The Foreigners

by Maxine Swann

  But Vera looked different. It was partly that she was tan.

  “I called and you were at the beach,” I said.

  She was dressed up more than usual. She had earrings on. But it wasn’t just that. She had a slightly harder look, maybe it was the eyeliner, black, right on the bottom rim of her eye. The jewelry also looked hard. She told me she had moved out. “A woman needs to be made to feel like a woman,” she said. “I’m not talking about just having sex, but by the way he treats her. With my first husband, because of his illness, it became hard to have sex, but he still always made me feel like a woman.”

  By now, I had taken off my pants and was lying on the bed, which was covered with a sheet of paper. Vera was preparing the wax as she talked.

  “How do you mean?”

  “It could be anything. The touch of a hand as he was passing by.” She was stirring the wax, thinking. “But maybe I idealize him.” She swiped hot wax on my legs. “My daughter says I do. Something happened once. There was a hairdresser’s on the ground floor of the apartment building where we lived. One time my husband told me he was going out to see a movie. This was strange. He never did this. But I was completely absorbed in the children, so I didn’t care. Then a few weeks later my mother-in-law called me. We were good friends. She told me my husband was seeing a woman who worked at the hairdresser’s. ‘He’s there now,’ my mother-in-law said. ‘Go find him.’ I went. He was just leaving. But he lied and said that a woman there was the girlfriend of a friend of his. He’d had to give her a message. I believed him. But the next week I went to the hairdresser’s myself to get a haircut. There was a pretty girl there working. I said, ‘My mother-in-law says you’re seeing my husband.’ She pointed to the other girl beside her, who was ugly. “That’s Tanya, not me.’ I began talking to Tanya. She told me that my husband had lied to her, saying he was single. She had a lot of problems. She was single and had a daughter. They needed things. My husband had bought them for her. Then they’d gone out for coffee, started dating.

  “After I was finished with my haircut, I invited her to come back to my house with me, so we’d both be there when Dima came home. Together, we packed up his things in a suitcase and waited there in the kitchen for him.”

  I laughed. “That’s funny. Revenge.”

  “Of course.” Vera looked at me quite seriously. “It’s very important to take revenge. In the right way, of course. It doesn’t mean you have to hurt anyone. But you act in a way that lets you keep your self-respect.”

  Yet another thing I’d never considered doing in my life, taking revenge.

  “When Dima got home, we told him that his suitcase was all ready and he had to go. He went crazy. He lied about everything. Then Tanya left and he went after her. I found out later that he’d told her that he loved her, he wanted to be with her and didn’t want to be with me. She said, ‘No, forget it.’ He came back and told me that he loved me and he didn’t love her and all he wanted was to stay with me. The next day, I went to the hairdresser’s again to talk to Tanya. She told me what he’d said, that he didn’t want to be with me.

  “That night, Dima came home. He said he wanted to do something very special, to have a special night together. He took me to the movies. Then he bathed me and made love to me, like never before, but I knew it was a lie. Later that night, when he was asleep, I went to the kitchen and took some pills, a lot of them. I didn’t know how else to get out of the situation. He found me, passed out, and called an ambulance. I spent three days in the hospital, but they saved me. The doctor was furious, my daughter was still nursing. ‘You were going to abandon your children for some man,’ the doctor said. A psychiatrist came and told me to say I didn’t want to kill myself, I just did it to scare my husband. Otherwise I would lose my job.

  “That whole year, I was not myself. I didn’t smile or laugh for a long time. My husband was really worried. He wouldn’t even pass by the hairdresser’s anymore. He’d take a bus on the other side of the building, wave as he was coming and going. I used to always be eating nuts. He would call me his squirrel. Now he would plead with me, saying, ‘I want you to be like you were before, my little squirrel.’ But I couldn’t. To have been lied to like that was something I couldn’t understand. Finally, I came out of it.”

  “You were able to forgive him?”

  “I don’t know if I forgave him. I just forgot. I became myself and we went on.

  “A few years later,Tanya died. She’d had a kind of prostitute life. We wanted to adopt her baby. It was my idea. We tried, but it didn’t work out. I don’t know what happened to her.”

  Suddenly, she was laughing.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “I’m just remembering, it was that year, the year that I started feeling better again, that the practice of blow jobs was imported to Belarus.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Yeah, no one did that. But then our friend Ludmila went to Poland with her husband, whose business had sent him there, and came back one day and told us about kissing everywhere on the body. None of us could believe it. I thought it was so disgusting that for months I couldn’t eat off of Ludmila’s plates. Just the thought of her eating off those same plates made me sick. Then little by little, we all started trying it.”

  twenty-four

  The botanist wrote me. He was even more excited. The latest news was that they were launching a massive counterattack on the Iris pseudacorus invasion, a measure known as biological control.

  In a biological control scenario, natural enemies such as insects, fish and pathogens are purposefully introduced by scientists to weaken and suppress invading plants. In order to find the right biological control agent, scientists travel the world in search of the target plant’s natural enemies. Once found, the weakening agent is imported to the host country and placed in a quarantine laboratory. There, meticulous experiments are carried out to ensure that the organism will affect only the invading species and will not impact native or crop species.

  Next the enemy agent is released into its new habitat to prey upon the invader. Classical biological control relies on numerous generations of the enemy agent to suppress the invading species over a long period of time. Another method, inundative biological control, functions through vigorous and swift counterattack, with enemy agents released en masse.

  In this case, inundative measures were being taken.Vast quantities of mottled weevils had been released in the wetlands. Simultaneous intergenerational damage was hoped for with the adults feeding on the leaves, where they would produce characteristic feeding scars, and the larvae tunneling in the petioles and crown of the plant. While the plants would not be wiped out immediately, their vigor would be considerably compromised, with the youthful irises suffering particularly.

  I called Leonarda. “Whatever happened with that dinner with the Beast?”

  “Really? You want to do it?”

  “Why not? I’m hungry.”

  “Okay, great.”

  I knew it would be something absurdly laborious, baby ducks steeped in wine for several days prior, then cooked low for twelve hours. Whatever. The perfect aperitif, wine, digestif. I relished all this preoccupation.

  We settled on that coming Thursday at 9:00 P.M. I snuck into the back garden a bit before that, positioning myself against the wall by the kitchen window, pressed into the jasmine.

  Inside, there was an immense amount of fastidious bustling. Leonarda was wearing green corduroys with a short skirt on top. She disappeared for a little while and came back transformed, the skirt alone, little heels, a blouse with a ruffle.

  I knelt there, breathing in the jasmine. At 9:30, she called me. I was holding my vibrating phone in my hand.

  “Hiiiiiiiiii. We’re waiting for you.”

  At 10:00, she said, “Where the hell is she?” She was angry and flounced petulantly around the house.

  “Let’s start anyway,” Miguel said from the stove.

  “I don’t want to start,�
� Leonarda said.

  He had already poured them aperitifs.

  He turned back to the stove. He was stirring. “Well, the risotto can’t wait. It’ll be ruined.”

  Suddenly, he looked agitated. He started moving his feet up and down, as if the floor were too hot.

  She glanced over with a look of scorn. “What’s wrong with you?”

  He pulled the pan off the fire. He was quivering, seemingly in a state of uncontrollable fury. This, at least, was amusing. She laughed. She went over to look in the pan.

  “It’s already ruined,” he said. The tendons on his neck and forearms were standing out.

  She dipped her finger in, tasted, wrinkled her nose in an awful way.

  He threw his hands up violently in the air, turned and left the room.

  She called me again. The phone vibrated outside, stirring the jasmine, right at my wrist. It was 10:30.

  She walked into the living room where he was wobbling on the couch, smoking his pipe, visibly strung out.

  “This is weird. I think something’s up. I’m going to her house.” She had put short boots on instead of her heels.

  She left.

  A moment after the door closed, he got up. He went into the kitchen and threw the risotto out. He took the ducks out of the oven, poured himself some wine and ate some snails. Then he put a DVD into his computer and sat down at his desk to watch it. Leonarda had told me that he liked to watch American TV series, like Sex and the City. He gradually relaxed. Every now and then he laughed.

  I closed my eyes and rested the back of my head against the wall.

  After a little while, Leonarda returned. Now she was the one in a state. “What the fuck? She’s not there. I went inside and everything.”

  “You went in?”

  “Yeah, I have the key.”

  He set about warming up the meal. “Let’s eat,” he said.

  She flung herself down at the table.

  “Have some wine,” he said.

  She didn’t touch her wine. I was enjoying this. She hardly touched her food, pulled the snails out of their shells curiously, as if it were an experiment, and left them lying there on her plate.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said after a while. She got up and left the table.

  He didn’t say anything, though his silence seemed to require considerable control, poured himself some more wine, finished his meal.

  My mouth was watering as I watched. Finally, he got up and walked down the hall toward the bathroom. She was nowhere in sight, must have retreated to the kid’s room.

  The window by the table was open onto the garden. She had hardly touched her baby duck. Dare I? I leaned in and plucked the bird off her plate. I carried it across the grass to the little bench in the far corner of the garden, where I sat down and ate it swiftly with my hands.

  twenty-five

  At first, she felt queasy. She was holding her breath, trying not to smell things. She had sought out a place as far away as possible from her usual stomping ground, so she wouldn’t have to run into anyone she knew. This neighborhood was literally outside the city. She’d also taken the extra precaution of wearing a wig, sleek, black, shoulder-length, with bangs.

  At first, she kept her distance from the other women there. But she couldn’t help overhearing their conversations, and then following them from day to day. One woman in particular narrated things very well.

  The day she’d hired her, the owner, Juana, had asked, “What do you do?”

  “Makeup and hands,” she’d said.

  There wasn’t much makeup work, so she began with hands. She did her first few pairs with repugnance, holding her breath. Then one day she worked a miracle on a pair of fingernails, making these ugly things—they’d been a particularly ugly pair, long, dirty, cracked—beautiful. Okay, she thought, think of it that way. The work required confronting ugliness, making it beautiful. This was something she could understand.

  Another day a woman came in with her daughter. It was the daughter’s fifteenth birthday. They both needed makeup. Juana called her over.

  She was nervous, but everything she put on the girl made her look so pretty that she gained confidence. Next she did the mother. Everyone in the beauty parlor exclaimed at her skill. “Now we don’t even know who’s the mother and who’s the daughter,” they said. One of the girls working there was going out on an important date that night. “Hey, can you make me up?” she asked.

  Going home on the bus that night, Isolde felt so happy she wanted to shout. Then she caught herself and felt strange, as if she must be living in a warped world. Could that really make her so happy, to put makeup on a working girl in a remote, shitty corner of a Third World city? She shrugged. Well, it had. The feeling was there, solid, in her stomach.

  It is said that monkeys are drawn instinctively to hair. The pleasure that the touch of hair affords them is such that they seek it from any source, the dead as well as the living, strangers as well as their own kind. Any hairy object, animate or inanimate, may form the subject of their investigations. The pleasure is the pleasure of the fingers. The specific life of the hand begins with grooming.

  Her entire life Isolde had had a horror of hair. Everyone in her family knew this. A hair on the sink, on the table, not to mention on the food. When she had been little and came across a hair in an unexpected place, she would start to cry. Sometimes she would even cry for a long time. To avoid these scenarios, her family would whisk any loose hairs away as soon as they appeared.

  One day, Juana came over as Isolde was working on someone’s feet. “We’re going to have to teach you to wax,” she said. Isolde’s face must have betrayed something. “The way we work here is that we all know how to do everything,” Juana said. But still she didn’t press Isolde right away.

  The next few nights, lying in bed, Isolde thought about hairs, meshes of them, creeping, crawling over everything. Dark or pale, white blond against pink skin or reddening at the roots. Hairs that had been dyed and were growing out white. Patches of flesh overgrown with hairs. She felt suffocated, pictured hair growing inside her throat, like a thicket, prickly, blocking the whole passage, encroaching on her tongue.

  While before she’d avoided even looking at the activities in the beauty parlor that had to do with hair, now she began to pay quiet attention. She knew she had to conquer this fear of hair. She began sweeping up the hair left on the floor after a cut. She’d been amazed that the other women could eat their lunches in this place so full of hair. She’d always step outside to eat herself, sitting on the bench right by the front door. One day, she made herself eat inside with them. She had to learn to be around hair.

  That same af ternoon, Juana asked her to wash a woman’s hair before a cut. It gave Isolde goose bumps, but she managed it. Soon afterward, Vera said one morning when Isolde arrived, “Today I’m going to teach you how to wax.”A few hours later, a young woman came in. She had tawny skin and hair almost the same color. “Come on,” Vera said, waving her hand at Isolde with an impish smile. Isolde went into the little back room with Vera and the woman. Vera explained how to heat and stir the wax. She let Isolde stir, waiting for the moment when the wax was liquified but not transparent. Vera spread wax on the woman’s leg and then tapped it with a wooden spatula. Once it was hard, but not too dry, she tore it off. The woman cried out. Her skin was left rosy and uncannily smooth.

  The mechanics of waxing were not foreign to Isolde. She did know, after all, how to wax herself. But she still wasn’t prepared for the first client she had, a dark-haired woman with lots of hair, not only on her legs and in her armpits, but everywhere, even on the fleshy curves of her butt. She had never seen so much hair on a woman in her life.

  Isolde plunged in. Unlike the first woman, who had cried out, this woman was used to the treatment. She made little grunts, nothing more, as the hair was ripped out. Isolde was sweating, she kept working. Whichever way the woman turned, there seemed to be more hair. Vera checked in on her every ten mi
nutes.

  Finally, once it was over and the woman had left, Isolde sat down, flushed and exhausted. Juana brought out a bottle of champagne. “To celebrate your first waxing,” she said.

  Over time, Isolde actually began to find the waxing satisfying. It even felt like a way for her to actively engage her lifelong horror of hair. Through actions of her own, she could confront and conquer it. She delighted in the smooth, clean surface of the skin afterward. The wonder of the wax, the hairs suddenly all gone.

  It was also strangely satisfying to get up every day and have something particular to do, somewhere to go, rather than have the whole day there, shapeless, looming before her. She was less lonely. She was in the company of people all day, listening to chatter, hearing stories. It helped that her clientele weren’t the kind of people she knew. They were from the province of Buenos Aires, Avellaneda.

  She still went to cocktail parties in the evenings. Of course, she could get any kind of beauty treatment done now for free. If anything, her look was now even sleeker, with the constant touch-ups. She received offers for dates, went on dates. She still handed out her card at cocktail parties, though less frequently.

  A t first, I only knew that Isolde called me less. I called her myself, to find out if everything was all right. When I did see her, she seemed different. I wasn’t sure if this was good or bad, but I did notice that I felt more relaxed around her. She was less bubbly. You didn’t feel you had to muster the same energy.

  Then it happened. One day at the beauty parlor, I noticed a new woman working. I saw the back of her head, shiny black shoulder-length hair. She turned. I saw only a sliver of her face, but I recognized her movement. Then she stood up and walked away. The walk. It was dizzying—it could only be Isolde.

  But I held back my impulse to call out her name. Something was obviously going on. She was here in disguise, didn’t want to be discovered. I followed Vera into the little back room.

  “There’s a new girl?” I asked.