On Wednesday afternoon, I have a hair appointment with Linnea.
I wonder, as I walk toward Linnea’s beauty parlor, how I got from Monday to Wednesday. Again—as was the case a few days ago, when I didn’t remember getting from the middle of last week to the beginning of this week—I don’t remember a lot of details. I can’t recall transitioning from my last dream, from bicycling with the children, back to the safety of my own bed. I don’t remember waking up on Tuesday morning. Indeed, I must have arisen and made breakfast and fed Aslan. I must have gone to the shop and worked. There would have been customers; there would have been book orders and shelf arrangements and conversations with Frieda. What did we discuss? I don’t remember. I think there was more conversation about the vacant space in the shopping center. I think we went over the financial aspects, trying to figure out how we could make it work moneywise. Did we decide to make an appointment with the bank to talk about an extension to our loan? Perhaps we did, but I can’t recall any particulars about the discussion.
Waiting for the light to change so I can cross the street, I pull my coat collar tightly around my throat, protecting myself from the windy, overcast day. I know this absence of memories ought to concern me, but when I give it more thought, I realize how very few actual moments—whether yesterday, last week, a month ago, last year—I can truly recall in detail. We remember so little of our lives, really, insofar as the finer points go.
Living, I think as I cross Jewell Avenue at Broadway, is not made up of details, but rather of highlights. Can I remember what I had for lunch last Thursday? Can I recall every word of my latest tutoring session with Greg? Do I know what the weather was like three weeks ago on Sunday? Certainly not. It all just flies by, the big and the small, and some of it stays in our minds, but much of it disappears the moment after it occurs.
I open the door to Beauty on Broadway and walk inside.
At her station, Linnea greets me with a smile. “It’s nice to see you again, Kitty. I’m sorry I haven’t made it to your bookstore yet. I really do want to see it.” She touches my hair gently, frowning at me in the mirror. “Goodness, you ought to come here to see me more often, though. If you don’t mind my saying so.”
I grin. “I don’t mind at all. You’re right; I ought to.”
After my shampoo, she settles into her work with the rollers. I lean back and relax. It’s Halloween today, and Linnea has her station decorated with a little paper black cat taped to the mirror and a bowl of tiny pink-and-white boxes of Good & Plenty candy on the vanity.
In the mirror I watch Linnea’s hands, those lovely hands that remind me of Lars’s. I want to reach out to them, and I have to press my own hands together, as if in prayer, to control myself.
I’m glad she’s touching me, however. It feels wonderful to have Linnea touch me.
“You made the right move, going into a line of work where you use your hands.” It sounds silly the moment I say it, and I close my mouth, embarrassed.
Linnea smiles. “Oh, I’ve got strong peasant hands,” she says. “They’ve done plenty of tough work over the years. My brother Lars and I, when we first moved to Colorado . . . we were kids, we had nothing, we took any job we could get. Dishwashers, potato diggers, bakers. He was a bricklayer for a while, and then he got a job as a streetcar repairman. Put himself through college doing that job.” Her brow furrows. “He was the real worker, Lars. He could fix anything, build anything. Loved to work with his hands.”
I nod. Though I have not witnessed this directly, I can imagine it. I can imagine how, given the time and capacity, he would build things, fix things.
And then something comes to me. A memory, or a thought, or something I made up. I have no idea where it comes from, but when I know it, I know it.
Naturally, Lars designed our house’s distinctive layout. Certainly, given his line of work and his enthusiasm for custom residential design, he would have done that. But he also personally constructed all the cabinetry in our house. Those slanted bathroom cabinets, and the slick-faced ones in the kitchen—Lars built all of those by hand.
I do not know how I know this, but I do. I close my eyes, letting reflections and memories from my made-up life envelop my mind.
When we first married, I gave up my duplex, Lars gave up his small studio apartment, and we moved together into a two-bedroom apartment on Lincoln Avenue. I could walk to the shop from our new place, and Lars took the Broadway line to the office he’d rented downtown for his fledgling architectural firm. The apartment was temporary, he assured me, just until his business showed a profit. “Then I’ll build you a house,” he’d said, looking around at the apartment’s bright but small living room. “I’ll build you a wonderful house, Katharyn.”
The apartment on Lincoln was where I spent my bed rest. It was the home to which we brought our babies when they were ready to leave the hospital.
After the surprise of triplets instead of twins, Lars had hastily switched the bedrooms, moving our double bed and bulky dresser into the smaller bedroom—which, months earlier, we had painstakingly set up as a nursery for a boy and a girl. I remember the pale yellow walls, the nursery-rhyme mural that I hired an artist friend of my mother’s to paint on the wall over the area where we placed the changing table. It was a lovely nursery, and adequate for two babies, but it was too small for three cribs and everything else that three would need. Lars selected another crib at Guys and Dolls, the children’s furniture store where we had purchased the other two cribs. He set up the three cribs, the changing table, and the rocking chair in what had once been our bedroom. I had been told that he’d made these changes, yet I remember my dismay, seeing the arrangement when the babies and I were finally discharged from the hospital. There had been no time for repainting; our bedroom walls were a sophisticated mauve that had gone wonderfully with my bedspread, but was not at all suitable for three babies. Although the children’s furniture fit in the room, it was a tight squeeze, and we had to shuffle sideways to fetch Mitch from his crib.