by Lynne Hinton
“You’re exactly right. Why don’t you go get a bowl from the kitchen, and I’ll get the water warm and find some suds.” Beatrice stopped clipping while Jessie went out of the room and into the kitchen. “Oh, and Louise, we’re probably going to need some newspaper to put down on the floor.” She noticed the floor around her feet. “I’ve already made a big mess.”
Beatrice walked into the bathroom and turned the water on in the sink. Louise got up slowly like she was a child being ordered into the principal’s office, obedient but afraid, and tried to find the newspaper they had brought in the room for Margaret when they came home from the hospital.
Charlotte stood up and began to pick up pieces of Beatrice’s hair that had fallen onto the carpet. She brought around the wastebasket and gathered up the short, curly hair and threw the pieces in.
Beatrice came out of the bathroom, her hair butchered and chopped, smiling and satisfied. She went over and got a chair from the side of the bed and placed it directly in front of the mirror. She sat down and draped a towel around her neck and handed Charlotte the scissors.
The young preacher stood there for a minute, staring first at Louise and then at the image of Beatrice in the mirror. Then she shrugged her shoulders and began to crop more of the older woman’s hair. She lifted and cut in concentration, feeling the soft strands as they collected and fell into her hands. And it surprised her how much she liked the way it felt to stand behind the older woman, engaged in such an intimate and ancient ritual as women cutting each other’s hair. It began to draw her back to days long before, when she and Serena sat in their grandmother’s kitchen, taking turns getting their monthly haircuts.
Charlotte was never actually allowed to cut her sister’s hair, but it was her job to brush and comb it while they waited for their grandmother to get ready. They would arrange the kitchen, then she would take her place behind the stool where Serena sat, kneeling on a hardback chair. She gently removed barrettes and hair bows and began to pull her grandmother’s soft-bristled brush through her sister’s hair. They would play in the midst of this task they shared, pretending that they were grown, sitting in a hair salon like the places their mother went to get perms or waves and color out the gray.
They would talk about movie stars and hemlines and hold make-believe cigarettes in between their fingers and lips, acting like the women they had seen, the conversations they imagined. And it was a marking of the years for Charlotte as she could recall hairdos and fashion and the way she moved from kitchen chair to footstool to being able to stand directly behind her sister, able to reach her in the same way she was now positioned behind Beatrice.
She loved her memories of those occasions with Serena; and combing and cutting Beatrice’s hair returned her to a time and a place when she and her sister were safe and happy and delighted.
She cut as much as she could of the older woman’s hair and stopped. By the time Jessie had retrieved the bowl from the kitchen, filled it with warm, soapy water in the bathroom, and walked into the bedroom, Charlotte had done all the scissors could do. Louise had placed the newspapers around the chair and was standing near, watching. Charlotte moved away as Jessie placed the bowl on the dresser in front of the women and took up a razor. She appeared clear but somewhat unsteady in what she was about to do.
By this time Margaret had finally managed to pull herself up to a sitting position in the bed. “Stop! Wait! Beatrice, don’t do this. It’s all right. You don’t have to do this. I know your support. I don’t feel by myself. Please, think about what you’re about to do.”
The two women faced each other in the mirror. The other women pulled away. Beatrice was rooted, confident, and unafraid. Her face was peaceful, her eyes shining. She spoke softly to Margaret as her friend sat leaning in the bed.
“Margaret, please let me do the thing I most desire to do.” And for a brief juncture she paused and then tipped her head at Jessie, who began to shave first the back, then the sides, and finally the front of Beatrice’s head.
The landscape of the balding woman’s face, the lines across her brow, the easy way she held her mouth, the calm in her eyes, none of these things ever changed. Nothing tightened or wrinkled, flushed or went pale. She did not bite her lips or even turn away. The quickening loss of hair did not diminish or disgust her. She never gasped or held out her hand to stop Jessie. She never closed her eyes. It did not shame or embarrass her or make her ugly. The cut and shave, in fact, seemed to do just the opposite.
The more hair that fell from her head, the more complete her baldness became, the more her scalp, white and unprotected, showed through, the more secure Beatrice appeared, the taller she grew in her seat, the higher she held herself. While everyone watched this vain and perfectly groomed woman lose her hair, sever this crown of designed and set curls, she was transformed before their eyes. Beatrice now understood the woman she really was. She had become exquisite.
One by one, Jessie, then Louise, and finally Charlotte, sat in the chair and gave up their hair and their thoughts about what marks a woman’s strength. Individually and together they changed their minds and their hearts about the ideas they had always believed to be true.
They dismissed their long-held notions that it was breasts or hips or fair, slender necks. They knew it was something broader. They rejected their fears that they were not tall enough, not young enough, not slim enough, to qualify them as pretty. They understood it was something deeper. They refused their speculations that it was their husbands or their children or their jobs that defined who they were. Finally, they accepted that it was something more.
They denied what they had heard all their lives, that a woman is only a woman when she achieves the necessary sum of all her outward parts, that her worth is determined only by how she looks or by the appearance of her family. In this ritual of friendship and surrender they realized that they were so much more.
Margaret watched these brave and beautiful women from her bed. These friends that were to her like sisters gathered before her and offered up their sacrifice. She sat, fully awake, completely alert, and observed a ceremony of companionship and solidarity that touched her more deeply, held her more completely than had fears of dying or the pain of loss.
She rested there in her bed, her right side ravaged and amiss, while the women she called friends, women who had grown with her, aged with her, cried, argued, and laughed with her, women who were her courage and hope, her faith and strength, gave up their locks and curls, an offering to the cancer god, without protest or displeasure.
It was the loveliest thing she had ever seen or known; and later that evening, as the four friends took shifts sleeping in the chair next to her, their bald heads gleaming in the night, Margaret fell into the deepest and finest sleep she had had in weeks. She dreamed of colors, brown and black and silver ribbons, angel tresses, streaming from heaven, and pulling her up into the arms of God.
Margaret, unwhole and uneven, was at peace.
VOLUME 1, NUMBER 9
Hope Springs Community Garden Club Newsletter
BEA’S BOTANICAL BITS
Knowing What to Grow
What’s a woman to put in her garden? Friends, this is your showplace, your stage, your land of self-expression. It is no time to be bashful or meek. The garden is no place for cowardice or timidity. Be brazen. Be haughty. Live on the edge.
You like flowers in early spring? Plant crocus and common snowdrop so that they sneak through the winter and give you a peek at warmer days. Want to show off to the neighbors? Plant shooting star and fleabane, lily of the Nile, and sweet pea. Let them grow unyielding and free, let them be your spirit.
Coneflowers and larkspur, pokeplant and marigold, let your hair down and go a little wild in your garden.
If it’s vegetables you desire, fill the space with too many vines of cucumbers and squash, melons and eggplant. Don’t be afraid to try something new. Peanuts and cow peas, Swiss chard and pumpkins. Get out there, ladies, go for it! It’s time
. Plant yourselves silly!
9
Nadine came home to Hope Springs after a farewell lunch of spaghetti and hot dogs and a party with the other patients and staff. She was presented with brightly painted pictures of encouraging greetings and reminders to take care of herself and to be proud of how far she had come. Everyone gathered around to send her on her way with plenty of hugs and lots of excitement. There were chocolate cupcakes for all of them, baked by the nurses; and they each had a candle to blow out and make a wish for their friend.
There were general hopes for sobriety and good health. Two of the teenagers wished for her to have lots of money and great sex. The man who thought he was Jesus wished for her eternal peace; and Grandma, distracted by the basket of flowers Sheila brought for Nadine, wished for her color in her garden and that she, along with everyone at the table, would find salvation and quit smoking.
Several of them exchanged phone numbers and addresses, but Nadine was quite sure she would never contact any of them. It would seem too odd, she thought, being with these people out in a different setting. It would be strange seeing them again after all they had talked about and been through together. She felt like what they had shared needed to stay where they had shared it. To drag it into the outside world would somehow alter what had happened for her, what the experience meant. So she stuck the slips of paper in her pocket but knew they would never be used.
Nadine rode in the backseat as her mother drove. She did not want to sit up front, preferring instead to sit behind and be chauffeured.
“You hungry?” Her mother watched her in the rearview mirror.
Both of them worried that all that had happened, all the confrontation and therapy and tears and support, all of what she had given and received, was simply not enough.
Nadine blinked without a response.
“You want to stop and pick up some groceries or do a little shopping?”
She shook her head.
There was a pause as her mother drove, alternating between paying attention to the road and studying her daughter in the mirror.
“You know, you can stay at home tonight. You don’t have to go back there right away.” Her voice was stretched, thin.
Nadine stared out the window without answering, and her mother nervously cut her eyes away from her daughter and back to the road that lay ahead. The young woman rested her head on the seat and closed her eyes. She thought of walking again into the empty trailer where she lived, the silent walls, the vacant corners, the locked room where her daughter’s things were still in place. She thought of how, in the past year, the space seemed to tighten around her when she was there alone, how the floor and the ceiling felt as if they were inching toward each other, flattening her between the grief of her own heart and the lonesomeness of space for a child.
She wondered if she would be able to stay there without running to her mother’s, spending the night with friends, or checking into the motel where she sometimes worked as a cashier in the restaurant. She wondered if she should sell the trailer and move to another side of town, where Brittany was not so much a part of the landscape, where it didn’t ache so much to breathe.
She wondered if what she had said she felt at her exit interview, strength and courage, could hold true when she was no longer in a place where she felt safe and protected, no longer in an unfamiliar place but returned to the environment that was wrapped up in her daughter’s memories.
Nadine opened her eyes and watched as the cars raced past them. She saw the billboards and truck stops, the expressionless faces of drivers, the heads of children playing in their seats. She noticed guardrails separating east-bound from west-bound traffic, wildflowers growing on the banks of hills, trees, trimmed and tall, on the sides of the road. She caught glimpses of all sorts of life as they hurried past; and she did not know how to reply to the suggestion of her mother or to the unreliable possibility that staying away from what she had to face could help her or distract her in any way.
“I’d like to stop and see her.” She spoke to the images flying by.
Her mother wanted to say that she did not think it was the best thing for the first day out of the hospital; but she did not know how to turn her daughter down. She only nodded.
The car slowed a bit. “You want to get some flowers?”
Her mother knew that she often stopped at a florist near the cemetery and picked up a few stems to put into the vase at the headstone. Black-eyed Susans, sunflowers, almost always daisies. In the midst of her fresh and uncontrolled bereavement, this had been the one thing she had been able to manage, flowers at the grave and clear instructions to everyone else about what could and could not be placed there.
Nadine would not let anyone leave silk or plastic plants because she said it made the death and the pain and the memories artificial and that even if the flowers died before she could change them, that at least they spoke to the reality of what had happened.
Plastic flowers, she had said, created an image of stale beauty, an ideal of perfection frozen and bound; and Nadine understood there was nothing beautiful or perfect or frozen about her daughter’s death. There was nothing beautiful or perfect or bound about her grief. It was what it was, ugly and completely imperfect, stagnant but alive; and she did not want to pretend it was anything else.
While she had been away, her aunts had kept the flowers fresh and changed; they had honored her wishes. But Nadine’s mother suggested stopping at the florist because she thought her daughter might like to place her own flowers there, her own gift, regardless of what someone else had recently done.
Nadine nodded, thinking that she might get something different this time, something a little more permanent. And she began to wonder about what kinds of flowers grew late in autumn. She thought of the flowers she had seen lately, orchid-flowered dahlias and autumn crocus, and wondered if the florist had any of these or perhaps mums, as she might buy a plant instead of the usual cut flowers. She thought a bright yellow one would be nice since that was Brittany’s favorite color and then wondered how a flowering plant would fare outside without constant attention.
Her mother drove the rest of the way in silence and then pulled off at the exit for the cemetery and parked right at the door of the florist. She turned off the engine and turned to face Nadine. “You want me to pick something out?”
Nadine unbuckled her seat belt and shook her head again at her mother. She got out of the car and went into the shop alone.
Nadine’s mother sighed and rolled down the car windows. Nothing had changed between them. She wasn’t sure what she had hoped for when she met Nadine at the front door of the hospital after she had been discharged. But she knew now, from the silence and the empty way she looked at her, that things for them had stayed exactly the same.
She had not known how to talk to her daughter since the accident happened, had not known how to convey her sadness or her concern, how to impress her love and support upon her. Even when the grief got out of hand and the drug use escalated and the despair widened, she had not known what to do or how to say it.
She had felt as powerless with her daughter as Nadine had felt when Brittany flew through the windshield and died in the preacher’s arms. She was the mother’s mother, the grandmother, the oldest in the line of tragedy. And she could not push away the sorrow. She could not lessen the doubts or put an end to the drifting away or relieve the slow dull ache of loss for her child.
All she had thought to manage was to take care of details, the bills, the cleaning, the filling out of forms, the driving to mortuaries and funeral homes, the phone calls to insurance companies and banks, those necessary tasks that had to be completed. These things and the wringing of her hands from the sidelines of Nadine’s downward spiral were all she knew to do.
She tried to talk others into helping Nadine—Ray, the preacher, the family doctor—but no one seemed to know either what could keep her daughter from plunging farther and farther down and away. She grew desperate in he
r pleas, desperate in her search, but nothing she could think of or suggest was doing any good. She was afraid she had lost her oldest child for good.
She thought this hospital stay seemed different from the other times, that somehow what had happened behind those locked doors and stark walls may have been loud enough or strong enough or deep enough to keep her daughter away from the edges of death; but she was not sure. And she watched in a mother’s uncertainty from the rearview mirror as Nadine slowly moved into the shop.
When she walked in, the bell on the door rang. The florist, the old man who had always been the one to wait on Nadine, yelled from the back that he would be right there.
Nadine did not respond to him but rather closed the door and went over toward the fresh plants that were situated in a corner near the window.
The man came into the room. He was wiping his hands across the front of his pants. He smiled at Nadine.
“Well, hello again,” he said, recognizing her from past visits. “We’ve missed you around here. Where have you been?”
Nadine did not meet his eyes but did wonder who “we” was. She had remembered seeing just the one man by himself whenever she stopped to buy her flowers. She had always figured that he ran the shop alone.
She checked the price on one of the plants and did not give a lot of thought to her answer. “Just around,” she said and then paused.
Then she decided to do something she hadn’t done in a very long time. She simply spoke the truth. “Actually, I’ve been in the psychiatric unit in Chapel Hill. I tried to kill myself.”
She was surprised at how good it felt to be honest, how freeing it was to tell the truth; and she hoped that was a sign that she was doing better. Then she faced the old man, worried that she might have embarrassed him with her frankness.
The florist did not appear rattled at her response. He did not reply at first; he only dropped his head with a slow nod.
There was a long pause and Nadine thought maybe she should apologize. She waited as she stood just watching the old man, thinking he probably wished he hadn’t questioned her; and then she changed her mind. He asked, she thought, and he got the truth. She turned and checked out an assortment of smaller green plants.