by Mary Robison
Mono Astro, a hair place, hadn’t been able to schedule me in until our last day at the Park Inn.
Raf asked, “Are you getting it all whacked off, Paige?”
“I have to see, I haven’t decided.”
“Just get it whacked off. Let’s both do, in fact,” he said. “I’m coming along.”
Mono Astro had an Asian theme inside. There were empty areas and blank walls, paper screens, neutral colors.
Raf dropped into a long chair that folded out in sections. He whistled along with the music surrounding us—a song by Turnpike People.
I told the woman who seemed to be running things that I wanted a shampoo, a cut, maybe a cellophane rinse.
“Maybe yes or maybe no?” she asked. Her natural voice was a whisper. Weedy sprouts of hair stood up on her scalp.
“I’m not sure yet,” I said.
“I want Vampira there to work on me,” Raf said.
“He likes you,” I explained.
“I’m married,” the woman whispered.
She introduced a man who resembled her, who had the same traumatized hair. This was Boomer, her husband.
I got horizontal in the deeply padded chair with my neck arched, my head tipped back, my hair flung in a sink.
Boomer kept quiet as he shampooed me, gathering my hair in great sopping snatches and making lathery spears with it. I closed my eyes and listened to the crackle of foam bubbles. He massaged my scalp, my temples; lulled me into drowsiness.
Raf wasn’t lulled. He chattered at the whispering woman, whom he called Barber-ah, and he wouldn’t let go of the tiny joke.
“You think I should get an earring, Barber-ah?”
“Wouldn’t know. Ask your wife.”
“You do pierce jobs, don’t you? Or am I too old for an earring?”
“Your wife might know,” the woman said.
Raf said, “Boomer, give my wife a back-to-school cut, O.K.? I’ll buy her a lunch pail and a little matching knapsack.”
“My students probably don’t want to be taught by someone who looks like their little brother,” I said.
“I hate doing kids,” said the whispering woman. “More than anything. You’re a teacher?”
“I’m on leave this year,” I said.
Raf said, “Do you ever take a leave, Barber-ah? Do a vacation?”
“I’m Lois. No. Hold still.”
“Aw, are we cranky? Do we need a sip of blood to feel better?” Raf said.
Behind me, Boomer sighed mightily.
“I know,” I said to him.
“You don’t shave, do you?” Raf asked Lois.
“No, we don’t do shaves. Not in this salon. It isn’t permitted to smoke in here, sir.”
“I know it,” Raf said. “I just want to make you angry so you give me a mean haircut, not a Houston haircut. You’re not from Houston, I hope.”
“I’m a native.”
“Tell you what I think of Houston . . .”
“Raf!” I said.
“I adore it,” he said.
“We’re happy to hear it. All Houstonians are relieved about that,” Lois said.
“I meant you don’t shave. Under your arms. I see up your sleeves you don’t.”
“Is he really named Raft or did he make it up?” Boomer asked me.
“Does it bother you, sir?” Lois was saying to Raf.
“Does Boomer want his butt pumped?” Raf said.
Lois balled up her hand towel and threw it. “I don’t have to take this,” she said.
“Then I don’t have to pay any forty fuckin’ dollars,” said Raf. He was standing now, with the body-length bib still tied around his neck, smoking and flicking ashes at Lois.
“Laws,” she said to him. “One phone call.”
It was a hundred and five degrees outside the salon. As we rushed for the car and its air conditioning, I said, “I don’t think you were being fair in there.”
“Nothing is no goddamned fair, Paige. You should’ve fucked Raymond.”
“And another thing,” he said as he was driving. “I don’t approve of us. Where are we going next, for example— the fuckin’ dry cleaners! Maybe afterwards we could do budget.”
He sped up, pressing pedal to the floor on a road called the Buffalo Speedway.
Yellow Note, Blue Note
THE CAR WAS IDLING in the Park Inn’s loading zone.
Raf hurled our bags into the trunk and whomped shut the door with full force.
I yelled, “I can’t put up with you like this, Raf! Your great big emotions! No more.”
“You have to go in with me,” he said, driving onto the sandlot for a used-car dealership in the Fifth Ward.
“Why, are we buying a car?”
We were. An ’81 Seeger-Z hatchback automatic the color of smoke, we were buying. With tax it cost five hundred dollars.
Our salesman was heat frantic in the glass-walled office. In metal-tipped boots, he clomped back and forth; fists balled up in the pockets of his vanilla suit pants. He had the phone receiver caught between his shoulder and ear. We sat waiting in scoop chairs. He arranged for a title, registration, plates.
“This is a good car we’re buying?” I asked Raf.
“Umm, no.”
“But it’ll run?”
“For a month at least.”
“Why are we buying such a car?”
“Consider the rental rates and gas for that thunder mobile you got,” he said. “This’s a money move. Same reason we’re renting a house.”
“Where? What city?”
“This city. I spotted it yesterday, doing my five miles. I already talked to the landlady. We’re buying a car, renting a house. . . . We’ll be set for what’s to come.”
“Leaving is to come! Why aren’t we leaving?”
“Paige,” Raf said. “Apart from your being in love with Raymond . . . We haven’t served out our sentences yet.”
Raf’s choice of house was a tilting two-story whose wood siding needed paint. Before the house and its garage lay a yellow patch of yard with a three-foot Francis of Assisi birdbath.
A boat on a trailer took up the driveway.
“Boat,” I said. Its hull and cabin were salt-eaten, both the same noncolor as the house.
“That’s no pleasure craft,” Raf told me. “That mother worked for a living.”
He led me onto the house porch, where a few old metal folding chairs were gathered.
I saw across the street a low cinderblock structure—the Stonewall Jackson Elementary. Neighboring to the south was a brick apartment building. A paper sign on its padlocked entry door said, DESGLAISES MENTAL HEALTH HOSPITAL—CLOSED FOR REPAIRS. Through fronds and elephant grass off the other porch rail, I made out the furrowed wall of a liquid-oxygen company.
“Houston has no zoning laws,” Raf said.
He said, “The house is unlocked. You can go on in.”
“But do I want to?” I said. “Raf, really. You’ve got summer-school kids across the street, yowling because they’re hot and miserable and have to go to summer school; a condemned mental asylum next door; an explosives factory in the side yard . . .”
“My kind of place,” Raf said.
“And now we’re driving a car that some boys built in metal shop. I truly dislike you.”
“Well,” he said, “I know.”
We got my bags and Raf’s bundles of running gear inside.
The living room was narrow and dark, and although the windows were propped open, warm.
“No air conditioning,” I said.
“One hundred a month, furnished, utilities paid. Be realistic, Paige. What can you expect?”
I stalked into the kitchen. It was better. Through the rear windows, a thicket of weeds and wild flowers gave off sweet smells. I heard a cricket, and birds.
I went back to the living room. Raf had taken off his shirt. He lay on a blue vinyl sofa he’d dragged
into a breeze from the screen door.
His face looked suffered, sharpened. “Come over here and kneel down,” he said.
“No you don’t. I need to talk to you about bugs.”
“El remedio es Black Flag.”
“What about rats, then, and lizards?”
“Plenty of both. Come on, Paige.” His hand moved to unsnap his Levi’s.
I rummaged in my satchel and threw the first thing I found—a five-pound anthology of Deep Image poetry. I missed him with that, but flung a ceramic mug and connected just over his eyebrow. He caught the mug on the rebound and held it protectively. I slung my notebook at him, a bottle of nail lacquer, my pocket calculator, sunglasses, a packet of tampons, triple-A batteries.
“You tick, Raf,” I said. “You lowlife.”
He didn’t raise an arm or duck but permitted the storm as if it were his due.
“You don’t want to live here?” he asked finally.
“Live!” I said. “I don’t want to know about here.”
Raf rode me around the new neighborhood to show me its sidewalk charms. We saw an Asian couple pushing a grocery carriage full of aluminum soda cans, some kids trapping a dog in a hammock.
A rooster picked its way across the street ahead of us. Raf pumped the brake pedal and we slam-stopped.
“Look at that moron,” Raf said.
The rooster twisted his head to glare at us. His eye was like a chip of some glossy stone—a mineral eye.
“I think you were going too fast,” I said.
Raf shook his head no. He was smiling. He said, “Come on, you gotta like the fuckin’ bird.”
Raf was as happy as he ever got, in the Desglaises Street house. The furniture was indestructible, so he could tumble it, climb on it, kick and send the castered chairs rolling.
He mounted a unit air conditioner in our bedroom window, and the machine kept the whole upstairs meat-locker cold.
“Say what you will, there is no television here,” he said. “And there will be no fuckin’ television. And no telephone either.”
The place was like a 1930s gangsters’ hole-up, but the days, I found, did have more time in them.
Early in the afternoon, the summer-school kids crowded the walk at the end of our yard. Raf and I sat on the porch together, on the metal folding chairs, and watched students board a long navy-blue school bus.
“Look at the one in the camouflage outfit. They have ROTC for elementary grades now?” Raf said.
I said, “There are soldiers in Africa who are not that old.”
“I think there should be more fat kids,” he said. “I count only two. If I had a fuckin’ kid, I’d make sure he was fat. Or she. You can’t love ’em otherwise.”
“You want to bounce them around.”
“Fat as buddhas,” Raf said.
I rented a Toro from the corner hardware and mowed the yellow lawn along a trail of shade cast by the liquid-oxygen company. I raked and bagged the grass clippings; edged with a new pair of shears.
This yellow grass was sweet, sodded to an anatomy of slopes and ridges that were gentle as a boy’s back.
“It’s like carpet,” Raymond said from the porch.
When I finished, I joined him there and drank a frothy Tecate.
Raymond tossed a silver coin into the yard. He said, “There you go, see? It’s long enough to lose a dime but short enough that you could find it, you know where to look.”
“I’ve never heard that,” I said.
“Well, it’s the right length for July.”
Raymond was different around me—acting shy as a shadow.
“After Princeton,” Raymond said now. “After they cut me loose, naturally I lost my student deferment.”
“Couple years before I did,” Raf said, dropping onto a chair between us.
“Ummm,” I said.
“Some story,” said Raymond.
I said, “Everyone who was around back then has a story, and there isn’t one that I want to hear.”
“A deal we have,” Raf explained to Raymond.
“I busted out,” Raymond said. “Not as honorably as they’d of liked.”
“Me too. Me neither,” Raf said.
“You guys,” I said. “Do you mind? Raf, you promised you wouldn’t.”
The dance club we frequented now was the Palm, and here Raf seemed driven by some decisive engine.
He paused at our table only long enough to gulp an iced coffee.
I said, “We are going home sometime—back East—right?”
“Guess so,” he said and shrugged.
“Because if you’re never going back you ought to tell me, Raf. I always thought we were happy in Brookline. . . .”
He stopped me with a dark look.
“A functional phrase, ‘we were happy,’ ” I said. “Apart from a few obvious things: That it’s cold. Students, and they call too often. You’re not allowed to park your car anywhere . . .”
He was leaving even as I recited.
I watched him move toward a woman in a knitted bubble of mini skirt; watched as he asked her to dance.
“And you have to tiptoe up and down the fire escape,” I continued, “every time you want to sneak Christy away from her husband. Anna doesn’t have a fire escape so if Juan comes home you’ve gotta jump from the balcony. Sometimes when Daphne phones for you I answer. . . .”
The hotel where my father and I stayed in Cameroon was called the Pilot. It stood to the side of a runway for a dead airport. The runway had a pink stucco radar tower, blind, its windows smashed to crystal.
There were customs sheds in use as caravansaries, and piled around were blackened bales of wool.
We could hear sheep bleating. Sometimes they’d cough like humans.
We could see Mount Cameroon from the windows. At night, tribesmen would set the brush on the mountain’s top afire.
We could see a dust field with a shrunken tree. Heat, we saw. No signs. No billboards.
The Pilot had a sandstone saloon that was noisy all the time from music and fights.
One evening, salesmen from Duaka visited. These were men with pale shoes that matched their pale suits. They met with women in dresses and took photographs of them with an Instamatic camera—flash bombs of light that made us blink.
I went upstairs early that night, climbed the three flights to my bedroom above. I sat in a square armchair. The radio had picked up a thirsty gargling. Pinned on the walls here were sepia-toned illustrations, carefully torn from a children’s Christmas book.
I brushed palm oil into my hair—brittle from the sun. I was twitchy; thinking, “Lonesome” and “Bored,” and about Raf.
He was in love that summer with someone. Mario knew this and took me away.
If there was any sense in teaching, it was for someone such as Millicent, in one of my first Harvard workshops.
She once situated herself in the Commons Room at Adams House for ten hours, writing hymnal measure, quantitative and syllabic verse.
I heard that her friends suggested she move along, to her quarters or to the cafeteria; heard that she swore at them.
From the one working phone booth outside the Fiesta I called South Houston State and asked to speak to Davey Salizar. I’d known Davey since graduate school. He was director this August, of the SHS Adult Education Conference.
“Is there any kind of opening for me?” I asked. “What do you have left?”
In fact, there was a slot teaching poetry writing to physicists. Davey said that some program advisor in administration had the idea of cross-discipline courses, and that dozens of scientists were enrolling for month-long classes on music theory, drama, film technique, dance history, glass blowing, and writing verse.
I found Raf checking expiration dates on orange-juice cartons in the Fiesta’s dairy section.
I said, “I might do some teaching while I’m here.”
“Sure, sure, and Little
Sheba will come home, and the three sisters will leave the Cherry Orchard finally and go to Moscow, and a gentleman will come calling for Blanche.”
“No, not a real department job,” I said, as he loaded tubs of yogurt and cakes of tofu into the shopping cart. “Just August at SHS. They have a summer arts festival.”
“You haven’t got a month’s teaching left in you, Paige. Ten years of it and you’re like a hunted thing around students.”
“I’ve thought this.”
“It’s bad for you,” he said. “It is bad. It’s the worst.”
The office lent to me at SHS had gray walls, charts, window shades, heavy black oak furniture, shelves of hardbacks.
August was at full fry. Cicadas sizzled all over everywhere. These were thumb-sized cicadas with sectioned powdery-black torsos. They looked like Inuit soapstone carvings with tomato-red beads for eyes, gold-lacquered wings.
When Raf phoned, I said, “Their noise sounds calculated, like song compositions. I have one going in my head right now that I don’t want to lose. ‘Bug-bug-bug.’ It’s a yellow note followed by a blue note.”
“You fucked any of the physicists yet?” Raf asked.
“They’re weird but not my kind of weird,” I said.
Barny I was thinking, for example. He had a beard and he’d been around Stanford in the quark search days. He had no skill for poetry but as a particle physicist he reported, “We think we have the answers to just about everything.”
“Can you imagine even thinking that?” I asked Raf.
From Freedom Hall, where class gathered, we had an easterly view of the central quad with its statues of Sam Houston and Jefferson Davis and one in black rock of the school’s mascot, a pug-faced Disneyish dinosaur.
I made my opening remarks: “Don’t stick to these patterns and forms exactly. Just allude to them and don’t worry about metricality or rhyming. The form’ll be back there, influencing you, is all. Think more about musicality, although nobody give me song lyrics.”
I said, “There isn’t anything inherently great about rhyme or meter. They’re just framing devices. But you can use them to control how we read the poem.”