looking and somewhat overweight. Her excessively highlighted and
permed
hair, heavy makeup, and colorful clothing were all
calculated attempts to compensate for her lack of prettiness. But they
completely failed to attract the desires of men that Donna so effortlessly drew
toward herself. In comparison with Donna’s palpable sensuality, Catherine had
the personal charm of an automated voice system. The usual reaction of men to
Catherine was to get away as fast as possible.

To Catherine’s question about the circulating car, Donna
replied, “Yes. That beat-up thing ought to be melted down and recycled.”
Appearances mattered very much to her. She drove a new BMW.

“Who do you think’s driving it?” Catherine asked.

“Don’t know.”

“What do you think they’re doing?” Catherine continued.

“Maybe it’s an old man who’s lost. He might have forgot
where he’s going. He’ll just go round and round in circles till he runs out of
gas.”

“It seems to be a man,” Catherine agreed. “He seems to be
looking in here, when he drives past.”

“Could be.”

“Maybe you have another admirer?” teased Catherine.

“If he is, I’m giving him to you.”

“You ought to. You could give one to everyone here. You have
enough,” Catherine complained. “Helen, would you like one of Donna’s ardent
admirers?”

“Maybe,” Helen said. “I’d have to see him first.” Helen
spoke in the same light manner that Catherine had. She was quite sure, however,
that she did not want one of the fellows drooling over Donna. She thought
Donna’s lifestyle more suitable to someone half of Donna’s age.

“I’ll take one,” the woman said, whose hair Donna was
cutting. “I’ll take anything over what I got. Nothing could be worse. I can’t
remember why I married him. He snores like a horse.”

Catherine was about to reply, but she glanced out of the
window. “Look, there he is again! Do you think he’s a stalker?” Catherine
shouted excitedly, as she pointed outside.

At Catherine’s exclamation, all ten women in the salon
rushed over to the window to get a good look at the car and driver. A stalker wasn’t
an every day occurrence in that town. That was big city news, and the women
wanted to catch it.

Outside, while Bill drove slowly by the salon, he saw the
women in the salon looking at him. Inside, the women saw him watching them.
Both parties became locked in a stare. Neither side knew what the other side
was up to. They were bewildered, perturbed, and profoundly transfixed by each
other. They were inseparable spectators and could not be parted. The women were
partly horrified, because they imagined that they had caught sight of a stalker
in brilliant daylight. Poor Bill, in return, felt all of their accusing eyes
upon him. His heart pounded. Sweat seeped from his pores. His hands clenched
the steering wheel. Although innocent of any crime—and guileless, simple,
and naïve by nature—he was turned into the detested criminal they thought
he was, simply by the strength of their glaring condemnation. He was so taken
with fear at himself that he was on the edge of a trembling fit. A moment more,
and he would have been twitching to pieces.

Luckily, a car came behind him and started honking. Bill’s
concentration had been so absorbed in staring and being stared at, that he had
begun to drive slower than ever. His foot had stopped pressing the gas pedal,
and his car had been barely rolling forward. He had no awareness of what was
happening around him. He had not noticed the car come up to his rear. The
driver of that car, after a few moments of proceeding at a turtle’s trot, laid
on his horn for several seconds, several times in a row. Bill was so
startled,
he almost leaped from his pants.

“What the...” he cursed. “This isn’t a racetrack.” He put on
his brake. Rolling down his window, he stuck out his arm and angrily motioned
the car behind to pass.

“There’s no NASCAR race around here, buddy!” he shouted at
the occupants. “What’s your hurry?”

A man older than Bill was driving the other car, and there
were two elderly female passengers. None of them responded to Bill, except to
briefly look at him, like he was an animal at the zoo.

“Get out of here!” Bill shouted at them, shaking his fist in
the air. “I hope you get a speeding ticket!”

While the car pulled in front of him, Bill’s Blackberry
rang. He pulled his arm back in and fumbled through the stuff on the passenger
seat to find the device.

In the salon, the women began chuckling with laughter, when
they saw the supposed stalker upset by the honking. Their previous suspicions
evaporated and were replaced with mockery of the stranger. They knew they
weren’t watching a hardened criminal engaged in illegal activity. They returned
to where they had been before rushing to the window, talking among
themselves
. One woman remarked, “If that man is a stalker,
we could all be FBI agents.”

Unlike the rest, Helen was silent, when she sat down in the
chair where she had been. She had not said anything to anyone, since they had
all rushed to the window. Looking outside, she had quickly recognized Bill’s
car and saw that it was
him
. She knew he wasn’t
capable of being a stalker, so she hadn’t watched him with the same feelings as
the others, but she didn’t want to defend him either. She had simply observed
how he handled an awkward situation. She suspected why he had unintentionally
created the embarrassing moment for himself. He should be ridiculed for his
timidness
, she thought, in driving by the salon again and
again, but still she considered him to have acted naturally, when he saw them
staring at him and when the car behind had startled him. During that time, when
all their eyes were on him, he had shown what she thought was openness and a
kind of pluck. He certainly had made a fool of himself, but on her he had left
a favorable impression.

“I know who that is,” she said to Catherine, when she was
seated again.

“Who?” Catherine asked, eager for gossip.

“It’s my neighbor Bill. I’ve known him for years. That’s his
car.”

“Is he stalking you?” Catherine wanted to know in all
seriousness. She still wished to believe that they had seen a stalker, since it
wasn’t yet apparent to her what else the man could be doing.

“No. He’s only interested in young women. The younger, the
better.”

“You’re not old,” Donna assured her, as she should. There
was less than a year’s difference between her age and Helen’s.

“I’m the same age as him,” Helen said. “But any woman near
his age he thinks is ancient. He brags to the front desk person and anyone else
he feels comfortable with that his girlfriends are always at least fifteen
years younger than him.”

“Oh, one of those,” Donna observed. She had a lot of experience
with men like that, more than she cared to remember.

“Child molesters,” Catherine declared grimly. Although she
was much younger than Donna and Helen, she knew she wasn’t young enough or
pretty
enough for Bill. She knew what Bill’s type wanted.

Helen, Donna, and the woman whose hair Donna was cutting let
out sudden, high-pitched laughs at Catherine’s comment. Catherine barely smiled
at their reaction.

Donna recovered the quickest. “So what’s he doing out there,
if he’s not looking for you?” she asked Helen.

“He probably wants to come in here,” Helen said, “but he’s
afraid. I guess he’s realized that his hair needs fixing. He dyed it himself,
I’m sure. It’s truly a mess. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

With a boldly inflected voice suitable for a radio
advertisement, Catherine said, “Sounds like a...”

“Man emergency,” she and Donna sang out together. They had
dealt with such emergencies before.

Donna, Catherine, and their customers smiled and shared a feeling
of superiority. They thought that a sensible woman, which they all knew
themselves to be, would never make the mistake of trying to dye her own hair.
Only a silly, old man would try to do that.

Chapter 17

Bill finally found his Blackberry in the pile of stuff on
the passenger seat, while still parked in front of the salon.

The text message read: “Lets go mountain climb. Call me now.
Linda”

Bill was irate that Linda had contacted him again. While she
had driven him home after his fall at Bear Mountain, in the midst of his great
pain, he had still had enough strength to tell her that since he couldn’t see
his backpack again, he didn’t want to see her either. She had called him stupid
to worry about such an ugly, cheap thing, and he called her stupid to throw
away a perfectly good purchase. They had fumed and fussed all the way to his
apartment complex, where he had bid her goodbye by telling her he meant what he
said: He would never see her again. In return, she had said, “My pleasure,
stupid! I never want to see someone as stupid as you.” Bill immediately
perceived by her message that she had been unable to find a smarter man to go
hiking with. No one is as stupid as I was to go hiking with her, he said,
raging at himself and his mistake. He was determined not to be dumb ever again
with a woman, and definitely not with Linda.

In his fury, he blamed her for everything that had gone
wrong that morning outside the salon: His endless circling, his embarrassment
in front of so many women, his fright from a car with older people. His violent
thoughts were unreasonable, but nonetheless immensely satisfying. They allowed
him to shift the blame for his public shame to her. He remembered that he had
dyed his hair in the first place to impress Linda and grew even angrier. He
shouted at his Blackberry, as if the little piece of metal and plastic was
her
, “No treks for me. Not now, not ever. Get lost. I’m
getting my hair done.” He threw the phone on the passenger seat, only to pick
it up again and continue shouting, “And I’m getting a facial. I’m going to meet
someone new. I’m through with you.” He flung the Blackberry down, boiling with
petulance.

Now he was more determined than ever to go into the salon.
In his eagerness and blind anger, he quickly shifted the car out of park and
stepped on the gas to speed to the nearest parking space, which was a parking
lot around the corner. Before he had gone twenty-five feet, however, he slammed
on the brakes. He narrowly avoided rear-ending the car, which had just pulled around
him, with the three elderly occupants. That car had come to a complete halt,
and one of the elderly female passengers was helping the other female
passenger, who was older than her, out of the car to a walker.

Bill had no patience for them or anyone at the moment. He
had someplace to go. Earlier that morning the car had been going much too fast
for him, but now it was blocking him. He stuck his head out of his car. “What
are you doing? This is a street! Not a parking lot! Drive that car! You want to
kill people?” he yelled. “Get going!”

The two elderly women on the sidewalk and the elderly man in
the driver’s seat ignored Bill. They continued to do what they were doing at
the same unhurried pace. Surging with impatience, Bill swung his car into the other
lane. He passed the stationary car, but was almost hit by a van coming from the
opposite direction on the two-lane road. The van driver luckily put on his
brakes in time to avoid a crash. As Bill sped away, the van driver cursed him
for being a reckless NASCAR racer.

After Bill parked his car in the lot, he sped to the salon,
pumping his arms and legs. But the closer he drew toward that place, the cooler
his anger and enthusiasm became, and the slower his limbs moved. The vehemence
he had felt only minutes ago toward Linda deserted him, and when he was a
storefront away from the salon, once again he didn’t know what he should do.
Should I go in there? Why am I going in there? For what reason should I spend
who-knows-how-much money? Who cares what Stan and my coworkers think about my
hair? Such thoughts ran around and around his brain, crippling his will to act.
If I was dating someone, he thought, I would run in there, but I’m not. Who
knows if I ever will again? Less than half an hour had passed since he had
reaffirmed his detestation of Linda in the strongest terms, but all of a sudden
a positive feeling for Linda overcame him, since she had shown interest in him
once more. But that transient sensation soon passed. He knew he had run a full
course of foolishness with her, and it was time to leave her behind.