REA TARVYDAS
#1
I sat in a barbershop in Calgary, Alberta. Chrissie Hynde was in the adjacent chair with her feet up on the counter. Her biker boots were scuffed, the soles worn. A minute earlier, the barber had refused to shave my head. I asked him why and waited. He ignored me and repeatedly dipped a comb in blue tonic. “You’re great,” he said in Chrissie Hynde’s direction.
“No, I’m not great. I’m an ordinary person who plays in a band. Why won’t you shave her head?”
“It’s the easiest way to grow out the grey.” I pushed my unruly hair behind my ears. There was an inch of grey at the roots.
The barber narrowed his eyes at me. “It’s too short for a woman. Besides, I don’t want to be responsible for someone who has her head shaved, then jumps off a bridge. No way.” He was a big man with small, close-set eyes, and an oversized head. His hair was dyed black and carefully combed over a bald spot.
I assured him I would not throw myself off any bridge.
“Women your age—” The barber draped a towel across my nape.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“That’s misogynistic bullshit and you know it,” said Chrissie Hynde.
The barber was silent, so she stood, grabbed a pair of scissors and set to trimming her bangs. The cuts were small but rough. Effective. Those bangs framed her kohl-ringed eyes to perfection.
“Looks good,” I said.
“It’s always a mess but I’ve learned how to manage it. I’m pretty comfortable with my look.” She wore a singlet under a blue vest, faded jeans and a black-and-white striped tie.
“You’re not very feminine,” said the barber. He snapped a nylon cape on me. Placed his hands on my shoulders like he wanted to calm himself down.
“Listen, I never wanted to be known as a girl in a band. I wanted to be known as a rock n’ roll musician,” said Chrissie Hynde.
And this got me thinking about how, the last few years, I wanted to be known not as a woman, but as a person. How I’d taken to wearing androgynous clothing and how I felt uniformly free.
“Shave it off,” I told the barber. He complied.
#2
I travelled to The Banff Centre to work on a novel. I woke sick with strep throat. I was delirious by lunchtime. It was February and minus forty degrees Celsius. The windows were frosted over with a half inch of ice that was clawing up the glass like it wanted to escape. The in-house doctor prescribed antibiotics. I was put into quarantine, but twice a day I wandered over to the dining room and choked down a bowl of soup.
At lunchtime, the waitress leaned in and asked, “Have you seen the athletes?”
It hurt to shake my head.
“There are eight hundred athletes here for the Junior Olympics. We’ve got them billeted in the theatres out back. There are so many, we’re feeding them in shifts.”
“Haven’t seen them,” I whispered. My throat was shredded.
Later, in my room, my fever spiked and the walls started leaning in. Trails of colour rose from the TV. And I thought I could hear the athletes below, talking and laughing together on their way to dinner. Delirious, I shoved a chair to the window and climbed onto it. Balancing, with my fingertips on the metal transom, I could just see over the ice. The angle was acute. The walkway was empty. No athletes.
There was a knock at the door. It was Chrissie Hynde.
“Hey, how’s it going?”
I told her about my throat.
“Throats. Listen, I know throats. You got a kettle? I’ll make you a hot toddy.” She held out a bottle of whisky.
I crawled into bed while Chrissie bustled around my room, clearing away my clothes and making space on the desk for a small box she had fished out of her messenger bag.
“What’s in there?”
“Stuff from home. I’ve been on the road a lot. I know to put together a lotta things out of little Ziplocs.”
“Have you seen the athletes?” I inhaled cinnamon bark fumes. They reminded me of my father and I hadn’t thought about him in months. Dad swore by the efficacy of hot toddies. “Cures what ails you,” he would say, and then plunk down a steaming mug of brown liquid.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, sick girl,” said Chrissie Hynde. So I explained.
“No athletes,” she replied and spun in the office chair. Her hair was pulled into a messy ponytail and I could see a bit of grey at her temples.
After a while, she asked, “What are you writing?” And I tried to explain my amorphous novel. I’d grown scared of its size.
“The writing process. Ain’t it grand? You’ll get there.”
Chrissie Hynde brewed another hot toddy, took a sip, hesitated, then said, “I have to tell you something. But you have to promise not to say anything to anyone.”
I promised.
“I’m thinking of going out on my own. I’m writing a buncha new songs. I swore I’d never do it and here I am, going solo.”
#3
I was standing among the avocados and blood oranges. Chrissie Hynde had shared her favourite salad recipe and I wanted to try it for dinner. A woman in her fifties stopped me and said, “You’re too old to be out in public wearing those.” And she pointed at my cargo shorts.
“Fuck off.” It came out of my mouth before I could stop myself.
“That’s not nice.”
“You’re not nice. I’ve never met you and you come up to me and tell me I shouldn’t be seen in public wearing shorts.”
“It’s unseemly,” said the woman. And I knew she was referring to my varicose veins.
“Fuck you,” I said with no hesitation. Later, I e-mailed Chrissie Hynde to tell her about my experience in the produce department at Safeway. I got an automatic response that indicated she was out of the country.
#4
Transporting my completed novel manuscript, I rode an asphalt escalator across Southern Ontario. I came upon Chrissie Hynde. She was playing a solo gig in the middle of a farmer’s field — empty save a small herd of cows grazing on cut hay.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m heading out on the road next month. I’ve gotta practice.” She strapped on her guitar and bent over a piece of equipment. There was a howl of feedback that she hastily subdued. I stared at the herd, knots of black-and-white cows with broad backs.
“New songs?”
She nodded. “Stockholm’s the name of the album.”
“Like Stockholm syndrome?”
“Nah. I went to Stockholm and recorded it there. But I know what the syndrome is. I mean, I read up on it.”
And I remembered a recent trip to Florence. In the Uffizi gallery, immense Renaissance paintings leaned over me like darkness visible. I grew frightened and escaped to a concrete bench in the packed square. Later, at the business hotel, I dreamt I was choking on blood-red oil paint.
“Are you scared?” My lips dried as I recalled the oozing sensation of my dream.
“You better believe it. It’s just me. No one else. I mean, a band has a personality of its own and once you know what it is, it’s pretty comfortable up there on stage. What the hell. It’s only failure.” Chrissie Hynde tuned her guitar, then launched into a jangled riff. When the amp crackled, the cows took off on an awkward run.
#5
I moved house. That is, I lifted up my bungalow and moved it to Saskatchewan. I’d always wanted to live by the Qu’Appelle River and figured my old house would survive the long trip down the TransCanada Highway. An urbanite wanted my narrow city lot, but not my sturdy bungalow.
I drove the pilot pickup truck forty kilometres an hour across the flatlands while Chrissie Hynde rode shotgun. “WideLoad” flashed the pilot pickup as it inched ahead of the flatbed that carried my bungalow, warning drivers all the way to Saskatchewan. “WideLoad, WideLoad, WideLoad.” That would be me. Too wide for places like city lots, office jobs, and marriage. Chrissie Hynde carried a red-and-white megaphone and, every once in a while, would announce a random thought out the open window.
“What happened with your husband?” she asked.
“I just need to be alone for a while.” I needed time to figure myself out.
“Listen, I’ve been on my own for a long while. I didn’t exactly plan on it happening. It just happened. But I believe in love.”
And I told her how I didn’t know what I believed. About a lot of things: writing, love, marriage. How living with a middle-aged man preoccupied with his aging body was hard work. How I couldn’t talk to him. How I couldn’t talk to strangers anymore.
“We’re all strangers, aren’t we?” she blasted through the megaphone.
I winced. “Do you have to use the megaphone?”
“You bet. I’ve got shit to say. Why in the hell are you moving your house, anyhow?”
“Geographical adventure. Dangerous impulses beneath the stucco.”
“The wiring’s hot?”
I nodded and fiddled with the radio knob. Reception was intermittent on that one stretch of road.
“Yeah, that’s menopause for you. Listen, you gotta have fun. I had an affair with a younger man a few years ago,” she blurted out the window through the megaphone. A chain of birds startled off the telephone wires that underlined the prairie sky.
“What was that like?”
“It was a doomed relationship, but the sex was fantastic. You’re on hiatus from your marriage. You should give it a try.”
I considered sex with a younger man. Twenty-five years since I’d disrobed in front of a man other than my husband. I considered the dangers of vigorous sex when lubrication was an issue. Cystitis at a minimum. “I don’t think I’m ready for that.”
“Do it anyway,” said Chrissie Hynde. And she asked me to pull over. The last I saw of her was in the rear view. She was standing in the middle of the road outside of Moose Jaw. The megaphone remained.