The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup

by Susan Orlean

  JOANNA WOLPER, a television producer, who has just walked in: Are you Molly? You were my first guest on my television show!

  Robert is now done with Alice and is cutting the hair of a ninth-grade girl named Anna Gay, who has also decided to get a Jane Fonda–in-Klute hairdo. Anna is watching herself in the mirror and appears paralyzed. Her mother, sitting on the banquette near the door, keeps telling her that she looks great. Robert finishes and says to her that she looks great. She looks as if she is about to cry. “You’re going to hate me for a day,” he says to her. “But then you’ll be okay, because everyone will tell you how great you look. You are going to hate me, but I can take it.”

  MOLLY: Doesn’t it kill you to see a girl getting her hair cut? It’s such a powerful memory, your haircuts when you were a kid. And the reaction of your mother. My mother is always telling me how she liked my hair better “before,” and the “before” is always some imaginary time that never was.

  ROBERT: My father had to drag me to the barber, kicking and screaming. Of course, with my family, everything I did I did kicking and screaming.

  In comes a pock-faced man selling packages of aerosol pepper spray, which he offers to Robert and Richard, saying, “Gentlemen, perhaps you’d like one as a gift to your wives or girlfriends?” Robert shakes his head, and the man shrugs and leaves. The door opens again, and Mimi Turque, who plays the mother in the Broadway production of Kiss of the Spider Woman, enters. She is here to tell Robert that her recent haircut was a success. “My husband fell over!” she exclaims. “The hairstylist for the show fell over! Everyone fell over!”

  Robert says, “Oh, oh, oh, oh, I’m just so happy for you,” and waves good-bye to her with his blow-dryer.

  The salon fills, empties, and fills again. Over the next few hours, the conversation wanders: The feminist art historian Linda Nochlin tells a story—about how she had her hair dyed when she was in Italy and it all broke off and she had to buy a wig—to Tanya Anticevic, an actress and a preschool teacher at Blessed Sacrament, who has just tried dyeing her own hair, which turned green, forcing her to wear a hat to school for a week until today, when she had time to come in and have it dyed back to her own color, which is especially important because she is about to audition for some movie agents; and in the next chair Ruth Kramer, a journalist who is leaving for London tonight to begin a book tour, is getting her hair blow-dried and is half-listening to Linda and half-listening to Robert, who is telling her how smart she is to keep her hair gray, but then he is interrupted by Denise Bethel, an auctioneer at Sotheby’s, who has just stopped by to show him an Atget photograph—he loves Atget—and is about to leave when Linda, overhearing her, begins debating with her whether Atget would qualify as “rare” or just “subtle”; and while they are talking, John Winer, a real estate investment banker, shows up for his appointment, and he and Robert begin a conversation about the psychological implications of being touched by service professionals—that is, dentists, hairdressers, manicurists—and John tries to convince Robert that he should get a massage, even though Robert thinks if he had one he might throw up, because he thinks he holds too much inside emotionally; and then Annette Kletter, Robert’s banker, comes in—she doesn’t have an appointment but she has just found out that her father has died—and after Robert hugs her and commiserates with her she says to him that she thinks that having her hair washed and cut will make it possible for her to face the rest of the day. After she leaves, Mary Ellen Burns, a division chief at the Federal Communications Commission, comes in, and while she’s getting trimmed she tries to reassure Robert—he has told her how much he’s worried by the conservative juggernaut—that she is certain that Clinton will be reelected, a comment that turns the discourse toward politics and money and class and real estate, which reminds Margaret Tracey, a principal dancer with New York City Ballet, who is trying highlights for the first time, of a ballet fund-raiser she has just attended, which was held in a palatial apartment that used to belong to Marjorie Merriweather Post; and her anecdote leads to a debate about funding for the arts, about whether Bert on Sesame Street is going to have AIDS, about why the audience for opera is so old, and about how Dirt Devils are so much better than Dustbusters—this comes up because Margaret’s fiancé, Russell Kaiser, who is also with City Ballet, has come in to tell her that he’s finished vacuuming the van they’ve borrowed—and then we talk about where to buy a Dirt Devil, about getting married, and about wedding anniversaries, and someone mentions how, coincidentally, her mother gave her money to buy a Dirt Devil as a tenth-anniversary present; and then somewhere in the middle of this the last customer of the day arrives, an old friend of Robert’s named Vincent Liff, who is the casting director of Les Misérables and Kiss of the Spider Woman and a dozen other Broadway shows, and, after they talk about Vincent’s newest project—to find a kid to star in a musical based on the movie Big—and about how the neighborhood has changed over the last twenty years and about losing hair and growing up and growing old, Vincent reminds Robert he really should go see Les Miz again, because right now there’s a particularly affecting Jean Valjean.

  AN ENDURING TOPIC in a hair salon, naturally, is how people look. In such conversations, Robert is a master of the thumbnail sketch. The first time he cut my hair, he asked me what we would be doing. I said I wanted it long but not unruly. He agreed, and then said, “On the other hand, you don’t want it to be too Upper West Side social worker with two kids and a co-op, either. You don’t want Barbra Streisand in The Prince of Tides.” One Saturday, there were about six people in the salon, and we all began talking about how shocking it is the first time you get bangs, and someone reminded Robert of the time a performance artist came in for her haircut carrying a little casket, and put the locks of her cut-off hair in it. Most people would rather not make their haircuts into quite such a performance. The other day, a woman named Rene Foss, who is a flight attendant on Northwest Airlines and is also half of a comedy team, was telling everyone about how one time at Robert’s she’d run into an ex-boyfriend. “Talk about a vulnerable moment,” she said. “You’re sitting here in this little robe, with your hair dripping wet, and you look awful, and then in walks some guy you’d been seeing.”

  “What did you do?” someone asked her.

  “I tried to tuck my head into the robe,” Rene said. “I thought since everyone looks so generic with wet hair and a black robe that maybe he wouldn’t notice, and he’d just go away.”

  “Was that the guy who was driving you crazy?” Miguel, the receptionist who was on duty that day, asked. “The one you said you were trying to avoid?”

  “Well, yes, it was,” Rene said. “Actually, I had decided I never wanted to see him again for the rest of my life. I did everything possible to avoid him, and I still managed to run into him everywhere I went. I started to think he was stalking me.”

  “And he’s a client of mine?” Robert said, with emotion. “I cut the hair of someone who was stalking you?”

  “Not really stalking,” Rene said. “I just thought it was weird that I couldn’t get him out of my life.”

  The conversation lingered on the question of how to avoid people you’ve broken up with, and then someone mentioned how irritating it is to still want to look good when you run into the person you’ve broken up with, and especially how irritating it is if you don’t look good but your ex does, and then we talked for a while about those perennial women-getting-their-hair-done topics—love, heartbreak, and romance—and then we made our way to the subject of antioxidant vitamins (Rene was on her way to her homeopath, who had recommended them to her), and then to the effect that flying has on the human body, which everyone agreed was frightening to contemplate, especially after Rene asked if we’d ever carried a bottle of Evian on a flight and then looked at how crumpled and imploded it had become by the time the plane landed. Robert said he didn’t trust technology, and Rene said that she had mixed feelings about it, and that, by the way, her chiropractor had her on a regimen
of green tea. Just then, on the banquette, two women were discovering that they were both curators—one for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, where she’d just put together the rap exhibit, and the other for a private art collector, for whom she sought out late-nineteenth-century School of Paris paintings. They kept talking, and it soon emerged that one was from Augusta, Georgia, and the other was about to go to Augusta, Georgia, for the Masters tournament. As it happened, they were sitting where, a few days earlier, I had sat listening as two women waiting to get blow-drys had discovered, while wandering through an idle, time-killing conversation, that they were both Dutch. This meant that—here, in the middle of Manhattan, on a rainy late afternoon—they could sit and speak Dutch, and punctuate the conversation with gasps of surprise at that pleasant serendipity. Someone else, eavesdropping, had remarked that she thought Dutch sounded exactly like Yiddish, and what followed was a round of discussion about dying languages, heritage, bringing up children, going to estate sales, and the fact that Jordan is now a very popular girl’s name. Several good haircuts were achieved in the meantime. It was one of those occasions when the conversation was really rolling; it felt as if it would have rolled on indefinitely, but then came the last haircut of the afternoon, and the end of the day.

  FIGURES IN A MALL

  ONE OF THE LAST HAPPY MEETINGS OF THE Tonya Harding Fan Club took place at Nancy Welfelt’s house, around her dining-room table. The meeting had actually begun at Clackamas Town Center—the mall, in Clackamas County, Oregon, where Tonya skates—on the morning of the day before Tonya’s on-again, off-again ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, began his sixteen hours of interviews with the FBI. That was several days before Tonya announced that she knew about the plot to attack Nancy Kerrigan only after it had unfolded, and about a week before Jeff pleaded guilty, but several days after Shawn Eric Eckardt complained to the Portland Oregonian that Tonya had browbeaten him for not getting around to arranging the assault as quickly as she wanted. It was a golden moment. It was probably the last moment when the fan club members could believe that Tonya had been completely uninvolved.

  On the morning of the meeting, January 25, as on most mornings since all the bad news, some of the club members went to the rink to watch Tonya practice. The ice was empty except for Tonya, who was bent over in the corner, fixing a skate. She was wearing a stretchy black sleeveless catsuit over a stretchy gray tank leotard. Every contour of her body was outlined in black—her thick back, her strong upper legs, with their blocky muscles. She stood up and started down the length of the rink, her skates cutting feathery grooves in the ice. Her lips were pressed tight, and her chin was thrust forward. Her expression was wan and stubborn. Her ponytail fluttered out behind her. No other part of her seemed to move, but she was crossing the ice with tremendous speed. A snatch of music came over the loudspeaker. At the end of the rink, where a hundred or so people were gathered, she turned sharply, bent her leg, and then spun until the ice beneath her skate began to make a sizzling sound. Suddenly she stopped, skated toward the other end of the rink, spun again, pulled at the waist of her catsuit, then circled the ice once more. For an hour, she practiced pieces of her program—a spin, a leap, a movement of her leg or hand. The pieces were never fused together into something fluid or pretty. They were just explosions of motion between long silent moments, when Tonya would stand alone in the huge, blank rink, kicking at a frosty patch or tightening her skates. She didn’t look happy, but she also didn’t look rattled or embarrassed or shy. At the end of the hour, when she stepped off the ice, the club members told each other that she seemed composed and steady.

  The club was meeting that day because the members had a lot of work to do. Since the attack, and since Tonya’s victory at the nationals, the club, four hundred strong, had received hundreds of requests for membership information. Elaine Stamm, the club’s founder and president, had printed up more copies of the flyer describing the memberships—ten dollars for adults, one dollar to join Tots for Tonya—and suggesting additional opportunities to support Tonya, by fund-raising, or by giving her cosmetics, hair care, and nail care, or by making calls about her to sports talk programs, or by mailing her encouraging cards. There were also scores of requests for Tonya buttons and bumper stickers, and for tapes of “It’s Tonya’s Turn,” written and recorded by Linda and Greg Lewis, local songwriters who a few years ago composed a hit song about Desert Storm. Linda and Greg had stopped by that morning to make some last-minute arrangements with Elaine about the song. Linda was saying, “We’re not skating fans so much, but we’re Christians, and we thought this was the right thing to do.”

  The mall was a good place for the club to gather and get all this done. There really isn’t a town of Clackamas. There are acres of Douglas fir forest and grassy idle pastures, and balding hills now sprouting subdivisions, and ranchettes on lawns of chunky red mulch, and squat new apartment complexes with tan siding and shiny driveways, and featherweight trailers perched on rough concrete blocks, and there are tumbledown old farmhouses on weedy tracts waiting to be seized and subdivided, and there are little strip malls and fast-food restaurants and glassy health clubs and tanning salons standing alone in enormous parking lots, and there are bushy fields of huckleberry, blackberry, sumac, and salal, and there are pockets of businesses having to do with toys and mufflers and furniture, but there really isn’t any town to speak of, or even a village to drive through. Unlike an old-fashioned town, which spreads out organically, Clackamas County’s settled areas look as if they had emerged abruptly, hacked out of the tangle of blackberry bushes and firs. Around the mall, new things are cropping up so fast that the place seems kinetic, as if everything had gone up, and could come down, in a day. Even where the county is overbuilt and busy, emptiness is the feeling it conveys.

  Portland is half an hour’s drive away from here. It is an old, compact city that was settled by Yankee merchants, who fashioned it after Boston. Portland is the largest city in Oregon, but it is of very little consequence to people like Tonya and Jeff and Shawn, who live in and rarely leave Clackamas and east Multnomah Counties. News reports that say Tonya is from Portland have missed the geographical and sociological point. The world that Clackamas County is part of starts somewhere in the Great Plains, skips over cities like Portland and Seattle, and then jumps up to Alaska—a world where people are plunked down on harsh or austere or overgrown landscapes and might depart from them at any moment, leaving behind only a few houses and some gear. Alaska, desolate and rugged and intractable, feels like an annex of Clackamas County, and Portland seems a million miles away. Alaska, not Portland, is also where many people from Oregon have often gone to get more land, or to make quick money by working for a summer in a fish cannery or on a logging crew. There is a Yukon Tavern in Clackamas County and a Klondike Jewelers, and at the nearby thrift stores you can find old table linens with Alaskan motifs—huskies, oil rigs, Eskimos—and old postcards of Alaskan landscapes and photographs of Juneau cannery crews and of log camps, scribbled with messages to the family back in Clackamas.

  The winter weather in this part of Oregon is gray and drizzly, and the light is flat and filtered through a low ceiling of clouds. Occasionally, the clouds bust up, and it will rain in spats—you can be driving around and the rain will pour on your car but not on the car behind you. The most monumental thing in Clackamas County is Mount Hood, a mostly dormant volcano, which is 11,235 feet high and is snow-covered year-round. Mount Hood has several active, constantly creeping glaciers. Otherwise, the only ice regularly found in the county is the skating rink at the mall.

  CLACKAMAS TOWN CENTER is a giant mall, the largest collection of retail stores in the state of Oregon; the space it encloses, more than a million square feet, is so much bigger than any other enclosed space nearby that when the mall opened, in 1981, it provoked a little local hysteria. Rumors went around the county that a band of hippies or Satanists was kidnapping children and taking them into the mall rest rooms and either castrating them or cutt
ing off their hair, then painting their faces and letting them go. Psychologists later attributed the rumors to the unease of people who were accustomed to being isolated and outdoors, as they always had been in this part of Oregon, suddenly making regular visits to a place that was crowded and contained.

  There is very little irony in the name Clackamas Town Center. Anything that goes on around here goes on at the mall. There are stores, of course, and also conference rooms where community groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and the Egg Artists of Oregon meet. And there is the skating rink, which the developers put in to satisfy local requirements for recreational facilities. In 1988, the developers proposed replacing the rink with a carousel, but at the public hearing on the matter, Tonya, who was only seventeen but already a nationally ranked skater, made a compelling plea to save it. The rink is Olympic-size, with big bleachers along one side. On the lower level of the mall, behind the bleachers, is a branch of the Clackamas County Library; a sign outside the door says, “YES! THIS REALLY IS A LIBRARY!” On the upper level of the mall, ringing most of the rink, is the food court, which may make this the only place in America where an Olympic contender trains within sight of the Steak Escape, Let’s Talk Turkey, Hot Dog on a Stick, and Chick-fil-A.

  On the morning of the meeting, Elaine Stamm, the president of the club, watched Tonya practice for an hour or so. That morning, when Tonya first came out on the ice, she was carrying a video camera to film the film crews who were in a press corral near the door to the skate shop. “Wasn’t that cute?” Elaine said, on her way to the meeting room. “Wasn’t that brave?” She was setting out boxes of flyers and tapes and Tonya buttons when someone quietly took her aside to say there was a problem: Somebody else needed to use the room. This was not a development as bad as, say, Jeff’s guilty plea would eventually be, but it eroded morale. The club liked the idea of doing its work in the very spot where Tonya had developed into an Olympic contender. Nancy Welfelt, one of the members, suggested reconvening at her house, so the members got their coats, and fanned out through the parking lot to their cars, and formed a small convoy to the Welfelts’.