The Wisdom of Hair (8 page)

Dead drunk. It was the term I had used most of my life to describe Mama and the men she lived with. The way the sheriff described my daddy.

“We ought to do something, even if it’s just put him to bed.”

“It’s his rule, Sara Jane. We can’t go in there. He hasn’t let anybody in the house since Emma died. Look, I know this all seems wildly romantic to you, but if I lose my apartment, I’ll have to move back home.”

“Well, what if he’s hurt or dying?”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

“What if I go? Then you won’t get in trouble.”

I didn’t answer her right off. I sat there watching and waiting for some small movement that would let me know he had just passed out and wasn’t in a coma or worse. I begged for another five or ten minutes, which seemed like hours, but he didn’t stir an inch.

“Okay. Just go in, see if he’s okay, and come right back out. Promise?”

She nodded.

“And, whatever you do, don’t try to wake him up.” She was halfway down the steps before I finished my sentence.

She knocked at the back door and looked up at me. I shook my head at her because he hadn’t moved. She opened the door and disappeared inside the house. An eternity passed before I finally saw her tiptoeing into the drinking room. She inspected him closely, and I nearly jumped out of my skin when she picked up his wrist to check his pulse. She gave me the okay sign as she waved at me with his limp hand, before she tucked it in close to his chest.

I knew for sure there’d be trouble when Sara Jane picked up the picture of Emma that Winston held all the time and gave me a funny look. I was up out of my chair, waving like mad for her to get out of there, but she would just pick something else up, look at it, and laugh or just point to it, like I could see through her eyes.

I thought I would die when she started up the stairs. Pretty as you please, she went into his bedroom, turned the light on in the closet, and stayed in there for at least a hundred years, stepping out from time to time to flash one of Emma’s frocks up so I could see it. I was sure this was God’s way of getting back at me for plundering a dead woman’s things.

Finally, she went back downstairs. Before she left, she threw a little white crocheted blanket over Winston and came back to the porch.

“He’s fine. He’s just drunk,” she said, real nonchalant.

“I’m gonna kill you, Sara Jane Farquhar. I can’t believe you went in there and took the man’s pulse.”

“Oh, Zora, he’s so drunk I could have sat on him and pretended to ride him down the beach, and he never would have known it. Boy, he’s tall.”

“You almost gave me a heart attack going through his things. You know I told you what would happen if you got caught.”

“First of all, the man couldn’t wake up even if he wanted to. Second of all, we needed to make sure he wasn’t dead or anything because you promised your teacher you’d look out for him, and I think she would call this looking out for him. And third of all…don’t you want to know what I found?”

I was so keyed up over the whole life-and-death thing and the possibility of getting caught that the thought had not even occurred to me. But as soon as she said those words, I had to know what was in that house.

“Let’s see,” she said, knowing she had my full attention, “where should we start? Well, the kitchen looks like nobody lives there except for the unwashed glasses in the sink, good crystal glasses. Waterford. I turned them upside down and looked. There’s hardly anything on the counters and the only thing in the refrigerator was an old box of baking soda his wife probably left there.”

She laughed when she saw my eyes roll over her detailed inventory of the kitchen.

“There’s lots of pictures in the hallway of the two of them in different places. Some of them were taken in Europe, I think, and then there were a lot taken at the beach, but not the beaches here, rocky beaches.

“The drinking room smells like a bar, but it’s furnished real nice. I don’t think he had much to do with that. Looks mostly like stuff that a woman would pick out. But my God, Zora, that man is gorgeous, even in a stupor.”

My heart felt like it was going to jump out of my chest. “I don’t think I can take much more of this, Sara Jane.”

“He still has her things in the closet, and, honey, that woman had some beautiful clothes, I’m telling you. He didn’t have much in there, everything was on hangers from the cleaners, a couple pairs of jeans, a dozen or so shirts, and a dark-blue suit that looks like it hasn’t been worn in forever. It had dust on the shoulders, lots of it. Next time—”

“No,” I said. “There can’t be a next time with you going in there like some kind of detective. It just adds fuel to the fire I already have for the man. Look, I need this place. I can’t afford to go and do something stupid. Tell me you’ll never go in there again. Promise me, Sara Jane.”

“Well, you didn’t even let me tell you the juiciest part,” she said and then she was purposely quiet until I begged her to tell. “Emma…looks a little…like you.”

I woke up
early the next morning and went right to work, cutting shortening into the flour. I poured a tad of salt in my hand with a dab of baking powder and dusted it across the flour before I worked a little ice water into the dough so that it was nice and firm, not sticky because that can be a real mess. I can’t tell how much of this or that I put in the bowl because I always eyeball things the way Nana taught me. It took a lot of patience on her part for me to learn how to make anything that way, much less dumplings.

They rolled out real nice, not paper-thin, mind you, just good and thin and ready to boil. I took the pot of chicken broth out of the refrigerator and turned the stove on high. Even though it was cold, I could smell the sage and the little bit of thyme I had added the night before.

There was just enough time to set my hair in electric curlers before the pot came to a rolling boil. It was almost seven o’clock,
already hot in that little kitchen. I stood there “glowing,” as Mrs. Cathcart would say, as I dropped those strips of flour into that good broth. I settled for a bowl of cereal as I watched those dumplings swirl about for a few minutes before it was time to finish getting dressed. I remember smiling to myself that day because I was making “lovin’” for Winston. When I was little I always called it “chicklin and dumplings,” but when I was real little, I called it “lovin’” because that’s what it felt like when Nana made it special for me.

It was strange when I first moved to Davenport, how every time Winston crossed my mind, I felt like somebody had caught me playing dress-up in my mother’s clothes. I was embarrassed but mostly ashamed that I had a little seed of Mama inside me, a seed that had taken root and was growing faster than the kudzu overtaking the trees behind my apartment. But the harder I fell for Winston, the less I thought about Mama.

I sang a little tune my daddy used to sing about the sun coming up over the mountain, took the rollers out of my hair, and twisted it up in a little knot so that only three or four curly little tresses fell across my face. I made a pouty face and put on some bright pink lipstick I had gotten from one of the beauty-supply salesmen, then went back into the kitchen to check the pot one last time.

I remember it was a Tuesday because that was the day Winston had his eight o’clock class. I checked myself in the mirror before I went out my front door and walked at a snail’s pace down the steps because he hadn’t come out of the house yet. I was on the second step from the bottom when the back door finally opened. He was in such a hurry, I guess, he didn’t see me until he heard the gravel crunch under my feet.

“Good morning,” I said when he looked up at me.

“Morning.”

It was the first thing he’d said to me since Miss Cunningham had introduced us and it wasn’t even a complete sentence. He had never once said thank you for all of the lovin’ I spent hours making him, most everything from scratch. He said nothing more than that one little word, got into that sports car, and drove off to work. That sure wasn’t the way I’d imagined our first exchange would go. Kudzu love or not, I marched myself down to the Davenport School of Beauty, worked ’til way past six, and gave that man Spam and cold grits for dinner that night.

That whole day was just bad all the way around. I’d been in school for two months and already had two regular clients, both of them Tuesday ladies and elderly. One lady, Mrs. Chute, didn’t have more than fifty hairs on her head, but she came every week for her wash and set. The other one was a big woman named Miss Girtha, a retired schoolteacher who always tipped me twenty cents.

Anyway, both of them canceled their appointments that morning because of the croup. So I just sat there with the rest of the girls hoping for a walk-in to practice on and listening to Mrs. Cathcart’s husband tell stories about his old homeplace.

Mother Hannah, Mrs. Cathcart’s mother, worked up front at the appointment desk. She was well into her eighties, and when she wasn’t nodding off, she’d walk back to where we were sitting with Mr. Cathcart and ask where all the customers were. Mr. Cathcart was always quick to promise that they’d come, but it was easy to get discouraged during the first couple months of school when the regular customers stayed away. Nobody said it, but I think all of us knew the walk-ins were hoping we’d make all of our beginner’s
mistakes on somebody other than them. Still, it was depressing to see a half dozen clients trickle through the door with the twenty-three of us standing around, ready to work.

“They always come back,” Mr. Cathcart would remind us several times during the day, “sooner or later. We’re the only place in town that’ll cut a kid’s hair for a dollar.”

A lot of mothers brought their babies in for first-time haircuts, which Mrs. Cathcart loved. She’d ooh and aah over all of them, even the ugly ones, and give them little pieces of Zwieback teething biscuits. The kids who had teeth got animal crackers when they were done with their haircuts.

I absolutely hated first haircuts because those babies—and they were just babies—never sat still. Everybody including me was so afraid we were going to cut one of them, and one day I did. Well, this one wasn’t exactly a baby; he was four years old with a head full of curly blond baby hair that had never been cut. When I wet it and combed it out, it was all the way down his back.

Mrs. Cathcart was good about teaching from our textbook, but she was also good about telling us practical things. Like if you’re cutting a little boy’s curls off for the first time, be sure and remind his mother that the moment you cut his hair it will most likely be straight as a board. Forever.

I ran the comb down his thin blond hair that almost touched the elastic waistband of his shorts and looked at his mama.

“This is a really drastic change. Are you sure you want to do this?”

“No, I don’t, but his daddy does.”

“His hair’s going to be straight like it is now.”

“I know. Go ahead, but give him the bowl cut. I’m not shaving it off like his daddy said.” She sighed like she hated to see those pretty blond ringlets go. “His daddy’s took to calling him ‘Johnny Sue.’” She took a handful of his wet hair in her hand and held it close to her face. “Those curls were just so pretty, I couldn’t never cut ’em myself.”

I thought it was sweet the way she carried on over her little boy’s hair, like somehow those blond curls would keep her baby from growing up. But it was too late. He was strong and a terror for his mama, who had to fight him just to get him in the chair. My job was to get the cape on him, which wasn’t easy because he kept unsnapping it and laughing when it fell into his lap. When he wasn’t doing that, he was pulling the cape over his head or flapping his “wings,” as he called them. I wanted to use those pretty, long curls to tie him to the chair. Judging from the look on his mama’s face, she wanted to do the same until he grew out of whatever phase he was going through.

I gathered his hair in my hand like a ponytail, held my breath, and cut the length of it off. Mrs. Cathcart kept a supply of pink and blue grosgrain ribbon on hand, and if he’d been the kind of child to sit still, I would have tied a blue ribbon around the fat lock and given it to his mama for a keepsake.

I held the little boy down by his shoulder with one hand and gave it to her with the other. “Oh,” her voice quivered. She looked up at me like the veil had been lifted. “He’s not a baby anymore.”

As big as that child was, he hadn’t been a baby for a long time. “Stop squirming now, Johnny.” I said it nice. “I can’t finish your haircut if you won’t be still.”

Without his baby hair to protect him, the little boy’s mama was getting really mad. “John Thomas Baldwin, if you don’t sit still, this woman’s gonna cut your ear off.”

And then it happened. I don’t know how, I didn’t even see it, but he made one wrong move, and part of that little brat’s ear went sailing across the room.

Now, you would think after all of the threatening that woman had done to her son that she wouldn’t have gotten so mad at me. But her baby was screaming and crying. He bled like I’d snipped a major artery, and she started shrieking at me, calling me every name in the book. Mrs. Cathcart was mortified by the whole exchange and immediately picked the sliver of ear up in a sanitized towel. The woman nearly fainted when Mrs. Cathcart handed it to her.