Peony Street (11 page)

“My mother had a Burberry trench,” the woman said. “She bought it on her year abroad, after Wellesley but before she married Daddy.”

“It performs its function, that’s all I care about,” Claire said, and thought she remembered that line from one of Sloan’s scripts. “If it’s good enough for the Queen…”

“Quite a nice family before the commoners married into it,” the woman said, and turned away, leaving Claire open-mouthed and appalled at such blatant bad manners.

Claire picked up her coat with the intention of leaving immediately, but saw her Aunt Alice and the busybody out in front of the shop looking in the window at the ruffled silk peonies stuck in an antique silver pitcher, starched linen handkerchiefs transformed into a fleet of origami swans, and a handmade wooden cradle full of collectible china dolls and Steiff teddy bears.

Claire moved to the table farthest away from the entrance, at the back of the shop, hidden behind a mountain of quilted fabric handbags and matching accessories, all in a ghastly bandana print of acid green and antacid pink. On the wall by the table were framed illustrations of Scandinavian children, some in sunny nurseries, and some lolling about with puppies in a garden under the watchful eye of a knitting nanny.

“What’s worse than twee?” she imagined Tuppy asking. “What’s twee to the twentieth degree?”

She was amazed to find she missed him. She also found it impossible to believe that the witty, energetic, ambitious young man she had known for such a short time could really be dead. Any minute she expected him to dash in, take a wide-eyed look around, and say, “Well. It’s all just too darling, isn’t it?”

She sighed. A phone rang and she heard the shop owner answer. She imagined the woman’s first name would be a family name, maybe even one of those last names for a first name: Blair, Spencer, Cavender, or Kennedy, and there would be a nickname associated with it like Bitsy or Kiki. Katherine Hepburn would have played her in tennis whites.

The woman raised her voice in anger, and the implication of drama, like the smell of freshly baked bread, immediately attracted Claire’s attention. It produced a delicious combination of curiosity mixed with the promise of schadenfreude.

“Don’t come here,” the woman warned. “Are you insane? I’m working … I have customers … my husband could stop by any minute. My son … I won’t let you. It’s over … there’s nothing to talk about. I’m sorry you feel that way but I really have no choice.”

The kettle wailed and the woman went to the back room where Claire could not hear the rest of the call. When the she came back to serve Claire her face was flushed and her hands trembled. Her attention was not on what she was doing, and she had to go back for a spoon and then a serviette. Claire could feel the tension building and decided to sip slowly, to wait and see if anything else happened. The caller was obviously a spurned lover, possibly a younger man, a married man, or a woman.

Within five minutes her patience was rewarded. The sleigh bells tied to the front door rattled violently and the woman gasped, then rushed to the front of the store. She shouted at the level of a whisper, but Claire could hear everything.

“I told you not to come,” she hissed. “It’s too dangerous.”

A deep voice, a man’s voice, said something Claire could not decipher, but all the hair rose up on her arms and neck.

‘Why would I have that reaction?’ Claire wondered.

“You’ll ruin everything,” the woman hissed. “I won’t allow it.”

Again she heard the man’s deep voice, too low for Claire to discern the words, but something about it made her deeply uneasy, almost panicked. Claire thought this was probably her intuition warning her that something awful was about to happen.

She quietly gathered up her handbag and raincoat, put a twenty on the table, skirted around the backside of the hideous handbag display, and tiptoed up the side of the store, hoping to slip out unnoticed. She decided not to look at the man in case he might kill her if he thought she could pick him out in a line-up. She was almost to the door, just beyond the shabby chic pillow slips covered in tiny yellow rosebuds and the display of “Team Darcy” and “Team Heathcliff” t-shirts, when the woman noticed her.

“You didn’t pay,” the woman spat.

“I left it on the table,” Claire said.

Her hand was on the polished brass doorknob when the man said, “Claire?”

A rippling goose-bump-covered shudder rolled up one side of Claire and down the other. Her stomach contracted,
Darjeeling tea threatened to leave the way it came in, and her fight or flight response got stuck on ‘stunned and paralyzed.’ More than anything else in the world Claire did not want to turn around. When she did, she watched the color drain out of the face of the woman standing next to Phillip Hobart Deacon, also known as “Pip,” also known as her ex-husband.

“Hi Pip,” she said, and fled.

Claire rushed out of the tea room and ran right into a man built like a fire hydrant. He caught her by the arms as she bounced off of him and almost fell.

“I’m so sorry …” she began but then he said, “Claire? Claire Fitzpatrick?”

Claire recognized him but couldn’t come up with a name.

“It’s Dominic,” he said. “Dom Deluca. We’ve only known each other since kindergarten.”

“Of course I know you, Dom. It’s just I suddenly don’t feel well and I need to get off the street as quickly as possible …”

“Sure, sure, sure, come with me to the shop,” he said, as he grabbed her arm and pulled her down the sidewalk. “You remember Denise Gambini? We got married after she graduated beauty school; we’ve got three kids and one on the way. She’ll be thrilled to see you. I haven’t seen you since your Grandpa Tim’s funeral.”

“Actually, I didn’t come home for that,” Claire said, as they arrived at The Bee Hive Beauty Salon. The logo painted on the window was a woman’s head with a towering hive-shaped hairdo around which bees were buzzing. It had to be seen to be believed.

“I coulda swore I saw you at that funeral,” Dom said. “It was the same week your cousin Brian escaped from prison and died in a car accident. His poor mother; we felt so bad for her.  Are you sure you weren’t there?”

“I was in Prague,” Claire said.

“Yeah, in the movies or something, your mom is always saying.”

Dom flung open the door and shouted, “Hey Denise! Look who I ran into! We really did run into each other, too; she almost knocked me over!”

As they entered the hair salon Claire inhaled the familiar chemicals of her chosen profession: the eye-watering sting of ammonia and peroxide mixed with hair color, the sharp tang of permanent wave setting solution, and a multitude of beauty products spiked with scents from floral to fruity to spicy, with various combinations in between.

A heavily pregnant Denise was artfully teasing and combing a woman’s hair, valiantly trying to cover her sparsely populated pink scalp, which was quite a feat given how little she had to work with. Claire could see Denise was in the zone: tease, comb, spray, tease, comb, spray, tease, comb, spray.

Denise squealed when she saw Claire and waddled over to give her a side arm hug.

“We went to beauty school together!” Denise announced to the room.

There were two women sitting under hood dryers; they raised the hoods up and leaned forward so they could hear. Claire recognized them but couldn’t come up with their names. The woman in the hydraulic chair who had been getting her hair teased seemed to be asleep or possibly dead (it had been known to happen).

“Oh, my God, tell me everything,” Denise said. “I know you’ve been working for that movie star, that red-headed one whose husband left her for that teenager, the one with the chest out to here. She won that award for playing a prostitute and her dress fell apart on stage. Oh, my God, I can’t believe I can’t think of her name. It’s Sonya, or Samantha, or something …”

“Sloan Merryweather,” Claire said.

“Oh, my God, yes! That’s the one. She’s so gorgeous. You do not know how many people come in here and ask for the haircut she had in that movie about the Internet thing where she fell in love with the guy who was her dog walker but was secretly rich.”

“Tweetheart,” Claire said.

“That’s the one! Oh my God, what’s she like? Is she nice?”

Claire hated these questions because there was really only one way to answer.

“She’s a legend,” Claire said. “Very talented and always professional.”

“It’s just awful what that husband did to her, so humiliating. I felt so bad for her. That he had the nerve to bring that skank to the award show.”

“Well, Sloan did win the Oscar,” Claire said. “So something good came out of it.”

“It was because they couldn’t have children or something, wasn’t that it? She couldn’t give him the son he wanted so badly. I guess he and that teenager have like five kids now, but all girls. God showed him.”

“Sounds like us,” Dom said. “We got three girls and another one on the way.”

“It looks like any minute,” Claire said. “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

“We didn’t do the test,” Denise said. “Last time we did the test the doctor said it was going to be a boy, and boom! We got Giana. Big surprise. And us with everything blue in the nursery. So we don’t know what it is, but we got our fingers crossed and a yellow and green in the nursery.”

“This might be my son,” Dom said with tears in his eyes, pressing his hand to Denise’s belly.

Claire was surprised to feel tears fill her own eyes as Denise took her hand and pressed it against her burgeoning bump. The skin was tight as a drum, and Claire felt something roll out against her hand, something like an elbow, or a knee, but so tiny.

“Isn’t it a miracle?” Denise said. “It’s why God made us.”

Claire thought but didn’t say that was certainly one point of view, but not necessarily her own. She loosened her hand from Denise’s grip, wiped her eyes, and said, “That little guy is strong. Shouldn’t you be sitting down with your feet up?”

“My due date was two weeks ago,” Denise said. “I don’t want him gettin’ too comfy in here. I’m off tomorrow and I’m gonna clean my whole house. I got Giana moving in the right direction by vacuuming the stairs.”

“We had to replace the carpet,” Dom said, while beaming at his wife. “We got hardwoods now. They’re much easier to keep clean.”

Claire thought it must be nice to be adored like Denise so obviously was, even when she looked like she was smuggling a basketball under her smock.

Claire heard Tuppy’s voice in her head saying, ‘She’s the goose that lay the golden Delucas.’

Claire had always enjoyed Tuppy’s snide comments when they weren’t directed at her, but she hoped he wasn’t setting up shop in her brain. It would be just like Tuppy to haunt her out of spite or boredom with the hereafter.

The woman in the hydraulic chair snored so loudly she woke herself up. Denise gave her one last spray, whirled off her nylon cape and brushed her neck and shoulders with a big fat powder brush. Claire walked over to a display rack to see what products Denise was pushing. The women under the dryers lost interest, sat back, and pulled their hoods back down. Claire was reading the list of ingredients on a bottle of something that claimed to stimulate hair growth when she heard Denise swear.

“Oh, my God, Dominic,” Denise said. “My water just broke.”

“He’s coming!” Dom said, and began to cry again. “Oh, honey.”

“About time,” Denise said. “Don’t just stand there bawling, you big dope, go get the car. Call Mama and tell her to have Stephie bring the overnight bag. Hurry, but don’t drive crazy.” To her customer she only said, “Don’t forget your change, sweetie.”

Claire looked down, and immediately realized she hadn’t expected the watery mess at Denise’s feet to have a smell. She felt a little nauseated.

“I’ll get the car!” Dom yelled and ran out of the shop.

Denise calmly gave her customer her change and the woman toddled out, oblivious to what was happening.

“You should sit down,” one of the women under the dryers said.

“You should cross your legs,” the other one said.

Denise was putting on her coat.

“What can I do?” Claire asked her.

“Finish those two and lock up,” she said, and tossed Claire the keys to the shop.

Tires squealed as Dom pulled the car all the way up on the curb.

“Wish me luck that, God willing, this is Dom Junior’s birthday,” Denise said, “because I’m not doing this again.”

“Good luck,” Claire said, and watched as Dom carefully shepherded his wife into the car, and gently, slowly backed out into the street and drove away.

“I’ll comb myself out,” the first woman said as she tied a plastic rain hat over her curler-studded head and slipped on her coat. “No offence, but I don’t let just anybody touch my hair.”

“I do have a license,” Claire said, but the woman gave Claire a weak smile and left the shop.

“How about you?” Claire asked the second.

“I’d love for you to do mine,” the woman said as she moved over to the hydraulic chair. “I want to know what all those people in Hollywood are really like.”

Claire jacked up the chair. It had been over twenty years since she graduated from beauty school, and at least that long since she’d done a roller set comb out that wasn’t for period costume; but it was like riding a bicycle.