Fragile (2 page)

Holly starts the water from the jet nozzle at the end of the hose and adjusts the temperature to warm the water. Then she soaks Amelia's hair, transforming it from a fine halo of golden gray into a limp solid mass that hangs from her head, dark and slick. She spurts a glob of fragrant shampoo into her palm and plies it onto Amelia's glimmering head, massaging the scalp, working her fingers into the hair. In all the years she's been cutting hair for a living, Holly has never tired of this part of the job. Weaving her fingers into the heavy, wet hair of her customer, she lowers her voice and murmurs a reassurance that everything will be okay, she will take care of her. She can feel the tension ease out of this woman as her eyes close and she slumps lower in the reclining black leather chair. Once again in this second-story shop high above ground, the inexorable force of gravity pulls Amelia's body towards the earth. Holly's fingertips press into the contours of Amelia's skull, massaging the scalp, exploring the interlocking bones of the crown. She works her way around to the sides of the head, probing the soft areas
around the temples. In the hidden pockets behind each ear, a knob of bone protrudes and there are paired clefts, indentations where the plastic earpieces of Amelia's glasses have worn their way into the soft bone over the decades, two groovelike canyons. Our bodies are surprisingly pliant, conforming themselves to the forces that mold us day by day, year after year. Holly's hand wends its way across the top of my head, pressing hard, now doing something with the water, squirting another glob of shampoo or maybe conditioner. This time it smells like cocoanuts, like a tropical drink with chemicals from a perm someone else is getting mixed in, tingling at the top of my head and down my back. It hurts where this hard sink presses into my neck. If she doesn't stop soon, I will have to tell her, but it feels so good where she massages that I don't want it to be over. I'd come back to this woman again just to have her wash my hair this way, but I doubt if she can cut it as well as Claire used to. No one else has been able to, why should she? Dolores says this shop is the best, so maybe this Holly will be as good as Claire was, but will you ever see me Tris? We could meet at the show, at the five o'clock show like we used to, or I could see you at the lunch counter at Haag's and have a soda, you know there's no point in avoiding me any longer. We could be together again, the way it was before. We could see each other every day, but you have to come now.

They say they're going to tear the Lyceum down, Tris. It's not a big hotel and theater anymore, now a boarding house for old people like us. They say they're going to knock it down with
a big wrecking ball, crumbling to a pile of dust, the whole wonderful thing falling into itself, all the beautiful carpets and the walls inside, the pastel walls cracking into a pile of dust and rubble. They're going to knock it all down and then the phone is ringing, playing a tune. Her hands went away, digging in her pocket. “Hang on a sec,” the phone is playing a tune.

The fan twirls up by the ceiling, and it's cold in here with my hair wet. The frond of the potted plant waves at me, “No Mom, I can't tell him to forget it … That's fine, if you insist on screwing up my life again, you've done it so many times before. Well, how can I ever repay you for that?… No, you go ahead. I'll find someone else to watch them.” She clicks the phone shut and twirls around behind me, her face high up, her chin, and the dark holes of her nose release a heavy sigh. She stares ahead at the empty space above me not looking down, not doing anything, filled with rage. “What's the matter?”

she says, tilting her head back and peering up at Holly from the dark confines of the sink. Holly doesn't want this old woman to be here, doesn't want her prying into her problems, her battles with her mother. For an instant, the old woman in the sink has
become
her mother, the head that stares up at her is the same as the fearful, reprimanding head of her mother, a sink full of shoulds and do's and don'ts calling up to her from somewhere in the depths of her soul, telling her what she must do and berating her when she doesn't obey the commands. Though the voice that floats up to her is meant to be helpful, it fills her with dread, eats away at the thin membrane that protects the innermost part of her
from the outside. Then, a wheel in her head turns a notch, and she knows she must answer the question.

“Nothing really,” Holly says. “Babysitter problem.” She grabs a fistful of the woman's hair and squeezes, ringing the water out.

“You sound upset.” The whites of the old woman's eyes rotate further back into their sockets. Trying to get a better look at Holly. “Is there any way I can help?”

You could shut up and go away, Holly thinks. She squeezes the hair tighter and imagines herself starting to pull, yanking the head down. If you pulled on the wet rope of hair hard enough, you could easily snap a person's neck against the fulcrum created by the smooth lip of the sink. The skin on Amelia's face looks like parchment, like the high-resolution color x-ray pictures of a mummy she saw in a news magazine recently, layers of papery parchment the color of a grocery sack bronzed with great age. The reedy lips move almost imperceptibly, the tongue still remarkably pink behind yellowed teeth and flaring gums, blowing puffs of stale breath, forming another set of words.

“If you need a babysitter,” the old woman says, “perhaps I can help you. You have kids that need watching, and I've got nothing but time on my hands.”

The words are so incongruous with the images flitting through Holly's head that it takes a moment for Holly to process what she's saying. She has never left her two girls with anyone but her mother. And as vexing as her mother can be, Holly feels confident that nothing bad will happen to the girls at her mother's house. Plus, leaving them there frees her to stay out all
night if she wants. Her implacable need for Rick injects itself into her thinking, races through the air above their heads like the swift shadow of a jet plane on its way to the point where it will meet with the jet itself on the runway when the plane touches down.

“Well,” Holly says, calculating, getting down to business, “where do you live? I mean, I usually drop my girls off at my Mom's house—instead of having someone come by.” The force of habit, the power of her need, frames her thinking: She wants to leave the girls at someone else's house, as she normally does. In the instant before Amelia answers, she tries to picture where someone like Amelia would live, and the results are not good. She imagines linoleum floors and empty tins of cat food stacked on the kitchen counter. Flock wallpaper and mildewy shag carpet, tinged with the smell of mothballs. A trailer park or an old farmhouse in a cornfield outside of town.

“I'm on the number 8 bus line. East Washington. I take the 8 downtown, and the 15 over here.” Then Amelia adds, in a voice lacking any hint of embarrassment. “I don't drive, you see.”

Amelia's lips form themselves into a broad, unassuming smile, a pressed shallow arc that reminds Holly of pictures she has seen of FDR's wife smiling in spite of hard times. Holly knows she must choose soon or the offer will be withdrawn, an idea whose sheer absurdity is revealed by gradual exposure to the light of day. The faces of her two girls loom before her, images that have been stylized in her mind's eye from dozens of photographs she has hanging on the walls of her home and
mounted in art frames on the table behind this sink in the salon: Jenny and Zoe standing next to a snowman they helped her build, their faces beaming with joy; their first family portrait together, the one with their father still in it; a Polaroid of Jenny from her fourth birthday party, the father no longer there, chocolate icing smeared across her chubby cheeks. And then the shadow of Rick's need darting past, her own need racing to meet it. Holly says “What time can you take them?” as if they are a burden to be unloaded. She twists my hair again to wring the excess water from it. Don't worry. Though I haven't even seen them, they are just as precious to me. I have taken care of children before, and Tris and I were children once together. We played in the yard behind the house in Elmer's garden, we ran behind the big swing, wrestled in the hammock.

“Whenever you need to bring them by. I can give them dinner, if you want.” We ran behind the swing and wrestled in the hammock. Tris had his arm around me and Elmer came by, Tris called out and rolled over, his weight tipped the hammock hanging between the two ends of the pole, he tipped it and fell out. She stares down at me with her eyes dazzled, glazed over by her wanting. It's okay, I want to say to her, it's okay for you to want a man. I wanted someone too. I wanted him, but he tipped and fell out. He fell and chipped his tooth, blood spilling across the grass. He fell and I wanted him even more, he fell and he slips the plastic card into the slot, the green light blinks above it, the door yields with a satisfying click, and he is in. The
maids have turned the air conditioning down too low, as usual—all these air conditioned spaces he inhabits, airports, rental car buses, hotels, restaurants, convention centers, are chilled to a temperature that's uncomfortable without a sweater, a sports coat, or a long-sleeved shirt, as if the wonder of air conditioning is not self evident without cooling the room to sixty-five degrees. He tosses the overnight bag on the bed and tests it, dropping his weight onto the side edge and bouncing up and down a couple of times—not too bad, firm. Plenty of pillows and several different sizes. He will use some for sleeping on his back, other larger ones for sleeping on his side, propping his head up at just the right angle to avoid getting a stiff neck.

In his years of travel for work he has become a connoisseur of hotel rooms, and though he is not a snob about it, he understands there are certain things that will make the brief segment of his life he is wasting in this rented space more tolerable. He always requests a king instead of two queens, because it means the large faux mahogany or cherry cabinet that holds the television will more likely be situated directly in front of the bed for optimal viewing—again, he avoids the stiff neck because he won't have to turn his head at an awkward angle to see the screen. He always requests non-smoking. There is an iron and ironing board. Wireless internet has become a must as well, though he notes that minibars have become much less frequent denizens of these tight, temporary compartments where he spends a good portion of his life. Too much pilferage? The only reason he can imagine for them to eliminate the profit center that provides the $6.00 cans of beer and $4.00 packages of cancandy
he used to enjoy. The obligatory small couch or chair fronted by a coffee table. The work desk and lamp, all furnishings in a comforting traditional style. The print of ducks on the wing or a bland, non-threatening landscape hanging on the otherwise blank walls.

He avoids the trendy, modern boutique hotels because they usually get something wrong in their efforts to be funky and bizarre. He drags the heavy curtains aside and opens the shades, letting the late afternoon sunlight filter in through the dust. A view of a parking lot and a city he will not even bother to explore. To him it is just another airport, another meeting. It could be Denver or Des Moines or Detroit just the same. Many years ago, in the first decade he traveled, he used to try to walk the cities he visited, to avoid being completely sedentary and to get to know the place. Now the thought of going beyond the constricted tube of airport/hotel/conference center/office space is repugnant to him. The more he sleeps and watches television, the sooner the trip will be over.

He pulls a wrinkled dress shirt out of the overnight bag and hangs it in the closet tucked behind the wall that partitions the vanity from the rest of the room and, as he sees himself doing these things, he catches himself thinking about himself in the third person again, as if he is a kind of benign, observant, godlike being or one of those tiny security cameras mounted in a corner of the room tracking the actions of this person who has entered and disturbed the muffled silence of the place—not a person so much as a sequence of states and events that lead smoothly from one to another to another until the ultimate and
final event has occurred. In a swift instant his awareness has skipped outside itself and he has lost all sense of being a single, unique person—Mr. Holloway was the name they addressed him by at the front desk—and instead he sees himself as merely an aperture for experiencing the sensations of this world for a brief time, a tiny hole that has opened in the fabric of time and space to capture bits of light and vibration, converting electromagnetic waves into images and sounds. Why me? Why this person, here, in this room: Tristan Holloway? He feels himself rising to a great height, outside himself, the world melting away beneath him. He has left behind whatever it was that comprised his self, and the sensation is one of dizzying freedom—everything that went into making this person, Tristan Holloway, is momentarily no longer there. In its place, a vast emptiness, the aperture expanding to encompass everything outside that narrow tube that was him.

The odd sensation is gone in a second.

Tristan Holloway finds himself standing in front of the closet again, staring at his blue dress shirt hanging on the hanger where he hung it a moment ago. He takes a deep breath and feels the hole he fell up through tightening around himself again. The aperture closes to a tight little point.

He walks to the bed and picks up another dress shirt, hangs it in the closet. Then, instead of finishing unpacking, he slips off his shoes and lies down on the bed where Tris and I used to lie down when they made us take naps in the afternoon. We were all up here, Louise and Elmer, me and Tris, and they made
us take naps, but we never slept, running around hiding and making noise, talking until one of them came up to quiet us. I could let the girls sleep here in this bed or maybe in Karl's room, the single room in back, if they have to stay all night. She wants them to stay all night, and everything's ready, they can stay all night and all the next day if she wants. I have taken care of children before, and Tris and I were children once together. He saw me, then I touched him. Now the bell is ringing, it's her ringing twice, she must be in a hurry.