I Love Tea

Here I sit, drinking my tea and watching the rain, my mind a lazy, pleasant blank. Presently I notice how stained my tea cup is getting and wonder if my teeth, too, are turning brown. I can’t say for sure when I look at them in the mirror. They don’t look as white as they used to, that’s certain, but then nothing much about my head looks like it used to.

I use whitening toothpaste sometimes. I don’t think it makes a big difference. The only thing it does for me, that I can tell, is kill off skin cells in my cheek lining which then collect into disgusting, gunky strings by morning. That white gunk is even less attractive than yellow teeth and I’m pretty sure that exterminating all those epithelial cells on a nightly basis will be shown, in about twenty years' time, to cause cancer or permanently coarsened, disfigured lips or some other undesirable situation.

But wouldn’t you agree that getting older is all about shifting priorities ? I would not have sacrificed white teeth for the pleasure of drinking strong, black tea fifteen years ago. Now I want my tea, I want it flavourful, and am quite prepared to trample on the weak and helpless in order to get at it, if things ever come to it.

Thank heaven I’ve never enjoyed coffee. The hold it has on its followers is much more powerful than that of tea. We all know people who have to plan out their day around their coffees. A few years ago I drove across the twisting, mountainous breadth of British Columbia with my coffee-addicted sister. Her quest for a decent cup dominated the whole trip. We had to note how many kilometres to the next town, and to consider what size of town it was and therefore what kind of coffee establishments it was likely to have. Then we had to factor in how much coffee she had left in her mug and plot it on a volume/time graph to estimate where we would need to stop. It was a real eye-opener for me. Though I’d always been aware of her coffee dependency — somehow, in any mental image of her, there was always a large travel-mug steaming near one of her elbows — I didn’t pay it any attention. You know how you are with things that don’t directly concern you. I don’t know, for example, what a diabetic person needs to do throughout the day because I’ve never experienced it. But after that all-day drive across the province I am convinced that Theo’s coffee addiction qualifies as a medical condition.

I remember things coming to a head as we coasted into one small town, Theo behind the wheel. Her travel mug had been empty for many miles and though she was making a heroic effort to be pleasant I could see the strain of it showing in her forehead vein. Her plan, I just assumed, was to stop at the first gas station we came to and chug some of their coffee straight out of the pot.

She didn’t even spare the gas station a passing glance. And as the first cafe rounded into view I cried “Hooray! There we are!” and smiled happily at Theo, whom I expected to be wearing an expression of profound relief. But no. She slowed down to look at the cafe as we went past but didn’t appear to have any intention of stopping.

“What – what are you doing?” I said.

“Oh, it didn’t look like it would have good coffee,” she said. Rather cavalier, I thought, for someone in fourth-stage coffee withdrawal.

“But this is a small town,” I sputtered. “There won’t be many to pick from.”

“Well, I’m not drinking the roofing tar they serve at places like that,” she said testily.

We drove along in silence. The main street turned a corner up ahead, and beyond that I could see it climbing away from the town and disappearing into the forest. We only had about two blocks left. I began to drum my fingers nervously on the armrest.

“Oh! Hey! Up ahead!” I burst out, spying another cafe.

“I see it,” came the terse reply.

Incredibly, she showed no sign of committing to this one, either. I could only sit in stunned disbelief as we cruised past.

We followed the street as it made its turn and saw that there was only one block of businesses left. Things were not looking good. Another gas station loomed on our right.

“What about just nipping in there for a cup? I mean, it’s an emergency, right? Isn’t gas station coffee better than no coffee?”

Theo turned on me. “You don’t understand. Bad coffee isn’t coffee at all, it’s poison, it’s sewer sludge, it’s not fit for human consumption. I’m not going to drink it.”

“Well,” I went on, foolishly. “You’re not going to find a Starbucks or whatever in this town.”

“We might,” she said, gripping the wheel tightly and narrowing her eyes. “A lot of tourists come through here in the summer. I’m sure there is some place that serves decent coffee.”

But we had run out of town. The shops had fallen away and it was only scattered houses around us now. Theo found a place to turn around and headed back.

Things went from bad to worse after that. Theo couldn’t believe that no one in town was prepared to brew a decent cup of coffee and she drove up and down side streets with narrow-eyed, silent purpose. We had around 14 hours of driving to do that day and so I was alarmed to note the minutes slipping by as she combed the town with increasing desperation. I continued to spout foolish ideas, including a proposal to bring our own picnic-sized coffee thermos with us in the car the next time. Theo, unwilling to waste any more of her rapidly dwindling life force on a coffee moron like myself, managed to make it clear in a few expressive words that coffee which had sat in a thermos all day wasn’t drinkable.

I can’t even remember where she eventually stopped. I know that we never did find a big coffee chain in town. I think maybe she ended up going into the nicest looking of the hotels we passed.

She returned to her normal, agreeable self within minutes of getting the coffee and the rest of the towns we passed through that day must have been more satisfying in their offerings because there were no further crises and we passed the time happily, trying to understand the rudiments of human behaviour and lamenting the general lack of appreciation for our own wonderfulness.

And now I find that my own tea cup is drained and I must go top it up with fresh stuff from the pot. It occurs to me that my portrayal of coffee addiction is unfair since my own tea habit sometimes places a burden on those around me. Simply put, when you ingest as much liquid in a day as I do, you can’t let yourself get very far away from a toilet. I try to manage my tea drinking. You know, schedule it for when I’m going to be at home for a few hours. But sometimes we go out on the spur of the moment and that can mean real trouble. I always jettison what I can at the last possible second before leaving the house but kidneys filter at their own pace and won’t be hurried.

Just last week M and I went with the kids for a walk down on the newly reclaimed seafront promenade and I didn't enjoy myself a bit because I could feel the tea working its way through my body and starting to queue up in the holding area. I knew that it wouldn’t be long before I needed a toilet. Well, there are no toilets anywhere on the promenade. To make a long story short, we had to cut the walk short, race back to the car and screech off toward the nearest restaurant where I threw myself out of the car and grabbed a passing waiter, shouting “Toilet! Toilet!” in deranged tones. It wasn’t dignified.

But I love tea too much to let such things put me off for long. So off I go now to fill my cup. If you need to find me, I’ll be the one with brown teeth and an adult diaper.

Nothing Will Happen

Driving down the street with Kassem yesterday in our usual, comfortable silence he suddenly turned to me and said, “Madam, I want you to know that I’m keeping the car gassed up at all times.”

“What’s that?” I said, thinking I hadn’t heard him correctly.

“I’m keeping the car full of gas at all times these days. Just in case. But don’t worry, nothing will happen.”

I realised suddenly that he was referring to the unstable political situation in the country right now. I looked at him like he’d sprouted a second nose.

“Don’t worry, Madam, nothing will happen,” he said, laughing at my expression.

I told M about it later that evening.

“Where does he suppose we’re going to drive to, anyway, if things do erupt around here? ”

“Ah, well, he’s right. It’s just better to have the car full of gas at times like this.”

“What? You think so too?” I said. “Why haven’t you said that to me before? Are things worse than I suppose?”

“No, no, things are not worse than you suppose. It’s really not a bad situation. Don’t worry,” he chuckled. “Nothing will happen.”

Formula 1, Tupperware

I’d like to talk about the Formula 1 decision to move from Bridgestone to Pirelli tires this year, and how that will affect the driving style of someone with tons of experience, like Schumacher, versus a newer driver like Vettel.

I’m sorry, M and Big C. That was just a ruse to lure you in to the blog. I don’t actually know anything about which tires F1 is using this year. If they had commissioned Tim Horton’s to make tire-sized doughnuts to put on their wheels it would be all the same to me.

What I really wanted to talk about was my new tupperware. Well, it’s Rubbermaid, actually, that’s why I didn’t put a capital ‘T’ on tupperware, something my spell-checker is having a very hard time accepting. Tupperware seems to have evolved into the generic name for all small plastic storage containers and if the people in their trademark division are going to hunt me down and melt all my Rubbermaid products for calling them tupperware with a small ‘t’, well that’s a risk I’m willing to take.

It’s like being told to write dumpster with a capital ‘D’, or kleenex with a capital ‘K’. I know they’re brand names but they are also generic names now and unless I’m selling my own brand of tissue and calling it Kleenex I think we can dispense with capitalizing the first letter. I feel like I’m talking about a person when I capitalize. “Honey, can you pass me a Roberto so I can blow my nose? And when you’re done do you mind taking the trash out to the Frank?”

I have a thing about plastic storage containers. What I mean by that is, I love them, collect them, sort them by size, genre, brand name and find endless solace in them. When I’m with my tupperware, I feel at peace. My whole house and life could potentially be sorted, organized and labelled into clear plastic containers, and sometimes I earnestly try to do just that.

Small containers are easy to find. Getting your hands on a really big one is harder. My sis Theo came home breathless with excitement once in Calgary because she had found the storage box to end all storage boxes. So I rushed back to the store with her and when I saw the boxes agreed that there was no way I could carry on living without buying one. We each bought two. I don’t remember how many litres they held but put it this way: a St. Bernard could have had a very comfortable nap in one.

You may think we lived to regret that purchase but you’d be mistaken there. We may have had some trouble getting the boxes in the car to bring them home but it was a short drive, maybe we kept the trunk open. It wouldn’t have mattered. We were triumphant.

I used those plastic wonder boxes for all kinds of things. The kids’ toys, mainly, but I also emptied one and used it as a mini pool for them. I put it in the backyard, filled it with water, and they enjoyed a few dips in it on summer afternoons. I even tied a rope on one, put some blankets inside and pulled the kids over the snow in it one winter.

I’m not making this up, though I have suddenly become conscious of how improbable it sounds. The Plastic Box that Did It All. If it will bolster my credibility at all, I can assure you that there were a few things it was not used for. It was never used as a spare bed, even for children. I didn’t put a desk and lamp in it and try to turn it into a home office. No trout ever swam in it.

My tupperware fetish wasn’t a big deal in Canada. A lot of women are storage container enthusiasts there. Here in the Middle East it seems to be less of a thing. My Lebanese friends and family, while appreciating the utility of tupperware, seem content to own two or three pieces. They laugh at my collection.

I never announce a new purchase to M. What would that serve? He doesn’t understand how I feel. When I buy a new container I put it into immediate circulation and pretend it has always been there. In defence of my hobby, it isn’t as expensive as purse buying, or shoe buying. As for clothes, Costco is good enough for me. Though sometimes I get the feeling that M wouldn’t mind if my taste in clothing got a bit more expensive. The Next jeans, bought five years ago, that I currently walk around in don’t really cut the mustard beside what the well-heeled Beirut ladies are wearing. I’ve never even entered an Aïshti store. (No, that’s not true, I went in the small one in Faqra last fall with my sister-in-law, who was cold and wanted a sweater. All we found was weird, plaid stuff for hundreds of dollars that only Elton John would look good in.)

I set out to enthuse over my new Rubbermaid collection but now it feels like the moment has passed. Maybe it has something to do with my discovery just a few minutes ago — in between paragraphs I’ve been getting up to hang laundry, make dinner for the kids etc. — that the labels I put on the new containers are not sticking well. The lids seem to be made of that kind of plastic that nothing sticks to. This is very upsetting to me.

This happened last fall when I tried to label a plastic storage box that I’d put our ski stuff into. I knew from previous attempts that labels don't stay on this kind of plastic so this time I took a paring knife and lightly scratched the surface in a label-sized area. But when I put the label onto the scratched spot it stuck no better than before. I tried attaching an index card by twist-tie through the holes in the box handle, but it wouldn’t hang straight and kept snagging and tearing on things when I moved the box.

I never have been able to keep a label on that box. I try not to think about it. But if labels aren’t going to stick to my new collection (27 containers with interchangeable, easy-stack lids) I don’t know what I’m going to do. Oh, this is all most upsetting. Most upsetting.

Making Turkey

Turkeys are important to me. I don’t make them often and only on special occasions. This makes them more special, if you see what I mean. I didn’t make a turkey this Thanksgiving, nor at Christmas. So when I saw some turkeys in the fresh meats cooler a few days ago at the supermarket I decided to get one, thinking (as I do about most things in my life), better late than never. But I saw from the label name that they were local turkeys and this gave me pause. I had only ever bought imported American Butterball turkeys, and not even so many of those. I’m not what you’d call an old hand at making turkey, and can never remember whether you’re supposed to put them in the pan boob-side up or down, or what to do with those fleshy bits that they wrap in paper and hide inside the body cavity. Also, do you cover it while it cooks? I’ve always subscribed to the philosophy that just getting something as big as a turkey into an oven is achievement enough and once it’s in there it’s on its own.

I decided to go look in the frozen foods section to see if I could find a Butterball.

But here I had a problem. I wasn’t in comfortable shoes and I’d already walked up and down most of the aisles of the huge supermarket. That morning when I’d left the house M wasn’t up yet. I knew he’d slept poorly during the night and so when I got up I crept quietly out of the room and closed the door behind me, leaving him to it. I really wanted to get the store early, before it got busy, but I didn’t want to wake him up to get my clothes and shoes from the room. By eight-thirty when the light still hadn’t come on under the door I decided he was either having a good catch-up or had slipped into coma. In neither case would my barging into the room be useful so I wore the only clothes I had access to, which was a pair of very saggy cargo pants that look like pyjama bottoms, and slip-on shoes with a bit of height in the heel. It wasn’t exactly like going to the store in pyjamas and pumps but wasn’t that far off, either. I put on a long coat and hoped no one looked too closely.

By the time I stood in front of the local turkeys my toes, having been rammed downward into the front of the shoe with each step, were mangled like a pack of sausages which have been bent in half and sat on, or so I imagined. Without enthusiasm I leaned over my shopping cart and pushed off toward the frozen foods section.

There were a lot of very long freezers and I walked up and down beside them all but could find no turkeys. All right then, I said. Fresh, local gobbler it is to be.  Heading back to the fresh meats cooler, I pulled my shopping cart by the front end because it was so weighted down I couldn’t steer it from the back anymore. Along the way I picked up more things. The weight of the cart gave it tremendous momentum and once we got rolling on the straightaways it behaved as if it was powered by an unseen motor, which is unnerving when you’re behind it but downright terrifying when you’re in front and it starts gaining speed. I took out a row of instant pudding boxes trying to navigate a corner and an old man had to jump out of the way as we thundered past the cheese and olive counter but by throwing my weight backwards I managed to bring the cart to stop, once again, in front of the fresh turkeys. I resolved to take one whether it spoke English or not.

Reaching for the smallest one, I was taken aback to discover that it was not a turkey but a chicken. Bending to read the label, I saw that it weighed almost 4 kilos. Since when have there been chickens that size? What would you have to feed one to get it that large? There were actually only two turkeys and I took the smaller of the two, at 6 kilos.

At the cash register as I was paying for my groceries I saw an extraordinary thing. My turkey had dribbled a bit of body fluids onto the rubber mat of the conveyor belt and the cash girl commenced to clean it off with a tissue and some spray. But what was so striking was that she pressed a button and the empty conveyor belt rolled around, quietly and efficiently, while she sprayed and wiped. It was the first time I had ever seen any cashier at a grocery store in this country use the conveyor belt. They all have them, they just don’t use them. I had always assumed they weren’t hooked up or something. Every single time I’d been through a check-out, including just moments before this when the cashier had rung through my mountain of groceries, the bag boy piled everything onto the conveyor belt and then patiently moved things by hand, item by item, closer to the cashier as she cleared a space on the belt immediately beside her.

It is a mystery.

At home I shoved the turkey into the fridge and forgot about it till late in the afternoon when there really wasn’t enough time to cook it for dinner. Well, I had thought there was enough time. Along with everything else about roasting a turkey I had forgotten how long it takes. I was thinking something along the lines of an hour and a-half. But when I looked it up on the internet and saw that I needed something like 3 hours I realized that the best thing would be to keep it in the fridge till the next day. But I couldn’t do that. Instead I rushed to the kitchen, turned on the oven, hauled the bird out of the fridge and washed it in the sink in a mad panic, splashing water and epidermis all over the place, polished it up with some butter and herbs and tipped it into the oven.

It struck me that there was something odd about the turkey. I was in such a hurry to get it into the oven that I hadn’t stopped to think about it being rather an unusual shape. Unlike the rotund, trussed, North American turkeys this one was long and sort of lean. The impression was one of athleticism and self restraint.

As it cooked it bore out the appearance of being less fatty than a Butterball. I’d always been able to make gravy from what dripped down off the turkey while it cooked but this bird didn’t drip. It just sat there turning brown and sinewy as the hours crept by. I kept adding water to the pan so that the two or three drops of butter that had rolled off the skin and landed there wouldn’t burn. I must have added a litre by the time the carcass, almost done, reluctantly released a modest dribble of juice.

I stood looking at it, oven-mitted hands on hips, for some minutes after hauling it out of the oven. It was a remarkable sight. Its legs stuck straight out like it had been running for its life at the very moment the heat and flame engulfed it. The elongated, muscular body added to the effect. But the colour was the most striking feature. It wasn’t so much golden-brown as sunburn-red. As the reddest parts were all on the top surface of the bird it looked uncannily like a beach-goer who has fallen asleep on the beach under a noonday sun.

The kids were starving by then and I put aside my reflections to slice some breast meat off for our meal. Since M never knows what time he’ll get home, and it’s usually late, we are in the habit of eating dinner whether he’s back yet or not. The meat was good and not dry like I had expected. The gravy wasn’t great, but that was no surprise since I’d had almost no drippings to work with.

Shortly after we’d eaten, and before I’d got up to carve up the rest of the turkey, M came in the door. He set his briefcase down, drew in a breath and said, “Mmm, what have you been cooking?”

Turning to the kitchen, his face froze. Sunburnt, stretched out beyond the ends of the roasting pan in a pose of agonized rigor mortis, the turkey was a grotesque sight to behold.

“What —?” he faltered. “What is that?”

“Oh, that’s a turkey,” I said casually.

“Thank God,” he said, “For a moment there I thought you’d cooked somebody’s dog.”

“It’s a Lebanese turkey,” I said.

“Ah.”

“And quite tasty.”

“Oh?“

“Yes. I think this was a turkey who took care of himself.”

“Very good. So what’s the occasion?”

“Well, no occasion, really. I just thought, I didn’t make one at Christmas and all, so why not.”

“Hm.” M went into the bedroom to change. When he came back to the kitchen he said, “Have you been watching the news?”

“Of course not. You know me. Canada could have decided that beavers are getting too much power and it’s high time another animal had a turn on the nickel and I wouldn’t know about it till someone told me.”

“That’s what I thought. So you haven’t heard that our government here has collapsed?”

“What? Here? The government collapsed?” I whipped my head around to stare out the window, though what I expected to see I can’t tell you.

“Yes.”

“Well, what does it mean? Should we be packing our bags, fleeing the country etc.?”

“Oh no, I don’t think so. Nothing like that.”

“We just carry on as usual, then?”

“Right.”

We sat quietly for a moment.

“Well. All right then. Let’s get you some dinner.”

And I shuffled over to the stove and began to saw at the turkey.

Another Haircut, Hopefully No Lice

It has taken another trip to the hairdresser’s to prod me back to blogging.

Last night when my mother-in-law was here she asked if I’d like to go with her to her hairdresser’s today. She seemed quite earnest in her wish to have me accompany her and told me (again) that it was a “cheap” place, apparently convinced that frugality prevents me from darkening the doors of hair salons more frequently.

Frankly, I think she has noticed my hair growing longer and is afraid I might cut it myself again.

If any other person, in any other place, had tried to entice me to a hair salon by telling me it was cheap I would have ended the matter on the spot with a few juicy words describing my experiences with cheap haircuts. If there was ever case of getting what you pay for, haircuts must be it. But some unnamed force inside me compelled me to say, “Sure, what the heck. Count me in.”

I guess it was partly the attractive anticipation of having my hair attended to by a normal human being in a normal shop instead of in the biosphere glass world inhabited by stick-insect automatons. Plus, I kind of just wanted to experience the cheap salon. Like when you open a container of moulding food from the back of the fridge and have a sniff. You know it’s going to stink, and that there’s nothing to be gained from smelling it, but you smell it anyway. It was sort of that same compulsion.

My mother-in-law told me to be ready at nine, that we would depart then. So this morning found me ringing her doorbell precisely at nine. She didn’t answer. I rang it, at intervals, about ten times. I could hear loud, vigorous noises coming from the other side of the door. It sounded like someone was stacking sacks of potatoes up against it. Finally I pulled out my cell phone and rang.

She answered in a breathless voice and I said, a bit pinched, “I’m at the door.”

“What, my door?” she asked in apparent surprise.

“Um, yes, your door,” I said.

She opened it immediately and apologized, saying that she had called me on our home phone a few minutes earlier and, finding no answer, had concluded I must be sleeping or in the shower. So she had got out the vacuum cleaner and was doing some housework. The thudding sounds were her piling the carpets against the door.

“But we agreed to leave at nine,” I said. “I would have let you know if I wasn’t going to be ready.”

“Never mind,” she laughed. “Just give me ten minutes. Have a seat. Do you want to watch tv?”

“No thanks,” I said ungraciously and plopped down on the couch to wait.

She dressed quickly and in a few minutes we were on our way. Kassem, our driver, was wearing a winter jacket that looked strangely familiar. I kept stealing glances at it but it wasn’t until later when I had a good look at the front of the jacket that I recognized it as one of our own discards. It was one M had been presented with once in Canada for his work on a company project and the jacket bore the project’s name on its breast pocket. Well-made and warm, the jacket saw some good use for two winters but when we found ourselves in the Middle East it wasn’t needed anymore. It stayed in a box for years until last fall when I reluctantly included it in some bags of clothes we were getting rid of. Here in Beirut there are no thrift stores as such but I give our unneeded things to either Kassem or my mother-in-law and they find their way to people who can use them. I didn’t remember specifically giving Kassem the jacket, nor did I suppose he would wear it to work, but I did and he has.

It made me remember once in Saudi my neighbour telling me, in outrage, that she had seen one of the compound gardeners wearing the very t-shirt she had thrown out in the garbage the week before. She was furious. She was a very nice woman who hardly seemed to mind anything but she was wildly indignant about that t-shirt. I understood how she felt because I’d have felt the same way. The idea of someone digging through my garbage! But the difference between me and her is that I probably wouldn’t have admitted my outrage. I guess she is more honest than I am. The shame of being so rich compared to so many in the Middle East is always a millstone around my neck.

Kassem drove us through tiny, crowded streets, my mother-in-law frequently shouting from the back seat things like, “Turn left here!” when Kassem had already started to turn left. We piled out in a one-way street with parked cars lining both sides of the narrow street. My mother-in-law seized my arm and pulled me with her into the path of a taxi and a moped that was overtaking the taxi. They swerved to avoid us and we gained the relative safety of the sidewalk (it really is relative safety – people drive their mopeds on the sidewalk sometimes).

Small shops selling jewellery, fabric, plastic bowls, step-ladders and authentic Giorgio Armini gowns squashed themselves into every square foot of space and pressed over us from the overhung first floor. My mother-in-law strode boldly to the nearest glass door and pushed but the door didn’t yield so without pausing she walked a few meters to the next door and tried it. It opened, but apparently she didn’t like what she saw for she backed out again immediately.

“Come on, Jenn, I know where it is,” she said, stepping briskly to the next door down the line.

This didn’t yield the desired results, either, and she paused to look around.

“Ah, there it is!” she cried, pointed down the block. “I know where it is, I just didn’t recognize it at first.”

This time she ushered me confidently through the glass door before her. It was indeed the right place. I was prepared for it to be no-frills but this was something on an a new scale altogether. It looked like a dodgy motel. The ceiling was low and the lighting weak. The walls, originally a headache white, were smudged and smeared, as if ten generations of mud-pat making little kids had attended nursery school there. The tiles were of chipped and worn marble with veins of red and green swirling garishly around each other and threatening sea-sickness if you let your gaze linger too long. Cigarette smoke hung heavy in the air, and a tired-looking bleached blonde woman greeted us indifferently.

My mother-in-law led the way around a corner, through a scattering of bare-bones hair stations and into a portioned-off back room, where ladies who wear headscarves could bare their heads in a man-free environment. Two or three older women were sitting around in various stages of root touch-ups. None of them were getting natural-looking colours. Even the oldest of them, a women who was well over seventy, maintained her hair in deepest shades of black.

The room was just incredibly dingy looking and I tried to keep the shocked look off my face. There seemed to be one hairdresser and a younger girl working as her assistant. My mother-in-law announced that we were there for hair-cuts and that “she”, pointing to me, “doesn’t speak Arabic.” I should mention here for those of you who do not know that my mother-in-law doesn't speak English, and that the only language in which she and I converse is Arabic. My grasp of the language is stumbling and limited but it's quite serviceable, yet in the car on the way to the hair salon my mother-in-law kept asking me questions about how I wanted my hair cut, as though she would have to explain everything to them (and which is exactly what she did).

The hairdresser said kindly that she would be with us in a minute so we seated ourselves on a bench against the wall. The assistant beckoned me over to wash my hair at the little sink in a dark corner of the room. I wasn’t expecting Aveda shampoo or anything but the smell of what she was using reminded me of hand soap in airport bathrooms. Sure enough when I straightened up with the towel on my head I saw that she had been using a giant bottle of the absolute cheapest-looking stuff I ever saw. It just said “Shampoo” on it and some Arabic print.

When I sat down at the hair-cutting station I noticed that the chair was an ordinary one and didn’t have any mechanism to raise or lower it. Hard luck for her today, I thought, since at 5’7” I am taller than most Lebanese women. She came and gave my hair a cursory brushing and that’s when I noticed, with horror, the absence of any kind of disinfecting receptacle for the brushes and combs. Looking beside me at the battered implements trolley I saw a selection of hair tools and not one of them was immersed in a bottle of alcohol (or whatever that blue stuff is that sizzles up lice and ringworm). When she set down the brush that had just swiped my own head a few times I saw that it was full of hair, not my own.

My mother-in-law, friendly and chatty with everyone, discussed various subjects with the hairdresser while the other set to work cutting. My mother-in-law explained to the hair dresser that I’d had long hair last year and it was really lovely, but that I’d decided to cut it and although it looked nice now it was really very lovely before. The hairdresser was a pretty fair cutter of hair, I’ll give her that. I was pleased with the cut. But after seeing the hairbrush I’m afraid the rest of the visit was a bit of a blur for me.

My mother-in-law wouldn’t let me pay when it came time to leave. Of course. She never lets me pay for things without a big fight. These days I find I am weary of the struggle and don’t argue. The haircuts were 5,000 LL each. That’s three dollars and thirty-three cents, in American money. I don’t believe I have ever had a haircut for that price. Even as a kid at the local hairdressers in our small town I’m pretty sure I paid five dollars, or even ten.

So there, I’ve done it. I have committed the hairdressing equivalent of smelling rotten food. I’m terrified that I’ve picked up lice and I won’t be able to truly relax for at least a week. Every tingle of my scalp is going to make me tremble in fear that it’s the first nibbling of hungry parasites. All this because I didn’t feel like watching snooty Tony fuss around me in his expensive jeans and silly voice. I’m telling you today, and you can quote me on this any time you want, that for my next haircut I’m going straight to Tony and I’ll kiss the sanitized tiles he walks on.