Karate Chop: Stories

HAIR SALON

I LIVE IN A TWO-ROOM APARTMENT IN A BUILDING AWAY FROM THE center. It’s not long since I moved out here and I don’t know many people. I asked the hairstylist on the opposite corner how much he charged compared to the ones in the city:

“Practically nothing,” he said, and asked me to lean my head back farther.

For smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee with the hairstylist I get my hair done for half price. Once in a while, the fat lady who lives in our building walks by on the street outside. She has permission to keep a dog in her apartment, because her dog can’t bark. I asked the hairstylist what kind of a dog can’t bark. He said it was because the fat lady gives the dog her medication. Apparently, she said it’s to be on the safe side. Which is fine by me. I don’t care one way or the other, and when the hairstylist asks me why I’m down in the dumps I talk about something else, or I say with a wry smile I don’t like to see in the mirror:

“Oh, the usual stuff.”

That makes him think it’s to do with men, and he can think what he wants. I can see the fat lady from my building tying up her dog outside the Laundromat across the street. We usually say hello, and I think it’s because she once helped me out in the Laundromat. I’ve often seen her on the bench in the park, sharing a beer with one of the locals. She’s always doing something, and now she goes inside the Laundromat as the hairstylist sprays my hair. He says I have split ends and wants to sell me silk oil from America, but I’m not buying any.

“It’s all about loving yourself. If you don’t love yourself, who else will?” the hairstylist says.

Someone, I think to myself, and gaze out at the fat lady’s dog. It’s sitting nicely outside the Laundromat. It’s turned to face the corner of the building, though not as if waiting for something to appear. It’s a nice dog. I’ve seen it often, of course, plodding along at its mom’s heel, but I never noticed what it actually looked like before.

“I wonder if it knows it’s out of its skull,” I say to the hairstylist, and he tells me it’s a cairn terrier.

“Well, it’s out of its skull, anyway,” I say.

We talk about what she gives it. The hairstylist thinks it might be diet pills. I say pancakes and estrogen. We laugh, and then the hairstylist says they’ve raised their prices at the Laundromat. Now it costs twenty-three kroner for seven kilos, thirty-eight for more. He thinks it’s extortion, but I don’t care. I never have more than seven kilos of laundry and have reached the point where I never will, unless I start stealing things. I say that to the hairstylist and we laugh about it, though I don’t care to see myself laughing in the mirror. It looks like I have no teeth.

It was at the Laundromat I met the fat lady the first time. She showed me how the soap dispenser worked and where the little cups were for the softener. She was doing laundry for someone else, she said, and didn’t think she’d seen me before in the neighborhood. I said I’d just moved here from the center and she nodded slightly.

When I came to get my laundry out of the washing machine she was still there. I had some trouble with the spinner and she’s the type who wants to help. She took control of my laundry. She rolled the trolley with my laundry over to the spinner and put my underwear inside piece by piece. She asked what number I lived at, and it turned out she went to the residents’ bingo nights with someone who lived on the first floor. While she was telling me about all the things she had won over the years, I was thinking she must have been young in the seventies. She was probably a bit chubby, but pretty. She’d have worn white jeans with bell-bottoms. She’d have had blouses with puffed sleeves, and her hair would have been fair and turned with a curling iron. Good company, but at some point she decided it was better to love everyone than just someone, and after that she just got bigger.

“All it needs is a quick spin,” she said, and I didn’t care that she’d had her hands in my underwear.

“Thanks for the help,” I said. “Anytime,” she said.

Now she thinks she knows me. If she’s out with the dog, she waves, and if she’s standing in one of the other lines at the supermarket, she’ll call out:

“Hey, how are you doing?”

“Fine!” I call back, and I don’t even know her name.

Sometimes she’ll come up to me on the sidewalk and tell me something trivial. One day, for instance, she stopped me to say someone new had moved into the apartment above her and that the person in question was noisy. The neighbors on her left always had their windows open to the courtyard, so all their conversations echoed in her kitchen, and the ones on her right were always doing it, as she put it. Morning, noon, and night they were doing it, she said, then made moaning noises and funny faces to avoid having to say sex, and she must have had the dog with her that day. I don’t know why I never really looked at it before. Its coat is brown, though graying at the ends. It wears a red collar.

“How about a smoke?” the hairstylist says, and I nod.

He goes into the little kitchen out back to get a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray. He has put his things, scissors and oil, on the counter in front of me, and while he’s away the fat lady comes out of the Laundromat across the street. I’ve seen her a couple of times standing in the store picking out pastries with another fat lady. She waves to me. I stick my hand out from under the cape and wave back. I think the hairstylist may be right, that it’s some kind of terrier. I can see her talking to it as they go down the street together. Valium, I think to myself, and the sun beats down on the pavement.