Harriet Doerr Read Online Free PDF

other part of her observes from a reasonable distance and sees that although something (a fist?) has hit Ann in the chest, she is unable to double over because of the traffic. The observer notices an object that looks like a knife protruding from Ann’s chest. She thinks Ann is driving competently. She is using her rearview mirror, she is signaling for lane changes, she is moving into the fast lane, doing a steady sixty-two. She has, without conscious volition, turned on the radio. It is Renaissance music. Ann is listening to a pavane played by lute and viol. This is followed by lively rhythms, subsequently identified by the announcer as a galliard. He says the instruments played in this dance were cornets, crumhorns, racketts, recorders, and a portative organ.
    When Ann hears him again, he is enumerating notable events that occurred on this day, October 15, in years past. It is the day Oscar Wilde was born. It is the day that Mata Hari was executed by a French firing squad. On this day, says the announcer, Hermann Goring committed suicide.
    At the parking lot, Ann pulls out the ticket to raise the striped barrier and sees by the clock that she is fifteen minutes late for her appointment.
    “You are fifteen minutes late,” says the girl behind the counter. She is someone new. She is made up like a Parisian cocotte, thinks Ann, or like Canio in Pagliacci.
    “We couldn’t reach you by phone,” states the mouth of the mask. “Joseph hurt his back. We don’t know how long he’ll be away. We’ve given you to Robert.”
    After her hair is washed, she sits in Robert’s chair, her bag at her side. Her distant self reflects on Robert’s paunch, which has been induced by an unbroken chain of two-martini lunches.
    “How about going for something different?” Robert says. “Remember, this is 1975.”
    Ann is afraid that if she argues he will look closer and perhaps see through her ribs and through her skull. He proceeds, using at random a hand dryer, a comb, scissors, and a curling iron.
    Carlos is combing out a woman in the next chair. She is in her fifties, and her body is a tightly belted gray wool sack tied in the middle by a belt. Her sloping forehead gives her the profile of a Nefertiti who was born neither beautiful nor a queen.
    “Carlos,” she says. “How old are you, Carlos?”
    Carlos says something to Robert in Spanish. Then he says, “Forty.”
    He is much younger, thinks Ann, who is forty-six. She imagines his baptism twenty-eight years ago in a small church, La Capilla del Espiritu Santo, a few miles out of Guadalajara. His godmother, wearing earrings shaped like hearts, holds him. His mother and father are short and proud. The priest expects to be paid with a turkey, for they have a farm.
    Now the woman has asked Carlos the year of his birth. The answer makes him forty-three.
    “Never mind, Carlos,” she says. “Age doesn’t matter. You’re my kind. I can tell. Why don’t we have dinner and talk? How about Saturday night?”
    Carlos thinks for a moment. “I will commit the engagement,” he says. “Do you have a BankAmericard?”
    Everyone laughs. Ann’s observer sees her laugh. She sees the knife make a quarter turn. At last, Robert finishes with her hair. In a voice that is a tape recording of her own voice, she asks if it will last.
    “Hang it over the side of the bed when you make love,” Robert tells her, and everyone laughs again.
    She gets her sweater and goes back to leave a tip. Drawing the envelope from her bag with the wallet, she hastily fits it behind the last bill, tips Robert, and hears her recorded voice say, “Thank you.”
    “Now go out and use it. Get it mussed up,” Robert tells her.
    Outside, she finds it is so late that traffic has thinned. In the sky, night has overtaken twilight, and cars have their lights on. Ann estimates that she will be home in thirty minutes.
    She is less than a mile from her exit when she sees ahead, where the freeway bends, a figure waving a