The Blondes (33 page)

As I approached Dundas Square from the west, I continued to admire the light show. The sky rained advertisements. Had I really been out in the country so long that Toronto’s one-intersection attempt to mimic Times Square could seem so huge? People had protested against these ads, saying that they were gawdy and distracting, and that the city needed more art, but to me, at that moment, they were the most stunning things I’d ever seen. Neon, sparkling life.

On a two-storey screen, a nude woman with jet-black hair held a small twinkling light in her cupped palm, a wistful smile on her face as she lifted it above her head and let it float away from her, bright as tinsel. B
LONDE
M
EMORY
, the screen said, burning gold, a glass bottle appearing ghost-like around the words. B
OTTLE IT
. W
EAR IT
. F
EAR IT
.

Other ads were hyper-masculine, edging into the territory women’s advertising had occupied for years, where women were portrayed as twinned naïfs, lover-like but without sex characteristics: pretty things fawning together
over pretty things that could be bought and sold. A man with all the glam charms of the 1970s lay in recline. He was thickly muscled, his black hair frizzing out from his head, his lips overly red, a feminine choker lacing his throat, a black vest over his nude torso. Behind him sat his buddy, white-gold and gleaming with his shirt off, wearing only a cream-coloured knit scarf and a pair of jeans. D
O WHAT YOU WANT
, the top tagline read, and beneath the models’ feet: N
OW MORE THAN EVER
and a logo. I think it was for jeans, or maybe clothing—the scarf did seem to stand out—but the subtext was that this was a better time to sleep with men than women.

I was walking past the Eaton Centre, laden shoppers ducking in and out of its opalescent revolving doors, when I stopped to watch a performance—a busker hoping for coins in the street. Painted on a placard were the words S
ILVER &
G
OLD
. He had divided himself down the middle like the male–female hybrid of midways and boardwalks, except in this case both sides of him were meant to be female. He was silver and bald on one side, sparkling gold with a blonde half-wig on the other. His dress was shiny, sprayed stiff. He mimed and vogued on the one side, tousling his blonde wig. Then he turned to the other side and broke into his silver schtick, which included a rain of tears made of a foil streamer he released dramatically from his hand. Music from a beatbox accompanied him. I couldn’t look away. Two teenage girls—both their heads shaven, wearing 1920s-style black caps with feathers in the front—approached, tittering, and dumped a
handful of dimes and quarters into his tin. He winked and rotated and began his dance again.

The girls returned to a group. A friend of theirs had pulled her knit cap off her hair, which showed an alluvial history: the layers of colour she had attempted over the past few months. Black now was striped with brown and finally blonde coming back in. She ran her fingers through it. “Oh, I don’t care if I get it,” she bragged to a boy in a pea coat who would probably be a catch when he was old enough to shave. “I hope I do—at least it would be
something
.” She smacked her cap against her thin leggings.

I must have been distracted and not watching where I was going, because the next thing I knew my body buckled and I was going down—fast. It was just a spot of ice, but my front was so much heavier than I was used to, and I realized immediately that I couldn’t stop myself from hitting the sidewalk hard. A voice in my mind said:
Protect your head, Hazel!
And another one shouted out at the same time:
Protect the baby, Hazel!
And my hands hit the cold concrete and still I was going down too hard to stop. I managed to adhere to the commands of both voices, and rolled onto my right shoulder, which took the brunt of the force. As I struggled to sit up, my chest started to heave with small sobs—from embarrassment more than anything. No one extended a hand to help me up.

The silver-and-gold man had plucked up his sign and his money tin. He was heading across the street to continue his act in Dundas Square. The girls in their feather headwear had scampered closer to the shopping mall. Even the nonchalant
girl with the cap and the hair like layers of sediment was watching me. Other people had backed away and were eyeing me warily.

Swallowing my embarrassment, I pulled myself up. I decided I wasn’t hurt and walked on fast, watching the sidewalk to avoid another spill. But the spirit I’d felt was gone. As I passed St. Michael’s Hospital, I saw the foyer was stuffed with people waiting for attention. I grabbed at a newspaper box and pulled out a free weekly.
I’ll Have a White-Blonde Christmas
, its headline proclaimed. I stopped in the park outside the Metropolitan Church on Queen Street and leaned there, resting as I flipped the pages. The frontmatter gave me the statistics. A pandemic had been declared several weeks earlier. In spite of increasing campaigns on the part of the Canadian government, the editorial said, prevention efforts were simply not working.

“People feel very beaten down,” a University of Toronto professor was quoted as saying. “It’s hard to protect yourself when you’re seriously depressed. On campus, we have poster campaigns to create awareness and free shave-and-dye kits, but it’s just not enough.” One in five people, the article claimed, had lost someone they knew to SHV, attacks, or acts relating to the virus. Around the world, cases had risen to a hundred thousand per day. There had also been a dramatic rise in instances of post-traumatic stress disorder. The number of women on anxiety meds had increased by 60 percent. Simply having a panic attack, the journalist wrote, could put a woman at risk, as the resulting behaviour—crying, acting emotional
or paranoid, trembling, collapsing—could lead spectators to conclude that she carried SHV. A case was cited of a Halifax woman who had been tranquilized by officials during a public anxiety attack, but who did not in fact have the virus. Her family had filed charges against the city for putting her into a ward where she might since have been exposed.

Across the lamp-lit park, I heard rustling. Even though evening was falling fast, and the temperature falling faster, a group of men sat at tables that were painted with chessboards. I remembered having seen men play there in the summer, always from a distance. Some of them were ragged. Some of them were old. Some of them were speed players with a timer, snapping it down like the pros I had seen in New York. Some of them were there day and night. And apparently some of them were there even amid ruts of slush and with darkness creeping blue at their backs. They were watching over each other’s shoulders, a serious huddle around one of the tables. With cramped fingers, I folded up the news weekly, rolled it under my arm, and continued down the sidewalk.

As I passed these men, though, I realized it wasn’t chess they were watching at all. They were frozen around their own table, the rooks and kings still in place, but their heads were turned to an adjacent chess table. A woman who looked like she had drifted into the church park for the charity dinner or for shelter was sitting there, her head lolling. I had to turn my own noggin to focus, because of my missing lens. I saw the word
Juicy
across pink track pants riding low on her hips, her back hunched. A smile-shape of skin was exposed. Her hair
was half blonde and half brunette, the dye long ago having grown out. She was muttering to herself, swatting at things around her head with one hand; the other supported the glowing end of a cigarette. It was impossible to tell if she was homeless and mentally unstable, like so many in Toronto, or if she was one of the blondes.

The chess players assessed her, then one of the seated men reached out quickly, picked up his bishop, and moved it forward. His opponent followed suit and the clock was punched down again.

I had thought that coming to Toronto would be a homecoming—that I’d find myself on familiar ground, feel a sense of relief after so many months away. I wasn’t expecting to find the fear of the Fury welling up in me only a few blocks from where I’d climbed off the bus. I zigzagged through traffic, not bothering to wait for the light in my haste to get away from there.

A couple blocks later, I slowed. An SUV idled at the corner. The woman inside it, all alone, wore a surgical mask. She was tiny inside the enormous vehicle. I remember that under the streetlight, the mask seemed to glow blue. The rest of the truck was dark and amorphous to me. She had a pensive look as she waited for the stoplight to change. I shivered and turned down Jarvis Street and headed south, past the Holiday Inn, St. James Cathedral, St. Lawrence Market, toward Larissa and Jay’s condo, a little farther on, below the black snaking expressway along the lake.

By the time I reached Lake Shore Boulevard, where Larissa’s condo was, the sky was between twilight and night, and everything seemed unfamiliar. I couldn’t tell if I had been away so long that I had forgotten where things were. I walked twice up and down the stretch. On the Gardiner Expressway above, traffic roared. Ice creaked beneath my feet, which were freezing in spite of my wearing a pair of rubber boots I had found in my size among the donations at the WEE. They were rainboots, after all, with thin unlined soles. As I took in the numbers on the buildings, tires hissed beside me on the wet pavement, and spat things out at the gutters. I could see the numbers through my one lens, but they weren’t making sense. So I walked through parking lots, right up to the buildings. All the condos looked the same to me, but still I knew Larissa’s was missing. Sure enough, the numbers skipped over hers from one building to the next. I trudged back to the street and stood looking at where I thought her condo should be. There was just a vacant lot, a blue gap with Lake Ontario showing through under a blue-black sky, where the building had been. What had been a landscaped front and a concrete parking lot was now gravel.

Brand-new condo buildings don’t get torn down, I told myself. People protest them going up—protest gentrification, changing a neighbourhood, blighting the landscape with their
sameness
—but they don’t get torn down once they’re
up
. Even if they go unsold, they’ll sit empty, waiting.

And yet, the building wasn’t there.

I’d told the government to send my things to this address.
I knew it by heart. But the address was gone, and the big white building it had been pinned to was also gone. The wind pushed in off the lake, cold, and I blinked back tears.

I returned to one of the other buildings and tried to get into the foyer, but the concierge wouldn’t let me in. He wouldn’t even answer my buzz. I just wanted to talk to him, ask him what had happened to the place next door. He looked at me through two thick layers of glass with dull eyes and distrust. It was a long way back to my old apartment in the west end.

The key didn’t fit my lock any longer. I could hear someone inside my apartment and I banged on the door four times, but no one answered. Finally, I went downstairs to the mostly empty Thai restaurant. They knew me there. When I walked in, one of the servers made a face and sat down abruptly in a chair, spilling the soup she’d been about to take to the lone occupied table.

“We—we thought you were dead,” the server told me. “That is what the girl upstairs said.”

My sublet had apparently sent me multiple emails and tried my cell to no avail. She’d made the only logical assumption. Canadians have no optimism. I told the server I’d been caught at the border, and her eyes widened. She must have heard about the WEE centres. She pushed the sloshed lemon–coconut soup toward me, urging me to take it. Then she went into the kitchen and got a new one for her table while I ate hungrily. I thought about how I’d lived upstairs and eaten
there for two years. The server and I had said hello and whatnot, but we’d never even swapped names.

When she came back, she told me there were new people in my apartment. “They are a little …” She made a sign, rotating her finger next to her cocked head. I took it to mean cuckoo, but later I’d find out she meant paranoid. She said that after my sublet left, the landlord got a little scared and changed the lock. When I asked her why, she said, “You know, the SHV.”

Then she left to greet new customers.

I opened up the news weekly I’d been carrying and skimmed through the pages as I ate. There were ads for products I’d never seen before, remedies like Blonde-Away and Blonde-Off—ointments, sprays, and skin tanners. I couldn’t tell if they were meant to keep blondes at bay or take your melanin up a level for self-protection, but they promised “miracle results.” The health columnist wrote of natural oils and their healing principles. Just a few drops in your bathwater or around your home would strengthen and purify you. Magnets, sewn into clothing, were also recommended, to achieve balance and repel the ions that supposedly activated SHV.

A syndicated sex columnist had coined a new phrase,
blonde-backing
, which was labelled a high-risk activity. The column confirmed that there were men who would pay ridiculous rates to have sex with blonde women. Sometimes they asked the women to perform as if they were crazy, sometimes to play dead, sometimes just to be their own
“blonde and beautiful” selves. Just a few tricks would pay for a full semester at an Ivy League school.