I poured bleach down the drain until it gave me a headache, but the next night the ammonia came back, and I dreamed, again, of her husband. He was wearing his high school letter jacket with the football on the sleeve, and a beard that he never had. It was trimmed pencil-thin along his jaw line, and he wore rimless glasses like the author on the book jacket of a novel I was reading.
The last time I got a perm, my best friend’s mother died. I’d heard about it seventh period, but no one knew for sure if it was true. I never knew anybody who’d died before besides my great-aunt Rose, but we all kind of saw that coming. I didn’t know what to do so I got the perm anyway.
I just sat in that chair with my hair in those plastic rods and looked at my face, which always seemed a little fatter in the beauty shop mirror. Maybe it was the cape, how it cut off my neck. Or the wet hair and rods. Or the fumes.
By the time I got back to my friendConnie’s house, it was after dark, and the whole town seemed to be there. The fire department passed me with grocery bags on their arms, and lined up casserole dishes along the kitchen counter.
My friend Connie was sitting in the crowded living room—past the point of crying, just tear-stained, red, and swollen. She stood and hugged me and asked if I sped driving over.
“I’ve never driven so fast in my life,” I told her. Then I remembered why I was there, and imagined her mother’s minivan accordianed against the front of a furniture truck, and realized that wasn’t the answer she was looking for.
We stood there in the hallway, my arms around her neck, her face in the crook of mine, buried in my hair. I knew she could smell the ammonia, but she’d never say it out loud.
I sat on the couch, shoulder-to-shoulder with the girls’ basketball team, while people filtered in and out of the house. The phone rang. The cordless was jammed between the cushions beside me. I pulled it out and answered, “Moshi moshi,” because that’s what Connie and I always did, and it used to make her laugh. Coach gave me a look when I said it that made me feel like an asshole. I just didn’t know what else to do. I was a fucking kid. Coach hated me, anyway. I was always double-dribbling and trying to shoot with two hands.
I stayed while everyone else trickled out, but never said a word to Connie, and slept on the floor by her bed like a dog for three days, smelling of chemicals and crying into false curls.
The next morning, I woke up on her floor in my own fumes. I wasn’t allowed to wash the smell out for a few days, or the curls would go, too. So I helped myself to her clothes, and went to school while she kept sleeping. Our English teacher hugged me after class and told me I was a good friend. But I didn’t believe her. I knew she could smell it, too.
Ten years later, my face still looks fat in the fog of my bathroom mirror, especially with the smell of ammonia wafting out of the shower drain. I was still dripping onto the bathmat when I first smelled it. I thought it was a fluke, some sort of karmic punishment, but through the steam and the shampoo, I could still smell that day. I could smell the perm and Connie’s mother dying. That night, I dreamed that I married Connie’s husband. Immediately after the ceremony, I panicked and ran to my mother, still wearing the dress, off-white and cap-sleeved. “How does annulment work?” I asked her, frantically. “I swear to God, we haven’t had sex yet.”
After smelling that day for a week in my shower, I pried off the drain cover with a butter knife. I got on my hands and knees and yanked out handfuls of long blonde hair tangled in disgusting black gunk that covered my hands and the bright, white tile. I poured bleach down the drain until it gave me a headache, but the next night the ammonia came back, and I dreamed, again, of her husband. He was wearing his high school letter jacket with the football on the sleeve, and a beard that he never had. It was trimmed pencil-thin along his jaw line, and he wore rimless glasses like the author on the book jacket of a novel I was reading. We exchanged flirtatious looks while a woman gave a tour of her house to a large group of people, and when we got to the outdoor living room on her roof he was there behind me, putting his arms around me, the sky beginning to curl and darken.
After two weeks, I called my landlord, insisting he send a plumber.
The last time I saw Connie was when I threw her a bridal shower at my mother’s house. I drove six hours after work to be there, and stayed up all night making crust for mini quiches. She hadn’t seen me wear glasses before. I thought they made me look smart. Like I hadn’t gone away for nothing. I drank too much champagne and gave her a set of coat hooks that she’d registered for. Afterward, she stood up and hugged my mother and thanked her for the party, and left without even looking me in the eye. But I was the one who drove all the way to Upshur County to buy six bottles of Korbel and made the crust three times so it’d be just right. She ate those mini quiches all afternoon, but never told me she liked them. All she bothered telling me directly was that she preferred to be called Constance now. I bought a Southern Living for the punch recipe. Once she was gone, I climbed on the couch where my father was napping, and cried into his shirtsleeve. All I could think was, moshi moshi, and about how I’m a bad person.
The plumber arrived, a little younger than I expected. We stood silent in the bathroom while the water ran in the shower so he could smell it for himself. I felt naked, reaching in out of habit to see if it was warm yet.
“There. You smell that? It’s ammonia.”
“That’s ammonia.”
“That’s what I said. It’s ammonia.”
He stared silently at the drain.
“Why is it ammonia?” I insisted.
“How long has smelled like that?”
“Two weeks—ever since I moved in.”
“It’s possible that the previous tenant used a cleaning agent with ammonia in it.”
“Wouldn’t it flush out by now?”
“Not if it’s sitting in the trap.”
“What cleaning products still use ammonia?”
“None, really. I guess.”
“What else?”
“Well, the kidneys secrete a form of ammonia to neutralize excess acid.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning ammonia is a byproduct of urine.”
“Are you implying that I piss in the shower?”
“You or the previous tenant.”
“Well I don’t piss in the shower.”
“Fine.” He held his hands up in mock surrender, but kept his eyes on the drain.
“So what will you do?”
“Nothing. It’s working fine. You’ll just have to wait it out.”
After three weeks, I wanted a second opinion. I dreamed that my office was filled with globes, but none of them were spherical. One was very bulbous, like a mushroom, and you had to turn it over completely to see South Africa. It was a busy day. Paper was floating, somewhat frantically, through the air, and I had to snatch my printouts from above my head. Sean from tech support kept reassigning me to different cubicles around the room because my phone wasn’t working. Wouldn’t it be easier to just move the phones? I wanted to ask him, but didn’t. Eventually, I ended up with a regular receiver instead of the operator headset I use every day. This was a good thing because I secretly hate the headset. It looks silly and pulls my hair, and I don’t actually type on the phone very often. My friend showed up, which is odd, because she moved to California with her husband. She was dressed all in black and didn’t speak, but stood by my desk waiting for me. I knew that she wanted to show me something on the mushroom globe, but the phone kept ringing and the papers kept floating, and I could not get away. Moshi moshi, I said into the receiver.
After four weeks, I stopped showering altogether. I stood at the sink, scrubbing under my arms with a washcloth, and it made me think of her just as much. About how they played Simon and Garfunkel at her mother’s funeral, and how so many people came that they had to open the chapel doors so kids could stand in the church foyer and out the front door to hear the preacher, who read the passage from Ecclesiastes that’s also a song by The Byrds. My dad had the LP, and I went straight home from the church and listened to it over and over, sitting on the floor in my best dress, until he yelled and said I’d scratch it up pulling the needle back so much. I never found anything in the song that made things okay. Just an empty buzz, and then the first few seconds of “It Won’t Be Wrong” before I got up off the floor to start it again.
After five weeks, I went to a conference in Berlin, where the showers just smell like showers. I met a preacher from Wisconsin who insisted on paying for everything, in a way I found obnoxious. He’d get us drunk and walk down the street shouting, “Guten tag! Döner kebap!” at everyone we passed. When he tried to buy my train ticket for an overnight to Munich, I told him he was being an ass. Standing on the platform a few minutes later he broke the long silence and said he was abroad spending his inheritance. He sat down on one of those giant backpacks people carry around Europe, and said his mother had died two weeks before. She left him more money than he knew she had, and told him to spend every penny irresponsibly. I felt guilty because it reminded me of Connie and how I always do the wrong thing. So I let the preacher fuck me in the couchette he’d paid for, and held him afterward while he wept for his mother. And I thought about King Solomon and Pete Seeger, and hoped I’d done better for him than arriving too late, smelling like sin.
He fell asleep with his head on my chest, and I watched Germany pass by silently in the dark, my face looking a little fat in the window’s reflection, high above the ca-chug, ca-chug of the tracks. In a stupor the day before, he’d dyed his hair blond, and now, up close, his head was just below my face, and I could still smell the peroxide and the ammonia. Guten tag, I said to her in my dream. Moshi moshi, she replied, over and over, until the whistle blew at Hauptbahnhof, and I left the preacher lying there, naked, asleep, and alone.
Lesley Clayton compiles obituaries in Austin. She is a founding contributor of WOMANZINE, and her fiction has appeared in Esopus.
