Liberty Street

by Dianne Warren

  I woke up hungover and wondering just how embarrassed I ought to be about my behaviour the night before, and feeling enormously thankful that I was waking up alone. I vowed that I would never drink too much, or wear that dress, again. I had once cut to ribbons a dress that I wanted to be rid of, and I was tempted to do the same to the black dress, but once more I thought, That’s what the old Frances would do. This Frances can cover the dress with a dry cleaner’s bag and hang it in the closet and look at it once in a while to be reminded of a lesson learned.

  So that’s what I did. Lesson learned, I thought as I hung the dress at the back of my closet (eventually I gave it to a thrift shop). Then I went back to bed and slept most of the day.

  Ian called a few days later, having got my number from the colleague who’d introduced us, and asked if I wanted to go out for dinner.

  I decided to be blunt and avoid future humiliation. “You’re too young for me,” I said.

  “What’s age got to do with anything?”

  “You’re on the rebound.”

  “I get the feeling you are too.”

  Funny, I thought, it was kind of true. I’d been on the rebound pretty much since I left Elliot.

  I agreed to meet him for dinner. We began to see each other—once a week at first, and then more often, spending the night at his house or my apartment. Our compatibility was confirmed when we discovered we both liked to don bedroom slippers as soon as we walked in the door from work. Mine were crocheted, purchased at the farmer’s market, and his were leather, the kind Mr. Rogers might wear. He was in the habit of cooking dinner in his suit minus the jacket, wearing slippers and an apron, which he began to do for me while I sat with a glass of wine and put my blue-and-green-mottled feet on the coffee table. We talked while he cooked, the facts of our current lives, the goings-on at our places of work. I stopped thinking about the age difference.

  Six months after we met, I moved into his house. He had to convince me. I was worried it was too soon. There was no talk of marriage, and by that I was relieved. The night before I moved in, while we were eating pizza in my dismantled apartment, he said to me, “I feel I should be honest about something. I don’t want to have children.”

  I didn’t have to think before I answered. “You’re safe with me, then,” I said. “No desire to have kids. No desire to get married. My happiness is dependent on neither.”

  Free and clear, I thought. There was no further mention of children or marriage.

  Until five years later, when Ian asked over dinner, a pasta dish with shrimp and lemon in a cream sauce—just when I’d been about to ask him how he kept the cream from curdling—“You could still have a child, right? A woman over forty can still have a child?”

  I set down my fork and looked at him. I had no idea that he’d changed his mind about children, although it was now dawning on me why he’d been showing such interest in the babies born to various co-workers. Within the last week, someone named Gary had had a baby girl. I’d thought Ian was telling me about his day—no computers because of a system crash, of all days for the new intern to start . . . lunch at that new coffee shop, you know the one . . . and oh, Gary and his wife had a baby girl, they’re thrilled, over the moon . . . It had all been leading up to the baby. They’d named her Ella after a special aunt.

  “A baby is not a good idea,” I said. “You’re the actuary. The odds increase drastically after a woman is forty. It could have Down’s syndrome.”

  “But not necessarily. There are tests.”

  “You’ve tied yourself to an older woman, Ian.”

  “We haven’t exactly tied ourselves to each other, have we? I wonder if we should. Maybe we should get married.”

  Married.

  I didn’t reply. I got up and left the room, abandoning my plate of perfectly uncurdled pasta, which had suddenly lost its appeal. Upset because he’d caught me off guard, suggested the impossible, disrupted the stability I thought I’d found. I could hear the echo of another man’s voice asking a similar question in a similar way: I wonder if you might want . . .

  Ian followed me, saying, “Frances, what the hell? I just asked you to marry me.”

  I was thinking, I’m already married, but I spoke three different words: “No. Just no.”

  For a while after, I worried that we, or perhaps I, had ruined everything, but we managed to drift back into our comfortable lives, baby talk thankfully forgotten, or so I’d thought. The years went by. We bought a new couch for the living room. We added on to the house and built a deck in the yard and bought a good barbecue. We talked about getting a dog but decided against it because we’d begun to travel, to go on winter holidays. The day I turned fifty, we had a few friends over for a fall barbecue—Ian’s friends really, but I liked them—and we toasted the future, growing old together. I joked that it would not exactly be together, since I would get there first, and Ian replied that I’d be able to shop for both of us and get the senior’s discount.

  I held up my wineglass and clinked it against his. “Here’s to me, with a Sears shopping cart full of bargain toilet paper and men’s socks and underwear.”

  Everyone laughed. We were good.

  And then Ireland, when something inexplicable came over me.

  And something came over Ian, and he announced that he was returning home early with or without me, an ultimatum. I had immediately known the terms: that I open the door to a locked room, giving him permission to look around, remove drop cloths, flip latches, peek into cubbyholes, turn back clocks. I didn’t know if a key to that room even existed, but if it did, I was not going to use it in his presence, and I was certainly not letting him in that room without me going through its contents first.

  That is what I was thinking when I made the decision to go hill walking.

  It’s what I was still thinking as I drove toward Elliot for the first time in many years, cold air blasting at me from the air-conditioning vents, my T-shirt sticking to the leather seat back anyway.

  What would I find when I got there?

  I did not know.

  And nor did I know that something as commonplace as a rusty nail was about to send me down a hallway of locked doors, which would swing in every direction before I could even lay a hand on them.

  Meaning there were no locked doors, not in Elliot.

  Meaning also that the weirdest fucking things just happen sometimes.

  AN HOUR AFTER I turned north and went through Yellowhead, I pulled into a small town with a full-service gas station, and as the young attendant—a gawky, long-legged teenage boy named Chuck, according to the badge on his shirt—filled up my car, I collected the washroom key and found the door marked Ladies around the side of the building. As I was washing my hands, I studied the face in the mirror. My hair was still red and curly, although it was now streaked with grey. Did I look like I had when I lived in Elliot? Would anyone recognize me? I didn’t know the answer to either question, but I knew my preference was to appear as a stranger in town. I left the washroom, and as I was paying for my gas, I asked Chuck if he knew where I could buy hair dye.

  “The drugstore, I guess,” he said, and pointed toward what I thought must be the main street.

  I found the drugstore, which reminded me of the drugstore in Elliot, where I’d had my ears pierced with a needle and an ice cube. I mulled over the dye choices for too long while the young clerk stared at me, this one a girl with peacock-blue streaks in her dark hair, and finally I decided to go all the way and turn myself into a blonde. I knew nothing about the rules of dying hair, but it seemed you could do anything you wanted with colour.

  I selected a box from the shelf—guaranteed, it claimed, to cover grey and make your hair soft and shiny—and took it to the counter.

  “Will this work on my hair?” I asked the clerk.

  It must have been a slow day because she took the question much more seriously than I expected her to. She had a good look at my hair and even reached up to touch it, which surprise
d me and caused me to take a step back. I wondered if she was trying to find a way to tell me I was about to make a definite fashion mistake. Perhaps I was hoping she would tell me that, but she didn’t.

  She finally spoke. “Okay. You’ll need to pre-lighten the colour because you still have quite a bit of natural colour left. I’m not really sure what the grey will do, but you can add lowlights later if you need to. I would go with a liquid cream bleach—the higher the number, the faster it will lighten—but you have to be careful not to leave it on too long or your hair will get really dry, plus it’s not that dark. And you’ll need to use a toner, but don’t use one with ammonia or peroxide. It’ll damage your hair even more. Then you need to seal in the colour. You can get a spray for that, and it will make your hair soft again too, so bonus.”

  My head spun. Who knew dying your hair with a do-it-yourself box from the drugstore would involve so many steps?

  To reassure me, she said, “I use box dyes myself, even for the highlights. It’s not so hard.” Then she told me she was hoping to become a hairstylist when she finished high school. “I get good marks in art. My teacher says I’m artistic and I need a creative sort of job.”

  “I used to know some art students,” I said, thinking about the ones who had once lived across the street from me, and also about my own hairdressing aspirations, which had lasted just long enough to appal my mother. “You could study art if you wanted to, at university. Save beauty school for later.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But I don’t really want to be an artist. I’d rather style hair. I wish they wouldn’t call it beauty school, though. ‘Beauty’ is kind of an old-fashioned word.”

  “I’m happy to hear that beauty is passé,” I said. “Anyway, you can start your hairstyling career right now. Can you just pick out everything I need? I’ll do whatever you say. And give me the highest number. I’ll watch the time.”

  The girl chose three products, plus a bottle of moisturizing shampoo. I got her to write steps one, two, and three on the packages, which she did with a black marker, carefully and earnestly. I thanked her for her help and told her I was sure she would make a great hairstylist, and then I drove back to the gas station and asked Chuck once again for the key to the washroom. He gave it to me, taking note of the drugstore bag I was now carrying. I went into the washroom and put on the rubber gloves that were provided, squeezed step one’s creamy liquid all over my head, and pulled it through my hair. Then I looked at the time on my watch.

  I figured I couldn’t spend the entire wait time in the washroom, which was clean but smelled of Pine-Sol and whatever I had just put on my head, so I went outside and found a place to sit in the grass while I kept my eye on the time and wondered what chemical transformation was taking place. I noticed that Chuck was watching me, and eventually he came over and said, “Are you dying your hair in our washroom?”

  “Yes,” I answered, “that is what I am doing: dying my hair.” I wondered what I would do if he asked me to leave.

  He didn’t. “Totally random,” he said. “Women do that in movies. Usually after they’ve robbed a bank or stabbed their husband. Not that stabbing your husband is always bad. He could have been, like, abusive.”

  “None of the above,” I said, wondering what about me had caused him to come up with the idea of spousal homicide. I asked him if my hair was turning green or orange or anything awful, and he shook his head. He took off his cap and scratched his forehead.

  “Which way are you going?” he asked.

  “Northeast,” I said.

  “Have you heard about the fires? They’re saying they might close the road. So much smoke you can’t see. At least that’s what I heard. From a trucker.”

  Then he put his cap on and walked back to the pumps, where another car had pulled in.

  When the time was up, I returned to the washroom and rinsed my hair in the sink and looked in the mirror, where a bleached-blonde woman looked back at me. Unfortunately, the dye job wasn’t going to change my best-before date, which would have been a welcome side effect.

  I applied the toner—step two—and went outside to sit in the grass again for the required amount of time. Then I washed my hair and sprayed on step three and ran a comb through my new look. I put my sunglasses back on and stepped out into the hot day once more. I wanted to laugh. I’d dyed my hair in a gas station. I waved at my new friend Chuck as I pulled away, but he didn’t wave back. Maybe he really thought he’d had a psychopath on his hands.

  As I drove north, I began to see the smoke in the air, which I might have thought was dust had I not heard from Chuck about the fires. The sun, I noticed, was turning that strange red colour, as it does when sunlight passes through particles of smoke and ash. You see this even in the city sometimes, when there are forest fires burning in the north.

  It was now late afternoon and blistering hot, and the road shimmered in front of me. I kept stealing glances at myself, blonde hair and sunglasses, and thinking, Who is that woman? And at one point I thought, It’s my mother. She’d never been blonde, but she had liked her sunglasses.

  When I hit the main northern traffic route, I turned east again, knowing that I was now on the road leading directly to Elliot, which I was relieved to find still open, no notices of closures up ahead. I was well into a mix of boreal forest and arable land—arable only because of persistence, since the poplars grew back like weeds when the land was cleared. This was the world of my childhood, where small farmers like my father coexisted with men who worked seasonally in the bush, cutting and hauling logs. Although my father and his neighbours were reasonably prosperous, it had for many families been a life of subsistence.

  The names of the towns I passed through became more and more familiar. The smoke in the air grew thick and the day grew darker, as if a storm were approaching. I began to smell the smoke, even with the car windows up. When I came to a sign announcing that the town of St. Agnes was ahead, I knew I was close, and I began to wonder if I was making a mistake. I sensed an invisible wall going up in front of me, an argument being launched against my return to Elliot. I knew there was a T-intersection with a road going south just this side of St. Agnes, a last-chance escape route, and I found myself watching for it, slowing down, driving below the speed limit. I began to feel unwell. I couldn’t tell if I was hot or cold because I was sweating and shivering at the same time, but I was uncomfortable enough that I pulled over and got out of the car. I was within sight of the intersection and having, I believed, a genuine anxiety attack.

  My first thought was to go for a walk to clear my head, but it was hotter outside than I’d thought possible this far north in May, and the air was now dense with smoke. I ended up standing in the grass at the side of the road, staring at the intersection, undecided, unable to make a decision, vehicles of all descriptions coming toward me, materializing out of the smoke and then disappearing again to the west. I wondered what to do. No one was making me go to Elliot, no one was expecting me, except perhaps Mavis, and it had to be an indication that your hometown was no longer your home when the only person expecting you was your real estate agent.

  An elderly man drove by in a farm truck going toward St. Agnes, gawking at me as he passed, and then he stopped and parked on the shoulder. I watched as he got out of his truck and walked back through the haze toward me. I knew exactly what was coming: the friendly greeting, some chit-chat about the weather, several subtle turns and segues until we arrived at the point, which would come as a statement of fact rather than a direct question—“I suppose you could use some help. Lost or broken down, I guess.” I was tempted to answer yes to all three—lost and broken down, needing help—but instead I stepped back onto the shoulder from where I was standing in the grass, the horseflies beginning to get bothersome, and I thanked the man for stopping and assured him that I’d just wanted a break from driving in the heat.

  “Smoke’s getting bad, eh?” he said. “Hope they don’t close the road. Not from around here, I guess.”<
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  I said, “Just passing through. Thanks for stopping.”

  Then the man returned to his truck and drove on.

  The exchange had happened exactly as I’d anticipated, had unfolded with such fluency. Although that could have fed the argument against my return, it didn’t. Instead, I had to fight the temptation to believe I somehow belonged here, which was an absurd thought. Still, I realized I was not quite ready to abandon my plan and turn south.

  I remembered there’d been a motel in St. Agnes, a single-storey fifties L called the Stardust, with a dozen rooms. It was built for the fishermen and their families who came north in the summer, the hunters who came in the fall. Perhaps it was still there, a relic now when once it had been invitingly modern. Perhaps I could stay the night in St. Agnes and drive to Elliot the next day. Or not, depending on how I felt in the morning. I started the car and drove on toward St. Agnes, the air conditioning once again blasting.

  As I approached the town, I thought it looked pretty much the way I remembered, with its main street stretched along the roadway, although it was also different. St. Agnes had always been smaller than Elliot, and had not had a high school or a hospital, even when I was a child. As I slowed to drive through town, I could see that it was now smaller still, and dilapidated. Mom’s Lunch, where the truckers used to stop, was boarded up, the grain elevator was gone, and I guessed that if I were to drive along the residential streets, the full effects of the closure of the lumber mill several years ago would reveal themselves and St. Agnes would turn out to be not much more than a ghost town.

  I was happy to see, though, that the Stardust Motel was still in business on the easternmost edge of town. It looked surprisingly well kept—newly painted, the half acre of lawn freshly mown, and the old-style outdoor swimming pool filled with water, ready for the season. There were only a few vehicles, all oil-rig trucks, parked in front of the row of turquoise blue doors with numbers on them. A neon sign said, unnecessarily, Vacancy.

  I parked in front of the motel office and checked myself in for the night. An indifferent middle-aged woman gave me a key and said, “By the way, there’s a piano in that room.” They stored the family’s various surplus items in the rooms, she explained; the one next door to mine had a freezer. I drove my car just a few feet to angle-park in front of room 3, and carried my suitcase into its hot and dark interior. The room was decorated in vintage orange and brown, and I immediately inspected the bathroom (as my mother would have done) and found it to be clean. Still, I wasn’t about to walk on the carpet in bare feet.