How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane

by Johanna Stein

Passive-aggressive expert that I am, my immediate impulse was just to override his concerns, present my daughter with her wonderful new Holiday Shrub, and henceforth be the titleholder of the Best Parent Award. But my cooler brain cell prevailed; this was going to take a little time and a lot of finesse. And if not that, then some harsh words followed by several well-focused silent treatments.

  But in that moment, with just twenty minutes before I had to pick up the kid from her preschool, I pulled a quick detour by the home of my friend Christina, whose name is no coincidence: her holiday rituals are staggering—she spends more in a month on tinsel than I do in a year on my hair.

  I carried the HS up to Christina’s second-floor apartment (stabbing myself in the face with its hypodermic-like needles as I went), set it on the landing, and rang the bell. I figured I could leave it with her for a day or two, or as long as it took for me to talk the husband into letting it live with us.

  As I made my way down the stairwell, Christina peeked her head out of her door.

  “MERRY CHRISTMAS!” I called out.

  “GET THAT UGLY-ASS CACTUS OUT OF MY HALLWAY” she called back.

  I explained my predicament—that I was on my way to pick up the kid and couldn’t risk her seeing the HS before clearing it with the husband. Christina’s thoughtful response was that I should “GET IT THE HELL OUT OF HERE RIGHT NOW.”

  I dragged the HS down the stairs (more facial stabbing), shoved it into the back of my truck, and, with just seconds to spare, sped to the preschool, where I found the kid proudly spinning the clay dreidel she’d made that afternoon. It looked like a four-sided blob of sparkly fecal matter, but as we walked to the car the kid babbled excitedly about the upcoming “Festival of Lights,” and as I buckled the kid into her car seat, I found myself getting choked up at her enthusiasm for this relatively minor Jewish holiday.

  “SOMETHING SMELLS LIKE GUM!” she said, unaware that twelve inches behind her head, doused in fake pine scent, was the answer to her dreams. Or were they mine? I was no longer sure.

  When we arrived home, the husband hugged me. “I’ve thought it over . . . Let’s do it,” he said. “Let’s keep the tree.”

  “No,” I whispered. “I’m taking it back tomorrow. No tree for us. We’re Jews. Big Jews. Jew Jew Jew Jew Jews.”

  The husband rolled his eyes and threw his hands up in a particular combination of exasperation and acceptance that I have come to know so well.

  Driving the child the next morning to preschool—her adorably Jew-y preschool—I felt at peace. It had taken years of inner struggle, but I was finally, truly ready to put my Christmas obsession into permanent storage. I was so focused on my admirable decision-making skills, in fact, that I hadn’t noticed the flashing blue and red lights behind me. It wasn’t until I heard the siren that I pulled over, in front of the kid’s preschool.

  The officer stomped toward my window.

  “You know you were goin’ twenty-five in a fifteen-mile-an-hour school zone?”

  “Was I? I didn’t realize. We didn’t want to be late. My daughter actually goes to preschool here . . .”

  “Oh yeah?” The officer seemed to soften. “My niece goes there too. It’s a sweet place.” He flashed a kind smile to my daughter, who smiled back.

  Then his expression turned to puzzlement as he looked beyond the kid to the green needle-y branches behind her head. He then shook his head and turned back to me, his face betrayed by the weariness of someone who gets lied to on a regular basis.

  “Nice ‘Christmas Tree’ you got there.”

  Before I could explain myself, and just as the words “HOLIDAY SHRUB . . .” tried to flee from my lips, I heard an ear-splitting squeal, and in the rearview I watched as my kid’s head rotated 180 degrees.

  “MOMMA, YOU GOT ME A CHRISTMAS TREE?! YAYYYYYY!!!!”

  There were so many things I could have/should have said. Instead, I just kept my mouth shut and held out my hand as Officer Greenberg handed me my ticket.

  That night we stood, the husband, the kid, and I: three Jews hanging Christmas lights and blobby Hanukkah decorations around a sharp, slouching bush, praying to God (or somebody) that nobody would put an eye out.

  “DO YOU THINK SANTA WILL COME?” the kid asked.

  I looked at the husband. He shrugged.

  “Sure,” I sighed. “Why not?”

  And he did. And it was good. And it was all thanks to a cranky police officer who’d forced our hands into making a simple, deliberate decision—that we would create our own holiday rituals, starting with the concepts of Inclusion and Joy. So this year there will be a tree and a menorah, stockings and dreidels, bagels and turkey, and a nighttime visit from some milk-and-cookie-fueled chubster in a red getup. And the following day we’ll invite our friends over for a Stein Day dinner. There will be plenty of gratitude for flexible family, and the halls will ring with singing and the voices of well-wishers calling out: “Merry Christmukkah-SteinMas to All, and to All a Good Night!”

  *I’m guessing I don’t need to explain what “kiki” means, but suffice it to say I have not had it waxed in a long time. I.e.: Ever.

  *Let the record show that I have since learned that Winnipeg is a veritable hotbed of Canadian Jewry. Clearly I should have gotten out more.

  *Except without the bong.

  sixteen

  THE VERY BAD HAIR DAY

  It’s the smell that hits you first. Like a mixture of Kool-Aid, nail-polish remover, and dirty nickels soaked in spit.

  As we enter, the four-year-old child emits a squeal that causes my pupils to dilate. I can’t exactly blame her; this place—a hair-salon entry into the lucrative children’s market—has been scientifically engineered for the delight of her species.

  We are greeted at reception by a disturbingly cheerful, tiara-wearing, Tigger tattoo–having girl named Caitlin, whose every sentence! Is punctuated by! An Exclamation!! Mark!!!!! She ushers us through the salon, giving us the apparently earth-shattering news that “YOU’RE WITH JENNA! OH EM GEE, I LOOOVE JENNA!”

  The place feels vaguely like a Chuck E. Cheese, only more hygienic and 15 percent less barfy. Colored lights flash on cartoon murals of oily-looking princes and brainless princesses; happy clients suck on lollipops in barber chairs built to look like race cars, rocket ships, and royal carriages; while pop music by singers with dolphin-pitched voices fills the air.

  It’s every kid’s dream—and for me a nightmare of Saw 14 proportions.

  I clench my jaw, personally offended that this place has the audacity to exist. I know I sound like my future grandma self when I say this, but What The Hell Have We Become? When I was a kid my mom would grab her pinking shears,* tell me to shut my eyes, and eight minutes of dangerous-implement wielding later, I had a perfectly good haircut that, if I tilted my head to one side, was pretty much passable.

  And if I sound crotchety right now, that’s because crotchety is the condition in which I find myself as I take in this overstimulating, acid-trip panorama through my strained and baggy red-rimmed eyes.

  The fact is that three weeks ago, said child did extract from me, in a weak moment,† a promise that I would bring her to this place for a haircut. And even though said child cannot seem to remember that “Tuesday” does not follow “November” on the calendar, she was able to recall that “TODAY IS HAIRCUT DAY!”—about ten minutes before the appointment. And though I may be a crank of immense proportions, I will not renege on our deal because I am a woman of honor. (Also, they made me give them a credit card number to hold the reservation, and there’s a twenty-five-dollar fee to cancel. Jerks.)

  My daughter eeny-meeny-minies between a hot-air-balloon chair and a royal-carriage chair (she “wins” the hot-air balloon, then picks the carriage anyway—clearly her sense of honor is not as strong as mine) and is then greeted by Jenna, yet another horrifyingly bright-eyed and cartoon-character-tattooed maiden who will be cutting the kid’s hair at a cost of approximately a dollar per strand.

  Af
ter a quick conference with Jenna about what we’re looking for: price (low) and style (who cares), I warn the child that she is not to request any extras (no bows, tiaras, gowns, or live Clydesdales) and to not even think about playing the extortionist Claw Grabber Game in the corner, and then I slither over to the bench to stew in what is probably number 3 in my list of Top-Ten Nonspecific Yet Supremely Foul Moods I Have Been In.

  I take a seat in the waiting area, where my thighs—the ones that have been struggling to escape the ill-fitting jean skort I’d thrown on before running out the door—are sticking to the painted wooden bench under them, making a nauseating FWAP FWAP sound every time I move, while twelve inches from my head an unattended toddler pounds away at the paddles on a retro Strawberry Shortcake pinball machine (BLAPATTA-BLAPATTA-BLAPATTA).

  Shifting uncomfortably (FWAP FWAP), I mull over the seventeen-item to-do list (CHANGE OIL, POST OFFICE, VET BILL) that is weighing heavily on my mind (PAY TRAFFIC TICKET, PICK UP PRESCRIPTION), or rather on my hand, where I wrote it (BLAPPATA BLAPPATA BLAPPATA ) in pen while driving here because I couldn’t get it together (FWAP FWAP FWAP) to buy a friggin notepad (BUY FRIGGIN NOTEPAD).

  I glance out the window and lock eyes with a sullen, mean-faced lady wearing a hat that appears to have been knitted from a knotted-up bundle of yak hair. Then I realize that the window is actually a mirror, and the mean-faced lady is me. And PS: it’s not a hat.

  I reach up and attempt to rearrange the yarn ball, but it’s pointless. I close my eyes and make a mental note to add “HAVE HAIR BALL REMOVED FROM HEAD” to my ever-growing to-do list, because of course I can’t find a pen to add to my list of hand-inked chores.

  A rhinestone-encrusted head rises up from behind the faux-castle reception desk.

  “EFF WHY EYE! YOU KNOW WE DO BIG GIRLS TOO, RIGHT???”

  Let me get this straight, crown-wearing commoner, I think. You really believe that I’m going to hop up into one of those thrones and submit to having my hair cut by some chirpy-faced, perky-chested beauty-school dropout with Disney characters tattooed on her arms? If I had an ounce of energy right now, I would fly at you like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill and pluck out your left—

  “IT’S ‘MOM-DAY MON-DAY,’ AND MOM’S ARE FREEEEE!!!!!”

  —then again, perhaps I thought-spoke too soon.

  “I THINK MILLIE’S AVAILABLE! SHE’S OUR MOST REQUESTED!”

  Caitlin picks up a phone and then squeals into it with a level of excitement I’ve only ever seen on The Price Is Right, “I HAVE A WALK-IN!”

  After a moment she hangs up. “YOU’RE GOING TO ADORE MILLIE!”

  Don’t tell me what to adore, I want to say. You don’t know me, and if you did, you’d stop talking in that particular way that makes my spine want to shoot out of my back. But of course, I don’t actually say any of that out loud. I’m far too annoyed/Canadian/passive-aggressive to do that. But the fact is that I do need a haircut, and it’s not like I have a regular stylist that I’d be cheating on.* Also, in some perverse way I’m looking forward to the opportunity of spreading my bad mood like a lip herpes.

  A velvet doorway curtain swishes, and through it walks Millie. Not exactly as I’d pictured her, Millie’s about thirty—make that forty—years older than I’d imagined. And bigger. About the size of two Caitlins and a Jenna. No Tigger tattoos on her fleshy arms, but there is bounce aplenty. And her chest is not so much perky as it is microwave-size, and restrained by what I’m guessing must be a very powerful, military-issue brassiere.

  Millie beckons for me to follow her. I do, drafting behind her wide backside and taking in her peculiar smell—part sweet, part salty, part dill. Not bad, exactly, though it does make me the tiniest bit hungry.

  She guides me past the race-car chair that, had I been in a better mood, I might have rallied for, and into a plain old stylist chair that’s a little more my size and speed.

  Millie covers me in a pink smock that’s been painted to look like a princess gown. She has difficulty with the tie in the back and mumbles something behind my head—“Bool-sheet cack”—which I realize are the first words I’ve heard come out of her mouth, and which, if you say them quietly to yourself (as I did, several times), you come to realize is some pretty powerful profanity, filtered through her vaguely eastern European accent.

  I look around the room to see if anyone has heard her. No, seems all the other stylists are occupied with their hyperactive, sugar-bombed clients.

  Millie wets my hair down with a spray bottle filled with a solution that smells like straight bubblegum water and begins combing out the nest on my head. “How old?” She juts her chin in the direction of my child, who at this moment is across the room, beaming as Jenna tosses into her hair a handful of sparkles that I will be vacuuming out of our carpets for the next eighteen months.

  “She’s four years old.”

  Millie emits a series of staccato grunts. “Mmh mmh mmh,” she says, nodding knowingly, as though I’ve just delivered a dark and unrepeatable confession. As though “She’s four years old” has told her more than she would ever need to know (like the fact that, earlier today, while trying to show me her new pill-bug pet, my daughter slammed her palm into my face and gave me a bloody nose, for example).

  Millie leans over and whispers, “I don’t usually do this. The little ones don’t like it so much.”

  “Do what?” I ask.

  Millie doesn’t answer; she just lays her fingers on my head and begins to massage it. Actually, not so much massage my head as assault it. She must have at some point in her life milked cows full-time, because this woman has the finger strength of fifteen dairy farmers. Of course the young ones don’t like this—no child’s skull could withstand this kind of force; their heads would literally explode into puffs of confetti—but me, I simply surrender to the awesome power of Millie’s man-hands, resisting the urge to cry while she squeezes my temples as though she is trying to get her fingers to touch somewhere in the middle.

  As I close my eyes and give myself over to Millie’s massausage fingers, memories begin flooding in—like the time I was fourteen and my friend’s sister took us to see a Chippendale’s show, and when one of the dancers came into the audience to hand out flowers, I gave him a dollar and tried to French-kiss the poor, frightened, nearly nude man . . . Dear Lord, I haven’t thought about that in years. What’s happening? Am I lucid dreaming? Having a stroke? Am I high? Or is it possible that Millie just touched my soul?

  I open my eyes to see Millie now holding a large pair of scissors (regular, not pinking). She gives me a once-over.

  “Not too short? Just trim?” she asks.

  I nod, cross-eyed, unable to form even a word, and vaguely aware of the bad mood I came in with. What was I mad about exactly? It was important, wasn’t it? Oh, yeah. My hand. The list. This place. That kid. I’m still mad about all those things . . . right?

  Millie begins to cut my hair, quickly and deftly, fluttering in circles around me with the grace of Baryshnikov, if he were a 200-pound, sixty-five-year-old woman from an indeterminate eastern European country. She stops in front of me and begins to chisel away at my bangs like a sculptor, leaving me for a disturbingly long time at eye level with her terrifying chest, its cleavage so impossibly deep it seems she could store legal-size folders in there, maybe even a credit card reader.

  I ask Millie—as much to confirm that I still have the ability to speak as anything else—“So . . . do you like working here?”

  “Is good,” she says. “I was working before at downtown salon. I had lady who ask me to make her look like Halle Berry. She was seventy-eight-year-old white woman. I say, I want also to look like Halle Berry. I would like also for my husband not be fekking the landlady, but you know we do not live in fantasy land.”

  I am caught so off-guard by this admission that I reflexively reach for my neck like an elderly southern lady clutching at her pearls.

  “Oh! And so . . . So then you came to work here?”

  �
��After I am fired, yes. I like it very much.”

  “You like working with children?” I ask.

  She nods. “They dun’t complain. Sometimes they cry, or make peess in their pants, but only because they are scared. I like the difficult ones, the ones who make tantrums. I tell them I am witch. When they ask if I am good witch, I say, ‘What do you think?’ They dun’t cry after that.”

  Millie lowers her voice and leans in to my ear. “My extra-special ones,” she whispers, “sometimes I let them under wig to see.” Then she adjusts her own hair by about 45 degrees. This causes me to flinch, which I then attempt to cover with a brief coughing fit.

  “Do you—do you have kids?” I ask.

  She is quiet for a moment, with a silence that speaks volumes. Perhaps her children have died. Or maybe she couldn’t have any. Whatever the reason, it makes me want to hold her—

  “My son drop out of law school to be rapper. My daughter is on third husband. Such disappointments.” She sprays the air with Kool-Aid mist as if to cleanse it of their memory.

  Suddenly, CAITLIN! comes over. As Millie turns, I catch the glint of something shiny poking out of her brassiere—perhaps it’s a section of overburdened underwire gone AWOL? Or maybe it’s the edge of a flask? Or a KGB-issued 9mm Makarov semiautomatic pistol? She moves too fast for me to be sure of anything.

  Meanwhile, CAITLIN! whispers something to Millie, who grunt-responds, “Mmh mmh mmh,” and then whispers something back. Caitlin nods. Have I just witnessed a hit being ordered on someone’s life? Or has some little kid plugged the toilet in the back? Rationally, I know that I’m letting my imagination get carried away. But still, my mouth goes dry at the possibilities.

  Millie, still talk-grunting with CAITLIN! reaches into her smock pocket, pulls out a purple lollipop, lays it on my lap, and flashes a knowing smile my way. Is she reading my thoughts? How else could she know the dryness level of my mouth? Or that purple is my favorite flavor? I feel like I’ve just entered The Matrix, and I don’t know what’s real anymore.