The Wisdom of Hair (9 page)

“Now you get hold of yourself,” Mrs. Cathcart said sternly. “Zora, bring the first-aid kit, and tell Mr. Cathcart to bring some ice.”

I brought the kit to her along with a large box of Band-Aids that was sitting on top of it. I expected her to bandage the boy up, but instead she took the smelling salts out of the little foil packet and waved it under the nose of the hysterical woman, who sat down on the floor but finally seemed to have come to her senses. Even the little boy had quit crying and was trying to look at himself in the mirror. Mr. Cathcart hurried out with an ice tray and cocked the handle so that the cubes spilled out on top of the piece of ear and onto the open towel on the woman’s lap.

The woman looked at the towel like someone had put a bloody stump in her lap. She pointed to me. “You need to fire her.”

“You ought to have raised your boy better. Even you told him to be still or I was going to cut his ear off,” I snapped.

“I don’t care. I want you fired.”

“Shut up, all of you,” Mrs. Cathcart screamed. “Nobody’s getting fired and nobody can cut hair like it’s a moving target. Now, you get this…this…get it on down to the emergency room right quick.” Mrs. Cathcart bound up the towel with a big red rubber band. “They’ll sew it back on good as new, but you’ve got to get over there in a hurry or it won’t take.”

The woman nodded her head like this all made perfect sense to her. “But we don’t have no car.”

Mr. Cathcart drove the two of them to the emergency room. The doctor said if it was a finger they could sew it back on; it wouldn’t take because the ear is just made out of cartilage. I could have told them that.

When Mr. Cathcart came back he complained all day long about the woman being indigent, that she wouldn’t be able to pay the bill. He was afraid that the hospital would make the beauty school pay for it, or that the woman might hire one of those ambulance-chasing lawyers. But none of that happened. As a matter of fact, the little boy still came to the school even after that. Everybody snickered when they saw him sitting so still in the chair, afraid to breathe, especially when the scissors glided around his ears. If I’d been his mother, I would have let him wear the bowl cut to cover up his disfigurement, but his mama always insisted the boy’s ears were cut out, standing there with her arms crossed and her feet spread apart, daring him to move.

Mrs. Cathcart always gave the other children who came in two
animal crackers after their haircut. “One for each hand,” she would say, but she always handed that little boy the whole box and let him take as many as he wanted. I think it was her way for thanking him and his mama for not suing the school.

Even after all that craziness I still loved to cut hair. I never cared much for doing perms because they smell awful, and I’m not great at color; that’s Sara Jane’s forte. But it was about this time I began to feel, just like Mrs. Cathcart said, that I had been called to fix hair for the rest of my life.

Back home, I
didn’t listen to music much. Whenever Mama played her records, I’d put a fat rubber pencil eraser in each ear to muffle Judy Garland’s show tunes. After a while, I didn’t need the erasers to tune out the music. But beach music was different. It had a sweet, soulful sound that always made me dip my shoulders and shuffle my feet without even realizing it. Sure there were radio stations who played folks like Duran Duran, Eurythmics, and the king of pop, Michael Jackson, but if you lived anywhere near the beach in the Carolinas, beach music was still tops.

As much as I hated drinking when I was living with Mama, it never bothered me that drinking had become Sara Jane’s and my favorite pastime. Every night the wine was cheap and cold, and went down as easy as those sweet piña coladas we used to drink on dollar night at Shag Daddy’s Beach Bar in North Myrtle Beach.

Sara Jane and I had been celebrating again. We were always
finding something to celebrate, and sometimes, when we couldn’t think of anything to cut loose over, we just turned the music up real loud and celebrated ourselves. I remember that Saturday night we were cleaning up the kitchen. General Johnson and the Chairmen of the Board’s “Give Me Just a Little More Time” was on the radio; it had become my own personal battle hymn where Winston was concerned.

“Give me just a little more time,” Johnson crooned, “and our love will surely grow.”

Sara Jane took the other end of my old checkered dish towel and we shagged along with the General as he belted out the chorus, pleading, “‘Give me just a little more time, and our love will surely grow. Baby. Please, baby.’” Scooping up my wineglass, I tried to drink and shag at the same time but made a mess.

“Shuffle, ball, change,” Sara Jane reminded me when my feet stopped moving, like I knew what that meant. I just watched her feet and tried to make mine do the same.

Sara Jane wanted to call the radio station in Myrtle Beach and request “With This Ring” by the Platters, which was her and Jimmy’s song. I wouldn’t let her because it was expensive to call long distance back then, so she settled for Clarence Carter’s “Too Weak to Fight,” which came on right after a commercial for Drink and Drown night at Shag Daddy’s and a wet T-shirt contest at another beach bar called Jimmy Mack’s.

I knew Sara Jane Farquhar had opened my silverware drawer at least fifty times since we’d started being friends, but she never once saw Emma’s little gift I’d hidden all the way in the back. I never really expected Sara Jane to see the dress boxes that were still in the same places Emma had stashed them, but she had been coming
to my place almost every day for almost three months and never once saw that little present.

“Sara Jane, you always wash. It’s your turn to dry and put away.”

She took a clean dishrag out of the drawer by the sink, shagging and twirling around me until she was beside the drain board. She went on and on about Jimmy, stopping just in time to close her eyes and cock her head to the side as she mouthed the chorus “too weak to fight.” I talked about school, feeling like Clarence Carter could read my mind. Every time he declared his own weakness for his lover, Sara Jane would pick up a spoon, a salt shaker, or anything else handy that she could use for a microphone and sing right along with him.

I knew Sara Jane liked everything just so and hated to leave the kitchen undone. I’d just enough wine in me to think I couldn’t live another day without telling her about all of Emma’s things, especially that little box in the drawer behind the soup spoons. I knew what I was doing, sure as the world.

“Oh, just let the dishes drain tonight,” she said, which didn’t work into my plan at all. “Let’s sit outside on the porch and finish our wine. I have something I want to ask you.”

“Lazy,” I said, flicking dishwater at her off the ends of my fingertips. Clarence gave one last James Brown yowl as Sara Jane scooped up a handful of silverware and opened the drawer real wide, and stopped just short of putting the knives and forks away.

“Zora, why do you have a wrapped present in your silverware drawer?”

“Oh, that. It’s not mine.”

“Well, who the hell does it belong to?”

“Winston’s wife, Emma. She left lots of things here, dresses and such. I think she bought them and hid them from Winston so he wouldn’t get mad. I just let everything be. Ooh, I love that song,” I said as soon as I heard the first few bars of “Sixty Minute Man.” “Would you turn up the radio? My hands are wet.”

“Everything?” she asked, ignoring The Dominoes altogether.

We dried our hands on the dishcloth we’d used for dancing. I showed her the dresses in the boxes under the bed and two in the top of my closet. I really made over them because I knew it was eating Sara Jane to know what was in the little box almost as much as it was eating me.

“Oh, my God, you just have to see this cute little angora set. It’s blue with little pearl buttons. They look like real pearls.” I didn’t have the first clue as to what real pearls looked like, but I pulled a box out of the bottom drawer of the bureau and tried to act surprised when she stopped me from opening it.

“Zora, why didn’t you open that present?”

“Sara Jane, it’s not mine. Besides, it’s wrapped and it just wouldn’t be right. I’ve got to tell you, I felt so guilty going through all of Emma’s stuff, I just couldn’t,” I said, like I hadn’t taken a complete inventory of Emma’s new clothes and tried on every single piece.

“Don’t you want to know what’s in there?”

“You don’t think we should open it, do you?”

“Hell, yes,” she said, tearing into it like it was Christmas morning.

The box wasn’t taped shut. When she opened it and pushed the powder-blue tissue paper aside, we both gasped.

“My God.” Sara Jane whispered, “Do you think that’s why he’s so sad?”

I couldn’t say a word. I blamed it on the wine and ran straight to the bathroom. Every time I retched, I saw the Serendipity box under the bed just like I had that first time I cleaned that toilet. I retched again and couldn’t stop.

“Honey,” Sara Jane cooed as she held my hair back. “You’re so slight. You’ve got to go easy on that wine.”

I sat on the bathroom floor and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Before I could say anything, Sara Jane had wrung out a cold cloth and was dabbing my face like Nana did when I was sick.

“You okay?”

“I don’t know.”

The baby’s rattle sat on the table for a long time. It was silver with two big hearts engraved on it. A fancy smaller heart linked the two together. The note card inside the box sent me running for the toilet again. “Our love has created something wonderful. I love you. Always, Emma.”

I told Sara Jane I needed some air, but the truth was I couldn’t stand to be in the same house with that baby’s rattle lying out on the counter. We took our chairs out to the porch where neither one of us said a word for a long time.

“Zora? Do you think he knew?”

“Maybe he did. I don’t know.”

“If she was pregnant, why did she hide the rattle? Why didn’t she just give it to him?”

“I don’t know, Sara Jane. Maybe she never got the chance. Maybe she did and that’s why he grieves so. Maybe he’s grieving for both of them.”

Sara Jane and I loved to laugh. Even when we’d had a rotten day, the
two of us could always find something to laugh about. But the whole idea of pregnant Emma and her grief-stricken husband squelched all the romantic fantasies Sara Jane and I had conjured up about Winston and me. And if the earth didn’t stop that night, I know the night sounds did. Everything good and sweet about a warm summer night seemed to wonder what in the world was wrong with us.

I couldn’t take another minute of silence. “What did you want to ask me earlier?”

“Oh, nothing. It’ll keep. You’ve had enough on you for one night.”

“Come on.” I tried to smile. “You’re my best friend. What is it?”

After a few minutes of me pretending like I wasn’t reeling from the thought of Emma carrying Winston’s baby, she decided to tell me.

“Well, I was wondering, and you can say no if you want to…I wouldn’t be mad, I swear. Could me and Jimmy use your apartment?”

“Sara Jane, have you already…?”

“No, we haven’t yet, but we’re so close. You know he lives two doors down from that Doris Erickson, and she’s the biggest gossip in town. I hear she watches her neighbors with binoculars. If we got caught…well, I just don’t think Mama and Daddy are ready for Jimmy Alvarez just yet. And you know Daddy hates everybody, especially Mexicans. I just—”

“You don’t have to say another word.” I was amazed at how the thought of Jimmy or making love with Jimmy had changed her. I doubt she had ever cared one bit about her parents’ opinion of the other boys she dated.

“Thank you,” she whispered with a sly little smile.

I never doubted whether Sara Jane cared for me, but I knew after she went home that night that she truly loved me. Before she left, she put away all the leftovers and the dishes, folded the wrapping paper neatly, and set the closed box back in the silverware drawer. I took it out but didn’t open it again. I put it back on the very same shelf where Emma had first hidden it. From then on, I kept my dinner plates someplace else.