CUTTING - short fiction
A work-place story from the out-of-print collection, Learning to Live Indoors, pub'd 1998 by Porcupine's Quill Press, Ottawa, Canada
Geoff and Ryan were always new. They came from back east; that’s all Ryan ever said. People—women—never cared where they were from, really. Women wanted to take Ryan into their houses. They didn’t want to know who had left him in the basket on the step. He would be all theirs, and he would never leave.
He always did though, and he took Geoff, his son, with him.
They would move on to the next place. and Ryan would talk: about freedom, about never saying sorry, about letting go. “You never know if something is yours, until you let it go.”
Geoff wrote those words into his notebook; maybe they would be important. He felt as if he was always waiting for something from his dad. A year before, at fifteen, he’d left high school, but he held on to the bound notebook that Ms Lindsay had given him. He filled it with his thoughts as if his head couldn’t possibly be enough for them, and he kept it in his knapsack, his knapsack he’d had since grade seven. There’d been too many schools in his life, too many teachers. Ms Lindsay was the last, and the first he’d remember.
“What are you writing in there?” Ryan asked, peering over his shoulder, breathing smoke, at the stop in Moose Jaw.
Geoff closed the book.
~~~
Ryan was good with other people’s money; he was a salesman and a gambler. He found the hair salon and Fred after one walk through the first mall they came to. “He has room for us. Sit here.” And Geoff sat on the mall bench next to the planter growing cigarette butts, and waited while Ryan met Fred the owner, and convinced him that he could do something with the back room that had been empty for six years: a fitness club, with weights and bicycles and scales and shelves and shelves of high-priced diet supplements and replacements. They could start with the supplements and stretch classes, he convinced Fred.
“Ha!” said Fred. He liked the idea.
Ryan and Geoff rented a motel room nearby.
~~~
In the staff room there was always Corinne, eighteen and pregnant. She’d worked the shampoo basins since she was fourteen. And Jackie, with all the efficiency of a high school graduate. She would own her own salon someday, she let everyone know.
Carla came in often on Friday nights, when her mother would braid her long thick hair, and always on Saturdays, when she’d pass time in the staff room, quarrel with her mother, watch scissors move. One Saturday, she said she’d come to work.. Two shampoo girls had not shown up for work the days before. They’d probably quit; that’s how it went.
First, Sonia argued with Carla, and from the staff room their voices were loud. At least, Sonya’s was. “I knew having you here every Saturday would come to this. I want you to go home.”
But Carla wouldn’t go.
Sonia stood in the doorway of the staff room, hands grasping both sides of the doorframe, as if she were a gate and would not allow Carla to pass. “I want you to go home.”
Fred stepped up behind her then. “Sonia,” he said. “We can all hear you. and we’re two girls short today. Carla knows how to shampoo.”
“See?” said Carla, and she slipped under her mother’s arm.
Sonia turned on Fred. “No way my daughter’s going to become a dropout, varicose-cursed, broken-backed hairdresser!”
Fred laughter. “Ha!”
Sonia lifted her hand as if to strike him, but he moved his short, thick body away. He was good at that.
Two girls missing. On a Saturday that meant four hands and felt like twice that. Sonia gave up to thin-lipped silence, and Carla greeted clients and led them to the basins.
“Come here,” Corinne said to Geoff. “Watch.” She showed him how to shampoo then, how to cup his hand around the ear, the nape—as she called it—and the hairline. “Massage like so. rinse. Condition, especially the ends. Rinse.” She was too quick. Her seven-month belly was incidental. But Geoff was quick, too, and followed every move.
And he was good. Carla grinned at him as they rubbed circles into clients’ scalps. She’d learned when she was a kid, practiced on her mother and her mother’s clients. Perhaps Sonia should never have taught her; why teach a skill and expect a child not to use it.
~~~
Carla was born the day before Geoff was. It was an odd thought, to think of her as an almost-twin, but her hair colour, so close to Geoff’s, made it easier. Though hers was thick and ripple-curled like a woman’s in an ancient painting..
Sonia could have been Geoff’s mother, with her Italian eyes, her wiry grey hair, at one time the colour of her daughter’s, the colour of Geoff’s mother.
Or perhaps it was the cross clinging to her neck that made Geoff liken the two women. There was something so familiar about it: the heaviness and the tired glint of worn diamond bits. He could remember such a cross from when he was young, swinging over him as he lay to sleep, and scratching his nose. He remembered the whiteness at his mother’s throat, and a scent as she put her lips to his forehead.
It must have been his mother he remembered. He must have been very young.
But it was old memory. Now there was Sonia, with her greying hair, so-fine lines running from her top lip, deep laugh lines like parentheses around her mouth. she could have been Geoff’s mother, except his mother hadn’t lived.
He preserved her memory with care, though, and allowed her to age.
~~~
Corinne saw Geoff shampooing and bellowed, “Fine job. You might as well do something while that dad of yours hangs around here.” She didn’t like Ryan. She seemed to know without being told that for Ryan there were always back rooms to be had and businesses to be ventured. She seemed to know that he carried his life in a bundle on the end of a stick, and his soul he’d left behind. She didn’t like his father, Geoff could tell.
Fred did, though. Ryan brought money into the shop, and women. Women who poked their noses through the back door and asked if anyone had time to trim their hair. Fred fitted them in with somebody. Corinne began to do more cuts and it was good to keep Corinne happy. She never did thank Ryan. She seemed to believe that what fell her way was hers.
She did ask Ryan once why he wore such soft shoes. “I can’t hear you coming and going. You scare the baby outta me, the way you sneak up behind.”
“Has he always worn those?” she asked Geoff.
~~~
Sonia ignored Ryan. She was so busy she ignored everyone. When she wasn’t cutting hair, she was sketching styled heads on bits of paper: curious little renderings, often not complimentary, but her clients must not have had a problem with her honesty. Even in the brief weeks since Ryan and Geoff had come, there’d been a full cycle of Sonia’s clients returning to her. The sketches would be blown into and caught in the corner of her work station, like a pile of leaves, rustling until Carla came along and gathered them into the garbage. Or they’d be trapped in the spikes of a brush or crumpled in the perm-rod tray. None of her clients dared to bring magazine photos.
Late Friday afternoon Sonia sat on the one chair in the staff room, her knees crossed, one leg wrapped in an odd fashion around the other—she was so thin—and her pencil prodded and flicked at the paper. She made Geoff think of how he’d imagined a student of art: the way Sonia studied a head, a line her, a bit of bone, contour. Then, again at her paper, her brow furrowed.
It was the grey in her hair that reminded Geoff she was not an art student; she was Sonia, hairdresser, old enough to be his mother, raging mother to Carla. And there was the lab coat. Sonia was old school, and wore a lab coat, with a row of silver alligator-mouth hair clips across a pocket. In the other pocket, though, were two or three charcoal pencils, and on the outside of that pocket, at the seam, there was the sooty rub of pencil ends.
“Your drawing,” said Geoff. “Where did you learn?”
She didn’t tell him where; she told him when. “The summer before Carla was born. I drew in the park and people paid for my drawings.” Her voice was not regretful, but still rather wistful.
“You like to draw?”
“Yes.”
“Do you draw anything else?”
“No. Not now.”
Geoff didn’t know what ‘now’ meant.
“You’re doing well with your shampooing.” She changed the subject and commended Geoff. With the side of her thumb, she blurred the hairline in the sketch, and she didn’t look at him. “Ever think about being a haircutter?”
She didn’t see the shake of his head.
“It’s not a bad thing,” she said. She breathed out loudly as if she’d been holding her air.
So it was all right for Geoff, but what of Carla?
Corinne came into the staff room, stood in the open doorway. Sonia reached out, put her hands over Corinne’s belly. She stared at the expanse of denim jumper. “He does move a lot, doesn’t he?”
Corinne shrugged. “What’s a lot? He’s my first, remember?”
“Are you eating well?”
“I do what I have to,” said Corinne.
Sonia untwisted her legs. “Sit, Corinne,” she said. She stood and was gone.
Corinne sat, took a swallow of the cold coffee Sonia had left behind, and poked a finger at the oxblood leather wallet beside it.
“Whose is that?” Jackie asked from the doorway. She was rubbing lanolin into the raw of her hands.
“Must be Sonia’s,” Corinne answered.
“It is,” Geoff said. Corinne and Jackie glanced at him as if they’d noticed him for the first time.
Corinne murmured, “I’ve wondered how old she is. She goes on like such an old woman.”
“Well.” Jackie’s joints were like hinges and swung in angles. Ninety degrees, and her hand plucked the oxblood, cracked open the fastening.
“Oh my.” Her voice was quiet. “She’s thirty-two.” She snapped it closed, dropped it beside Corinne.
“Sonia was sixteen when Carla was born.” Jackie stared at Corinne. “No wonder she stares at us and mutters about when she was our age.”
“No wonder,” said Corinne, “she sends the kid to Catholic girls’ school.”
They both laughed, and Ryan appeared in the doorway.
“Damn you, soft-shoe man.” Corinne stopped her laugh and bellied past him.
Ryan looked at Geoff. “What was that about?" His voice was low, and Geoff had to move close to hear his words. “Well?” He waited with a slow smile.
“They were talking about Sonia. Carla.”
He eased forward. “Carla? What about Carla?”
It was a small room.
“Sonia was sixteen when Carla was born.” Over his shoulder, Geoff could see one of Fred’s clients approaching the basins. Everyone else was busy.
“I have a shampoo to do,” said Geoff.
“A shampoo?” Ryan half-whisper came to him. “I thought you were going to write. Or was that before you left school?”
Geoff heard his chuckle, the crackle of a match lit, and he smelled a puff of smoke as Ryan disappeared into the back.
~~~
Mrs. Roland smiled at Geoff. “They have you at the basins now, do they?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Geoff said.
Her head sank into the moulded sink-front. “And how’s that father of yours doing?”
“Fine.”
“Business going well?”
“Busy enough.”
“Your father is quite the man.” Her eyes closed as the water sprayed from Geoff’s thumb. “If I were younger…” She put her hands under her ribs and laughed, but she’d been suffering from bronchitis and it was not a pleasant sound. “Anyway,” she concluded.
Geoff wrapped a stained towel around her hairline. “Do you want a rinse?”
She jerked fully upright, surprisingly quick. “Im not ready for blue hair yet, son.”
~~~
“What do you think?” Sonia showed Geoff a sketch of Carla. A three-quarter profile, her face tilted, turned slightly, to show a braid begun near her temple, snaking to her nape, up to her forehead, draped over one eye and trailing, ending over a shoulder, bare.
For this drawing, she’d taken more time: for Carla’s earrings—gold hoops Sonia had bought for her birthday—and more time to work on her eyelashes, individual and soft in the shadows that were under Carla’s eyes.
“It’s for her graduation,” she said.
“That’s more than a year off, isn’t it?”
“I like to play with ideas.” She held the sketch to the light, and turned to Geoff. “Perhaps some day you can go back. To school.”
And be a good boy. Geoff smiled at her. I am a good boy, he thought.
“How did your father feel when you left school?” she asked.
“Ryan?” That stopped Geoff. “I don’t know.” It had never occurred to him that Ryan felt anything at all about it. Ryan was a man of action and he hadn’t done anything. He just talked about freedom.
~~~
Once Geoff had refused to go home; home was always a B&B or a studio apartment, most often a motel room.
He hadn’t really refused though, not like Carla had. He’d said yes as he always did, and then he’d gone to the park, but the park was lonely, and he was home before Ryan was, and Ryan never knew he’d been anywhere else.
When Geoff was very young, Ryan had said, “I’ll take you home.” And Ryan would reassure the woman he was with that someone would be there with Geoff when he left his son.
As Geoff grew older, Ryan said, “You can go home now.” His voice was always muted; no one could hear the wheedling or the force in it. Ryan had never yelled at Geoff; Geoff knew that most people would find that remarkable.
Geoff had learned that the TV could be friendly, and they usually lived on busy streets where, from the window, he could watch the night or the long afternoon. Ryan was fond of afternoons.
~~~
Friday evenings at the shop were long and by the time the last client had left, everyone was too tired to go home.
A second wind would blow through the place then and someone would suggest doing someone’s hair. In variably the person chosen would be Sonia. She had the air of a horse and could take colour after colour. Two days later the colour shed.
“My grey laughs at you,” Sonia said. “But try again.” And she’d laugh herself.
So Carla took the tint bowl and a brush from the cupboard, and with the others suggesting concoctions in a code of letters and numbers, Carla would mix. Geoff stood and watched as she parted the hair, and pushed mulberry foam at the roots. Ryan watched too.
Usually he leaned in the doorway. That night, after the oxblood had let its secret, he stood on the other side of Sonia. Though she had her eyes closed, she must have felt his breath on her shoulder. She took no notice, it seemed. And Ryan watched Carla, the slightest smile on his face. He was quite the man.
Geoff moved to the doorway and watched. He could see Carla’s face, the quarter that was missing in her mother’s drawing, just a pale crescent. she never looked up from her careful colouring, never looked up to Ryan, but now and then her mouth curved with something he said to her, words no one else could hear. Sonia’s eyes stayed closed.
It would have bean so easy for Geoff to walk across the scratched tiles to the staff room, join Corinne there, stand beside her with their backs to the mumbling towel dryer, the vibrations a long-day’s massage. He could fold towels into four, his mind with them, neatly, neatly.
But he stayed where he was, though he could see Corinne in the room, head down.
He watched Ryan, his father. Ryan worked until Carla laughed.
Then Sonia looked up; Geoff could see her in the mirror. Just a trace of red at her cheeks, her neck her curiously convex breastbone rounded like armour and swelling from her green v-neck.
Ryan met Sonia’s eyes in the mirror and everyone could hear his words: “Carla, you are beautiful like your mother.” For the briefest moment he touched Sonia’s shoulder, but she pulled forward, away, and then was gone, heading for the basins and calling over her shoulder.
“The colour won’t take anyway. Rinse it out, Carla.” And Carla followed.
Ryan stayed where he was for a moment, his hand still out in mid-air, palm down. He seemed to forget his hand, and he peered into the mirror when he thought no one would notice. Geoff had seen him do that before: stare into his reflection as if he was looking for something.
Ryan followed Sonia and Carla, and Geoff could hear the rumble of his voice at the basins.
Then Geoff did join Corinne in the staff room and folded towels.
“Ever thought about apprenticing?” she asked.
“Never thought I’d be a hairdresser.”
“There’s worse things,” she said. Her entire belly rolled but she didn’t seem to notice.
There was a noise from the basins. The blast of a laugh that Geoff recognized as Ryan’s, and a shout from Sonia, which was suddenly cut off as if she’d clapped her hand to her mouth. Her shoes click-clacked to the staff room.
“You’re dripping wet,” Corinne observed, and handed Sonia a worn towel.
Sonia threw it down and reached into the warm pile on the dryer for another, which she rapped tightly around her head.
Carla stood in the doorway. “Mum,” she said softly—Geoff had never hear her speak like that before—”Mum, he only wants me there once in awhile when he’s really busy. Fred says it’s okay.”
Sonia’s voice squeezed. “I’ll not have you working in the backroom with him.”
“But I’ll be working as a receptionist, not a a shampoo girl. That’s what you want for me, isn’t it? Something else?”
“Something else. Not anything else.” Sonia had picked up the old worn towel and was pulling it between her hands. Suddenly she looked at Geoff, realized he was the son of the man she was speaking of. The towel shredded, and she handed the pieces to him.
“Come.” She took Carla’s shoulder and drove her through the shop and out. The door to the parking lot slowly closed behind them, and Geoff could feel wind and raindrops. Fall had come, it felt.
When Geoff turned to Corinne behind him—for once she was silent—she was standing absolutely still, her arms wrapped tightly around her belly.
“Ryan.” Geoff started after him, still at the basins.
His father was sitting in a shampoo chair, puling the green from a fern leaf.
“Why don’t we leave this place?” Geoff asked.
“Leave?”
“Carla’s a day younger than me,” Geoff said. “She could be my sister.”
Ryan stood. “Not if she’s a day younger.” His laugh was in his throat, and as he walked past, he rubbed the top of Geoff’s head.
~~~
Tuesday, Fred called to Geoff. “Shampoo, please.” He trotted to the rear of the shop. When he sat in one of the chairs and leaned back, his feet stuck out and splayed. “A good scrub,” he directed.
But he cut Geoff off halfway through. “One shampoo’s enough,” and he sat up, water splashing down his back. He walked away, sponging his hair with a towel, forcing some shape into it. He turned with a grin. “How’s that for an interview, eh? A job’s yours if you want it. Corinne’s taught you well.”
“Mrs. Wagner!” he bellowed at his next client. “Take a seat!”
“Me next, please,” Carla stood in front of Geoff, her fingers picking at a pleat in her uniform skirt. She must have just gotten off the bus after school. Her hair was wet already, with rain water. The hood on the back of her coat was soaked and pulled away from her neck. Why wouldn’t she wear her hood? She stripped her coat off, then her burgundy issue-sweater.
“You’ve stained your shirt,” Geoff said, noticing the deep red on the shoulders of her white cotton.
“Have I?” She put her head back into the basin and closed her eyes. When clients closed their eyes, they didn’t want to talk.
Her scalp was hot under Geoff’s fingers, moving through her thick hair, pushing water into it, shielding her forehead, cupping her ears. She opened her eyes as he tilted her head to catch a corner behind an ear, and he lost control of the hose and sprayed his shirt front. He wished she would close her eyes again.
“Mum’s going to do my hair,” she said.
“What’s she going to do?”
“Just a trim—the ends are dry. It’ll still be long. We’ve been growing it forever. for my grad.”
“Your mum was working on a sketch.” Geoff wrapped the towel loosely around Carla’s hair, glad her eyes were finally off his face. He led the way to Sonia’s seat and pulled a wide-tooth pick through Carla’s hair.
Sonia said goodbye to her client, took the pick away from him. She combed Carla’s hair back, and curly bits escaped her hairline.
Sonia didn’t see Ryan as he moved close, closer, plucked the sketch of Carla from her station. Not until she stood and bumped his elbow. He held the paper in his hand and his fingers traced the snake of braid on the paper, and the bare shoulder. “Nice,” he murmured.
Sonia’s pale skin was white—whiter than Geoff had ever seen. Her face was so tight and wrung-out. she combed and combed, and finally clipped up most of Carla’s hair and bent to snip an inch from the ends.
Geoff heard her swallow then. She loosened the next section of hair, combed it down, stooped again. Carla should have stood; Sonia should have sat on the chair. That was how long hair was done. But she stooped, and missed Ryan walking away with the sketch. Or maybe she didn’t.
With the end of her comb she re-parted the second section and wound it back into the hair gathered and clipped to Carla’s crown. The first section was in its place again, ends trimmed, curls wisping as the hair began to dry.
Sonia snipped high across the back of Carla’s neck, and the long hair fell silently to the floor.
There was a sound from Carla. Not even a syllable. More than air intake, though.
Sonia pulled down the next section and with her fingertips, she pushed Carla’s head down. That long neck stretched forward. The scissors snip-snipped over the guide of the first section. Next section. Next. Sonia drew up Carla’s head with a single finger. The girl’s eyes were tightly closed. Sonia cut away around her face. Other side, next section, next, all so methodical, schooled. So unlike how she usually cut, when she simply parted the hair, pushed it loosely into place, away, with her comb, while her clips were scattered over her station or still at her pocket edge.
Sonia cut, parted, clipped, cut, and Geoff watched as hair collected at the base of the chair.
Carla’s eyes were closed until it was over, and Sonia was combing straight back. As the comb left her scalp, Carla opened her eyes, dry. A second sound came from her throat. Just an oh. And then she was gone, through the backroom—Ryan’s room—and out the door. Geoff imagined her through the parking lot, the roadway, into the fall rain that felt like now that it had begun, it’d never end.
Sonia followed Geoff to the staff room She poured a coffee, but spilled it over the bare toes of her open-cut shoe. She cried out in pain and yanked the shoe off, ran it under the tap, water pouring through the opening in the front. She pulled it over her foot, and water dribbled out. There was a rude sucking sound as she stepped forward. “Damn.” She leaned over—one hand gripped the counter—and removed both shoes. The cross swung heavily from her v-neck, across her face, and she caught it and sent it over her shoulder, where it slithered on its chain to her back. She stood, without shoes, shorter, the chain binding her neck, and the receptionist’s voice came hesitantly through the crackly, seldom-used intercom.
“Sonia? Are you there? Your next client is here. Sonia?”
Then a second voice, chirpy and sing-song. “Make me beautiful, Sonia-girl!”
That would be Mrs. Hunter.
“I’ll shampoo her,” Geoff said.
Mrs. Hunter was halfway to Sonia’s chair, when he met her. “This way, please.” I sound like I’ve been doing this for so long. Like Corinne, he thought.
He shampooed three times. The second time he pretended to use the wrong shampoo and apologized for having to do it again. Mrs. Hunter was beginning to breathe deeply and her head was dropping farther into the basin when Sonia looked around the corner. Her shoes were on.
“That’ll do,” she said.
~~~
That night, alone, Geoff packed the knapsack he’d had for so long, and he left on a slow bus, on a ferry, to the next city. He knew Ryan wouldn’t follow him.
There he found someplace else to shampoo and learn more about cutting.