Girl in Shades (5 page)

A pimple blisters on the side of my father's chin. Its presence is a mystery. Maybe it grew from the stress of taking a day off work, or the unexpected October heat. Either way it shouldn't be there, not on a man his age. Don't adults ever outgrow those things? To distract myself I rest my head on the car window frame and watch as the side of the road flies by in a blur. Now that we are out of the city, I can see for miles. Or kilometres, which Mr. Wigman has told my class is more Canadian. Jagged green machines spin to create circles of hay that dot the fields like gifts waiting to be opened. The road ahead of us extends so straight I could nod off from the monotony.

Even though he won't go to the office today, my father still wears his brown pinstriped suit. He uses one hand to drive and in the other hand he grips a coffee mug, covered with a plastic lid so nothing spills out onto our laps. I breathe twice as fast to inhale the French roast wafting out of his cup. The engine pings with each rotation of the car's wheels, but if my father hears the sputtering he pretends not to notice. I try to tune in to his thoughts and am met with a steel wall, cold and unwelcoming, shutting me out with no mercy. It should be different because I'm his daughter.

“Have a nap if you want to,” my father says. The digital clock on the maroon dashboard between us says 7:45 a.m. and I have just watched the sun blossom out of the shiny fields of wheat around us.

“I'm not tired,” I say. I prefer to watch nothing as we speed along. Watching nothing gives me relief.

My shampoo commercial shoot is to start at 9 a.m. We travel the prairie highway on route from Saskatoon to Regina. My hair, matted from sleep, drapes over my headrest. It's greasy — the opposite of glamorous — and I pull at it. I did not wash it this morning, partly because of time and partly not to affect what they do to it when I arrive.

“Don't worry, they will prepare you,” my father says.

“Prepare me for what?” I say, snapping my head to look at him.

“Your hair. They will get your hair ready.”

“I'm not worried,” I say. I put my chin in the air and lean back against the head rest.

The car radio provides the soundtrack for the silence between my father and me: Tina Turner, “Private Dancer”; Cindy Lauper, “Time after Time”; The Buggles, “Video Killed the Radio Star”; and at 8:15 a.m., my secret voice of encouragement, Corey Hart, “Never Surrender.” He croons and I melt. I instantly vow never to do it, surrender that is.

“Mind if I change it?” My father asks.

And when the night is cold and dark.

You can see, you can see light.

“Wait until this is over.” I intercept his hand.

'Cause no one can take away your right

To fight and to never surrender.

Corey's voice reminds me of what my father would sound like if he sang, deep and rocky, the vibration seeping through my pores and into my cells. When the song is over, my father flips the dial. Soon, brass horns and flutes fill the space around us while my eyes dart back to my father's pimple friend. Then it happens. I hear a small air bubble pop from under my father's pants. In horror I realize that I am smelling my father's fart.

“What was that?!” I say as I roll down my window.

“Oh, excuse me,” he says, his faced flushed with a red that extends outwards past his skin. For a moment I can see him as a little boy. Chasing butterflies in a field, begging for ice cream, crying when he didn't get his way. My father clears his throat to recover. “You just concentrate on yourself, Maya. Acting in a commercial is a lot of work. Who knows if you can even do it.”

“It's not that hard, I'm sure.”

“You just wait and see.” I pull the lever on the side of my seat and swing backward to try and escape him.

The woman who is supposed to meet us outside the door of the studio, Velma Cawshanks, is not there when we arrive, so we stand beside a black bolted door with the sun stabbing our eyes. When she finally pushes open the door out from the inside, her necklace beads clink around her neck and add music to everything she says.

“Maya and Steven, I presume,” she says, reaching out her hand from under her clipboard so my father can shake it. “I'm so sorry, guys. I flew in from Vancouver last night and I must still be in their time zone.” Her laugh pierces holes in my eardrums, high and cackling. I nod and smile to make her feel good.

“That's no problem,” says my father. “We were just enjoying the weather.”

“It is beautiful for October, isn't it? I'm Vel, by the way. Come on in!” She pulls the door open, and I feel like Dorothy being let into the Emerald City. Only the inside of the studio is not green (not even the so-called Green Room, which is peach) and no one is happy or singing. They do want to make me over, only not with an extra layer of hay like they did for the scarecrow, or a polish of my armour like they did for the Tin Man.
Nip, nip here, tuck, tuck there
. They focus instead on my hair.

Vel leaves with my father to show him the set and I am brought into a makeup room with a blond-haired woman named Jennifer. If you ask a fake person how they are, they will always say “wonderful,” which of course is what Jennifer says when I say, “I'm fine, and you?” Only she stretches it out so the “o” takes four times as long as it should have and the “l” is capped off by a forced smile.

“Mia, together we are going to make your hair look amazing! Are you ready?” She flips a bunch of my hair into the air.

“It's Maya, thanks.”

“Let's see where we should start. With the mixture I think.”

“What mixture?”

“You'll see.” She leaves the room and comes back with a paintbrush stuck into a clear plastic cup. The cup appears to be full of egg yolks and brown and black streaks and something gritty. “This is my own magical hair tonic.”

“It smells,” I say, sniffing.

“No matter, we'll wash it out after.” She dips the paintbrush into the cup and starts to brush the substance onto my hair. Every few strokes a piece of the goo drops off her brush and onto my bare neck, leaving slime on my skin.
Watch it
, I warn her in my head, but I can hear that she is only concerned with the size of her new boyfriend's muscles. She thinks,
I know they say that size doesn't matter. He works out pretty hard at Gold's. That should be enough. But maybe size does matter. Am I the only one who actually thinks it doesn't?

I make the mistake of telling her out loud that she should lighten up and stop being so superficial.

“What?” She looks at me with concern and I feel embarrassed for having responded to her inner worries. “How old are you?” she asks me.

“Twelve.”

“Have you got a boyfriend?”

“No, not really.”
And when the night is cold and dark.

“Just you wait. With this hair and your creamy skin, you'll get all caught up soon enough. Your mom and dad will be chasing the boys away with a stick.”

“My mother is dead.”

“Oh, sorry.” I can tell she means it.

“And if she was alive, she would never hit anyone with a stick.”

“You are a terribly serious child,” she says, dragging me to a sink for a rinse.

After the concoction comes an old-fashioned shampooing. Only I am surprised to see that she doesn't return with a blue bottle of Shinesse shampoo, but with a white bottle, one of those fancy salon kinds.

“What are you doing?” I ask as she shakes the bottle.

“Putting shampoo on your hair,” she says with one eyebrow raised. “You'll see, this will make it look really nice.”

“But it's not Shinesse?”

“You're darn tootin' it's not Shinesse,” she says.

“I refuse. That's false advertising.”

“With all due respect, young lady, it is not in your capacity to refuse.” She squirts the shampoo into her palm.

“It's not?”

“'Fraid not, missy. You've signed up for this, and now you're ours to do with what we like . . . so to speak.” She laughs like a bimbo. I don't say anything, slumping down in my waxy black chair that reclines into the sink while she slaps on the shampoo and lathers me. She leans me back to rinse and water spurts draw tiny circles on my scalp.

When I see my father again, my hair has been blow-dried, curled, moussed, arranged, hair-sprayed, and set. He has a bloody crater on his chin where his zit used to be. (He must have popped it in the bathroom — yuck!) He's still chatting with Velma, who stands beside him and seems to be moving closer and closer to him as they talk. She even reaches out to touch his arm every few sentences. I squint my eyes and build up a flirt-proof barrier around his body that is clear and deflects any attempt to connect with my father. She pulls her eyebrows up and sways back when I have completed it. It's not that I don't want him to make friends, I just wish that he would do it with me first.

They have put me in a tube top, neon pink, which Velma says is “sassy,” but I know it looks just plain weird over my mosquito-bump boobs. Stardom is not worth this. I wonder what Mother would say if she saw me. I think she would tell me to take it off. To stop acting like such a hussy. She'd probably tell me I needed to meditate to get some authentic direction in my life.

I baby-step my way out into the studio, afraid to move and shake a single hair loose from its position. I am awed by the bright lights and how everyone looks like they have something really important to do. I wedge myself between my father with his see-through barrier and Velma who annoys me, like a yapping poodle, until I notice she is wearing a band on her left hand's ring finger.

“Stand over here, Maya,” Velma sings out to me. My father only nods and grins. I feel like a show dog, being groomed, dragged around and now poked and jabbed once I am in position. “Your feet should point to the left, look over your right shoulder, two strands of hair in the front, two on the side, the rest on the back. Bring out this dimple here . . .” Velma's finger pokes into my cheek. “That's it, smile.” When I am balanced into position, they expect me to remember my lines — the words I studied during the last week, at home and on the steps behind the school when no one was looking. I speak my lines even though I don't believe what I'm saying.

“Shinesse transforms my hair into a bodacious masterpiece,” I look into the singular eye of the camera. The red light is on. There was no practice run.

“More energy!” Velma throws her arms up like she is praying for a miracle, but in her mind she says a swear word I have never heard out loud, and the dark blue around her slim body turns thin and murky.

“Shinesse transforms my hair into a bodacious masterpiece!” I say louder but what I really want to do is put my hair in a ponytail and leave. Instead, I repeat just under my lips something I used to hear Mother say when she was having trouble making it through the day:
I can be okay, even through this
.

“Maya, I need to see more enthusiasm from you. You love the softness of your hair, you love Shinesse, you love life!”

I can be okay, even through this
.

The pressure of the moment leaves a dull hum in my head, intensified by the lights pointing at me like a collection of vengeful suns.

I feel like a fraud.

“Shinesse transforms my hair into a bodacious masterpiece,” I say again, this time my lips have started to close down over my teeth and invisible strings have lifted my shoulders.

“Maya, you're going downhill here, maybe you need a break?” Then my father's voice from the black void beyond the lights: “C'mon, Maya, concentrate. This is going to be great.”

“Shinesse transforms . . .” The inside of my mouth starts to sweat and bubbles jump in my throat. “My hair . . .” I can feel a hundred faces staring at me from the dark. “. . . into . . .” The black from behind the camera closes in on me, wrapping me up and taking me over from my feet, legs, stomach, heart (beating fast), shoulders, and then it explodes — I fold in half while chunky throw-up spews from my mouth, jerking me in waves until finally with my feet soaked and my hair crusty, it pukes itself out. I smear the gook off my lips and look up into the camera.

“I can be okay, even through this,” I say out loud into the silent black space.

According to my father, the “takes” before I got sick weren't nearly as bad as Velma had made them out to be, and a week later he returns home with the news that they have decided to use the second one, where I screamed the lines.

“The company just doesn't have the money to do another shoot.”

“Sorry,” I say from the kitchen table slurping a milkshake I made with vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce, and the syrup from a jar of maraschino cherries.

“It wasn't your fault, Maya,” my father says and for once I feel like his mind is thinking the same thing, though I can't hear. “You can't help getting sick.”