The Wisdom of Hair (5 page)

She cocked her pretty head to the side and put her hands on her hips.

“Who in the hell is Winston?”

Well, it was almost like he drove up in the yard on cue, and for the first time that day, other than when Mrs. Cathcart was talking, Sara Jane Farquhar was speechless.

“His wife died in a car wreck. It’s really sad.” Both of us stared out the window and watched him disappear into the house.

“Oh, my God, it sounds just like
Passion Heals the Lonely Heart
.”

“What?”

“
Passion Heals the Lonely Heart
, by Gussie Foyette. You don’t read her books?”

“No.”

She looked at me like I had just asked her to suck eggs.

“I read a lot when I was in school, not romance. My English teacher loved Shakespeare. Oh, and Hemingway. She loved him, too.”

“Does Hemingway write romance?”

“Some, but not the kind—”

“Well, I didn’t think so. I’ve read just about every romance written in the last five years, not to mention everything Gussie Foyette’s ever written. I can’t believe you’ve wasted your time reading those guys when you could have been reading Gussie Foyette.

“Anyway, what I was saying is that this situation has
Passion
written all over it. You got yourself the gorgeous grieving hunk of man, Trevor Waynewright. That would be the owner. Then there’s the beautiful young woman fate sent his way, Angelina Bouvier.
That would be you.” I smiled and could feel myself blushing. “It’s all right here, plain as day. You got your estate in the English countryside there, your old Victorian mansion here in Davenport. If you take out the indentured servants, the horse-drawn carriages, and the bastard son by Trevor’s chambermaid, it’s the exact same story.”

The white princess
telephone by the bedside table never rang unless Sara Jane called to say she was coming over. But it was there, right beside the alarm clock, reminding me every morning that I should call Mama. I’d tried to ignore it for almost a whole week. Twice I picked it up and dialed her number, then put it back on the cradle before it rang. I was sick to death of being tormented by that old telephone first thing every morning, so I finally picked up the receiver and called home.

The line crackled with the tension, or maybe it was just because the princess phone was old. The boulder that was in my stomach the day I left the mountain was replaced by butterflies having a knock-down-drag-out. I trembled hard, holding the telephone with both hands. It rang maybe a dozen times. Somebody picked up but didn’t say anything.

“Mama?”

I could hear Judy Garland in the background singing “Me and My Shadow.” The song was from her
Alone
album and was meant to be more playful than sad, but the way Mama had it cranked up made it sound staticky and morbid. She’d probably put it on the record player the morning I left and had kept it on, just waiting for me to call.

“Mama, I can hear you breathing.” Still no answer. “Okay then, I just wanted to call and tell you I’m okay and—”

She slammed the receiver down like she was using it to kill bugs, lots of them, and then the connection was lost. Since she wasn’t standing in front of me with those great big Judy Garland eyes, I was surprised at how much I didn’t hurt, how easy it was to just tell myself Mama was bat-shit crazy and wasn’t worth the worry.

I propped the door to my place wide open. It was six thirty and already hot. The window beside my bed stayed open all the time because the window unit in the living room only pretended to be an air conditioner. Every time I turned that thing on, it made a god-awful noise, but I never complained to Winston about it. It would have been the perfect opportunity to see him up close, hear his voice again. Maybe present myself as a living sacrifice. But that wasn’t what I had in mind for our first real conversation.

I heard the screen door to his kitchen open. It sounded like an old cat whose tail had been stepped on and would have kept right good time with the window unit when it was running. I sprinted back to my bed and peered through lace curtains that moved about in the breeze just enough for me to see him sitting there in an old swing, drinking coffee. His arm was draped over the back of the swing; I smiled as I imagined myself there beside him, tucked
up under his arm with my head pressed against his chest. I could see his face, not real good, but good enough to know he was just hungover and drinking coffee.

After a few minutes, he put the cup on the ground. A fat bumblebee flew by him several times, but I don’t think he noticed. He just stared at the cup for the longest time and then put his face in his hands. A while later he looked at his watch and trudged back into the house like an old man. I saw him go upstairs. The shades were up in his bedroom, which was unusual. He took some clothes out of a drawer and went into the bathroom.

I lay back down, dizzy from the thought of Winston naked in the shower with water rippling over his lean body. I closed my eyes, exhausted from wanting him. How many times had I reminded Mama how dangerous it was to fawn over a man, even more dangerous if he were to actually take notice.

I heard the screen door open again. I saw Winston turn and lock the kitchen door. He shifted some books around in his arms, opened the car door, and slid into the seat of his little sports car. With one great puff, the morning breeze suspended the curtains in the air so that if he had been looking at my room he would have seen me. I ducked down in the bed like I hadn’t been spying on him and lay there with the covers pulled up to my chin and my heart racing the way it did every morning with his engine.

I’d spent so much time spying on Winston, I only had ten minutes to get ready for school. I knew I’d get the eye from Mrs. Cathcart. Everybody did when they came to school without fixing their hair or doing their makeup just right. The crying girl always got the eye, which made her cry even harder. Sara Jane and I were the only ones who didn’t make fun of her, but we did roll our eyes
at each other sometimes when we heard that pitiful little wail before she cut loose.

I tried to slip into my workstation unnoticed, but that was impossible. I was grateful Mrs. Cathcart didn’t call me out. Then she started up again. “Remember, class, tardiness is one of the seven deadly sins of cosmetology. Your clients will not tolerate it for long, and neither will I.”

Dolly, Mrs. Cathcart’s German shepherd, came wandering back to our classroom for a dog biscuit. Mrs. Cathcart kept them in a glass Barbasol container, the kind you pour that blue stuff in to sterilize combs, but Mrs. Cathcart was too busy lecturing me and the rest of the class on the other six deadly sins to tend to Dolly. Poor Dolly went and laid her head in the crying girl’s lap. The crying girl hadn’t cried all morning, but the minute Dolly looked up at her with those sad old eyes, the dam broke.

The girl cried and Dolly cried; only Dolly quit when Mrs. Cathcart gave her a biscuit. Mrs. Cathcart must have felt sorry for that girl because she was always trying to help her, but the crying girl needed more help than Mrs. Cathcart could give.

*

We’d been in
school about three weeks and had not touched a human head of hair. Mrs. Cathcart said after four weeks of studying, she would let us shampoo some of the customers when the girls in the class ahead of us got backed up. Every day was spent practicing on faceless, black-haired mannequins, doing pin curls, updos, and spit curls. I was horrible at spit curls, but not Sara Jane Farquhar. She could do anything with hair.

Mrs. Cathcart had the best-looking mannequin head. She
named it Dolly, after her beloved, who spent her days sleeping under the seat of any one of the hair dryers that happened to be on. Mrs. Cathcart loved to run her hands through Dolly’s artificial hair and demonstrate techniques we all knew we would never do in a real salon. Things like upsweeps that had gone by the wayside ten years ago but would still be a part of our exam. Most every day Mrs. Cathcart got flustered. Before she could finish her long and involved how-to explanation, Sara Jane had done the drill on her ratty old mannequin and had done it better than Mrs. Cathcart.

One of my high-school teachers told us about little a boy, maybe eleven or twelve years old, who was enrolled at Duke University. She explained to us that the little boy was a prodigy, and that’s exactly what Sara Jane Farquhar was like when it came to hair.

I don’t think Mrs. Cathcart knew what to make of Sara Jane. I could see a part of her was proud Sara Jane could do the mannequin drills faster and better than her own example. Still, you could tell she was jealous. Mrs. Cathcart liked helping us, especially when we got flustered. Whenever she walked by Sara Jane’s mannequin, she just nodded and smiled a phony smile that said, I’ll stump you yet, Sara Jane Farquhar.

We’d taken our first written test from our ratty blue textbooks. I was pretty sure I had done well. When Mrs. Cathcart laid my paper facedown in front of me, she said, “You did a fine job, Zora.”

I turned the paper over. She had circled 100 in red in a way that made it look like a happy face. I blushed and looked over at Sara Jane. She rolled her eyes at me and showed me her paper. Mrs. Cathcart had written
STUDY
across the top in big letters, under that a 27 was circled in the same gaudy red ink.

“What happened, Sara Jane?” I asked during our break.

“With what?” she answered. “That test? I can’t pass a test to save my soul. Shoot, it took me six tries just to get my GED, and I don’t think I passed. I just wore them down.”

“I’ll help you study.”

Nina Price, otherwise known as the crying girl, and a few others who didn’t do well on the test were huddled in a corner of the canteen. Some of them cried right along with Nina. In contrast, Sara Jane stood there with her perfectly colored blond hair drawn up in a loose bun on top of her head and little golden tresses hanging down around her gorgeous face. From the neck up, she looked like one of the heroines on the cover of a Gussie Foyette romance. And she wasn’t the least little bit concerned about grades.

“I won’t pass.” She shrugged off the words with a thin smile.

“You have to, Sara Jane. I’ll help you; my God, you’re so talented. You can do anything with hair, even better than Mrs. Cathcart.”

“I know I’m good at hair, but I can’t remember much of anything after I read it, especially the names of muscle tissue or nerves in the human head.”

“But you’re so good at this.”

“I’m not good at the books. Shoot, the stock boys and the guys in the meat market across the street are betting on how many weeks I’ll last. The big money is on six weeks. I’m really trying to make it past then just so daddy’s new stock boy will win. He bet I’d make it all the way. He didn’t know any better.”

Sara Jane Farquhar read every romance novel she could get her hands on. Heaving breasts and throbbing loins engrossed her so much that at first I just laughed it off. But it was sad that she could
remember the tiniest details from books Nana Adams would have rightfully called smut, but she couldn’t retain one word from a textbook.

“Sara Jane, if you don’t mind me asking, why are you here if you know you aren’t going to pass?”

“I wanted to do something; Mama knew I had a knack for fixing hair and thought it would be a good idea. She knows I won’t pass, either. I got it from my daddy, whatever it is that makes me so I can’t learn. Grandmamma let him drop out of school when he was in the eighth grade.”

“I’ll help you study. Every day. Please, Sara Jane.”

She smiled at me and brushed one of the wispy curls that dangled seductively near her green cat eyes. “Sure we will. We’ll have a real good time.”

*

The sound of
Winston’s car in the driveway surprised me. Sara Jane and I had been studying so hard for the next exam, I’d completely forgotten to cook his dinner. The two of us rushed to my bedroom window and watched him get out of the car. He didn’t even stop at the picnic table to see if there was a Styrofoam plate covered in tinfoil. He just went straight in the house to the living room and poured himself a drink.

“Oh, Zora, he’s got something heavy on his mind.”

I’d not missed a single day setting that hot plate on that stupid picnic table. I’d set it in the same place so often that the heat from the plate had made a permanent mark on the redwood table. I couldn’t believe Winston didn’t care his dinner wasn’t waiting for
him. I felt like someone had kicked me in the stomach. At the very least, it should have occurred to him to come check on me to see if something horrible had happened to me.

Sara Jane got up, went to my little refrigerator, and moved things around until she found a bottle of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine she had actually bought at another grocery store across town because her parents were Baptists and didn’t believe in drinking alcohol much less selling it. She poured mine in a Bama jelly glass and hers in my only teacup. “You drink and I’ll talk.” She took a big gulp of wine. “I’m going to tell you about Preston Hensley.”

I nodded and sat down on the couch. It was impossible not to smile when Sara Jane gave me that little smirk. I was still dazed and wounded, but she had a way about her that made me lay down my cross for the moment.