Cheapskate in Love

by Booth, Skittle

  Later on the same day when he had gone to lunch with Stan, he casually asked his coworkers what they thought of his hair. He wanted to see whether Stan’s judgment was an isolated one. Bill wasn’t the type who was quickly convinced into spending money on himself, and he thought that most of Stan’s opinions were fine for someone who had a bigger paycheck. His coworkers paused at his question and looked at each other with wondering expressions. There was a smatter of mild comments in response. “It’s sort of OK.” “I’ve seen worst.” “Did you do it yourself?” Suddenly the dam of their politeness and pent-up repugnance broke—no one had given him their honest opinion about his hair before—and he was convinced that he had to take action. Katie contributed the most to his certainty. Although her words were not as personal and biting as the others, he thought that her inability to remain neutral was the most urgent sign that his hair needed fixing. “My grandfather tried to dye his hair once, and it was a mess, just like yours,” she said. He did not want to be compared to anyone’s grandfather.

  While Bill was driving around the block, so he could pass in front of the salon again and look through the window once more, a conversation took place inside that concerned him.

  “Donna,” said Catherine. “Have you seen that car that keeps driving by?”

  Donna, who was the owner of the salon, stood nearest to the window in the interior. She was busy cutting the hair of a customer. Because the front desk was situated between her and the window, she could not be clearly seen by anyone passing by in a car or on the sidewalk, and she was someone whom people would notice. In excellent shape for a woman who had reached her mid-fifties, Donna could pretend to be much younger than she was, and she did. Plastic surgery helped support the illusion. In addition to her physical attractions, she exuded a warm sensuality more common to women of a childbearing age that men of all ages found irresistible. While she had been married for more than twenty-five years, she had been frequently and secretly admired and occasionally propositioned, but she had always refused to be unfaithful. Her former husband was a policeman and very handsome. However, since they had divorced about a year ago, Donna found the attention she received from strange men much more flattering and passively encouraged it. Although she already had a much younger, jealous boyfriend, who disapproved of her showing interest in other men, she did what she wanted to. He always forgave her, and her husband now wanted her back. Like Helen of Troy, men couldn’t let go of her and fought over her. She considered her profession as a hairdresser a form of artistic expression and dressed mostly in black.

  Catherine, another stylist in the salon, stood next to Donna. She was working on Helen, who was a regular customer there. Like Donna, Catherine could see what was happening outside without being seen. They were both in the habit of gazing out the window frequently during work. There was little of interest outdoors in that town—the commercial street in front of them had intermittent pedestrian and vehicle traffic—but they had been working in the salon for so many years that the wonders of hairstyling, chair massages, and facials had been exhausted for them. Although the chance was small that they would see something new in front of the shop, they kept looking. The other way they had of passing their day was talking. They indulged in that liberally. They kept almost a constant banter going amongst themselves or with customers. They had talked so much over the years that they had an intimate knowledge of each other’s life. Neither woman was secretive. However, although the two women were good friends, entrusting personal secrets to each other and spending time together outside of work, they were quite different in several ways. Catherine didn’t have the voluptuous beauty of Donna. She was plain looking and somewhat overweight. Her excessively highlighted and permed hair, heavy makeup, and colorful clothing were all calculated attempts to compensate for her lack of prettiness. But they completely failed to attract the desires of men that Donna so effortlessly drew toward herself. In comparison with Donna’s palpable sensuality, Catherine had the personal charm of an automated voice system. The usual reaction of men to Catherine was to get away as fast as possible.

  To Catherine’s question about the circulating car, Donna replied, “Yes. That beat-up thing ought to be melted down and recycled.” Appearances mattered very much to her. She drove a new BMW.

  “Who do you think’s driving it?” Catherine asked.

  “Don’t know.”

  “What do you think they’re doing?” Catherine continued.

  “Maybe it’s an old man who’s lost. He might have forgot where he’s going. He’ll just go round and round in circles till he runs out of gas.”

  “It seems to be a man,” Catherine agreed. “He seems to be looking in here, when he drives past.”

  “Could be.”

  “Maybe you have another admirer?” teased Catherine.

  “If he is, I’m giving him to you.”

  “You ought to. You could give one to everyone here. You have enough,” Catherine complained. “Helen, would you like one of Donna’s ardent admirers?”

  “Maybe,” Helen said. “I’d have to see him first.” Helen spoke in the same light manner that Catherine had. She was quite sure, however, that she did not want one of the fellows drooling over Donna. She thought Donna’s lifestyle more suitable to someone half of Donna’s age.

  “I’ll take one,” the woman said, whose hair Donna was cutting. “I’ll take anything over what I got. Nothing could be worse. I can’t remember why I married him. He snores like a horse.”

  Catherine was about to reply, but she glanced out of the window. “Look, there he is again! Do you think he’s a stalker?” Catherine shouted excitedly, as she pointed outside.

  At Catherine’s exclamation, all ten women in the salon rushed over to the window to get a good look at the car and driver. A stalker wasn’t an every day occurrence in that town. That was big city news, and the women wanted to catch it.

  Outside, while Bill drove slowly by the salon, he saw the women in the salon looking at him. Inside, the women saw him watching them. Both parties became locked in a stare. Neither side knew what the other side was up to. They were bewildered, perturbed, and profoundly transfixed by each other. They were inseparable spectators and could not be parted. The women were partly horrified, because they imagined that they had caught sight of a stalker in brilliant daylight. Poor Bill, in return, felt all of their accusing eyes upon him. His heart pounded. Sweat seeped from his pores. His hands clenched the steering wheel. Although innocent of any crime—and guileless, simple, and naïve by nature—he was turned into the detested criminal they thought he was, simply by the strength of their glaring condemnation. He was so taken with fear at himself that he was on the edge of a trembling fit. A moment more, and he would have been twitching to pieces.

  Luckily, a car came behind him and started honking. Bill’s concentration had been so absorbed in staring and being stared at, that he had begun to drive slower than ever. His foot had stopped pressing the gas pedal, and his car had been barely rolling forward. He had no awareness of what was happening around him. He had not noticed the car come up to his rear. The driver of that car, after a few moments of proceeding at a turtle’s trot, laid on his horn for several seconds, several times in a row. Bill was so startled, he almost leaped from his pants.

  “What the...” he cursed. “This isn’t a racetrack.” He put on his brake. Rolling down his window, he stuck out his arm and angrily motioned the car behind to pass.

  “There’s no NASCAR race around here, buddy!” he shouted at the occupants. “What’s your hurry?”

  A man older than Bill was driving the other car, and there were two elderly female passengers. None of them responded to Bill, except to briefly look at him, like he was an animal at the zoo.

  “Get out of here!” Bill shouted at them, shaking his fist in the air. “I hope you get a speeding ticket!”

  While the car pulled in front of him, Bill’s Blackberry rang. He pulled his arm back in and fumbled through the stuff on
the passenger seat to find the device.

  In the salon, the women began chuckling with laughter, when they saw the supposed stalker upset by the honking. Their previous suspicions evaporated and were replaced with mockery of the stranger. They knew they weren’t watching a hardened criminal engaged in illegal activity. They returned to where they had been before rushing to the window, talking among themselves. One woman remarked, “If that man is a stalker, we could all be FBI agents.”

  Unlike the rest, Helen was silent, when she sat down in the chair where she had been. She had not said anything to anyone, since they had all rushed to the window. Looking outside, she had quickly recognized Bill’s car and saw that it was him. She knew he wasn’t capable of being a stalker, so she hadn’t watched him with the same feelings as the others, but she didn’t want to defend him either. She had simply observed how he handled an awkward situation. She suspected why he had unintentionally created the embarrassing moment for himself. He should be ridiculed for his timidness, she thought, in driving by the salon again and again, but still she considered him to have acted naturally, when he saw them staring at him and when the car behind had startled him. During that time, when all their eyes were on him, he had shown what she thought was openness and a kind of pluck. He certainly had made a fool of himself, but on her he had left a favorable impression.

  “I know who that is,” she said to Catherine, when she was seated again.

  “Who?” Catherine asked, eager for gossip.

  “It’s my neighbor Bill. I’ve known him for years. That’s his car.”

  “Is he stalking you?” Catherine wanted to know in all seriousness. She still wished to believe that they had seen a stalker, since it wasn’t yet apparent to her what else the man could be doing.

  “No. He’s only interested in young women. The younger, the better.”

  “You’re not old,” Donna assured her, as she should. There was less than a year’s difference between her age and Helen’s.

  “I’m the same age as him,” Helen said. “But any woman near his age he thinks is ancient. He brags to the front desk person and anyone else he feels comfortable with that his girlfriends are always at least fifteen years younger than him.”

  “Oh, one of those,” Donna observed. She had a lot of experience with men like that, more than she cared to remember.

  “Child molesters,” Catherine declared grimly. Although she was much younger than Donna and Helen, she knew she wasn’t young enough or pretty enough for Bill. She knew what Bill’s type wanted.

  Helen, Donna, and the woman whose hair Donna was cutting let out sudden, high-pitched laughs at Catherine’s comment. Catherine barely smiled at their reaction.

  Donna recovered the quickest. “So what’s he doing out there, if he’s not looking for you?” she asked Helen.

  “He probably wants to come in here,” Helen said, “but he’s afraid. I guess he’s realized that his hair needs fixing. He dyed it himself, I’m sure. It’s truly a mess. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  With a boldly inflected voice suitable for a radio advertisement, Catherine said, “Sounds like a...”

  “Man emergency,” she and Donna sang out together. They had dealt with such emergencies before.

  Donna, Catherine, and their customers smiled and shared a feeling of superiority. They thought that a sensible woman, which they all knew themselves to be, would never make the mistake of trying to dye her own hair. Only a silly, old man would try to do that.

  Chapter 17

  Bill finally found his Blackberry in the pile of stuff on the passenger seat, while still parked in front of the salon.

  The text message read: “Lets go mountain climb. Call me now. Linda”

  Bill was irate that Linda had contacted him again. While she had driven him home after his fall at Bear Mountain, in the midst of his great pain, he had still had enough strength to tell her that since he couldn’t see his backpack again, he didn’t want to see her either. She had called him stupid to worry about such an ugly, cheap thing, and he called her stupid to throw away a perfectly good purchase. They had fumed and fussed all the way to his apartment complex, where he had bid her goodbye by telling her he meant what he said: He would never see her again. In return, she had said, “My pleasure, stupid! I never want to see someone as stupid as you.” Bill immediately perceived by her message that she had been unable to find a smarter man to go hiking with. No one is as stupid as I was to go hiking with her, he said, raging at himself and his mistake. He was determined not to be dumb ever again with a woman, and definitely not with Linda.

  In his fury, he blamed her for everything that had gone wrong that morning outside the salon: His endless circling, his embarrassment in front of so many women, his fright from a car with older people. His violent thoughts were unreasonable, but nonetheless immensely satisfying. They allowed him to shift the blame for his public shame to her. He remembered that he had dyed his hair in the first place to impress Linda and grew even angrier. He shouted at his Blackberry, as if the little piece of metal and plastic was her, “No treks for me. Not now, not ever. Get lost. I’m getting my hair done.” He threw the phone on the passenger seat, only to pick it up again and continue shouting, “And I’m getting a facial. I’m going to meet someone new. I’m through with you.” He flung the Blackberry down, boiling with petulance.

  Now he was more determined than ever to go into the salon. In his eagerness and blind anger, he quickly shifted the car out of park and stepped on the gas to speed to the nearest parking space, which was a parking lot around the corner. Before he had gone twenty-five feet, however, he slammed on the brakes. He narrowly avoided rear-ending the car, which had just pulled around him, with the three elderly occupants. That car had come to a complete halt, and one of the elderly female passengers was helping the other female passenger, who was older than her, out of the car to a walker.

  Bill had no patience for them or anyone at the moment. He had someplace to go. Earlier that morning the car had been going much too fast for him, but now it was blocking him. He stuck his head out of his car. “What are you doing? This is a street! Not a parking lot! Drive that car! You want to kill people?” he yelled. “Get going!”

  The two elderly women on the sidewalk and the elderly man in the driver’s seat ignored Bill. They continued to do what they were doing at the same unhurried pace. Surging with impatience, Bill swung his car into the other lane. He passed the stationary car, but was almost hit by a van coming from the opposite direction on the two-lane road. The van driver luckily put on his brakes in time to avoid a crash. As Bill sped away, the van driver cursed him for being a reckless NASCAR racer.

  After Bill parked his car in the lot, he sped to the salon, pumping his arms and legs. But the closer he drew toward that place, the cooler his anger and enthusiasm became, and the slower his limbs moved. The vehemence he had felt only minutes ago toward Linda deserted him, and when he was a storefront away from the salon, once again he didn’t know what he should do. Should I go in there? Why am I going in there? For what reason should I spend who-knows-how-much money? Who cares what Stan and my coworkers think about my hair? Such thoughts ran around and around his brain, crippling his will to act. If I was dating someone, he thought, I would run in there, but I’m not. Who knows if I ever will again? Less than half an hour had passed since he had reaffirmed his detestation of Linda in the strongest terms, but all of a sudden a positive feeling for Linda overcame him, since she had shown interest in him once more. But that transient sensation soon passed. He knew he had run a full course of foolishness with her, and it was time to leave her behind.

  Vacillating again about entering the salon, he did what he had done earlier in the car, this time on foot. He walked back and forth on the sidewalk, stealing peaks inside the salon. He acted as if he were waiting for someone, who would be coming down the block, but that pretended motive was completely unconvincing. He loitered only around the salon and looked frequently inside, w
ith an obvious interest in what was happening there.

  On that suburban street, as in American suburbs everywhere, people were seldom seen outside of cars. As a result, drivers of vehicles passing on the street stared at Bill, as if he was a space alien investigating earth, who had yet to learn how to blend into human society. Pedestrians going into businesses along the street—darting inside stores after parking as close as possible—were surprised to see someone loitering on the sidewalk and stared at Bill, too. He didn’t appear to be a homeless person begging, so they couldn’t understand what he was doing.

  Inside the salon, the women were joking about the return of the stalker. One woman suggested that they should run out in a posse and capture him, making a citizen’s arrest. Another woman said they should call the police, who would haul the criminal into the salon and handcuff him to a chair, so they could give the perp the treatment he needed to look respectable again. Helen was laughing along with the rest, but she had more sympathy for Bill’s situation. She knew he was not a daring person and resisted doing new things, even if there was little cost involved. She imagined how much he must be suffering at the moment, thinking about the expense of a salon visit compared with what he usually paid at the barbershop, and felt a little sorry for him.