Story Two. Part 2.
Editor’s Note: Beth Kalet's story Salon Confessional follows. “Salon” is one of 7 short stories included in Beth’s book Seven Stories, published in 2012. The story will be published on Hummingbird in three parts, one per week over the next weeks.
Beth, a Hummingbird Guest Contributor, is an accomplished writer and editor. Her work, and her own story encouraged us to reach out to her.
In Salon Confessional, Beth changes gears from Trouble’s Always Just Around the Corner. “Salon” utilizes less “active” intrigue; and more of two women looking inward. Somehow, these disparate women, thrust together by chance, understand each other, and offer the other what they sorely need.
And ONWARD!
Book Cover Photo Credit: Diane Pell
Salon Confessional
Her own little girl feet in red cotton socks, blue canvas shoes with rubber soles tapping against the legs of a wooden stool. She sits at a counter, counting beans, making piles and rows and rearranging the piles and rows. Beans dance with one another in her soft little fingers along the counter as grandparents cook. Always in her memories rise the odors of cooking; she sees and smells the haze of a kitchen pungent with steam and spice, fish and oil, the kitchen of her childhood. Sometimes she sees herself snapping off the ends of green beans, sometimes she is playing with her dolls. Sometimes she is older, her parents no longer work, and grandparents no longer need to tend to her.
She met Yoon, her husband, when she was 16, at a social to which they’d both been brought by their parents to meet other suitable young people and to learn the rules of etiquette. They’d fallen madly for each other, in that passionate way children can. Within two years they’d married and soon had fallen just as madly for the promise of adventure offered by Yoon’s oldest brother, a businessman who owned nail salons in The States. “You will work for yourselves,” he promised. “Be your own boss.”
Now, clack, clack, clack… Small plastic beads knock against the glass nail polish bottle as Jin shakes it with short, tight jerks. The piquant odors of greens, spices and fish are replaced by the piercing odors of toluene and resin countered by the rose petal soaking solution, hibiscus lotion and vanilla shea butter. Guinevere is wide awake in Carolyn’s world now.
“I’m a little nervous about this wedding tonight,” Carolyn confided, lowering her voice to a whisper and craning her head down so she was closer to Guinevere’s, bent over the task. “I really want to look my best.”
And, oh how difficult that will be, Carolyn thought. She couldn’t possibly shine tonight, though she would try her damndest. How could she shine, in the shadow of Fern? For the last six months Carolyn had been listening to Sage drool over the way bride-to-be and mother-of-bride-to-be had been attending toning classes at the gym together; had been jogging together; had been under the guidance of a personal trainer to be fit and trim, fitter and trimmer than any earthly being.
Of course Fern had all the time in the world for that sort of thing. Fern hadn’t worked since she had her kids; not that Carolyn begrudged her good fortune. As she’d told Paul many a time, if he had earned enough to keep her from taking on the part-time real estate sales job she’d had since Sage was born, she, too, would have been happy to be a stay-at-home mother. It just didn’t work out that way for them.
The market was killing her now. When she did show a house, it was an exhausting event; house-hunters nit-picked more than she’d ever seen and often sellers shaved her profit down to just one percent. When she’d first started, Carolyn would show houses right in her own neighborhood in the afternoon, while the kids were at school. Sometimes Fern would babysit for her if she had an afternoon showing. She’d drop the kids off after school.
True her work was sporadic, but it took its toll. On her shape, anyway. She could never shake those 20 or so pounds she’d put on sometime between pregnancy, child-rearing and what she thought of as early onset middle age. She never got on the scale anymore. It could be worse, she allowed. She was determined to put a good face on it, keep her youthful point of view.
Carolyn appraised Guinevere, enviously. And thought again of Fern, who’d been seen jogging through the neighborhood by every man and woman with eyeballs. Fern, her old friend, whose daughter and hers were closer than two peas in a pod. Fern, whose year-long affair with Paul back when Kenny was a baby had just come to Carolyn’s attention.
Earlier that day, after Kenny had gone to school, Carolyn and Paul were alone at the kitchen table for a bit, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper, like any other couple on any day. She set her cup down, looked over the paper at him and saw his salt and pepper hair, high forehead and dark brows furrowed as he read the news. She could smell his particular scent.
Opaque, Carolyn thought. An SAT word and it fit Paul to a T.
I know, she thought. But she wasn’t ready for the words to spill out. She looked at him lovingly and it hurt her so much to know that he’d tricked her. This betrayal felt different from anything she’d ever imagined, so painful her heart ached like a teenager’s. She felt sure the affair was in the past but Carolyn’s jealousies and her wounds were fresh.
She’d grown used to the comfortable pattern of their lives now, giving little thought to the fraught atmosphere of their household when the kids were young, money was tight and their words often sharp. They’d come through that. Doesn’t everyone have a rough patch? Now, she realized how her husband had coped with it.
Looking across at Paul so casually reading the paper like any other day, she wondered whether to take the high road or to let emotion guide her. So close to crying out. But what good would it do now, after all this time. And, today of all days. She was paralyzed. She wouldn’t confront Paul. She didn’t want to know more than she knew. Not now. Maybe never.
Paul folded his paper and saw she was looking at him. “What?”
It was hard to explain, hard to shift from the image now in her mind -- Kenny as a toddler, trying to roll a beach ball on the grass, Paul and Sage on lawn chairs laughing -- to the strange feeling she had that she was looking across the table at a stranger in a very familiar costume.
© Beth Kalet
Stay Tuned. Part 3 of Salon Confessional to follow.
Prior Parts of Salon Confessional
Story 2. Part 1.
To learn more and to purchase Beth Kalet’s book, Seven Stories, please click here. You may also contact Beth through Hummingbird by clicking here.
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