The Wisdom of Hair (20 page)

She put the car in gear. “Zora, you know this isn’t going anywhere. Think about what I said about Jimmy’s friend, okay?”

“We—” I wanted to say I loved him and we’d made love. I wanted to tell her I’d bought something to charm Winston with and hoped I’d be trying on a wedding dress one day. “We had fun, didn’t we?”

She nodded and I closed the door as quietly as possible. Sara Jane waved and pulled out of the driveway. The day had been so full that other than buying the teddy, I truly hadn’t thought much about Winston, or Jimmy’s friend, or any man for that matter.

As I climbed the stairs, I wondered if it had something to do with what Mrs. Farquhar called “Retail Amnesia,” meaning that just looking at or actually buying something new makes you forget your troubles. I thought about Emma, wondering what she could have possibly been trying to forget when she lived with Winston. Before, I’d always thought she was just a lot like Mrs. Farquhar and just loved to shop.

I walked into my little place and noticed the magazine I’d left on the couch was gone. Two glasses and a cereal bowl were in the sink. I pushed my bedroom door open, the bed was unmade.

“I meant to straighten up this morning,” he said, from the old chair in the corner of my bedroom.

I looked at him and didn’t say anything.

He walked over to the bed and pulled the spread up like he was trying to make the bed. “I had a bad night and just wanted to stay here. I hope that’s okay?”

I nodded, not really knowing what that meant. Then he looked at me and somehow I knew that it had something to do with Emma. Whether it was her birthday or their anniversary or the day she died, it had crushed him so that he had taken refuge here.

I walked around the bed to where he stood and kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll fix us some dinner.”

He followed me into the kitchen. There on the counter was a small accordion-like wine rack filled with nine bottles of wine and two good crystal glasses.

“Do you want some wine?” he asked.

He never said he bought those things for me, but I knew he did. He opened a bottle of Beaujolais and spent the next few minutes trying to teach me how to pronounce the word properly. We drank that fine French wine with bacon and eggs, and toast with peach preserves Mrs. Farquhar had given me that summer.

“I missed you,” he said, while I was cleaning up the dishes.

My heart stopped. “I missed you, too,” I whispered.

He turned the little radio on until he found some music so we could hold each other close and dance. It seemed like I had never left at all, and this was the way things should be. While the man on the radio was announcing the next song or selling something to the other listeners, we kissed and nuzzled each other, waiting for the music to begin again.

We danced for a long time without stopping, not even for a drink. After a while, we wandered into the bedroom, and I went into the bathroom to change into the short little sexy thing I’d bought in Atlanta. When I came out, he smiled at me, and I remember thinking this must be what it’s like to love and be loved.

The next morning, the phone rang and woke us up. I reached across Winston and answered it.

“Zora?” Mrs. Farquhar said. “We sure missed you at church this morning. Aren’t you feeling well, darling?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I guess I just overslept.”

“I’m so worn out from our trip, I didn’t cook. Jerry and Jimmy went out to pick up some barbecue. We’ll hold dinner for you, if you like.”

“Oh, no ma’am, y’all go ahead. I’ll be fine. I’m just going to hang around here for a while. Maybe clean up a little bit.”

“Well, you rest up, but if you change your mind, do come on by.”

He never asked who was on the phone, just spooned up close to me and kissed the back of my neck. He pulled the sheet back and watched his fingers travel over my body. He loved to do that, and sometimes it seemed like he did it for hours.

I lay there thinking about when I was a child and the times I trespassed in the pasture of some rich guy’s mountain home, losing myself amongst his horses. One of the mares, Jezebel, so her fancy halter said, quivered when any male got near her, even the geldings. It was funny to watch her eyes widen as she called to them. The other mares made a game of running hard from their lovers, but she ached for them like I ached for Winston.

I wish he hadn’t known this about me the way the other horses knew it about Jezebel. I wish he had to talk to me, had to seduce me with words, because I think that maybe things might have been different.

I didn’t realize that he’d dozed off and I startled him when I
asked if he wanted some breakfast. He stretched and yawned. “I’ll cook for you,” he said, which felt strange because I’ve never been good at letting somebody else do for me. He got in my kitchen and messed up every single dish and pan I had as he panfried two little beef filets with some garlic, then dumped a whole carton of sliced mushrooms over them and put the lid on. He cut the ends off of green beans and steamed them in a pot that he jammed my colander into, then wrapped two potatoes in tinfoil before throwing them in the oven. The thermostat was set way too high, but I didn’t say anything, even when the bottoms of the potatoes were crusty and hard.

“Beaujolais or Pinot Noir?” he asked as he set the table.

Even though he’d schooled me on pronouncing the names of fancy wines, I felt better pointing at the bottle. He opened the wine, poured a tad in the glass, and swirled it around. After taking a tiny sip, he nodded in approval.

“Good choice,” he said.

He had obviously gone to the grocery store while I was gone because he made me a salad with some kind of dressing that he made from scratch.

“Thank you,” I said as he put the bowl in front of me. If he could cook like this, what in the world did he need me for?

The entire meal was great, and if we’d had a little sliver of that grasshopper cheesecake like I had in Atlanta, it would’ve been perfect. I was so charmed by this man and the fact that he had done something sweet for me, I never noticed the absence of conversation. We enjoyed our food in silence like we did our time in bed, and that seemed so natural at the time.

The wine was going straight to my head. I sat across from him
at my little table and slid my foot up his thigh until it rested between his legs. He put his napkin in his plate and began to massage my foot, then gradually slid his hand up my thigh.

He pushed back from the table and came to where I was sitting, and pushed the spaghetti straps off of my shoulders. I closed my eyes and let him enjoy making me crazy for him. I should’ve learned something from those mares and the way they brought their lovers to their knees with the chase. But my mind was awash with lust and red wine and something else that I had to say before I burst.

“I love you,” I whispered.

He looked at me like I had said something in a language he didn’t understand and hugged me close. It wasn’t the way lovers hold each other; it was more how a brother or a sister might hold you. He said nothing.

I knew I had to get Winston into bed, to please him more than ever because that was the only way I could keep him. So that’s where we stayed the rest of the day, drinking, sleeping, and touching in silence.

I don’t know
why I crept about the apartment so quietly, because Winston was still drunk from the night before. I dressed and ate a little biscuit left over from Thursday’s dinner, looking in on him every so often and then one last time before I left. His face was so peaceful, vulnerable, almost innocent.

The morning was crisp and beautiful, like apple season in the mountains. Leaves rustled about as I tiptoed down the steps of the garage apartment and stepped into a world of live oaks awash with color. Not the brilliant reds and oranges of the hardwoods back home, but deep greens and rich browns. Still pretty.

I walked like a little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes, grown-up and giddy at the same time. I loved playing house with Winston. It agreed with me, having my man, loving him to the point that I was grateful to be alive just so I could feel this way. I spoke to everyone I passed by. I could tell by the way an old woman
smiled and nodded back at me that she knew what I was feeling, that she had felt that way herself at one time.

If I hadn’t been tethered to the ground by graduating and getting a job, I would have floated right up to that sweet November sky and made a place there for me and Winston forever. Instead, I glided through the door of the beauty school, hung my jacket up on the rack, and turned around to find Sissy Carson right in my face with an annoying know-it-all smirk.

“Who is he?” she asked.

“What?”

“I’ve seen that look too many times on my own face. Come on and tell now. Who is he?”

I smiled and pushed past her to sign in at the appointment desk. It galled her so that she followed me around while I got a permanent out of the storage closet for my first appointment and restocked my station with perm rods and clean hairbrushes.

“You know they’re all shit. Every single one of them.”

I gave her a look and waved to Ellie Jeffords, who was checking in for her appointment with me. Ellie used to be the poster child for happiness, but in the past few weeks she seemed to be renting it rather than owning it. She came in four times last month and always wanted to do something different to her hair, not in the way that she just wanted a change of style; it was more like she was trying to change something else, something that even an ordained cosmetologist couldn’t fix.

She was married to Ned Jeffords, a good-looking young attorney who worked for his daddy’s law office in town. She came into the school with the longest, silkiest chestnut hair that you ever did see, clear down to her waist, and said she wanted it cut, short like
a pixie. Now I never cut anybody’s hair from real long to short, so I talked her into cutting it right about to her shoulder blades. Two days later, she was back, wanting to go even shorter and talking about a perm. I told her I didn’t think a perm was such a good idea because her hair was great just the way it was, but that I would cut it to her shoulders if she wanted.

When I was done, I handed her the mirror and watched her look at herself. The haircut framed her gorgeous face. She was beyond beautiful, but I don’t think she saw that. She said I did a good job and that it didn’t have anything to do with me before she made an appointment for the very next week for another haircut and a perm.

“If you don’t want to do the perm, I’ll go somewhere else, Zora.” She didn’t say it mean like, just sort of matter-of-factly.

Ellie’s wanting to mess with her hair like that didn’t make any sense to me. But I promised I’d do the perm and told her I thought she looked perfect the way she was. She just smiled at me. It was then that I saw between the lines and knew for sure that this woman was miserable.

“I know you don’t want to do this, Zora,” she said as she sat down in my chair that morning.

“What does your husband say?”

“Ned? He’s so busy studying for the bar exam and chasing after his daddy’s coattails, he doesn’t say much. But his mama…”

I noticed her hands begin to shake, and she had the same look on her face that someone does when they really need a drink.

“Do you spend a lot of time with Mrs. Jeffords?”

She nodded as I began to section off her hair to wrap it for the perm.

“She’s horrified I come here. Says a woman in my position in the community should never go to a beauty school, but my mama always came here. She brought all seven of us. Sometimes we got good haircuts and sometimes Mrs. Cathcart gave us an extra cookie because the girl messed up our hair. If this place was good enough for Mama…” Her voice trailed off.

I got her hair rolled up and put the solution on. I sat down on a little stool in my station and set the timer. She hadn’t said much for a few minutes. I thought maybe she didn’t want to talk, which was fine by me and one of the ten important telltales Mrs. Cathcart taught us about meeting our patrons’ needs. But she looked too fragile to be left alone, even for twenty minutes.

“We met in high school,” she began. “I don’t know why Ned was attracted to me. It didn’t make any sense. Mama said I was his Indian chief.”

“His what?”

“You know, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief.” I nodded. “Ned was voted Most Everything that was good—popular, humorous, most likely to succeed. Somewhere in all that he chose me.”

“Ellie, you’re beautiful, inside and out. Why wouldn’t he choose you?”

“I don’t know. For a long time I thought he did it to make his folks mad, but that wasn’t it. Ned says he fell in love with me the first time he saw me at high school. I had gone to the same school with him since we were in the sixth grade, but I guess he didn’t notice me then. He doesn’t see me much now, either, but when he does, he’s so…sweet.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah, he keeps telling me that once he feels comfortable, like he’s got a handle on things and as soon as he passes the bar, he’ll spend more time with me, but how can that be? His daddy says that once he passes the bar, I’ll never see him. He said that to me like he was proud of it. I think they hope that I’ll just get fed up and leave Ned, but that would break his heart, and I could never do that.”