When you wear red lipstick, you look like your mother. Not a brash red, but a dull and sultry shade. It makes your hair seem darker, your skin thicker somehow, your eyes a more vibrant shade of green. Your mother is olive and you are fair.
When you are young, younger than two, your mother rents herself an apartment on the other side of the city. She changes banks. She tells her friends that yes, she is going to leave him. That she has to, that she is bouncing off the walls every day now. The last night in your parents’ home, she rolls your crib into the spare bedroom and reclines on the guest sheets, listening to your father sleep and cry, sleep and cry through the wall. Three weeks later, you and your mother share a single room on the other side of the city.
This is what you do for a living: you cut hair. You work in a salon and stand for eight, sometimes ten, hours a day and cut hair. Men mostly, sometimes women. You started off washing hair, but someone else, Rita, a black girl with a thin silver hoop through her nose, has that job now. Not often, but once in a while you stand back and watch your hand run the electric razor up some man’s neck and wonder about the nature of things. Why all the attention to hair? And what if none of us had hair at all, or what if we were each allotted only one strand? Would we still worry over it the same way? Trim it? Wash it? Condition, color, highlight, perm, tease, style, straighten it the way we do? Once a client told you, My wife won’t touch my hair. She says pieces of it fall out in her hands. What can I do about that? You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Not because of the question, but because you had to take it seriously and because you didn’t have an answer.
When you hug your father, he laughs out loud. As if you are tickling him, grabbing his side or his kneecaps. He bellows out a deep and hearty laugh, while you hold on tight, arms around his thinning belly, his narrow hips, refusing to untangle your fingers and telling yourself that this laughing means he loves you too.
There’s a man in your life now. He brings you plants, a rosemary bush and daffodils. He brings you books on how to train your dog. He brings over cookies and game hens and hair gel, which he leaves on the bathroom counter next to your tweezers. He’s a city planner and was married before. He has daughters, two of them, and one night when he drank too much whiskey he told you about the look in his daughters’ eyes when he picks them up for a weekend. The word he used was pure. This man makes you want to go to bed early just so you can lie there in the dark and think about him. He makes you spend an entire Sunday organizing your drawers.
When you dress up and drink too much wine, you grab people by their arms and throw your head back and laugh at what they say, even if it is uninspired or you have heard it before. You have a picture of yourself. You’re clutching a tall glass and leaning unsteadily, a short statue dipping back from her hipbones. You’re laughing with a blonde woman, whose hair is piled high atop her head in lilting, effortless curls. You keep this picture in a desk drawer with the pens and paper clips and extra batteries. You look at it a lot lately.
These are the things you want: people to quit dumping trash into the ocean and a pickup truck. You’ve always wanted a pickup truck. You can’t explain it. You’ve never even been south of Buffalo, but the image you hold of yourself bouncing down some dirt road or sprawled out on the flat bed drinking a beer and watching the sunset is as dear to you as anything. It is the one thing you know you own.
Your mother calls to tell you that she doesn’t feel good about the man you’re seeing. That she has a feeling. A bad feeling. A feeling that he isn’t a city planner at all. That he’s lying to you. Before she hangs up she tells you that you should call your father because he isn’t doing very well. You sit by the phone for a long time and realize it’s been over a month since you called your father and that you hadn’t even noticed.
When the city planner makes love to you, he likes to leave the bathroom light on. You scan the ceiling sometimes and realize that you had it all figured out when you were six. That little girl knew the sum total of sex and love and expression–she called it jiggling. She’d whisper to her best friend on the bus, My mom and the man from her office were in the room jiggling last night. You watch the light bounce across the ceiling as the city planner’s body moves with urgency at the end, and you smile. Jiggling. You were a smart girl.
Rita says she’s not washing hair anymore. She’s quitting and moving to California with her boyfriend. She’s done with snow and working for tips and her hands feeling like sandpaper all the time. The owner of the salon throws her a bon-voyage before she leaves, and you ask the city planner to the party. He says he’d rather not. Says he’s got the girls this weekend. You go to the party alone and stand next to Rita who keeps shaking her head and saying, Milk and honey, baby. Milk and honey.
When your father dies, the city planner takes you to the funeral in his company car. You stand between him and your mother on the front row of the church. You and your mother and the city planner are the family. The rest of the rows are filled with men in unsure coats and ties, men who worked for your father for years. Your father owned a construction company. He built homes in the suburbs, and when the reverend says, He was a man loved by his friends and family, you begin to sniffle and your shoulders shake. Your mother snaps open her clutch purse and hands you a tissue. The city planner takes your hand and gives it a big squeeze.
When the funeral is over and you have sent your mother home in a taxi, the city planner takes you out to the airport and parks in a field across from the runway. You roll the windows down and feel the heavy air settle on your face and lean the bucket seat way back. He offers you a cigarette. The planes creep onto the airstrip, stop momentarily and then the noise begins. It rushes, explodes and is deafening and wonderful as you and the city planner watch the fantastic lights of the plane pass right in front of your eyes. After, in the silence waiting for the next one, you ask him, “Do I look like my mother?”
He turns toward you in his seat. “A little bit.”
“How?”
He tosses the cigarette out the window and reaches over. “Oh, in here . . . .” he says and runs his fingers beneath your eyes, caressing the bones of your eye sockets. “I see it in the eyes.”
-Susan ShieldsÂ
