The Blondes (36 page)

I didn’t tell him I had watched Allen’s entire oeuvre as downloads. It was precisely because of observations like this I admired Karl. Admired, perhaps, more than loved. Although when I think of the way Grace speaks of him—spoke of him—I realize perhaps it was a kind of love.

I remember the night Grace made me the maternity clothes, she knocked back half a bottle of red wine from the pantry. “You still look a little clownish,” she said, scrutinizing me. “But at least you’re presentable.”

I did look clownish, but I had to admit I was more comfortable than I’d been in months. “You have to understand,” I told Grace, “since you crushed my glasses, I can’t really see myself.”

“Now, if I can just get you to shave your head more often … or maybe those eyebrows.”

I noticed that she ignored my accusation about the glasses.

At that point, I’d never seen Grace drunk. Her body bent more. Her arms flopped out from her stick figure. I seized my moment.

“I don’t know how many times I should ask you to forgive me.”

She raised a hand like it was no big deal. It hovered, her elbow on the wooden arm of the chair. Her painted face reclined against the cushion. She closed her eyes, her mascaraed eyelashes standing out all the more on her hairless face—or maybe they only seemed to because I had no glasses.

“He had a ball sac like a jelly doughnut, didn’t he?” she said through lipsticked lips.

I didn’t say anything.

“But he won in the end. He really won the war.”

Grace kicked the cowboy magazine off the table with her wool-socked toe. She had the TV on mute. We’d been waiting for a television series I abhorred to come on. Grace said it was “top-notch, production-wise, and very smart.” I think she meant for Canadian television, but she didn’t say that. The show was called
Fourteenth Colony
, and it was set on another planet where people had been sent to live after an outbreak wiped out much of the earth’s population. They were rebuilding in a back-to-basics way, but with advanced technology. We’d watched one episode already and I’d thought that it was too on the nose, that the actors were like highly polished wood. Nonetheless, Grace insisted we watch. But before the program came on, there were commercials, then an on-the-hour news update.

There had been a riot in Toronto at the Eaton Centre shopping mall. Surveillance footage showed a faceless, shapeless herd of people. They rushed past the fountain on the lower level, shopping bags strewn everywhere. Another camera had captured what was happening a level above. An enormous Christmas tree, twenty-five or thirty feet tall, had tipped and was balanced precariously on the rail, threatening to fall. Ornaments had already dropped off, like small, bright bombs smashing on the tile below.
Boxing Day brouhaha leaves six dead and forty-two wounded
, the closed captioning declared in large letters. I could only make it out because I was sitting on the end of the sofa that was closest to the screen.

In spite of the calendar in the kitchen, Grace and I had missed Christmas.

In the next bit of footage, the newscaster was positioned against the same rail as the toppled Christmas tree, overlooking the fountain structure. Officials below her were attempting to clean it. The still water in its base was blood red. It seemed to catch both the uniforms and the newscaster off guard when the fountain shot up, geyser-like. The newscaster recovered quickly and continued with the broadcast, saying that a little girl had plunged to her death in the latest SHV attack, and that five trample victims had succumbed to injuries. Others were in hospital and being treated. Four blondes, an a cappella choir comprised of sisters, had been taken into isolation. I watched the newscaster’s lips moving silently and the type parading across the bottom of the screen. I leaned forward, squinting to make it out.

“I stopped sleeping with him eight years ago,” Grace said.

She’d drunk too much and wasn’t paying attention to the TV. My mouth went dry.

“I just realized one day that I didn’t need it, and that I still seemed to get everything from him that I wanted.”

She volunteered this information easily, and I stared at the screen, trying to figure out if officials were pulling a dripping Santa Claus hat or a bloodied garment from the fountain with a net. Either way I felt sick. I was glad I didn’t have my glasses.

Grace just kept talking, in her own world. “There were other girls before you, you know—plenty. But I think he loved me more after we stopped. He just did. He loved me more.”

Grace sat up as the television flashed the photo of the little girl who had died. She was about four years old, with exaggerated dimples and brown eyes. Her name was Kami. Over the next two days they would show that picture about eighty more times—as if that little girl was the face of all victims of the virus. They didn’t show a photo of the blonde sisters.

Grace poured herself another glass of wine. She was all elbows and knotted wrists. In comparison, I was shaped like a balloon. I watched her move. She got up and rolled the empty bottle onto the counter in the kitchen and came back, taking up her glass and sinking into the chair without spilling it.

“Let’s watch TV,” she said, even though I was already watching.

“You go ahead,” I told her, and I got up and went to the bathroom. I heard her jack the volume up for the final minute of the news.

I have to tell you, my little water bug, there are so many things I wish I could change. I wish, for instance, that I had got up before Larissa on that one day in Toronto in particular. And I wish that I had thought to make a list of things I needed to do, like getting my glasses repaired, or making a doctor’s appointment, or going to my bank and seeing about getting access to my account even without my card, or finding a contact who could locate my things from Canada Customs—because chances are, they’re sitting in some little back office somewhere. There were so many things I should have done while I was in the city. But I thought I was going to be there longer.

It was Larissa who brought my attention to the letter from the City of Windsor. In the morning when I got up, she had put my things out for me on the coffee table. I guess I’d just dumped them in her hall when I walked in, like I owned the place even though I’d never been there. But that’s what an old friendship will do to you.

“I didn’t have any coffee, so I went out and bought us some,” she said. “I’ll do some shopping later.”

The coffee was from Tim Hortons, the same brand as the empty store that was across the field from the quarantine. I kissed Larissa on the cheek and told her the story of how I gazed longingly at that distant building while captive at the Women’s Entry and Evaluation centre. I wrapped my hands around the cardboard cup and breathed in the smell of the coffee.

“You should open those,” she said abruptly, about the
mail I’d collected from my old place. “I’m kind of worried about that one.” She indicated the government envelope. She told me that as the strip club capital of Canada, Windsor had become a war zone, that bleaching had reached an all-time high, and that officials were unable to deal with the fallout from the rampant virus. “My dad’s retired now, but he tells me things about city hall and the stuff they’re dealing with. They’re basically bankrupt …” Her voice trailed off. Then she said brightly, “I’m going to take a shower,” and she left me alone with the envelope.

The language of debt—of bills and collections—is colder than winter. As much as I could figure, the invoice the city had sent me was for the disposal of my mother’s body. I owed them $5,243. This was, apparently, the “basic” service. I sat holding on to the edges of the letter for a long time. I could feel my heart beating in my chest like someone punching me from the inside, or maybe that was you. Eventually the shower stopped, and I heard flushing and then the hair dryer. It roared like the blood racing inside my skull.

When Larissa came out, she said apologetically, “I’m sorry, hon,” without my having to tell her what the envelope contained.

“Where’s Richard?” I asked numbly, but I wasn’t asking Larissa. I knew he was the executor of my mother’s estate, and the burden of her burial should have fallen to him. I’d never been particularly fond of him—my mother drank as
much with him as she had before him—but he’d been well enough off and emotionally even. Or so I’d thought. Then I remembered my mom at the beginning of the outbreak, saying her business was going gangbusters. Still, she’d asked Richard if she could give me the money she put in my account. Possibly, he too had made the assumption I was dead, like my landlord had; maybe he’d taken whatever money Mom had and gone somewhere safer.

I shut my eyes and tried not to think about the risks my mother must have faced in the Head Start salon. The wallpaper and wood panel of that old place appeared behind my eyelids, unwilled. I could feel my mother’s hands on my scalp, the way she used to wash my hair for me sometimes—in spite of my protests—in the big black sink. “What do you do to your head, Hazel?” she used to nag. “You’ve got ten fingers. Use them,” and her fingertips would dig and rub, working in circles. She would massage down to my ears and neck like she wanted to excise something from me. Sometimes it was torture, and sometimes a kind of affection, the soap blooming in her hands like a ball of white lace.

When I opened my eyes again, Larissa’s back was to me and she was fixing toast. There were only two pieces left in the bag and one was a crust. She gave them both to me, smeared with honey from a jar with a cloth-and-ribbon lid. They went cold. The coffee had also gone cold. I wished I could throw up, but I seemed to be past that part of the pregnancy. I went into Larissa’s tiny bathroom. Her medicine cabinet was well stocked with bottles that sounded like anxiety pills,
their meaningless syllables clumped around a big Z:
zzzzzz
.

In the end, I didn’t take any pills. I wasn’t sure what effect they would have on you, and when I laid my hand across my abdomen, you jumped. All of a sudden you seemed more important than anything else in the universe. Up to that point, I’d thought of you as a seedling in the wind. Something blowing past me that would inevitably find its place. Now, every gust of breath seemed vital to the direction you might travel. You were all I had, and you were just a shivering little star of flesh beneath my hand. I showered, not soaping, just standing still as the drops beat over my bald head and my belly.

“What do you want to do today?” Larissa asked when I came out, like she was glad we had cleared that other bit of business out of the way. She was over by the living room window in the sun, nibbling the toast I’d left.

It was the medication, I told myself, making her behave that way. I stared at her. Her expensive jeans had faded, but you could still tell by the cut that they had cost a lot. The children upstairs thumped across the ceiling even though the schoolday had already started. I asked Larissa if she had to work, but she smiled and said, “Not today,” and, turning her back to me to look out the window, “I told them to make do without me.”

Larissa left her giant headdress at home, and we went out shorthaired. She put on long earrings to compensate. She guided me to a brunch joint with a French name, as if it would make up for the shock of my suddenly being motherless. She
said that I had to eat right for my little bundle, that Jay had practically forced her when she was carrying Devang, and now she would force me.

I followed her without protest. I didn’t know what else to do. She glided into a sparkling green booth in the front window and ordered herself an open-faced sandwich, a
croque
, and when I just stared at the menu, she said, “Two, please,” and held up two fingers.

She seemed almost like her teenage self, excited that we were together again, careening through the city. She grasped my hand across the table and whispered, “I didn’t want to tell you this last night because everything was so
serious
, but I’m seeing someone. He lives in the building. He’s incredibly good-looking.” I squinted at her and wondered what part of the morning hadn’t been as serious as last night.

She smiled and played with her hair, feathering it ‘80s-style with her fingers. She watched people pass by outside, the women in footwear that was still meant for November instead of December, stepping as though they were afraid they might slip. It was sunny but the ice hadn’t melted. Everything dazzled and reflected. I asked her, “What about Jay?”

“Oh, Haze, we’re all adults. I know you liked him,” she said. “But he’s gone. Fidelity is only as far as your area code.”

She pulled her coat back on and excused herself. She said she didn’t want to smoke around me given my condition. Through the window, I watched her bum a cigarette and a light for it on the sidewalk. She held it glamorously in the V of her fingers; she tipped her head back and expelled smoke. The
light caught her face and I noticed how colourless her eyes were. The server brought our beverages. I drank and stared at the cigarette moving toward her mouth and away. Those fluttering hands. That was when I realized it: her long fingers were naked, no wedding ring.