The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [36]
Had I missed my stop? I went to ask the driver, who told me it was the next one, a bus terminal, the end of the line. The river wasn’t immediately in sight. I started walking one way, felt I was definitely off track and turned the other way. There was a chainlink fence, a jacaranda tree. Then I saw it, a glimpse. I was coming up on a bridge, small, cement, with sidewalks on either side for pedestrians. I stepped onto the bridge and walked out to the middle. The water below was moving slowly, almost curling, like molasses. On the banks were mudflats. Trash littered the flats. The smell was not so bad here or the wind was just right, I wasn’t getting it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something floating, near the right shore, a russet-colored shape, familiar. Then I understood, it was a dog’s back, most likely an entire dog, its legs hanging down out of sight.
I looked across the bridge. I knew the city ended here. The Riachuelo was the limit. In the distance, on the other side, I saw people walking on the streets, some carrying bags, out shopping. There was smoke rising, a smell of something burning. I decided to go across. I crossed and began walking up the street. I passed a supermarket, stores. I stopped in front of a hairdresser’s and looked in the window, then stepped inside.
I’d never had an elaborate beauty regimen, but would regularly get a haircut and have my eyebrows plucked. I’d noticed that morning that my eyebrows needed work. In the States, my hairdresser had plucked my eyebrows too. But this time, when I asked about eyebrows, I was sent to the back, the waxing area. A woman in her late forties, with short dark hair and a round face, greeted me, introducing herself as Vera.
“What do you want to do?” she asked.
“Eyebrows,” I said.
She patted a high vinyl bed with a large sheet of paper over it. “Lie down here,” she said. In one corner were metal bowls of hot wax and a spatula.
She had an accent. “Where are you from?” I asked.
“Belarus. You?”
“The States. The U.S.”
Her Spanish was good, if quirky, as was mine, only our variety of quirkiness was different. Still, we managed to communicate pretty well.
“Are you married?” she asked.
Wow, I thought, cut to the chase. “No,” I said. “Are you?”
She smiled. “Second time.”
“Happily?” I asked.
Vera shrugged. “I say to him—‘One day I’ll just go down to Retiro and get on a bus, whatever bus, and see where it takes me.’”
I felt a bit jittery in a nice way. Only in a beauty parlor could you arrive at this place in a conversation so fast.
“What happened with your first husband?” I asked.
“He died in Belarus. Gangrene. You know what that is? When the blood stops flowing. It happens a lot in cold countries. The arteries get blocked. Nothing’s circulating and the limbs just die. He had to have one amputation after the next. First they cut off his big toe, then the next toe.”
“Jesus.”
“The doctor said smoking made it worse. He had to stop smoking. But Dima couldn’t stop. The doctor said, ‘Stop smoking for your wife.’ He couldn’t do it.”
She had waxed my eyebrows and was now touching them up with tweezers.
“Dima never used to drink, which was rare for a Belarusian. That was actually what I had liked about him. I’d been in love with a different guy from my high school. We had been going out together for four years. But when he came back from military service, he was drunk all the time. He worked in an auto factory. I’d see him around on the streets. He’d be totally drunk. It was a small city. I hated that.”
She dabbed a little cream on the skin around my eyebrows and passed me a hand mirror so I could inspect them. She had shaped the arches very nicely.
“Great,” I said.
“Anything else?”
I hadn’t been planning to do anything else, but I also wasn’t ready to leave. “Like what could I do?” I asked.
She laughed. “Everything. Armpits, legs, toes, down here.” She pointed between her legs.
“Okay,