by Sarah Ellis
Charlotte didn’t really remember Marilyn. In fact, she had never heard of Marilyn. But it wasn’t a real question.
“Of course she had Vaseline to grease her valves. So I decided to go as a sea urchin. I gooped up the ends of my hair and it really worked. Even Helen, who was the flute player in our group and such a snob, even she said it was good. But then the next day I tried to shampoo it out. Nothing happened. The shampoo just slid off the goop. One of the nice kitchen ladies gave me vinegar and I tried that. It hardly helped at all. Then she gave me some dishwashing soap and all that did was make my scalp itch. I was getting desperate. Helen, who was over being nice, kept saying that I looked like a greaser and that I was an April Fool’s joke.”
April Fool’s. Charlotte had overlooked it completely. No school and time out of time.
“That sounds horrible.”
“Completely! Anyway, after a day of humiliation this string bass player named Serge came over. I hadn’t noticed him before. Well, you never notice string bass players. They’re all shy and hide behind their instruments.”
“Hmmmm.” Dawn was given to statements like this about musicians. Oboists were out of tune. Bass clarinetists were nerdy. Trumpeters were bossy. Charlotte couldn’t argue because she failed recorder in grade three and didn’t know any other musicians except Dawn.
“So Serge said he’d be happy to cut my hair. He said that his dad was a hairdresser and had taught him some stuff and that he’d been cutting his little sister’s hair for years. So then I remembered that I was going to be a different person at camp and I decided to be brave so I said yes.”
“You’re kidding! You let some almost complete stranger cut your hair?”
“I know, crazy, but it worked. That afternoon, at break time, Serge set me up on the chair behind the auditorium and found some proper scissors somewhere and gave me a pixie cut! Oh, Charlie, you have to see it right now, right now this very minute and second. Can I come over?”
“Sure. I’ve got some news, too.”
“Okay. See you.”
* * *
“Do you like it? Do you really truly like it?”
Charlotte met Dawn at the front door and they went up to her room.
She really truly did like Dawn’s new hair. It made her look light and floaty and ready for anything.
“It looks great. Kind of Twiggy. That guy’s a good hairdresser. Hey, did you see the thing about Mrs. Radger?”
Dawn didn’t seem to hear the question.
“But Serge? Of course, everybody found out about the haircut and he got a lot of teasing — hairdresser teasing. But then, surprise surprise, mean Helen stood up for him and started saying dumb things like how strong and masculine the string bass was. This is just the sort of sucky thing you would expect from a flutist. And then, no surprise either, Serge fell for it. Bass players are not that bright. Anyway, they spent the rest of camp wrapped around each other. I could have told Serge what a bad choice he was making because Maxine in the second violins who is from Helen’s school? She told me that Helen already has a boyfriend …”
Helen … Maxine … first chairs … girls who play trombone. What was that smell? Charlotte’s stomach perked up. Was Uncle Claude baking? Muffins, maybe?
“Charlie? Charlotte!”
“Um, what?”
“Bangs down or bangs pushed back. What do you think?”
Charlotte thought it didn’t make much difference but she knew the rules of the game. “Oh, pushed back. Definitely.”
“I might have to use spray then. Otherwise they just fall forward.”
Enough about hair. Charlotte was just about to bring out the newspaper article when Dawn leaned forward.
“So what about Dodger Boy? Is he still here? Which room does he have? Is he here now?”
“He’s at work but he’s usually here in the mornings.”
“Did you get to hang out with him?”
“Yeah. We went to the library and did a shift at the store but mostly we just sat around and talked. He’s easy to talk to.”
“Luck-kee! Okay, so tell everything. Does he have a girlfriend back home?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know? How can you spend hours talking to him and not ask? What did you talk about?”
“Everything. Music. War. Americans and Canadians. Women’s liberation. Unteens. Whether people are good.”
“What do you mean, whether people are good.” Dawn sounded annoyed.
“Tom Ed says that he believes that people are born good and they get messed up by bad stuff that happens to them but that his father believes that people are born bad and they need to have the badness tamed out of them.”
Dawn rolled her eyes. “That’s what you talked about? Boring.”
It wasn’t boring. It made her brain stretch.
Dawn tucked her hair behind her ears. “Anyway, that’s not the kind of thing you talk to boys about!”
“He’s not a boy.”
“Of course he’s a boy.”
“I mean he’s not a boy like that. He’s not like a how-to-talk-to-boys boy.”
“How to Talk to Boys” was the name of an article from Seventeen that had gone around the grade-seven girls. Charlotte had made fun of it and Dawn had joined right in. What was happening to her friend?
Dawn pushed back her bangs. “Well, it sounds pretty boring. Of course he’s really polite.”
“He wasn’t being polite. And anyway, not as boring as Helen and Marian and a whole bunch of other people that I’ve never even heard of and that have made you start talking like a teenager.”
“Marilyn! Not Marian, Marilyn. Sorry that I bored you. Besides, Charlotte, when are you going to get over the Unteen thing?”
Get over it? Unteen was their best thing. Their best idea. It wasn’t something to get over. How long had Dawn been thinking this way?
“You’re mad.”
“I’m not mad. I’m just saying that it’s time.”
The thing about Dawn was that she would never give an inch in an argument, never not once. She would never even admit that an argument was going on. Charlotte knew she was just the opposite. She could smell the faintest whiff of tension at fifty paces and she just couldn’t stand it so she would do any kind of patch-up dance to make it go away. It was the way she and Dawn were together.
But giving up on Unteen?
And anyway, why was she always the one doing the patching?
She looked over at Dawn, who was rearranging the shells on the windowsill.
It wasn’t just the new hair. She looked like a total stranger.
Ten
The kitchen counters were crowded with baking. The sink was full of bowls and a floury Uncle Claude was punching down some dough.
Dawn had left. Charlotte had tried a patch-up, changing the subject back to hair, but it was all stilted and stupid.
Charlotte stood in the kitchen door and felt like crying. Punching something also looked good.
“Can I help?”
“Sure. Good timing. Knead this.”
The dough rolled under Charlotte’s hands, smooth and soft and springy.
“How come you’re making so many things at the same time?”
“I’m going back to the bush tomorrow. Got the call yesterday. I’m baking for the freezer here. Survival food for you guys.”
“You cook here and you cook up there. You should take a holiday.”
“That’s what Gloria says. She wants to take the Fun Bus to Reno. Maybe come summer.”
Gloria lived across the line in Washington State. She had a mobile home and grown-up children. Sometimes Dad teased Claude about marrying her but Uncle Claude said that Gloria had had enough of husbands, which suited him just fine because he didn’t think he was husband material. She and Uncle Claud
e went on holidays together.
“Dawn go home?”
“Yeah.” Charlotte turned over the dough and slapped it down on the counter. The sugary smell from the oven was making her feel sick to her stomach.
“You two good?”
“Yeah. Well, no. She’s mad at me but she’s pretending she isn’t.”
“Hmmm. Too bad. You don’t want to fall out with your friend. Why don’t you invite her for dinner? The whole gang’s coming, Miss Biscuit and all. Dodger Boy. Even James, if he can tear himself away from microeconomics. I’m thinking Swiss steak.”
Charlotte hesitated. Why should she make the first move? Why should she do the patching? After all, Dawn started it.
But her stomach won. Anything was better than going around feeling like throwing up.
Dawn answered the phone excited and bouncy, happy to come for dinner. It was as though the morning had never happened. As though she hadn’t gone all cold and too busy to hang around. As though she hadn’t left without saying “see you” or “phone me.”
When Charlotte hung up she spent some minutes untangling the phone cord. Her stomach had calmed down.
She was just going to forget the morning. If she could.
* * *
At dinner, Tom Ed was model polite as usual, complimenting Dawn’s hair and asking about music camp and quizzing Miss Biscuit about their squirrels. As Charlotte watched him charming everybody and juggling his cutlery (for Swiss steak he used the side of his fork as a knife, a handy approach) she was amazed at how much she knew about him — small things that added up to big.
Were all Americans like this? So willing to tell you about themselves? Or was it just Tom Ed?
The feeling at the table was so good-natured that even James got sociable.
“Did you drive any good cars today?”
As usual, he didn’t look at Tom Ed and addressed his question to the bowl of scalloped potatoes.
“Sure did — ’66 Dodge Charger.”
“That was the last year with the Fratzog emblem on the grill as well as the trunk hatch, eh?”
“Nope, they had that in ’67 as well. But, on the subject of cool cars, I’ve got a job tomorrow with the coolest.”
“Sunday?” said Miss Biscuit.
“Yes, ma’am. They have to get a car to some place called 100 Mile House. Have you heard of that town?”
Miss Biscuit had indeed heard of 100 Mile House and they proceeded to tell a story about a British nobleman who built a lodge there, back in the old days.
“What’s the car?” James asked the carrots.
“New Dodge Super Bee convertible.”
“No!”
“It’s a great assignment. I get time and a half for Sunday, expenses, and I get to drive one of the coolest cars in the world.”
“Are you going there and back in the same day?” asked Dad. “That’s a long drive.”
“Yes,” said Tom Ed. “I’ll be leaving very early.”
“Can I come?”
The words were out before Charlotte actually thought them up.
Everyone laughed. (Well, not James. He just looked annoyed.) But then it quickly seemed to come around to real.
“I’d certainly appreciate the company,” said Tom Ed.
“Are you allowed to have a passenger?” said Mom.
“Yes, ma’am. They said I could.”
It got noisy. Miss Biscuit was wondering if the luxury car was for the Marquess of something-or-other. Uncle Claude was clearing the plates. Dad was quizzing Tom Ed on his highway-driving experience. James was asking the pickle dish about front bumper design.
But there was one silent pool. Dawn, completely quiet and intense, was looking at Charlotte with laser eyes.
“Can Dawn come, too?”
Tom Ed did his slow smile. “That would be fine with me.”
Of course then there had to be phone calls where Mom talked to Dawn’s mom and Dad talked to Dawn’s dad and then it made sense to have a sleepover because of an early departure and Dawn had to go home to get pajamas and a change of clothes.
* * *
“Where is 100 Mile House a hundred miles from, anyway?” Charlotte launched the question over the edge of the bed to floor level where Dawn was on an air mattress.
“Charlotte, we really need to go to sleep. We have to wake up at five.”
Was Dawn being sensible or was she still being kind of mad?
“Okay. You’re right. Goodnight.”
Charlotte was the opposite of sleepy. “Maybe it’s a hundred miles from Vancouver but I think it’s more. Or you could go straight up a hundred miles and you’d be at, like, Sputnik. But they didn’t have Sputnik when Lord Whatshisname went there so that can’t be it.”
Breathe, breathe, slight sniffle, turn over, squeak of air mattress. Sigh.
“Then again you could go straight down. Then you’d get to melted rock. Is there melted rock at a hundred miles? Is that magma? Or maybe it’s called the mantle.”
Exasperated sigh.
All right. Give up. She had offered silly and Dawn wasn’t going to play along. Maybe she would unbend by tomorrow.
Puff settled into the crook of Charlotte’s knees and purred. At least she appreciated Charlotte.
* * *
The Super Bee was amazing, bright yellow with a black band around the back and angry-wild-animal headlights.
“Top down?” asked Tom Ed. “It’ll be a bit chilly first off.”
“Down for sure,” said Charlotte.
“Definitely,” said Dawn.
The front seat was wide enough for three, even if the passengers wanted to sprawl around, which Charlotte and Dawn did.
“Who’s this for again?” Charlotte asked.
“I don’t know,” said Tom Ed. “I’m just delivering it to a dealer. Maybe for that Lord somebody that Miss Biscuit was talking about.”
Dawn raised both arms to the sky. “Oh, if only we would see somebody we know!”
“Who’s going to be car-gazing at five o’clock in the morning?”
The Bee came into its own on the highway. It floated along all well behaved, but to Charlotte it felt like Puff when she was getting herself ready to jump up onto the kitchen counter, poised to do something bad.
The radio was playing quietly. Sometimes the rhythm of the song matched the telephone poles or the broken line on the road. Charlotte pulled up the hood of her jacket to keep her hair from flying all around. She tried to stay awake but her head kept flicking forward. Dawn had conked out against the door.
The Super Bee turned and slowed.
“Breakfast time,” announced Tom Ed. “See that sign? Red’s Diner. I think we can trust somebody named Red to do a good breakfast.”
Red’s was a busy place for so early in the morning. All the booths were full of guys in baseball caps so they took a table.
Tom Ed held out the chairs. Dawn lifted her eyebrows as if to say, “Wow, manners!”
“Just to be clear,” said Tom Ed. “It’s on me. I’ve got expenses.”
Charlotte perused the menu. It was huge. You could have used it as a pup tent. She searched for the cheapest thing. It was nice of Tom Ed to treat but for sure the car dealership wasn’t paying for three. The Quintans didn’t eat out very often and never for breakfast. When they traveled, which was almost never because of the store, they carried a kettle and ate from the big red cooler.
Toast. Toast would be good. There was a little caddy for jam on the table and it had both marmalade and peanut butter, Charlotte’s favorite toast combo.
“Coffee?” said the waitress, coffee pot in hand. She was wearing an apron with frills. The frills didn’t match her voice, which was flat and bored.
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you very much.”
“Yes, please,” said
Dawn.
What? Dawn didn’t drink coffee. So much for coffee tasting like mud.
“Um, tea for me, please.”
“I’ll go ahead, shall I?” said Tom Ed. “Lumberman’s Special, side of pie and a Coke, please.”
Coke! For breakfast! Not to mention pie.
“What kind of pie?” asked the waitress.
“You look like a person who knows her pie. What would you recommend?”
The waitress brightened. “Apple’s good.”
“Then apple it will be.”
Dawn ordered the Sunshine Breakfast with the bacon option. After that it would have been ridiculous to just order toast so Charlotte followed suit. And if Tom Ed was having Coke, so were they.
Dawn sipped her coffee and dumped three more creams and a sugar into it. She shook out her pixie cut and leaned across the table.
“Is this what boys eat in Texas? Lumberman’s Special?”
“Well, it’s not called the Lumberman’s Special because we don’t have lumber. In fact where I come from we don’t have hardly any trees at all.”
“No?”
Charlotte jumped in. “Yeah, there’s a town near where Tom Ed grew up called Levelland where it really is just level, with no mountains and no trees. If you stand on a can of tuna you can see to the edge of the state.”
“Tuna?”
“More coffee?” The waitress was hovering.
“Yes, please, ma’am. This is fine coffee.”
“What’s that?” Dawn reached out and touched the back of Tom Ed’s hand. A fine white line went across the back of the knuckles.
“That’s from the shark-infested water.”
“You got bitten by a shark!” Dawn’s voice went up a few octaves and the ball caps turned.