Let Down Your Hair (8 page)

The first coherent thought that returned to me was a three-year-old conversation with Jess.

“So how come you’re called Sage?” she’d asked, eyes wide and wondering. “Is it a feminist thing?”

At the time I’d reassured her that “Sage” had nothing to do with feminism. Now I knew it was Andrea who’d chosen my name,
amended
my name, I wondered if I’d been wrong. Andrea despised twee, childish girls’ names. Maybe she thought
Sage
was stronger and more dignified than
Sadie Melissa
. Andrea also loathed it when women adopted their husband’s surname. To her this symbolised submission, slavery, the surrender of a woman’s identity to her new lord and master. Not that Matti had been Emmeline’s husband. Why had my mother given me his surname?

The answer welled up as I reread the certificate. Because that was what Emmeline had wanted—to be my father’s wife, with his legitimate child, instead of a single teenage mother, pining for her married lover. A bubble of grief for her burst inside me.

I retrieved the documents from the carpet and leafed through them. Most concerned my education: a letter from the government granting Andrea permission to home-school me, materials on how to do this. There were no personal letters. Biting back disappointment, I replaced the file and sat,
Sadie Melissa
beating in my thoughts like a moth against a light bulb.

Andrea’s lecture ended at six. At five to six, I locked the filing cabinet and left for Seminar Room 4. Halfway to the stairs, a new possibility occurred to me. I rushed back to the filing cabinet and flipped through the files until I reached the letter V. And there, overshadowed by the three drawers above it, was a file labeled
VIRTANEN, Sadie
.

I yanked out the file with shaking hands. Its contents had been sorted into manila folders labeled by year. All except for a single envelope, postmarked about a month ago. An unopened letter, addressed in a round, feminine hand to Sadie Virtanen, care of Andrea’s address on campus.

The envelope weighed in my palm like a planet. I desperately wanted to open it, but Andrea’s lecture finished in two minutes, and I still hadn’t put back her keys.

I jammed the file back in the cabinet, locked it and bolted for Seminar Room 4, letter in one hand, Andrea’s keys in the other. Students were pouring out, and Andrea was fielding a short queue of people who’d come down to the front to ask questions. I ducked inside, dropped the keys on Andrea’s notes and joined the crowds squeezing into the lift. When I reached the ground floor, I hugged the letter to my chest and ran all the way to the bench on the Library lawns where I’d met Ryan. Heart hammering, I slit open the envelope and took out one handwritten page and a birthday card with a pink gift card stuck inside. I opened the letter.

I reread the letter until the words fused together on the page. Each time I read it, “Sadie” stuck in my eyes like a piece of grit, as though I’d finally found my mother and she’d been stolen by someone else.

I opened my wallet and took out the photo. Emmeline stared out at me, curled like a cat in the armchair that still sat in our living room. A thin wrist hugged her knees to her chest, and long, rope-colored hair draped around her like a shawl. She had Andrea’s eyes, looking much larger in her young, heart-shaped face, but her lips must have come from her father. They were full, with a deep Cupid’s bow, as if a fingertip had dented her top lip. Like mine. When I first saw this photo, I sat in front of the mirror for hours, fitting my fingertip into the lip that linked me to my mother. My mother the fashion model.

She probably wasn’t a model any more, of course. By now Emmeline would be in her late thirties, and fashion models peaked at my age or younger. In my imagination I tried to age her, thickening her waist and jaw, carving crow’s feet around her eyes, sprinkling gray through her hair, but the embellishments slid off her smooth young face like butter.

The return address appeared to be an apartment in a big block, somewhere among the city skyscrapers. Forty minutes away on foot, fifteen by bus, ten by train. I might have passed her in the street, or sat beside her on a bus. But I wouldn’t have recognized her, because Andrea had locked away her letters and only given me a photo of how she looked at seventeen.

Something flared in my chest. I slung my bag over my shoulder and started walking, my feet pounding the ground, my mother’s letter clenched in my hand like a dagger.

The house I shared with Andrea was dark and empty. All I could hear as I headed for the kitchen was the sinister drone of the fridge. I laid my mother’s letter on the table and sat in front of it, as if I was at a formal dinner where I couldn’t eat until the other guest arrived. Ten minutes later, the front door opened, and Andrea stalked past me, a batch of envelopes in one hand.

“Forgot the mail, I see.” Her sarcastic tone implied that this was only to be expected.

A week ago I would have apologized to her. But not today. “So did you, it seems.”

Andrea looked up from her bills, her finger ripped halfway through an envelope from the gas company. She opened her mouth to respond and her eye fell on the letter on the table. Her mouth stayed open.

“According to the postmark,” I said, in a cold, gritty voice, “this letter arrived in your pigeonhole a month ago, but it seems you forgot to pass it on. And absent-mindedly locked it in your filing cabinet.”

The skin around Andrea’s eyes tightened. I tensed for attack, but she said nothing. Her mouth closed, and her gaze returned to the gas bill without meeting mine. She unfolded the bill, checked it, and attached it to the fridge with a
Reclaim The Night
magnet.

I grabbed my mother’s letter and thrust it under her face. “Aren’t you going to
say
anything?”

Andrea opened a second bill, still not meeting my eye. “What do you want me to say?”

“My mother has been
trying to contact me
.” I spat the words like missiles. “She sent me a letter and a birthday present, and you never gave them to me.”

“No. I didn’t.”

Andrea attached the second bill to the fridge. It was a phone bill. Our phone number was silent, and she changed it regularly. She said she did this to protect us from the bullying men she fought each week at work. Had she actually done this to stop my mother ringing me?

I slapped the letter back on the kitchen table. “This isn’t the only letter she’s sent me, is it?”

Andrea shrugged. “She’s sent a few.”

“And you’ve never passed them on to me.”

“No.”

She inserted her finger into the third bill, and I snatched it from her hands. “
Why not?
”

She looked at my blazing cheeks and trembling lips, and I recognized her expression. It was the one she wore in court, grim-jawed and merciless, the face that withered men in the dock.

“Because unlike
you
,” she said in blistering tones, “I know Emmeline. Do you know what she did to you? When you were only six months old?”

“She abandoned me.” My voice began to teeter.

“Before that. She put you in a
beauty pageant
.” Andrea snatched back the bill and slapped it on the fridge. “Baby girls too young to crawl, in makeup and tiny tiaras! I’ve never seen anything so grotesque. Then there was the business with your father.”

Unable to look at Andrea, I turned my gaze to the letter, imagining my mother’s hand brushing across this envelope as she addressed it in round, careful writing. I didn’t know Emmeline, but I’d grown up in what used to be her room, walking on carpet dented by her childhood furniture, lying in bed looking at the patches left by pictures she’d blu-tacked to the walls. It was
her
absence that haunted me, not the absence of the Finnish man who got her pregnant.

“She wanted to take you to see him. Hours on a plane to Helsinki with a baby. No plans, no place to stay at the other end. She figured once she arrived, Matti would sweep in and take her to happily ever after. Leaving behind his
two children and wife of ten years
.”

My stomach lurched. My mother was only sixteen when that happened. Sixteen, in love with the father of her baby, and too young to understand that love might not be enough.

“Then there was her obsession with her appearance,” Andrea went on. “Leaving you to cry while she did sit-ups. Refusing to breastfeed because it might ruin how she looked in a bikini.”

My mother was a fashion model
.
Her looks were her career
. I wanted to shout it, loud enough to drown out what she was telling me, but I couldn’t get my lips to move.

“And no,” she said, “I didn’t want you in contact with her. Why?
Because I didn
’
t want you growing up exposed to those values
.”

Years of submission dragged on me. But this time, the counterweight of years of betrayal was enough to strengthen my spine.

“I’ve grown up now, Andrea,” I said, wobbly but defiant. “You should have let me choose for myself.”

She gave a contemptuous snort. “You would have
chosen
to be exposed to those values?”

“Yes. I would.”

Andrea’s face hardened. “Oh, you would, would you? Why’s that?”

“Because she’s my mother.” My voice teetered again, and I had to look away.

Andrea made a sound between a scoff and a laugh. She turned her back, plonked a glass on the counter and filled it to the brim with pinot noir. “Your mother’s not the person who gave birth to you,” she said, in a rusty voice I hadn’t heard before. “She’s the person who looks after you, and reads you stories and makes sure you’re safe. Emmeline’s not your mother, Sage. I am. I’m the only mother you’ve ever known.”

She corked the bottle, picked up her glass and headed toward her room.

The door closed behind her, and I sat without moving with the letter in my hands, listening to the drone of the fridge. My grip had left new creases in the envelope. As I smoothed it out, the thought I’d been avoiding pinched like a buried splinter. Emmeline had grown up in this house, and she didn’t live that far away. If she’d really wanted to see me, she could have demanded to be let in, or tapped on my window in the night even. But she hadn’t. She’d posted off letters and presents, as if we were on opposite sides of the world. And Andrea had destroyed or hidden all of them, to make sure she didn’t corrupt me.

I picked up the letter and retreated to my room. The last of the sunset had drained away, but the curtains were ajar, letting in an apricot glow from the street lamp outside. Hugging my mother’s letter like a teddy bear, I climbed into bed and lay staring at the rectangles her posters had left on the wall.

Ryan’s arms engulfed me. “Why didn’t you
call
?
”

He sounded both horrified and hurt, hurt that my natural reaction to crisis hadn’t been to ring him for comfort and support. I flattened my face into his shoulder. Underneath the warmth of his arms, I felt cold and bruised, as if I’d been in a car crash.

Ringing Ryan hadn’t occurred to me. He wasn’t part of the disintegrating world I shared with Andrea. He belonged to a different, magical place where I danced and lay on a futon with my legs tangled round his naked body.

“There you were,’ he went on, ‘having a major life crisis, and where was I? In the kitchen drinking Shell’s vile homebrew! I would have
welcomed
a crisis call! You weren’t scared of waking me, were you?”

“Not exactly, but—”

“Call my cell! Call at four if you have to!”

I smiled into his shoulder. “I’m sorry. Next time I have a major life crisis, I’ll call you straightaway.”

“I should think so!”

He laid his cheek against my hair and held me without speaking until my cold, bruised heart began to thaw. My eyes flickered open and fell on his quirky retro clock. “When are your lectures on today?”

“Twelve and three.”

It was a quarter to twelve. He was missing his lecture to comfort me. I felt as though I’d swallowed something too big for my throat. Wanting in some clumsy way to thank him, I pulled my mother’s letter from my bag and held it out.

He hesitated. “Are you sure it’s OK for me to read this?”

I nodded. He took the letter and his eyes widened. “
Sadie Virtanen?
”

“Andrea changed my name when she became my legal guardian.”

“To Sage Rampion.”

“Yes.”

Ryan turned the envelope over. “This is an address in town. We could get on a train and be there in twenty minutes.”

I smiled bitterly. “We could, but she wouldn’t be there. I looked it up. It’s a hotel.”

His face fell. “She wrote to you when she was on holiday here?”

“Looks like it. Nice of her to drop by.”

“Oh, Sage.” He gathered me close again, and hot tears striped my face.

“You know the worst thing?” I said into his chest. “There were more letters in there. At least I think they were letters. Lots of them, sorted into manila folders. She can’t have written all of them on holiday. And I just left them there. I stole Andrea’s keys, and I was running out of time to put them back and I panicked.” I lifted my head to look at him. “Why didn’t I grab the lot?”

“We’ll get them out, Sage,” said Ryan, taking my hands. “I’ll break into her filing cabinet and get them for you. Tell me when and I’ll do it.”

I sank my face back onto his shoulder and wept.
I would have answered your letters, Mom. I would have. I always wanted you in my life, I never wanted
to punish you. And it’s not totally your fault, it’s Andrea’s. It’s Andrea’s.

When I raised my head, Ryan was reading the letter. “Andrea’s told her you’re doing a PhD.” He looked up, and his eyes were like bullets. “That means they’re in touch. Probably by email. We should hack Andrea’s computer, too. Search her hard drive. Check her browsing history. Crack the passwords for her email accounts.”

I shivered at the vicious note in his voice. People didn’t talk about Andrea like this. Not her colleagues, not her students. Even the men she brought to justice through her work—men who would have stuck a knife in her and jeered while she bled—cursed her name with a measure of respect. My flesh shriveled at the thought of what she’d do if someone hacked her computer. “Isn’t that … unethical?”

“Compared with twenty years of lying to you and hiding your mother’s letters? Frankly, I’d call it divine justice.” He shoved the letter back in its envelope and noticed the gift card. “What about this?”

I took the card. One side was lollipop pink, with
Bradenfield Gift Card $300
on it in curly silver letters; the other had a signature panel and a magnetic strip.
I got something close to every girl’s heart
, my mother had written. Meaning shopping. Not going out to buy something I needed, but shopping as a pastime. Hours of browsing the unnecessary stuff sold to women to decorate their bodies. Andrea thought that sort of thing was disgusting and exploitative. But apparently she was fine with lying, hiding letters and making a child think her mother didn’t love her.

Gripping the card, I took Ryan’s hand and stood up. “You hate your three o’clock lecture, don’t you?”

“God, yes. ATC. Advanced Teaching Curriculum, also known as A Total Crock. Why?”

“Because I thought you might like to skip it and come shopping with me.”

I ducked into a corridor labeled “Center Management”, gasping as if I’d been swimming underwater. Ryan joined me, looking unfazed.

“Are shopping malls always like this?” I had to repeat the question twice before he could hear me over the noise.

His eyebrows drew together. “Like what?”

“This!” I waved a weak hand at the hordes of people, stomping among garish shops, dangling glossy bags, shouting into cell phones, wielding their prams like bulldozers through an endless, mixed blare of music. Andrea called shopping malls temples to greed. To me, this was more like a crowd scene from a play set in Hell.

“Busy, you mean? Depends on the time of year. This is quiet. Just before Christmas everything stays open until ten and there are five times as many people.”

My imagination tried to cram five times as many people into the escalators and aisles, and it fractured. I sank onto a bench, clutching the store directory like a shield.

Ryan took the directory from my hands. “So how do you want to spend your gift card?”

He unfolded the directory and a massive list of shops swam before me. I forced my eyes to focus, and the words “Eyewear and Optical Accessories” floated to the surface. Two escalators later, I was blinking at a mirror while Ryan perused the racks of frames.

Ryan plucked a pink frame from the wall. “Try these!” The lenses were shaped like cat’s eyes, with diamantes and odd pointy bits near the browline. “Funky and cutting edge? Or Bride of Elton?”

I put them on. “Bride of who?”

“Elton John. Ageing gay singer with a taste for mad specs. I’ll borrow a CD from my mom for you.”

I peered at the price tag and nearly fell off my stool. “
Four hundred and eighty dollars?
Just for the frames?”

Ryan shrugged. “Funky doesn’t come cheap. When did you last buy new glasses?”

“I’ve never bought new glasses.”

“Where are those from, then?”

I handed him the Bride of Elton frames, a worm of embarrassment coiling in my stomach. “They’re Andrea’s old frames. She had my prescription put in them.”

Ryan’s mouth hardened. “So,” he said, folding up the frames, “Andrea’s devoted her professional life to empowering women.” He replaced them in the rack with a
click
. “Makes it kind of ironic,” he went on, “that’s she’s devoted her personal life to oppressing one.”

For a second, I couldn’t process what I’d heard. Ignoring the contribution of women to history was oppression. Penalizing women for childbearing was oppression. Sexualizing six-year-old girls was oppression. “How is Andrea supposed to have oppressed me? By making me wear her old glasses?”

The idea was laughable. Ludicrous. Disrespectful to genuine victims of oppression. I started to say so, but Ryan’s grim, troubled face made me stop.

“My mother was a fashion model,” I said, turning to the mirror and reaching for the dent in my lip. “She got pregnant at sixteen to a married man. Andrea didn’t want me to turn out like her.  She shouldn’t have kept the letters from me, but I understand why she did. She wanted to protect me.”

I glanced up at Ryan’s face above mine in the mirror. He didn’t look appeased.

“Why are you defending her, Sage?”

“I don’t know.” I felt uneasy, like I was covering for a bully. A criminal. An
oppressor
. “I’m sorry,” I said at last, not sure what I was sorry for.

Ryan shook his head. “It’s Andrea that should be sorry, not you.” He selected another pair of frames. “Try these.”

I looked down at the frames. They were narrower and squarer than the previous pair, in mingled shades of iridescent blue. The label read
I-Wair Paua Shell, $180
.

I put them on and looked in the mirror. Not at myself, but at Ryan again, whose face showed plainly that he liked what he saw.

“What do you think?” asked Ryan.

“I’ll take them.”

I paid for the frames, and the sales assistant gave me their email address so that I could send through my optical prescription. I pocketed the business card, pondering the question I hadn’t answered. Why
had
I defended the woman who’d cut me off from my mother?

The answer came to me piece by piece as we set off through the crowd. Because Andrea was the only mother I’d ever known. Because I wanted to believe she’d been protecting me, not oppressing me. Because even if Andrea’s world was oppressive, it was the only world I knew.