The Lavender Hour (11 page)

I had never been tempted to alter my hair color. I knew the damage the processing could do. I'd read somewhere that Jean Harlow bleached her hair with a mixture of peroxide, household bleach, soap flakes, and ammonia until it fell out. In Renaissance Venice, they used to use horse urine to bleach hair. In ancient Rome, they used pigeon dung. No thank you to any of it.

So, posture and hair: a plus.

I continued the scrutiny of my face. Unless you were looking for it or I was fatigued, you couldn't detect the asymmetry around my eyes, how when I was overtired, my left eye drooped a bit. My complexion was good—if you didn't mind freckles—but faint lines fanned out from the corners of my eyes. Already. At thirty-two. All those years of mindless tanning before we knew better. Still, feature by feature, there was nothing exactly wrong. I wasn't plain, but I wasn't beautiful either. When I was at the Art Institute, a French exchange student I'd dated briefly told me I looked
American. When I'd asked him what that meant, he'd said, “Good teeth.” I'd felt like a horse.

I changed into pajamas and climbed into bed, wondering what kind of woman Luke liked. Tall and built, judging by the photo of the brunette in the bikini. I found myself again wondering why he had gotten divorced. I wondered what his favorite food was. Wondered if he had been an imaginative lover. Had been. Past tense. I wondered if he was afraid of dying. I remembered when I'd first begun radiation, one of the other patients I'd gotten to know asked me if I was afraid of death. No, I'd said. It wasn't death I feared but the process of dying. The deterioration of mind and body. That was why, when I was sick, I couldn't stand to watch a plant wither and die. I still couldn't. If I got flowers, I tried to throw them out right before they started wilting.

It was late, but I couldn't drop off. My mind was restless, ruminating on Lily and then Ashley and then Luke. Lately my insomnia had returned, and I wondered if I needed to get back on Xanax. It had seen me through some rough times in the past five years. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of a quicksilver fish fighting its way upstream to spawn. In the dream, even knowing it was forbidden, I lifted the fish in my hands and carried it over the steps of the ladder to the millpond, where I released it and watched it disappear into the depths.

I
N ANOTHER ERA,
hair workers were called spiders because they wove and crocheted and spun human hair into things of beauty. I never found this term demeaning. Sometimes, bent over my table, twisting and weaving human strands, I felt akin to the solitary arachnids whose filament webs were strung in corners of my cottage.

Working with hair brought me to a nearly altered state. It was calming, the way using your hands could be, and settled me. Better than the meditation my doctor had prescribed. When I sat at the braiding table and wove the strands into their intricate pattern, a deep serenity often settled over me. I knew I was part of a history and craft that spanned continents and centuries.

Hair jewelry can be traced back not just to the Victorian age but even further, to the Middle Ages and as early as the Egyptians and in ninth-century Japan. I had read that, in the early 1800s, a town in Sweden had been famous for the hairwork done there. During years when the crops failed and there was a famine, whole families would leave the village and travel to other towns with their craft, thus sustaining all the residents of the town. Another curious fact I'd turned up in my research was that, in the 1853 Crystal Palace Exposition in London, there was a full tea set made entirely of hair. (I could only imagine what Lily would think of that.) I'd heard of an artist in Chicago who chopped hair into fine pieces and mixed it with pigment with which she painted.

With the permanence, I liked the resiliency and surprising strength of hair. One single strand could support a three-ounce
weight without breaking. Because it is nearly invisible and lasts a long time, conservators use it to mend textile art. Beyond these properties, I found hair wonderfully articulate, both uncivilized and raw, of a charged nature, and vital and connected to life. Once I'd examined a hair shaft under a microscope; it looked like the bark of an ancient tropical tree.

T
O BEGIN
a piece, I sorted the hairs into equal lengths and tied the ends with packthread, which I then soaked in a solution of water and baking soda and boiled for about fifteen minutes. When it was dry, I divided the hair into strands of twenty or thirty each, knotted the strands, and fastened a lead weight to each. On the opposite end, I tied a sailor's knot using packthread and gummed with cement comprised of yellow wax and shellac. After these preparations, I was ready to begin.

The bracelet on my table was nearly finished, and I was relieved to know I could soon ship it off to the young leukemia patient. When I was done attaching the gold clasp, I rose, and the calmness that had centered me while I worked evaporated. Two days had passed, and I assumed that, by now, Paige or Luke must have told Nona that I'd left him alone. I was surprised that Nona hadn't reported me to Faye. I was due at the Ryders' in a half hour, and as I threw on a clean shirt and put on some lipstick, blush, and eyeliner, I rehearsed the explanation I had prepared to give to Nona. In spite of my anxiety and dry mouth, I found I was also more excited about the visit than I had any right to be.

W
HEN
I got there, Jim was sitting at the kitchen table with Nona, filling in a records chart.

“Hi, sunshine,” he said.

“Hi.” I glanced over at Nona but could read nothing on her face except worry and exhaustion, a face full of effort. My heart twisted in sympathy. That morning, sitting at the table, if someone had told
me that, within months, Nona and I would become adversaries, I would have found it impossible to conceive.

“How is everything?” I asked, everything meaning Luke.

“The same,” Nona said.

I waited while Jim finished with the paperwork and gathered his things together.

“So,” he said, “did you hear about the duck who went to the drugstore to buy some prophylactics?”

“No,” I said, although it was an old joke, one I knew. “I haven't heard that one.”

“Well, the druggist asked him, 'Do you want to pay cash, or shall I put it on your bill?'”

A tired smile creased Nona's face. She waited for the punch line, which Jim delivered in a cartoon voice.

“I'm not that kind of duck,” he said.

Even knowing the joke, the way Jim told it, I had to laugh. It took Nona a moment to get it, and then she laughed, too.

He stood up. “Ready?” he asked her.

Nona nodded. “Jim's taking me to the Stop & Shop,” she said.

I looked at him, raised a brow in question. This was not part of his job.

“I have to go anyway,” he said.

I suspected this was untrue. “I'd be happy to run you there,” I told Nona.

“You stay here with Luke,” she said. “He mustn't be left alone.”

I looked at her, trying to determine if there was a hidden message there, but Nona was picking her handbag up from the counter. “Anything I can do while you're gone?” I asked.

Nona shook her head. Jim took her arm, opened the door for her. “Oh,” she said, remembering. “Rich—the man you spoke to on the phone the other day—he might be coming by to pick up the trash.” She pointed to a pile of trash bags by the back door. “I didn't set it outside because of the raccoons.”

“Got it,” I said.

J
IM'S
J
EEP
had no more than pulled out of the drive when I heard Luke's bell. My heart gave a queer jump. I combed my fingers through my hair, felt my scar, tucked my shirt in my jeans. He was in the chair by the window and looked thinner than I remembered. I recalled Faye's response on Sunday when I'd asked how long he had to live. Weeks or months? Yes.

“Hi,” I said.

He stared at me, and again I had the queer sensation he could read every thought my mind had conceived. “Where's Nona off to?”

“Shopping,” I said.

“So does it make you feel good?”he said after a minute, his voice gone flat.

“What's that?”

“Coming here. Being a do-gooder.”

“Yes,” I said straight out. “In fact, it does.” I think my acknowledgment surprised him. “What? You'd rather your mother didn't get any help?”

“I don't like taking charity.”

“So you'd feel better if you had to pay me?”

“Feel better?” He gave a mirthless, hacking cough of a laugh. “No. I'd feel better if I wasn't lying here waiting to die.”

“Yeah, well I'd feel better if I had some kind of life myself,” I said, and then immediately regretted the comment.

He opened his eyes and looked straight at me. “What exactly is it that's so bad about your life?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just talk.”

He gave me that piercing, truth-seeking look.

I sighed. “You don't want to know.”

“Why?”

“Trust me. It's boring.”

“I'm listening.”

I looked around, wanting to get off the subject. We had been
told not to sit and talk about ourselves when we visited. “Church visitors” Faye called the people who came to the room of a dying person and filled the air with talk of their grandchildren and their most recent trips. You go there to help, she'd told us early in the training, to offer the comfort of being less alone, and to listen, not to talk about yourselves to someone in the last portion of his life. Scanning the room, I saw a small oil painting on the wall that I hadn't noticed before. A dory pulled up on the shore with similar subtlety of composition to the painting in the living room. “I like that,” I said.

“You want it,” he said. “It's yours.”

“I just said I liked it.”

“Guy I knew in college did it. What? You thought I was a high school dropout?”

“I wasn't thinking anything, really,” I said, although that was exactly what had gone through my mind. “I mean, I don't know any more about you than you know about me.” Not true, and he knew it.

“What did they tell you about me? What was in my chart?”

“That you're forty-five and a fisherman.”

“Was,”he said. “I was a fisherman.”

“Let's see,” I went on. “You're divorced with a daughter. You didn't want hospice coming in.”

“Really? Well, they didn't tell me a damn thing about you.”

I knew this wasn't true. The caseworker had given both Nona and Luke some information about me. Without waiting to be asked, I crossed to the chair by the bed. “I'm thirty-two,” I said. “I was born in Richmond, Virginia. I have one sister who's two years older than I am. When I was fourteen, my daddy died of a massive heart attack. Lily—my mama—is still alive. I graduated from the Art Institute in Chicago and taught high school art until last year, when the school district eliminated my job.” I paused to take a breath.

“You finished?”

“Not quite. I'm not married. No children. I make jewelry. I guess that's about it.”

“Boyfriend?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don't think I'm capable of it,” I said, surprising myself with this answer.

He studied me for a minute, and I felt a flush heat my chest, spread up to my throat. And then he smiled and said, “Do I know you?” in a way that made me smile, too, like we were both discovering a long, shared history we were only now remembering. It was that kind of eerie moment of recognition that could make a person believe in past lives.

“So,” he said, “do you know how to play backgammon?”

“It's been a while,” I said.

He indicated that I was to pull up a chair by the card table. While I set up the board, he ran through the basics, reminding me where to place the stones. For a time, while the two of us sat there and played, I swear I could nearly forget how ill he was. I was a tentative player; he was ruthless and lucky, throwing so many doubles, I accused him of cheating. We played three games, and I lost them all, crying “enough” after the third. He put the stones in their storage slots, then closed the board. The Lab, who had been curled up on the makeshift dog bed, rose and crossed to me. I rubbed his ears and the ridge of his spine, felt the coarse and oily fur of a water breed.

“You like dogs?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“He's my third. All from the same line. This one was the pick of the litter.” He looked over at the Lab. “Isn't that right, boy?” Rocker thumped his tail against the floorboards.

“He's beautiful,” I said.

Luke stared at the dog. “There was this famous actor out in L.A. who owned a horse,” he said.

I waited, wondering where he was going with this.

“So this actor, he got cancer.”

I focused on the dog, unable to meet Luke's eyes.

“He'd been born somewhere out in the Dakotas, and that's where he wanted to be buried.” He stopped and stared out the window at something I couldn't see. He fell silent, and I wondered if he was thinking about his own death and where he would be buried.

“Private funeral,” he said after a moment. “Then he was cremated. Those were his instructions.”

I waited, petted the Lab.

“Families don't always do that, you know. They don't always do what a person wants.” It was like he was talking to himself. I didn't interrupt.

“Well, about a week later, a few of his childhood friends and what family he had left all met in his hometown in the Dakotas. About eight of them in all. They rode on horseback out to this particular site where he wanted his ashes buried. One of them led the actor's horse along with them. When they got there, they braided the horse's mane with flowers they had picked, and bunches of sage. They said whatever it was that was in their minds to say and buried the actor's ashes.”

I could actually picture it. The circle of people and horses beneath the endless sky. The vial of ashes. The solitary horse, his mane bedecked with Dakota sage. Luke's next words took me by surprise.

“They shot the horse and buried him there, too.”

I stared at him, too shocked for words.

“That's what the actor wanted,” he said, as if I had argued.

“God.” My fingers tightened on Rocker's fur. “That's terrible.”