| |
I SPENT MOST OF THE day getting ready for the Business Boosters volunteer dinner. Had I been on the mainland, I might have attempted to iron my hair straight, but in Mahina’s damp climate, the effort would have been futile. Betty Jackson had told me she started wearing her hair natural within days of moving to Hawai`i. She’d had to assure her department chair it wasn’t a political gesture, but a practical one.
I had asked Betty why her department chair thought her hairstyle was any of his business in the first place. She simply shook her head and said she had learned to pick her battles. Betty looked great with her hair cut close. She was tall and elegant, with a long neck and a perfect jawline. If I tried to copy her short hairdo, people would assume I’d given up on my looks entirely and devoted myself to the life of the mind.
I peered closely into my bathroom mirror and dabbed beads of sweat from my upper lip. I would have to get an air conditioner installed one of these days; my ceiling fans just pushed the damp air around. I stepped back, released my hair from its ponytail, fluffed it out, and appraised the effect; no, I decided. My hair was so frizzed out my head looked like a pyramid. I wet my hands, smoothed my hair back, twisted it, and pinned it in place. It was a relief to feel air circulating around my neck. I pulled out another tissue and dabbed the sweat off my face again.
I rummaged through my closet and settled on a white blouse and grey silk charmeuse slacks. The outfit looked dressy enough for dinner, and had the added advantage of being comfortable. I finished the look with a chunky silver necklace I didn’t get to wear much. Faculty members in other disciplines could get away with a little flash, but the College of Commerce faculty were expected to follow a dress code I privately referred to as Business Boring.
By the time I got to Donnie’s house I was sticky with sweat again, but it was too late to do anything about it. I stood at the front door, took a deep breath, and rang the doorbell. The door opened and Davison stood there, shirtless and looking like he had just rolled out of bed.
“Eh, Dad,” Davison called over his shoulder. “Molly’s here.”
Davison’s tattoos probably cost more than my car. His chest, arms, and neck teemed with spiders, snakes, and centipedes; a pair of scorpion claws poked up from his waistband. I felt like telling him to go put on a shirt, but of course I wasn’t his mother. I wasn’t even his father’s girlfriend anymore.
“May I come in?” I asked.
“What? Oh. Yeah.” He opened the door wider and absently rubbed his stubbly cheek, exposing a tuft of black armpit hair. I caught a whiff of sour body odor as I passed. He had apparently been moping around, unshowered, for a while. Sherry was gone, probably back on the mainland by now with Atticus. Mad Dog. Whatever his name was.
Donnie emerged from the hallway, neatly dressed for dinner in a pressed aloha shirt and black trousers.
“Davison, didn’t you shower yet?”
Davison muttered something under his breath and lumbered toward the hallway leading to the bedrooms.
“You gonna be okay?” Donnie said to Davison’s retreating back. Davison shrugged.
“We’ll be back in a couple hours. There’s some leftover pork roast. Take the plastic off this time when you heat it in the oven.”
By the time we reached the Maritime Club and parked, the initial awkwardness had worn off, and I was feeling comfortable in Donnie’s company again. Our conversation seemed to flow, although maybe I was comparing it to my awkward outings with Atticus Marx. As dinner progressed, Donnie asked my opinion of the various menu items, and speculated on the storage and cooking methods used for each. I told him I approved of the rich and salty furikake salmon, I thought the Marsala sauce on the chicken was too sweet, and I would have preferred my vegetables less crunchy.
Donnie also told me I looked beautiful. It felt like nothing could go wrong this evening. The wait staff had just started to bring out the dessert (haupia and sweet potato cheesecake) when Donnie’s phone rang. He listened briefly, and hung up.
“I’m sorry, Molly. We have to go.”
“What’s going on?”
Donnie was already back on the phone, so he couldn’t answer me. I collected my purse from underneath the chair, stood up, and brushed the crumbs from my pants.
“Yes, I will,” he was saying, “I’ll pay the overtime. As soon as possible. This is an emergency.”
“The bathroom’s flooded,” Donnie said to me, when he had hung up. “Davison’s shower backed up.”
“Oh no. You might have to pull up the red wall-to-wall carpet in his room. Was that Davison who just called you?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t he just...okay.”
I thought Davison should have called the plumber himself and not interrupted our dinner. But being depressed over Sherry’s departure had apparently rendered him more useless than ever. Donnie and I worked our way toward the exit, but someone of Donnie’s standing didn’t simply leave a Business Boosters gathering. Donnie was stopped at every table on our way out, and had to spend so much time handshaking and small-talking I wondered if his house was going to float away before we got back.
“My shower’s backed up before,” I said, once we were in the car and on our way. “It was my hair. I had to buy those little filters to put over the shower drain. I wish someone had told me about those earlier, before I had to have the plumber come out.”
“I hope Davison put some towels down. I can’t have water sitting on the wood floor.”
The plumber’s van was already in front of Donnie’s house when we pulled up. Donnie jumped out of the car and ran inside. I found Donnie and Davison in Davison’s bedroom, standing on white towels spread out on the soggy red carpet. They were watching the plumber snake the shower drain in Davison’s bathroom. Davison was wearing a black satin bathrobe. It looked like the same one I had last seen wrapped around Sherry Di Napoli.
“Eh, dunno what happened,” Davison was saying to Donnie. “All of a sudden was water everywhere.”
I joined them, and the three of us stood on the soaked towels, watching the plumber dragging the snake out of the drain as if he were performing a magic trick. And then, abracadabra. He pulled up an object that looked like a small, bedraggled mammal.
“Eh, Missus,” the plumber said to me, “you get your drain all clogged wit’ your hair.”
“Me?”
“See? This your hair right here.”
“That’s not my hair.”
He shook out the water, and from the slimy clump he lifted up a long coil of dark brown hair.
“See it all the time,” he said. “Wahine wit’ long hair. All you gotta do is go down to the hardware store, try get some shower drain filters, one for every shower in the house. Cheap, those things. Save a lotta money in the long run.”
Donnie was staring at me in horror, as if I had just pulled off my human face to reveal a tentacled alien underneath.
“Donnie, don’t look at me like that. That is not my hair.”