Strangers Among Us

Washing Lady's Hair-2

Did the chickens really have no heads? Karen wasn’t sure if it was true or Greenie apocrypha but it didn’t really matter. It could’ve been true; if it wasn’t true now, it would be soon.

It felt like it was true now.

She left without eating her chicken. She never told Thelma. She went to Rick’s. Her schoolbooks were all in her locker at the high school. She wore Rick’s clothes, and bought a few more at the St. Vincent de Paul, which was a lot cheaper than Value Village. She went on student assistance so she could help Rick pay his bills. He welcomed the windfall and spent a lot of it on art supplies. And Green.

Diving and phone calls were activities inimical to one another. And Karen wouldn’t have called her mother once they’d resurfaced; after diving, sleep always seemed of the utmost importance, leaving pesky to-dos like letting family know you’re safe to be left till morning. Anyway, Thelma wouldn’t have worried, not right away; she’d have known Karen was at Rick’s.

Problem was, she’d never called. And it was two years later.

Shit. No wonder Thelma was melancholic.

Karen picked up the store phone, looked at it.

Put it back. Shadow would hate it if she used long distance.

She left her painting to get up and re-arrange the crab in the window. It was slipping a little from its perch in a pink velvet Victorian armchair; if it fell forward to the floor it might break; papier mâché was hardly the most hardy of materials. Beautiful and rose-hued, the crab’s huge claws were painted with an eerie life-like verisimilitude. Light-shadows of waves floated across its back as though it were underwater, and prisms swirled in its eyes. Most visionary art was wall art painted on canvas and the fact that Rick’s was 3-D gained him an extra cachet. Even his early attempts back in Vancouver had been clearly better than average. It was why she’d crushed on him in the first place, more than his looks or his charm which were, truthfully, somewhat non-existent. Karen had still been living at her mom’s, going to high school and hating her mom’s creepster boyfriend. Dropping in at the café where Rick worked part-time and hung his sea creatures had been her one solace; the dreamy oceanic peace in his work implied another world was possible, in a way nothing else ever had.

Rick hadn’t gone to Emily Carr. Green Lady, he used to tell her, earnestly mixing adhesive in their basement apartment, woke the neurons in his brain. He’d stay up all night studying and reading and making big slurries of smelly papier mâché. He spent their money on wire to make the armatures and flour to make glue. Karen wouldn’t have thought it possible to burn through a check buying flour, the cheapest of all possible supplies, and he probably wouldn’t have, if it weren’t for the infestation. One day when she went to close the big twenty-five kilo bag of flour Rick had left open, she was greeted by the tiny smiling faces of countless little white wriggling worms. She didn’t want to see what they turned into after they pupated, so she dumped the flour out in the alley, under the surprising winter-blooming hollyhocks, the uncollected pumpkins planted by forgetful guerrilla gardeners, caved in now and covered with the slightest dusting of snow.

Rick told her she was hallucinating.

“Hallucinating the faces, Rick, but not the worms.”

She remembered looking at his sculptures and wondering whether she should drop in on Thelma and ask if her mother could get her a job at the call centre; she could work in the evenings after school. It might work except she already got so tired. Algebra seemed especially strange when they’d dived the night before, never mind the regularly scheduled day-after exhaustion. Maybe if she’d had a nutritious breakfast more often, she could’ve concentrated. Maybe if Rick had cleaned up the apartment now and again.

And that smell. It had rained for months on end and Karen told Rick she thought the half finished sculptures were rotting instead of drying out.

Smell pulled you back like nothing else. Was it just the Vancouver damp? Mould was supposed to be so very bad for you.

Mould. The smell had come from mould. But it wasn’t mould in the walls.

Gathering up the laundry after school one afternoon, she’d lost her footing and fallen into an unfinished orca sculpture, and the ghastly smell had suddenly been everywhere. Enveloping her, touching her, clothing her. The smell was like Syd’s hands. It gave her the same feeling of shocked humiliation, as though the mouldy whale was raping her, as Syd, technically, hadn’t. There’d been a knock at the door then; the landlord asking for the check.

“I thought Rick paid it,” Karen said, looking down at the smelly goo on her sneaker. Syd’s smell was suddenly still on her too, in spite of all the baths and showers she’d had in the interim. But there it unarguably was: the smell of lavender oil and alcohol and cheap cigarettes, intermingled with the smell of rotting papier mâché—a smell not entirely dissimilar to the smell of normally drying papier mâché but more sour, more vile, more loathsome, more Syd-like.

It was as if Syd’s hands were still under her shirt while she waited for Thelma to come home, while she waited for Syd to notice he was crazy and offensive and stop.

While she waited.

While the landlord stared at her, smelling that smell.

Karen finally said, “No, Rick didn’t give me the rent.” Greenies always said one shouldn’t spend too much time thinking about such bullshit, and the truth was, chronic divers were forever having their hydro cut off. Even in the rare instances when they had the money, they often forgot to pay.

Maybe welfare had found out she wasn’t at school much anymore. She’d been cut off and that was why there was no money for food; it wasn’t, as she’d thought, that Rick had spent it all on art supplies. Karen wasn’t sure. She stood there blankly looking at the landlord, just as she’d sat there blankly while Syd felt her up.

Neither moment had any intention of ending; worse yet, they were merging. Maybe they’d go away if she swore at them. Karen was tempted, but she didn’t. Both the landlord and Syd remained where they were. At least the landlord’s hands weren’t under her shirt.

The landlord stood staring at her goo coated foot and then he turned around and shut the door on her in a final sort of way, more or less as she had done to her mother that night. Karen sat down on the unmade bed and cried. She was afraid of being charged with welfare fraud.

Perhaps she cried, then as now, because she hadn’t eaten or maybe because of the overpowering smell of mould and of Syd’s breath which still, even now, clung to her.

Mouldier even than the mould.

They were given their eviction notice two days later.

Rick insisted Green Lady would fix things. She was magic, mistress of synchronicity, of providential solutions appearing as if out of nowhere to solve even seemingly insoluble problems.

“Why didn’t Lady help us before?” Karen dared to ask. “We’ve never seen her, not even once.” Green Lady was an aquatic goddess vision who appeared occasionally to divers. Rick and Karen had been waiting a long time.

“Because we didn’t ask for her help before we dove,” Rick replied, the perfect logic of it creasing his face into a delighted elven grin.

Green Lady’s hair. There had been so much of it.

They’d gone walking after their dive, thinking they’d resurfaced and it was safe to do so, oddly not exhausted as was usual, and saw her hair emerging from the sewer grates. It was made of weeds. Living weeds; dead weeds; grass with clumps of mud in it; bits of stones and seashells and the tiny legs of crabs’ shed exoskeletons.

And really a lot of garbage.

Karen sat down on the street and plucked bits of broken glass and bits of Styrofoam, bits of plastic bags, bread tags and surprisingly many tiny oval fruit stickers out of the goddess’s hair. The Styrofoam was the worst. Of course it didn’t decompose, but why did it have to convert to pellet form? There were beads and beads and beads of it stuck in Green Lady’s rampant hair, flowing now, not just along the gutters but over the curb and along the street.

Karen sat there for what felt like hours, cleaning Lady’s hair. It felt like stringy mud in her fingers, muddy and slimy and maybe some of those clumps weren’t mud at all. Her hair was coming up, out of a storm grate, after all, and the recent storms had wreaked havoc with the city’s plumbing. Karen understood suddenly that the mould from the rotting carcass of orca and the smell of Syd’s breath and Syd putting his hands on her all stemmed from this simple undeniable fact: they hadn’t looked after Lady’s hair, hadn’t kept it clean.

Rick sat down beside her, crying and threading the condoms and syringes out of her hair, careful, so careful not to stick himself. In no time they had a big heap going. Rick doused it with lighter fluid. They burned it, burned all the garbage that had been stuck in Green Lady’s hair.

“Thank you for helping,” Karen said.

“I wouldn’t even have seen it, if you hadn’t pointed it out,” Rick said. “It was here all the time, her filthy hair. She was begging us to clean it for her. I’ve walked past it a million times and never even dreamt it was there. Maybe now my life can change.”

“How come we see the same thing at the same time, anyway?” Karen asked.

“That always happens on Green,” Rick said.

“But we resurfaced hours ago,” Karen said.

“Maybe this time it’s real,” Rick said, “Maybe it’s the next level.” He pointed at Lady’s hair, which, now it was clean, began to move, sparkling and shining and flowing down the sidewalk, an endless green wave, smelling of beauty and the sea.

They stood there, holding hands by the little fire of burning plastic which made a worse smell, Karen had to admit, than Syd’s breath and mouldy papier mâché put together. But at least they were getting rid of it at last, the pollution in Lady’s beautiful hair and in their own souls, it felt like. And then they heard sirens.

“Let’s go,” Rick said, and still holding hands they ran down alleyways only he knew. Hiding in the unused entryway of a brick building, they waited and waited for the cops to find them, but they didn’t.

The phone rang the second they got in the door to their basement flat. Rick talked for an hour. It was his friend Shadow, long distance from Toronto.

The Green thing was catching on. There were people who went dancing after they did Green; Green visionary art was needed to hang in the clubs. The sea creature sculptures were perfect; Shadow would introduce him to the club owners. But of course Rick was good; Shadow knew that. He’d always been talented. Those drawings he’d done in his binders at school instead of his chemistry; they’d been amazing: hauntingly beautiful and sad and masterfully drawn. “Greenstyle.” It was clothes too; maybe Karen could get into that, or she could work in Shadow’s gallery and clothing store, Green Magic. They could live upstairs.

Rick got off the phone and stared at Karen. “I told you so.”

“What, what, what?” Karen asked, and so Rick told her all of it.

“I told you Lady would fix it up,” he said, but not in a mean way, just as if he was a little boy who had finally met his fairy godmother.

My mother couldn’t take care of me properly. I couldn’t tell her about Syd. Thelma needed him too much and it was too weird, I just couldn’t voice it, and maybe Lady will be our mother now.

“It’s not even our mothers’ fault,” Rick said, “they did what they could, the world being what it is. Their own lives are so lost after all, lost from themselves, how could they mother us any better than they did?”

“You knew what I was thinking.”

“Lady makes that possible,” Rick said, it had to be admitted, a little smugly.

“I was so mad at Thelma for leaving me alone with him, for not noticing Syd was that kind of guy. She was so starved for anyone who’d be even a little nice to her. He rubbed her poor feet in real lavender oil,” and Karen started to cry.

“Yes, but now it doesn’t hurt so much anymore, does it?”

“That’s true,” Karen said, because it suddenly was. “Why?” she asked.

“Because we have a real mother now.”

All moments go on forever, Karen thought, not one of them ever ends, either the bad ones, or, more usefully, the good ones.

She’d never told Rick about Syd, and about her mother before. And he’d been kind.

It was time to close. Karen, after taking out the garbage which smelled more than a little, locked the street door and turned out all the lights.

Slowly, she made her way up the stairs, wondering what to make for dinner. She should make rice and vegetables, but she was so tired. Maybe a can of soup. Almost anything, so long as it wasn’t KFC.

For once there were no dark circles under Rick’s eyes. Still, she looked at her boyfriend’s sleeping form a little reproachfully and said, “What happened to my dreams?” She didn’t ask what had happened to Rick’s dreams, because, implausibly, they were coming true.

Maybe Karen didn’t believe in Green Lady as much as he did. Or maybe she should figure out what her dreams even were.

It would beat a lot of the other things she had planned for tomorrow.