The Blondes (5 page)

A little while after that, we mixed the cheese powder and milk into the Kraft macaroni and ate it cold. “This is just awful,” he said, laughing, and I hoped he meant the instant macaroni. I thought he did, but I knew he was upset with himself for coming over, for staying too long, though it had been only an hour or so. He said he was going to go. No,
had
to. Had to go.

He kissed me at the top of the fire escape, his clavicle against the top of my head when he hugged me. It was the second week of July. The smog of the city felt like a blanket on our shoulders as we stood in the open night air and said goodbye. Then he was going down the steep metal stairs out the back of my place, and because I knew his feet must not fit entirely on the slats, I watched him as he descended carefully from the second floor. I wanted him to look back, and when he got to the bottom he did. He grinned for a second, like a seventh-grade boy in spite of the wrinkles around his mouth, like he had accomplished something. His glasses were in his pocket, and he looked younger with the streetlight from the alley streaming across his face. The fragrance of the Magic Thai restaurant downstairs was belching out the back door into the heat. The moment felt perfect, reckless, floating, and I thought to myself:
Remember this
.

Remember this—and here we are, and I have.

And then he ruined that moment. “I wish you could be my girlfriend,” he called up, still grinning, as if he had said something profound or beautiful. As if he had said, “I love you.” He turned, and I watched his tucked-in blue shirt drift
away through the dark. A large wooden bead tumbled in the back of my throat.

It was that time, then; that was when you happened. I was punished for my desire. (The fifth time, although it was the last, was lacklustre, unmemorable.)

In the salon, six flies stuck themselves to my jeans and I felt like a freak, like Pig-Pen from Charles Schulz’s
Peanuts
comic strip. The stylist came back, and the flies took off; they only wanted me. The ammonia climbed my nostrils, a scent that I could taste with each breath, it was so astringent. My eyes still burned and I still wanted to cry—and I would have, if I hadn’t already been cried out. Karl was old and pathetic and sad, and I had been attracted to all those things about him. I “got off” on them. I writhed against his sadness.

I remember the tug of the stylist’s hands as she checked my hair again, parting the sections and rubbing at them with latex-gloved fingers. Eventually I was done. She gestured me over to the shampoo chair, where I reclined as she washed out the rest of my disintegrated colour. Then she applied the dye almost tenderly with a brush, smiling at me and talking to the other woman in Korean. My stomach had a gaping feeling in it, but I couldn’t tell if it was nausea or hunger. In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have been around all those chemicals in my state.

When the stylist had applied the colour and rinsed it again, and dried and styled my hair, and it was all over, I looked like a self I hadn’t seen in a long time. Against my mother’s wishes, I had been dyeing since age fourteen. The stylist had taken an inch or so off and my hair was gently bobbed. It lay
just below my collar: a brilliant orange, the colour of lilies. I didn’t know how I felt about it.

“Pretty,” she said, moving the hair around my face, adjudicating me.

I had staggered into the cheapest-looking salon I’d passed, but of course it still cost more than I had, this thing I hadn’t wanted, but that, well, filled the time. I pulled out my credit card and paid the woman.

It was just after three and I was on my way home
—home
being a relative term—when the first incident happened.

Businesspeople were striding along the sidewalk past me, weaving and streaking into each other, a blur of hosiery, patent leather, pinstripes. I felt bright as a Christmas ornament with my new hair, which was really my old hair. It wasn’t far back to the Dunn Inn, but I was walked out. I would ride home, and do what made the most sense: call Karl. The academic feminist part of me felt defeated: devastated by biology, I had run out to get my hair done as a balm. As I descended into the white-tiled corridors of the station for the F train, the gluten and cheese of a pizza slice shifted inside me, and I wondered, too late, if I should have opted for something less heavy.

My feet, the shape each made on the stairs as I descended: I remember watching them. I remember clinging to the rail as I tried not to be rushed by the impatient crowd behind me, a knot of hollering high school boys. I was about to sit down to wait on the one bench seat remaining when my guts roiled.

I put my hand out for one of the posts. I drew a quick breath—
hold it down, hold it down
—and stared at the ceiling, my eyes tracing the pipes.
Aspergillus
and peeling white paint. The dark station was hot and smelled of urine and sweat, which only made the closed-in feeling worse. I swallowed, and shuffled slowly between clusters of other waiting passengers, over to the trash receptacle. It seemed the logical place to be for what I thought—feared—might happen. I placed one hand on the bin. Where normally I wouldn’t have touched it, now I was leaning on it. If anyone noticed, no one seemed concerned. Given the time of day, almost everyone was young, oblivious. Nearby, some schoolgirls in kilts and sneakers were pushing each other’s shoulders and laughing. Upstairs, a lady busker with a karaoke machine was crooning into a microphone. The Supremes: “Baby Love.” Slightly off-tempo, a high, reedy voice tumbled down the stairs, the words just reaching us. My eyes watered. I swallowed. My newly coloured hair fell forward, forming a curtain between me and my surroundings. Through it, I saw her.

Something about her pace drew my eyes. She was ambling along the yellow stripe of the platform opposite. Under the fluorescents and through the wall of black posts that divided our two tracks, I watched her. My face was tilted almost sideways, so that everything seemed off, skewed, yet I couldn’t help focusing on her. She had a slight lumber, as if one side of her body were heavier than the other. Her left leg seemed to drag a little. She was wearing a red power suit, sneakers—puffy, bright white Nikes—and her Barbie-blonde hair touched
her shoulder-padded jacket. She had the chiselled chin of an older woman who maybe had had some work done, though truthfully she was too far away for me to make this observation. Maybe I’m remembering pictures I saw later, when the whole story surfaced. A white bow was knotted at her neck. Again, I probably didn’t notice that at the time. What I did notice, though, was that her movement didn’t match someone so put-together, long strides that lagged as if her feet weren’t behaving. Maybe, I thought at the time, her odd gait came from wearing heels all day—except she wasn’t carrying any, and not even a purse. Then the truth dawned on me. I knew the insane well from my home in Toronto, a city that had a grand scheme of integration alongside gentrification; condo towers had been built practically on top of what was once called the asylum—all just a couple of blocks from my old apartment. Living there had taught me how to identify crazies from a distance. It’s funny but I was almost grateful to the strange woman in that moment, because she gave me something to think about besides myself, something to focus on as I fought the second wave of nausea. She had almost reached the end of the platform when it happened, quickly and—I hate to say it—almost gracefully.

A girl across the way, about the same age as the schoolgirls beside me, was holding a heavy backpack and corded to an iPod. She had turned to peer down the tunnel for the train. She was standing so close to the edge. The blonde woman loped up to her, seized her by her shoulders, brought her face into the girl’s hair, as smoothly and easily as if they were old
friends embracing. The girl let out a shriek, and my head snapped up on my shoulders, my heart racing. By then the blonde was holding her at the edge, the girl’s body seeming to dangle there on the lip of the platform, her dark backpack and dark hair nearly hanging over those black tracks. Then the blonde businesswoman reared back, the white bow of her blouse suddenly blurred by blood. As she reeled she dropped the girl abruptly onto the tracks. The girl hit the metal with a frank thud, and the shrieking stopped. Just like that. The pack with its weight fell over the girl’s head.

Upstairs by the turnstiles, the karaoke lady kept warbling for quarters to an anemic music track, oblivious. It was some old show tune—maybe “Happy Talk” from
South Pacific
, I think now.

On the opposite platform, figures rushed away from the scene like a herd moving together from danger.

A woman on our side yelled for someone to get the attendant. All eyes were on the girl, though, and in contrast to those on the opposite platform, our crowd seemed frozen. I know I felt that way. For several heartbeats I just stood there.

Then cellphones came out into palms, and people punched into them, some reticently, some frantically. The punching continued for what seemed like forever, but no one lifted a device to an ear. Lack of reception. A couple of the high school kids didn’t even bother trying to phone; instead, they held up their devices and calmly filmed.

An older gentleman in a suit rushed forward from our platform, hand out. “Here, here!” he yelled. The girl on the
tracks had pushed herself up on her hands now and was struggling to regain her feet. But she didn’t look in his direction. Her iPod. She still had her ears stopped with music. Behind her, the blonde was laughing, a kind of chortle that woke up my body and propelled it toward the tracks. The next thing I knew, I was kneeling beside the man in the suit, and both of us had our hands out. A third guy joined us. I could feel the LEGO-like bumps of the safety strip digging into my knees.

“Let them work it out,” a voice said behind us. “They probably know each other.”

I couldn’t freaking believe that. Farther down the platform, although I can’t say for sure, I thought I heard the words
cat fight
. The people behind me were muttering, rationalizing. I turned and—I’ll never forget this, although it was just a split-second glimpse—saw a barrel-chested guy about my age pushing an oversize hero sandwich into a mouth not large enough to encompass it. This guy, he stared at the scuffle, chewing as if he were at a main event. A pair of mirrored sunglasses hung from the collar of a T-shirt that said, in letters so large I caught them without trying,
Just Pretend I’m Not Here
. He kept chewing. It makes me shudder even now. I turned my head quickly back, heat prickling through me.

The girl, by this point, was limping across the rails, bleeding from her shins through her white socks, which were also streaked with dirt. Because I was the one on my knees, closest to her level, it was my hand she reached for, and as I leaned out, I felt one of the men next to me slip his arms around my waist to give me support and balance. The suited
man reached out and grabbed her other hand. Her hands were small. Her eyes dark, full of fear. I could feel her breath wrench through her in small gasps, and I caught the tinny smell of her saliva. Then she kind of … Yes, she put one foot against the wall to spring up, but her fingers—her fingers were slick with sweat and slipped from mine, and she fell.

There was a stomping sound—the blonde had jumped onto the tracks. She was wearing those white trainers on her feet, so she crossed the gap quickly, and the girl too was now moving quickly. The girl grabbed the lip of the platform with one hand and the suited man’s hand with the other. She swung a leg up and her sneaker glanced the yellow safety stripe before it slid off. The blonde had her by her skirt’s waistband, and the girl was going from us—going, slipping away. We watched as it happened. The whole platform watched. The two women stumbled, tall and short, blonde and dark, old and young, struggling, over the closest tracks and onto the other set. The girl, she was fighting all the way, and she managed to jab a fist upward into the blonde’s throat, but the blonde had her now by the hair—I mean fistfuls of it—and was dragging her, a mad determination on her face.

Then there was a light in the tunnel, coming closer on our side.

One of the men still had his arm around me, something I didn’t realize until he pulled me back, hard, and we landed together on our butts on the platform. A huge simultaneous shout went up from the crowd on our platform, and I didn’t know why, except that the train had pulled in. The guy and I
just sat there blinking at each other. He’d had his arm round me the whole time, but I hadn’t even looked at him before that moment. He was short but beefy, wearing a Mets ball cap.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I—I don’t know,” he said.

If I close my eyes, I can still hear his voice and see his face. He had clear brown eyes and a crewcut with a bit of gel at the front beneath the cap. He wore a white T-shirt with a small gold cross on a chain.

The train doors started opening and people were climbing off. We were lost in their legs, and they didn’t seem to understand, pause, or stop. It was such a mess. Someone stepped on my hand and it hurt, and I had to skitter backward, crab-style. Then we heard it. I could see it on this guy’s face the exact second I heard it: the thundering.

Somewhere behind our train, somewhere we couldn’t see, a train was coming from the other direction.

The guy beside me swore in Spanish. He and I both stared at the tracks. We could see windows through windows, the second train through our train. We could see the shapes of people riding on the train like an ordinary fact. Red shirts, blue jackets, white skin, brown skin, backs of heads, hands wrapped around poles.

“I had her,” the older man in the suit said as he regained his footing against one of the posts. “She was right here.” He held out his hand to us, peering at it. He looked like any businessman. He had silver hair on his knuckles and a thick gold ring with a tiger’s eye or topaz embedded in the middle.
“I had her,” he said again, and he continued to say it, staring at the hand.

The young guy said something in Spanish again, then glanced around us. “My bag …” He became distressed. He must have put his knapsack down. It was gone, long gone. You wouldn’t think he would care at that point, but he got up and began to jog down the platform, weaving, glaring at those he passed as if he would recover his bag from them then and there. But the crowd—our original crowd—had meshed with the exiting passengers. Some were left, I guess, standing in shock, while others had already boarded the train. I could still feel the guy’s arm around my waist where he had grabbed me to try to help, yet there he went, already disappearing up the stairs, taking them two and three at a time.