The Polite Act of Drowning, page 7
‘If you don’t like it,’ Mom threatens from the top of a high stool, dusting the exposed beams, ‘Aunt Rita offered you a job at the Bait & Tackle.’
She sends Hare up onto the dining-room table with a vinegar solution, instructing her how to clean the birdcage chandelier, salvaged from a garage sale near the city. Hare has to take all of the glass teardrops off the brass frame, soak them, then scrub them with a toothbrush until they gleam.
‘Why bother?’ she complains. ‘We never eat in here.’ But she unhooks the teardrops anyway.
I am sweating and weary from the heat after cleaning screens, but Mom sends me straight to the icebox, an antique she refinished last year – Mom and Dad dragged it down into the workshop, amid Dad’s grunts and Mom’s terse commands. The top door was crooked and missing a hinge, the wood gummed with years of varnish. It didn’t come back up for a long time, but when it did, it was the colour of raw honey, the decorative carvings now obvious through the refinished wood. I love lifting the polished heaviness of the handle, feeling the door move open on its new hinge. It is my favourite piece in the house. I like thinking of the family who once used this as a modern, functioning unit: how they fitted blocks of ice into the bottom door; a family who most likely sewed their own clothes, and ploughed the fields and attended Sunday service and never deviated from what they were meant to become in life.
Now, the icebox stores folded-up brown paper bags from the grocery store, Tupperware, clothes pins, an overflow of tin cans.
Hare comes to Mom in the early afternoon, repentant in tone, helpful and sweet, wanting to know if there is anything else to be done before she leaves to meet the girls. Mom tells her tersely that she isn’t going anywhere. I sense a danger in her movements, something fraught.
‘I hate you,’ Hare screams. She dusts the piano with furious blows to the keys.
‘Plenty more jobs waiting for you tomorrow,’ Mom tells her.
Mom turns to me, gives a little shake of her head, giggling, as if we are allies and I am having as much fun as she is.
‘What else do you expect?’ I ask. ‘We’re not dogs.’
I turn back to restack the brown shopping bags, already regretting the remark. I feel the silent, unstable atmosphere building behind me. When I turn, betrayal burns on her face.
‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that,’ she cries. ‘Not you.’
Why not me? I have never spoken back to her the way Hare does daily. I jut my hip out with the injustice of it.
She crosses her arms.
I cross my arms.
We lock each other in a glare, the house gleaming all around us. It has never looked so clean. There is a sense that we are going away, leaving for good. Mom laughs. She brings her hand up to her mouth and giggles. I put my arms down and press my lips together, not wanting to give in so easily. She lifts strands of my hair, twists the ends together, brings the pile up close to my chin, surveying me as though seeing me for the first time.
‘Get in the truck,’ she says. ‘We’re going to Carol’s.’
*
Hare storms out of the house and sits down hard on the passenger seat, slamming the car door, the hatred rolling off her. There is no arguing.
‘Haircuts, girls.’ Mom claps. ‘Let’s go get you some smart summer styles.’ She sings her words. She sings to the radio, all the way to Carol’s.
When we pass Maureen’s farm, Mom lays on the horn. Hare startles. I startle, too – but then I laugh, a nervous laugh. Hare’s bewilderment, though, quickly turns to tears. She turns her head and watches the fields move by in a blur, wiping her eyes nearly all the way to the city limits.
Carol lives and works in the last rural farmhouse before the city. A wooden sign hangs off the front porch; her husband hand-painted it: THE VILLAGE BANG. We walk around back to an addition that connects to her house with a screen door. Carol is surprised to see us.
‘I was about to close up shop,’ she tells Mom. She is finishing smoothing the blue-rinsed strands of an older lady’s hair. Mom gestures to the chairs, anyway, and we all take a seat. ‘How’ve you been?’
Carol is Mom’s friend – sort of. That’s how I think of her anyway, the way they are friendly with each other. Carol never stops by our house, and Mom never goes through the door that leads from Carol’s beauty parlour into her kitchen, but they speak to each other like they have known one another a long time. Carol does most of the talking and Mom listens, flipping through magazines from the coffee table.
Hare slumps in the chair beside me. Something like a dishpan rattles in the other room, through the open door of Carol’s kitchen. The customer stares dully at her own reflection while Carol teases her short, tight curls into volumes of fluff orbiting her scalp. All the while Carol speaks at Mom through the mirror about the price of gas. Mom half-listens, half agreeing with a disinterested smile. When Carol turns on the hairdryer, Mom leans over and shoves a magazine under my nose.
‘What do you think about this?’ she asks, excited.
The picture is a famous skater, Dorothy someone-or-other. Her dark, shiny hair is the same colour as mine, but hers is hewn in a wedge below her ears. Hare shifts in her chair to get a better look. She shoots me a warning look. Hare always says Carol is a hairdresser for old ladies.
A girl comes out the doorway that leads from Carol’s kitchen, carrying combs and brushes in a towel. She organises them back onto their hooks on a pegboard by the register. Carol is perpetually training a new girl; we never meet the same girl twice.
The girl sweeps the fluff from underneath Carol’s feet. Carol shakes her head and sets her mouth; she catches Mom’s attention, rolling her eyes.
‘Sonia will take one of the girls,’ she says sharply, which makes me look again at Sonia.
I feel sorry for her and like her at once, with her long hair, shiny and straight and tucked behind her ears, like mine – only hers is so blonde that it looks white. I can sit on my own hair, even when it is tangled. When I was still in elementary school and Mom would remember to come up out of the basement to watch us leave for school, she’d look at my hair as though the knots and tangles were there purposely to annoy her. She’d tear a comb through the strands, catching the snarls in the teeth.
‘It’s full of rats’ nests,’ she’d tell me.
She’d work it backward then, pulling the strands into two tight lines of braids that made the skin behind my ears pinch all the way through lunch.
‘Well?’ Mom asks now.
I shrug. Mom tells me all the time that I need to learn to say no. Now would be a good time to practise, but while I hesitate, she decides.
‘Let’s do it.’ She taps the page off her knee.
‘You girls are getting tall,’ Carol says, walking the lady to the register. The bells on the door rattle when she leaves.
‘She has terrible psoriasis on her scalp,’ Carol whispers, watching the woman get into her car. She shudders. ‘Poor woman.’
Once the lady has closed her car door, Carol’s voice returns to its normal volume.
‘Three grandchildren – they never visit. They live a couple blocks away and it seems they go out of their way to avoid passing her house – unless her daughter needs something.’ She waves to the lady’s car. ‘And she is so nice. I don’t understand. It’s very sad.’
Carol pats the chair, signalling for one of us. Hare bolts out of her seat and sits down. Carol spins her around to face the mirror.
Sonia smiles at me from across the room and pats the chair on the opposite wall. Mom follows me over and shows Sonia the picture. I hardly register the look of concern on Sonia’s face. I am beginning to think how closely the look resembles Lucinda’s cut, which is short, though her hair flips up at the ends and this one tucks under.
‘Are you sure?’ Sonia asks me, when I settle back into the chair. It almost seems she is willing to conspire if I say the word. She pulls my long strands through her fingers.
‘She’s sure,’ Mom answers from across the room. She has opened the magazine before Carol can start talking again.
Sonia washes my hair, and I imagine walking into school in the fall with my new hairstyle and my new friend. She wraps a towel around my head and rubs; some drips fall down my back. She combs all around so that a curtain of hair falls across my eyes. I can see through the parted strands into the mirror: straight black rows, like a field harrowed in spring.
She measures with the tips of her scissors and the point of her comb, brings her scissors to the ready for the first snip, measures again, hesitating as one calculating their entry into a moving skipping rope. Finally, she makes the first snip, and then another. Long black strands fall limp into my lap. Sonia shrugs her shoulders as though shaking off her conscience.
I close my eyes and feel the weight of my hair fall away from my head.
Behind me, Carol attempts to have a conversation with Hare, telling her how her own daughters graduated, how they had been cheerleaders back in high school, when they were Hare’s age.
‘Had the time of their lives.’
Hare stares blankly at herself into the mirror.
‘Are you a cheerleader?’ Carol asks.
‘Nearly,’ Hare answers flatly. ‘Don’t take too much off,’ she adds, ‘just a trim.’
Sonia spins me around so that I face the back wall. I watch their exchange in the mirror. Carol raises her eyebrows and looks pointedly at Mom, who smiles sheepishly and picks up a bottle of lotion on the table beside her.
Carol pumps the pedal on Hare’s chair vigorously, misting the ends of her hair with brisk pulls on the water bottle. She turns her attention to Mom.
‘Any news from your parts?’ Carol asks.
Mom has none.
‘How’s Rita?’
‘Rita’s good.’
‘And Edna? Have you seen her?’
Mom nods. ‘Edna McCarthy? Yes, she’s fine.’
Mom glances down at her magazine, turning the page on her lap.
‘You sure about that?’ Carol has paused, mid-snip, a smug curl to her lip.
‘What about her?’
‘She’s got a new girl staying with her. I hear she is quite a handful.’ She leans down to Hare and evens up her bangs. ‘She’s about your age.’
Hare doesn’t bother telling her we’ve already met Lucinda.
‘I have never seen one hair out of place on Edna – have you? But this girl has Edna positively possessed.’
‘I saw Edna on Memorial Day,’ Mom reports. ‘I’ll have to get out to the farm for a visit.’
‘You do that,’ Carol instructs. She brushes Hare’s long strands, separating them down the middle.
‘Hey, what about that girl drowning in the lake near you?’ she asks. ‘That was terrible.’
‘Yes, it was.’ Mom glances at me, sensing me tense.
‘They cancelled the parade.’
‘Yes, they did.’
‘She was a cousin of one of my clients. You know Josey Stephens? They came in before the funeral, the family all distraught. Imagine losing your child – any way would be horrible, but drowning?’ Carol’s scissors stop mid-air; she presses her lips together. ‘Oh, Rosemary, I’m so sorry – I’d forgotten.’ She puts her scissors down to her side, and her face drops.
Hare looks up at Mom in the mirror.
Mom stares down at her magazine.
‘That’s tough . . .’
‘It’s all right,’ Mom says firmly.
Carol takes her scissors back to the ends of Hare’s hair, snips crisply. She talks faster, not stopping for breath.
Mom occasionally mumbles ‘hmm’ in response. Soon I lose interest; Carol’s voice becomes like a washing-machine spinning out in the background: loud and annoying and something to ignore.
‘Jack and I are driving to Elvis country for the Fourth.’
‘Hmm.’
‘We can do that now the girls are grown up. Taking the convertible. It’ll cost a fortune in gas, but when will we ever do it if we don’t do it now?’
Mom doesn’t have an answer for this.
‘Are you going anywhere yourselves?’ Carol asks Mom.
‘Maureen’s having everyone over to the farm,’ Mom says.
Hare looks up at her then; for the first time, she seems interested.
‘I hear she’s back home now.’
Mom straightens, then shifts, in her chair.
‘You’re practically on each other’s doorsteps.’ Carol isn’t ready to let up. ‘How nice.’
Mom turns the page, bows her head back down to the magazine.
Hare shoots me a look in the mirror. She does a double take, squints.
Sonia swivels the chair and concentrates on my bangs, clipping a little here, then a little there. She brushes them one way, then the other. Her brow wrinkles, puzzling something over, then measures again as she takes another little snip.
Carol decides to change the subject. She lowers her voice conspiratorially. ‘You heard about the Shirey boy?’
‘Hmm,’ Mom says. I am not sure if this means that she has or she hasn’t. But I am hoping Carol will say more so I can hear about the Shirey boy.
‘Caught.’ Carol puts her tongue in her cheek.
I have no idea what this means. Mom doesn’t confirm or deny that she knows or doesn’t know exactly what happened with the Shirey boy. She lifts her eyelids and tips her head back a little, showing mild shock, but her distant smile never fades.
‘There’s something for you,’ Carol says, catching Mom looking at the products displayed on the table.
‘Hmm,’ Mom says again, turning a bottle over in her hand, reading the ingredients.
‘That’s my new line. It’s the three-step cleansing process. You’ve got your cleanser, your toner, your clarifying lotion.’ Carol’s voice changes from conspiracy to commercial, like a cheap ad on television selling salad-chopping instruments.
‘I’ll take your order if you want to think about it. Usually takes three weeks to deliver. Or I’ve a few sets in the back if you want to take some home today, give them a try. They’re moving pretty quick. It’ll change your life.’
I very much doubt this and hope Mom won’t fall for it.
‘Oh, really?’
‘What are you using at the moment?’
‘Ivory soap.’
‘Oh, dear.’ Carol’s voice takes a dramatic turn. ‘That’s OK for now – you’re young – but give it a few years, hon, and that soap will turn you to leather.’ She shakes her head, concerned, and looks at Mom in the mirror. ‘It’s an investment. But you’re worth it – I would hope Danny sees it that way.’
‘Hmm,’ Mom says again. She seems so small, there, at once – and beautiful, with her legs crossed underneath her. Her hair is natural and soft with curls – curls Hare inherited. Mom trims it herself to keep the split ends away. She pulls it back or pins it up most of the time, but I love when it sits on her shoulders, like now. Her eyelids are plump and rounded, rosy on the lids when she closes them, squinting to read the print on the bottles.
She looks from Carol to the beauty products. Her consideration of the bottles gives me a swollen ache in my throat. I look at Carol in the mirror, her scissors clipping furiously at the ends of my sister’s wet hair, and I think of how much more beautiful Mom is than Carol, with Carol’s sharp nose and jet-black hair, dyed and chopped too short so that it sticks up like a bird on the crown of her head.
‘Head down,’ Sonia instructs, tilting my head forward. She doesn’t seem as gentle now.
‘I’ll give it a try,’ Mom tells Carol. She sounds unsure or a little embarrassed – or both.
‘You won’t be sorry,’ Carol tells her authoritatively.
Sonia clips closer and closer to my ear. She turns the chair toward herself and tells me to look up while she clips across my bangs again. She looks terror-stricken now; she moves my chin abruptly and clips above the other ear. I am terror-stricken, too, afraid to look.
Carol pats Hare’s shoulder, and she climbs out of the chair, slumps into a seat by the register; she picks up a magazine. Carol sweeps up the clippings. There are so few that they seem like a light pile of feathers, like the ones that come out so easily from the corners of my pillow. Below me, my own dark pile of hair looks like the long tails of dead rodents. When Sonia swivels me back toward the mirror, I can’t bear to look.
Mom pays at the register, asking for the price of the bottles along with our haircuts.
Sonia turns me toward the mirror and moves my head up, trimming here, moving it down, trimming there. I keep my eyes on the strip of lights running along the table under the mirror.
Carol takes the money and picks up the broom again. She follows the long strips on the floor up to my face.
‘What in the world have you done to this child?’
When I finally look up, I watch Sonia, not my own reflection: her face crumpling, lips trembling, tears streaming down her face and onto the back of my neck.
Carol hands Sonia the broom. She swivels the chair around one way, and then the other. I feel as though I am the styling-head doll that I didn’t ask for but received one year for Christmas; I never even pulled it out of the box. Carol pulls her fingers through what remains of my hair.
I bring myself to glance at the mirror. My bangs, wet, look like the serrated cardboard in a book of matches. Mom and Hare stalk up beside me; their faces look as though they are registering a car crash or a puzzle or both. Hare’s puzzlement quickly turns to mirth. She tries to supress it, but this only makes it worse. She hisses like the opening of a shaken bottle of pop, effervescent laughter escaping from behind her hands.
Mom shoves her out of the way and lifts the magazine, shifting through pages for the image as though this will change the outcome.
‘This is not what we asked for,’ she is telling Carol. ‘Her bangs are like a ski slope!’
‘It’s only her second haircut!’ Carol barks.
‘Look at her.’ Mom sounds confused and angry.
‘What did you expect?’ I’m not sure if Carol is saying this to Sonia or Mom or herself.
