Marie-Helene Bertino - 2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas

“Everyone will be thrilled to see you. What changed your mind?”

Everyone. Sarina hears the bell that signals the end of lunch. Through the window, she watches her students return dully to the yard. She injects her voice with an improbable amount of positivity. “I wanted to be in the company of adults.”

“I’ll help you find some.” Georgie laughs, no doubt holding a fistful of roots, orbited by an adoring, whimsically colored cat. She is the kind of woman who is endlessly in from the garden where she has been cutting chives. “When was the last time we all saw each other? It’s sad if you let yourself think about it.”

“So sad,” Sarina says.

“You will call if you are running late?”

“Of course!” She hangs up the phone.

In the yard children from several grades seem to be playing a game called Everyone Is Dying and There Is Chaos. One of them, an official-looking boy, barks orders, while someone else yells “Mark” over and over. “I’m dead,” a little girl says, before another voice corrects her: “You’re not dead if you’re talking.” Through it all a kindergartener keeps up an impressive, enduring wail.

The game heightens as several kids scream contradictory directions. Mark! Mark! Mark! Mark!

Unless they really are dying, Sarina thinks, not rising from her desk.

Madeleine sulks through the backyards of the row homes that border Saint Anthony’s, past the market dotted with shoppers, to where Beauty Land sits, painted an unnatural pink, on a stretch of paved lot.

Darla Henshaw, junior hairdresser and default receptionist, is on the phone warning a client they can squeeze her in but the shampooers are already backed up. “Be ready to wait is what I’m telling you.”

Madeleine hands Darla the piece of paper. Darla reads it as, in her ear, the client has her say. Darla says she gets it, it’s hard all around, then hangs up. “Christ, Madeleine, lice?”

At the back of the salon, Vince Sherry, owner of Beauty Land, instructs his client to cover her eyes. He sprays her head in patient, liberal strokes. When the mist settles, he unwraps a stick of bubble gum and admires his work. “You’re done, gorgeous. You look like three million dollars.” Then he yells toward the front, “Who has lice?”

“I got expelled,” Madeleine tells Darla.

“For having lice?” she says.

“For punching a boy.”

“Madeleine punched a boy because she had lice!” Darla yells.

“The lice is unrelated,” Madeleine says. “It’s not my lucky day.”

“No kidding.” Vince appears at the desk. “You got lice and expelled. I wouldn’t buy a lottery ticket.”

Darla holds out a plastic bag. “Your scarf and hat. In here. We’ll wash them.”

Vince leads Madeleine to the bank of sinks and lifts her into the last chair. “Lice means you have good hair.” He selects the particular shampoo from a top shelf and gestures to the older women who surround them; helmeted, curlered, flipping through brightly colored magazines. “These women would kill to have enough hair for lice.”

When he is finished washing her hair, Vince escorts Madeleine to his station. He pumps the chair several times so she can see herself in the mirror. “We’ll cut it, too,” he says. “You’re due.”

Darla hovers nearby. “You’ll never believe what they found in some reject’s apartment in University City.” The phone at the front desk rings. She leaves to answer it with an aggravated sigh.

Vince snips around Madeleine’s ears. He was her mother’s best friend and had promised to cut Madeleine’s hair until she turned eighteen. Thin and mustached, he is the type to dart in place, several irons and dryers firing at once. Before the city’s laws changed, he cut hair with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, cottony ash inches from Madeleine’s cheek. Now, he chews gum while participating in an argument he’s been having with Darla for as long as Madeleine can remember. The smell of him, conditioning crèmes and piney talc, has such a leveling effect on her that when she encounters these scents in other places she grows immediately calm.

Darla is back. She speaks so everyone in the salon can hear her. “A fucking alligator and a tiger.”

“You didn’t hear that,” Vince says to Madeleine. Then, to Darla: “An alligator and a tiger what?” And Darla says, “Is what they found in this reject’s apartment in University City.”

The woman in the chair next to Madeleine flips a page in her magazine. “It’s like the punch line to a joke,” she says. “An alligator and a tiger.”

“What kind of asshole,” Darla asks, “keeps an alligator and a tiger in his apartment?” The ringing of the phone summons her to the front.

“You didn’t hear that either.” Vince clips and frowns. “What’s up with the expulsion?”

“Denny Pennypack laughed at me and I punched him.”

“You got expelled for that?” Vince peels another piece of gum from its pack. “Vicky Randles was so jealous of your mother she couldn’t walk straight.”

Madeleine never tires of this story. How Principal Randles and her mother went to school together. How everyone wanted to date her father. How her mother could dance better than all the neighborhood girls. How Vince and her father and mother built soapbox cars and raced them in Vet stadium’s wide, flat parking lot. Before they were her father and mother. When they were just kids in snow hats.

“Mrs. Santiago stopped in to invite us to your birthday party,” Vince says. “How old are you turning?”

“The God’s honest truth is I would prefer not to be bothered. Mrs. Santiago is so overbearing.”

Vince straightens up, suddenly livid. “Darla! Where are my tiny shears?”

“On your table, you drunk SOB! Try opening your eyes.”

Vince digs through his drawers and Madeleine reads a magazine. On a beach on the other side of the world, people who are famous for who they are related to eat shellfish.

The woman in the chair next to her clucks her tongue. Her black hair is being highlighted the color of toast, the ends battened into squares of aluminum, making her look like a Martian. “You sound like an ungrateful little girl,” she says. “Mrs. Santiago is a good woman.”

Darla returns, plucks a pair of shears from Vince’s tray, and holds them up. “What are these?”

“Those weren’t there before!” Vince says.

“Your ass.”

Vince resumes cutting Madeleine’s hair and Madeleine tries not to stare at the woman whose insult has brought tears to her eyes.

“Don’t mind Louisa,” Vince says. “She’s going through a transitional period. From bartender to question mark.”

“Principal Randles said I was a problem child,” Madeleine says.

“Just like your mom,” he says. “Walk the line, girl. Or it’s the strip club for you. And your mother would land right here”—Vince points to a tray of combs—“and beat the snot out of me.”

“Fierce mother,” the Martian says.

“My mother is dead,” Madeleine says. This has the desired effect of changing the woman’s smug expression to something resembling pity.

“She’s Mark Altimari’s kid,” Vince says.

“Sugar,” the woman says. “I’m sorry. I worked with your mother at The Courtland Avenue Club.”

“Are you a snake lady?” Madeleine says.

“I was a snake lady. I work at The Cat’s Pajamas now. Well, worked.”

“What’s The Cat’s Pajamas?” Madeleine says.

“A jazz club.”

“Jazz club?” Madeleine sits up abruptly, sending the magazine to the ground. “Where is it?”

“Jodi Columbo’s here!” Darla yells from the front.