And She Was (16 page)

“How? How could you love someone who does that to you?”

I knew even as the words left my mouth that I’d gone too far. I had
neither the wisdom nor the experience to go with this responsible feeling. And Mary knew it too.

She turned on me. “You don’t even know me, and you want to tell me anything. Nobody asked you.”

Mary got up to pull two teacups from a dish drainer on the counter. I waited, caught in a kind of no-man’s-land of my own making. No wonder I usually stayed out of this kind of thing. Mary placed one cup carefully on the table in front of me. She held the other cup and stroked its smooth surface with the back of her index finger. When she spoke again, her voice was calm, instructive even.

“You think I don’t know about you? Haven’t been watching you? You’re no different from me. I see you waiting for him to come back, needing him. But you’ll wait for him to leave too. Won’t you? You’re no different from me. You just don’t love him is all. You haven’t even got that.”

I felt my lower lip tremble and saliva pool in my mouth. How could my motivating role have turned so quickly? How could a woman like Mary have so much clarity when it came to men? How could I have so little?

I gulped down my tea, burning my tongue and throat. “I better go.”

Mary stood up too. “I didn’t mean it to sound like that.”

“Yes, you did.”

I pushed against the gray planks of my door and stepped into a cabana that wasn’t as empty as I’d left it. It seemed weighted with the past, with Liz’s presence. I lit the kitchen propane light and watched the shadows form along the walls. I poured an eight-ounce glass of Baileys and sat down at the table. She’d sat here. She’d stared out these windows. She’d been that other woman then. I could almost see her, moving about the cabana, straightening, making dinner. She has all her teeth; her hair is sleek, she wears something light colored and wool and cotton. She hums as she works. Maybe she’s preparing for a visitor. But she stops now and then. She puts down her broom or her spoon and walks to the windows. She looks out over the valley, and the smile leaves her lips. Something heavy is already growing in her, some
thing that will soon submerge Liz beneath a torrent of guilt. And then a flood of booze.

As I climbed the ladder up to my loft, I thought about her hands clutching these same rungs, like me, head spinning from a night of drinking. I lay in my feathered loft, feeling the empty space beside me.

AUGUST 2, 1986

B
ellie and I were sitting at her kitchen table, inhaling the leftovers from a three-day relationship with a fisherman called Reek. I leaned back and inhaled sharply through my nose. I could feel tiny bits of powder clinging to the cilia.

“That bitch from the HiTide made a play for him,” Bellie said, getting up to pour herself an orange juice. “He goes, ‘I want an Alaskan woman.’ And I say, ‘Of course you do. You’re not stupid.’”

Bellie had been raging about the thin work ethics among the women who worked the men in Dutch. It seemed the HiTide whores weren’t playing by Bellie’s rules, which were quite simple—if she had targeted a man, everyone else had better back off.

She dumped another little mound of coke on the mirror. “Besides,” she said, “I’ve got other things to deal with. I can’t have my life messed up right now. You know?”

“No. What things?”

She looked at me then, tearing her eyes off the lines she’d been slicing. “Nothing. Or everything. Nothing.” Her focus returned to the mirror and razor work. “I mean, there’s so many guys. You don’t have to get like that. I could knock her head off. You know what I mean? All those fuckin’ blondes are bitches.”

She looked at me with a startled expression. “Except you.”

“I’m not that kind of blond. Mine’s real.”

“What’s the fucking difference?”

I pinched one nostril shut and sniffed. “There’s a big fucking difference.” I began to explain my blondness theories to Bellie. I’ve come up with a fairly well constructed paradigm.

The first known fake blondes were these Roman highbrow women. They were all pissed because their husbands had the hots for the fair-haired, buxom German captives they kept bringing home from the campaigns. Now, these chicks were slaves, plain and simple. But they didn’t act like slaves, the way I imagine it. They held their conquered blond heads high in that sea of dark hair and sparkled. They were the outsiders, the other, and yet something about them, about their hair at least, captivated their conquerors. Soon the Roman women were mixing stuff like pigeon dung, vinegar sediment, goat fat, beachwood ash, crocus flower, leaving it on their hair overnight and waking up bleached. Sometimes the German women would sell their long golden locks to wig makers, who stuck them on well-to-do Roman heads. Even the men went blond sometimes. I’m not sure why rich, world-conquering Romans would clamor to emulate their own captives, but that’s what happened.

The pure and true-hearted Romans, however, knew it wasn’t good. They knew that if you let the vanquished people set the trends, you’d basically relinquished the power of your conquest. All that blood and beheading and so forth for naught.

Tertullian, one of the early Roman Christian proselytizers, was not the first to complain about this egregious capitulation, but he was enthusiastic. “I see some women dye their hair blond by using saffron,” he wrote. “They are even ashamed of their country, sorry that they were not born in Germany or in Gaul! Thus, as far as their hair is concerned, they give up their country.”

Did those newly blond Romans feel guilt for their bloody conquests? Did they go blond like we hang dream catchers in our windows or turquoise bracelets on our arms, to identify with the victims? Mingle ourselves with them and shed some culpability?

Or do people just instinctively need to change their appearance from time to time? The epic quest for a new look.

Either way, it started with insecurity and stuck there.

I noticed Bellie was no longer in the kitchen. “Where did you go?” I yelled.

She didn’t answer, but I heard the drier down the hall start to rumble. She returned to the kitchen with an armload of laundry and dumped it on the counter.

“I was just saying it’s about insecurity.”

“Um-humm,” she said, folding now.

I could feel the coke zinging along my limbs and circling my brain. I couldn’t stop now.

Frankly, fake blondes give us real blondes a bad rep. The truth is that most women with iffy morals attempt to go blond. Check out any corner where the hookers hang out. Count the blondes. You’ll see. It was the same way in Rome, where blond hair quickly became the trademark of the working-girl set. But even your ordinary bleached blondes are little better. They may not be true hookers, but they sure know that by going blond, they’re advertising. Bleaching is a signal that screams—I’m easy. I’m insecure. Just give me a man, and I’ll be okay.

Then we come to the dumb blonde phenomenon. The crux of the issue is that it’s true. Blondes are dumber. Here’s how it works. A blond girl starts getting attention. Even if she’s butt ugly, she’ll get it from the rear. She’s walking down the sidewalk. A carload of boys cruises up behind. They see that cascade of hair swaying and start to hoot and honk. Her hair gets all that attention before the boys pull alongside and notice she’s got three eyes or something. If she’s reasonably symmetrical, the hoots and hollers continue. So our blond teen grows up with the feel of being singled out by boys and men. She finds out her looks can get her in, take her up, squeak her by. So naturally when it’s her looks that conquer, she doesn’t have to concentrate as much on, say, learning the dialectic or figuring out which way is north, or all that complex birth control stuff. A bubblehead in the making.

Of course, it’s not just men who create the blond psyche. Women do it to each other too. We have a sense of the blonde’s sexual power. So maybe we don’t expect as much. Our brains are so impressionable this feeds on itself, and soon what was once a blonde’s tendency to use her sexual power more than her intellectual power is just who she is. She’s dumb but blond.

I know all you blondes are sputtering, “But I’m blond and I’m smart.”
But think how much smarter you’d be if you weren’t blond. I took a rinky-dink IQ test once. I was one point away from a genius score. That one point is my hair. And my mother’s obsession with it.

I can trace the beginning to that one night—the night my father passed out and fouled my report card. I’m still sitting there, watching it, watching him when she comes home.

She cradles my head against her chest, and I can remember the sweaty smell and the smooth glassiness of the dress. “Oh, Brandy,” she says, pulling my hair back from the sticky tears on my cheeks. “I told you not to listen to him. I tried to warn you, honey. He’s weak. He’s not like us.”

She holds me like this for a minute or two, then she turns me around to face her. “There’s something I’ve been saving for you.” She’s all soft smile and humble victor. “I was going to give it to you for your birthday. But now’s as good a time as any.” She takes my hand and leads me to her bedroom.

It’s a makeup kit—Maybelline, in a three-tiered travel case in swirls of brown and green. I count the eye shadows—twenty-four. The blushers—five. The lip creams—sixteen. And there are pencils and pluckers and sharpeners and brushes and three tiny bottles of perfume. I run my fingers over the mirror sewn into the case lid and over the clean rows of colors and instruments. And I know I’m crying because I can’t see any of it.

She sits next to me on the water bed and squeezes me. She leans in to my ear and whispers as if there was someone to keep a secret from. “I knew you’d love it.”

A month later, he left for good. I hadn’t been good enough, smart enough, studious enough. But, as Mom said, I was pretty enough. And I was blond enough.

For those who aren’t—the fake blondes—it’s worse. These chicks are often not that smart to begin with. They know, somewhere under that mouse brown hair, that they aren’t cutting it in the brain power world. But, they think, I could gain the upper hand in the looks department, because let’s face it, sexual power is power immense. So they take the cheap, easy route and go blond. Hence a great many blondes, both real and fake, are tipping the scale toward dumb.

“So that’s the just of it,” I said, turning to Bellie.

Her ass was sticking out of the fridge, her head buried deep inside as she sprayed and swiped.

“Bellie?” I said louder.

She pulled her head out. “What?”

“Do you get it now? Do you see what I mean?”

She sat down across from me and drew her straw through a less than perfectly straight line. She pinched one nostril shut and snorted deeply.

“Shit,” she said, looking at me like I’d been masturbating in front of her. “All you blondes got some kind of stick up your ass about it?”

“No, just pisses me off, is all.”

“You definitely got a stick up your ass.”

“I’m trying to say, there are different categories here.”

“Yeah, but you’re blond.”

I changed the subject.

I admit I did have a stick up my ass about it. And that stick was beginning to chafe. I’d always been able to place myself into a superior category to the other blond, loose, directionless women I’d known. But, out here, with so few of us and so many of them, I’d been less able to keep my delineations distinct. I was slipping, or perhaps just understanding I didn’t have any height to slip from.

So you can imagine my reaction when one of the HiTide babes invited me to a party. Her name was Honey, and she had a bad bleach job. The kind with that chalky, crispy texture that gives way to a spreading dark part that seems to be cleaving the head in half. Even more than usual I needed to separate myself from the desperate fake blondes that came my way. But I was also bored, sick of being alone, and not given to rejecting party invites.

“It’s going be a blast,” Honey said, the next afternoon when I was sitting with Carl at the bar. Sitting with Carl was just that. It does not imply conversation, just sitting. We’d been trading Russian cigarettes again. I don’t know why this became such a hobby in Dutch. The cigarettes were bad, every single brand. But we traded them anyway.

“Me and Jill can give you a ride out,” Honey was saying. “These guys from a trawler are throwing it. Shit, they’ve flown in a case of tequila
and fuck knows how much beer.” Honey leaned toward me and whispered in my ear, “They’ve got some connection in Sand Point with fantastic blow. These guys made like forty-thou each.”

She stuck her cigarette firmly between her lips to free her hands so she could reach down to adjust a wayward boob. She blinked her purple-smudged eyes several times to clear the smoke that drifted into them. “Anyway, there’s like seven of these guys and only four of us. So they asked us to get some more girls for the party. We thought of you.”

And there it was. I’d been lumped into the blond coke-whore set by the blond coke-whores themselves. These fake blondes had so little self-awareness they couldn’t see the distinction between themselves and other blond cocktail waitresses who wear tight jeans and padded bras. A moment of panic set in. Who else was oblivious? I wondered if the distinction was all that distinct. I looked at Honey’s short denim skirt and stiff, sprayed hair and felt immediately better. I would never wear a skirt at the Elbow Room, let alone one that rode up to my crotch when I sat on a bar stool.

“Oooo! I want to come. I want to come,” Les piped in, giving a stiff-legged hop and clapping his hands.

“They want girls, not queers.”

“Actually, I can be very girlish.” Les leaned across the bar toward Honey and rested his cheek in his hand. He pushed his full lips out in a kiss and made an exaggerated smacking noise. When Honey didn’t seem convinced, Les straightened and turned his back on the bar to fiddle with booze bottles. “Brandy can’t come without me,” he said over his shoulder.

Honey looked at me.

I shrugged. “I’m merely a pawn in Les’s game.”

“Whatever,” Honey said, crushing out her cigarette. “We’ll pick you up around three o’clock.” She pushed her short skirt off the stool, swooshed a large leather bag over her shoulder, and headed for the door. Turning as she swung the door open, she tugged the hem of her skirt down over the back of her ass and left.

As soon as the door closed, Les did a backward moonwalk. “Going to a party and we’re going to get laid. Going to a party of love,” he sang to the tune of “Going to the Chapel.”

“Les,” I said, “what do you think you’re doing? If these guys asked
for girls, the chance they’re going to switch over for your skinny ass is less than remote.”

He didn’t answer, kept singing.

“Les,” I said again, “why do you even stay here? I mean the queer scene here is, well, limited.”

“You don’t got a clue,” he said, moonwalking toward me now. “There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil….”

He stopped moving and leaned in to me so close I felt his breath moving my hair. “Why are you here? I mean the white girl scene here isn’t, well, that happening.”

When I didn’t answer, he turned to Carl, two stools down. “Whadda you think, Carl?”

Carl grunted and reached for the jar of beet-colored pickled eggs.

“What the fuck’s he doing here?” Jill, the driver, leaned across Honey’s thighs, packaged in black leggings, to shout out the passenger door.

Honey lifted one leg over the gearshift to slide toward the driver. She shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Who knows.”

Les started to climb into the truck.

“No room,” Jill said. “Get in the back.”

Les grabbed my hand and boosted me into the truck bed.

“Hey, she can ride up here,” Jill yelled, craning her neck backward out the driver’s window.

“Drop dead,” Les said.

“Dipshit,” Jill said and ground into first.

Les and I scootched our butts against the rear of the cab.

I had worn tight Levi’s tucked into my suede boots. On top I’d put on a short lilac Benetton sweater that would ride up over my belly button when I reached up or took a deep breath or moved. I’d put the front third of my hair into a ponytail, which hung down over the loose hair in back. I had on Mary Kay mascara, powder, and lipstick.

Les was wearing what Les always wore. Jeans, of some nonlabeled brand, and a T-shirt with a jeans jacket over the top.

“Look at them,” Les said, pointing behind us into the cab. Jill and Honey were passing a bottle of tequila between them. Les rapped on the window. When they turned, he made a swigging-the-bottle motion.
Jill rolled her eyes and passed the bottle to Honey, who struggled to open the rear slide window. It was rusted shut. She rolled down the passenger window and squeezed herself through up to the waist, reaching out with the bottle. I leaned out over the truck bed and made a grab for it. The truck lurched through several potholes, and we fumbled, like relay racers fucking up the baton transfer, but eventually made the handoff.