I have to make a decision, says the woman under Hilde's hands,
staring into the mirror while the brush fluffs out the careful curls.
What? What? ask the cosmetologists.
My husband is going to Malaysia for a year, the woman says.
BIG bugs, says Jane, combing out another customer.
Hilde laughs, Oh yes, BIG bugs.
Big bugs. Cockroaches the size of lap dogs. Moths you can wear as a hat.
And not just bugs, but others: lizards, geckos, frogs,
things with shining yellow eyes, smooth green skin or translucent brown,
thin clawed toes or sticky fat ones,
lipless mouths curved in the hint of a smile
as if they knew.
Oh, don't tell her those things, Jane, says Hilde.
The customer's hair is a halo of auburn fuzz, just a touch of silver.
Her hands are round, wrinkled, bearing gold rings,
resting on the counter before her like a penitent ready to pray.
I don't want to go, she says, watching Hilde's eyes in the mirror.
I like my house. Who will water my garden, now that I have it
just the way I want it?
You wouldn't see me there, says Jane. Too hot. Too humid.
But everything is cheaper, says Hilde. You could hire someone to help you.
Someone to kill the bugs, they laugh.
And the flowers are so beautiful there, Hilde adds.
Flowers of pale pink, deep crimson, lavender, peach, dusky purple
burst in imagined rooms:
garden bowers burgeon with humid green vines
wide glossy leaves starred with buds
the eye of each blossom the door to a chamber, enticing
their scent clouding the air with smells of fruit, musk, calm blue evenings.
And my husband, the woman says, I can't trust him.
He never kills the spiders in our bedroom.
Every night I get into bed and I check the walls for spiders --
-- You do that? asks Hilde --
-- Yes, and if I see a spider I ask him to kill it --
-- I do that too, says Hilde --
-- And he stands on the bed with a Kleenex and then he knocks it on the bed!
Ron knocks it on the floor, says Hilde. And I say,
you better not come into this bed
until you find that spider and kill it.
The breath of a tropical afternoon washed by rainfall hovers just outside their circle.
Branches hang heavy with rain; fat leaves shield a lizard watching a roach.
And on a foreign bed, standing on the lemon yellow coverlet,
a husky man raises his arms in the tepid air
pajama tops rising to reveal his belly
and presses his thumb to the ceiling.
4/25/96