Javier pauses and turns toward where I slouch in the chair next to him and pull at a loose thread on the hem of my smock.
“Sit up straight,” he says. “You’re such a pretty girl and you go around slouching like you’re wearing a fifty-pound hat on your head. And even if you are, honey, sit up straight anyway.”
Mrs. Montano strolls the room like a chain gang foreman while I roll Kitty Hawk’s hair in wet set number one hundred and eighty-five of the two hundred that are required. Closing in on the finish line, I tell myself. Eyes on the prize, sweetheart.
I look in the dingy mirror, sticky with a film of hair spray. My cheap black pants snag on the nail protruding from my station. My hair is greasy. Painful purple zits blossom along my chin. Remnants of last night’s eyeliner hang on beneath my lower lashes. Huge caffeine- and exhaustion-dilated pupils nearly eclipse my dark brown irises and the effect is blankness.
When Javier finishes with his client, he styles her tight perm into a fluffy confection. Then he takes the daisy out of the Starbucks cup vase on his station and pins it above her ear. She looks like an ancient version of a WWII dance hall girl. It’s transformative. Her head perks up and her eyes look almost alive and suddenly her stockings don’t seem so sad.
After she leaves, Javier calls me over to his chair and throws some quick curls into my hair with the iron, then rolls each curl around his finger and pins it.
As he rolls and pins, rolls and pins, we talk with Vi across the aisle.
“What I don’t get is, where in the story are you?” I ask. “Are you Snow White, like, already married and living happily ever after? Or are you at some other point where you still have that catastrophic apple thing ahead of you?”
“You don’t get it,” says Javi. “Snow White is a magic princess. She exists pre- and post-apple at the same time. Pre–and post–happy ending at the same time. And Milla gets to insert herself into the script any damn place she chooses or take them all to brunch with Goldilocks and the Three Bears at their summer place in Mendocino County. People get all blah blah it sends the wrong message that all the princesses get saved by men. Like these stories are going to ruin the rest of my daughter’s whole life. It’s bullshit. Milla knows that she can write another ending for the princess anytime she wants.”
“You have to admit, though,” says Vi, “Cinderella does suck.”
I don’t feel like arguing, but I don’t agree with Javi. I think it can ruin you to think that some man is going to kiss you awake and that you’ll open your eyes to a new world. Prince Charming or Jesus or whatever.
But at the end of the afternoon, Javier takes the pins out and runs his fingers through the waves and I am transformed into a poor man’s fairy princess. It’s that easy. And I remember why I’m serving out the remaining sixty-four hours of my sentence at Moda.
“Just sleep on a satin pillowcase and those curls will still be luscious tomorrow,” he says.
I clock out with confidence. Stop believing in one thing and you make room for believing in something else. Hopefully something that works a little better.
A hairdo can change the course of your whole day. Maybe your whole life, I tell myself, if you let it.
1536 hours down. 64 hours left to go.
Seven
Violet stands in the middle of our room in her Snow White wig and her underwear, a princess gone porno. I take the dress from its hanger on the back of the door and help her to navigate the sea of tulle and satin before zipping her snugly into the bodice. She pulls on her little white gloves, the final touch that changes her from porno into perfection.
She hollers, “Buck! Get up here!”
Buck takes the stairs two at a time and appears in the doorway. When she sees Violet, she’s immediately hypnotized.
I toss the bag at her and she offers Violet her arm to walk down the stairs.
“Aren’t you a vision.”
Buck is Violet’s escort to the party and she’s dressed as some approximation of Prince Charming, in a white jacket with gold epaulets and a gold sash.
“Are you Prince Charming or a tuba player in a marching band?” I ask.
“That depends on which you think is hotter.”
When I hear the door close behind them I settle back to read the weekly free paper and wait with resigned dread for my meeting with Susan, our resident social worker. I flip absentmindedly through the pages until I get to page seventeen.
What I see on page seventeen turns my stomach cold and causes dark spots to flicker at the corners of my eyes. I haven’t seen that face in over a year now. I haven’t seen it since the funeral.
It’s an article about Billy. The headline is: The Radical Reinvention of Jazz Legend Billy Coyote. Some words I see are: sober, new band, new sound, new vision, reinvented, reborn.
The bees start to pump into my bloodstream every time my heartbeats and then the rhythm speeds up and my breath catches as if there’s a little door in my windpipe and it blows shut. I can’t suck in enough breath. The dark spots in front of my eyes grow larger and the memory loop gets rolling and no matter how tight I hold my head there’s no stopping it. The film runs through the machine making that flickaflicka sound. A shaft of light shoots the pictures out onto the world in front of me. It starts with the lie I told Aaron: that I was going to California.
I had been working at Rusty’s four nights a week since the summer after I graduated high school. A summer job that turned into a year that turned into three years. We had jazz and blues at Rusty’s. Mostly local guys and not too bad. Once in a while a small touring act came through. For bands on tour, Toledo was somewhere to fill in a show between Cleveland and Detroit.
I restocked the beer at around four the night Aaron’s band showed up. I was already keyed up before they even walked in. They were an out-of-town band, a wild card. He ambled in the door first, trumpet case in his hand. I looked up. I hadn’t seen anything like him in my life. I couldn’t read him. Not a white guy but not a black guy, with a head of dreads and slow, brown eyes behind those Buddy Holly kind of glasses. Tall like me but all angles.
He strode up to the bar.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m Aaron.” He extended his arm, smiling a goofy smile with those pointy wolf teeth on the sides that I always liked.
I wiped my wet hand on my jeans and shook his. Long and dry and warm. No other musician had ever walked in and shaken my hand like that. Maybe he thought I was somebody I wasn’t. But probably not. I didn’t look like anybody. Kind of pretty in the face, maybe, but not like I was somebody.
The rest of the band and their one roadie filed in the side door behind him.
“Dressing room is around the left side of the stage,” I said, pushing my hair back out of my eyes. “First door on the right.”
He headed toward the back of the club. A couple of the other musicians nodded or mumbled hellos as they followed him. The last one in was the guy holding the guitar case, whose band I assumed it was: Billy Coyote. He kept his sunglasses on and his head down, with a lit cigarette dangling from his lip. He looked lost, like he couldn’t find his way even through the simple geography of a bar.
If I had to be in Toledo, which I did until I could formulate an escape plan, Rusty’s wasn’t such a bad place to serve out the sentence. Most of the assholes from my high school went to the bar with classic rock cover bands. There was good music at Rusty’s and a bunch of harmless, regular drunks who were sloppy but nice to me.
Mike, the real bartender, was a fat, laid-back guy with a bad mustache and an emergency Twinkie always hidden behind the bar. He had been working there for a hundred years and he had some good stories about my pop. His old lady died the year before from cancer and I think he knew something about me and something about a lot of things, though we didn’t talk about it much. Instead he asked dumb stuff like when I was going to apply for college and maybe if I didn’t like regular school that I should go to cosmetology school like his oldest, Janice, who had her own shop now and
made a grip of money and didn’t even live in the old neighborhood anymore but had a ranch-style house on the north side of town.
I always replied, “Why would I want to apply to school when I won’t be in town long enough to graduate, Mike?”
Mike shrugged and didn’t tell me I should be sensible and stay, like everyone else said. Get a job as a hairdresser and find a husband.
Mike was one of the reasons I drifted from Zion in the first place. Mike was a lapsed Catholic and his old lady passed away and she wasn’t saved. How was I supposed to look that guy in the face and tell him that I believed that Sandy was burning in hell? For that matter, how was I supposed to look myself in the face and imagine my own pop there?
It was one of those things that I didn’t get how important it would be until later. The being-saved thing. That it wasn’t just about being saved, it was about all these other souls not being saved. Little babies in Africa with flies on their eyes who die of starvation and Gandhi and earthquake victims in China and my pop and Mike’s Sandy. And in the end I couldn’t hang. I just couldn’t hang with that. I miss the rest of it every day, but I don’t miss hell.
Anyway I stood smoking a Virginia Slim, one hand on the bar, rag over my shoulder, and watched the band as they sound-checked. Billy Coyote was too high or drunk or something. He never even stood up off his stool and he barely lifted his head the whole time, but still, you couldn’t stop looking at him. The rest of the band was bickering and lackluster, except for Aaron. He stayed off to the side in a pool of calm as bright as a spotlight. When he put the horn to his mouth, for the first time I understood in my gut something my pop had always told me: playing the horn is really singing. Aaron played a killer solo in a nearly unrecognizable interpretation of “Dream a Little Dream,” except I pegged it on account of I sat around a jazz club every night. And I could tell Aaron’s performance was for me, the only audience. He was singing to me.
When they were done he took a long step off the stage, pulled a baggie of weed and a package of rolling papers out of his shirt pocket, and walked up to me.
“Smoke?”
The early evening was heavy with humidity, but we went outside anyway and sat sticky on the white vinyl seats of my mother’s Camaro. We rolled the windows down and passed the joint back and forth. It was incredibly strong, not the Toledo dirt I was used to, and the world spun like a slot machine. I had to blink hard and will it to stop. I focused on the Jesus Loves You air freshener hanging from the rearview. It was my contribution, but had long since lost its scent.
“California,” he said, meaning the weed. “Got it from some cat in San Francisco. That’s where I’m going when we’re done. To the Church of St. John Coltrane in San Francisco.”
“That’s funny. Me, too,” I lied. But at that moment I felt as sure of California as I was of anything. “I mean California. That’s where I’m going as soon as I’ve got enough saved.”
“Oh, yeah? When will that be?” he asked, with a sarcastic edge I didn’t much like.
“I’ll let you know. So you can look me up when you get there.”
The pot was too potent for me. I held on to the door handle. Breathe in. Breathe out. Brain like fuzzy sparkles. The church of who?
“Where are you going to?” he asked.
“What?” I was confused.
“Are you leaving?” he asked in a lazy kind of way, leaning his head back against the seat and smiling. “You’re gripping the door like you’re leaving.”
“No,” I replied. “I’m just hanging on.”
“I get it,” he said.
Later, after the show, he kissed me in the parking lot. I figured I was being a slut because he was leaving for Cleveland in the morning and I probably wouldn’t ever see him again. I consoled myself with the fact that I wasn’t going back to his motel room like some kind of hooker. But I wanted to kiss him to see what it was like to touch such a creature who owned all this music inside and carried powerful drugs in his shirt pocket and whose hands were so long. A guy who said he was going to California and probably would. Probably he wasn’t the liar that I was.
He put his glasses on the hood of the car and placed his hands on either side of my face like I was someone he knew or cared about or something. I was wearing my Levi’s tight on the hips then, red hair feathered over to the side and too long over one eye. I grabbed his wrist because I don’t know what, and then let it go and let him be there and touched his shoulder blades over his nice, cotton button-down shirt, because jazz guys don’t wear T-shirts even in dingy bars in drab towns. And kissing him was leaving Toledo right there. A promise of another side. Easy to lose myself because I probably wouldn’t see him again and really I was just standing there in the gravel next to my mother’s car.
I asked him with my mind, my psychic will, to take me with him to California, to Cleveland, to Chicago, to anywhere. Things you don’t say out loud. He tasted like whiskey just turning to late-night sick sugar mixed with my own spearmint gum. Smelled like nice sweat and some kind of coconut hair oil. And we didn’t kiss for too long and we didn’t get sloppy sucky mouth open too wide and he didn’t try to grab my tits, which made him the first in history.
That night I drove away with him still standing there. Always good to be the one who leaves first. Advice from Mom that she never took herself. But I went back. I went back the next morning. I went back with a bag packed and figured I was at the beginning of my own little fairy tale.
“Breathe slow, now, Bebes. It’s okay. Just slow it down.”
I’m on the floor with my head in my hands. Buck sits next to me and rubs my back. I don’t remember falling. Another panic attack. They happen pretty regular since the accident but mostly in the car.
“Good thing I came back for Vi’s headband,” Buck says. In her hand is a bedazzled red bow.
Billy Coyote. Son of a bitch. Of course after all of it, he’s the one who reinvents himself.
Eight
“Hello, Beth,” says Susan Schmidt, our director of counseling here at Serenity. Susan Schmidt insists on calling me Beth because my born name is Beth Baker. She has this theory that nicknames reinforce “old behavior,” even though I’ve explained to her that my own mother calls me Bebe. It’s not like it was my gang name.
Susan is always calling a meeting with me about some concern she has. “Concern” is her favorite word. I can’t figure out why she doesn’t like me. Why I don’t like her is that she is a big rich phony who looks at us all like we’re a bunch of derelicts and thinks of herself as some heiress Mother Teresa, when really she’s a control freak with the tiniest sadistic streak. Like she enjoys it when she has to kick someone out of the house for an infraction. I’ve noticed a glimmer of pleasure in her eyes when she alters someone’s life completely with a stroke of the pen. I saw it when she cajoled my friend Tammy into coming clean about her stash of diet pills and then gave her the boot.
“Come in, please.”
The office is set up faux cozy. A framed print of a sunflower with a Maya Angelou quote underneath hangs over a wall of mismatched filing cabinets. I sit on a lumpy thrift store love seat facing a new brown leather chair. I can tell Susan Schmidt thinks her chair is very therapisty. All of this crowds into what may have been a walk-in closet when this place was a grand Victorian house, before it was a haven for half-crazy drug addicts.
I look around at the same crap I have looked at a hundred times—potted plants, a crystal paperweight, a wooden plaque that says Keep It Simple—just so I don’t have to look at Susan. The air hangs thick with awkward static, like it usually does around the endless parade of therapists, social workers, and grief counselors. Does anyone feel comfortable in these tableaux of forced intimacy where you’re meant to shine a light in your darkest corners for someone who is supposed to be nonjudgmental? As if there is such an animal.
Today, Susan Schmidt wears a blazer and riding boots and some kind of khaki leggings that might, God help me, be jodhpurs, but I can’t tell
for sure because she’s sitting down.
She leafs through some papers in the manila folder on her lap. “I see here that you’ve been with us for over a year now and that you’re nearly done with your cosmetology training. That’s just wonderful.” She crosses her legs, looks up, and smiles. “How do you feel about this accomplishment?”
When Susan Schmidt talks she gesticulates with her left hand, her chunky diamond engagement ring catching the light with dramatic flashes. I bet she sits at home in front of the mirror and practices making that ring sparkle.
“I feel fine. Grateful to be alive and sober today.”
It’s the truth, you know. I am. I mean, if I have to be the one left alive, I’m grateful to have at least done this one thing. At least I’ve looked life straight in the eye for a year and haven’t once taken a drink or a drug. Maybe you think that’s sad, if it’s the only thing valuable I’ve ever done. Maybe you think that’s pathetic. Like some people are born to win gold medals in the Olympics and some people go to medical school and then help little kids with cancer. But the truth is that was never going to be me, accident or no. Some people are just trying to learn how to not want to die all the time. Some people don’t have a whole lot to be proud of, but I’m proud of me for this. I am. I just don’t go into detail with the likes of Susan.
“You really have a wonderful tenacity, Beth.”
Along with the word “concern,” Susan is fond of “wonderful.”
She shifts her facial muscles into a more somber configuration, indicating that the real reason for our meeting is coming up.
“You’ve been through a great deal. A profound tragedy. I suspect you have more feelings about it than you seem to be comfortable expressing to me or to your peers on a group level. I imagine that could feel terribly lonely,” she says, swinging her shiny brunette bob around like a hair commercial as punctuation.
Pretty Page 6