The St. Ambrose School for Girls(19)
“A big load. I have to get out bleach spots.”
“Use all three then. The dye can’t hurt nothing.” She continues to pick up the boxes one by one and enter their price. Even though it has to be the same. “You want to prewash the clothes first. Leave ’em in wet and fill up the washer with the hottest water. Before you put the dye in with it, you need to dissolve the boxes in two cups of hot water, and do the same with a cup of salt in four cups of water—oh, and you’ll want to add a teaspoon of dish soap to that. Take out the detergent dispenser tray and start the cycle. You want to pour your dye mix in where the dispenser tray goes, followed by the salt, and then rinse that with four cups of cold water. You want your cycle to last a good thirty minutes, longer if you can. Where’s your ColorStay?”
“ColorStay?”
She looks at me with exasperation, as if I have forgotten how to tie my shoes at my age. “Go and get a box of ColorStay. You want to put that in with the load, too, so everything don’t bleed when you wash it next.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
I dutifully go back and reenter the crosshairs of the pharmacist. Returning to the front, I find myself in a five-dollar predicament. But I’m still on the planet. Or at least, I think I am.
“Is it better to have more dye or the ColorStay?” I ask. “I can’t afford it all.”
The two cashiers lean in and whisper gravely to each other, whatever transpires between them a discussion of nuclear arms race gravity—although I don’t know enough about clothing dye to tell which is the Soviet Union and which is the United States.
“Here.” My cashier pulls over a clear plastic dish, like something you’d get tuna fish salad in at a deli. “Let’s see what we have. You, too, Margie.”
The two women count out the coppers in their Give a Penny, Get a Penny dishes. Then Margie chips in a quarter of her own money and my cashier, Roni, as her name tag says, does the same. I am rung up and my five-dollar bill taken, the supplemental change they provide bridging the gap between what I require and what I can afford.
I duck my head and my eyes, mumble a thank-you, and leave quickly, before they can see that I’m teary. To keep myself together, I inform my emotional side that the reason for their aid has nothing to do with me. It’s not about a lower-middle-class girl who needs charity because an upper-class girl is being a bitch; it’s the integrity of the dyeing process. Yes, that’s why. They provided the funding because they take fabric dyeing seriously and wouldn’t feel right if the project failed.
Outside, the rain has arrived, and as I step out of the cool and dry interior of the CVS, I am hit with not just raindrops, but the prevailing humidity that took me five days to get used to, and ten minutes to acclimatize out of in the store.
I turn my face to the angry sky and let the rain fall on my cheeks to camouflage my tears.
I don’t have any salt and I’m out of money.
Maybe I’ll just stand over the open washer and cry.
chapter SEVEN
As thunder booms and lightning flashes, I know I must get back to campus in a hurry, but I feel very small and very weak, my Band-Aid ripped off by the begrudging kindness of strangers with name tags, my tender wound exposed. I have a thought that I need to toughen up, and the thought is spoken in my head in the voice of an older male, the one that identifies as that of my father, although I have no memory of what his voice actually sounds like.
You need to toughen up, it repeats.
I stop walking about three stores down. My feet just refuse to keep going. Standing there in the rain, I wonder how to restart my pedestrian engine and wish there were some kind of gas station for the energy I require. Unfortunately, fortitude is not something you can pump into somebody, and besides, no matter the price per gallon, I have no more money on me.
A car goes by heading out of town. A car goes by heading into town. I imagine the shop owners across the street staring out around their meager wares, pointing to the black-dressed girl who’s turned into a statue.
I imagine me still here at Halloween, dogs passing by and lifting their legs to piddle on my ankles, birds sitting on my head and pooping down my back. I am here at Thanksgiving. Christmas. New Year’s. Snow accumulates upon my straight and angled parts, concentrating on my shoulders where the birds perch and on the tops of my boots, over my toes. I am still here in the spring when the snow melts and the birds and the dogs come back, the former free to fly wherever they want yet subject to the cruelties of nature, the latter chained and licensed to masters who feed and care for them, lives extended through beneficent imprisonment.
As all of this rolls out not as a hypothetical, but as history about to be discovered, I am aware that my foundation is quaking again, and this scares me, especially as I feel myself step out of my body and walk forward, turning back to inspect the me statue. Especially as I picture nothing about my stance or my expression changing for decades, yet in this unaltering, altered-state reality, my hair continues to grow.
I watch as the brown roots push down the dense black ends, the length extending from my head on a fast-forward reel that has pedestrians and traffic going by at blurring speed. The ends curl up, the roots stay straight, and I see it reaching my hips, my knees, the pavement, the false black color now a minor footnote to the brown, dominant whole. I watch a municipal worker with a hose wash me down and the weight of my hair ropes with the water. I watch the water dry. The length continues to extend, even as my clothes rot off of my body, ragging away, falling free in strips like the flesh of a zombie.