Stay Where I Can See You by Katrina Onstad

Author:Katrina Onstad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2020-02-18T16:00:00+00:00

In the blank air of the mall, swinging her tiny bag of perfume, Gwen stopped in front of a hair salon, its interior sparse and white. She regarded the white tulips in a clear glass cylinder, reflected in a mirrored wall. Then another reflection, and on and on and on. She walked inside.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” said the man behind the desk, who was wearing mascara. “You’re twenty minutes late.”

Gwen was about to explain that she didn’t actually have an appointment, but instead she said, “Remind me—how long did I book for?”

He sighed and read from the computer impatiently. “Three hours: cut and colour.”

That would be enough time. A woman walked by, paused slightly at the salon entrance—Gwen felt a little anxious—and then continued on her way. Gwen exhaled.

“So Shelly can get started, then?” said the receptionist.

Shelly had short, platinum blonde hair. She pulled out Gwen’s long greying locks and spread them in the air like bat wings.

“So what’s the plan, my dear?”

“Something like yours,” said Gwen.

The stylist made a happy clapping gesture without actually allowing her hands to touch. She put all of Gwen’s hair in an elastic band first, and then sawed through the horsetail. Gwen felt nauseous, suddenly, to see the bodily waste that was her hair, severed and held in a stranger’s hands. She had kept locks of the kids’ hair from their first haircuts in a little cardboard jewellery box. Then as they got older, she accumulated enough hair to fill a shoebox, stealing from their hairbrushes. Finally Seth said, gently removing the box, “This is getting to be like something a serial killer has in his closet.”

“Ta-dah!” Shelly waved the slab of grey in the air. “We can donate this.”

“Who would want grey hair?”

“Oh, you’d be surprised. Everybody gets cancer.”

As Shelly cut, and bleached, and coloured, and cut again, checking her watch as the hours ticked away, Gwen thought about the woman who had reneged on her appointment. The stranger had missed an opportunity for change, and Gwen had seized it. That woman would never know what had happened, but Gwen looked at herself in the mirror, boyish and foreign, white blonde, and sent a thought to this shadowy, forgetful person: thank you.

* * *

When the tournament ended, and the boys had lost, Gwen made her way to Eli’s dressing room. As soon as she pushed open the door, she knew she shouldn’t have. A dank, damp synthetic sweat smell overtook her. There were no parents, only boys, sitting and standing in various states of undress. Their bodies were surprising in their pronounced differences. Some chests belonged to little boys, smooth and narrow with the nipples of toddlers. But there were a few who had broadened and coarsened, hair sprouting on legs and poking out from armpits.

The team was bereft from the loss, and therefore quiet and angry. One boy threw his glove across the room. He looked at her in a way that Eli’s friends had never done until that moment. He looked at her the way a man would look at a woman, appraising and dismissing in a single beat.

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