The Blondes

ALSO BY EMILY SCHULTZ

Heaven Is Small
Songs for the Dancing Chicken
Joyland

PART ONE

WOMEN HAVE STUPID DREAMS
. We laud each other only to tear each other down. We are not like men; men shake hands with hate between them all the time and have public arguments that are an obvious jostling for power and position. They compete for dominance—if not over money, then over mating. They know this, each and every one. But women are civilized animals. We have something to prove, too, but we’ll swirl our anger with straws in the bottom of our drinks and suck it up, leaving behind a lipstick stain. We’ll comment on your hair or your dress only to land a backhanded compliment, make you feel pathetic and poor, too fat or too thin, too young or too old, unsophisticated, unqualified, unwanted. For women, power comes by subtle degrees. I could write a thesis on such women—and I nearly did.

Don’t get me wrong. I am one of
them
too. I’ve had stupid dreams, and you yourself are the result.

You: strange seven pounds of other.

Here you are, under my hand, swimming in blood, about the size of a turtle. I know my voice must sound far away, muted, like someone talking under water. Maybe it’s crazy that I’m nattering on, having a conversation with you when you aren’t even born yet, just tumbling and turning in the big cloud of my abdomen. You can’t possibly understand … Still, this is where I’ve got to. I’m here in this cottage in the woods and the snow—stuck here, really, because Grace has taken the car with gas and left me with the one on Empty, and how far can I walk in this state? To be honest, I don’t know what else to do. So I talk.

Let me tell you where we’ve been over the past few months, baby. You’ll never understand, but let me tell you.

Right now, I can see our neighbours outside the window and through the trees. They’re the only people other than Grace whom I’ve seen in nearly three months, always from a distance and only sporadically—perhaps they aren’t home all the time, or don’t go outside any more than I do. There are just the two of them. I can see the red of her coat and the blue of his. I only know who is who by their heights. I can smell the smoke that’s rising up, the stench of something singed. Even through the closed door and the window glass I can smell it. Like sulphur. I smelled it the first day I came here, but there was too much happening then for me to think to ask what it was, and Grace probably wouldn’t have told me anyway. She had her own troubles—and I … I was just looking for Karl.

Now I know it’s the smell of hair. Burned hair. It flares up quick and bright, and then it’s gone in a breath of dark smoke. Before Grace left she was shaving hers and flushing the trimmings down the toilet—although where does it go except to the septic tank? Our neighbours are even more cautious than Grace. If any of them had seen what I’ve seen, they wouldn’t worry. They’d know that disease comes or it doesn’t, and if it comes, there’s nothing you can do to prevent it.

Just as I can’t prevent you growing inside me, little baby, my skin bulging more around you each week. I can’t stop your growing, can only watch and wait. I’m sure that Grace has left me here all alone on purpose, that this is a power play in the ongoing sad tale of the fallout from my affair with her husband. She’s left me in this, their second home, with all their things—and still I have nothing. She must know that to be alone out here at this stage in the pregnancy is more dangerous for me than anywhere I’ve been.

It doesn’t seem that long ago I was in New York. I remember the day I found out about you: I lugged the weight of a suitcase behind me, down four flights of stairs at the Dunn Inn. There was no other way to move between rooms. So I had packed up everything I owned and taken it down to the check-in desk to check out—and then check back in again. I would have to heave the case up those stairs again when I got assigned my new hotel room. The stairs were steep, narrow and twisted, the green banister caked with paint from being retouched
many times. My calves knotted as I descended. Forty pounds of suitcase behind me, handle sweaty, as I shifted my laptop bag on my shoulder. It was always with me then, like a growth, a clumsy but permanent part of me. Down I went, down, the wheels of the suitcase sticking on the fireproof carpeting. I lost a shoe on the landing and had to wriggle it on again before the suitcase bumped me down to the next step.

For a legal reason I didn’t understand, the hotelier wouldn’t let me keep the room for more than fourteen consecutive days. I hadn’t been in Manhattan long enough to know about squatters’ laws—that if they let me stay longer in one room I could deem it my permanent residence. I’d been in New York only fourteen days times two, and was moving for the third time already.

I had started out in an apartment—an old railroad flat, just a room for rent—but it was overrun with roaches and roommates. The bugs darted up along the shower pipe in the tub in the morning, and we rinsed them down before we stepped into it. One of the girls was a student, the other a stripper (although it was never said). How they knew each other—or even if they did—I have no idea. I had found the place online, sight unseen, a bad idea. All of our rooms were one after the other, with me in the middle, and not even a window. I didn’t sleep for the first two days—it was ninety degrees and the air in the room was so dense. Of course, the student had the least privacy of all: her space was not really a bedroom so much as a cot and a desk in a screened-off dining area that the stripper and I had to walk through. The third
morning I saw two rats in the alley, scuttling from one garbage heap to the next. So I found the Dunn Inn in Chelsea. It was overpriced but clean. And now I was moving from one hotel room to another as if playing musical chairs at a birthday party. I’ve always hated birthday parties.