Authors: Cathie Pelletier
“I bet it's nice and shady under there,” Pete said, his eye on the willow trees where Howard's ball had neatly disappeared. As usual, Howard said nothing. They started a slow walk toward the clump of trees, where Howard would be forced to kneel and dig the damn ball out from under the green branches with his club as Pete watched. This was usually when Pete began his little “it's all psychological” pep talk, the one that always informed Howard that the willow trees were
in
his
head.
But on this day, Pete broke with custom.
“I can't stand it anymore,” he said. “Why the hat?” Howard got back on his feet, slapped the green grass from off the knees of his slacks, and slipped the ball into his pocket.
“I just needed something to keep the sun out of my eyes,” he said to Pete.
“But a
cowboy
hat?” Pete asked.
“It was the only one at Baker's Merchandise that fit,” Howard answered. That wasn't really true. But the other hats were so, well,
old-fashioned,
the kind of hats aging men wore in movies, men curved over wooden canes, men inching along sidewalks like slow-moving spiders, hoping to catch a bus, gray felt hats pulled low above their yellowed eyes. The cowboy hat was, well, the kind of hat
cowboys
wore.
They were at the eighth hole, overlooking the algae blob, and Howard had already said, “We should complain about this.” And Pete had already used the side of his shoe to push a red toothbrush, its white bristles fat and worn, back down into the slime and ooze. It was then that the hat came up again. In fact, it was when the hat came
off.
Howard had just noticed that the little 1959 Galaxy car was back. It had driven itself up again to the surface of the muck, its painted yellow headlights half-hidden in greenish algae. He felt an instant sympathy for it, for what it
used
to
be,
a shiny new idea, once, years ago. And the painted yellow lights reminded him again of the mural on the ballroom wall, back at the Holiday Inn, a frozen memory of warmth, once. Surely, with the proper cleanser that rust would come off. The thing was probably a collector's item by now. After all, car companies don't make
real
cars anymore, cars with personality and looks. Eliot! Howard imagined his grandson opening a birthday box to discover a fully restored classic toy car. It was one small way the Ford Motor Company could pay him back for all their harassment. And that's why he had bent over and pulled the little Ford Galaxy up out of the muck. And that's when Pete had pulled Howard's cowboy hat off his head.
Nothing was said for what seemed like long seconds.
Ticktock. Ticktock.
Then, “Holy shit,” said Pete. “What the fuck happened to you?”
Howard was almost too angry to speak. He grabbed the cowboy hat back from Pete's hand and repositioned it on his head. He felt a warm blush moving like a cloud across his face. Would Pete Morton ever grow up? Would he ever learn how to act like an adult? So Howard asked him both of these questions. Pete thought for a minute.
“
You're
the one with orange hair and wearing a cowboy hat,” Pete said.
“It isn't orange,” said Howard.
“Yes, it is,” said Pete. “When the sun hits it just so, it's got an orange tint.”
Howard took a deep breath. His hair was very
Brown,
this was true. There was nothing
Medium
about the brown, and there was certainly nothing
natural
about it, considering the formula had decided to attack every hair on his head and not just “target the grays.” And when Howard Woods found the time to dash off a letter to the company that had manufactured
Grecian
Formula,
he would inform them of this. As well as the fact that when light, artificial or otherwise, struck his hair in a certain way, it did look as if the strands might be on fire. He heard Pete suppressing a laugh behind his back.
Howard turned and looked toward the clubhouse, that distant glob of white paint, all the way down at the eighteenth hole. Fuck it. He was done for the day. He'd simply had enough. Without a word, he turned to face Pete Morton, and then, his eyes staring hard at Pete's, he swung his golf club around and around in the air above his head. Pete ducked just as Howard let the club go. They both watched, fascinated, as the club flew gracefully through the air like a dark boomerang, cutting a fine arc as it went. It struck the top of some elm trees thirty feet away. Then, silently, the club made its way down through the arms of the tree, taking its time, all slow motion. Small branches and leaves broke away and came down with it. Finally, the club hit the ground at the base of the tree with a
thunk
and lay there, exhausted. Sun caught the silver and it sparkled. Pete looked back at Howard.
“You know, Dances with Bulls,” Pete said. “That's the best drive I've seen you make in years.”
***
“The brown is way too dark,” Howard told the same salesclerk who had sold him the infernal box of formula in the first place. “And when the sun hits it, it has an orange tint.” He was whispering, embarrassed that other shoppers might hear. And he was again wearing his cowboy hat.
“I don't understand,” the clerk said. She was blatantly staring at the feathers in the brim of the hat. “Why would it do that?” Howard wished she'd lower her damn voice.
“Because,” he whispered, “the color you gave me didn't work.”
He removed the cowboy hat and showed her his hair. She stared, her bottom lip doing a bit of a quiver. Since she now appeared ready to run, Howard quickly put the hat back on. Maybe she thought his next move would be to unzip his pants and expose himself, orange-tinted pubic hairs and all.
“You obviously left it on too long,” she said, her voice high enough to crack a Pepsi bottle. “It's a five-minute formula. Didn't you read the box?”
Howard thought about this. No, he had not read the box. He had read
Macbeth,
by God. He had read Hemingway and a host of other great writers. He had even read Samuel Pepys's boring diary, ridiculous old freeloading, gossipy leech that
he
was. But no, by Christ, he had not read the goddamn
Grecian
5
box!
“No,” he admitted. “I didn't.”
“Well, no wonder it didn't work,” the clerk said, smug again. “So what happened? Did you fall asleep with it on?”
Howard couldn't help himself. He wanted to explain, to perhaps vindicate himself. Otherwise, she would think he had dabbed dye on his head just in time to nod off in a senile snooze, the box still in his hand, his mouth wet with drool. All he had set out to do was to hide a few straggly gray hairs. Was that such a crime?
“My daughter-in-law is in theater,” he heard himself telling the clerk. Had he grown so pitiful that her opinion of him was now important? Yes, he had. “And she got to telling me all about
Cyrano
de
Bergerac
, and then Eliot came in for a sandwich which Patty made for him, and then Patty's mother called, and while she was talking on the phone I started reading my new
Golf
Digest
and, well, we sort of forgot about the time.”
He
had
fallen asleep, there in the chair, and Patty let him snore, thinking a nap would be good for a retired cuckold about to become divorced.
The clerk stared at him, as if waiting for his full confession. Howard gave up. Let her think him rude, ruder than any of the other senior shoppers. He turned his back on her and began searching through the boxes himself.
Grecian
Liquid, clear and colorless. Grecian Cream, grooms and conditions hair. Grecian Plus, foam that thickens and conditions gray, thinning hair.
When had it become an
empire,
this hair business?
“Maybe you ought to go to a specialist,” the clerk suggested.
***
Howard remembered seeing a small beauty salon out at the mall, a few shops down from the Bixley Travel Agency. This was a safe distance from the salon in town where Ellen and Molly frequently sat under hair dryers, flipping through the pages of
Women's Wear
Daily.
And, if Howard remembered correctly, the mall shop had a sign on their door that said:
Walk-ins Welcome.
The little Aston Martin spun away from the drugstore, just ahead of rush-hour traffic.
Ten minutes later, and still wearing the protective cowboy hat, Howard was peering through the glass panel window of The Hair Cyndi-Cut. Seeing that all the stylists were busy with customers, he decided to wait outside the door until a chair became free. Passersby stared at him, or so he imagined. If he thought his life as a
cuckold
was embarrassing, that was only because he had not yet become a
walk-in.
Finally, he saw that a chair was becoming available, a young woman digging into her purse for a credit card. The stylist looked through the glass at Howard and nodded. She was ready for him. Howard took off his cowboy hatâhe was still too much the Eisenhower generation to step inside any room wearing a hatâand held it against his chest. But before he could lift a foot, a hand touched his arm. Billy Mathews.
“Billy,” said Howard.
At first, Billy simply stared at Howard's hair, assessing. Howard could almost see the brain process in the works, a few dull snaps along the neurons, a few listless sparks. Then, it was as if Billy understood. He grinned.
“Did you just get back from Norway?” Billy asked. Howard was about to ask “What the hell are you talking about, Billy Mathews?” when he remembered.
The
Berlitz
Guide
to
Norway.
Howard nodded.
“I did, Billy,” he said. “As you can see, I was there for their national celebration.” He pointed at his hair. More wattage burst forth in Billy's eyes.
“Was it fun?” Billy asked. He had in his hand that perpetual McDonald's cup, the straw sticking like a periscope up through the plastic lid.
“Billy, I'm about to go inside here.” Howard gestured at the chair, the stylist. “And get my hair
American
again.”
Billy nodded that he understood.
“When you come out,” said Billy, “can we talk? I don't quite get the thing with Jake and Brett. I mean, why do they sit in bars and talk a lot? Why don't they ever act like, you know, boyfriend and girlfriend? I think that's really all they want to be.”
Howard put his cowboy hat back on his head, lest someone he used to teach with, some graying academic, pass by and see him there.
“Billy, I'm no longer your teacher,” Howard said, gently. “The class is over. The grade has been turned in.” And, if Howard remembered correctly, he had been gracious to give the boy a D, instead of failing him.
Billy's face seemed to hang like a sad moon before Howard's own.
“Hey, cowboy!” someone shouted. “Park your horse and get in here!”
Howard looked up to see the stylist, hovering at her empty chair, a hand now on her hip, impatient. She had short, frozen spikes of hair sprouting all over her head.
“See you, Billy,” said Howard. “Take care.”
Howard clutched his hat and stepped inside the salon. He went willingly to the stylist as she swung the chair around to accept him. A small badge pinned to her shirt said,
Hello, I'm Cyndi. A
shiny silver bead gleamed from the left nostril of her nose. She picked up a plastic black sheet and shook off dead curls from the previous customer. Then, she looked closely at Howard's hair.
“Whoa, look at this!” Cyndi said, loud enough that all the other girls stopped cutting and curling and combing and coloring in order to listen. “Incoming wounded!”
“I was very drunk. I was drunker than I ever remembered having been.”
âJake Barnes,
The
Sun
Also
Rises
It was Wednesday afternoon that Howard drove toward Patterson Street in a rumbling rental truck, Pete Morton bouncing around in the passenger seat. Howard had already backed the orange monstrosity up to the service door at the Holiday Inn, where Wally had tossed out a couple dozen empty boxes.
“If you need more,” Wally said, “I'm expecting a delivery tomorrow.”
Howard had thanked him, and then he and Pete Morgan had climbed into the cab of the truck and, gears grinding, had headed for Patterson.
“A van would have been big enough,” said Pete. “I mean, she's keeping the furniture, right?”
Howard tried not to think about this:
the
bed
they
had
slept
in
for
all
those
years, a nick in the wood on his side of the headboard; that sofa that seemed to reach up and pull one's tired body down into the plushness of it; the kitchen table where John had dropped his pocket knife in the third grade and knocked away a small chunk of wood; the lamp Ellen had bought at an antiques store in Connecticut, a clipper ship of some kind that they'd always intended to have appraised; the coat rack Howard Jr. had made in shop.
He could go on and on if he got to reminiscing about the material things inside the house. But he had agreed in the divorce papers that the house and its contents would remain with Ellen, his personal belongings would come with him. On paper, it was just a string of words, meaningless. Now, those words had turned into a string of brown boxes.
At the corner of Patterson, Howard slowed the big truck as he shifted from third into second. Pete rolled his window down and rested his crooked arm in the open space. He looked over at Howard.
“I mean, this is a Norman Schwarzkopf kind of truck,” Pete said.
As they passed the massive lilac bush at Marjorie Cantor's house, Howard shifted back into third. He wanted a big truck, dammit. He wanted Ellen to see in a
big
way what was taking place. He had called the night before to inform her that he would be arriving the next day to get his things, as her letter had instructed him. She was polite. She was cool. She was brief. “That's fine, yes, that's fine,” was all she had said. Now, Howard envisioned the big orange rental truck as a military maneuver all its own. When Ellen saw him packing his personal things, his clothing, books, mementos, into brown boxes that said
Smirnoff
and
Cutty
Sark
and
Jack
Daniel's
, when she realized he was really moving out, the knowledge would shake her up. Funny, but in the beginning, the power of the fight had lain in Howard's hands, at Howard's camp, his to dole out as he wished. But now, he sensed a change in the air, something Stormin' Norman probably also knew, a knowledge that the sands of war had suddenly shifted. They had shifted all right, and now Howard Woods had gone from being a general who could hang up on his wife to a nomad who didn't even own a ratty tent. A funny thing, the war of divorce.
“By the way,” Pete added. “I like your new hair. It takes a week off your age, maybe even two weeks.”
Howard ignored him. He honestly didn't care if anyone noticed that a few dignified grays were now tactfully scattered here and there among his
natural
medium
brown
hair. Let Pete joke all he wished. Howard
did
look younger, and what's more, he
felt
younger too. He had even made an appointment with Cyndi, for the very week he returned from Spain. “Remember,” Cyndi had lectured him, the silver bead in her nostril catching the overhead light. “Roots are the enemy.”
Howard tooted at some kids who were hovering dangerously close to the street, the chrome of their bikes gleaming beneath them. He could see his old driveway just ahead, so he shifted down to second and then to first.
“You know,” Pete said, thoughtfully, “if I'm gonna use your room now and then, I wish you'd move away from the ice machine.”
Again, Howard said nothing. He had no intention of letting Pete Morton use his room ever again, and this was even before he found the tan bikini panties under his pillow, looking more like a Band-Aid than an article of clothing. His true intention was to move out of the Holiday Inn soon, very soon. Whether he would be moving back to his home on Patterson Street or not remained to be seen. He would know more once he looked into Ellen's green eyes and determined for himself what might lie in his future.
Howard parked the truck close to the garage doors, which Ellen had actually remembered to close. He would be blocking her car inside, true, but he doubted she would go anywhere while such a dramatic event was taking place. After all, her husband for over four decades was moving out, the way Howard Jr. had moved out when he went to law school. The way Greta had moved out to take that job down in Miami. The way John had moved out to enlist in the Air Force.
Howard pulled the heavy parking brake on and then opened his door.
“Wait here until I talk to her first,” he said to Pete, who waved a hand, understanding the need for privacy.
“Do what you gotta do, pal,” said Pete. He reached inside his jacket pocket for the remains of that morning's cigar.
Howard walked to the house with what he hoped was a confident stride. He knocked on the garage door but there was no answer. He turned the knob. Locked. The house itself was quiet, no radio playing, no sound of laughter from the back patio, no whir of a vacuum cleaner. He turned toward the gray cement stones leading across the lawn to the front door. Ellen had made that walkway herself, during one of her summer vacations from school. Howard saw a cloud of cigar smoke wafting from the passenger window of the truck. He felt Pete's eyes on his back with every step he took. At the front door a note was taped to the outside knob. Howard pulled it away and opened it. There was Ellen's old-fashioned handwriting again, those swooping tails on the Ss, those fancy loops and curls. He'd been seeing a lot of this writing lately.
Howard. The key to the garage is under the front doormat. I've packed all your things for you. You'll find the boxes in the garage. I'm at ballet class, but if there should be a problem, you may reach me on my cell phone.
And she had kindly listed a phone number for him.
With Pete's eyes burning boulder-size holes into Howard's back, he folded the note and slipped it into his pants pocket. He leaned down to the mat beneath his feet, lifted its corner, and found the key waiting for him. Ellen with a cell phone? One of those contraptions she was forever complaining about when they buzzed loudly in quiet restaurants, in bookstores, at the library? What she called “the end to civilization as we know it”?
Ellen
had
a
cell phone?
Howard heard the truck door slam and Pete grunt as he jumped down from the passenger seat. Wanting to see for himself what awaited him, before Pete Morgan could add his five cents worth, Howard unlocked the garage door and stepped inside. What he saw overwhelmed him. There before his eyes was cardboard box after cardboard box, one piled on top of the other, all the way up to the ceiling of the garage and filling the entire space that used to hold Howard's little blue Ford Probe. His life, his guts, all packed neatly and piled out in Ellen's garage for him to gather up and disappear with into the world.
If
you
push
on
something, it will push back on you.
Howard heard Pete whistle softly from behind his shoulder. He hoped there was a lesson in this somewhere for his golfing buddy, hoped that something good would come from Howard's pain. Maybe the brown mountain before them would inspire Pete Morton to toss out that little black book of which he was so proud.
“Holy shit,” said Pete. “You mean I really gotta help you move? I figured you'd come over here, pack a golf club or two, and she'd start crying.” He whistled again, soft and low. Howard could do little but read the names on the sides of the boxes as he searched for something to say:
Murray's Clay Pot Kit, the Bread Company, Amazon Books, Lilly's Glassware,
and so on. Not a single
Smirnoff
or a
Cutty
Sark
or
Jack
Daniel's
among the pile. So much for the opposite roads their lives had taken.
Howard turned and walked out to the street. He stood there looking up and down the length of Patterson at the separate houses his neighbors had built for themselves, those wooden boxes in which to contain the years of their lives. The Masons, the Taylors, the Bradfords, the Davidsons. He could name every house on each side of the street if pressed to do so. It was as if they had
all
moved to that housing development at the same time, all hoping to raise their families in a pool of sensibility, as far from the riotous sixties as they could get while they struggled to keep the ideals of their parents alive. They had prospered as a team, the Kings, the Hartmans, the Turners, the Whites, names that might have come over on the
Mayflower
, the kind of folks who settled Jamestown or climbed into Conestoga wagons and bounced West, sensible and adventuresome WASPs that they were. They had been part of a
team,
those Eisenhower teens had, the dollars and cents on their paychecks growing thicker as their hairs grew thinner, an inground pool here, a gazebo there, AstroTurf here, a second family car there. That's what Patterson Street had always meant to Howard Woods. Mornings when he came out to fetch his paper, the grass still limp with dew, he always took a few seconds to pay penance to the street where his kids had first walked to school, first pedaled their tricycles and bicycles, and then spun the tires of their first cars before disappearing out into the world. There was something about Patterson Street that had given Howard the illusion that he was still safe in the 1950s, on a street such as the one he had grown up on, in those days when he was just coming to his young manhood. Those were the times when one could hear hammers tapping out all over America as the earnest and well-meaning built homes away from cities, those halfway houses between civilization and the primordial sea, between safety in numbers and no safety at all. Their own little purgatory,
the
'burbs.
And Howard had loved that notion, had loved his safe house, his safe job, his safe wife. Let others think what they would, but to Howard Woods the 1950s had been a sweet, almost idyllic time for him to grow up. It was all so easily defined back then: Democrats beat up on Republicans, who beat up on Communists, who beat up on the poor and downtrodden, who then beat up on each other. Nowadays, it was tough to tell a Democrat from a Republican from a Communist. But back then, in America, there was a new idea called
the
middle
class,
and Howard had found himself smack dab in the center of it, thanks to the fact that his father had managed to start his own construction company. And what a time to be building in the United States of America, when those soldiers who had been at war came back to set up housekeeping! Sure, it was also a time when your own neighbor might be a Commie spy, coming and going from the new ranch-style home with the latest model of Chevy gleaming in the yard, just to throw off suspicion. Who wants to borrow a cup of sugar from a Commie? So if the bastard's got a strange last name, or a stranger accent, just tell him the house on the corner is no longer for sale. And keep your kids away from his kids, because Communism comes hand in hand with indoctrination. It's catching. It rubs off. And if it does, well, you might as well pack up your Commie ass and move to Russia. That was the nature of the 1950s. If you weren't
for
America 100 percent then, by God, you were
against
her. Sure, that decade had its modern critics, but Howard wasn't fooled by that. He knew damn well that if it hadn't been for the fifties there wouldn't have
been
any sixties. Any dolt could see that it was back in those Cold War years, those days before color television, in those times of lynchings and McCarthy's witch hunts, that the ideas took firm root for the seedlings that would crop up a decade later. This was where the feminist movement got its boost, in the dazed faces of all those suburban housewives, in all those old black-and-white TV commercials, women with aprons lashed around their waists and tied securely at the back in Little Bo Peep bows. Women who stood vacant over TV dinners and waited for the doorbell to ring and that briefcase to appear, the man they married firmly attached to its handle. Women who slipped off their Donna Reed high heels at the end of a day and soaked their swollen feet behind a closed and locked bathroom door. Were they unhappy? Were they anticipating the Valium and the Xanax, and all those other antidepressants that were still to come? Maybe. But Howard hadn't forgotten the lesson Americans had learned from Khrushchev and Nixon: There are no modern kitchens in Commie Land, no new dishwashers, no new electric stoves and ovens, so before you sell a sketch of the atomic bomb to the Reds, you better shake the little missus out of her stupor and ask if she really,
really
wants to cook dinner where there's no electric can opener.
Ellen had a cell phone.
Howard turned and walked back into the garage. Pete was sitting on the inside step that led up to the kitchen, just finishing the last of his cigar. Howard looked down at Pete. Neither man spoke of the incident, for this was their own code, just as Hemingway's men had a code and stuck by it. Men of Howard's generation didn't appear on a television show to discuss their deepest angst. This was their own code, and they both knew it.