Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries) Read Free Page B

stylish. Often I do take the damn thing off and it’s in one place and I’m in another.
Quite
another.”
    “What did you do?” Helen asked.
    “I didn’t do anything!” the woman bawled. Then she laughed. She dropped her cigarette in the cup of coffee she was holding.
    The washing, the cutting, the drying, all this took a long time. Her hairdresser was an Asian named Mickey. “How old do you think I am?” Mickey asked.
    “Twenty,” Helen said. She did not look at her, or herself, in the mirror. She kept her eyes slightly unfocused, the way a dog would.
    “I am thirty-five,” Mickey said delightedly. “I am one-eighteenth Ainu. Do you know anything about the Ainu?”
    Helen knew it wasn’t necessary to reply to this. Someone several chairs away said in disbelief, “She’s naming the baby
what?”
    “The Ainu are an aboriginal people of north Japan. Up until a little while ago they used to kill a bear in a sacred ritual each year. The anthropologists were wild about this ritual and were disappointed when they quit, but here goes, I will share it with you. At the end of each winter they’d catch a bear cub and give it to a woman to nurse. Wow, that’s something! After it was weaned, it was given wonderful food and petted and played with. It was caged, but in all other respects it was treated as an honored guest. But the day always came when the leader of the village would come and tell the bear sorrowfully that it must be killed though they loved it dearly. This was this long oration, this part. Then everyone dragged the bear from its cage with ropes, tied it to a stake, shot it with blunt arrows that merely tortured it, then scissored its neck between two poles where it slowly strangled, after which they skinned it, decapitated it and offered the severed head some of its own flesh.What do you think, do you think they knew what they were doing?”
    “Was there something more to it than that?” Helen said. “Did something come after that?” She really was a serious girl. Her head burned from the hair dryer Mickey was wielding dramatically.
    “These are my people!” Mickey said, ignoring her. “You’ve come a long way, baby! Maine or Bust!” She sounded bitter. She turned off the dryer, removed Helen’s smock and with a little brush whisked her shoulders. “Ask for Mickey another time,” she said. “That’s me. Happy Holidays.”
    Helen paid and walked out into the cold. The cold felt delicious on her head. “An honored guest,” she said aloud. To live was like being an honored guest. The thought was outside her, large and calm. Then you were no longer an honored guest. The thought turned away from her and faded.
    Her mother was watching television with the sound off when Helen got home. “That’s a nice haircut,” her mother said. “Now don’t touch it, don’t pull at it like that for godssakes. It’s pretty. You’re pretty.”
    It was a ghastly haircut, really. Helen’s large ears seemed to float, no longer quite attached to her head. Lenore gazed quietly at her.
    “Mom,” Helen said, “do you know there’s a patron saint of television?”
    Lenore thought this was hysterical.
    “It’s true,” Helen said. “St. Clare.”
    Lenore wondered how long it would take for Helen’s hair to grow back.
    Later they were eating ice cream. They were both in theirnightgowns. Helen was reading a Russian novel. She loved Russian novels. Everyone was so emotional, so tormented. They clutched their heads, they fainted, they swooned, they galloped around. The snow. Russian snow had made Maine snow puny to Helen, meaningless.
    “This ice cream tastes bad,” her mother said. “It tastes like bleach or something.” Some foul odor crept up her throat. Helen continued to read. Anyway, what were they doing eating ice cream in the middle of winter? Lenore wondered. It was laziness. Something was creeping quietly all through her. She’d like to jump out of her skin, she would.
    “You now,” she