Strange Sisters (16 page)

"The dean wants me to see Dr. Sandstrom," Kathy said.

"Dr. Sandstrom! My God, you aren't going to do it, are you?"

"I don't know. I could probably stay on here if I did."

She had no intention of seeing the psychiatrist, of course. Nothing on earth, at that time, could have prevailed upon her to do so. But she derived a sadistic pleasure from the flaring fear in Vera Telsa's eyes, and she derived a concurrent pleasure equally intense from the inversion of hatred, the sickness within herself that came from the cruel exposure of ugliness where she had thought there was beauty. She sat quietly, looking up at Vera with a demure expression, and across the room on a spindle, trapped in a black disk, Chopin was silent.

"You little fool!" Vera said. "Do you want to ruin yourself? Do you have any idea of what that woman may do to you, may make you say?"

Kathy sat quietly for another moment, her head held a little to one side and the faint demure smile on her lips, as if she were listening for a small sound that might come to her from a great distance, and then she stood up and said, "You're very frightened, aren't you? It makes you hate me very much. You're afraid that I may ruin you, not myself. But you needn't worry. I won't hurt you. I wish you no harm now. I only wish that you'd died before I met you."

Then she turned and let herself out of the house and went back up across the campus past the administration building and down the long slope among the trees to the bank of the river. She had been remembering the river as she had seen it through the dean's window all the time she had been in Vera's house, and she had thought that she would return to it as soon as she was free. It was very cold. The wind crossed the water and knifed through her thin, plain coat. She could feel over all her body a roughening of skin, and her blood seemed to sing in her veins a strange, sad song. Later she would have regrets, very grievous ones, but she had none now, and the predominant quality of her temper was the great sadness that was somewhat like the emotional equivalent of the sound of the river whispering past her in the night between narrow margins of ice.

And the river had continued to flow through time as well as space, from then to now, and morning became afternoon, and the afternoon passed, and it was evening of the last day.

She was by that time slightly drunk again, having stopped several places in her prowling of the streets, and she was standing on the sidewalk looking into the window of a drug store. It seemed to her that drug stores had recently been playing an unusually important role in her life, and this drug store was no exception. This drug store was, as a matter of fact, undoubtedly the most important single thing that had ever happened to her.

Because it had given her, after so many false starts, the real solution to her problem. And she had almost missed it. By the sheerest luck, in passing, she had caught it in the corner of her eye. And it was so simple, so absurdly simple, that it was just positively incredible that she hadn't thought-of it before. She felt faint with relief. Her body began to shake, the sidewalk tilted under her feet, and she took a step forward and leaned her forehead against the cool, smooth surface of the window. The blonde, the brunette, and the redhead smiled at her from inside.

Oh, the reasoning was logical. A child could follow it. It was like a syllogism. You could state it very clearly in a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. She stated it, leaning her head against the glass, thinking each statement through carefully in advance, putting it in exactly the right words. Trouble is the color of the hair. The color of the hair can be changed. Therefore, it is possible to change the color of the hair from the wrong color to the right color and thus end trouble. The end of trouble in a bottle, price one dollar, special offer. Very easy to apply. Using the brush which was provided, you started at the roots and brushed outward with long, even strokes.

The bus fare had been three dollars and fourteen cents. The price of peace kept getting cheaper and cheaper.

She smiled back at the blonde, the brunette, and the redhead. Her eyes lingering last and longest on the redhead, she was reminded of the calendar on the wall of the bare little room at police headquarters, of the small boy with the rooster. The boy had such red hair, the reddest hair she had ever seen. That was the color of hair to have, all right, because it left no question in anyone's mind and was obviously just what it was. There was about its bold, bright honesty nothing nameless and abominable.

Grasping the purse which she had remembered to bring with her from police headquarters while forgetting entirely the small bag, she pushed herself back from the glass and went into the store. Identical twins of the blonde, the brunette, and the redhead were sitting on a glass counter. She went back and stood under their smiles and awaited the arrival of a tall woman who came toward her on the other side of the counter. The woman had shining yellow hair that was set in an elaborate coiffure and was obviously supposed to be an example of what anyone could do with one of the special dollar bottles with directions attached. Her mouth was scarlet and moist, extended carefully beyond the natural lines of her lips, and her lashes were impossibly long and thick and looked as if they were about to start dripping. Flesh surrounding mouth and eyes had a lacquered finish, bright and brittle. If the woman were to smile like the three on glass, Kathy thought, her face would surely crack and check like a cheap china plate.

"How do you do," the woman said. "May I help you?"

"Yes. I want a bottle of the hair dye. Red, please."

The woman jeopardized her face by permitting plucked eyebrows to climb the brittle skin. "Red? Are you quite sure, honey? Or is it for someone else? Your natural coloring..."

"I'm quite sure. I want the red. Nothing will do but the red."

The woman shrugged. Wrapping the bottle of dye, she handed it across the counter. "One dollar, two cents tax, one dollar and two cents, please."

Kathy lay a bill and two pennies on the glass and took the package. Now that she had the simple stuff of a miracle in her possession, she was driven to set it working at once. With a sense of being under pressure of time, she hurried out of the store and turned on the street in the direction of her apartment. Lights were coming on now, incandescents and fluorescents and colored neon tubing twisted into countless spellings, the frail foes of darkness. The earth moved, and time moved, and she must hurry, hurry, hurry. She didn't know why. She only knew that after killing the day she was now imperiled by the passing of time and that it was urgent to do quickly whatever was to be done at all.

In the apartment, she stood with her shoulders against the door behind her and drew her breath in deep, ragged gasps. After a few minutes, her breathing slowed, became shallow, the pressure of time and peril relaxing. With the door closed between her and whatever had pursued her through the streets, she was somewhat reassured. Carrying the bottle of dye, she went into the bedroom and, placing the bottle flat on a chest of drawers so that there was no possibility of its tipping over and breaking, removed her clothing down to her slip. Then she took the bottle and went into the bathroom.

Standing before the little mirror on the door of the medicine cabinet, she unwrapped the package and laid the bottle and the little brush in the lavatory. Retaining the sheet of directions, she sat down on the edge of the bathtub to read. It was really the most simple thing imaginable to work so great a miracle. One had only to brush the dye onto the hair with the little brush, just as it had said in the window, starting at the roots and brushing outward with long strokes to insure even application. The directions said to pour the contents of the bottle into a shallow bowl or pan or any kind of ordinary open container, and so she got up and went back out through the bedroom and living room into the kitchen for a bowl. In the bathroom again, she set the bowl in the sink, first removing the bottle and brush, and then she poured the contents of the bottle into the bowl. It was certainly red, all right. It was as red as fresh blood. It was as red as Paul's Scarlet roses nodding in a June night. Oh, it was a glorious, shining, trouble-free red so wonderfully clear that she could see in it, looking down, the softly distorted reflection of her own face.

The little brush looked a lot like the kind of brush which one used with shoe polish, only it was much softer, of course. Proceeding with great care in exact accordance with directions, leaning forward to follow in the little mirror the progress and effect of her effort, she began to apply the dye. She took into her fingers only a few strands of hair at a time, holding them apart from the rest of her hair and pulling them taut under the stroke of the brush. The dye had a rather unpleasant odor, somewhat like some kind of disinfectant, she thought, and it burned her scalp. At first the dyed strands of hair looked merely a little darker than the rest, as if they were wet with plain water, but after a while, as they began to dry a little, she saw that they assumed an unmistakable red-orange hue, and this filled her with an exorbitant feeling of accomplishment.

It required a long time to do all the hair, and when she was finished at last, the bowl in the sink was almost empty. Inspecting the final effect of her work in the mirror, she was forced to laugh at herself. She was forced to admit that she looked very funny. The hair, unequally dried, was still of various shades, and it was, moreover, quite sticky. It stuck out stiffly in all directions from her head, and it looked even more ludicrous than it might have otherwise because her face below it was so thin and sad. She was like one of these sad-faced clowns who make comedy of misfortune. She laughed and laughed at herself because she was funny and because the miracle had really worked and her hair was another color, or other colors, and she was therefore very happy. The directions had warned her about the stickiness. After the dye had set, you washed the hair in luke warm water and the stickiness disappeared.

She went into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed to wait for the dye to set. Now that she had taken positive action to end her trouble, she didn't mind thinking about things that had happened or might happen, and so she began thinking about what the newspapers and the radio newscasts would say and about the effect of what was said on certain people. She found that this was a great pleasure to her, stimulating a sly, malicious amusement that made waiting easier. For a while she thought about Jacqueline, and then she went back beyond Jacqueline and thought about Vera Telsa. It was certain that both knew by this time that she had been questioned by the police about the murder of Angus Brunn, and it was certain that one of them knew she was guilty. That was not important, though. So far as they were concerned, murder and guilt were minor, and nothing was important or of any consequence whatever except what might be said and become known. And now, at this time, while the possible instrument of their incidental destruction sat on the edge of her bed and waited for her hair to dry, they were feeling the cold fear of the uniquely vulnerable, the grim, oppressive threat of the merciless They.

Sitting there thinking about their fear and how she was the cause of it, she was as delighted as a perverse child. She sat erect, the primness in her posture, and inside she felt rather light and gaseous, and the light feeling, the gas, swelled and gained volume and came up through her throat in the form of laughter. She sat without moving for almost an hour, sometimes laughing a little and sometimes mute as well as motionless, very pleased to think that Jacqueline and Vera were so frightened about something that was not worth being frightened about, because now, of course, since she had discovered this simple way to change herself entirely, she would never do anything bad again, and nothing would happen because of anything bad she had ever done. Being changed, being a different person, she was naturally not responsible for whatever had been done by the person she no longer was.

Eventually it was time to see if her hair was ready to wash. The directions had said approximately an hour. Surely an hour had passed. She got up and returned to the bathroom and peered at her reflection in the little mirror, and she could see immediately that she had again been made the victim of a monstrous joke, and the small tiled room reverberated to the thunderous, rollicking laughter above the lip of the world. For the dye wasn't going to work after all. She should have known, having had so much experience with the caprice of God, that it would never work. Oh, her hair had changed color, all right, and it was still a bright red-orange to casual observation, but this was only part of the joke, the necessary stimulus of false hope, and she could see in the glass that the real color was already beginning to return and that it could never be altered or disguised, never on earth.

So she would have to destroy it. She knew that now. That which cannot be altered can nevertheless be destroyed. If your eye offends you, pluck it out. The Bible said that. If your hair offends you, pluck it out. Whether it said eye or hair didn't really matter. It was the idea that mattered. It was the idea of destroying whatever was offensive.

In the mirror, her thin, sad face crumpled and blurred, and she reached up and took her ridiculous orange hair in both hands and pulled as hard as she could. Some of the hair came out in her hands, but only a little, and it was very painful pulling it out that way. She doubted that she could stand the pain. She would probably faint long before she had all the hair pulled out.

Turning away from the mirror, she went into the bedroom and pawed through the top drawer of the chest until she found a pair of scissors. With the scissors, she cut her hair off, doing as she had done with the dye, taking a few strands at a time and cutting them off as close to the scalp as she could. When she was finished, she returned the scissors to the drawer and went back into the bathroom and looked into the mirror again. There was nothing on her head now but a fine bristle over the scalp, and she saw that her scalp was covered with large orange blotches from the dye. She was quite pleased with what she saw. She rubbed a palm over the bristles and laughed into the mirror.