ORDINARY FAME

by
Elizabeth P. Glixman

Ann didn’t like the smell of the hair dye Mr. Lorenzo painted on her scalp. She breathed in deeply and watched in the salon mirror as Mr. Lorenzo dressed in a white sweatshirt and tight spandex jeans, placed tin foil on her head to cover places that would not be changed. At night, Ann did the same with cardboard boxes from the dumpster, decorating the space behind the fifth street overpass where the grassy slope fell close to the river. She covered the grass that would be her bed so as not to rumple the whole damp and cold landscape. Each night Ann slide into her cardboard pyramid. It was like living in a stiff tent with the words caution flammable article inside scribbled across your house in black ink. Ann used to be Mrs. Smensky wife of the CEO of Smensky’s Hardware. She lived on the outskirts of a large western city in a dry palace of a house with pristine sides. That was long ago before she took the cigarette cartoons from the drugstore without stopping at the cash register to pay, before she totaled two Mercedes, and before her children were taken away by the department of social services.

Ann cross-examined herself in the salon mirror. You are. You aren’t. You said? I heard. In the end she saw a woman who looked like a stray beaten dog. There was nothing left but a dim recall of ancient sparkling love between her ears. Who had kicked her to death? Not her loving hardworking husband of thirty years or her children, Brittany and Samantha, or even her pudgy thirty something boss who told her to snap out of it, or there would be dire consequences. “A drunk can’t run a restaurant,” he said the week before he let her go.

And not her parents who took her to every doctor they could find to treat her for her secondary depression. “We’ve paid for clinics and rehabs and taken care of your kids and consoled Walter. What more can we do?” They told her this tearfully ten years ago when they had no more to say. Ann remembered her mother who was a meticulous dresser saying, “You have everything a woman could want. Walter is a good provider and husband.” Everything but red hair Ann thought as she surveyed herself in the oval baroque imitation salon mirror.

At fifty Ann was the winner of the makeover contest for Sad Women Who Wear No Makeup. Women who were homeless but in recovery and out of jail were eligible. Ann told her probation officer Arlene she hadn’t had a drop in months.’ Arlene entered Ann in the contest.

Ann regarded Lorenzo in the mirror behind the washbasin.

“This is your lucky day,” his spotless reflection said.

“Are you sure you know what you are doing? Red hair? I never had red hair in my life."

“Darling, listen to Mr. Lorenzo. Would this handsome boy,” Lorenzo said pointing to himself, “ lead you astray?”

Ann wondered. Was his voice real or Memorex?

Lorenzo reassured her. “Ann, the red with strawberry blonde highlights goes so well with your skin. You are a winter, in the skin scheme of things.”

Ann looked into Mr. Lorenzo’s eyes colored bright green by contact lenses.

Ann had been feeling desperate since an older female drunk moved into her territory by the river. As she lay curled up in her box at night, listening to her neighbour talk to no one who was there, Ann watched the constellations in the sky glitter. She prayed to the higher power they talked about in AA for a bottle of anything. Instead of a drink she was getting her hair colored a god-awful color only clowns wore. “Some big magician you are,” she said looking upward. She quietly gave her higher power the finger under the thin thermal blankets they gave her at the women's shelter.

“ When the photographer from the newspaper comes, remember wear the orange leather pants suit and the pearls,” said Mr. Lorenzo, spraying Ann’s hair with sticky vapors.

“Right,” said Ann.

All Ann wanted to do was to crawl into her home under the stars far from bottles of blood red liquid that lined this false world of beautiful images. Young successful models looked at her from oversized pictures on the wall. Ann’s eyes looked down to her rotting sandals. She did not want anyone to see her ribs, her drawn face, her worried eyes, her fictitious hair. She did not want anyone to see her lonely children sleeping in wet diapers at night or find her grown children who did not know who their mother was. She hoped the new dumpster crop was abundant that night.

She dressed in her orange leather paint suit and pearls. The photographer arrived and clicked her photograph. Arlene gave her a smile. Lorenzo said, “Magnifique.” Her fifteen minutes of ordinary fame gone.

Anne was eager to get back to the river and her home. The moon would light up her world as she slept with her new red hair

© Elizabeth Glixman
Reproduced with permission

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