The Blondes (35 page)

She told me she’d fix us some tea while I put my bag in on the bed. I went down the little hall and found her room. It was the only bedroom and it contained a double bed with her and Jay’s beautiful spread on it, but the rest was pretty bare. There were two unopened paint cans from Benjamin Moore
sitting on the floor with a clean roller, and swaths of peacock blue across the tops of the cans to show the colour, as if she planned to do some decorating but hadn’t yet. There was a picture of Devang on the bedside table, but other than that, just a chair with a pile of clean clothes on it and a pile of dirty clothes in the closet, which was missing a door. There were no men’s shirts or jackets hanging in the closet, no baby toys scattered across the rug the way I would have expected. No crib or change table.

When I went back through the hall, I saw that Larissa had taken off her wig and placed it on a Styrofoam head as if it were a hat that you removed whenever you went in or out. From wearing the wig, her hair now stuck to her head in some spots and jutted up in others. It was pitch black, about an inch and a half long all over, like she was trying to grow it out after having shaved it. The kettle was on, and she was pulling cups out for us. They were big, sturdy ceramic ones in a terracotta colour. I’d been with her the day she’d bought them and I remembered how much she paid for them—how I couldn’t get over the fact that she would pay that much for a set of mugs, as if she had become a suburban housewife while still in her twenties. I watched her move in the kitchen, that natural grace she had, as if her limbs floated. She’d lost weight. It was that, I realized, not the big snowball wig, that had made her look different. More like high school Larissa.

She removed an already opened package of crackers from the cupboard and arranged them artfully on a plate along with a knife. Then she pulled a nub of cheese out of the fridge,
sniffed it, and put it on the plate. She dug into the fridge and produced another morsel. It too went on the plate. I leaned in the doorway, bracing one hip against the frame. It creaked and she jumped, and the knife clattered to the floor.

“You scared me,” she said sheepishly.

“Where did you think I was?” I asked her.

“The bathroom, I guess. I’m just jumpy here.” She bent to pick up the knife. She rinsed it in the sink and then we took the things into a little living room off to the side, where we sat on one part of the sectional that had previously been in her condo. The other half seemed to be missing.

When she had set everything up on the glass coffee table, she smiled. We sat down side by side. One cheese, she said, was a smoked apple cheddar. The other was a blue cheese with an ash rind. She urged me to try it.

Overhead, footsteps flurried: kids racing across the floor. We both looked up, but she didn’t comment on it.

“It’s hard to get used to you without your hair,” she said to me, and I laughed and said I could say the same of her.

I remembered once or twice in high school, Larissa had come to my mom’s hair shop. Everyone wanted henna red hair one year, and Larissa thought I was crazy that I insisted on dying mine the opposite when I naturally had what everyone else yearned for. My mom gave her highlights for free, streaking her hair from gold to auburn—and later that year dyed it back to blonde for her. But Larissa wouldn’t let Mom cut her hair. She was very particular about that. When I reminded her, she laughed and ran her hand over her short cut.

I remember I was worried back in high school that my mom would feel insulted by Larissa, but she hadn’t been. Meanwhile I was walking around with my mom’s practice cuts, “new” styles she would persuade me to let her try. Needless to say, in high school I was always growing out awkward lengths—until I too put my foot down and wouldn’t let her touch my hair. There are two things women latch on to when they feel circumstances are outside of their control: their weight and their hair. I didn’t care about the former; for me it was always the latter. But Larissa? She never seemed to struggle over anything. With her, my mother just smoked and smiled, smiled and smoked, abandoning the scissors in the vanity drawer. They both liked Virginia Slims and my mom let Larissa bum them if she promised not to tell. I recalled Larissa walking around that shop with the broken linoleum floor, the white wallpaper with the aqua-and-pink diamond pattern, the wood-grain vanities, a cigarette burning between her pro fingers …

Larissa laughed again, a forced chuckle. We chewed through a few crackers. They were a little stale. She didn’t ask me anything about the day I was supposed to come, the day I was supposed to bring Moira, or about my time in the WEE, or about Karl and the baby. If she had asked me those things, I guess I would have been happy to tell her, to ignore the fact that her child wasn’t there and there weren’t any toys in the place. But she didn’t, so I couldn’t pretend.

“What’s happened, Larissa?” I asked abruptly.

She picked up her tea and held it by the brim with both hands, ignoring the big handle she’d bought it for (because it
would fit Jay’s hands, I remember she said when she snapped down her credit card).

When she set the mug down, she said, “We might need wine for that particular story,” and she got up and went into the kitchen. I reminded her I couldn’t drink, and she said, “Oh, shit!” Did I mind if she did? I told her to go ahead, and heard her open the fridge. She brought a half-full bottle of red into the room with a glass. Larissa had been one of those people who pored over the wine picks in the paper. The Larissa I’d left a few months ago would never have put a red in the refrigerator. It was just wrong.

“Jaichand and Devang are in India.” She poured herself a glass and sat back on the white leather sectional-half beside me. “We thought it would be safer. We all thought it would be much safer. His parents wanted them there,” she said, leaning her head back, digging her way into the pillows. The flourescent kitchen light was not atmospheric to sit by, so I reached over and turned on a small table lamp with a paper shade. It was yellow, and immediately Larissa looked better and I felt better.

“Oh, right,” she said. “I forgot you haven’t had too many comforts lately. When it’s just me, I sometimes forget and don’t bother.”

But I wasn’t fooled; Larissa always bothered. It was the essence of Larissa.

“Will you join them?” I asked her.

“I would if I could, but I can’t. Borders are still closed,” she said, her lips tight.

I noticed now that she was wearing a shiny turquoise
camisole without a bra. I guess that was all she’d had on beneath her winter coat, but I hadn’t noticed. It looked like something she would normally wear with a blouse or a blazer. I wondered if, when I called, I’d gotten her out of bed. She
had
said at first that she couldn’t come. It was about eleven on a Thursday evening. I asked her when Jay and Devang would come home, and she said that was the part she wasn’t sure about.

She drank some more while I told her about the WEE. She was horrified at everything, so much so that I left out all the really gruesome details and just talked about things like never having hot water for the shower because it ran out too fast.

When I brought up Moira, she said, “Oh, right, you were going to come here with a friend,” as if it had completely slipped her mind. Of course, I thought more important things had happened between that time and now—like her husband and child going away, and having to move out of her old building.

I brought this up, but Larissa waved her hand like it was a bad smell, nothing more. “That explosion. I wasn’t even there when it went off. I came home and the front of the building was charred, but I don’t see how it affected the structure of the place enough that they had to take it all down. Thank god Jay and Devang had already left, huh? There are some small miracles.”

“I thought you were all there,” I said.

She swallowed the rest of her drink and looked at me as if I were silly. “You must be bone tired, sweetheart,” she said.

I admitted I was.

“It’s so good to see you,” she said again.

“It’s so good to see you,” I said.

I felt like we were parting instead of going to bed in the same tiny apartment. The place was smaller, in fact, than the one I’d just left to the stoners. She said she could dig around and find some blankets and make me up a bed on the couch, but in the end, we just flopped together onto her bed, wriggled under the blankets, and passed out. Larissa’s comforter was the softest thing I had ever felt.

I put my cold feet on her shins, and she laughed. “I had poor circulation too when I was preggers with Devang,” she said. “It means it’s a boy.”

“That’s just an old wives’ tale. And only a Windsor girl would say
preggers
,” I told her.

I fell asleep when my feet got warm.

YESTERDAY, I CLIMBED UP INTO THE COTTAGE ATTIC
and went poking around. I found a box of old things up there. I went up very carefully. I want you to know that I am cautious, for your sake. Sliding the stairs down wasn’t easy, but I worked at it slowly. I had to stand on a chair and I wasn’t sure of my balance, but I had to do something. Without Grace, the days are longer than ever. It’s dusty up there, and pink insulation runs all around the outside, fluffy as birthday cake frosting.

The box I found was full of photos of Karl as a kid in Alberta: the Diclicker homestead, which appears to be a very clean but no-frills farmhouse. The family was Swiss. There were his sister and mother done up in 1960s hairdos sitting on the hood of the family vehicle at what might be a rest
stop; his father with thick black glasses and a cowboy shirt; Karl in miniature, about eight, holding a View-Master just below his face, as if he’s been told to lower it for the picture, as if he were more interested in what was in the machine than wherever they were going. At first I thought the photos were of some other family—relatives, maybe. I didn’t recognize Karl because he was so fair. He was blond as a child, and then, you can see from photo to photo, his hair darkened gradually.

It makes me wonder about you, whether you might be blonde when you’re born. My mother was blonde, and it seems Karl was too—at least for a while.

I felt like I shouldn’t be up there, opening things, peering in. Like it wasn’t mine to do. But, my little kangaroo, you’re here—you will be here soon, at least—and he was your father.

An old thesis of Karl’s was up there. It must have been written during his MA. Hand-typed, but he’d had it leather bound. “The Grotesque in Early Cinema.” I read ten pages of it before I realized he was talking about clowns. I was stunned to discover it was no better than something I’d write. But god, the attic was cold and the floorboards very hard beneath me. My muscles started to seize up and I couldn’t stay there very long. I thought I heard a car far away and I stopped for a second and listened. But it was nothing.

I found Grace and Karl’s—which is how I’ve begun to think of them, even though I used to think “Karl and Grace”—marriage certificate in a closed-up box with a bunch of other trinkets. It was folded, not even framed.

She retained her name after marriage, I remember Karl telling me the one time we came here. She retained it because she didn’t want to take on a name that wasn’t even originally his own, that he’d given himself. She said it felt like playing pretend, like becoming a fictional character from one of her own TV shows. Pargetter-Mann, she’d have been if she hyphenated. But she’d already started her career and didn’t want to do that either, so she remained Grace Pargetter. I remember I asked Karl if he minded, and he said, “No, no, not that,” as if there were something else that he minded. But then he rolled over and picked up the DVD case for a movie he’d wanted us to watch. It was
Ekstase
, a silent film starring Hedy Lamarr.

“Who’s this Hedy Lamarr chick again?” I asked, flicking my thumb at the pounds and pounds of dark hair surrounding her face on the case’s cover.

Apparently, in
Ekstase
, she acted in nude scenes where she approximated the female orgasm as if her young soldier lover were giving her oral pleasure.

“Interesting,” I said.

“When Lamarr later married, her husband, a munitions manufacturer, attempted to buy up all remaining copies of the film to destroy it, he felt so possessive of her. Benito Mussolini retained his copy, refusing to part with it for any price.”

“And who’s this Mussolini guy?” I asked.

Karl tapped me on the nose and said, “Don’t be cute.”

He rolled away from me and I remember his thin, hairy buttocks. I remember the dark seams of him.

“ ‘The last time I was inside a woman was when I was inside the Statue of Liberty …’ Woody Allen,” he proclaimed.

I covered my face and groaned,
“Don’t!”
He was old, so old.

“The only difference between you and me,” he said, picking his clothes off the back of the plaid couch, “is that I thought I was special at eighteen for seeing Woody Allen films in the theatre when they were first released, and when you were eighteen you thought you were special for finding them in the video store and renting them on DVD. The film is the same. The experience is the same.”