Mary held her breath, pressing buttons, until a young woman seated across from her set down her magazine and pointed out, “Could be your battery. Just shut it off.” The woman reached out, taking the phone from Mary and opening it, and announced with authority, “It’s not a message. You just need to recharge.”
“Thank you,” Mary said, taking the phone back. She toyed with the idea of asking the woman for a crash course on the cellphone but when she looked up Big Avi was sailing toward her, his sunburned face split by a wide grin, trailed by a voluminous woman with platinum hair piled atop her head and a face so painted that her exotic features seemed to stand out in relief. This woman, years younger than Mary but almost as large, with her black-rimmed almond eyes and enormous berry-stained lips, scrutinized her, unsmiling, like a garage mechanic appraising a wreck.
“This is Mary Gooch?” she asked, with an American accent that seemed to betray foreign roots.
“Mary, I would like you to meet Frankie,” Avi said formally. “This is her shop.”
Frankie was dressed not in a white smock but in a flowing, long-sleeved, turquoise paisley blouse over a matching skirt that caressed the rolling flesh of her hips and buttocks. She was beautiful. Big and beautiful. Here was self-acceptance, Mary thought. Or perhaps Frankie’s apparent comfort in her body was just another deception, like those movie stars who celebrated their volume on the covers of magazines, then went on to shill for weight-loss companies.
Mary rose with some effort and offered her hand, which the woman took but did not shake. “Come with me, honey,” she said, pulling her along.
Big Avi patted Mary’s shoulder. “Frankie will help,” he said, then checked his watch and promised, “I be back. One hour.”
Even as she was sitting in the waiting area of the beauty shop, Mary had not guessed that Frankie was a woman, or that the purpose of their stop was a makeover. Feeling far beyond such superficial assistance, she would have protested had she known. She never watched makeover shows on television, too depressed by the quick fixes and confused by the mixed messages. It seemed that people, not just women, were told, on the one hand, to embrace their uniqueness because the superficial was irrelevant, and on the other hand, that an updated hairstyle and a few good accessories could alter the very course of their lives.
She watched through half-closed lids the shivering flesh on Frankie’s neck as she massaged a creme rinse into Mary’s long hair, and cringed when the woman announced loudly, “My first husband left me too. Six years ago this spring.”
“Oh,” Mary said, deciding that she was grateful Big Avi had told the woman her story, so she didn’t have to.
“Best thing that ever happened to me. Two weeks later I met Bob at Ralph’s and I swear to God I have never looked back.”
“Oh.”
“I’m there at the bakery desk, right, ordering a cake for my nephew’s birthday, and Bob’s standing there, and we start talking about traffic or whatever. I was a little freaked out, frankly, because in, like, two minutes, he’s asking me for a date.” Frankie leaned in closer, whispering, “I decided to just put it out there, and I go, ‘Are you one of those creeps who likes to fuck fat girls?’ And he looks me straight in the eye and he goes, ‘If you’re one of those fat girls who likes to fuck creeps.’ I laughed so freakin’ hard. I’ve been with him ever since.”
Mary was shocked by the woman’s language and candour, but the story had a certain sweet charm. “That’s nice,” she said. “Are you Israelite too?”
The stylist shampooing a brunette at the next sink cackled, “She’s Persian,” as if that should have been obvious.
Away from the sinks and with the door in view, Mary once again felt the instinct to flee, but with Big Avi gone and her hair soaking wet she could only sit in the swivel seat Frankie offered and endure the brushing out of her locks. Irma, she thought, mildly comforted to know that her mother would be oblivious to her absence, even as it had tormented Mary for so many years that she’d been unaware of her presence. She squeezed her eyes.
“It’s hard, honey, I know,” Frankie said, reaching for a bottle of milky detangler. “Avi said the airline lost your luggage.” Mary was too weary to explain. “Is it another woman?” Frankie asked.
Mary sensed that the women nearby, the customers and stylists, were listening, and she answered quietly, “I don’t think so.”
Frankie sighed, looking at the strands of damp red hair. “Your ends are so damaged, and this length ages you, like, ten years. I’m thinking, take it right up to the shoulders.”
When Mary didn’t respond, the woman in the next chair spoke up. “You have such a pretty face. Doesn’t she have a pretty face?”
Mary smiled at them both in the mirror. “Cut it,” she instructed Frankie. “Whatever you think.” Frankie grabbed the length of her ponytail and hacked it off like a nasty weed. Mary watched the red tail fall to the floor as if it belonged to someone else.
A customer in the row behind shouted, “You go, girl!”
Blushing scarlet, Mary looked up as Frankie waved her scissors like a wand over the group. “Okay, everybody. This is Mary from Canada,” she announced. “Her husband left her.”
The women tsked their sympathy.
“He’s at his mother’s place over in Golden Hills and she’s going to give him a piece of her mind after she leaves here.”
All around were murmurs of support, and Mary was struck by the women’s unanimous interest. There but for the grace of God go I.
“I’m thinking blunt to the shoulders and a little curl around the face,” Frankie continued, eliciting opinions.
A stylist behind her called over the din of the blow-dryers, “No bangs. Lana Turner with a side part and some volume at the crown.”
Mary felt her heart racing. Her privacy invaded. Her hair cut off. If she’d ever been confused about her identity, she was even more so now. “I shouldn’t have come,” she whispered to the mirror image of the big woman with wet shoulder-length red hair. “I just feel completely lost.”
The woman who’d remarked on her pretty face found her eyes in the mirror. “We’ve all been there, sweetie. We’ve all been there.”
Another woman, whom Mary hadn’t noticed beneath a hair dryer in the corner, looked up from a bizarre wig of aluminum-foil squares and called out, “How long have you been married?”
“Twenty-five years.”
“You must have been a baby.”
“Eighteen,” Mary said.
“I don’t care what happened. Twenty-five years is worth fighting for,” the woman declared. She stood and shuffled across the room to take the other chair beside Mary. The woman’s eyes were held captive by her smooth, rigid face—a sheer serenity that, along with bee-stung lips and collagen-filled nasal labia, had become as standard as any fashion, but which Mary had never seen in person.
Many years ago, in one of Mary’s painful Sunday calls to her mother-in-law, Eden had told her in an offhand way that she was having a facelift. Mary had felt a twinge of self-righteousness but stopped herself from begging an answer to why? She’d been surprised by Gooch’s reaction, when he’d merely shrugged and said, “Whatever floats her boat.”
“But what about aging gracefully?” Mary’d asked. “I thought you’d hate to think your mother was so vain. Don’t you think it’s wrong?”
“My mother is vain. But who are we to judge?” he said pointedly.
“People die from plastic surgery, Gooch. I’m just saying I think it’s a stupid risk.” Her obesity had swung its trunk in the corner of the room, and they’d said no more of Eden’s decision.
Now, surrendering to her beautification, she shut her eyes and accepted the rush of pleasure from the warm air of the dryer. A rare sensual pleasure. She realized that although it had been six and a half years since she and Gooch had had intercourse, the intimacy of the act had been lost many years and pounds before that.
After their first few years together, when the very thought o
f his lips had driven blood to her core, she’d begun to make excuses when Gooch reached for her in bed, her desire enslaved by her perception of being undesirable. When Gooch was particularly insistent, never rough or pressuring but with his mouth on her neck or his fingers mining her cleavage, she’d borne the event like Irma with dinner, anxious to have it over with.
When Mary opened her eyes again, she did not recognize the woman with shoulder-length red hair framing her pretty face. She could only say, “Oh.”
Frankie smiled—an artist having completed her masterpiece. “You’re gorgeous,” she breathed, followed by a gush of accord from the others. Mary blinked her thanks to them all, searching their faces for tells. She wondered if this display of generosity was what it appeared to be. In discovering her loss and confusion they’d all taken a step in Mary’s shoes, or boots, as the case was, and had seen not a fat woman or a thin woman, or old or young or rich or poor, but themselves, in a soul who’d been left and felt lost.
The plastic cape that Frankie had draped over her front but failed to clasp around her neck slid off as she prepared to rise.
“She can’t wear that,” one of the stylists said, pointing out the navy scrubs, and Frankie frowned. Helping Mary from the seat, the big beautiful Persian American woman pulled her through the silver swinging doors and into the privacy of a large, well-appointed bathroom.
“Are you a nurse?” Frankie asked, opening the door to a large armoire.
Mary shook her head, not attempting to explain the navy scrubs, as she looked at the collection of plus-sized clothing with price tags attached. Frankie found a paisley skirt-and-blouse ensemble identical to the one she was wearing but in green, and handed the hanger to Mary. “Put this on. Go ahead. It’s my husband’s dress business. I’ll give it to you at cost. Try it on.”
When Mary didn’t move, Frankie whispered, “You need privacy. But I’m gonna tell you something, because we’re both big girls and I can say this. If you think your husband left you because you’re fat, you should thank God you got a second chance.”
“Is that why your husband left you?”
“He left me because I was miserable. I was always on a diet. But Bob loves me big. Bob taught me how to own it. If you don’t like something about yourself, change it. If you’re okay with it, you gotta own it. There’s nothing in between.”
“Okay.”
Before Frankie left, she added, “There’s a shoe store at the next plaza over. You can’t wear those boots in California.”
Stepping through the swinging doors in the attractive clothes, Mary found Big Avi and the entire shop waiting for the big reveal. Feeling like an unwilling contestant on a game show, she twirled, turning scarlet. She stopped in front of the mirror as Frankie fixed her waistband and fiddled with the blouse.
“How much do I owe you?” Mary asked, reaching for her credit card.
Frankie wrote a number on an invoice and handed it to her. The amount was more than three weeks’ groceries.
Another stylist hurried out from the back room carrying a plastic bag containing her navy scrubs. She passed it to Mary, whispering, “You can’t wear those boots in California.”
Smiling to hide his impatience, Big Avi took Mary’s arm, escorting her through the doors into the blinding sunshine and back to the leather cocoon of the waiting limousine.
WEEPING WILLOWS
Big Avi smiled broadly in the rearview mirror. “You look beautiful. You feel strong? Yes?”
“Yes,” Mary agreed, but it wasn’t because of the makeover. She was superficially transformed, no doubt, but she did not identify with the red-headed, finely dressed (apart from the boots) woman she’d seen reflected in the mirror of the beauty salon. Her fortification was no product of this transformation, but a strength stirred by those women who had armed her in green paisley and sent her out to battle for love on behalf of them all.
“I just don’t know how to thank you,” Mary said. “I just don’t know a lot of people who would do what you’ve done for a stranger.”
“It’s enough,” Big Avi said, waving his hands. “I charge you just for regular car service. That’s all.”
“Thank you.”
“So many strangers helped me when first I came to America, I can’t tell you. My thanks is to serve. It’s enough. You understand? You know this feeling?”
Mary did not know the feeling, as she’d spent most of her life in service to her hunger, and most of her days with her eyes cast down, suffering and frustrated and too weary from her own dissatisfaction to measure the misery of her fellows. She might have said she had served Gooch, but it would have been a lie. She’d found the notion of domestic servitude anti-feminist, and even if Gooch did work longer hours and bring double the money to their joint bank account, she’d resented the chores of sweeping the house and making meals, and had never found glory in a scrubbed-clean oven, or peace in the crease of the shirts she ironed Sunday mornings.
“I know Willow Drive,” Big Avi announced. “It’s in the suburbs before Oak Hills.”
Leaford had no suburbs to speak of. There were huge, beautiful Victorians in the historic old centre of the town and wartime bungalows on the periphery, and the rest of the population lived in the country, either farming the land on which they lived, or living in homes on land farmed by others. Mary’d seen the suburbs of Windsor, the ones Gooch described as monotonous for the sameness of the architecture, but those homes were unique in comparison to the landscape she was entering now. These suburban homes were enormous dwellings, monster houses in six repeating models—the single-storey, the double, the garage on the left, on the right, the giant bay window, the smaller bow—painted one of three shades of beige, with a cluster of tall palms or a fountain of willow at the centre of the landscaping design.
“Welcome to Willow Highlands,” Big Avi said.
Set high on the crest of rolling hills, featuring even larger houses, with wide, paved streets and so much free parking that those drivers in Toronto and New York would seethe with envy, Willow Highlands looked to Mary like a movie’s painted backdrop, as if a shift in perspective or the touch of a finger might destroy the illusion of paradise. It was mid-afternoon and the suburbanites were presumably at work or school, but she nonetheless felt the souls lingering within their homes, living their American dream.
The few toiling humans she could see as the car rolled past were diminutive brown people. “Are all these people Mexican?” she asked.
Avi checked the mirror again, uncertain of her humour; then, deciding she wasn’t joking, he answered, “Everybody has help. The gardener. The housekeeper. The nanny.”
“Are they illegal? Even in Canada you hear so much about the illegal Mexicans down here.”
He shrugged. “Some. Everybody has opinions on immigration. Me, I do my immigration legal. It was hard. Cost so much money I can’t tell you. But I see these people come for a better life. I have sympathy. They want to work.”
Mary watched one of the Mexican men wearing an enormous contraption on his back, wielding a fat hose like a submachine gun to blow debris from the white sidewalk. “The leaves fall here too,” she remarked.
“Some. Yes. Of course. There is seasons. In winter it’s not cold, but at night you bring a sweater.”
“In Canada they say we have two seasons—winter and construction,” she said, but when he glanced in his mirror she saw that he was confused. “Because summer’s the only time the construction crews can work on the roads.”
“Ah, a joke.” He smiled and turned down another street. “Two more streets is Willow. What number please?”
“Twenty-four.” Mary swallowed. Looking out the window, she was surprised to see that the limousine had left the cluster of sprawling homes and found a much less affluent neighbourhood at the base of the hills, which she reasoned must be Willow Lowlands. Smaller stucco homes with less adorned lawns alternated with rows of two-storey townhouses. As her in-laws had significant wealth, she suddenly panick
ed that she had the wrong address. Or even the wrong town.
“I have to go quickly,” Big Avi said, glancing at his watch. “My little Avi has soccer.” He pulled to the curb in front of a modest white home with a high arched entrance, outside of which a few neglected plants in clay pots lined a short, cracked walk. “Twenty-four,” he announced.
There were two vehicles in the leaf-strewn driveway—a battered red Camry that Mary guessed to be a late-nineties model, and a newer white Prius, the hybrid car Gooch had admired but dismissed as too small for a big man to drive comfortably.
“Someone is there. Yes?” Avi asked, swiping her credit card through his machine.
“I can’t imagine that this is the right house,” Mary said, hesitating. “My in-laws are quite rich.”
“Wealthy is different in California,” he cautioned. “This house cost nearly one million dollars.”
“No!”
“It’s true!” He climbed out of the front seat to help her out of the back. After squeezing her hands and looking into her eyes, he whispered, “Go talk to your husband.”
Mary smiled and nodded, waving as the car pulled away. God, she prayed, please help me find the words. Her heart fluttered, and she cursed herself for not remembering to eat more from the wicker basket. Turning to the little stucco house, she hoped she might sense, the way she did God, the presence of Jimmy Gooch.
But it appeared increasingly likely that she did have the wrong house, considering the no-smoking sign plastered to the glass on the front door. She’d never seen Jack, in person or photographs, without a Marlboro wagging in his yip.
Approaching the door, she strained to listen over the black crows cawing from a nearby tree, but there was no sound within. The wrong house. There must be another 24 Willow Drive in another Golden Hills, California. She remembered that her in-laws’ previous dwelling had had a lap pool and tennis courts. Eden had sent a photograph of herself and Jack, in matching designer track suits, leaning against their silver Acura in the driveway of the enormous manse, and Mary recalled Gooch’s comment: “Why would they need seven bedrooms?”