The Blondes (17 page)

The centre was Catholic, a family practice.

“If it were up to me personally I would arrange service for you,” the doctor said, as if we were talking about a transaction like renting a car or hooking up my cable. She said that these were not her beliefs, but that of course the policy wasn’t up to her. She had to respect her workplace. She recommended a clinic in Midtown and said she wasn’t going to note the conversation in the file.

None of our antibodies were binding—or perhaps all of them were. In any case, the group of us was given a clean bill of health and we were put back on the same bus we’d come on. It dropped us at the AirTrain/subway depot. Those who had places to stay in New York headed back into the city. Those who didn’t, went back to the airport in search of flights out of other terminals, or to try to gauge what had happened to their partners or families.

I suddenly felt so tired I thought I might collapse. I stopped at a stand in the subway and bought a large bag of cashews and a package of M&Ms. I ate them both in handfuls, which helped a little. Then I rode back to the Dunn Inn, where Natalie’s sister, whose name I didn’t know, said she couldn’t give me the same room. She checked me into Moira’s old room, 306. I had been away for only twelve hours.

I hauled what fragments I still possessed upstairs. My checked luggage hadn’t come on the cart into the air hangar, or if it had, I hadn’t been able to locate it. So I was left with a
broken laptop and the clothes I was wearing. I lay on my back on the blue quilt and, cradling the heavy room phone to my ear, dialled my mother. She started crying as soon as she heard my voice. She said a bunch of dumb, slightly incoherent, vaguely racist things about terrorism, and I said, “I’m all right, I’m all right,” again and again, as tears ran down the sides of my face into Moira’s quilt.

I loved my mother, even if she was racist. I loved that she hiccuped when she cried. In that moment, I loved everything about her. I loved that she’d grown up during a time when girls rolled their hair on soup cans to achieve curls instead of using a plug-in iron. I loved that she had met my father in a disco, and that she still called it a disco when everyone else called it a club. I had been conceived who knows where—maybe in the bathroom there, maybe in the back seat of his car, maybe at his apartment, maybe in my grandparents’ home. I’d never asked. I even loved that the conception had happened in Windsor, a city that was like a grubby-kneed little sister to Detroit, a working-class town where sloppy unions transpired in alleys after last call and people looked the other way.

These are your grandparents I’m talking about now. And they met in an honest-to-gosh discotheque, like the kind I used to read about in the French textbook at school.
Allez-vous à la discothèque? Gaston et Gabrielle vont à la discothèque
. Dad had been tall with flaming red hair that went straight up, an open shirt collar—you couldn’t miss him, Mom always said. Sadly, I got his hair and her height (or lack thereof). His last name was Urie, but she gave me hers, as if she’d known from
the beginning it wouldn’t pan out. That’s a good thing, because to me Urie sounds like
urethra
, and imagine the teasing I’d have faced all through school. They were married briefly, then divorced, then together off and on. He’d come around again and again as they tried to work it out and be a family, but I’m about five in the last memory I have of him—eating ice cream outside the Dari DeLite on Howard Avenue, dirt from passing trucks making the chocolate swirl gritty—and then he was gone like something that had melted. That’s my creation myth.

I told my mom I might need some money, a few hundred. I didn’t tell her what it was for, and she assumed it was for the replacement flight to Toronto to see my thesis adviser. She’d never understood what I studied, but she knew school was important. She said she’d check with Richard about the money, but that the hair salon was going gangbusters since the Blonde Fury had broken out. “Went and broke out,” that’s how she worded it. When I asked what colour her own hair was, I heard the neck of her beer cluck against the mouthpiece. “Purple as a baboon’s butt,” she sputtered.

It would cost me a fortune to tell the story of my day all over again, so I reminded my mom to phone Larissa and fill her in. Then I hung up. For a moment I thought about emailing Karl. But the computer was broken and I doubted he was worrying about me yet. I wondered how long it would take for him to link what he knew of my travel plans to the national disaster.

I didn’t always feel so tenderly toward my mom—your grandmother, not that you’ll meet her. It required catastrophes to coax that feeling out of me, to make me let go of grudges.

My mom changed after she met her boyfriend Richard, became happier, more settled. When I left for Toronto and grad school, I really didn’t know what would happen to her. We’d been so set in our routine, and without me … well, I didn’t think there would
be
a routine. I thought she would slide downhill. But Richard came along and he effectively took my place.

Before him, about five years ago, there was Joe. He was just some jackass who looked like Mr. Clean and took my mom to suburban taverns, but when he and my mom broke up, she got drunker than I’d ever seen. I counted her beer bottles the next day and she’d put back eighteen. She’d been on a bad streak to begin with. Before him, she’d worked her way through a group of linebackers turned line workers who liked to drink as much as she did. She and the new one, Joe, had been going together about four months, which might have been a record for her around that time. He dropped her out of the blue—but not really, because he was a hothead and any little thing could set him off. She accused me of having a thing with him.

I remember we were in the Head Start salon. God only knows why she felt like she had to clean the shop at that moment. She used the water spray bottle that dampened children’s heads during haircuts to wet the vanity. She swiped at it with a paper towel. Then she said, “He didn’t like you hanging around. He said you were too old to live here. He didn’t like you, you know.”

“Oh, I know,” I said, and I pulled the shampoo and conditioner bottles down from the shelf that she’d asked me to dust.

She was already unsteady on her feet. She’d been planning to sharpen her scissors, but she must have realized she was wobbly because she set down the scissors on the vanity next to her vodka glass and sat in her own styling chair.

“You didn’t say something to him, did you?”

“I try to say as little as possible.”

She appraised me, her mouth scrunching. “You didn’t do it, did you?”

“Do what?”

“Fuck him.”
She leaned forward in the chair and stabbed her cigarette out in the ashtray. “Ya fucked ’im.”

“Like I would!” I paused. “I don’t—I haven’t fucked anyone, Mom.”

She said, “Oh, that just figures,” but her tone and her facial expression softened. Then she put her scissors in the drawer and lit a second cigarette.

Later that week, Ruth, the majority owner of Head Start, walked in with bags of new hair rollers.

“This one’s still a virgin,” Mom said, gesturing at me with the comb.

“Well, that’s no surprise,” Ruth said, without raising an eyebrow.

I loved my mom, but I didn’t want to be like her.

I took my laptop to a shop where they said it would take a few days to fix it, and they couldn’t promise a full recovery. So for a while I bought newspapers and watched television to follow the outbreak. It took three days to locate and retrieve my suitcase from the airport.

In the meantime, I bought a package of plain white Hanes Her Way from the drugstore, even though they made me feel seven, and a couple of sports bras, and some kilts and cords and blouses at a slightly malodorous Salvation Army. I handed over these articles to be laundered for eighty-five cents a pound. I knew that when I got them back they would be passed over the counter to me on paper-covered hangers that declared:
WE HEART OUR CUSTOMERS
. As the shop owner took my clothes and his wife wrote down my name for the tag, they smiled widely at me. I wondered briefly if they did
heart
me to some extent, if commerce between people was a type of love. At the very least, our exchange felt more honest than any of mine and Karl’s.

The cleaner was not far from my favourite deli. The creative writing students I’d seen before, the boy and girl, were there again. And this time they had a friend with them—a girl with her head shaved and a shiny red headscarf tucked in on itself around her scalp, old Hollywood–style. They were sitting at a tall table with stools, and were easy to spot among the businesspeople. The place was busy and I had to wedge myself in behind them to eat at a narrow ledge. The former peanut-butter-haired girl was now sporting jet-black tresses. She looked like Snow White.

I remember the skinny boy told jokes where every punch line ended in a zombie-like groan, one side of his mouth turning down, one hand lagging behind as he turned in his seat. “How many blondes does it take to invade an airport? Anhhhh. Anhhhh.” He groaned eight times before announcing the punch line: “Eight! What does a blonde say when she bumps into you on the subway? Anhhhh. How do you know if a blonde is having an orgasm?”

“We’re still blondes, you know,” the shaved head put in before he could groan again.

“Blonde at heart,” the original girl seconded. They ripped into a shared bag of potato chips and ate loudly, without reserve.

“Anhhhh,” the boy groaned. His T-shirt sported a thought bubble with no text inside it.

I picked up a discarded newspaper near the garbage bin. It had a headline announcing the naming of the blonde virus. Scientists had settled on SHV,
Siphonaptera Human Virus
, after fleas, which they believed were involved in transmitting it to women who were vulnerable to becoming hosts. “When the insects blood-feed, the parasite enters the bloodstream of the host.” The hitch in this case was that not all those who came into contact with the virus were likely to carry it or succumb to it. Some, like men or women with dark complexions, even if bitten by an infected flea, would show no signs of illness or transmit it to others. There was a sidebar with illustrations of other anthropods that had been vectors for diseases. Mosquitoes: dengue fever, yellow fever, human malaria. Fleas: bubonic plague, murine typhus, and tapeworms. Ticks: Lyme disease.
Tsetse flies: African sleeping sickness. Triatomine bugs: Chagas disease. Bats: Coronavirus such as SARS, rabies. Just reading the names made me itchy.

A related story described an attack outside a Planned Parenthood. “A chain of life became a chain of death this week. A group of anti-abortion protesters had linked arms to block women from entering the medical office when one of their own turned against them. The young woman, silently affected by the virus, arrived with her church group to participate in the demonstration. From within the chain she began screaming, then acted out violently, resulting in broken arms for two of the other protestors and the death of a church leader, Reverend Randall, 48. The name of the attacker, age 17, has not been released.” I scanned the article, then rolled up that section of the paper and pushed it away. The travel section touted vacations to Cuba and Mexico. Large ads featuring bright blue skies beckoned me to say
sí
to Cuba. Meanwhile, I noted, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland were bursting with SHV cases and in lockdown, travel-wise.

The students hadn’t made up by the time I left the deli. I went back to the hotel and made phone calls, waiting through an hour or more of voice recordings before a woman told me that I would receive a credit for my missed flight, but that international travel was still cancelled. This had been a Major Event, the woman said, repeating it again as if it were a corporation’s version of a personal day. If I needed to leave the country, she suggested, I should fly to a nearby city, such as Boston or Pittsburgh, then try again from there—contingent
on there being no more Major Events. Because I still didn’t have my computer and couldn’t book a ticket online myself, I phoned a Flight Center. I discovered that by the time I added the cost of the flights—the one from Boston or Pittsburgh to Toronto would come out of pocket—I would save nothing with the voucher. I asked about Detroit from JFK, thinking I could get Mom or Richard to drive the half hour across the U.S.–Canada border to pick me up. But to travel in the next two days, even with the credit, would cost four hundred dollars more than my original flight. I told the Flight Center rep I would think about it and call her back.