plotless oneshot #1

 The tinkling of the bell signified the entrance of another customer, ushering in a wave of the blistering Virginia humidity along with the patronage. For a moment, there was a lull in the flitting conversations had by the multitude of African women, each of them peering up from the heads of hair their fingers were navigating through to turn to face the door. A few with phones balanced between their cheeks and collarbone could only follow with their eyes as the slender woman moved to a seat near the entrance of the salon and began to rifle through the tatterings of magazines placed on the adjacent table. Only a few seconds passed before conversation resumed, filling the air with the buzz of fast-spoken French.

“Jo-Jo,” a voice chimed out above the hum of the room, causing the woman at the front to pull her lips together in a terse smile at the attempt at endearment by use of the nickname. 

Jodie stood and hurried over to the source of the voice: a stocky, blue-black woman by the name of Lela who was beckoning her to sit in the salon chair.

“Ay, it has been long time eh?” Lela asked with a smile, fanning the cape out with a flourish and clipping it together at the nape of Jodie’s neck. She deftly unraveled the swathes of blow-dried hair that had been deceitfully hidden within a bun, and handed Jodie her hair-tie.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, as the hair unfurled down the back of the chair. “Very long time indeed!”

Jodie chuckled at Lela’s amusement with the length of her hair, a constant at each of her visits. Jodie pulled off her glasses and stared silently ahead while Lela began to part and meddle with her hair. It was a tacit agreement of “don’t speak unless spoken to” implemented by Jodie when she first started visiting Legacy Salon a few years ago. The ladies flitted about, their French words fluttering through the air, leaving no room for Jodie to interject with English even if she had felt like speaking. Unless directly addressed, she would stay silent and focus her attention towards squinting at her phone or the TV across the room that exclusively played, titillating, albeit quite blurry, Nollywood soaps.

Soon another woman came to join Lela, and they encircled Jodie in a frenzy of foreign conversation, pulling at her hair and deftly braiding it with nimble fingers. With Lela’s belly poking into the side of her face, Jodie felt a buzzing sensation along her jaw. Lela moved away, procured her phone and held it against her ear with her shoulder.

“Hello?” 

A beat.

“Aw hi Benjamin, good to hear from you,” she cooed sweetly, her African accent lavishing her words.

Jodie closed her eyes and let the calming sound of Lelas voice wash over her body as she chatted—no, flirted? — with the “Benjamin” on the other side of the phone. Lela’s giggles shuddered her corpulent frame, allowing Jodie’s shoulder to take in some aftershock. After that conversation had ended, the giggling continued as Lela and the other woman pursued a follow-up conversation in French, leaving Jodie out of the loop yet again. As intrigued as she was, Jodie’s high-school level Spanish did not aid her in understanding their conversation, but she was able to parse out words that resembled English: intelligente, remarquable, sincère.

Jodie smiled to herself. This Benjamin fellow sounded, from both description and voice, quite sweet. Lela had never mentioned a husband in the four years of Jodie’s patronage or any sort of suitor for that matter, or if she had it must’ve been in her native tongue, rendering Jodie ignorant to it.

Lela acknowledged Jodie’s attentive ear with a question:

“Jo-Jo, you have boyfren yet, lah?”  

Jodie abruptly opened her eyes again, blushing at her own intrusiveness.

“Oh! Y-yes, I do,” she stammered, caught off-guard.

Did.

“Did. We, uh, broke up…recently.”

Lela sucked her teeth while the other lady clucked her disapproval.

“Don’t worry,” Lela patted her shoulder reassuringly, “there will be others.”

“Yes,” the other woman added, pinching the hair at Jodie’s nape and making her wince. She caught her eyes in the mirror. “You are too beautiful!”

“And too smart!” Lela thumped Jodie’s temple for emphasis. “Must be something wrong with him, eh?”

Jodie let a wry chuckle of agreement escape her lips. Just as she began to protest their compliments or elucidate further, the women had exchanged their English for French yet again and became engrossed in another incomprehensible discussion.

Five hours passed without consequence, and aside from a sore behind and even sore-er wallet, Jodie left the braid shop relatively unscathed. Personal life was never something she craved to be the subject of discussion at the braiding shop, hence the  self-imposed vow of silence.

But today was different. 

Today, she longed to return back in the chair, expounding upon the great trials and tribulations her past relationship had endured while the ladies offered their exclamations. The slight correction in tense made her realize that today was the first time she’d really spoken about it, besides to her parents, but even that conversation was brief. Most of her diatribe was confined to a forest green, leather bound notebook, that lay awaiting her on her coffee table the moment she arrived from the braiding shop. To the left of the table sat a large reusable shopping bag, overly stuffed with her ex’s things, prompting her to take her phone out.

Jodie: when are you coming by to pick up the stuff?

Damien: Few blocks down. Be there in 5.

Jodie boded her time by helping herself to a glass of Moscato and pouring over her recent journal entries. Her dark, slender frame made a sharp angle as she leaned on the kitchen counter, flipping pages. She laughed somberly at the dried tear marks clotted with mascara that stained the most recent pages.