Cha-Ching! (13 page)

He was like an experimental poet reciting to an audience of one.

“It's still coming up black. We should've let all that ride,” Theo said sadly.

“No, no. We're straight,” Big Vic said, giving Theo a celebratory jab in the arm.

She counted out eighteen hundred-dollar chips and held onto the rest as they went to cash them out at the window. After paying Big Vic, she had won $3,100. While she waited for the cashier to pay her she was trying to calculate how much she would have won if she'd let the money ride one more time.

On the drive back to Brooklyn, Theo tried to make Big Vic talk to her so she wouldn't fall asleep, but before long he'd passed out with his head pressed into the window. The rest of the ride she obsessed about Marisol. She would take her out to a fancy dinner with her winnings. It was morning rush hour when they reached the city. Everyone in the cars around them had the sleepy faces of people heading to work. Big Vic asked Theo if she could drop him at a subway station. He was getting dental work done at the Bellevue dental clinic. Then he was going to buy a minivan for his mom.

Theo slept late into the afternoon, waking up confused. She felt hungover, something she hadn't experienced in a long time. Slowly she began playing back the events of the night before, squashing out the bad feelings about drunk-dialing Marisol by focusing on the fact that she'd won another $3,100. She got into the shower and tried to scrub off the smoke from the casino. She would bring Marisol flowers and return her books to the library. But first she needed a haircut.

Theo had always picked her barbers the same way she picked her therapists: less than fifteen dollars and a vacant chair. Because of this she often met sad barbers who drank coffee out of dirty cups and read magazines that had hit the stands thirty years ago. Barbershops were dangerous watering holes, where predators waited in hiding for the timid sirma'amsir to come and drink. She came from a long line of barbers and hairstylists—in fact, she'd considered becoming a barber herself. She'd gone to man barbers and woman barbers, friend barbers and stranger barbers who asked was she on her lunch break, did she speak Spanish, have any children, go to church, know how to drive, have rent control?

She gave vague instructions, “Number two on the sides and natural in the back.” If asked straight sideburn or angle sideburn, she'd say straight. If asked square back or natural back, she'd say natural. She'd had her hair cut by religious women whose shop walls were so completely covered with Psalms posters, there was barely room for all the crucifixes. She'd had her hair cut in kitchens, in discount haircutting franchises by Russian students, by women who looked at her and told her to bleach her hair, or at the very least try a few highlights, and they said it without malice, as one woman to another. They told her because they'd bleached their own hair, to get a man or keep a man, and Theo knew that when they looked at her she seemed like some kind of terrifying exotic food dish, like pig nipple, or brain, or eyeball or tenderloin of sirma'amsir served with mint jelly, and they combed her thick fur this way and that and hung their heads over her shoulder asking if she was absolutely sure she didn't want highlights, and they said it with an open heart: They wanted Theo to be able to seize a man, any man, because they were absolutely positive there was no way a person who looked like Theo had a man. Or maybe they wanted Theo to be a woman, and when they looked at her they had no fucking idea how to begin making that happen, so they thought they could chip away at it by starting with highlights. And for the most part Theo couldn't hate those women, because she could see the goodwill in their eyes.

Sometimes she would go to Mary's, where the men's haircuts were ten and the women's twelve, and when she got to the register to pay there would be a giant debate of
diez o doce, diez o doce
?
And ultimately it was
doce
, the timid sirma'amsir too timid to object to a two-dollar surcharge.

Today Theo wanted a haircut so she could feel handsome enough when she asked Marisol out. She walked up to 4th Avenue and found a shop where the barber had just finished giving a buzz cut to a redheaded man. Theo looked at a few handmade signs posted on the mirrors that said the prices of haircuts had just gone up from eight to ten dollars. The shop thanked the customers in advance for their loyalty. The man who'd left his tufts of red hair on the ground didn't have enough money for a tip because he hadn't known about the price change. He looked sheepish, gave the short, old, sad barber the money he had, saying, “I'll come back after I eat lunch,” which Theo doubted.

The barber motioned Theo into the chair, and as always when she climbed into these chairs, she slumped forward with a submissive posture, curling her body into its most unobtrusive shape, not knowing if the barber thought of her as a man or a woman.

“What you want?” the barber asked.

She tried to figure out the man's ethnicity but could not. She guessed Filipino.

“Number two,” she said.

“And nothing off the top,” the barber said, more as a command then a question.

“Right,” Theo said, even though she did need the top trimmed.

The barber started to buzz the sides of her hair with the number two attachment. She watched him slyly in the mirror then glanced through the front window to the street. There was a perfect spiderweb shatter from a bullet that had been halfheartedly covered with a calendar. The barber was using only one of his hands to do everything, and she wondered if he was paralyzed. In San Francisco there had been a paralyzed barber. Her friends went to him but she'd never been because he was a few blocks farther than she'd wanted to walk. He'd had a stroke but kept on working, modifying, holding things with his shoulder to his bent neck and one good hand.

Paralyzed barber or not, Theo was happy with this haircut. She could tell from how the hair was falling off easily that the man had good buzzers. She caught a glimpse of the dark circles under her eyes, a result of her all-nighter in
Atlantic
City. Barbershop mirrors were especially abusive to the timid sirma'amsir, how they showed every flaw.

There was a haircut called
The Butch
on the poster on the wall.
The Butch
was next to
The
Flat Top
and
The
Brush Cut
. Honestly, she couldn't tell the difference between any of them. Nor did she think the man in the illustration of
Haircuts For Large Ears
seemed to have large ears at all. Theo looked at her ears and wondered if they would be considered large. It amazed her how many times she'd seen this exact same yellowed poster advertising
Haircuts For Large Ears, Haircuts For Small Ears
,
The
Flat Top
,
The Professional
, and
The JFK
. This neighborhood was Puerto Rican and Dominican; still, the poster on the wall offered choices for white men with blond hair from fifty years ago. If a person didn't want a haircut from the 1950s, they could choose from some photographs that were taped to the mirror of clients who'd gotten sports team logos shaved into their heads.

Theo was looking at the shots of young men who'd gotten New York Yankees symbols buzzed into their heads when she heard the buzzer stop and the shop door open.

A man on crutches came in, pulled a blue bottle out of the side pocket of his backpack and said, “Can I leave this here?”

He seemed sketchy. The barber looked at him as if he were a fly circling his dinner, not quite close enough to swat.

“I'm gonna leave this here, okay?” the man said again holding out the blue bottle.

The barber glanced at him, turned his buzzer back on and continued to circle around Theo's head with his one arm. The man crutched forward and now Theo knew he was on something because he had a relaxed, underwater opiated speech that Theo recognized. She wondered why a man who was carrying an entire backpack would feel as if that bottle was the one thing weighing him down. Maybe there was something hidden inside it, like drugs. He took another crutch step into the shop, and Theo watched the barber continue to ignore him as he set his water bottle down on the windowsill.

The barber flicked his eyes at the man, and the man mumbled, “This is dangerous,” and lifted the crutch straight out, pointing the tip at the barber like a child pretending he has a gun.

The barber finished with the buzzers and fumbled around in his drawer.

Theo took the barber's cue and feigned indifference. She realized the man wasn't threatening them—he was showing them that the metal had pushed through the rubber stopper at the bottom and he didn't want to walk on the tile floor with his broken crutch.

“I'll come back tomorrow for that,” he said, pulling the barbershop door closed. The barber watched him go, continuing his fumbling in the drawer. With great effort he lifted an enormous pair of scissors. They seemed like a joke, something to trim a hedge. Now Theo could see there was something physically wrong with his hand—the effort it took, how he steadied the scissors with his other hand like a paw. For a second she worried about getting a haircut from a man who didn't have two functioning hands, but of all the places Theo stuffed her feelings, barbershops were at the top of the list.

She wanted to make small talk with the barber, ask him if he'd ever seen the movie
Giant
.
Theo and Sammy had gone to see it earlier in the week at the movie house that showed old movies, and two-thirds of the way through the screen had turned into psychedelic garble and the house manager had come out to say the reel had been chewed up in the projector. Everyone got coupons for free popcorn and a movie. She and Sammy couldn't believe they weren't going to see how the movie ended.

“Have you been busy because of the holidays?” Theo started.

The barber turned off the buzzer and looked at Theo.

“Off the top?” he said.

“Yes,” Theo said, watching him touch his ear. She realized he was wearing a hearing aid.

“This much,” he said, holding a few inches between his fingertips.

“Okay,” Theo said.

He nodded and picked up the hedge trimmers again. Theo watched him hack at her hair like it was some sort of irritating weed in his vegetable garden and was thankful when he put the hedge trimmers down. She studied her haircut in the mirror and was surprised how good it looked considering her fears. The barber unbuttoned her drape and began to lather her neck and face with shaving cream. Never in her life as a sirma'amsir had someone tried to shave her face.
He thinks I'm a man
Theo thought as she watched him open the straight razor. He steadied the open blade in his good hand with his bad hand.

“Everything's fine,” she thought, her heart pounding. “If it's my fate to have my throat slit open by a paralyzed barber while getting my face shaved, so be it.”

The barber pulled the straight razor down the side of her face under her sideburns, and she sat there listening to the sound of the blade scraping her skin. Then he dragged it down the other side, continuing until all of the shaving cream was gone. He took a bottle of bright blue tonic and dribbled some on his hand and slapped the sides of Theo's face until the skin tingled. Then he put his fingers on her head and rubbed her scalp. When he was all finished Theo said, “Thank you.”

The barber touched his hearing aid again, and said, “Ten dollars.”

She pulled a hundred-dollar bill from her pocket and handed it to him.

He made a face and then turned to his cash box to root around for change.

“Keep the change. Merry Christmas,” she said.

Theo walked out, her face still tingling with the tonic.

•

It felt good to give her winnings away. Plus, she had so many hundred-dollar bills there seemed no end to them. Theo left the barbershop feeling dapper and grateful to be alive, but when she got within a few blocks of the library she felt her stomach starting to get nervous. She stopped at a display of flowers outside a bodega, settling on a bunch of variegated yellow-and-orange roses. She paid for them and battled an impulse to pull a tallboy of Budweiser from the icy barrel next to the register. She was not going to drink today, despite last night's setback. She didn't want to fall into her bad habits. Her thoughts were like cars rushing down the highway in a video game and she was a frog, trying to hop across five lanes to safety. It took all her energy to not buy the beer.

As she walked toward the library she was feeling a mix of butterflies and bravado. She already had her speech planned out. She would give Marisol the flowers and ask her if there were any books on how to build miniature bird bicycles. She had considered buying her a blue lovebird she'd seen in the pet store window. “Need I say more?” she would say, setting the cage down on the checkout desk. When she'd told Sammy the idea she'd said maybe that was a bit much.

While she waited for the light to change Theo read the neon flyers taped to the light pole.

get paid to drink alcohol

Was God speaking to her directly? She tore off one of the bright pink strips, and one from the green flyer that simply said
depressed
?

It was like a work fair designed specifically for her.

“How was Atlantic City?” she heard someone say.

Marisol was standing next to her.

“Uh. Hi.”

“Did you win money?”

“Actually yes,” Theo said. “Here.”

She handed Marisol the flowers. She took them, seeming a little stunned.

If possible, Marisol looked even hotter than Theo had remembered. She was wearing tight black jeans with knee-high black leather boots and a fitted black peacoat.

“I'm job hunting,” Theo said, gesturing to the flyers.

“I should join you,” Marisol said, pulling off a phone number for herself. “I just got laid off.”

“What?”

Marisol nodded. “Right in time for Christmas.”

“Fuck. That sucks.”

Marisol ran her finger over the edge of the rose.

“Maybe you'd like to be in the depression study together,” Theo said, excitedly.

Marisol just stood there holding the flowers. A cold wind had picked up and blown a few strands of her long hair into her lip gloss. She plucked at them.

“Can I buy you dinner? Or a drink? Or take you to Atlantic City? I'm considering becoming a professional gambler.”

“Atlantic City sounds good,” Marisol said.

“Really? I have a truck.”

Marisol gave her a small smile.

“Or maybe you want to be alone?”

“I don't want to be alone,” Marisol said.

“Okay. Wait here a second.”

Marisol watched Theo run across the street and drop her library books through the return slot. She jogged back across the street, winded.

“I've got to quit smoking,” Theo said, pulling a cigarette out of her pack.