Let Down Your Hair (3 page)

“You really don’t know how to have fun, do you?” snapped Jess.

I froze, shocked and stung.

“I mean, OK, so you’re a
feminist
,” she went on, with a sneer in her voice, “but that doesn’t mean you’re better than everyone else.”

My face went numb. “I never said I was better than everyone else.”

“You don’t say it, but you
think
it, don’t you? You’re always judging people. Well, sorry, but I like pop music, even if it
is
commercial and sexist. And I like guys, and wearing nice clothes. And if that makes me oppressed and stupid, well, at least I know how to have fun.”

She hung up. I pressed my fingers into my welling eyes and fumed. At Caitlin for ridiculing me, at Jess for siding with her friends, and at myself, for seeing how much truth there was in what Jess had said.

The front door opened, and I remembered it was haircut night. Andrea spread newspapers on the kitchen floor and I went to fetch the scissors. I closed the blades on tuft after tuft of gray hair, as if trying to chop Jess from my memory. Overnight, the world had become a sea of sneering faces, laughing at how I dressed and how very, very little I knew.

The last wiry tuft hit the paper. “Can students do Women’s Studies subjects online?” I asked.

“Our students are almost all women, Sage, and lots of them are caregivers.” Andrea’s voice was impatient, implying that I should have known this without being told. “We offer everything online. It’s an equity issue.” She peered at me suspiciously. “Why?”

I grabbed a cloth and bent to clean the scissors and hide my expression. “I was thinking I might finish my degree from home, instead of attending classes.”

She shrugged. “Suit yourself.” She didn’t ask me why, and her offhand tone sounded almost like relief. “I’ll let Student Admin know.”

She took the scissors and waited for me to sit down. I looked at the chair, Caitlin’s words burning in my guts.
She must be a dyke. Check out the butchmeister haircut.
“I might skip the haircut tonight.”

Andrea’s face darkened. “Why’s that? Too much time on your hands? Growing yourself a lure to attract
men?
”

I shrank from her words, but my feet wouldn’t budge. “No special reason,” I said to the scissors, “I just thought I might let it grow.”

Something was beeping. The sound was coming from my head, as if an electric mosquito had sneaked inside my skull. I groped around blearily and the computer mouse fell in my lap. Startled into consciousness, I realized I’d fallen asleep on the space bar. The reason for this gleamed above me on the screen: Jacqueline Fisher’s PhD thesis.

This thesis
, wrote Jacqueline,
endeavours to interrogate the unidimensionality of the socially embedded and heteronormative paradigms of corporeal femininity, with post-structural reference to historically contingent constructions of pedagogical discourse.

Four pages in, I felt new respect for Jacqueline’s PhD examiners, who’d managed to read the whole thing. I tried to add to my notes on her work, but it was like giving birth to a building. With a resentful burst of energy, I pressed
Print
and reached behind the bookcase for the rolled-up drawings from last week’s class. I had to go downstairs to the staffroom for the printouts, so I could toss these drawings in the recycling bin at the same time, and come back to Jacqueline refreshed.

I unfurled the roll of paper for one last look and found my five-minute sketch of Ryan in a fedora. A strange fizz went through me. Though I’d drawn him too thin, and his feet looked like turnips, I’d captured some of his bright, jaunty energy. In fifteen minutes he’d be back in the studio, posing for Sally’s next life drawing class. Not that that had anything to do with me. I had an acclaimed PhD thesis to read.

The sign on the door said “Staff and Graduate Students Only”, which as of last week included me. With a twinge of excitement, I opened the door. A printer in the corner was churning out paper, and beside it stood Fran Mackenzie, small and neat with smooth red hair. I was suddenly hyper-aware that I was carrying several large pictures of a naked man.

“Sage,” she said, smiling as if I were a long-lost friend, instead of the granddaughter of her boss and arch-enemy. “Taking drawing classes?”

I clutched the drawings to my chest, trying to screen them with my arms. “No, no,” I said, my voice unnaturally high. “I was just … looking at how women are portrayed in different media.” I glanced down. In between my wrists was my squeamish attempt at drawing Ryan’s penis. I hastily swiveled the roll to hide it.

“Well, if you decide to look at popular media, let me know.” Fran turned back to the printer.

Heat rising in my cheeks, I located my freshly labeled pigeonhole, grabbed a sheet of paper and wrapped it strategically around the drawings. Had Fran seen the penis? What if she told people?
What if it got back to Andrea?
I peeled back the paper, peeked at the offending organ and breathed a quiet thanks for my lack of drawing skills. Hopefully she’d thought it was an oven glove.

Fran approached, holding out my summary of Jacqueline’s first chapter. “Is this yours?”

“Um, yes. Thanks.”

I willed Fran to leave so I could throw out the drawings, but she paused, leafing through her printouts. Close up, I could see she was wearing makeup. My tongue made a silent click of disapproval.
Queen of the lipstick feminists
, Andrea called her. Fran attracted third-wave feminist graduates who wrote fashion blogs and wanted to call our field “Gender Studies”.

“I hear you’re starting a PhD with us,” she said. “Well done. Have you been assigned an office?”

I wrapped an extra layer of paper around the drawings. “Andrea invited me to share hers.”

Fran’s brows hit her hairline. “Is that what
you
wanted?”

My hackles rose. “Of course. Anyway, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go.”

Still bristling, I stalked out to the elevator and pressed the button for the ground floor, where there was a larger and more public recycling bin.

Like all the best arch-enemies, Fran had started out as Andrea’s friend. Her daughter Freya was two years older than me, and Andrea used to invite them around to give me contact with other children. We saw them every couple of weeks for some years until Freya, then fifteen, arrived on our doorstep wearing makeup and heels. Andrea declared Freya a negative role model, and refused to let her in. The heated argument that followed ended in the Mackenzies being banned from our house, and began a long and bitter feud between Andrea and Fran.

The elevator doors opened. I marched straight to the recycling bin and threw in the drawings. They unrolled and there was Ryan looking up from his blanket, just as I’d seen him through the skylight. I told myself to go back to the office, but my body refused to obey. My hands snatched up the drawings again, and my legs led me out the door and pelted across the grounds towards the studio.

“Today,” Sally Old’s voice drifted down the corridor, “we’re going to try drawing with our non-dominant hand.”

I skidded to a gasping halt in the doorway of Studio 3. Sally was back inside the ring of easels, but the rug behind her was bare. Last week’s drawings sagged in my grip.

“Hi Sage,” said Sally. “Catch your breath and grab an easel.”

I was levering an easel from the pile in the corner when the curtain across the room opened and Ryan stepped out. The room brightened, as if lit by his zest. Hair springing cheerily, he strode to the rug, clothes and bag of props on one shoulder.

His gaze fell on me and a flicker went down my spine. “Oy!” he said with a grin. Not sheepish, like last week’s, but bright-eyed and broad. “Who invited
you
back here?”

A smile broke out before I could stop it. “No one,” I said. “I just thought I’d come back.” I dropped my head to hide my blush, and realized two things that embarrassed me further. One was that I’d been watching him ever since he appeared. The other was that the unsaid rest of my answer was
because I wanted to see you
.

The phrase roared in my ears. I scuttled away, hiding my face with my easel and trying to shut down those unthinkable words. Unthinkable because I wasn’t the sort of woman who took drawing classes to court a man’s attention (
was I?
). I chose to take the class because drawing was a refreshing break from Women’s Studies. Something I’d enjoyed. Something that hadn’t been chosen for me by Andrea.

This unexpected thought distracted me until the drawing exercise began. Ryan assumed a comical muscle-man pose, with chin lifted and one bicep flexed. From where I stood I could see the tension in his arm, and the gleam of his eye. His lashes were as thick and dark as his hair, and his limbs were slightly browner against the ghost of his T-shirt.

“You OK there, Sage?” called Sally.

Everyone else had started drawing several minutes ago. I snatched up my charcoal. “Um, yes, I was just … I was … I’m fine.”

“You’re left-handed, then?”

Left-handed?
What … oh. Drawing exercise. Non-dominant hand. I switched the charcoal to my left hand. After a few flustered minutes, my mind changed gear, and the man on the podium changed from Ryan to a shape marked with contours and shadows. Capturing these with my left hand instead of my right felt awkward but strangely freeing, like a window had been opened in a long-shuttered part of my brain.

Twenty minutes later, when the timer went off, the shape on the podium turned back into Ryan. He pulled on his robe and wandered around the circle of easels, looking at the drawings. I covered my clumsy left-handed sketches as he approached, but he didn’t even glance at them.

“
So
, Sage,” he said in a portentous tone, “have you figured out why you’re here yet?”

Because I wanted to see you
. “Actually,” I said, “I have. I think I need to do something that’s not academic sometimes. To reconnect with mainstream society.”

My smile evaporated as the sentence left my mouth. What was I, a yoga teacher? No one at Jess’s party would have spoken like that. I was about to blunder in to amend what I’d said when I saw his face fall.

“
Mainstream?
” His horror was only half-comical. “I’m not
mainstream,
 I’m offbeat! Cutting edge!” He seized the charcoal T-shirt he’d hung on a chair. “Check out my T-shirt. I ask you, is this the T-shirt of a mainstream man?”

The front was printed with a drawing of four dancing figures framed by grape vines. The sinking feeling from the karaoke bar returned. This picture must be like a Madonna song, one of those things normal people just
knew
.

“It’s from
Prince Caspian
,” said Ryan. “The cover of the first edition.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to sound enlightened.

Ryan looked at me, a suspicious frown creasing his brow. “You’ve read
The Chronicles of Narnia
by C.S. Lewis, haven’t you?”

“Not really.” I contemplated my pencils, scared I was about to see that saucer-eyed look on his face. “I was home-schooled.”

“And your parents didn’t read books to you?”

“I wasn’t raised by my parents,” I said, head still bowed. “I was raised by my grandmother.”

Before Ryan could respond, the timer went off, and he hurried back to the rug with a wave. In the next break, he came straight to my easel. This time I didn’t hide my drawings. Or my smile.

“So what books did your grandmother read you?”

My smile faded. “My grandmother’s a strict feminist,” I said. “She wanted to protect me from patriarchal messages.”

It would have been easier to say my grandmother was in jail. No one outside Andrea’s world admitted to feminism any more. Feminists were hairy-legged, man-hating monsters, who were bitter because no one would marry them.

“So she gave you … feminist books?” He sounded intrigued, not contemptuous.

I nodded. “Feminist books, feminist plays. And absolutely nothing with advertising. No magazines, no commercial radio, no TV.”

“Wow,” said Ryan.

Wow?
I searched his face to see if he was mocking me, but he looked awed.

“That means you haven’t been exposed to mainstream culture.” His eyes were almost starry. “Think of the art you could make!”

“
Art?
” I glanced at my easel.

“You won’t need to steer clear of clichés, because you never learned the clichés in the first place. Your perspective is
totally original!
”

Did Ryan actually
envy
me? I’d never been envied before. Then the sneers at Jess’s party crept back into my mind, and the brief glow inside me winked out. “That’s not such a good thing.”

“How do you mean?”

“It’s embarrassing,’ I explained. ‘There are all these things I’m just supposed to
know
, and I don’t know what they are.”

He gave me a quizzical look. “What things don’t you know?”

“Slang. Fashion.
The Chronicles of Narnia
. Madonna songs.
Everything.
”

“Hmm.” His brow crinkled in concentration, like I was a puzzle he was trying to solve. “You know what you need? A mentor. Someone who
just knows
those things, and can teach you what they are.”

Something wary stirred inside me. Was he about to volunteer for the post? Before I dared ask, Sally spoke.

“OK everyone,” she announced, “time for the twenty-minute pose. We’ll be doing this pose again for the next slot, so take your time.”

For half of the next break, Ryan sat on the podium while Sally marked the position of his limbs with masking tape. He spent the rest of the break talking to an artist who wanted to hire him, but once or twice he threw me a quick smile or glance to let me know I hadn’t been forgotten.

When the timer rang for the last time, Ryan dressed in record time, came over and pressed something small into my palm. “I have to run,” he said, “but if you want to continue your education, give me a call.”

He scampered for the exit. I opened my hand and found a chic cream business card with
Ryan Prince
printed on it. Underneath his name it read
Artist, life model and art teacher
, with his cell number and email address.

“So, Sage,” said Sally, a knowing smile on her lips, “I smell success.”

My jaw tightened at her smirking, nudging tone. “How do you mean,
success?
”

“A successful pick-up. Are you going to call him?”

My face flamed. “It’s not that,” I said, closing my fingers over the card. “He’s just … I don’t know much about popular culture, and he’s … offered to fill me in.”

Sally chuckled. “Don’t be shy, he’s a lovely guy. If I was single, I’d have a crack at him myself. Give him a call. This was his last week, so you won’t see him again unless you do.”

She winked and headed off. I slid the card into my pocket, rolled up my drawings and slunk out, pulsating with embarrassment.

Have
a crack
at Ryan? I’d never
had a crack
at anyone in my life. Picking up men was what other women did, women with painted faces and low-cut tops. I told myself this as I walked back to the Humanities building, but I also slipped my hand in my pocket every few steps, to make sure his card was still there.

Back at the office, I opened a new Word document and tried to think sensibly about research. Half an hour later, when I shut down my computer the document was still empty.