The Blondes (21 page)

“Hey, Firecracker!” the girl on the bumper yelled. She threw her arms up in the air and crossed them, waving them back and forth. “Hey, you, Firecracker Girl!”

I braced myself and waited for the insult. She was with two guys, both older. One had a ponytail and was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved shirt even though it had been a hundred degrees all day. The other guy was better-looking, with spiky bleach-blond hair, a white T-shirt with tattoos peeking out from the sleeves, cargo pants, a length of plumbing chain at the throat. The kind of gaze that made me worried. As my mom would’ve said, “Handsome as hell and don’t he know it.”

But they weren’t making fun of me—they wanted something.

“You got a light?” the girl called, jumping off the car and jogging across the lot to me.

A silver ankle bracelet made of bells chirped with each step. She put the cigarette in her mouth and held her hand out. She had on a clingy white T-shirt beneath the sundress, so that she looked half hippie, half La Senza. She was tall and her arms were long and gold.

“I don’t smoke,” I told her.

“But you have a light for that—” She gestured at the roman candle I was holding.

At her command, I dug into my jean shorts and retrieved the Johnnie Walker lighter.

“I’m Larissa,” she said around the cigarette as she sparked it like a pro.

She wore her hair long and iron-straight, parted down the middle, no bangs, one side tucked behind an ear. She walked back to the car with my lighter and I followed her.

“Hey, Molly,” the bleach-blond guy said, putting his hand out for the lighter, which Larissa passed him, “who’s your friend?”

“Hazel,” I said, not wise enough to take the cue that she hadn’t told them her real name.

“Nice,” he said, flicking the lighter. “You drink Black Label?”

I shook my head. He passed the lighter to his friend.

“What about beer?”

“That’s a stupid question,” Larissa said. “Everybody drinks beer. You don’t get sick on it.”

The other guy handed me back the lighter, appraising me as he did. “She’s not old enough to drink,” he said.

“That’s Rob. Don’t listen to him.”

“Fuck off, Derek. It’s Robert,” Rob said. “How come you only
have one?” He gestured to the roman candle, then turned away from us to gaze out over the river, expelling the cigarette smoke.

“That’s—that’s all he gave me,” I stammered.

“At least they sold to you,” Larissa said.

I had gone up a notch in her eyes: she thought I’d bought the firework.

“You want a beer?” Derek nodded to the back seat of the car. I forget what kind it was, just an ordinary car.

“Not here,” Robert said. He clearly had moral misgivings about the fact that he and Derek were in university and Larissa and I were minors. Either that, or he was worried about getting caught.

Larissa began edging around the car in a floating, shuffling little dance; a few cars over, someone was playing music. She was waving her cigarette up and down. It reminded me of a firefly, her head dipping and her hair following, her arms weaving, and the glow of that cigarette arriving at her mouth again and again. When she came back around, she looked at me and winked. She was a thick girl, like me, maybe a little smaller, size twelve or so. But she was tall, which makes all the difference between stacked and stout. She had a heart-shaped pixie face with a sprinkle of freckles across it, the kind of face guys automatically love. She step-danced in strappy sandals, leather flowers encircling her toes. She yanked open the back door of the car and climbed in. A decision had been made.

“You should sit up front with me,” Derek said, draping a hand over the open door and placing the other on the car roof, peering in at her.

“Nuh-uh,” she said. “I sit with my girl.”

Suddenly I was not just a stranger but her friend. I was going with them. Because I had a lighter. Because I was a girl and there were two guys.

“Unless you let me drive,” Larissa sang, leaning her head to one side, her hair shifting.

“You got a licence?” Derek asked. He looked up and glanced over the car at me like I was in on the whole thing. His eyes were so blue that his gaze made something pool low inside me. He had more pronounced eyelashes than I did. He was wearing eyeliner, I realized. It was hot.

“Got a permit …” Larissa cajoled.

“Rob–ert
,
”
Derek drawled, “get in the front.”

Larissa rolled down the window and tossed her cigarette butt out. I couldn’t believe she had sat in their car smoking without even asking if it was okay. She had such nerve.

No one had ever asked me to go for beers before. I got in the car.

As we headed away from the crowds downtown, out along Riverside Drive, Robert rolled down his window and stuck his head out like a dog. Like he couldn’t be bothered to talk to us. The sound of the wind clipped the conversation between the front and back seats. I watched his ponytail fly around. It was sweltering and I was glad for the breeze. I leaned in toward Larissa’s ear and asked if she knew these guys.

“Anh,” she said, making that waffling hand motion that my school’s French teacher always made when she said
comme
ci, comme ça
—so-so. “I’ve seen them around. How well does anyone know anybody, man?”

“I have to be home by midnight,” I told her.

“Don’t worry about it.” She shrugged. “He seems like he likes you.” She indicated Robert behind his back.

I told her I thought the other one was cuter.

“Yeah …” she inclined her head. “But I think I might be in love with him.”

I remember being impressed that she believed in love.

By the end of the night we’d stolen a canoe from a dark house along the waterfront, from someone the guys vaguely knew. It probably wasn’t a smart thing to do, but we paddled out to Peche Island, an uninhabited bit of land shaped like a crooked question mark, floating between Grosse Pointe and Windsor. Larissa went off into the woods with the gleaming-haired Derek, leaving me alone with a beer-breathed Robert, who didn’t seem that happy to be stuck with me. We sat on a thick log of driftwood embedded in the sand, looking back toward the low beaded lights of the Windsor skyline.

“What do you think they’re doing?” I was already a bit light-headed but I tipped back some more of the beer. I hated the taste and smell of it—it reminded me of my mom—but there I was and it seemed like the thing to do.

“Them? They’re probably banging boots by now,” Robert said flatly.

I’d never heard the saying. It reminded me of someone kicking the side of a house to get mud or dog shit off his shoes.

He asked me why I’d come out there, and I said I didn’t know, and he said he didn’t either. Then he slid over next to me, and even though I’d never been kissed, I knew he was going to kiss me, so I set down the beer in the sand and licked my lips. He looked me in the eyes and leaned in, and then his mouth was on mine and his eyelids flicked closed. He kissed me once, just a peck, and then I said, “Glasses,” and took them off and held them in my lap. His long hair hit my face, which was kind of nice, and I could feel him breathing, then he pried my lips open with his tongue and put his hand on my boob over my clothes, just like that. Either I stopped kissing him, or I leaned back enough that he got the idea I was sort of done with the moment.

“How old are you really?” he asked, pulling away.

I didn’t lie. He and Derek had five or six years on us.

“What about Molly?”

“Isn’t her name Larissa?” Then I held up the roman candle, because I thought you could stop a boy kissing you if you gave him something else to do. “Do you want to light this?” I asked.

Later Larissa told me everything that she and Derek had done in detail. She said Derek totally wasn’t worth it. She was wild. She would have laughed if I’d told her she would one day keep a Full Life Diary. Larissa didn’t need a diary then. She went after the whole experience, the full life, and I kept her secrets for her.

After our phone call ended, I lay back against the motel pillows and wondered what it was that Jay had instructed her to tell me. It sure wasn’t long, baby, before I found out.

WHEN I FIRST ARRIVED HERE
at the cottage, I really thought everything would be okay. I remember steering into the driveway, which was thick with snow. I figured Karl had been here for some time and hadn’t shovelled. I didn’t know that the snow could collect that way overnight, blowing, filling in the tire grooves. As I neared the cottage I could see Karl’s Mini Cooper under the carport. A stupid car for Canada, but it lit something inside me to see it again. My hands shook as I killed the engine. When I got out, snow squeaked beneath my soles. I pounded three times on the cherry-coloured door. My knuckles turned red as I waited. My breath went in and out. I called his name. The wind seemed to take it from me.

You know, of course, that it was Grace who answered. She pulled open the door slowly, after about half an hour,
when I had already circled the place, sinking flesh-deep into the snow and getting it somehow under my pant legs and inside my boots. I was standing on the deck in the back and peering through the sliding glass doors. The place was aglow, and because it isn’t large, I could see most of it from there. The back of that couch, the old-fashioned record player, the king-size bed tucked into the alcove to the right where Karl and I did it that first time, not even separate from the living space. The only things I couldn’t see were the kitchen and the bath. I was about to resign myself to the fact that in spite of the car, no one was here, when I saw the boots. Sitting on the stone tile to the left of the door. When I went round front again, I pounded and yelled, her name this time, interchangeably with his: “Grace! Karl! Karl, it’s Hazel! Grace, let me in!”

I remember Grace cracked the door and all she said was “What do you want?” Her face peered out from underneath a turban, her narrow nostrils quivering. The turban was a thin white scarf, and it gave her the appearance of wearing a bandage around her head. I thought she might have been bathing, but she was wearing makeup. Her eyebrows had been stencilled on.

“Is Karl here?”

She looked down at my torso. “What do you want?” she repeated.

That first night with Grace was the longest. She was so reluctant to let me in, and when she did finally allow me inside to warm up, she watched me constantly. Every time my eyes
came to rest on some object, she would follow my gaze, then look back at me, as if she would be able to tell whether I recognized things inside this space. We barely spoke at first. She simply said, “Fine,” and held the door open for me to enter. She went into the kitchen area and put a kettle to boil on the antique stove. We waited for the water, and when it was hot, she tripped past my melting boots with a glare and set down yellow mugs of steaming lemongrass on the coffee table.

I knew where the bathroom was, but asked anyway, and she brusquely told me. When I returned she had sunk into Karl’s cowboy chair, a low glider on old springs. That left the sofa to me. I sat in the middle of it, my shoulders hunched. I remember I was getting a pinched nerve from having been out in the cold. My body has become a foreign place—muscles just kind of seize up, without provocation.

I was too short for my feet to touch the floor, and I remember that night, especially, feeling like a little kid, trying to sit up straight on Grace’s couch, my legs and toes hanging out awkwardly. My bump, you—even more awkward.

She sipped at her tea and stared at the wood stove as if it were the television. The TV itself was grey and blank. Grace’s face was not the face I remembered from the day I’d glimpsed her far off down the hall at the university, what now seems like an eternity ago. At the time, her hair had been wrong for her: short and spiky, emphasizing the points of her face rather than lending it softness.

I remember Grace’s face was hard that night, as though she were made exclusively of bone, and yet her mouth was
wide, and in the light I could see that if she was smiling, she would be a striking woman. She
is
a striking woman, even without her hair—perhaps more so without it. Her forehead is large, her cheekbones pronounced, her eyes catlike. As cold as she was, she was comfortable in her stillness, which made me even edgier. All of a sudden, I had no idea why her husband had slept with me. It was like a joke on the chubby girl. Grace sipped her tea silently seven or eight times in a row, and it seemed like a signal to me to say something. She was accommodating, but it was clear she didn’t want me there.

“I’m one of Karl’s students …” I began.

She put her mug down on top of a magazine on the table.
American Cowboy: Guns, Guts & Glory
.

“I know who you are,” Grace said in a way that dared me to say anything more.

But I did say something more. “Where’s Karl? Will he be back here?” The Mini, of course, was Grace’s—I’d realized it the moment I saw her boots beside the door. Karl just liked to borrow it.

Grace stared at the sofa I was sitting on. If I had to describe it, it’s kind of a nothing colour mixed with green plaid. Like faded Christmas. On the end table was a small ceramic wagon train. “You know,” she said after a minute, “all this cowboy stuff—after a while things go past irony, and then you wonder if you’ve become someone with bad taste. I think maybe I’ll rip out the wood panel and paint the place yellow. Just something nice. Maybe ecru. Ecru and cranberry.” The mug clicked on the wood table as she missed the magazine.