A Song in the Daylight. Paullina Simons
whole world would know how she had loved it all.”
She needed to buy only a few things; why was she still stumbling around the store thirty-five minutes later? After school today, Asher had an orthodontist appointment and a guitar lesson. And Emily had cello and voice. How did Larissa manage to allow the last few minutes of her afternoon to be vacuumed into aisles of self-rising flours and Cajun spices and new milk bones for Riot, into mozzarella cheese and new yogurt with antibiotic properties, which apparently she couldn’t live without? There were only three cashiers working, and one of them was on break, just leaving, or just coming back, i.e., incredibly slow. Larissa’s ankle felt sore, swollen. She couldn’t even muster a tight smile for the chronologically impaired cashier who looked all of twelve and wasn’t smiling much herself.
“Cash back?”
“What?” Larissa’s teeth were jammed together.
“Would you like some cash back?”
“No. No, thank you.” I’d like thirty minutes of my life back, can you do that?
A full fifty minutes after she walked through Stop&Shop’s automatic doors, she slid out of the automatic doors, leaning on the grocery cart for support. It was cold, her coat was unbuttoned, her capri-style sweats fit over the boot-cast but also bared her good ankle. She had forgotten the scarf, the gloves. What might it be like to stick her wet tongue on the metal handles of the cart, she wondered, as she pushed it slowly across the parking lot. And what if her tongue got stuck? She and Che used to do that when they were kids. The image of herself—nearly forty, limping, freezing cold, coat opened, shirt too thin, six bags of food in front of her, on a sub-zero January weekday bent over with her wet tongue crazy-glued to the steel handlebars—made Larissa laugh.
Her face still bearing the lines of the smile, she inched past a young man sitting astride a shiny flash motorcycle, about to pull a helmet over his ears. He wore the motorcycle. Brown leather jacket, jeans, black boots. The helmet was metallic silver, to not match the burnt yellow and black of the bike. He smiled at her.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
Larissa looked for her car. Flustered by her idiotic thoughts and her vapid grin, she tried to cover it up with a shrug, and a “Oh, nothing,” grimace now frozen on her face, morphing into polite stranger nod. He spoke again. “You’re a trooper, walking around in a cast. Need help?”
“No, no. I’m fine.” She averted her eyes, not for any reason other than she tried not to make prolonged eye contact with male strangers, especially male strangers wearing bikes and jeans and boots and shiny helmets. “Thanks, anyway.”
He got off his bike and came toward her.
“How long in a cast?”
“Uh—about four weeks, I guess.”
“You broke it at Christmastime?” He whistled. “Bad luck. How’d you do it? Skiing?”
“Skiing? No. I don’t ski. I just—it’s silly.” She still wasn’t looking at him, but she did slow down. Not stopped—just slowed down. “It’s my ankle. I tripped coming out of the hair-dresser’s.”
Now he laughed. “You tripped coming out of the hairdresser’s? Oh, that’s rich.”
“Well, I didn’t think so at the time.”
“You’re right—that is worth laughing about.”
“Really?” she said noncommittally, wanting to breathe into her cold hands. “That’s not why—” the image inside her head still of her slithery tongue stuck on the metal bars. God! She stopped walking.
“I’ve noticed,” he said with a teasing air of forced formality, “one thing about women based upon years of careful observation …”
“Years?” Larissa muttered, drawing attention to his youth. “Really.”
His chuckle was easy. “Yes, really. I grew up with a mother, a grandmother, and two older sisters. So. As I was saying. After years of observation, I’ve concluded that women take great care with their hair.”
Larissa forgot for a moment how cold she was. “You don’t say.”
The boy refused to be baited. “Even in the neon supermarket on a shotgun Monday afternoon, women take more care with their hair than with any other part of their appearance.” He spoke of it like he was reading poetry, like it was his life’s philosophy, while Larissa wanted to button her coat so he wouldn’t catch a glimpse of her frumpy sweats. He spoke of hair the way Ezra spoke about the metaphysical reality of the soul!
“It’s always clean,” he continued, “it’s styled, moussed, gelled. Women think about hair. No one just gets out of the shower in their empty house and towel dries.”
“What did you say?” She squinted. Empty house? “Not even you?” His hair was sticking out every which way till Sunday. He took off his helmet to show her his kinky helmet head, thin brown-blond hair frizzing in all directions.
“Except for me,” he replied cheerfully. “But women think more about their hair than about anything else, would you agree?”
“I don’t agree.”
“No? You don’t think about what to put in it, how to curl it, thin it, thicken it, style it, shape it? How to put it up, how to braid it?” He pointed to an older woman pushing her cart past them through the thick cold. “Take a look,” he said. “She’s wearing a sheepskin rug for a coat, and her husband’s loafers, but her hair is blown dry and immaculate and shining! No makeup, but the hair is perfect. Like the Werewolf, baby.”
Werewolf! Larissa stared at him, wondering at what point to take offense and at what point to laugh. His eyes were merry. He clearly thought he was being clever. “I don’t mean it as a criticism,” he assured her. “I mean it as a compliment. Hair rules the world.”
Okay, she’ll play on this cold Monday. Why not?
“Hair and shoes,” she said.
“Yes!” he heartily agreed. “Everything in the middle, you can pretty much not waste your time or money on.”
It was true. Did anyone care that she spent twenty-seven bucks on Chanel mascara instead of six bucks on Maybelline?
She didn’t say anything, just squinted in the sunlight. He put the helmet back on his head. In the few seconds of silence between them, Larissa’s mind traveled from hair to boots, from mascara to jeans and in between belts and necklaces saw the other thing that both men and women noticed. Probably third after hair and shoes.
The swell between the breasts. Cleavage.
“I’ll tell you a little secret,” he said. “Men never notice shoes.”
“Some men.”
“Not straight men.”
She laughed. “So not shoes but hair?”
“Yes,” he said. “Hair we notice.”
And breasts. She hoped the sunlight would keep him out of the expression in her eyes. But he said nothing—in that pointed way people say nothing when they’re thinking about things that can’t be said.
“Jewelry?” She was fishing for other things in the water.
“If it’s sparkly, come-hither jewelry, yes.”
Come-hither jewelry! Now she said nothing in that pointed way people say nothing when they’re thinking about things that can’t be said.