Bad for the Baby

This woman is cutting my hair, and I shouldn’t hate her for it, but I do. Because of the production. Because it’s worth getting better hair than you can afford if only for the months in between when people will assume you’re a better person than you are, by which I mean you have more money. I put on the clothes I knew had brands while she still knew that I did it for her and thought less of me for it. But it didn’t matter, because we’re both working toward the same end: an appointment every three months and a twenty percent tip.

Since I’d come last, she’d gotten bigger, and while I thought she might be finally fatter, the gain was too central to the middle, and I figured she was pregnant but not pregnant enough to ask. I thought about the chemicals they used here and if they’d be bad for the baby. I guess you have to let people make their own choices about whether or not they want a chemical baby. Or I might assume she’d looked into it a little before coming to work every day, but you know you can’t trust people to do that because hey, she needs the money.

She had that kind of job where you get to learn to tell the difference between people who have money and people who don’t even when you don’t have any yourself, and that’s why I thought she could tell I didn’t. Maybe this time I tricked her, with my consignment pants that don’t fit right and this top that’s not right for the weather; nothing’s right, nothing’s ever right. Something is always wrong, and that’s how you know someone’s poor, but at least, I thought, at least I could be poor and have nice hair.

I wouldn’t put it past her to mess it up just to keep the natural order. Make sure I couldn’t pay for nice hair, couldn’t trick the rest of them. I thought of the haircut she’d give someone else, someone better, the real haircut and treatment that she’d decided I didn’t deserve. The fake one that she gave me that seems real but indicates to the rest of the world I’m not meant for it.

Over the baby she wore high shorts and, though I saw her every three months for years, I’d never seen that tattoo before, and as soon as I did, it cut me.

It was the same one you had.

Have.

Didn’t have when I met you and then did have and still have even when I don’t know you anymore.

The red toque from that Wes Anderson movie that when we saw it, you said was real outsider stuff, and I let you say it because I already knew I wanted to love you. I agreed with you it was outside the norm of what you’d normally see at the theatre, and I didn’t say anything about the other men who’d shown me the movies much further outside of the theatre, about the music I listened to when I was with them and about how Pink Floyd wasn’t really as far from the mainstream as you think.

I bet she wished she hadn’t gotten that tattoo and maybe that’s what she was thinking about when she hit my head with the wrong end of the dryer, or maybe she had an ex whose tattoo matched the one on my shoulder. All we can know for sure is that she was the one with all the tools while I remained confined under this plastic cape that made me just a head to her, and it’s hard to treat someone who’s just a head with dignity, especially when their hair is wet.

You take someone’s hair off them, someone whose hair is supposed to be there, and they’re not the person you thought they were. That’s why they do it to inmates. The moisture just simulates it.

I remember the other Wes Anderson movie, where he cuts his hair in the sink before he tries to kill himself and fails. I remember thinking that that hair’d be left behind when he was gone, clogging the drain if someone wasn’t smart enough to pull it out before turning the taps on, but you know how people are. They make things worse to make it easier and then make it harder. You told me that you’d thought about that haircut, that drain, and I thought that might make you more experienced in life than you were. Now I know most everyone thinks of offing themselves at some point. Especially people who watch Wes Anderson movies.

What was the fucking problem, anyway, you had with my tattoos? They were the wrong things, in the wrong spots, in the wrong colors. Up until exactly the point that you got yours, they were for bad people, stupid people, people who didn’t know that what you have to do in life is pretend to be someone else if you want to get by. So what if that was normal where you came from; don’t admit where you came from; people who come from where you came from don’t get anywhere; don’t you know that? No, I didn’t.

I knew how to unclog your drain, though.

When she got out the flat iron, I knew she was trying to cover up some mistakes I hadn’t noticed. They put this giant mirror right in front of you, but it’s rude to look at it, to look her in the eye, to watch her work while I just sit there. I like to not talk and look out the window. There were men in uniforms because of the armoury nearby, and there was a guy who shuffled on by at one twentieth speed in a get-up that must’ve grown onto him, because they don’t sell that kind of thing in stores, and you can’t get it at the Salvation Army. The kind of garment produced when layers of sweaters came together, bulked up, wore down, stretched to someone’s knees, homogenized colors into a form of grey unique to the clothes of the sort of man this was. I could pretend to look at him instead of her, and we’d all be better off for it.

Do you remember, on the dance floor, I didn’t even see you come in, but it was one of those nights when our bar was running an event, something to do with the leftists winning or rallying support, but those events were just the same as any other weekend night except with chalkboards to tell you what we were all dancing about. I remember being happy and thinking how long it’d been since I’d been happy and then wondering if I knew what it felt like enough to know. I didn’t see you come in but, by the time you did, I’d put my purse down in the corner and my drink down on the ledge next to the sound booth by the DJ, who’d never want to play what I wanted him to and with good reason, because every night’s a celebration and nothing I ever wanted to hear would make people happy. You came up behind me dancing and moved around the crowd of people until you were right in front of me, and I thought maybe, maybe this one time we were going to be all right, just for a while, and no one would hurt anybody. I thought we had a truce of silence and that maybe for a moment we could get on dancing near each other and off into the night again, but then you leaned forward and when I thought you’d ask me how I was doing or where I’d been all these years or tell me where you’d been instead you told me, “I still love you. You know?”

I guess I did know or I hoped so and I might have even loved you back but I knew I didn’t want to suffer and that’s why I said no.

How am I the only time that you decided to give up? What happened to make you always want to come home late and leave so early? What demon whispered in your ear what I would do to you if you came back? Why couldn’t you have said something like that the year before, or the year before that, or the year before that one?

Why couldn’t you have known someone before me who had loved you? Why couldn’t you have learned when you were young what to do to people when you care? Why did you think you always had to make it hurt to feel something? What wrong thing had I done in life already to deserve you? How long had things gone wrong before we met?

What address are the ruins at now? How many walls have you punched in since last we talked, and who’s fixing them? What’s she telling you about what happened between us and why she’s not the same? What have or haven’t you learned since then, and shouldn’t you have known it already? What devil made the world that made you first and second made me find you? What made you come knocking at 3am drunk to tell me she was pregnant when three weeks later, you wouldn’t have had to?

Why couldn’t you find someone else besides me to live for?

I teared up looking at the man outside with his sweater and wondered if the stylist could tell or if she was used to people crying in her chair. You’d have thought she was pretty and told me so. You’d have let me know I wasn’t the only woman in the world and thought me better off for it, when all I wanted was to be. I made up an alternate life where you and my stylist had gotten those tattoos together, while we were together, how Steve Zissou’s toque was meant to serve as a forever reminder that as hard as I tried, there’d always be another one of me and that you’d find them eventually. I looked at the scissors and the razors and the flat iron and thought about which ones I could use to cut that tattoo off her thigh.

But it wouldn’t be good for the baby.