The Blondes (38 page)

I shoved on my boots and went outside. She must have assumed I was going to go out to the woodshed, blow it off, and come back. But I walked down the roadway until I could see the lights in the next cottage. It was about ten below freezing. I went up to the neighbour’s door, plowing through their snowed-in driveway in my boots. I knocked, my fingers pink with the cold, but if they were there, they didn’t look out or answer. I stood there, feeling like I could hear my breath whistling through my chest. I mean, why would they take me in? I was a stubbly in-between colour in the middle of a blonde outbreak and probably everyone in these parts was like Grace: paranoid and hiding out.

I thought about coming back to the cottage and telling Grace that Karl and I had done it only once here, and that it hadn’t been that spectacular, but then I thought maybe she envied me. Maybe I had some kind of power in her eyes, and I should let her think whatever he’d told her. I wondered if Karl really had bragged about me, or if it was just her interpretation. It’s possible he did use those words—it’s possible he enjoyed those kinds of games—but I try not to think so. I’m all right with thinking of him as sad or selfish, or even self-loathing. But I don’t want to think of him as intentionally cruel. I think of you now as your own entity, separate from him, but it still makes me feel better to try to think well of him if I can.

I trudged back to the cabin, and when I got here, I went around back to the woodshed. I tried to catch my breath. Sometimes it feels like you’re upside down inside me, hanging
like a bat from my lungs. I put my hand on the axe. I did. I remember the smooth, cold wood handle between my fingers. I lifted it and let it fall against the tree trunk.

When I came back, Grace was furious. She had locked herself in the bathroom and wouldn’t come out. I had calmed down but I did tell her through the closed blue door that
she
should be apologizing to
me
. She never did, never once. She just yelled that I’d put her at risk by leaving and walking around out there.

“How do I know you don’t fucking have it?” she hollered through the door.

“I am not blonde. I am forming coherent sentences,” I yelled back at her, and fought to control my breathing.

“I took you in and this is how you repay me? You wobbling, fat, toad-shaped cunt.”

“No wonder he slept around on you.” At first I didn’t think I said it loud enough for her to hear, but I must have, because the door flew open and Grace slapped me in the face.

I don’t know if I failed to see it coming because I didn’t have my glasses, or if she was just that agile. She was tall and long-limbed enough that she just reached through the door and clocked me. I stumbled backward and bumped into the fridge. I stood there, my face stinging. The blow was hard enough that it left a mark. She slammed the door shut again.

A few minutes later, I heard her throw up into the toilet.

I was on the sofa with the lights out by the time she came out and found her way around the corner to her bed.

The cottage wasn’t big enough for us to avoid each other. We had to accept the grudges we held against each other, if we were determined to survive.

The next morning Grace was taking a bath and I was desperate to pee. It felt like you were standing on my bladder.

“Fine,” Grace groaned, and I heard the water in the tub splashing, then the door lock click open, and then the sweep of the shower curtain rings along the bar. “Come in,” she said.

I burst through the bathroom door and lifted the lid on the toilet, fumbling with my clothes.

“Shit,” Grace said from the other side of the curtain, where I tried not to think about her being naked. “You might need to flush.”

Inside the toilet were the trimmings of her pubis. Floating on the water, blonde-brown stitches. I tapped down the handle and they disappeared.

While I was peeing she said through the curtain: “So can you tell me if he was taking risks even then, or are you so young and super-fertile that it happened just like that, through a condom after half a fucking second?”

I sat on the toilet. The room was steamy and her voice sounded small and wobbly.

“Just young and fertile, I guess.”

“Of course you would be, at your age … God, are you packing a Super Soaker? Aren’t you done yet?” Her hand came around the vinyl curtain and she pulled it back slightly and peered out at me. Un-made-up, she had dark circles like tracks around her eyes. Her lips were heavily lined, the colour of raw cedar. I caught a glimpse of the slope of her white chest.

She looked me up and down. The fleece pants I slept in were around my thick, scarred knees.

“Wow, that’s some tumour,” she said, then pulled the curtain back in place. “What’s the term for what I am to that? Stepmother? Mother once removed? Friend of the family? Aunt?” There was a quaver in her voice again and I’m tempted to say she was crying, but then she ran more water into the tub, so I couldn’t tell.

I wiped, and flushed, and left her alone.

Through to the end of January, Grace and I listened to the wind outside and fell back into our routine of breakfast, dishes, bathing, waxing, and shaving. After that, she would sit in the living room. She cut back on the drinking a bit too. She showed me how to wax my “stumps,” which was what Grace called my legs. The waxing made me wince and cry but it seemed to make her relax about the chance of SHV, so I humoured her. I didn’t tell her that I’d been down the hall from a room full of women who’d gone out, and that if I were susceptible, I’d already have it. Working on a TV crime show had not prepared her for death.

Waxing was also something to do. It takes a hell of a long time when you do it at home, heating up that little jar in the microwave, trying not to let it get too hot, waiting for it to cool just enough. Grace gave me my own jar so our hairs wouldn’t mix in the solution, which was sticky as molasses. She knew exactly how thick to spread it, and how fast to rip the paper strips, and in which direction to pull. When I did it myself I wound up botching it. It hurt worse and the hairs stood up like weeds but didn’t let go. My mom had tried to show me how to wax when I was in grade nine or ten—she sometimes did lips and eyebrows at the shop—but at that age, I hadn’t been willing to let her show me anything …

“When I was a kid, six or seven,” I told Grace, “women would come into my mom’s shop. It just amazed me, these strangers talking. What did they find to say to each other? They could just talk, and talk, and talk. My mom standing there, plucking away at their heads, tilting them this way and that, wriggling things out of them.”

I remember the exchange of money. My mother took away their hair, shook it out of the vinyl smocks that covered their chests, swept it up with a black broom or chased it with a blow dryer turned on high across the floor of the shop. She stored the combs that groomed them in blue water, and they gave her dollars, counting the bills out into her palm because there was no counter to stand between them.

“The gift of the gab,” Grace said, and took a strip off me before I was ready.

“I never had it,” I squeaked. “Never learned it. Existed in
an entirely female environment and couldn’t pick it up.”

After a while Grace pulled her yoga mat out of a cupboard and showed me some moves. She asked how my round ligaments were feeling, and I told her that I didn’t know what those were, but that everything was feeling pretty round.

She would bend over in front of me with her hands on the floor and her butt in the air. She was so vain, it was funny to see her in an old pair of black stretch pants, one buttock out like a primate, one hand up in the air, the other touching the floor beside her toes. Given my condition, I wasn’t very good at yoga. She ran through the poses like a drill sergeant and I would watch her, attempting to wriggle my body into a contortion that looked similar to hers, but never quite getting it down before she moved on to the next one. “Warrior,” then “Reverse Warrior,” she called out. The only position I managed very effectively was the Child. You basically lie like an egg on the carpet, but with your arms out like you’re praying to Mecca. It’s getting harder now, actually, which must mean I’ve grown more, in just this week she’s been gone.

Grace assured me that lots of pregnant friends of hers did yoga, and that it would loosen tight muscles and improve my sense of balance. She showed me another position she called the Pigeon, where she sat up with a leg flexed out behind her, toes on the floor. Her entire body was made of flat surfaces.

I don’t know if I gave her a look, but she said, “What? Lots of my friends have been pregnant in the past year or two. I could still get pregnant and be a mom. Or, I could have been … with Karl. How old do you think I am?”

Contorting her body into some kind of balletic stance, Grace asked me if I had things for the baby. By
things
, I suppose she meant clothes, blankets, hats and booties, and gear. “I expect people will buy things for him,” she said, letting her toe slide back down her leg to touch the mat again. She nodded at my gut—at you. “They always do.”

Her voice was breezy. Perhaps she imagined I would go back to Toronto to find everything normal again, a baby shower magically organized, although I couldn’t think by whom.

I hadn’t gone to Larissa’s shower for Devang. She’d told me I didn’t have to, as if she thought I’d find it a chore. A lot of her work friends would be attending, artists and curators, she said—people she’d met during the years she’d been in Toronto ahead of me. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to dissuade me from going or if she didn’t want me to spend money I didn’t have. She’d researched strollers and car seats and Björns and cribs and diapering options online for weeks. She’d registered at two different stores, a large chain and an eco-friendly boutique that dealt in organics. “So people have some choice,” she’d said.

In the end, I went over to Larissa’s after the shower. I spotted a plate with grape stems on it and I picked at the remaining fruit, noting how the gift bags had been folded meticulously for reuse. Larissa had laid tiny sleepers and sweaters across the dining room table. There were the newborn onesies with fleece feet shaped like animal faces. There were the white sleeping gowns made masculine with trucks and boats and dogs and dinosaurs printed on them. There were
jacket-and-pant sets with snaps up the front. The clothes came in sizes small, smaller, and smallest. As if the child who would wear them already had an opinion, the clothes contained messages:
Beary Handsome, Strong Like Daddy, Bananas for Mommy
, and
I Love Hugs
.

I had brought Larissa a pair of Robeez baby shoes, well outside my budget. They were brown leather with pink cupcake patches on the toes—even though we both knew she was having a boy. I thought she would appreciate the subversion. She hugged me with tears in her eyes, and she said she loved them. After Devang was born I never saw him wear them.

What I remember most, though, was how Larissa looked at each item of clothing—with so much tenderness you’d think it already contained her son.

What will I dress you in, my new roommate? What will I wrap around you to keep you warm in this empty winter?

WHEN GRACE ISN’T HERE
, I feel your father more, in his things, in these walls, in the bed linens, though she’s slept in them more recently than he has. In retrospect all her cursing lifted some of my grief. When she was here I didn’t look at his things—
really
look at them. It’s funny, but I feel like I’ve got to know Grace better now than I ever knew Karl … I slept with him, but I’ve lived with her.

No, that’s not true. That’s a lie. The two kinds of familiarity can’t be compared. I did know him very well, in glances.

And besides, Grace surprises me too sometimes. There are many ways in which I don’t know her. Take the dog. I guess it was early February, three weeks ago now, when it showed up. Grace was outside and I was in. She was bringing back wood for the stove, and taking a long time about it. I got up
from the couch to find out what had happened and I saw her bent over. I didn’t realize why at first, and I thought maybe she was sick. The wood was scattered all around her. She was wearing her big black coat, her behind in the air. Then I saw the blur of fur, and I was afraid she was being attacked. I could just glimpse a shape, and movement. I threw open the door and called her name.

She turned, still bent over, one hand out. “Look at this little hobo,” she called.

Then I saw him, dirty yellow fur, pushing his head into her lap. Again and again, the dog would back up and then come to her, pushing its head against her, ramming her. Why, I didn’t understand.

Her arm went around its head, its neck. She bent her nose to its ear and nuzzled. Her glove came off and went into her pocket. I watched her hand stroking the fur along its back, the way the animal leapt into her, whining, almost bleating, trying to make as much contact as possible, eager for touch. She laughed, rubbed it all over.

There was a ribbon of colour along its neck, a collar, but it didn’t look like anyone had fed or loved it anytime recently. It was so skinny it barely resembled a dog—I guess that’s why I’d thought coyote at first. The dog head-butted Grace until it pushed her over on her bum, then it climbed on top of her, all paws and wagging tail.