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By Root 999 0

modern about it and had advised her to live with him for a while, but no, Linda wanted the big wedding and the honeymoon, and then what did she do? She ended up with a big divorce as well. “Why don’t they listen? It’s not as if I like being right all the time, being right is certainly not fun for me.” Being right, especially about your husband, can be painful; and sometimes you would give your left arm to be wrong. As she sat there waiting for the end of the train to pass, she thought about the events of the last few days. She had been feeling a little more anxious than usual, and now wondered if she had not been having some kind of premonition that something terrible was about to happen.

As she ran over it in her mind, she remembered she had started feeling a little anxious Wednesday morning, right after her regular ten-thirty hair appointment down at the beauty shop. “What could have set it off?” she wondered. She thought back to that morning…. She had been in the chair as usual, having her hair set, when Tot Whooten, the snow monkey look-alike, reached across to pick out a medium-size roller from her plastic tray, and dropped it on the floor.

“God dog it!” Tot said. “That’s the second time I’ve dropped something this morning. I tell you, Norma, my nerves are all ajingle. It seems like after 9/11 happened, everything has turned upside down. I was doing just fine, had gotten over my breakdown, came back to work ready to go, and then, wham, you wake up and find out that the Arabs just hate us to pieces, and why? I’ve never been mean to an Arab in my life, have you?”

“No…never met one, really,” said Norma.

“And, then you find out people all over the world hate us.”

“I know,” sighed Norma, handing Tot a bobby pin. “I’m completely baffled, I thought everybody liked us.”

“Me too, I just don’t get it. How could anybody hate us, when we’re so nice? Anytime there was a problem anywhere in the world, haven’t we always sent money and help?”

“For as long as I can remember we have.”

“Aren’t we supposed to be the most generous people in the world?” she said, sticking a pin into a roller.

“That’s what I’ve always heard,” said Norma.

“Now I read that even Canada hates us…Canada! And we just love them, everybody’s always wanting to go up there and visit. I never knew Canada hated us. Did you?”

“No, I didn’t,” said Norma. “I always thought Canada was our friendly neighbor to the north.”

Tot took a drag off her cigarette and put it back in the black plastic ashtray. “It’s one thing when somebody you know hates you, but when perfect strangers hate you, it just makes me want to put a rope around my neck and jump out a window, doesn’t it you?”

Norma thought about it and said, “I don’t think I want to kill myself over it, but it’s certainly very upsetting.”

Tot picked up a hairnet. “I say forget trying to help the whole damn world, because they sure don’t appreciate it.”

“They don’t seem to,” said Norma.

“Hell…look at France, after we went over and saved them from the Nazis, and now they say all those ugly things? Shoot, I’ll tell you, Norma, this whole thing has really hurt my feelings.”

Norma agreed. “It does almost make you not want to even try and help people, doesn’t it?”

“You got that right!” she said, stuffing cotton behind Norma’s ears. “All my hard-earned tax money going around the world, and do I even get a thank-you? I used to have faith in the world, but it’s turned out to be as bad as my own children, nothing but gimme, gimme, gimme all the time…and it’s never enough.”

Tot’s daughter, Darlene, who was as wide as her mother was thin, was working in the next booth and heard her last statement. “Well, thanks a lot, Mother!” she said over the partition. “See if I ever ask you for anything again!”

Tot rolled her eyes in Darlene’s direction, and said to Norma, “I can only hope.”

Although Norma did not like to think about it, Tot was right of course. After the terrorist attacks on 9/11 everything had changed. Even in a small town like Elmwood Springs, people had been so shocked, they had become a little crazy.