Free The Blondes by Emily Schultz

come back on. It’s worth trying. Steady, and … Shit, it’s cold. If I can use my glove to—What’s that sound?
    The mail truck.
Oh
. Why is she swerving like that, like she’s drunk, like—It’s that same delivery woman. Damn, I can’t believe it. Grace was right. Yeah, yeah, baby, I know. I’m going. I’m climbing down. Slowly, carefully. We’re going to run back inside. Look at her go. Holy frig! It’s like she isn’t even seeing what’s in front of her. She just took out the neighbour’s mailbox as if she were driving over a soda can. That must be what I heard before. I’m surprised she hasn’t wound up in the ditch. Don’t wind up in the ditch, please don’t wind up in the ditch—I don’t want to have to make adecision about whether or not to help. Good, just go. Go. Wow.
    We can’t get a signal out of the satellite, but if
that
isn’t another kind of signal, I don’t know what is. And don’t worry, baby, I’m not going back outside again—not today, anyway.

HERE’S WHAT I SHOULD TELL YOU about Dr. Kovacs before I get to the story of our meeting: the thing about Kovacs is that she did try to help me. But here’s the other thing: if I hadn’t met her that day, I wouldn’t have been so angry with Karl. And if I hadn’t been so angry, our lives, mine and yours, might have taken a different path. That said, it’s easy to look at the what-ifs or trace an alternative route after the fact, isn’t it, my little hatchling?
    Kovacs, sitting in the booth of the restaurant that day, had the bearing of someone who had been waiting half the afternoon and had reached her last shred of patience. I remember how her mouth turned downward in a slightly constipated way. Here was this tall woman, chiselled chin emerging from a sleek white-blonde bob, white eye shadowand black mascara highlighting dark eyes. Dramatic, my mom would have said. Kovacs’s long manicured nails were wrapped around a half-empty glass of red wine. I stopped partway to the booth. She hadn’t spotted me yet. In the black-and-white photo on her department webpage, she’d looked silver-haired. I hadn’t anticipated that she would be blonde. Although her head had clearly been assisted to such levels of luminosity, there was no doubt that she was naturally blonde. This is what gave me pause: I wasn’t sure what a blonde would make of my thesis. Would she find that it perpetuated stereotypes, even though I was attempting to dismantle them? (Most models in advertisements are blonde—or they were back then.)
    I also had a hard time marrying this woman in front of me to her work. Kovacs’s thesis focused on the early men of Hollywood, how they—insecure about their Jewish culture, concerned about class, and about appearing aristocratic—turned away from the thick-tressed, dark-haired beauties of the silent film era to the blonde starlets, who would pervade pop culture ever after. They selected small-nosed, pale-skinned lovelies as a standard for the silver screen, and any mark of originality was cut away, surgically removed or dieted off with the help of doctors on the studios’ lots.
    One of the men she wrote about was Louis B. Mayer, who grew up in Saint John, New Brunswick, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. By the age of seven he was a full-time scrap collector, supporting his family by salvaging and selling odd pieces of metal. Kovacs’s description had made quite an impression on me; I imagined a small frame tottering throughcobblestone streets and dirt lanes, forty pounds of odds and ends hanging on the child’s back. Mayer was a constant truant from school, lugging sharp, unwieldy objects in a red metal wagon. In my mind, he took on the shape and grubbiness of an eighteenth-century London, England, bone-collector or rag-picker. In spite of his dedication to his work, he was mocked by his teachers and beaten by his father for being overly ambitious. Silent films arrived in Saint John in 1897, and Mayer, age twelve,