Delilah Betrayed

Charlotte Sears seemed so out-of-place in Emmy’s dingy little barber shop, Delilah’s.  Her hair didn’t really need a cut at all.  It was flowing and soft, a blond cascade down to the first curve of her back.  This delicate back, decked out in a sequined silk dress, leaned gracefully against the rusty metal chair.  When she moved her arm to indicate what she wanted, bracelets glittered on her wrists.  And the chair squeaked.  And when she scooted back, kicking off with her red pumps, to get more comfortable, cotton fluff fell out of the seams of the leather throne like dandruff. 

Emmy was acutely aware of all of this as she snipped away.

“And could you dye it red? Something shocking but sophisticated,” Charlotte said.

“Of course,” Emmy said.  In her ugly grey apron and dumpy clothes, no one had ever asked her for something sophisticated before.  Her fingers tingled.  Could she do it?

She finished dying it, and ruffled it up, watching the tresses like tendrils curling around her fingers. 

“All done,” she said.  Charlotte put down the magazine she was reading and posed in the mirror. 

“It will do,” she said.  “I’m going on a date tonight.” 

“Really?  With who?”  Emmy occasionally liked to listen to gossip.  Just snippets.  Little bits like trimmed split ends.  Nothing that really got down to the roots of the hair deep in the scalp, the deepest and darkest motives of love and hate behind a simple dinner date.  Just the snippets. 

“Oh, he’s around forty, business type, but he doesn’t just sit around in his office.  He’s travelled the world.”

Sounds like my husband Bill, she thought.  She slaved away at this barber shop so he could go on expensive trips.  The last one was to Egypt.  She’d always wanted to go there, but he hadn’t brought her.  Closing down the shop for a week would ruin us, he had said.  Maybe the guy Charlotte was going to meet would be more of a gentleman. 

The shop closed early tonight, but she had to wait for Bill to pick her up.  She left the candy cane striped sign glowing just in case someone dropped by, like a beacon of hope in the dark.  She waited until midnight, and he never came. 

At one in the morning, she startled herself awake by falling off the spinning chair onto a hairbrush.  It felt like a cactus against her cheek.  She hadn’t known she’d fallen asleep.  Sighing, she slipped into a wool coat.  She’d have to walk. 

The moon shone optimistically.  Someone out there was having a romance under it.  But it wasn’t Emmy.  She reached her house, three blocks away, and let herself in.  Her husband’s car wasn’t in the driveway.  The television enticed her, so she sat down and waited for him to come home.  But sleep caught hold of her eyelashes and dragged her away.

The next morning the barber shop was closed, but her work was not over.  There was laundry everywhere.  It was scattered on her floor, hanging on the shower curtain rail, by the sink, in the basement, and everywhere else you could imagine.  As she folded her Bill’s clothes, she noticed a perfume scent.  She sniffed it, and knew she recognized it from somewhere.  But where?  No matter how much she thought about it, she couldn’t guess.  She also found a stain that smelled a bit like wine.  But he never drank at home, and certainly not at the office.  Where had he been?

She never got to ask him, because he was out all weekend at business meetings.  And when that was over, he went fishing with his best friend Sam.  Not inviting Emmy.  When he came home, he dumped the stinking bucket of fish in the kitchen, telling her to make a stew. 

Dutifully, she did.

Next Friday, she was back at the barber shop, when she heard the light clomp of designer boots on the sidewalk and the bells jingling that signaled someone entering the shop.  It was the figure of Charlotte Sears.

She was wearing a mink coat and a shimmering dress that looked like it was made of scales.  Her earrings were prisms, and her shoes were pointed like knives.

                “

I’d like a perm and highlights,” she said.  She slouched into the chair and picked up her magazine without another word. 

“How did the date go?” Emmy asked, starving for romance.

“It was the most fun I’ve had in a long time.  He told me I was beautiful.  He looks into your eyes like you’re the only woman in the world.  ”

“Well, you probably are, to him,” she said.

“Nope.  He’s got a wife, he told me,” she said.  “He says she’s clingy.”

“You went out with a married man?”

“Darling, married men are like forbidden fruits! They’re much more interesting than the singles at the bottom of the tree there for picking.  You gotta have charm.  That’s why I come to you.  He loved my hair.  Kept smelling it.”

Emmy closed her eyes and imagined it.  Her husband hadn’t done that to her for a while. 

“Did his wife find out?”

“Naw.  She still thinks he loves her.  In fact, we’re going out tonight again.”

That night, Emmy dreamed about dancing in a red feathered ball gown.  She was woken at two in the morning.  Where was Bill?  He forgot her again.  She saw the guy from the Italian restaurant next door lock up, and raced out the door. 

“Could you drive me home?” she said. 

“Of course, my friend,” he said.  “Maybe you will trim my moustache sometime to repay me?”  He had the cutest turned-up moustache, shiny black, she’d ever seen.

She was surprised.  His request was so simple.  “Anytime.”

He drove her home, humming Italian love songs all the way.  He had a picture of his wife taped to the rearview mirror.  She was plump and smiling.  She worked alongside him at the shop.  Emmy wondered what Bill would look like snipping someone’s hair.  He’d mess it up, just like he did with every other chore.  He burned the toast, left crusty remnants on the dishes he washed, and put dark and light clothes together in the laundry.  He’d leave her head with a frizzy perm and a choppy disaster.  Most of all, she imagined him snipping Charlotte’s hair.  Thinking about him touching her scalp, massaging the creamy shampoo, and gently combing the locks, she realized there was a knot in her stomach. 

At her house, she got out of the car and thanked him.  “No problem! Anytime!” he said.

“Don’t worry, it won’t happen again.  My husband’s been so busy lately, but he’ll pick me up once this is over.”  She wished she could be sure of this.

The next morning, she rolled over and hit her husband’s chest.  He was home, for once!  But his breath smelled of champagne as he snored.  And his cheek…what was that red mark? Lipstick?

Her eyes narrowed.  The only person she knew who wore lipstick was his mother.  Had he been visiting her?  But she lived two hours away.  It was unlikely.  She saw a ticket on the desk.  He was going to Brazil and he hadn’t even told her? And it was for tomorrow?  She’d always wanted to go to Brazil and get those tiny braids in her hair that looked like millions of tassels.  She’d learn how to make them, and then sell them in her shop.  The teens would go wild for it.  But there was only one ticket on the desk.

Quickly, Emmy dressed and drove off to work.  She flew through a red light and ignored a stop sign.  Finally she calmed herself.  I have to focus, she said.

Charlotte Sears arrived shortly after Emmy flipped the “We’re Open” sign.  She strutted in like a peacock, with a letter in her hand.  She ripped it open and licked the glue.

“You lick it when you close it, not when you open it,” said Emmy.

“I’m kissing him indirectly,” she said.  “I bet I know what this is, but I wonder what he wrote me.”

Emmy coughed.  “What would you like me to do for you?”

“Give me a chemical straightening.  And I want blond hair.  I need to look gorgeous for the beach.”

“Where are you going?”  A sinking feeling grew in her stomach. 

“RIO!” she cried out, hands in the air and bracelets dazzling.  She plopped into the chair and looked into the mirror expectantly with big smoky eyes.

“Rio…de Janeiro?  In Brazil?” Emmy croaked.

Charlotte nodded.  “He sent me a plane ticket in the letter.  Let’s see what he wrote.”

Emmy stood behind her and began to comb, in complete shock. 

"He says: ‘Charlotte…’ Wait, what does that say after it?  His scrawl is impossible to read.” She held the letter up to Emmy.  Emmy wanted to close her eyes.  She wanted to look away.  She didn’t want to know, to see the truth that she knew deep inside was true.  But she could not avoid it.  Her eyes met the blue ink, and she recognized the handwriting, scribbled in a way that it had used to seem a code that only she could crack, a secret language of curves and loops that could never be deciphered by anyone else. 

Her voice cracked. “It says: ‘I love you’.”

Her eyes dropped. Below, it was signed Bill.