The Wisdom of Hair (31 page)

The old Planters Peanuts can was still there, the one that Nana kept spare buttons in. I always loved that little can, the way the buttons sounded in it, and I played with it so much over the years, the little peanut man was nearly rubbed off. I looked at the backside of it and saw where I had claimed it for myself a long time ago by etching my name with a stickpin into the navy blue paint. I took a pin out of the can and underlined the letters.

Nana’s clothes, her shoes, and old flannel robe were gone. I opened her bureau drawers and didn’t see anything but three or four little pink sachet tablets I had given her for Christmas one year that had long since lost their fragrance. My baby stirred inside of me, and I touched my belly.

Mrs. Farquhar put her hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry it’s all picked over.”

I nodded, set the paper bags with the sewing basket in the hallway, and closed Nana’s door, holding on to the doorknob for a brief spell.

Mrs. Farquhar put her arm around me and we walked by our tiny bathroom with the little blue gingham skirt around the sink. The curtains Mama made out of bath towels were gone. There wasn’t a time that I could remember when the bathtub faucet
didn’t leak. With no heat, the stream of water had frozen solid, extending from the spout to the drain like a great icicle. The rug that hid the bare spot on the linoleum floor was gone. I could see where a knothole had given way and wondered how long the floor had been like that.

“Is this your room?” Mrs. Farquhar opened the door at the end of the hall. I stood there frozen like my breath in the air, like the good and bad of living there was all balanced out and one false move might tip the scales.

I remembered Nana nursing me when I was sick and soothing me when life had nothing but bad for me. I remembered my daddy kissing me good night with cheap bourbon thick on his breath and giggling with me over things that only we thought were funny. I shook my head, trying to get hold of the present, taking note of real things that I could see and touch. My bed was stripped, too, like the rest of the room. Birthday cards from Daddy and Nana were still taped to the mirror over my dresser, along with a picture Nana took of me the morning of my sixteenth birthday. I looked so much like Mama it made me think of the bad men she brought into our house.

I struggled to keep my mind on the inventory. The cedar chest was open. My graduation dress was gone. My baby clothes were soiled by animals that didn’t seem to miss an inch of the place. Mrs. Farquhar scooped them up in a plastic bag she found in the kitchen to boil them until they were sanitized.

My school box was on the floor. All my papers were still in it, along with precious little gifts I made Nana for Christmas and Mother’s Day. A tiny pair of white leather baby shoes was there, too. I wasn’t sure if they were mine, but I took them anyway.

Mrs. Farquhar put the top on the school box. “Do you want to take this, too?”

I nodded, and we started packing the car with bits and pieces of my life. It didn’t take long before the trunk was full. I put the little step stool Nana always kept in the kitchen in the backseat. I remembered sitting on that thing when I was little, and I wanted my baby to sit on it, too.

When we were done packing, I took a walk around the yard. Mrs. Farquhar walked beside me in a quiet way, smiling at a bird that sang every time the sun tried to peek through the clouds. I looked down the old well and remembered it had always scared me so. A little girl had fallen down one and died when I was maybe five or six, so every time I got near that old thing, Daddy would remind me about her and tell me to get away from it. But there is something about a well that makes even scared little children peer into it. I stared at the outline of myself in the stagnant water and remembered how daring and frightening doing that used to feel.

Behind the barn, I ran my fingers over the rough, weathered wood of the little shed where I dreamt Daddy Heyward had sobered up to share the secret of the universe. How in the world could I ever be a good mother?

For the past six months I’d clung to the notion that Winston’s looks made me do the things I did. The very idea that I might have the tiniest bit of Mama inside me was terrifying.

“She never loved me,” I said. “What if I’m just like her?”

“Zora, you’re going to be a wonderful mother. I don’t know everything that happened between you and your mama. I do know that she was fourteen when she had you, no more than a child herself. I suspect she loved you the only way she knew how.”

“I still hate her.”

Mrs. Farquhar put her arms around me and rocked me like her own child. “My sweet girl, all the hate you have for your mother, rolling around inside you, kicking up such a fuss, is fighting to stay alive. It can’t exist alongside that precious baby you’re carrying.”

She held me at arm’s length and brushed my tears away and then her own. I knew she wanted me to pardon Mama for all her sins, but the hate I carried with me made grace and mercy for Mama like a toy put up on a shelf to punish a bad child. Not that fawning over Winston Sawyer or even getting pregnant was an unforgivable sin, but somehow knowing better and then traipsing around in my mother’s shoes was.

I’d only been
working at Ronnie’s for five months, but Ronnie and Fontaine were good to me from the start. They helped me build my clientele by giving me all the walk-ins I could handle and even rubbed my swollen feet in between appointments. Fontaine never got excited about anything, but I knew both he and Ronnie were as excited about the baby as I was.

One of my regulars, Charmaine Lyndell, came slinking into the shop on the wrong day. I was tired before I got up that morning and had eaten ham for dinner the night before so that my ankles were so swollen; they looked like they were going to explode. Charmaine loved nothing better than tormenting me, although if Ronnie or Fontaine had known what she was doing on a biweekly basis, they would have thrown her out of the salon on her rhinestone ass.

Right off, Charmaine and I recognized each other as mountain
folk. Sometimes, after I was done fixing her hair, her eyes would narrow and she would look at me in the mirror like I’d better keep my mouth shut about where we came from. I never asked her when she left the mountains, but legend had it that ten years and two kids ago, she was a stripper in Myrtle Beach. She came to Davenport one weekend with a friend for a wet T-shirt contest, won the contest, and married the guy who owned the bar. Because of all that, and the fact she had money, she thought she was better than everybody, especially me.

When you’re fresh out of beauty school, you’ll put up with almost anything to build a clientele. As bad as Charmaine was to me, I was glad to have a steady patron. So I ignored her digs and her bragging and her huge store-bought tits her husband got her after she had her tubes tied to get that big tip. For a thirty-dollar haircut, Charmaine would leave a twenty, for a fifty-dollar cut and color, she’d leave two twenties. With the baby coming, I saved every cent I got my hands on, except the money Charmaine slipped into my maternity pants pocket, like I was some kind of stripper, too. I always made a point to buy something nice for the baby or myself.

Of course, when somebody hates you, truly hates you, there’s a natural tendency to speculate why. I’ll always believe Charmaine hated me because I have good teeth. I don’t know this for a fact, but a lot of mountain folk don’t have good teeth, especially the ones poorer than I was growing up, which, judging from her choppers, included Charmaine. With those big tits, nobody much looked at the one thing that gave her away, but I knew. It was stupid for her to be like that. She always wore a ton of real gold
jewelry from her brother-in-law’s pawnshop and could have traded it in on dental work any time she wanted.

“You’re so pale, Zora,” Charmaine purred. “You need some color.”

I smiled and nodded at her Scotch-Irish white mountain face she’d fried crispy brown that made her look fifty instead of thirty.

“It must be hard,” she went on.

I was determined not to get sucked in by her venom.

“Yeah, I bet it’s hard, you being so big and just seven months. I never gained more than twenty pounds with my young’uns, but Lord, girl, you’ve got eight more weeks to go. If you keep getting bigger, you won’t be able to get that fat belly anywhere near this chair.”

Now, there are two ires you never want to raise. One is the anger that spews from a hormonal, swollen mess who’s been pregnant approximately two hundred and ten days and the other is the ire of a highly protective, bitchy gay man.

Ronnie marched over to my chair and looked in the mirror at Charmaine. “Do we have a problem here?”

“Oh, Ronnie, don’t be such a girl, I’m just teasing Zora a little bit.”

Ronnie tilted his chin up and looked down on Charmaine. He ran his hands through her platinum blond hair like she wasn’t even there and looked at me.

“Between this color and the condition of her skin, you might want to tone down the blond so she doesn’t look so old.”

He sashayed back to his station but kept cutting his eye around at Charmaine while he finished up his lady’s hair.

“Do you?” I asked. “Want to go a little darker, Charmaine?”

“Do you want to be fat forever?” she hissed under her breath. “Because that’s what I’m wishing for you right now. Get my regular color going, I’ve got better things to do than sit around this dump all day.”

I mixed Charmaine’s color and started applying it with the brush. I couldn’t help but think about the client Mrs. Cathcart had used as a cautionary tale to remind us just how tricky color can be. Legend said she was fifteen and completely gray. She’d been teased so much at school, she was already damaged by the time her mother brought her in to have her hair colored, something nice and blond. Her mother said her daughter had horrible allergies and asked if that made a difference. The student didn’t think to warn the girl that some people who are prone to allergies can have a reaction to the bleach and went on about her business.

Not only did the poor girl’s face end up looking like the Elephant Man’s, the student overprocessed the hair, so when she started rinsing the color out, it came out by the handfuls. Needless to say, if there really was a student, her calling to fix hair was revoked that very day.

Charmaine eyed me suspiciously as she dabbed at the foamy white bleach around her hairline. I smiled at her and went to the break room to put my feet up. I didn’t set the timer. I could have fried her hair to match her skin, but the clock inside me that always knows how long to process a perm or let color sit said it was time to rinse out Charmaine’s hair. I hauled myself up out of the chair and went back to the shampoo bowl.

Charmaine was right, my belly was big. I smiled as it rubbed up against the side of the chair and wanted to laugh out loud when
the baby kicked so hard, Charmaine moved her arm away from me. When I towel dried her hair, even wet I could tell the color was perfect. Charmaine Lyndell still had fried skin and bad teeth. She was still a pitiful woman, but when I was done with her, her hair looked fabulous.

Dealing with emotionally charged women was draining, especially being pregnant. But Ronnie and Fontaine were a wonder. The most burned-out, stressed-out, miserable women could sit in their chairs and dump every care in the world on them and it didn’t seem to faze them one bit. At first, I watched them, the way you might watch a magician to figure out where the rabbit went, but after a while I just gave up and asked Ronnie how he did it.

“As close as I am to my ladies, I have to envision a protective pink bubble between us, one that I can reach my arms through to fix their hair and still listen to their problems, but not take them in. If I did that, I’d be crazier than a bagful of squirrels.”

It was hard enough to muster up enough energy to get through the day, much less conjure up a pink bubble to protect myself from the likes of Charmaine Lyndell. I didn’t know the next woman coming in for a haircut. The day I spoke with her on the phone, she said her name was Maxine Waverly and then paused for me to be impressed. She said she was new in town and was referred to Fontaine by her real estate agent. When I told her Fontaine was booked for three weeks and she couldn’t have Ronnie, either, she let out a disgusted little huff and snipped, “Well, is there anyone else who can fix my hair?”

I could tell by the nasally tension and the way she said every word just so, she probably wasn’t going to be easy. I didn’t tell her I was fresh out of beauty school and figured we were even.

As tired as I was, I knew the best thing for me and Maxine Waverly’s hair was to call and cancel her appointment. Before I could make it to the phone to call, she pushed through the front door of the shop almost an hour early. She was a pretty woman in her forties and was dressed like a Stein Mart mannequin in a loud, expensive-looking dress. She didn’t smile or say hey, just headed straight for the hairstyle books and magazines because she wanted a change.

Fontaine was running way behind because his client had just seen the movie
Big
. She’d brought a picture from
People
magazine in and the woman wasn’t leaving until Fontaine made her board-straight mop look like Elizabeth Perkins’s hair. I was wrapping Fontaine’s four o’clock perm while Maxine went through a dozen books before pointing to the edgy Dorothy Hamill haircut Ronnie had sketched out for me and had framed.