by Quan Barry
Later in the week, sister papers the Salem Evening News and the Beverly Times would get in on the action, both newspapers running the exact same rags-to-riches story about us under the generic headline “Local Sports Team Makes It to States.” Their photographer wasn’t any more forgiving, just a quick “Hey, look over here,” leaving Mel Boucher blinded and mole-like on the front page of two different sports sections.
With our media domination under way, Girl Cory’s stepdad called a buddy of his at the Boston Globe to see if he could get us a feature. Larry was told the game might get an inch or two if we were lucky, and even then, it would only happen afterward. Also, there would be no photo. Only Larry was put out by this news. For Jen Fiorenza’s sake, the rest of us were glad her secret wouldn’t be printed in 100,000 newspapers and distributed all over greater New England. Showing up in her current condition in the local pages of the Herald, the News, and the Times was bad enough.
In the early days of the hysteria, we were still not openly talking about what was going down with Jen. Even while Mo was taking our photo as he simultaneously picked something out of his teeth, Jen Fiorenza stood proudly in the middle of our squad next to Abby Putnam, her oldest friend in the world, our two captains fearlessly brandishing a pair of crossed field hockey sticks between them. Though Jen was dead center, she held her head high but to the side as if she were looking off into some glorious future where we were already state champs. Even as she posed like that, you could still tell something wasn’t quite adding up. None of us said anything out loud, but Heather Houston summed up our thoughts as follows: res ipse loquitur. The thing speaks for itself.
When the first photo was published in the Danvers Herald, kids all over school started whispering. Everything the peanut gallery said was true. Even Jen knew it. You couldn’t argue with facts. And the fact was the Claw looked as if a middle-aged man with a comb-over had decided to style his hair like a seventeen-year-old girl.
In a nutshell: the Claw wasn’t what It used to be.
As in: It was thinning.
As in: It was falling out.
As in: somebody should’ve called Jen’s priest to come administer extreme unction.
As in: Brian Robinson and his crew of football Neanderthals began referring to Jen as Cancer Patient #1. Even gentleman quarterback Log Winters couldn’t help but snicker each time someone said it.
Yeah, it was cruel, but it was high school. Brian Robinson was just barely smart enough to stick to the first rule of comedy: know your audience. Secretly, we had to hand it to Jen. As things began to unravel, she kept up a brave face, shellacking her eyes peacock blue and gold with emerald green smeared in the crease in an effort to divert attention from the calamity taking place upstairs. In some ways, it was amazing it hadn’t happened well before this point. It stands to reason that even a strand of hair, which is basically just a helix of dead cells forking out of a follicle, can only take so much. Maybe this was the Claw’s way of saying It was damn mad and It wasn’t going to take it anymore. Or maybe years of Clairol’s “Does she or doesn’t she?” meant the end was finally nigh.
Jen took it all in stride, each morning artfully arranging the ever-diminishing grandeur of the Claw into a facsimile of Its former glory. The Claw’s ups and downs closely mirrored the trials and tribulations of 77 Carolyn Drive, where the Claw had made Its first appearance on the world stage in the Fiorenza winter of discontent otherwise known as December 1986. What we learned over time: the old adage you are what you eat got it all wrong. What it should have said: you are what you grow.
* * *
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Jen Fiorenza might have been an only child, but the whole world knew she had a twin, hairily speaking. The Fiorenza Twins were born one slushy December night two days before New Year’s ’86. 1986 had been a tough one for 77 Carolyn Drive, the Fiorenza homestead. Even now, out of all of us, only Abby Putnam remembered Mr. Fiorenza well enough to be able to pick him out of a lineup should it ever have come to that, which thankfully it never did. Tony Fiorenza was a paramedic who had a soft spot for the Boston sports teams. It was rumored that said soft spot put Tony $40,000 in the hole with various gentlemen in Southie. Things would’ve been okay if Mr. Fiorenza only had a soft spot for his beloved Celtics, who won three national championships in the 1980s. But unfortunately, Tony Fiorenza’s soft spot extended to the Bruins, the Patriots, and those lovable losers the Red Sox, who, in October of ’86, let a World Series slip through their legs. Thus, when Southie comes a-callin’, as it did to many an unfortunate Bosox fan that autumn, it’s time to go, and so by New Year’s Eve 1986, the Fiorenza homestead was Mr. Fiorenza–less.
In hindsight it was weird how Jen was the only one of us whose parents were divorced. It was just one of those things we never really thought about. According to various after-school specials, we were supposed to be the Latchkey Kid Generation. At the end of the school day in cities and towns across America, millions of kids everywhere were allegedly letting themselves into a silent house with the keys hanging around their sad little necks like a soldier’s dog tags. But in practice we didn’t actually know too many kids like that. Go figure. The kids we did know whose parents were divorced all had two distinguishing characteristics in common: (a) they all lived with their moms, and (b) their moms were always invariably financially struggling.
Ana Fiorenza was no exception. She worked as a psych nurse at Danvers State, officially known as the State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers. The job was enough to cover the modest ranch on Carolyn Drive, but there were no trips to Disney World during April vacation, no car for Jen’s sweet sixteenth, new or used. Still, Ana tried to make her daughter’s life as interesting as possible. She did this inadvertently by reversing their positions in a kind of Freaky Friday move but without the actual body swapping. In other words, the mother became the teen daughter and vice versa. Things worked out pretty well for one of them. The other one? Not so much.
That night in December 1986, Ana wasn’t looking forward to the new year. Tony had been gone since the Series between the Red Sox and the Mets ended badly for Boston. At the very least Ana had convinced her ex-husband not to fake his own death. She pointed out that it was both cliché plus it never worked unless you lucked out like that father and son who most likely swam away after the commercial jet they were on skidded off the runway at Logan into Boston Harbor. The bodies of father and son were never recovered, the two of them the only fatalities in an otherwise-uneventful airline mishap. No bodies meant tongues started wagging. There was talk of loan sharks, which maybe explained why the Boston Police barely scanned the waters of Boston Harbor before hitting Dunkin’ Donuts. Ana told Tony he couldn’t count on being so fortunate. His best bet was to head to Florida and work his tail off to try to raise the money. And with that, he was off for sunnier climes.
On the night of the Claw’s birth, the clock was coming up on 1:00 a.m. The house smelled like burnt popcorn. A special Tuesday-night edition of Friday Night Videos had just ended, Madonna bouncing across the screen in a strapless black jumpsuit in “Papa Don’t Preach.” At least Jen didn’t have to worry about that. Tony wasn’t in any position to pass judgment on anything she did. Not that she’d done anything yet.
“Do blonds really have more fun?” Jen asked her mom. She was a freshman at Danvers High. At fourteen years of age, she still valued her mother’s opinions. Their Freaky Friday role reversal was yet to come, though tonight they would take their first steps toward merging.
Ana dropped her Newport Light in an empty Seagram’s Golden Wine Cooler bottle. “Let’s find out,” she said. She got up off the couch and disappeared into the bathroom. A few minutes later she came back out with everything they’d need.
They both saw results within a week of bleaching their dark brunette a brassy orange. At school, a pimply sophomore boy who at least owned his own car asked Jen if she wanted to go see Friday the 13th Part V
I. Jen saw that and then some and came home a woman. At work, Ana ended up having sex for the first time in months in a supply closet with a married psychiatrist. And so life as blonds proved good. It was as if as their hair got lighter, it also got lighter, their bangs beginning to physically defy the laws of gravity. What had started off as mother-and-daughter mole hills eventually grew into mother and daughter mountains. Everywhere, the culture approved. On MTV, men in spandex ran around with hair big as Bodhi trees, their hair a shelter from any storm. Like C.C. DeVille, the lead guitarist in Poison, his hair a blond fire raging a good seven inches off the top of his head.
Through the years the Fiorenza Claws evolved from Cream Soda to Champagne to Cool Blond to Icy Blond to Silver to Titanium. Every three weeks mother and daughter took turns brushing the smelly paste onto the other one’s roots, Dynasty or Knots Landing playing in the background. It had all the trappings of a ritual. Sometimes Ana made margaritas while they bleached, other times Jen whipped up cookies. Depending on how badly Ana’s day had gone at the State Lunatic Hospital, an occasional roach might pass between them, said spliff often resulting in their hair accidentally lightening further up another shade on the color wheel. In between bleachings, Jen would maintain her look with a few well-placed squirts of Sun In followed by high heat from her Conair blow-dryer.
Question: Have you ever gotten to the point where something in your life was such an integral part of your identity that to be without it would make you unrecognizable to yourself? No need to answer. If you’re alive, we’ll assume it’s a yes, and if you’re a girl, we’ll put you down as a hell yeah. Please remember it was the era of conspicuous consumption. Greed was good. Bigger was better. The Claw got the Fiorenza Twins noticed. There was no going back.
And so like all good stories of ascendancy, the Fiorenza Claw finally arrived at the end of the line. Jen couldn’t really say when she first noticed the hair on her pillow in the mornings, hair in the shower, hair on the carpet, hair in her cereal bowl, silver threads like tumbleweeds blowing through every room of the house. Maybe it all started when Clay moved in with his Nintendo and terrarium for Iggy Pop, his pet iguana. Clay was a janitor at the State Lunatic Hospital. Allegedly he was also taking classes at the community college, though in what nobody was quite sure. He and Ana had been “running into each other” in the supply closet for six months when he got kicked out by his roommates for letting Iggy have the run of the place. Before Jen could even say, “Why?” Ana suggested he and Iggy move into 77 Carolyn Drive instead.
If pushed on it, Jen might’ve conceded that Clay’s arrival was the beginning of the end of the Claw. Clay himself was a David Lee Roth look-alike, his naturally blond hair luscious and full in a California-kissed kind of way, not overly mussed or overly moussed. Honestly, his was the kind of hair both Jen and her mother would have killed for. But now when Jen came home from school, there was Clay and her mom sitting on the sofa eating Rocco’s Hawaiian pizza, Clay slathering Ana’s roots with crème developer as Joan Collins bitch-slapped some nemesis on TV, Clay helping her rinse when the timer dinged. And to make it all worse there was Iggy Pop wrapped up in an old sweater and nestled in Ana’s arms like a newborn baby just as Clay was removing the towel to reveal Ana’s newly revitalized locks.
Maybe the Claw was just sad about being displaced. Maybe that’s why each night Jen’s hair wistfully loosened from her scalp like autumn leaves from a tree. Or maybe something foul was afoot. After all, we were living in the Town of Danvers. 77 Carolyn Drive was just a hop, skip, and jump from the Salem Village Meeting House a mile up Hobart where something wicked this way had indeed come almost three hundred years ago. Yeah, mos def something foul was going on with Jen’s hair. It was like a plot straight out of Sue Yoon’s beloved Murder, She Wrote. In the winter of 1692, the udders of local cows dried up into milkless leather gloves practically overnight, most likely due to someone’s evil eye, or so the local denizens believed. December 1989 it wasn’t too much of a stretch to say Jen’s Claw began to wither just as her mom’s began to bloom. At least that was our story and we were sticking to it.
* * *
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Wednesday morning the Advanced English teacher Mrs. Sears couldn’t close her mouth. “The sheer nerve of it!” she stammered, her pale hand clutching her fake pearls.
In all her twenty-six years of teaching, there’d never been a need to put a lock on the book cabinet where she kept the full state-approved curriculum plus the summer reading, everything from To Kill a Mockingbird to King Lear to The Once and Future King to Brave New World to Emma. It wasn’t like kids were hot to get their hands on The Fountainhead. Why lock up what she could barely get students to even crack open? What unnerved her most was that she might not even have noticed the theft until next fall except for the fact that she’d been looking for that specific teacher’s edition because it was where she’d stashed a blank check to help pay for the joke bustier-and-thong set the faculty bought for ancient Mrs. Bentley’s birthday.
Within minutes of being notified, Principal Jack Yoff came in to sniff around. The cabinet looked ordered, everything in its place. But where the teacher’s edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn should’ve been along with sixty-five copies of the paperback, there was simply an empty space on the shelf, a neat hole like when a tooth gets punched out. When she’d opened the cabinet, Mrs. Sears’ jaw had dropped hard. It was still hanging open incredulously as she tried to regain her composure over a cup of coffee during morning donuts in the teachers’ lounge.
“Does anyone have anything stronger?” asked Coach Nutting. The Home Ec teacher Mrs. Emerson came forward with a small yet tasteful flask, which she somehow pulled out of her bra. She placed a heavy pour of Southern Comfort in Mrs. Sears’ Cathy coffee mug.
“Who would do such a thing?” Mrs. Sears asked. “Is nothing sacred?” She was shaking so bad the school nurse had put one of those tinfoil emergency blankets around her shoulders.
“Bastards,” said Principal Yoff.
“You already read it?” asked Coach Nutting.
“Of course,” said Mrs. Sears. “Seniors open the school year with Huck Finn.”
“Too bad, that could’ve meant one less book,” he conjectured as he popped a chocolate Munchkin in his mouth.
Our own Coach Butler was subbing that day for the American History teacher Mr. Matthews, which meant there would be no history test on the Korean War, another generation of American students left fuzzy on just what exactly the TV show M*A*S*H was all about.
“Shouldn’t we call the police?” asked Mrs. Sears.
“They’re coming in anyway,” said Principal Yoff. “The PTA still wants answers about whether or not Coach Mullins was cavorting among the mermaids.”
The teachers all looked at him, wondering if “cavorting” was code for something even worse than they were already picturing. We were getting our intel secondhand through Coach Butler. At Tuesday afternoon practice we’d made it official and had her sign a fresh page in Emilio. We said it was just a scrapbook chronicling our tremendous season. Eagerly she took up a pen and put her John Hancock down on the page. We thought we were being clever. Turns out she was the clever one. Marge had known about our blue armbands for quite a while, ever since that practice where she’d made us run wind sprints in the freezing rain. That day, she’d decided to tie herself up in the name of camaraderie. But now that her actual name was in the book, Emilio was going live and giving her the full treatment. According to Jen Fiorenza, by the time Marge figured out it wasn’t just her imagination but the actual voices of her eleven varsity starters raging around inside her head, Worcester would be long over and we’d cut her loose.
“What is this world coming to?” said poor Mrs. Sears. She held out her Cathy coffee mug for more Southern Comfort. Jack Yoff pulled a full bottle of Wild Turkey out from the bottom of a hollowed-out fire extinguisher. In a way, they owed the
book thief one. Morning donuts never went down so good.
* * *
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D period an announcement came on through the PA system. “What?” said a voice. “No, I didn’t know it was on sale. Where? At Kappy’s?” It was Mrs. Fellows, the principal’s secretary. “My hubby won’t touch the hard stuff, but I like it,” she slurred. “Oh. I’m on? Bottoms up!” She cleared her throat and tried to pull herself together. “Good morning, Falcons,” she said. Her intonation reminded us of the voice on Charlie’s Angels, the one that poured through the white speaker box at the start of every episode and had made a nine-year-old Sue Yoon think Charlie was a disembodied robot. “Would the following students please report to Room 138?” Mrs. Fellows then proceeded to butcher all our names, including Abby Putnam’s, which she pronounced “Ab Eye Gail.” One by one wherever we were across the vast galaxy that was Danvers High, we closed our Trapper Keepers, said our goodbyes, and headed for the door.
The first of us to arrive at Room 138 found now-less-than-intrepid Falcon Fire reporter Nicky Higgins and her barbed-wire jaw sitting at a desk. Quickly Nicky rolled out whatever she had going in the Smith-Corona Correction Electric II and scuttled out of the room. Room 138 was the typing studio. We should have paid more attention to what she was up to, but the smell of the law was in the air and we didn’t give Darling Nicky any mind.