Peony Street

by Pamela Grandstaff

  The woman raised her voice in anger, and the implication of drama, like the smell of freshly baked bread, immediately attracted Claire’s attention. It produced a delicious combination of curiosity mixed with the promise of schadenfreude.

  “Don’t come here,” the woman warned. “Are you insane? I’m working … I have customers … my husband could stop by any minute. My son … I won’t let you. It’s over … there’s nothing to talk about. I’m sorry you feel that way but I really have no choice.”

  The kettle wailed and the woman went to the back room where Claire could not hear the rest of the call. When the she came back to serve Claire her face was flushed and her hands trembled. Her attention was not on what she was doing, and she had to go back for a spoon and then a serviette. Claire could feel the tension building and decided to sip slowly, to wait and see if anything else happened. The caller was obviously a spurned lover, possibly a younger man, a married man, or a woman.

  Within five minutes her patience was rewarded. The sleigh bells tied to the front door rattled violently and the woman gasped, then rushed to the front of the store. She shouted at the level of a whisper, but Claire could hear everything.

  “I told you not to come,” she hissed. “It’s too dangerous.”

  A deep voice, a man’s voice, said something Claire could not decipher, but all the hair rose up on her arms and neck.

  ‘Why would I have that reaction?’ Claire wondered.

  “You’ll ruin everything,” the woman hissed. “I won’t allow it.”

  Again she heard the man’s deep voice, too low for Claire to discern the words, but something about it made her deeply uneasy, almost panicked. Claire thought this was probably her intuition warning her that something awful was about to happen.

  She quietly gathered up her handbag and raincoat, put a twenty on the table, skirted around the backside of the hideous handbag display, and tiptoed up the side of the store, hoping to slip out unnoticed. She decided not to look at the man in case he might kill her if he thought she could pick him out in a line-up. She was almost to the door, just beyond the shabby chic pillow slips covered in tiny yellow rosebuds and the display of “Team Darcy” and “Team Heathcliff” t-shirts, when the woman noticed her.

  “You didn’t pay,” the woman spat.

  “I left it on the table,” Claire said.

  Her hand was on the polished brass doorknob when the man said, “Claire?”

  A rippling goose-bump-covered shudder rolled up one side of Claire and down the other. Her stomach contracted, Darjeeling tea threatened to leave the way it came in, and her fight or flight response got stuck on ‘stunned and paralyzed.’ More than anything else in the world Claire did not want to turn around. When she did, she watched the color drain out of the face of the woman standing next to Phillip Hobart Deacon, also known as “Pip,” also known as her ex-husband.

  “Hi Pip,” she said, and fled.

  Claire rushed out of the tea room and ran right into a man built like a fire hydrant. He caught her by the arms as she bounced off of him and almost fell.

  “I’m so sorry …” she began but then he said, “Claire? Claire Fitzpatrick?”

  Claire recognized him but couldn’t come up with a name.

  “It’s Dominic,” he said. “Dom Deluca. We’ve only known each other since kindergarten.”

  “Of course I know you, Dom. It’s just I suddenly don’t feel well and I need to get off the street as quickly as possible …”

  “Sure, sure, sure, come with me to the shop,” he said, as he grabbed her arm and pulled her down the sidewalk. “You remember Denise Gambini? We got married after she graduated beauty school; we’ve got three kids and one on the way. She’ll be thrilled to see you. I haven’t seen you since your Grandpa Tim’s funeral.”

  “Actually, I didn’t come home for that,” Claire said, as they arrived at The Bee Hive Beauty Salon. The logo painted on the window was a woman’s head with a towering hive-shaped hairdo around which bees were buzzing. It had to be seen to be believed.

  “I coulda swore I saw you at that funeral,” Dom said. “It was the same week your cousin Brian escaped from prison and died in a car accident. His poor mother; we felt so bad for her. Are you sure you weren’t there?”

  “I was in Prague,” Claire said.

  “Yeah, in the movies or something, your mom is always saying.”

  Dom flung open the door and shouted, “Hey Denise! Look who I ran into! We really did run into each other, too; she almost knocked me over!”

  As they entered the hair salon Claire inhaled the familiar chemicals of her chosen profession: the eye-watering sting of ammonia and peroxide mixed with hair color, the sharp tang of permanent wave setting solution, and a multitude of beauty products spiked with scents from floral to fruity to spicy, with various combinations in between.

  A heavily pregnant Denise was artfully teasing and combing a woman’s hair, valiantly trying to cover her sparsely populated pink scalp, which was quite a feat given how little she had to work with. Claire could see Denise was in the zone: tease, comb, spray, tease, comb, spray, tease, comb, spray.

  Denise squealed when she saw Claire and waddled over to give her a side arm hug.

  “We went to beauty school together!” Denise announced to the room.

  There were two women sitting under hood dryers; they raised the hoods up and leaned forward so they could hear. Claire recognized them but couldn’t come up with their names. The woman in the hydraulic chair who had been getting her hair teased seemed to be asleep or possibly dead (it had been known to happen).

  “Oh, my God, tell me everything,” Denise said. “I know you’ve been working for that movie star, that red-headed one whose husband left her for that teenager, the one with the chest out to here. She won that award for playing a prostitute and her dress fell apart on stage. Oh, my God, I can’t believe I can’t think of her name. It’s Sonya, or Samantha, or something …”

  “Sloan Merryweather,” Claire said.

  “Oh, my God, yes! That’s the one. She’s so gorgeous. You do not know how many people come in here and ask for the haircut she had in that movie about the Internet thing where she fell in love with the guy who was her dog walker but was secretly rich.”

  “Tweetheart,” Claire said.

  “That’s the one! Oh my God, what’s she like? Is she nice?”

  Claire hated these questions because there was really only one way to answer.

  “She’s a legend,” Claire said. “Very talented and always professional.”

  “It’s just awful what that husband did to her, so humiliating. I felt so bad for her. That he had the nerve to bring that skank to the award show.”

  “Well, Sloan did win the Oscar,” Claire said. “So something good came out of it.”

  “It was because they couldn’t have children or something, wasn’t that it? She couldn’t give him the son he wanted so badly. I guess he and that teenager have like five kids now, but all girls. God showed him.”

  “Sounds like us,” Dom said. “We got three girls and another one on the way.”

  “It looks like any minute,” Claire said. “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

  “We didn’t do the test,” Denise said. “Last time we did the test the doctor said it was going to be a boy, and boom! We got Giana. Big surprise. And us with everything blue in the nursery. So we don’t know what it is, but we got our fingers crossed and a yellow and green in the nursery.”

  “This might be my son,” Dom said with tears in his eyes, pressing his hand to Denise’s belly.

  Claire was surprised to feel tears fill her own eyes as Denise took her hand and pressed it against her burgeoning bump. The skin was tight as a drum, and Claire felt something roll out against her hand, something like an elbow, or a knee, but so tiny.

  “Isn’t it a miracle?” Denise said. “It’s why God made us.”

  Claire thought but didn’t say that was certainly one point of view, but not
necessarily her own. She loosened her hand from Denise’s grip, wiped her eyes, and said, “That little guy is strong. Shouldn’t you be sitting down with your feet up?”

  “My due date was two weeks ago,” Denise said. “I don’t want him gettin’ too comfy in here. I’m off tomorrow and I’m gonna clean my whole house. I got Giana moving in the right direction by vacuuming the stairs.”

  “We had to replace the carpet,” Dom said, while beaming at his wife. “We got hardwoods now. They’re much easier to keep clean.”

  Claire thought it must be nice to be adored like Denise so obviously was, even when she looked like she was smuggling a basketball under her smock.

  Claire heard Tuppy’s voice in her head saying, ‘She’s the goose that lay the golden Delucas.’

  Claire had always enjoyed Tuppy’s snide comments when they weren’t directed at her, but she hoped he wasn’t setting up shop in her brain. It would be just like Tuppy to haunt her out of spite or boredom with the hereafter.

  The woman in the hydraulic chair snored so loudly she woke herself up. Denise gave her one last spray, whirled off her nylon cape and brushed her neck and shoulders with a big fat powder brush. Claire walked over to a display rack to see what products Denise was pushing. The women under the dryers lost interest, sat back, and pulled their hoods back down. Claire was reading the list of ingredients on a bottle of something that claimed to stimulate hair growth when she heard Denise swear.

  “Oh, my God, Dominic,” Denise said. “My water just broke.”

  “He’s coming!” Dom said, and began to cry again. “Oh, honey.”

  “About time,” Denise said. “Don’t just stand there bawling, you big dope, go get the car. Call Mama and tell her to have Stephie bring the overnight bag. Hurry, but don’t drive crazy.” To her customer she only said, “Don’t forget your change, sweetie.”

  Claire looked down, and immediately realized she hadn’t expected the watery mess at Denise’s feet to have a smell. She felt a little nauseated.

  “I’ll get the car!” Dom yelled and ran out of the shop.

  Denise calmly gave her customer her change and the woman toddled out, oblivious to what was happening.

  “You should sit down,” one of the women under the dryers said.

  “You should cross your legs,” the other one said.

  Denise was putting on her coat.

  “What can I do?” Claire asked her.

  “Finish those two and lock up,” she said, and tossed Claire the keys to the shop.

  Tires squealed as Dom pulled the car all the way up on the curb.

  “Wish me luck that, God willing, this is Dom Junior’s birthday,” Denise said, “because I’m not doing this again.”

  “Good luck,” Claire said, and watched as Dom carefully shepherded his wife into the car, and gently, slowly backed out into the street and drove away.

  “I’ll comb myself out,” the first woman said as she tied a plastic rain hat over her curler-studded head and slipped on her coat. “No offence, but I don’t let just anybody touch my hair.”

  “I do have a license,” Claire said, but the woman gave Claire a weak smile and left the shop.

  “How about you?” Claire asked the second.

  “I’d love for you to do mine,” the woman said as she moved over to the hydraulic chair. “I want to know what all those people in Hollywood are really like.”

  Claire jacked up the chair. It had been over twenty years since she graduated from beauty school, and at least that long since she’d done a roller set comb out that wasn’t for period costume; but it was like riding a bicycle.

  “Heavy tease and spray?” she asked the woman.

  “Better lay it on pretty thick; it’s got to last through Tuesday,” the woman said. “I’ve got the Interdenominational Women’s Society meeting on Tuesday night at the Owl Branch Missionary Baptist Church. We’re doing a cookbook to sell as a fundraiser for Pine County Hospice. I’m going to have a fight on my hands getting my broccoli casserole in there instead of Sister Mary Margrethe’s.”

  As the woman filled Claire in on the fierce political battles being waged over the charitable cookbook project, Claire loosened the rollers and pulled them away from the woman’s thick, unnaturally black hair, which sprang right back into crisp, roller-shaped curls. Claire pictured Myrna Loy in The Thin Man and Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce. No, not quite right. She wished the woman had a big white streak in front or something that would make it more interesting. She pictured the Bride of Frankenstein and smiled to herself. She’d done that one before, on herself for a Halloween party.

  “Did you ever see Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame?” she asked the woman.

  “That’s one of my favorite movies,” the woman said. “Do you like old movies?”

  “Love ‘em,” Claire said, and set out with fresh enthusiasm to recreate the hairstyle Mame Dennis was wearing when Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside fell in love with her while shopping for the orphans’ roller skates at Macy’s.

  As Claire was finishing up with what she thought was Denise’s last client of the day, her Aunt Alice and the busybody came in. They were surprised and delighted to see Claire, who enthusiastically faked the same reaction. As she took Auntie Mame’s money she glanced at the appointment book and saw two more customers were scheduled after these two. The first was Scott and the other name was smeared and illegible.

  “This is wonderful,” the busybody said. “You can tell us what all the movie stars are really like.”

  “You’re so thin,” Aunt Alice said. “The last time I saw you your hair was blonde and curly and you were carrying an extra twenty pounds. You’re not anorexic, are you? I hope you’re not hooked on any of those drugs because that would kill your mother. She has enough to worry about with that crazy father of yours. How did you get your teeth so white? They don’t look real. ”

  Claire wondered how she would get through the next hour.

  After Alice and the busybody left, Claire finally dealt with the gross puddle Denise had left on the floor behind the front counter. Her eyes watered and she fought her gag reflex with rubber gloves on her hands and a whole roll of paper towels. She threw everything that had gotten wet in the trash and bleached the floor.

  She called her mother to tell her where she was and what she was doing.

  “That’s awfully nice of you,” Delia said. “I’ll have to make them a meatloaf tonight and run it over there in the morning.”

  She still had some time to kill before Scott’s appointment. She worried that if she sat still she might think too much and this was definitely not a safe place to fall apart. She swept the floor, wiped the counters, washed out the sinks, washed and dried a load of dirty towels and then folded them. She organized the supply shelves and made a list of things Denise was out of. It was quiet, she was surrounded by familiar objects and smells, and hardly anyone knew where she was. It felt completely natural to be there.

  ‘Could I do this every day?’ she asked herself.

  She envisioned the energy it would require and the competition she would have if she started her own business in L.A. If Sloan followed through on her threat to blackball Claire in the industry there was no point in even trying. There were so many younger and hotter-looking kids coming up, and all of them were probably more talented and skilled than Claire. Her ace up the sleeve had been her connection to Sloan. Without that she might as well buy The Bee Hive, pull on some support hose, and get her teasing arm back in shape.

  ‘I’d be right back where I started,’ she thought.

  It seemed to Claire as if the opportunity for her potential life, the one that would eventually include settling down in one place with a really nice husband and at least one cute kid, had passed by without her realizing it. She was almost forty. It was too late to start over in her chosen career and about a minute before too late to have a child. How was it that three years ago when she’d signed her last contract with Sloan, it had seemed like s
he had so much time left to start the next chapter, the really meaningful chapter? Now it looked as if her best years had been squandered.

  Reluctantly she let herself think about the man she’d left in Scotland. Drama professor Carlyle McKinney wasn’t handsome, but with a crooked smile and laughing brown eyes, his face had character. He was barely as tall as Claire, and she blushed to think how readily she gave up high heels for him.

  Although a master of accents, Carlyle’s trained speaking voice was pure Masterpiece Theater. Claire had been thrilled every time a little Scots burr sneaked in during his unguarded moments. Speaking of which, the unguarded moments had been brilliant as well, an intoxicating mixture of passion, tenderness, and laughter.

  The producers on Sloan’s last movie had hired Carlyle to be Sloan’s dialect coach, and as a consequence he and Claire spent many long days shivering under the same umbrella. He made her laugh, which for Claire, now immune to the physical beauty of the gorgeous actors she met every day, was a potent aphrodisiac. Of course, as soon as Sloan caught wind of what was going on she found a way to ruin it, and Claire had given her final notice.

  ‘I miss him,’ she thought, and then immediately scolded herself for her weakness.

  “La, la, la,” she said, but these feelings, once dug up and brushed off, would not be buried again so easily.

  ‘You’ve got to quit being such a romantic,’ Claire told herself. ‘There is no perfect man.’

  “Hello,” Scott called as he came in. “Hey, Claire. I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  She filled him in on Denise and he said he didn’t mind if she cut his hair.

  “I hope it’s not a conflict of interest or anything,” she said. “I don’t want you to get in trouble with Sarah.”

  “If you knew how little I care about what that woman thinks of me,” he said. “Plus you can’t be chief of police in this town and not trip over a conflict of interest at every turn. Your dad forgot to tell me that before he retired.”

  “Do you think they’ll clear me for take-off soon?”