The Blondes (4 page)

“What you want?” the boy asked the girl. He repeated it several times and she wouldn’t look at him or answer, her arms folded across her stubby body. “I said, what
do
you want?”

“I don’t want nothin’,” the girl snapped, and she stood up and made a big production of straightening her cargo purse
before she walked away, the skull patch on it bouncing off her hip. He looked at me, and I looked back, apologetic for women the world over. His mouth made a straight-line smile, as if saying he’d had better days. He had small acne bumps across his cheeks—and I realized neither he nor his girlfriend was more than nineteen. He lifted himself off the bench and loped after her like he wasn’t in any hurry to catch up but would eventually.

“Call me,” I said to the phone, quietly. “Call me. Call me.” I stared at that goddamn phone the way I used to stare at objects the summer I was eleven, the summer I thought I had telekinetic powers. It didn’t warble, burble, vibrate, or sing. Wouldn’t you know the cold black object just sat there in my palm, ticking off the time? I dropped it back in the side pocket of my bag and stalked off in the same direction as the young couple. With every step, I wondered where the fetus was located inside me. Did it slosh to the right or the left? Did it bob between my hips like a thimble in a tub of water? How big was it? Was it just a tadpole still?

I felt incredibly naive, unfeminine—un
female
—not automatically knowing these facts, and a wave of heat overcame me. I vaguely recollected a series of pink illustrations from some textbook, imagined a seahorse or dinosaur shape, with alien eyes, about the size of a cashew. I sat down again before I had crossed the park and swiped my short sleeve across my forehead to mop up the sweat. As you will eventually learn, I overheat when I’m in crisis. I added another shade of pink to my list of pet peeves: sex ed.–pamphlet pink.

Eventually, I got up off that bench and kept walking, and after a while I found myself in a hair salon in Midtown. By then I had decided I didn’t want you. How do I explain this? Especially if you can hear me. If you can understand. But you
can’t
understand, can you? I’m just a voice. A hum.

It’s a rational thing. I’ll tell you all my reasons. I didn’t want to be a single mother. I had no income. Sure, I had an MA in Culture and Communication Studies, but what did that really mean? I was a PhD candidate living on a ticking grant clock. I could probably find employ back in Toronto, something dull but for which I was qualified: a job in media or arts, copywriting, maybe the CBC. God, how we all wanted to work at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation! It was practically upper-middle-class welfare. I was qualified to teach, but even sessional college jobs were rare. I could get a job doing some kind of marketing, or maybe just secretarial work. But the idea of raising Karl’s baby when I wasn’t sure how I felt about Karl made me feel small, both as a woman and as a human. The idea of raising
any
baby was bewildering.

I’m not sure exactly how I came to my conclusion about you that afternoon. It just seemed that with each step one thought replaced another, and by the time I found myself sitting in the swivel chair of a stylist who didn’t speak a lot of English, I had run out of ambiguity.

“Fix it,” I instructed, pointing to my roots.

“What you want?” the stylist asked, cocking her head, oddly echoing the words of the teenager in the park.

What
did
I want?

The stylist was middle-aged, her own hair a lustrous black without a strand of silver, blown into a bob, smooth and straight around her face. She held up hanks of my hair and then let them fall again, watching. Then she watched in the mirror as she repeated the gesture. My hair was dull, she told me. This was a surprise to me because New York’s water was softer than Toronto’s, and I had thought my hair was healthier than usual. But she gazed at me like she had known me all my life and the way I had treated my hair was a true disappointment to her. She shook her head. “So dull.”

I thought I might cry.

I had heard a lot of hair tips over the years from my mom. I had followed none of them:

I was never sure how an eco-girl was supposed to cope. As for scalp massages, if my head was any indication, it seemed I was always rundown and tense.

“Colour it,” I choked to the stylist. I took off my glasses and laid them over my knee. I wiped one eye with my fist, and some mascara came off on my knuckle. I wiped my knuckle on my jeans. I put my glasses back on. “Colour it,” I said again, stronger. I tilted my chin at the stylist as if daring her to object.

“Oh-kay,” the stylist said, as if thinking,
It’s your funeral
.

My hair has always been slightly bushy, with a coarse, brittle texture, and it was this, I thought, more than the colour, that she was reacting to. White people’s hair is supposed to be fine, like cornsilk. My hair came from my father’s ancestors, who, although I never knew them, were apparently as Scottish as border collies. It was sheepdog thick.

The stylist went to a cabinet and took out that book all salons have, the one with loops of hair in a myriad of colours: black velvet, ebony, sable brown, umber, chocolate, walnut brown, ash brown, mahogany. I used to love playing with them when I was a kid in my mother’s hair shop. The stylist flipped quickly through the browns. Then came auburn, orange-red, ginger, copper, radiant red, flame, deepest scarlet, merlot, purple orchid, violet, plum, indigo, azure, and even flamingo
pink. And then there were the blondes. Though I’d never been one, I knew the names by heart: sahara, desert ochre, dark blonde, goldenrod, luminescent blonde, honey, chamomile, chardonnay, silver blonde, white blonde, and finally, platinum. Back and forth the stylist flipped the book.

“Brown,” I told her, sheepishly. “Just a mid-brown. This colour.” I showed her the ends of my hair. The roots, on the other hand, were the shade of spaghetti marinara.

I had never seen a woman over forty wrinkle her nose, but this woman did exactly that as she looked at me in the mirror. I watched her hold up the book and select a rusty strand to hold next to my roots. “This one,” she said, and nodded.

I craned my neck to look her in the eye. “Brown,” I insisted, but even I could hear some hesitation in my voice.

The stylist next to us looked over. She was younger than my stylist. She said something in Korean. Then she looked hard at me and said, “Go back to your natural colour. It’s right for you.”

I didn’t say anything more. The stylists had won.

The older woman whipped around and started mixing up the colour on a side counter. She threw a vinyl smock over me without even a glance at my face.

She was going to strip out the colour that I’d put in. At least the bleach burning my eyes meant I could cry in public if I wanted to. I had lots of reasons to cry: Karl Mann wouldn’t leave his wife. We had slept together only five times. Karl and his wife had slept together how often? Fifty-five times, three hundred and five, one thousand and five, ten thousand and
five? I imagined them fornicating into infinity. I saw them floating nude through the chamber of their clean white bedroom, like astronauts untethered from gravity, stray limbs tangling like ribbons, indulging in upside-down acts of love-making.

It was just before Labour Day weekend, and the younger stylist had propped open the door of the shop. A fly came in and landed on my pant leg, then another. I jostled my knees and they lifted off, zipped around the salon, then returned, settling defiantly on me.

Karl and I actually slept together six times, if I counted the night in his Mini Cooper, when he had begged me to masturbate for him just once, then give him a hand job, just a hand job, then cried afterward while I rooted around in my purse for a package of Kleenex to clean up. I usually didn’t count that one. I had seen men cry before. My dad, when I was really young. But watching Karl cry was different. He was too tall for that car and the space felt small to begin with. He was a married man, and he wasn’t mine, and I wasn’t sure why I got crying Karl while
she
got stoic Karl. And he didn’t just tear up and hold his fingers across his eyes like my dad had. No, when Karl cried he blubbered like a hundred-and-seventy-pound baby. I had never seen anything like it. His whole forehead wrinkled up. There were more wrinkles there than I’d ever seen in one place, and Karl’s emotion seemed to surge upward through his whole body as if the cacophony, and his soul, would emerge out the top of his head in a big mess. A volcanic eruption. It was like watching someone
orgasm, but uglier. Ours was an ugly affair. And now the flies were back, four of them, big black ones.

“Shoo,” I said, “shoo.” I shook my knees and they took flight, only to return a minute later. In the mirror, my hair looked positively white, fuzzy with the bleach. I had taken my glasses off, and they lay folded on the vanity. My stylist came over to check on me. She gave me a magazine to swat the flies away, but the flies kept returning.

If I were to try to guess when
it
happened—this thing, this strange thing,
your conception
—I would say the fourth time. And that’s what I sat there thinking about, in that hair salon, sweating under that smock. Even now, I still think it was that fourth time.

Karl had shown up at my place unexpectedly. It was close to eleven at night, a Friday, and suddenly he was at the alley door, standing on the fire escape, his drunken face on the other side of my window. I was straining Kraft Dinner for a late meal. I dropped the strainer and the pan together in my sink and sprang halfway across the room I was so surprised. Drops of hot water had splashed my wrists, and they burned, but I said nothing, just wiped my hands on my shorts. I don’t know if shock always leads to good sex, but in that case it did. That he’d come to me was thrilling. Watching him move through my space, touch my things, was more of a disinhibitor than alcohol or the weed no one ever shared with me.

That night, I felt as if I filled my entire body for the first time, was as present as I could possibly be. The only time I’d ever felt even close to that way before was in a women’s history
elective in second year, when I’d sat behind a girl named Catherine Lee—I knew her name only because she raised her hand a lot, and the professor would call on her. And every time she raised her hand, her scoop-neck shirts would gap and I’d stare straight down her perfect back at her black bra straps. I don’t know
why her
, but when she did that, especially if she leaned forward to get the prof’s attention, I felt as if I would burst out of my own skin. It might have been the fact that she didn’t care if her bra showed, that she’d seemed to have a sexuality all her own—I certainly never felt like I had that. Even the couple of men before Karl that I’d messed around with had been like experiments in tactile sensation and physical mechanics rather than fulfilling contact. And until that night in my apartment, Karl had also been an experiment.

I fell on Karl and kissed him in the hallway. He was about to use my bathroom to urinate but somehow I pinned him against the doorway, and in spite of his condition, we began, right there, standing up. I remember I got the feeling almost right away.
That
feeling. It’s one where you feel limp and full of adrenaline at the same time, and your head is suddenly a black-and-white movie, and you can hear the ocean crashing a thousand miles away and radio static and snatches of songs at full volume, and there aren’t any words for it. It wasn’t exactly the sound of violins, but … I hadn’t felt anything like it before with Karl. Maybe he sensed it too, because he got nervous and stopped.

“We shouldn’t,” he said.

But then we went into my bedroom.
Professor Karl Mann
was in
my
room. He was breathing my air, and then his hands and his hair and his scent were in my sheets; he was leaving behind his skin cells; he was trailing a finger over my books and saying something innocuous, and out of the dresser drawer I pulled a condom—the only one I owned, procured two years before from the university women’s centre along with a safe-sex instruction kit. I threw the condom on him, and we finished what we had begun. But because I was still going, could have continued indefinitely, was having my first orgasm with him, he stayed inside me with the condom on after he’d already finished. That must have been when it happened.

In that Midtown hair salon, I shooed the flies away again.

Karl had always seemed delicate. He was tall and thin—much thinner than me. He had a long thin face, and long thin fingers, and a long thin penis, which I didn’t love but also didn’t mind. I had made a lot of noise that night, which I hadn’t done before. Because we’d never been anywhere where I could. Except the one time at the cottage.
This cottage
.

But that was early on in our relationship and I was too nervous to make much noise then.

At my apartment, it was different. It was mine and I was comfortable there. I couldn’t tell if he liked it, my being loud, or if it bothered him. He called having an orgasm “getting off,” which I found alienating, impersonal:
Did you get off?
I felt a little ashamed, and I remember I walked around my room, cleaning the place up, because I couldn’t look at him.