“Good, honey. Real good. It’s getting ready to snow here. Can you believe it? You can smell it in the air. It’s real nippy outside today.”
“Huh.”
“Still getting snow so late this year. The frost killed my early flowers already two days ago. Bet there’s no snow out by you, though, huh?”
“Not exactly. How’s work?”
“Oh, the same. The same. Pam took me to Red Lobster last night and I thought that was real nice of her. Those shrimp are just sweet as candy. Do you have Red Lobsters out where you are?”
“What’s the occasion?”
“For what?”
“The Red Lobster?”
“It was her birthday.”
“She took you to Red Lobster for her birthday.”
“So?”
Someone closed a locker on her windbreaker. Someone dropped her box of wig pins and didn’t bother to pick them up. Someone spilled something liquid on the floor of the hall. There’s a Three Stooges moment in the making. I imagine Mrs. Montano walking down the hallway, slipping on the liquid, and trying to grab for the corner of the jacket. It slips through her fingers and she lands right on her ass on the wig pins.
I forget what we were talking about.
“Um. Yeah,” I say.
Or I could just go ahead and stick a wig pin in my eye.
“Yeah. Well. How’s your beauty school? Are you beautiful yet?”
“Ask another question.”
Mom has been working as a receptionist at a doctor’s office for about ten years now, which gives her perks like health benefits and free pens from pharmaceutical companies and unlimited stolen prescription pads. When we talk on the phone I hear the telltale fading in and out, the lazy consonants. She calls a lot less than she used to. She started drinking again when my stepfather, Rick, left her for some slut who had just graduated from junior college and was studying for her real estate license. At the time, I was bitter and dismissive. Said it was a good thing, that she was better off without him. That hasn’t turned out to be true.
“Another question?”
“I’m almost done here. The pin curls are challenging but I think I’ve got a real aptitude for blow-dries. I’ll have a big career any day.”
“You can do my hair next time you come to visit.”
“Sure, Mom.” I never visit. I haven’t visited once in four years.
“Eyes on the prize, honey.”
“Eyes on the prize” is pure Rick. She still talks like him all these years later. He’s still in her. In our family, it was always him with the “chin up” and the “early bird gets the worm” kind of shit. I remember Rick at my soccer matches: “Eyes on the prize, Bebe. Eyes on the prize, sweetheart.”
I had asked my mother to tell him not to call me that and, while he was at it, not to come to my games at all, but my mother pointed out that it was his car and I should be grateful we had one at all. She said I should be thankful he took an interest in me and wanted to marry a widow with a six-year-old daughter.
Rick sold hot tubs. A luxury profession in a luxury-starved town.
“You shouldn’t be able to sell hot tubs in Toledo,” he said. “Not now. Used to be a different kind of place. Where there were plenty of men doing ordinary jobs for fine money and plenty also getting rich off them. Not anymore. But I’m a can-do guy, Bebe. And there are always people with money and if there aren’t people with money there are people with credit and if there are people with credit than I can sell ’em something.”
Mom met Rick at an AA meeting and they bonded over the fact that his son, Hunter, was the same age as I was. It was a valiant save. How Rick swooped in just before the house was gone and the car blew its last whatever it is cars blow. I remember Mom sitting up rod straight on the padded chair at the head of the polished oak dining room table that used to be Grandma’s. She called me over and pulled me into her lap and then she told me about Rick. How we were leaving the house and moving in with him on the north side. They had only been dating a few months.
I felt panic. We couldn’t leave. We lived in the only house with a hill in the whole town practically. A hill to roll down. A hill to lie across and look at the sky. Dad would have dismissed Rick with a snort. Dad would have called Rick a square.
“I don’t want to go. I want to stay. Rick is a square.”
Mom laughed at that. She pushed my bangs off my forehead to kiss it. I guess she once was the kind of mom who smoothed my hair.
“I know, sweetie. But Rick is an okay guy. And he can take care of you and Mommy.”
My mom was a pretty lady. Prettier before she cut her hair off short and started wearing sweater vests, but pretty still. Why did she have to give up so fast? Our old chandelier threw little rainbow splashes onto the gray walls. There were no rainbows in Rick’s house—no rainbows, no hills, no dad I wanted anything to do with. I held her hand, her nails always polished coral and filed to a tight oval. Then I put her index finger into my mouth and bit down, crunching the bony joint. She yanked her hand away and shoved me roughly off her lap. Her hand hovered in the air somewhere between suspended in surprise and wanting to give me a good whack. She never did whack me, though. I can say that for my mom.
“I swear, Beth Baker. I don’t know what is wrong with you sometimes. What kind of animal are you?” She stalked off into her bedroom and I stood outside the door and heard her crying and was glad.
The last day of August we moved into Rick’s house with the stone fence and the broken gate and the orange carpeting woven through with yellow dog hair. Rick lounged in his undershirt on the recliner in the living room that first night, with the cable box resting on his round belly, and showed me how to make the channel change, the fat, white buttons making a nice thunk sound when you pushed them in. I guessed Rick was okay, but I didn’t like him to call me sweetheart.
Every night in that new house my mother lay next to me and sang when she put me to sleep, holding my hand in hers, her sweater smelling like perfume and dinner. My wallpaper was green and white with a fern leaf design that crawled and shifted in the dim light. She and Rick took me to pick it out myself. A seashell night-light glowed peach in the corner. We sang Joni Mitchell songs, “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Little Green.” We sang the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” and I sang “sumbarine” instead. When I want to hang up on her, want to put down the phone and never pick it up again, I try to remember that. When I hear her voice and it seems it belongs to no one I’ve ever met, I remember how we sang the song about the sumbarine.
I used to want her to be a mom who could teach me something. Who would pass down a recipe for homemade spaghetti sauce, an heirloom necklace, and wise words about love. But I am her daughter—pretty like her and unlucky in love. And I don’t have a pot to cook spaghetti sauce even if she did have the recipe to give me. So it’s not just her who can’t figure out how to live.
“Well, guess I should get back to my pin curls.”
“Pin curls. How funny. Your grandma Betty used to set my hair in pin curls.”
Six
I 532 hours down. 68 hours left to go.
After lunch, I clock in three minutes early and go to
the back of the room, taking my regular station next to Violet. The room in which we spend our afternoons looks like a combination of a classroom and a beauty salon. It’s called “the floor.” Stations line up back-to-back in crowded rows and are lit blue-green with fluorescents glaring from the particleboard dropped ceilings. Everything here has a film of grime ground into it that dates from Paleolithic times. If Hercules went at it with a river of Clorox this place would still look dirty. All along the walls are posters from the eighties that are bad Nagel rip-offs meant to demonstrate an array of hip hairstyles. All the white girls in the paintings look like Sheena Easton and the white guys look like David Hasselhoff. The black people have their own separate poster and they look like the cast of The Cosby Show.
The Armenian girls spend their days highlightin
g each other’s hair until it breaks off in clumps. We’ve perfected the art of looking busy while we do as little as possible. We use the same doll heads styled with the same finger waves to get points every day. In all fairness, finger waves are seriously hard. Women have it rough, man. We do. I can’t believe women used to do that to their hair every day.
Anyway, most of us, excluding Javi, are usually either trying to scam the teachers for our points or hiding in the bathroom or cutting the hair on our doll heads progressively shorter and shorter in random terrible haircuts until they look like butch dykes. At which point we paint tattoos on their necks and Violet makes facial jewelry for them out of paper clips. Violet and I duck beneath our stations when real clients show up, but Javi bounces up with enthusiasm every time someone walks in the door. We don’t get all that many clients anyway. Mostly we just gossip, roll the occasional wet set, and stare at ourselves in the station mirrors that hang merciless in front of us all afternoon.
We’ve each named our favorite doll heads, the ones whose hair we don’t cut but rather leave long to style into wet sets and finger waves and blow-dries and beehives. Javier’s is a blonde named Lorelei Lee, mine is a redhead named Kitty Hawk, and Violet’s is a brunette named Bella Donna. I’m not sure why I named mine Kitty Hawk, except that maybe something about her pert, shiny face reminded me of pictures I saw once of Grandma Betty when she was young. Grandma Betty, my mom’s mom, was born in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and she maintained that there was an unusually high population of angels there. She told me that was why it was the place where the Wright brothers first took flight. She said they didn’t just fly, they were lifted. My mom used to roll her eyes and say I got my religious streak from her.
When I get back from lunch, Javier is already at work directly across the aisle from Violet. He is in a particularly jovial mood because last night Paul dyed his Mohawk sky blue and new hair always makes him as giddy as a schoolgirl. Also, he’s breathlessly excited about the extravaganza he has planned for his daughter Milla’s birthday party tomorrow. Paul calls every three and a half minutes with cupcake disasters and complaints about Javi’s bitchy sister and, I imagine, worries about whether Violet is going to pull off her all-important role in the festivities.
Violet has been cast as Snow White because of her vampire pale skin and her jet-black hair but mostly due to the fact that she has an incredible costume. She inherited it from her mother, who was Snow White at Disneyland for a record fifteen years—the longest-lasting Snow White in Disney history. Vi pretty much grew up at the happiest place on earth and you can see how far all that happiness got her. But she treasures that costume and it wasn’t all that hard for Javi to talk her into carrying the torch for the day. I suspect she’s regretting it now. I’m glad I turned down the role of Ariel with the excuse that I have a mandatory meeting with my social worker.
Javi drills Vi on the lyrics of “Some Day My Prince Will Come” and criticizes her performance until she’s almost in tears.
“Do it again. You’re singing like an emotionally retarded turnip. Remember, you’re it. You’re the real thing. As far as these little girls are concerned, you’re a genuine princess. I hope you fully appreciate the awesome burden of that responsibility.”
“That really puts me at ease.”
“I’m not interested in ease. I’m interested in magic.”
“Javi, stop terrorizing her,” I interject.
“Oh, you’re right,” he concedes. “I’m a psycho. I’m sorry. You’re gonna be great, pumpkin. Even if the best you can do is stand there and look like you don’t want to hang yourself, you’ll still be better than last year’s princess. Oh, my goddess, you should have seen the Sleeping Beauty they sent. Sleeping? Nodding is more like it. And ugly as a bucket of homemade sand.”
Every day, Javier tapes pictures of Paul and Milla all around the mirror of his station. The teachers here make him take everything down at the end of the day, but each morning he decorates anew. A single daisy stolen from the farmer’s market sits in a Starbucks cup next to his color-coded wet set rollers. Javi knows what starting over is about. Most of us do, here at Moda, one way or another. In Javi’s case, he was married with a newborn and working a desk job for American Airlines when he wandered into Pottery Barn one day and saw Paul restocking the Fiesta-ware. It’s hard to imagine—Javi in polyester uniform pants and a matching tie. Javi coming home to a pregnant wife and a town house in Simi Valley. It’s enough to make your head spin.
Javi goes back to work putting the final touches on his black doll head. To set off her press-and-curl, the doll wears a leopard-print scarf on her head. For her face, Javier glues on fake lashes then applies dramatic liquid eyeliner. He’s been working on her with fierce concentration for hours. He steps back as if done, then sees an invisible flaw and fusses again for a few minutes. Finally, he presents her to us with a flourish.
“Do you love her? She’s Diana Ross circa the Supremes era. Can you tell?”
“She’s fabulous, honey,” I say, because she is.
A few of the other students gather around to ooh and aah over his work. He has the kind of talent that comes from love.
“I have a vision. She’s the star of my new musical,” Javier says, indicating the disembodied head stuck to the top of his station. The heads have a hole in the bottom of them. You set them on a short steel pole with a little vise on the bottom to secure it to the end of the table. The stand looks like a silver butt plug and is the subject of many jokes.
“What musical is that?” Violet asks.
“The musical I’m presently composing about our rich experience here at Moda Beauty Academy. It’s called Beauty School Massacre. All the doll heads come to life and mutiny. They murder the owner of the school. It starts out with a scene where one of the students graduates. The doll heads sing for him . . .”
As Javi begins his song he mock-cries, dabbing at his eyes with a pantomime hankie. He acts out the scene of his musical, doing the pomp-and-circumstance slow step down the aisle between the stations.
One of the students is now moving on
To a Beverly Hills salon
When he leaves we will surely cry
That queen could style a great beehive . . .
Javier’s semicircle of an audience all giggle appreciatively, though I know many of them don’t understand the actual words he is saying. Still, he gets the point across. Violet laughs so hard at Javi’s song that she has to wipe her tears with the corner of her smock. I think the musical is actually kind of a good idea.
As if on cue, a cloud rolls over our little party. The owner of the school, recently cast as the mutiny victim in Javier’s new musical, waddles down the stairs directly behind us. She no doubt heard the laughter and aims to quell any merriment that might soften our daily misery.
Mrs. Montano looks disturbingly like pictures I’ve seen of John Wayne Gacy when he dressed up like a clown. She appears to be wearing a giant beach ball costume, with only her dwarfed hands and feet sticking out. Her hair is a lacquered auburn helmet, the exact shade preferred by beauty school teachers the world over. Her makeup looks like a mean puppet face, with white foundation, an angry gash of red lips, rainbow-colored arches of frosted eye shadow highlighting the crepey skin of her eyelids, and two perfect circles of blush that sit unblended on her cheeks. We hear her heavy breathing as she comes down the stairs, but not fast enough to reassemble and look industriously unhappy.
“Hello, students,” she says real evil, as she passes us and walks to the reception desk.
Mrs. Montano looks at the books and gets on the intercom. She turns up the volume so the crackly loudspeaker assaults us.
“There is a perm client here. Javier, please come to the front.”
Let me explain that this is meant as a punishment. Perms reek enough to make you gag, they take forever, and they’re so toxic they peel the skin off your hands if for some reason there are no gloves, which sometimes happens in this chintzy pit.
>
“You have no power here. Be gone. Before someone drops their house on you, too,” he says under his breath before sauntering, unshaken, to the front of the room. He doesn’t hide from the clients and cheat on his credits like the rest of us. A devoted clientele of local biddies always ask for him. Javier offers his arm and chivalrously escorts the perm client, a deflated old Chinese lady, to his station. One of her gray, knee-high stockings has crept down around her ankle. A thing like a fallen stocking can make me so sad some days.
“How do you stay so cheery? And without meds even,” I ask him, ignoring the client, who just sat down in his chair.
“Honey, I could have it a lot worse, okay? I could be in Guatemala farming sugarcane with my ten brothers and sisters.”
“You grew up in the OC, so spare me.”
“But I could have been born in Guatemala, honey. My grandma was. And you could be in Tolethal, Ohelpme, right now, so chin up. Only sixty-eight hours left to go before you start your glamorous new career in the vortex of vanity.” His own phrase impresses him. “Hey, that’s good. Maybe I’ll name my salon Vanity Vortex. Or maybe it’ll just be my new drag name.”
The idea fires him up. He bounces up and down on his toes for a minute. How can he care about every little thing?
The old lady sits in Javier’s chair looking dazed. He spritzes her thinning hair with water before sectioning it off in neat little rectangles with his rattail comb and then rolling each section onto a thin, hourglass-shaped perm rod. He works quickly with a little wrist flourish after he secures each rod. A fat drop of water runs down the client’s nose and she makes no attempt to wipe it off. Javier sees it and blots it gently with a towel.
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