Stray

by Stacey Goldblatt

  “Um, let me think…. No.”

  Nina grabs my hands like we’re two schoolgirls on the playground. “Now, c’mon, Nattie! It’s only hair. The dye will fade. Just for the summer.”

  Kirby holds a rope of my long wavy brown hair in his hand. “You don’t even have to go all blue; just do a strand or two.”

  Kirby and Nina don’t have to worry about what their mothers will think, but my mom would be furious if I came home with a head full of blue hair. She held out on letting me get my ears pierced until I turned fourteen, and even then, I was limited to one hole per lobe—studs, no hoops. Distressed jeans with cool holes and scrape marks are banned from my closet because Mom thinks they look trashy and it is mortifying to her that anyone would pay money for a pair of ruined jeans. I barely squeak by with the faded ones I wear. I doubt Mom would approve of blue hair.

  Maybe it’s because I spent an inordinate amount of time today harboring resentment toward my mother, but I feel the desire to rebel. I should dye my hair. Or shave it all off.

  “Okay, go for it. All of it! Dye my eyebrows, too.” Kirby hurries to grab a box of hair color obviously reserved for me.

  “Wait,” I say. Mom will disembowel me. This is not rebellion. This is plain stupid. “Don’t dye all of it. Just do this section in the front. On the right side.”

  Nina drapes a towel over my shoulders and tilts my head forward into the sink, dunking it gently under the faucet.

  A few minutes later, the cord of hair I surrendered is emblazoned in blue. As I stand in front of the mirror, tears overflow from my brown eyes and skitter down my round cheeks, then cliff-dive toward my narrow body below. The blue is not too dramatic: most of my head is still covered with a mane of wavy brown hair.

  “What’s wrong?” Kirby asks.

  “We can dye it back if you want,” Nina says, grasping my shoulders.

  I sniffle. “It’s not the hair.” I trudge over to the toilet and sit. Nina and Kirby crouch at my knees. “It’s my mom. This guy is moving in with us.”

  “I didn’t know she had a boyfriend,” Kirby says.

  “No, it’s this guy our age. He’s the son of some lady my mom went to college with,” I explain. “The lady had a ferret and the son almost killed my dog Troy with chocolate.” Nina unravels some toilet paper from the roll and dabs my cheeks. “He gets the room above the garage.”

  Nina and Kirby recoil and gasp sympathetically.

  “Why is he coming to live with you?” Nina asks.

  “Because he likes animals. And he cranked on his SATs.” I wipe my nose along the back of my hand. “And he’s traveling to Africa to help his mom cure people.”

  “I’m sorry, Nattie,” Nina says. “I was looking forward to helping you fix up that room this summer. I was even getting used to the open-door policy.”

  I shake my head. “The guy is probably just an older version of his stupid former self with a bookshelf full of Cliff’s Notes who got lucky and aced high school.” I tear a sequence of squares off the toilet paper roll and blow my nose. “Unlike me, who totally sweats my ass off to score a report card that looks like a tribute to the first letter of the alphabet.”

  “Glass full. Glass full, okay?” Nina says in a calming voice. She springs up from the ground. “Glass full, he might be amazing. He could be totally hot and know all about black holes and the mysteries of the universe. Maybe he’ll know how to clip bonsai trees.”

  Kirby adds, “Maybe he collects belly button lint for his loom so he can weave elaborate wall hangings. Or”—Kirby pauses to run his fingers through his mop top once again—“maybe he has blue hair.”

  Auditory signals enhance obedience training sessions.

  —Michael Kaplan, The Manifesto of Dog

  It’s already past five-thirty. I’m late, and Grandma will not understand. I jet out of Rescued Threads and zoom home across train tracks, darting past the 7-Eleven parking lot, which buzzes with skateboarders, and into Residentia.

  When I get home, Grandma is standing as still as a hood ornament on the curb. I step out to help her even though, at seventy-eight, she insists she can do things on her own.

  She wears her fitted pin-striped blazer and skirt. A pile of silver hair perches atop her head like a tidy bird’s nest. Her swollen feet manage to squeeze into the daintiest of shoes. Tonight she’s forced them into black patent leathers.

  Standing at the open passenger door, she glares at me from behind an army of wrinkles. “You are late,” she says in her thick German accent, leaning over to kiss me on the cheek.

  “Hi, Grandma. I’m only eight minutes late tonight.”

  She lifts herself into the seat and clutches her purse on her lap as if she’s holding on to a roller coaster bar.

  Once she’s secured inside, I get behind the wheel and restart the car. “You look nice.”

  Grandma stares at me, her brow furrowed. “Vhat did you do to your hair? You look like a girl on the MTV.” As if MTV is the dumping ground for all youth’s derelicts.

  I pull away from the curb and follow the curve of the cul-de-sac. “Keep your eyes on the voad.” Grandma points a crooked finger toward the block ahead as we pass Laney’s house again. She reaches toward the radio dial. “How do you turn this off?”

  “It is off.”

  Grandma came to live with us after Grandpa died, a year before Dad left. If I could choose only one comparison between Grandma and my mom, it would be that Grandma’s tyrannical disposition in the car is very similar to Mom’s control-freak tendencies as a mother.

  One might think that my mom is strict with me because she was raised by wolflike parents, but this is not true. Oddly enough, my mom breathed from a tank of freedom when she was my age. My grandparents trusted her. She got to live with a host family in Spain for a semester when she was sixteen. My mom would never let me have that kind of experience, even with a surveillance camera sewn into my skull.

  My current theory is that Mom doesn’t trust me because she has the brain of a forty-five-year-old woman whose ex-husband, although firm and controlled with dogs, has no control over the unit located in his boxer shorts. Therefore, Mom thinks I don’t have the self-control needed to contain myself should I be in a position where I am asked to do something dangerous or profane—like drink cheap wine or flash my boobs.

  “Turn on blinker!” Grandma shouts when we reach Clove Street. I am taking driving cues from a woman who survived the Holocaust but never managed to pass her driver’s test.

  “Grandma, we need to go one more block to Jade.”

  She starts knocking on the dashboard with a fist. “Here! Turn here!”

  I heed her directions the rest of the ride even though it takes triple time to get to the senior center.

  When we arrive, she asks, “Are you coming in?”

  “No, thanks.” I reach behind the seat, where Mom told me she’d put my U.S. History book. “Class starts on Monday, and I already have reading assigned.” I talked Nina and Kirby into taking U.S. History with me this summer: four hours a day, five days a week for six weeks and we’ll earn ourselves a free period next year.

  “Good.” She gives me a friendly slap on the knee. “I tell everyone you are a good student, study hard. That you even go to school in the summer!” She leans over and I reach the rest of the way so that she can give me a kiss. Then she sobers her tone. “You stay here for me.”

  I watch my grandmother leave the car and shuffle slowly into the mouth of the senior center. My grandpa, a U.S. soldier, liberated her concentration camp, and later, they fell in love. She has lived through the loss of her parents and sisters, the pain of three miscarriages, and the death of her husband.

  And here I am feeling sorry for myself.

  History assignment for first class: read chapter 1, “Manifest Destiny.”

  Grandma must have played a good round of rummy, because an hour and a half later, on the drive home, I get only a few fist poundings on the dashboard from her. “Ve play rummy vhen
ve get home. I show you how your grandmother von tonight,” she says proudly.

  When we get home, the house is dark. Mom must still be at the clinic.

  Before I slip the key into the door, the dogs bark their excitement on the other side. Pip (golden retriever with one eye), Southpaw (velvety black Great Dane and Labrador mix missing her right foreleg), and Otto (German shepherd with parts intact) meet us.

  “Go! Oafs!” Grandma says, waving them away from her space. They cower in her presence. Then she disappears into the kitchen as their tails begin to thump on the wall, sounding like the percussion section of a marching band.

  I smooch each one of them. “Hi, babies.”

  They follow me into the kitchen. Grandma is at the counter, lifting the dome off a cake platter. “I made chocolate,” she says, cutting into the soft moistness of the cake.

  After replenishing food and water for the dogs and pouring hot water from the kettle into Grandma’s tea-bagged mug, we play rummy at the kitchen table. She wins each round with black, white, and red fanned arrangements of same-suited sequences of hearts, clubs, diamonds, and spades. “Vone more?” she asks after my many losses. “You vill vin this time.”

  I will not win. Not now. I’ve already lost too much today with Mom taking my room away from me.

  “No, thanks. I have to work tomorrow. Better get to bed.” I kiss her good night and take our cake plates to the sink. “The cake was excellent, by the way.”

  Grandma’s cakes are always perfect. She told me once that cake saved her life. When she was in the concentration camp, she and the other girls in her bunker were freezing, terrified, and starving. They would make up elaborate recipes for cake to distract them from the living hell they had to inhabit. “Sometimes imagination keeps us alive,” she told me.

  Instead of climbing the stairs to my bedroom, I risk walking out into the cool night and up the stairway to the room above the garage. The dogs follow me.

  Inside, I bend down to rub Fu-Fu. I keep the room dark and walk to the window facing the street. A telescope isn’t necessary for a perfect view of Laney Benning’s porch, where Laney is now sitting in a lounge chair, looking past the lamppost. Her long sandy brown hair covers her bare shoulders like a shawl.

  A red car pulls up in front of Laney’s house. She stands, hesitates cautiously for a second, pulls a duffel bag from beneath her chair, then lugs it down the steps and into the car. A bass beat pours from the open door, then stops once the door is shut. The car follows the curve of the cul-de-sac. Its red taillights flicker and then fade down the block.

  Laney reminds me of the women on the covers of Grandma’s glossy magazines. I just don’t get why I care what she’s doing, yet I can’t help flipping through the pages to find out.

  A game of catch awakens a dog’s fundamental need to retrieve.

  —Michael Kaplan, The Manifesto of Dog

  Mom came into my room last night just before ten-thirty, kissed me on the forehead, and told me she was home. I was curled up in my bed with the lights out, putting off facing her with blue hair.

  She goes in early on Saturdays, so I walk the mile and a half to work this morning.

  To have my own car would be bliss—and not just because I could display a My Dog Is Smarter Than Your Honor Student bumper sticker on the fender. In the world according to Mom, giving me a car would be like providing me with a gateway drug. It might push me toward hard-core activities like shooting heroin, having sex, and driving myself to school.

  But really, a car would be nice to have, especially because I’ll be working every day after school and all day on Saturdays this summer: that is a lot of walking. The good news is that I’ll clock in about thirty hours a week at $240 per week. By the end of summer, $2,000 will be mine to buy my own car with. Then will come the real work of convincing my mom to let me buy one. Baby steps, though.

  When I get to work, I stand outside the window-paned door and see a guy in the reception area looking at the Dogs of the World poster on the wall. He turns to me when I push open the door and the bell on the handle jingles.

  I’ve liked guys in the past but almost always from a distance. Like I’m holding binoculars and I can see them, but they can’t see me. (As was the case with the recently departed Taylor Newcastle.)

  There’s something about this guy, though. I’m standing in the reception area, unable to blink. A tribal drum beats in the vault of my chest, and I’m feeling tingly all over. I mean, all over.

  His blond hair is disheveled and slightly covers his light green eyes. I’d guess he’s eighteen—nineteen, maybe. His face appears mature enough to have survived puberty but it’s not whiskered and sharp like those of the older men in Grandma’s GQ magazines. I’m enjoying his pink cheeks and boyish freckles. He may be a tad weather-beaten, but he carries a kindliness and self-confidence: very Portuguese water dog meets golden retriever.

  “You must be your mom’s daughter,” he says to me.

  Okay, so maybe he’s not too bright.

  He whacks his forehead with his palm. “That sounded pretty stupid.” Perceptive. “I meant to say that you must be Dr. Kaplan’s daughter.”

  “Natalie,” someone else says. The voice is low and pissy. Maryann McClure stands a few feet away, showcasing her glossy globbed lips and tanning-booth radiance. A little pink purse dangles from her wrist. The bleach blond plume of hair surrounding her head makes her look scrawny. She is so hairless Chinese crested dog, it’s not even funny. “Where’s Bogart?” she snaps.

  “I’m not ready to tell you.” If she really cared, she would have been here yesterday.

  Poster Boy looks from me to her. He’s tall enough that my head would perfectly fit on his shoulder without my standing on my tiptoes. I take further stock of him, admiring his simple style: faded baggy jeans, white T-shirt, and black flip-flops. Definitely more “let’s watch the sunset” than “I’m gonna go shoot me a bear!” A thick-banded watch hugs his wrist. It has one of those compass/stopwatch/ time-telling faces that say something about a person, although I’m not sure what.

  A pixie in my stomach does a backflip.

  Maryann crosses her arms. “You were outside with Bogart. He was sleeping next to you when we put our bras on your stomach.” Great, Poster Boy must think I’m a real winner.

  I narrow my eyes at her. “He had dirty water, no food. His nails were completely overgrown, which, by the way, can be harmful to a dog of his breed. He was clearly being neglected.” Maryann looks at me long and hard, her lips puckered in frustration. Defeated, she leaves the office, bell jingling behind her.

  Poster Boy gazes at me like I’m the superhero of the dog world. The temptation to place my fists on my waist in a photo-op pose, my hair swooping up behind me and a banner that says “Dog Girl!” waving overhead, evaporates quickly.

  Reminder: breathe. I walk behind the reception desk for security. A blue strand of hair dangles over my eye. I wish I could tuck it into a drawer. Mom didn’t see me last night, and I’m not looking forward to her reaction.

  I need to ask Poster Boy why he’s here: whether he has a dog in the exam room, whether he’s here for a pickup, whether he has a girlfriend, whether he’d like a Shiatsu massage. “Are you waiting for someone?” I manage to ask.

  He runs his hand along the back of his neck before shoving it into his pocket. “Actually, I’m waiting for your mom. She said she’d be right back.”

  Outside the pounding of the tom-tom in my chest, there’s a bubble of silence. “Have you seen a dog like this?” He points to the bearlike Bouvier des Flandres, a relative of the massive Newfoundland, on the poster.

  Mom pops out of the examination room. “It’ll be just a few more minutes,” she says, smiling at Poster Boy. Her smile fades when she sees me and my length of blue hair. I can tell in a millisecond that she is not happy. “Hey, Natalie, can I talk to you?”

  I shouldn’t have dyed my hair.

  Mom tows me on an invisible rope into the exam room, leavi
ng Poster Boy with his unanswered question. She shuts the door behind her and reaches out to finger my blue tendril of hair. “What is this?”

  “Nina, Kirby, and I dyed our hair yesterday,” I say, trying to convey sincere advocacy of blue hair.

  “Well, it is unbecoming and completely inappropriate.” Mom frowns, opens her mouth to proceed with more criticism, but I quickly change the subject.

  “Who is that guy in the reception area?”

  She leans against the stainless steel exam table, which is always cold to the touch. Fortunately, I’ve distracted her. “That’s Faith’s son. Carver.” She says it as if “C-a-r-v-e-r” has been a part of our vocabulary for years.

  “You didn’t say he’d be here today.”

  “I would have told you yesterday, but you were so upset. Vernon picked him up from the airport and Carver stayed with him last night.”

  I eye the countertop with its glass jars of Q-tips, cotton balls, and prepackaged syringes. Mom knew that Carver would be here today. She didn’t tell me. Is that any different from lying?

  She starts to get defensive. “We need the help now. Our patient load has increased and we always have more boarders during the summer.”

  Nice. As usual, I get to be told what is happening, as if my life is some story being written by my mother. There’s no room for insertions or deletions.

  “Be open to this, okay?” Mom brings me closer for a badly timed hug. I’m waiting for her to demand that I dye my blue-streaked hair back to brown. She doesn’t say anything, though, which is unusual.

  Is this an even trade? Mom sort of lied to me about Poster Boy, so maybe her gift to me is a stripe of blue hair. This may be the first gift from her that I’ve ever gotten to choose without her guidance. I certainly didn’t choose the gifts she presented to me on my last birthday, including the book What Smart Students Know: Maximum Grades. Optimum Learning. Minimum Time., which may very well be a riveting read. I was just too busy studying to crack it open.