She looked at Thi rubbing circles on her temples, then past her, through the window to the sidewalk where Amanda was gambolling in a long dark coat. It was raining and she was holding a purple umbrella and stretching her free hand in the air as she leapt. Not a frisky person even in happier times, Alison couldn’t believe her now as Mary Poppins. She pointed, but Thi didn’t seem to think it an odd scene. Because she had met Amanda outside, she knew already what it took Alison a moment to figure out: that Amanda was trying to untie the knot halfway up the column. Succeeding, she pulled free the black tail of sodden ribbon, unwinding it from the column, a funereal maypole. Their mourning officially over, now they would have to get on with it—life.
Billy asked her, ‘Are you still reading that book?’
‘I renewed it.’
‘You’re applying for a job at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre?’
‘What?’
Moving closer, he began a ticklish sniffing at her neck. She shut the book and rolled over to face him; it slid off her chest and down between them like a wall. For a minute they kissed over the top of it, then Billy took it and dropped it on the floor.
‘Just today I read in Physiology and Behavior, volume forty-five, number two, a study by Albert and Petrovic. They found that female Wistar rats become aggressive when cohabiting with sexually non-performing males. It’s definitive.’
Alison rolled onto her back again. ‘I’m not a rat,’ she said.
At her request, he had taken down the poster, so now she stared up at what had been under it—a clean white rectangle on the yellowed ceiling. The problem was, it seemed so like a screen now that the images she had been staring at in the book projected out of her stunned retina and shone horribly back down on her.
‘I hate to beg,’ said Billy, ‘but—please, please, please.’
She put her hand over her eyes to block them out: the open pit, the naked bodies jumbled in it, the limbs like sticks. Oh, Christian, she thought.
‘May I at least cop a feel?’ asked Billy, trying to be funny.
‘No.’ She curled up, hugging her knees.
He rolled over, his aggrieved back against hers, and turned out the light without telling her goodnight. Five weeks ago, when Christian was killed, Billy was as horrified as any of them, but now he was tired of hearing about it. He’d only met Christian once. How could she expect him to feel for a person he barely knew? Yet, as she lay there with her face turned to the wall, she knew it was possible.
4
At Billy’s insistence she went to see the doctor, who listened patiently to her story, then sent her to the lab for tests. By nightfall, a huge purple bruise appeared on her arm where the needle had gone in, the smeared tattoo of a rose. It worried her, this stain under her skin, but when she went back to the doctor, all he did was tell her her blood test was normal—no anaemia, no hormonal irregularities. He asked if she wanted an antidepressant.
‘Why—?’
She was asking about the bruise, but with the waiting room crowded with the unwell, he interrupted. Not that he was unkind or negligent. He made time to wax philosophic about the vicissitudes of life and how the body, naturally, felt these too. After what had happened to her friend, of course she felt depressed.
‘Those are legitimate feelings of grief, but aren’t they dragging you off to a different place now? You can go there if you want, but it’s not necessary.’
Alison wondered if all of them at Vitae had seen the same doctor; one by one they had each brought in their pills. The doctor, reading her mind, said, ‘Look at it this way. Feelings are chemicals, too. They’re just chemicals in the brain.’
‘Really?’ said Alison.
She dropped the prescription off at Shoppers Drug Mart and went back to work. Mrs. Soloff was in the waiting area when Alison arrived. They greeted each other warmly, as if there had never been any tension between them. Mrs. Soloff was, after all, a great and gracious lady of immense fortitude. Mrs. Soloff had come back from the dead.
Alison led her to the dressing room. ‘How are you doing? Would you like my help?’
‘Yes, dear.’
She stepped inside and slipped Mrs. Soloff’s blouse off her bowed shoulders, averting her eyes so as not to see the numbers. Close to her like this, she was again aware of the paradox of the old lady’s tremendous frailty and inner strength. She tied the ties, pressed the Velcro, then offered her arm again.
After work, she collected her prescription and took it home. As soon as Billy got in, he wanted to know what the doctor had said to her.
‘I’m depressed.’
He laughed. ‘You needed a doctor to tell you that?’
‘I didn’t think I needed a doctor,’ she reminded him, going over to the window.
‘Did he give you anything?’
She nodded, still staring out. The prescription was lying on the coffee table. Billy put down the papers he had brought home and opened the bag. ‘Great. How long do they take to work?’
What Alison was thinking: that she wasn’t going to take those pills. There wasn’t anything the matter with her.
‘Come here,’ he said, patting the place next to him on the couch.
She came and sat. Across the coffee table, he had spread a half-dozen travel brochures, glossy, in blinding colours.
‘What’s this?’ she asked.
‘We talked about a holiday.’
‘Next Christmas.’
‘I thought we could go sooner. You know, get away and dry off.’ It was a lot cheaper in the spring with all the package deals. They could afford it. ‘Look.’ He put a brochure in her hands and trilled his tongue. ‘¡Viva la Revolución!’
She flipped through the pages, saw bikini-clad women dancing on the Cuban sand, hibiscus flowers, foot-long cigars. Such easy pictures to look at.
He made her promise to go through all the brochures; Mexico, Hawaii, Costa Rica, the Caribbean. She agreed. Of course she would.
‘Do you have a passport?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘We’ll have to get you one.’
When they got into bed that night, she wanted him to look at pictures, too. First she showed him the photograph in the book of the shoes. They were collected together in a very large high-ceilinged room. In the background, someone had propped a ladder up against where the shoes were piled the highest, to the ceiling, but now the ladder, too, was engulfed by shoes. Shoes flattened and stacked like firewood, shoes avalanching into the foreground, shoes and shoes and shoes.
‘I keep telling you,’ said Billy. ‘That hall closet? One day the door is gonna give and the whole apartment will look like this.’
Then he asked her if there was a picture of her sweaters. He meant to make her laugh, and did, proving to her something she had been gradually comprehending—the duality of all, even ordinary things. In a picture of a room full of shoes, she saw horror; he saw too many shoes.
In the middle of the night Alison, sleeping fitfully as usual, got up and went to the kitchen for a drink. She tripped on something, grabbed the counter, dropped the glass. The sound it made shattering in the dark terrified her.
The next morning, she paused before stepping in the shower. She would never be able to take a mindless shower again. Never, she thought. Afterward, she dressed, throwing on anything and a sweater, and said goodbye to Billy. On the way to catch the bus, she stopped on the railway tracks and looked down the gradually converging rails to the vanishing point, so aptly named. The bench where she sat in the sunshine waiting for the bus had a view north to mountains two-toned with snow. Ten minutes west lay the ocean, that plated sheet. Her own country she had barely discovered; it was beautiful and wild. Safe, peaceful, affluent was how she had heard it described all her life.
Shoes were just some of the plunderings. They took everything—prayer shawls and eyeglasses, jewell
ery, teeth, everything—and stored it in a warehouse, and when that warehouse had filled, they built another and crammed it, too, with booty.
Warehouses named Kanada I and II.
5
At Vitae, Malcolm marvelled to see how they put the tragedy behind them—so soon, when he was still sniffing his wrist and cringing. Of course things were not as before: tempers flared, and here and there a shaved head appeared, but there was a consensus among them, most of them, to recover. They even brought their recovery in and passed it around in the form of pills.
That the girl was in disagreement was soon apparent. Alison had used to welcome any task you asked of her, grateful for the opportunity to do the very things you shirked. But now she had slowed down and there was instead a listlessness about her. She seemed suspended in distraction. Whereas before, if she displayed the ability to read it would be the back of a shampoo bottle or a magazine, now she began to show up with a book.
‘Oversized’ read the label on the spine, the damn thing so big it had to be carried in and out each day in a canvas bag possibly purchased to bear this very burden. Immediately after putting on the coffee, she would heft it from the bag; she needed both hands to do it. Open in her lap, it seemed to hold her there, preventing her from getting on with the day. She would stare at a page, sometimes not even reading, just looking at a photograph and twisting her dark hair around a finger. Eventually Thi would have to send someone to tell her it was time to get to work.
Their reactions to the book he observed with black amusement. At first everyone recoiled to see it there, juxtaposed with Chatelaine, Hair Flair and Vogue. Cautiously, they approached—there was barbed wire on the cover. The first plate, a blurred sepia-toned enlargement of a crowd, Malcolm himself had to look at twice to figure out. It was a crowd of children mostly dressed in stripes, each extending a bare arm. In the centre of the photograph, one child was frozen in the act of pulling up her sleeve. All of them holding out their left arms to show their tattooed numbers to the camera.
Roxanne’s reaction was to shut the book quickly; with her every edgy movement, jewellery rattled, or was it her bones? Thi turned a few pages pensively. When Malcolm asked if she had been born in Vietnam, she answered, ‘Yes. We came here when I was a child.’ Her doll’s face darkened; at some point, she had likely been in a camp of sorts herself.
Robert actually studied the book for the length of a coffee break. He’d always seemed to Malcolm the most reflective, brooding and serious, like a missionary trying with his pierced eyebrow to insinuate himself among the natives. Jamie dismissed the book entirely. Amanda stood with her hands on her hips and said, ‘Can’t we do something about this clutter?’
The whispering started between Roxanne and Donna. All Malcolm heard was, ‘The book, the book, the book . . .’ Then Thi added her discontented voice and it became The Book.
The appointment book was on the desk before Alison, unadorned black leather with a spine that made a cracking sound every time she opened it. She found the name she was looking for and started to read it out, but her voice cracked. She’d seen a photograph of one of the leather books they had recorded the prisoners’ names in at Auschwitz. Covering the page with her hand, she asked the woman there, ‘Are you next?’
Alison led her to the dressing room, then continued on to the back to get her tea. Amanda and Thi were there having their weekly conference, this time with Donna. Thi asked,‘How many heads have you done so far, Ali?’
‘Yours, Jamie’s and Roxanne’s.’ She filled the teapot with water.
Amanda hooted. ‘Roxanne looks fabulous!’
‘Roxanne did that after,’ said Thi, grumpily. ‘Ali’s cut was great.’
‘How about Ali doing Donna’s client’s highlights, with Donna supervising?’ Amanda suggested.
Donna said, ‘She’s not ready.’
Thi threw up her hands. ‘Of course she is!’
Alison took the steaming teapot from the microwave, assembled the tray and carried it out with Donna trailing behind.
‘Where is she?’ Donna asked.
‘Up front.’
‘I thought you said she was ready.’
She set the tray down at Donna’s station. ‘You said I’m not ready. She’s changing.’
‘Snarky, snarky. Where are you going?’
‘Don’t you have to cut her first?’
‘I cut her yesterday! We didn’t have the time for the highlights!’ Harrumphing, Donna went to collect her client. She came back a different, gushing person. ‘Oooh, I still like it. The highlights will give it texture. I was thinking red might be nice.’ Her fingers, under the woman’s hair, tilted her head at different angles.
‘Red?’ she asked.
‘Well, reddish. Alison, bring the colour samples. Alison is going to help today.’
Recapping bottles, Alison happened to be right next to the sample board, so she brought it over to Donna—hair fixed in rows, all colours, the whole human spectrum bound into single locks by plastic tabs. Donna moved her open hand around the board, as if choosing by aura, then disengaged two locks, one blond and one copper. ‘If we blend them. They look bright against my hand, but—’ She ruffled them into her client’s hair. ‘Oh, I like this one.’ Laying the copper lock against her own bleached head, she shifted her weight to jut a teasing hip.
‘You’d go from that to that?’ asked the client. ‘How daring.’
‘Listen. If I wanted to know what colour I really am, I’d have to see a baby picture. You like this combination? Good. Maybe Alison, since she’s just standing there staring, wouldn’t mind getting the cap and hook.’
Alison went to the back room and took the cap out of the box. It was made of a waxy-looking rubber, semi-transparent, perforated. She dusted the inside with talc and brought it to Donna’s station. With the client holding the rim tight against her forehead, Donna pulled it down with a jerk, talc puffing out of the perforations, as if the woman’s head were smouldering inside it.
‘Where’s the hook?’
She passed it to Donna who poked it into a hole and drew out a tuft. Across the room, a shaver came on with a buzz, Robert’s client just then bowing his head, meekly presenting the back of his neck. Through the fresco window on the back wall, she saw the nudes in their distorted poses. First they were stripped naked, then they were shorn. Donna, moving her wrist in expert flicks, pulled hair through the cap in a patch until the client looked almost, but not quite, shorn. She looked as if she had escaped just before the shearing was finished.
‘Here.’ Donna handed the hook back to Alison. ‘Like I just did.’
It seemed absurdly the opposite of plucking a chicken. When she finished, Alison stepped back. Ghastly, the tufts poking straight out or drooping. ‘I look like I just had chemo,’ said the client. ‘You know, it always amazes me how ugly I am when I’m sitting in this chair. My hair’s parted in the middle and pasted down. Under these lights I’m yellow. My moustache shows. But by the time I go, I’m beautiful.’
It was something Alison had used to marvel over herself, but now she wondered if it really mattered how she wore her hair.
Donna reappeared in rubber gloves, a plastic bowl in each hand, paintbrush held in her mouth like the stem of a rose. ‘Take these,’ she told Alison through bared teeth. Alison recoiled from the fumes, stood holding the bowls away from her body, head tilted back, mouth-breathing while Donna dipped into the yellow paste and began painting a broad vertical stripe on her client’s head. It was not so much the actual fumes coming off the paste that bothered Alison as the idea of fumes.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, abruptly setting the bowls down.
She bolted for the bathroom where the door was ajar, went in without knocking, burst in, then gasped and turned away—but would never unsee it because already it was in her portfolio of horror: Roxanne in the mirror squeezing pus from
her bottom lip. With her mass of fecund and trailing hair, she had used to look like a hanging plant on a pole; now that she had shaved her head, she looked just like the pole. Mouth open as she prodded, her cheeks sunk in. Her eyes shifting listlessly towards Alison seemed over-large now in their shaded sockets. She seemed to see Alison from the bottom of a pit.
‘You should go to the hospital,’ Alison said.
‘I know,’ Roxanne replied dully, poking at the lip. ‘It won’t heal up no matter what I do.’
Alison backed out of the room. She turned and headed through the gallery to find Jamie, because after Christian he was the closest to Roxanne. They were supposed to love each other. Donna was just then lowering the hairdryer onto her client’s head. What could possibly have been the harm in that, but how it descended on the head, how the head fitted, and knowing, too, that a current ran through, made Alison shudder. In the dance track, she heard whips. Robert was raising his scissors, tips ceiling-ward, to free his wrist from a constricting cuff. Scissor points and blades, straight razors: oh, the things in that room that cut. Also, Malcolm must have been working with the curling iron because Alison thought she could smell burning hair. There was hair all over the floor. This was how it started. Then it filled the room.
She about-faced and went to get the broom.
Maybe nothing was the matter with Roxanne. Nobody else had mentioned they were worried. Maybe she was just skinny and Alison perverse. She had been on her way to get Jamie, who seemed to be out, running an errand on his break, when she got distracted. She decided not to say anything.
A History of Forgetting Page 17
