Let Down Your Hair (18 page)

The dryers in the hotel salon hummed softly instead of droning, and the staff had sleek updos full of highlights and spray.

 “You OK, babe?” said Emmeline, in the quiet tone people use at a sick bed.

The knots in my stomach winched tighter. Since seeing Dr. Clarke, I’d barely been able to assemble a sentence. Emmeline thought I was being nervous about my modeling job, and I hadn’t told her otherwise. I nodded.

She gave me a one-armed squeeze. “Don’t stress so much. They’ll love you, I promise. Now take a seat and let me handle everything, OK?”

Emmeline went to the counter, and I sleepwalked to the couch, my secret pounding on the walls of my womb. The spotlight that had followed me since I’d become beautiful was now a giant arrow suspended over my head that read
Single, Homeless and Pregnant with TWINS
.

Desperate to distract myself, I leafed through a glossy magazine from the nearby coffee table.
Hollywood
’
s latest baby bumps. The truth about your post-birth body. Jessica
’
s baby joy: pregnant at last!

“Feeling clucky, are we?” said a world-weary drawl over my head.

I slapped the magazine shut on an article titled
My biggest role yet: Being a mom.
“No, no,” I said, my voice higher than usual. “I was just … flicking through.”

The owner of the drawl gave me a knowing smile. She was a chic forty-five or so, with a caramel chignon and a uniform that matched the salon decor. “Don’t worry, angel. It’ll happen for you. Probably sooner than you think.”

I gave her a watery smile, and followed her to the sinks.

“My name’s Monique,” added the woman, lowering my head into a porcelain horseshoe, “and I’ll be your stylist for today.”

A soothing stream of water sluiced over my scalp. Beneath it, my mind whirled like a hamster wheel. Ryan vanished. Suspended from my PhD. Starting work as a fashion model. Living with Dirk. Emmeline not telling him I was her daughter. Pregnant with TWINS.

“You’re
such
a lucky girl,” said Monique, rubbing shampoo into my hair. “I’d
die
to be a natural platinum blonde. Are you Swedish?”

“Half-Finnish.”

Matti’s lean face floated across my memory, staring into the distance through a coiling wisp of smoke. The platinum hair which won me this modeling contract was his only contribution to my life. Platinum hair and five thousand dollars.

“Lucky thing.” She massaged in conditioner. “I might have to tint it to match the extensions, but I’ll do a temporary color. Wouldn’t mess with natural color like this.”

Emmeline was chatting with the woman at the counter, looking too young and glamorous to be anyone’s mother. Yet twenty-three years ago she’d been more or less where I was now. Young, pregnant, single. With a career that required her to look thin and beautiful. Almost anyone in her position, in my position, would get an abortion. Yet she hadn’t. Because she thought having her lover’s child would convince him to leave his wife.

Monique tilted my head back and rinsed my hair with warm water. I stared at the ceiling, breathing in the bitter smell of hair products. I owed both my conception and my birth to Emmeline’s naivety. Or to her love for Matti, if I was feeling charitable. And seeing I was living off her charity at the moment, the least I could do was offer her mine.

Monique squeezed out the moisture with a tiny plush towel, and showed me to a swivelly leather chair. Protected from small talk by the blow-dryer, I swallowed my bitterness and tried to figure out what to do.

I’d always believed in abortion on demand. Yet every time I thought about clinics and procedures, I saw Emmeline, pregnant at sixteen with me. And the two tiny heads floating inside me, bowed as if waiting for the guillotine to fall.

“You found some long blonde extensions in time, then?” said Emmeline, as Monique blow-dried my hair. “Did you have to courier them in from interstate?”

“Found them locally, would you believe. Little place north of the city. Natural light blonde, real human hair, enough for a full head. Rare as rocking horse doodoo, and he knew it. It’ll cost you, I’m afraid.”

Emmeline gave an easy shrug. “That’s fine.”

Chalk up another debt to Dirk’s Visa card. Did he even check what Emmeline spent his money on? Maybe he was too rich to care. But surely even the richest man would notice if a bill from an abortion clinic appeared on his statement. Or two babies appeared in his penthouse.

My womb heaved and capsized, a ship with two stowaways on board. Could I handle this without Emmeline? If I earned enough through modeling to pay for an abortion, she wouldn’t even need to know I’d been pregnant.

Monique took a lock of long, straight blonde hair from the box of extensions, and laid it against my bob. “
God
, Em, look at that. Perfect match.”

Emmeline gaped. “It’s like you grew them yourself, babe!”

Suspicion narrowed my eyes. The hair extensions were sitting on a trolley. I peered in the box, and caught a faint but distinct whiff of fennel. Emmeline left to see her personal trainer, and Monique started re-attaching the hair I’d sold to Roy.

My chair was well-padded, yet somehow I couldn’t get comfortable. I shifted and squirmed so much under Monique’s fingers that she asked if I needed the toilet. The second time she asked, I said that I did, mostly to escape from her small talk.

The face in the bathroom mirror was whiter than the sink. White as mother’s milk and freshly laundered diapers. White as the bones of a two-month-old fetus. I felt like a murderer-in-waiting. One pregnancy and my mind was waving pictures from a pro-lifer picket line.

I washed and washed my hands, trying to remember what my position had been last week—when fashion modelling was an appalling profession that objectified women, instead of the career I hoped would liberate me from my mother’s sugar daddy. When women’s reproductive rights were something I wrote essays about, instead of something I needed to exercise.

Pro-choice
doesn
’
t have to mean abortion
, I reminded myself. I could continue the pregnancy. But what would we live off? And where? The thought of begging charity from Dirk, or crawling back to Andrea, made me want to claw my face off. But unless I came up with an alternative plan to support and house myself and two newborn babies, they were the only people I had to ask. And it was very possible that both would say no.

Without warning, a floodgate broke and Ryan tumbled in. Stroking my hair, teaching me to dance, hacking Andrea’s computer. Being wheeled away to hospital. And then deserting me, disappearing so completely it was like he’d died. I shut my eyes and pain poured in like tar, shutting down my thoughts and turning everything black.

By the time the last extension was bonded and styled, it was past six, and I’d inhaled enough hairspray to lacquer my lungs. My head was aching, and the hamster wheel had spun on for hours without solving my problems.

Monique picked up a huge hand mirror and angled it to show me the back of my head. “All done. Stand up and take a look.”

I stood, and the mirror reflected my still-flat stomach. My hands sprang up to cover it, as if muffling two tiny heartbeats.

“So what do you think, angel?” drawled Monique.

My hair hung to the middle of my back—five or six inches shorter than it was before I sold it to Roy—and Monique had layered it, to disguise where the extensions began. To my surprise, the overall effect looked natural, as though all of it was still growing from my scalp.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. And it
was
beautiful, sleek and swishy in a way it had never been before. Beautiful, but foreign. Whatever Roy had done to turn my hair into extensions had made it feel like a wig.

Emmeline appeared in the doorway, pink-cheeked in lycra. “My God, babe,” she gasped, “look at
you!
”

“Scrubs up well, doesn’t she?” said Monique, looking at me as if she’d made a particularly fine sculpture.

“She looks like a fairy princess!” Emmeline circled me, open-mouthed. “Are you happy with them?”

I wasn’t sure, but I nodded. My new hair rippled like a sheet of golden water.

“Wash and style them like your own hair,” said Monique, producing the bill. “When they need touching up, or you want to take them out, just give us a bell.”

Emmeline paid, thanked Monique for fitting me in, and led me to the lift. “So how are you feeling? A bit more confident?”

She looked so earnest and concerned I longed to tell her the truth so I didn’t have to carry it alone. “A bit,” I lied.

“Oh,
babe
,” said Emmeline, with a one-armed squeeze. “You’re going to be fabulous, I swear. You are
gorgeous
. The way you look with long hair, you’ll be on the cover of Vogue before you know it.”

We stepped out on the second floor and into a restaurant called Dominique’s. A tuxedoed waiter handed us leather-bound menus and took us to a table marked
Reserved
. “Anything to start, ladies?” he said, pouring us glasses of water.

“An antipasto platter for two, thanks,” said Emmeline. “That OK with you, babe?”

“Sounds great.”

The swirly words swam on the pages. Emmeline was trying so hard—to groom me, to reassure me—and here was I, weeks away from being too pregnant to model and too scared to tell her. I felt like a coward and a liar, but I still couldn’t tell her.

“What happened to
your
modeling career, Em?” I said. She’d managed to model after having a baby, so it was possible. Or possible so long as you handed the baby to your mother to bring up. I pictured Emmeline, raising my twins while I modeled, fitting them in around her beautician and personal trainer, changing diapers with her manicured hands. The idea was laughable. But if not her, who else? A nanny? How much did that cost? The freezing ocean returned, icier than ever, sucking me deeper and deeper.

“Well, I didn’t make the cover of Vogue.” She gave me a wry smile. “But I did pretty well. Before I had you, I got lots of work. It got tricky, coming up with new reasons why I wasn’t at school. In the end I forged a note from Mom saying I had glandular fever.”

The antipasto platter arrived. It looked like an illustration from Dr. Clarke’s
Foods To Avoid During Pregnancy
brochure. Smoked salmon. Uncooked fish, which might carry salmonella (fetal damage). Camembert and fetta. Unpasteurized cheeses, which could harbour listeria (risk of miscarriage). Salami, chorizo and prosciutto. Preserved meats, which contained nitrites (toxic for unborn babies).

Emmeline looked at my untouched fork. “Aren’t you having any, babe? Have some cherry tomatoes. Only a calorie or two each.”

Raw vegetables (risk of toxoplasmosis if improperly washed). And now Emmeline was back to thinking I had an eating disorder. I scanned the platter and located some cheddar. Hard, pasteurized cheese. Risk of cross-contamination from other foods, but otherwise safe.

I ate the cheddar as slowly as I could, searching for a main course that didn’t break the rules. “What about after having me?” I said, trying to sound casual. “How long was it before you could model again?”

“Nearly a year. Having babies is really tough on your body. I didn’t get stretch marks, but my tummy went to squish, and I put on
masses
of weight.”

The delicate, leggy teenager in the photo from my wallet flitted uneasily across my mind. How thin had she been
before
she got pregnant? How thin would
I
be expected to be? How had I gone from articles about the evils of modeling to preparing for a photo shoot in the space of a week?

“So what did you do?”
Live off cherry tomatoes?

“Oh, my tummy sprang back in a month or two,” she said, beckoning to the waiter. “No personal trainer, nothing. I was only seventeen, remember. And I was so miserable the weight just fell off. There was no saving my boobs, though.”

Something about the way she said
saving
troubled me. It was like her body was a building, and her breasts were an awning too damaged to repair. “How do you mean?”

“They were awful. Sad and saggy and under an A cup. Like someone stuck a nail in a tire.”

She spoke as if those sad saggy breasts no longer belonged to her. As if she’d had that damaged awning removed. Or … renovated.

My stomach bunched up. Her breasts were about the same size as mine, but they sat a little higher, and were round as half-grapefruits. “You mean you … you had a … a …”

Emmeline gave me a weary smile, as if I were impossibly innocent. “Babe, I had to. My clothes looked like shit, and every time I saw a girl with cleavage, I wanted to cry.”

My bunched-up stomach plunged toward my feet. Cosmetic surgery. My mother had paid a surgeon to cut open her breasts and put in a bag of chemicals. Going under the knife, not because she was sick, but to make her
clothes
look better.
She was a model, Sage
, I told myself.
Making clothes look good was her job
. “Isn’t that … expensive?”

“Absolutely. Especially if you get a good surgeon. And you don’t trust your body to a cheap one. But hey,” she said, with a conspiratorial twinkle, “it doesn’t cost five thousand dollars to fly home from Finland.”

Her matter-of-factness disturbed me.
Babe, I had to
. Looking good was compulsory, and having a baby didn’t entitle her to time off. Any lapse in standards made her body an enemy that had to be bullied into line. “But you were
homeless!
”

The twinkle turned flinty. “Excuse me, honey, are you judging me? For having a boob job?”

“I was just—”

“This is
Nanna
stuff, isn’t it?” Her voice was scathing. “What was I meant to do, donate the money to a women’s shelter?”

I bit my lip, already wishing I hadn’t brought it up. “I just thought you would have spent it on somewhere to live. Setting yourself up. Instead of your … looks.”

Emmeline’s eyes blazed. “I
was
setting myself up, honey. You think I would have got any more modeling work with flat, saggy tits? You think I’d be living in a luxury penthouse with Dirk?”