The young man tried to hide his hopeful smile and slumped lower into the vinyl seat under the neon pink dryer hood. Splaying his legs wider, he cast his eyes to his unlaced white sneakers, unmarred by scuffs. They looked expensive. Tamara worried for him. Two years ago, a boy had been found stabbed to death. The only thing missing was his sneakers. Edie tugged at her hair and uncurled a three-inch strand.
“See how much it’s grown? I told you I’d bring your hair back. You’re using the coconut and olive oil every day?”
“Yes.”
Edie selected a weft of long hair from her stand. Tamara’s scalp whitened as the track stitched across her temple. Pain needled her skull, pore by pore. Edie had pianist’s fingers, long and strong. A thin braid, perfectly symmetrical, spooled from between her palms. Tamara concentrated on the display of Styrofoam heads lining the glass shelves.
Unlike the white mannequin heads, the black mannequin heads had eyes with irises and pupils. Huge eyes, but oddly, blue. The irises almost filled the whites. The eyes looked upward, as though the phantom bodies belonging to the heads were on their knees. The faces were painted with dark eyeliner, thick arched eyebrows, blush, and cherry lips, and coiffed in wigs coyly christened Asia Blue, Angel, and Juicy. The heads were precariously perched on foot-long necks no thicker than Tamara’s wrist and appeared sacrificial, if not brave.
“That’s right. Listen to her, she knows what she’s talking about.” Edie had a habit of speaking to the perpetually chattering television mounted high in the corner. “She’s always right, that one. Ah, now here they go, listen…”
Braid number two was taking shape. Tamara was queasy from the relentless jumble of sounds. Deep in her belly, the air conditioner rumbled low. On her lips was the metallic taste of refrigerated air, but her brow was sweating. Her eyes followed the philodendron’s tendrils snaking up the red walls to the gloss-black ceiling where haphazard staples thwarted their escape to the window’s light.
“When are they going to take hold of their own lives?” It took a moment to realize Edie was speaking to her. “I see the same thing coming through this chair all the time. I tell them to pick themselves up. Life’s made them forget who they are.” Edie’s fingers pecked around the strands of the virgin’s sorrowful hair entwining hers. Tamara’s stomach churned. “But I see them. Weddings, proms, funerals, new jobs, christenings, babies, grand-babies, cheating men, new men, lazy men, good men, I see them getting sick and well, and well and sick—I see them needing to look their best, even for the worst.” Heat radiated from Edie’s hands on the nape of her neck. “And I listen. I give them new hair and they walk out of here taller.”
Tamara wanted to walk out of here taller. She wanted to tell Edie about the bad call, but she didn’t trust herself not to cry. And if she started to cry, she didn’t trust herself to be able to stop. She counted one, two, three, four and focused on her reflection, ignoring her torso and shoulders. She imagined herself as a mannequin’s head, earless—deaf. All she had to do was breathe and let the room fall away. Focus on her day’s plan. Hassan was waiting for her and soon she’d be home. She’d make herself a real meal, lay out her clothes for work tomorrow morning, have a shower, and read a book. Her shoulders loosened, soothed by the familiarity of routine. She tested the words in her head: 911. What is your emergency? Nothing felt amiss.
Edie reined her up by her hair. “Sit up straight. Why are you slouching?” Tamara extended her foot-long neck. Edie spoke to all her clients with the authority of a mother. Or how Tamara imagined mothers spoke to their daughters. It was her house. Her rules.
She couldn’t remember her parents. When she’d emptied the contents of Granny Nan’s house, she had found a newspaper clipping in the dresser. It didn’t say much. Car went off the road, two dead. She was five. Granny Nan was babysitting that night. “They’re with Jesus now, baby girl. He needed them to come home.” For a long time she hated her parents for choosing Jesus over her.
In elementary school, while the other children were drawing Mother’s Day and Father’s Day cards, her teachers let her draw whatever she wanted. Mostly she drew cars. Cars going over cliffs, cars on fire, cars crushed under trees, cars hitting deer, cars upside down—until the teachers took her crayons away.
Edie’s hands stopped. “Oh no. His mother was here just last week. Oh, that poor baby.”
She followed Edie’s gaze up to the television. A police spokeswoman was speaking directly to the camera.
“We’re looking for the public’s assistance…”
Edie shouted to the young man under the dryer. “Do you know that boy, Trevor?” She tied off the braid with an elastic band and picked up the scissors to trim the end.
“Yeah. We all did.” The young man’s foot bounced up and down.
The screen cut back to the news anchor, looking appropriately concerned. “Anyone with information pertaining to the shooting death of twelve-year-old…”
Tamara shut her eyes tight. She stuffed her nose, ears, eyes, and throat with Styrofoam. She scoured away the irises and pupils, scraped off the blush, cherry lips, and brown paint, and hollowed out her head. She smothered the words, black against the white, that would force her to remember. 911. What is your emergency?
She burrowed deeper and ran the scales of the A-flat melodic minor. Four octaves, ascending and descending. Securing every note with an unwavering touch. She ran the notes over and over, filling the white with black, obliterating every memory, every imagining. 911…Faster, faster. Leaping to the D-flats. D is for Devon. Twelve years old. The notes ricocheted off the back of her eyes. She crashed into C major and became the keys, became the hammers striking the strings, CDEFGABCDEFGAB, became the vibration of just C in the knotted whorl of the heartwood…
“We’re done.”
The room returned to the natter of the television’s regular programming. In the corner, the dryer droned, and above it, the air conditioner rattled. Edie nudged one of the braids, checking its alignment, and coaxed it forward. She took Tamara’s chin in her hand, turned her face left then right, gauging her reflection in the mirror, then tugged hard once on each new braid. Tamara flinched.
“There you are, beautiful girl.”
* * *
—
Hassan didn’t notice her coming out of the salon. The engine was off and his window down, yet he appeared nonplussed by the simmering heat. He was reading a book propped against the steering wheel. Its yellowed pages were dog-eared and loose.
Insect legs of panic scuttled up Tamara’s throat. She was exposed on the street, but couldn’t interrupt his reading. Her heart quickened and her palms flushed. She breathed through her mouth and told herself, He’ll turn the page soon. Five things she could see: a taxi, a Bluebird sign, a tire, a door, a taxi driver reading a book.
His face was relaxed. The corners of his mouth sagged down and his lower lip pouted in serious contemplation. His reading glasses were low on the bridge of his nose and he leaned ever so slightly into the pages. He was inside the story, following the characters into their limitations, their wants, their hearts, giving them life word by word, compelling them towards a fate as yet unknown. She could tell by the way his fingertips lightly rested on the pages that he loved, ached, and feared for them. She couldn’t break that private communion. She could wait.
Four things she could touch: her skirt, her braids, her purse, her watch. Three things she could hear: cars whooshing past, laughter, and somewhere a radio busting rhymes. Drawing courage from the cab and Hassan so near, her heart rate slowed and the heat of her panicked blood receded. Two things she could smell…She inhaled exhaust and the sweet rot of garbage bags lining the curb. She lifted her eyes and broadened her view of the street. She stood very still. No one seemed to notice her.
The majority of faces looked like hers. The forty-degree temperature had driven people out of their homes and onto their front steps, so unlike the fair-skinned migrations of her neighbours into their cloistered, canopie
d backyards. Kids sucked on freezies, their tongues stained purple, red, and orange. Shirtless men and skirted women, their flip-flops kicked off, cooled themselves with handheld battery-operated fans. Conversations were shouted jovially across yards.
It had the lazy, easy feel of a community street party despite the early rush-hour traffic with its rolled-up windows nudging past the rowhouses towards the bridge and out, out of the city. The neighbourhood didn’t betray its historic scars. An explosion that had flattened houses, shattered glass, blinded a thousand eyes, splintered trees, snapped iron railings, and hurled church bells, an anchor, fish, and torsos onto rooftops and into fields. There wasn’t a high-water mark from the tidal wave that followed or scorched stones to commemorate where timber houses burned and black snow fell. She couldn’t imagine the volume of 911 calls had there been phones.
One thing she could taste. Coconut oil on her lips. Five things she could not see. The layers rebuilt. The strata of greengrocers, cobblestone, and tramways giving way to sailors and kitten heels; acquiescing to neon signs, dance halls, movie theatres, furriers, and jewellers; receding from public housing, artists, students, and gentrification. A street constantly in the throes of dying and being reborn.
This part of the city was choked with two hundred years of red and purple dots. Now it was covered with the more common yellow, orange, and black marks of drugs, addiction, and mental illness. And reds…there were still so many reds. Salvation Street. Hope Street. Save Yourself Street. Step inside to bad coffee, good intentions, praying hands, caring hearts, and not enough money. Not much had changed in appearance since she had lived here with her Granny Nan.
Heat wrapped around her bare legs and arms and sucked at her breath. Devon’s mother had walked out of Edie’s salon, perhaps even paused at this exact spot. What was the colour of grief spilling from the soles of her feet? She looked down at her sandals. There wasn’t an inch of sidewalk here that wasn’t stained. These were the facts: people lived, people died, people were cruel, people were kind, some were rich, more were poor, there was seldom justice, some suffered more than others. Life was a momentum of loss, but life persisted nonetheless, perhaps even because of that loss. Granny Nan used to tell her, I live for you.
Across the street, a toddler chasing bubbles screeched with each pop on the end of his fingertips. A barbecue was smoking. A man was laughing and a little girl was clipping a pink barrette in his hair. A woman stood up and waved to an old woman pushing her walker up the street. There was so much more that couldn’t be seen.
She couldn’t have done any more to help that boy. He was one boy, who was now a red dot. Granted his dot was larger than others and would be remembered longer than some, but he was still a dot, and no longer a boy who would become a man. The colour pooling at her feet was the same delicate pink as the roses in the dashboard vase. I will live for you, she promised. Hassan turned a page and she reached for the door handle, but it was locked.
He swung around as though she had a gun. “Aasef. Salam.” Then remembered his English. “Hello. I didn’t see you. Come in.” He slipped the paperback under the front seat. The lock clicked and Tamara got in. The seat was hot, too hot. The car had superheated, but Hassan wasn’t sweating. “I’m sorry. I’ll make it cold for you.”
He turned on the air conditioner and she leaned into its relief. The chill fanned her face, but it was the white noise she craved. The combination of every tonal frequency cancelling the others out, becoming everything and nothing simultaneously. She hadn’t realized she had shut her eyes until she opened them to find Hassan studying her face. Surprisingly, the car was still parked. She could have sworn they were moving, which she attributed to standing too long in the sun.
“You look nice,” he said. Perhaps her eyes betrayed her discomfort at having been seen unguarded and he quickly qualified, “Your hair looks nice.”
She reflexively reached for her virgin’s hair and ran her fingers down the comforting plaits. “I’d like to go home now.” She had been outside too long.
The meter was stopped at $5.75. He turned it on and it immediately flipped to $5.85.
“You should have kept it running.”
Bowing his head as though apologizing for the need of money, he shrugged the suggestion away. “You’re a good customer.”
The turn indicator clicked patiently while he waited to merge. He wanted nothing from her and for that she was grateful. She would give him a generous tip. “Hassan.” She said his name with care. “What are you reading?”
“You like books?” In the rear-view mirror, his eyes enlivened and he missed an opportunity to merge.
“Yes,” she said.
“I love books, Tamara.” He said “books” the same way he said “Tamara.” She wondered where his home had been. “I learned words in English books. The same stories I read before are a different music in this language.” He eased into traffic.
She didn’t ask for the name of the book again or how the music differed. He needed to focus on traffic. She reached for her seatbelt, which they had both forgotten she had to fasten.
* * *
—
The delivery boy was late and Tamara was hungry. Ravenous, in fact. She had planned a menu of Greek salad, homemade spaghetti sauce, fresh pasta, and to finish, ripe peaches and ice cream. But the ingredients hadn’t arrived yet. She would have been more irritated, but it was true that after Edie’s, even she felt taller.
She had already laid out her clothes for the morning, selected a book to read, tidied the house, and changed the bed. Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major, opus 15, was trilling from the record player, dashing through the living room, around the kitchen, ducking in and out of bedrooms. One of her favourites.
The final movement reminded her of young lovers playing a giddy hide-and-seek for a covert kiss. She could see the long skirt hiked above the ankles, a rush of crinolines darting down hallways past doors and hidden cubbies. Cheeks flushed, chests heaving until they were alone together, for one—oh so gentle—illicit touch before their sweet, forlorn parting.
Beethoven himself played the concerto’s debut in Prague. He was twenty-eight years old and blissfully unaware that in two years he would be losing his hearing. He dedicated the work to his pupil, a Croatian countess. Perhaps it was more than a kiss that was stolen. Tamara was pleased with her coquettish mood. She was feeling better. Her hair was fixed. She was feeling strong and ready for work tomorrow.
Beethoven’s notes leapt and pirouetted on the piano. She tried to imagine his hands. A stout, broad-chested man, just five foot two, his fingers would have been short and thick. He was known to snap strings and break hammers. One of his students said he demanded too much from his pianos and pushed them to the breaking point.
She looked to the piano to confirm that the fallboard was down. Today she would retrieve the groceries at the steps. She turned up the volume. Vinyl was still her preference when listening to classical music. The crackle and tone placed her in the concert hall, front row centre where she could have a clear view of the hands.
Her favourite run, the final cadenza, was approaching. The rondo was soaring and falling, the notes climbing upon each other’s backs, the orchestra receding, giving way to the piano gradually quieting…the individual notes caressing each other, fading…
The doorbell buzzed. She lifted the needle from the spinning record. She unlocked the bolts, placed herself between the door and the doorframe. Furnace heat blasted her bare legs.
It was another boy. Older and white. At the curb, a woman kept watch in a running car. This boy set the groceries on the step and handed her the receipt. She reached in her wallet for a fifty-dollar bill.
“Where’s the other boy?”
“Devon’s dead.” The boy’s eyes glistened. “Some fucker’s gonna pay.”
She declined the change and gave him a ten-dollar tip. It was too much, but it was all she could say. He took the money. His hands were hot. He ran back to the car
and didn’t look back.
She hauled the grocery bags into the house and locked the door. She carried them to the counter, put away each item, folded the bags, and tucked them in the drawer. She should make supper now. She went to the television and turned it on, muting the sound.
She didn’t have to wait long to see his face. A photograph filled the screen. He was wearing a toque jauntily askew, exposing one ear. He had on a puffy coat and checkered shirt. At a doorway, he was looking up into the camera. Close up. Smiling to the picture taker, “Here I go.” He didn’t look like the boy she had imagined.
The image cut to a woman corralled by microphones. Tamara turned up the volume. “If anyone knows who did this to my baby, I’m asking you to come forward.” She looked directly into the camera, her eyes hard and dry. “You do the right thing.” The anchor man returned. “Weather’s next, we’re keeping an eye on a tropical depression in the Atlantic…”
She shut off the TV, went to the piano, and opened the fallboard. She sat straight with her hands on her lap. She pushed the bench back, scooted to the edge, and splayed her leg honky-tonk over the side. Her fingertips grazed the keys and she pulled them back. Leaning her shoulders in, she curved her body into the piano and cocked her ear. Feeling like she might fall, she dropped her wrists and attacked the keys.
“Twinkle, Twinkle” burst from her unbridled hands, cantering into the jump and bounce of notes stumbling, the rhythm careening uncontrolled. She reined in hard, forcing it to gallop, beating down the melody. It pulled and yanked to free itself from her stranglehold. The music reared and fell apart beneath her hands. She slammed the fallboard down. The strings’ harmonics bled. She couldn’t breathe.
The Waiting Hours Page 12
