The Blondes (13 page)

Several heads turned from the screen to look at her. It must have made her nervous because she ran her hand back through her hair. She was pale as an elephant’s tusk.

“What?” she said.

The smell of pepperoni floated over us, and people passed by, ignoring the news to get their lunches.

“You’re still blonde,” a guy in cargo shorts pronounced. “That’s not real smart.”

The girl said she was a model. “I just got a big gig—what would you do?”

The businessmen looked at Model Girl sympathetically but said nothing. Money was their language.

The TV told us:
The public is advised not to assist women who appear to be in crisis. Contact can lead to the spread of this disease
.

Above the news captions, a smiling blonde continued silently delivering some other report. A portion of the screen showed rain, and another portion followed cars creeping along the Jersey Turnpike.

Does trauma make people go through a purge-and-binge cycle? I found a deli, where I ordered a sandwich the size of a hubcap and probably heavier. I took the plastic basket to a table for two and sat alone, eating. It was almost lunchtime and the place was starting to buzz with human traffic. Two undergrads at the table beside me were lingering on a long wooden pew strung with little tables. They were picking at their food rather than eating it—the same way they probably pretended to read for their courses but only skimmed, pretended to drink more than they did, and get laid more, and do drugs more. I knew they were university students because because they were talking about what they wanted to compose for a creative writing class. The boy was cute and dark, and he squirmed in his chair complaining about how fat he’d become even as he pushed his chips around. I remember him stressing that, because it was a ludicrous suggestion. He was wearing a T-shirt with a drawing of an octopus swallowing a businessman, gripping him in its multiple-tentacled arms, dress shoes dangling. I couldn’t decide if the girl was his best friend or if she wanted to be his girlfriend. She was preppy and back-to-school clean.

“It would be set in Paris in the 1950s and it would be, like, a love triangle thing, because, you know, I’m writing it,” the boy said.

The girl asked him if he’d feel comfortable reading something like that aloud in class and he said no, that was just it, he could
never
. That’s why he hadn’t written it.

Yeah, yeah
 … the radio sang above us.
Nobody feeds you like your mama
. A feminized begging blues updated with a grinding bass track by the then-still-living pop sensation known as Shelbee Brown.

The girl had an excuse for not having a single idea about what to write for the assignment: her mom had called her in crisis over the blonde thing. The girl rolled her eyes. The boy clucked how sweet it was that her mom cared. His parents hadn’t phoned him, he pointed out.

“But you’re male. Like you have anything to worry about.” The girl crunched potato chips loudly around her words. “After they announced it, all these girls in my dorm were crying. People were, like, locking their doors, locking each other out, as if it’s already in the dorm!” She tossed the crust of her sandwich down angrily. “They’re making this big thing of it later today. Like our brother residence is coming over and they’ll shave and dye the girls, to try to take the sting out of it, make it, I dunno, sexy or fun. Like it’s the new frosh week or something? It’s so lame. I’ll probably go.”

The boy cocked a finger-gun at her and told her she should
so
go. “Boys doing hair? I’m there!” They laughed.

“Is this blonde?” the girl asked, touching her hair. The boy squinted as if he were really assessing it. I snuck a glance. If I recall, it was the colour of peanut butter, mud mixed with honey, golden olive, neither brown nor yellow.
Mousey
, my mother would have called it, not that this rich New York University girl would ever have set foot in my mother’s partially wood-panelled salon.

“Get a handsome one,” the boy told her.

Yeah
 … the radio moaned. The girl nodded, then started to cry. As the song ended, she drew the back of her hand across her face, like an overtired little kid. I looked away.

As I finished my sandwich, it occurred to me that the news captions on TV had all been directed at men. There was nothing about the symptoms women should look for in themselves.

“You changed it again.…” Natalie, the concierge at the Dunn Inn, nodded at my hair, which was back to basic brown.

My things were packed and I was paying her in advance for the amount owing on room 305.

Her hair colour was still the same, chestnut. She told me she had liked mine before, when it was bright “like nasturiums.” “This epidemic …” She shook her head. While she was waiting for the machine to process my credit card, she said, “You know who doesn’t have to worry about this thing? The juice.” She whipped up the receipt and patted it onto the counter. “Of course, I shouldn’t say that, because maybe you are. But my parents were Sicilian, so we’re like the juice.”

“Sorry? Pardon? Maybe I’m what?” I stared at the receipt, pen in hand.

“Jewish,” she said. “This epidemic passes right by them like it has its turn signal on. Except for one or two blonde ones I read about in Israel. It’s gone the whole world over. Almost as bad as swine flu.”

“No, I’m not Jewish,” I said, and signed the receipt.

“Well, too bad you’re not. They’re lucky—they’re mostly safe. My sister’s after me to colour this black like hers, but then we’d look too much alike.”

I had a professor in Toronto, Dr. Jacques, who said that the first thing you noticed about a person was their hair. That you didn’t see their face; you saw the way the hair framed the face, and recognized the person from this. That’s why when someone changed their hair colour or cut it drastically it took you much longer to recognize them. Maybe Dr. Jacques was right. I hadn’t looked closely at the sisters’ features as they Windexed the door windows or slapped keys onto the board behind the desk, but now I saw clearly that they were twins.

“Y’all got it in Tor-on-to?” Natalie pronounced every syllable, the way I had when I’d first moved to that city three years before. Three and a half years ago now. I had quickly learned to say it
Tronna
like everyone else, like something slick that you slip on walking down the street. Like dog shit.

I told her that from what I’d heard we did, and that I was only going for a short visit. I’d be back in a week or two. I’d make a room reservation online like I had before. I didn’t know if I was telling the truth or not.

“Just show up. We’ll take care of ya,” Natalie said, and punched the yellow bill onto a stick. “Tourism’ll be down with this bug goin’ round.”

At last I sent one email—number twenty-nine—to your father:

When I got up at five the next morning for my flight, I found a response from Karl. He’d sent the email after one, which I thought meant he’d been waiting till Grace was asleep. Now I know that she goes to sleep religiously at eleven. Beauty sleep, she calls it. He hadn’t even bothered to use capital letters. You don’t forget an email like that, even if you forgive it:

It was composed so that someone else could read it and not smell a whiff of joined crotches or anything else between us. At least, that was my impression. It was from his personal account, not his university one. The last sentence was a statement, not a question, as if he didn’t want to know how the thesis was.

I remember I went into the shower and took longer than I should have on a flight day. I lathered my legs but then put the razor down. I wouldn’t shave because I wasn’t going to sleep with him, even if he made time for me in the end. The lather ran away in the shower stream like milk. I threw up twice and brushed my teeth twice. The thought that Karl was already seeing someone else crossed my mind, but then Grace’s face chopped through my brain. Had Karl been noncommittal with me out of anxiety? Or out of pride? I considered writing back the very basic “I’m pregnant,” but when my hand reached the laptop I found myself shutting it down. I wish I had written those words though. I still wish it. I wonder what it might have changed, if things could have been saved.

I stashed the laptop in my shoulder bag and left the Dunn Inn, pulling my suitcase as quietly as I could down the steep carpeted stairs. In the foyer a large bottle of sanitizer had been placed on the occasional table. Because I wasn’t expecting it, I almost knocked it over with my suitcase. A markered sign read:

I liked the way the last line read, as if the Dunn Inn was congratulating itself for putting up the sign.

I remember pale daylight and industry floated beyond the windows of the AirTrain, which glided over parkways trim as golf courses, parking lots with trucks backed into loading docks, and strangely, a pond with ducks and swans. Three uniformed guys—maintenance, or maybe ground crew—jostled near me, mumbling and joking as they rode to work. They were a few years younger than me, and wore their plain navy uniforms with a sexy haphazardness. With the smallest gestures, they’d found ways to stylize their homogeny. One had the collar open a button, a white undershirt showing, a chain at his throat. Another had bought his belt oversized and it hooked back through the loops twice. I can picture it even now: the exaggerated length seemed phallic. The third wore his pants a shade lower than they were meant to be. Their day was just beginning and they were already hopped up on sugar and hormones. In contrast, I’d had only one coffee and was seriously yearning for another. One of the guys took his automatic clicker from his pocket and pointed it out the window, attempting to lock or unlock his car in the parking lot as the train glided by. His friends ribbed him for thinking it would work from that distance.

But sometimes we do things just to see if we can. I know I have.

As the train skated deliberately around on its track and the doors opened and closed silently at terminals that weren’t
mine, I thought of Karl that first time we kissed in his office. There were a few of us who tricked him out to the pub for beers with us sometimes after class, though you should know he seldom drank more than half a pint. In his defence, I guess it must be said that we weren’t high school kids hanging out with our teacher; we were twentysomethings, thirtysomethings. Seeking out someone twenty years our senior had an illicit vibe, but only because it seemed as if we were getting away with something. We sought to impress him and occasionally topple him with our more current trivia.

Once, at Karl’s insistence, four of us jammed into a room in the Media Lab and watched
Alien
, which as a Cultural Studies major I was supposed to adore, although maybe I would have liked it more if we had still been living in the 1980s. Karl argued, with himself, about whether the character of Ripley should have appeared in her underwear at the end of the film.

“When this came out, it was a fierce debate, whether it was conventional sexism on the part of Ridley Scott, who just wanted to show Sigourney Weaver in her skivvies, or if it was humanizing to feature a heroine in her underwear and in fact sexist to automatically assume it sexist.” I’d noticed Karl frequently used words like
fierce
around his gay students. He craved acceptance.

That was followed by an episode of the American
Queer as Folk
, because it was shot in Canada and Karl had never seen it. Jude was the one who had insisted that Karl couldn’t possibly teach us without having viewed it, that it had been a groundbreaking show, and he ought to grasp its importance.

But that particular night Jude and Addy had gone, if they had even been with us at all. It was often just me and the boys. In any case, I was the only one left in Karl’s office. It was eight or so at night and Karl asked if I
puffed
, which was his word for getting high. It was October, not this past October, but the one before. I had been stoned only a few times and not for a long time. We went out and walked across the quad, passing the tight white line of a joint between us. He had seemed younger to me in that moment, hipper. The world was as leafy and rich as the smell of the weed. The air seemed to ring without any noise. I became aware of Karl, his clothes, the brown buttons on his jacket, his knuckles, his fingertips as we moved alongside each other. When we went back inside, the office seemed small and I felt as if my lungs had feathers inside them. I was standing too close to Karl—whom I still called Mann, or Dr. Mann—and I knew it.