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I get myself a takeout coffee from the deli across the road and wait idly for a while. I’m not sure she’ll come out again and I’m just starting to think,Why am I here again? So, she lives in a pretty blue house. Okay, can I go home now?when her front door opens. She’s changed into shiny, dark gray leggings and white running shoes with a hot pink stripy pattern on the side. She walks briskly down the street and crosses the river via a small pedestrian bridge, then takes the path that I know loops around the park and along the riverfront.
I’m red-faced and out of breath by the time I sit down on a bench with my coffee and watch her run in circles. She doesn’t even break a sweat, her ponytail swinging in time with each strong, bouncy stride. Whenever she loops past me I am tempted to extend my leg and watch her tumble into the geraniums. It’s surprisingly difficult to quash the urge, so in the end I leave and go home.
The next day I spend half an hour before the staff meeting browsing online until I find the exact same running shoes. I make a note of the brand and at lunchtime I go down to Champs and get myself a pair, even though they cost $160. I also buy a pair of leggings, which is kind of scary because my thighs are not what they used to be, and a T-shirt with little holes in it, just like she was wearing.
“We should go running together,” I tell Luis that night.
He frowns. “Why?”
“It would be fun. Don’t they say that couples who run together stay together?”
He laughs, because he thinks I’m joking. I’m about to argue, insist, but then I think I should probably practice first.
And I do. Only because I want to follow her again, and it’s easier to do that if I’m running. I get to the park and there are so many of us runners and for the first five minutes I’m enjoying myself. I feel like I’m part of a tribe as we smile at each other as we pass. It’s nice. I’m tempted to go up to Isabelle and sayHi! Remember me?just to see the expression on her face. But then she might suggest we run together and that’s just not an option. Compared to Isabelle I look like a sad middle-aged woman with saggy breasts and an expanding waistline desperately trying to hang on to her youth. Which is exactly what I am, so that makes sense. I don’t even know what I’m trying to achieve here, other than check her out. Size up the competition. And it’s done now: I’ve checked her out and she’s as beautiful as the first day I met her, which was just the other day, and she runs like a gazelle and I run like a duck.
Back home I put the clothes away in the bottom of the closet.
Three days later and I’m having a beauty day, as I call it. I’ve made an appointment after work at Marcus Bond Salon because it’s eye-wateringly expensive, so I figure that’s good, he should be able to fix me up.
I’m about to leave when Geoff shows up. “Anna, can you type up this grant acquittal, please?” He hands me the paperwork.
“It’s the form,” I say.
“Yes, I know.”
“But it’s blank. It hasn’t been filled in.”
“Yes, I know, that’s why I’m asking.”
“But it’s going to take hours, and I can’t right now.”
“What do you mean, you can’t? Why not?”
I slip on my jacket and grab my bag. “I have a hair appointment if you must know.”
“Oh? A hair appointment?” He smiles. “You know you’re beautiful just as you are.”
He’s still holding out the form. I tap it with one finger. “Ask Mila,” I say. “She’s all over this stuff.”
Two hundred and twenty dollars later, and I walk out with my hair dyed almost black. It was brown, but with strands of gray peeking through which I had said I wanted to get rid of. It’s been straightened to an inch of its life—it was vaguely wavy—and with bangs cut bluntly in a horizontal line. It’s in a kind of short bob, and when I say short, I mean cut-it-any-shorter-and-you’ve-gone-past-my-hairline short, and also cut real short above my ears, and whatever is not the bob is shaved, which is most of the back of my head.
“Short hair makes you look younger,” says the woman cutting my hair, who is not Marcus Bond, because apparently Marcus Bond only cuts for his regular clients.
It’s terrifying. And I don’t look younger. I look about fifty now, which is ten more years, boom, just like that, and I don’t know what to say, and my chin wobbles when I pay but I don’t want to cry at the hairdresser because who cries at the hairdresser? Other than small children, I mean.
I don’t go back to work; I just go straight home and Luis says, “Oh, wow, Anna, what happened?” and he says it like I had an accident and I’ve walked in on crutches.
“It just needs a wash,” I say. “You know what it’s like. They put too much product in it. I’ll be right back.”
I rinse it over the sink and it’s still very bad and very scary, so I grab my nail scissors and start to hack at it, hoping to transform it into some kind of cute pixie cut.
“Oh, wow, Mom, what happened?” the children say later.
“Nothing. You like it?”
“No.”
“Okay then. Can you set the table, Matti?”
