Magnetism

  ‘I don’t feel well,’ I say. ‘I can’t go to school.’

  Neither of them bothers to look in my direction, but Mom says, ‘What’s wrong?’

  He says, ‘I don’t know how you can think about the Fourth of July. You want to play Leave it to Beaver when, in real life, the world is in revolution. Things are changing.’ And then he’s gone. He slams the door to the garage behind him and I can hear the car engine start up. He didn’t even say goodbye.

  I back out the door, saying, ‘Stomach ache. I’ve got to stay in bed,’ and go back up to my room, aware that I have broken the first promise and also promises seven, eight and nine, and even the last one, because I definitely hate Vanessa now.

  I climb into my bed considering how my scouting career is over, and my school life is also over. I won’t get my cooking badge because I can’t even think about cooking now. I can’t make the one-pot meal, or even the dip. And Mom will come up soon and take my temperature. I should pull the blankets up and get myself as hot as possible or else I’ll have to go to school with this hair and everyone will laugh at me. The scarf idea is stupid. Who wears a scarf except someone wearing curlers? Maybe if I can just wait until Monday it won’t be so bad. Hair grows fast. Maybe I could get a wig, or something.

  I try to think about my problem and then think about how, when I was disappointed that we had to cancel Easter vacation because Mom can’t stand Kenny and Jennifer, Dad said a broader perspective helps a person cope with personal setbacks. I think about the riots and the marches against the war. All the soldiers getting killed and the draft. Dad thinks about this stuff all the time and it’s always on TV. I know that civilians are killed over there too, and that it’s all wrong and that the President is an idiot.

  I shouldn’t be worrying about my hair. It’ll grow back. There are more important things going on in the world. However, I’m still not feeling brave enough to go to school, so I get out of bed and put the scarf on then get back into bed, even more disappointed in myself. All I keep coming back to is my stupid hair, which is my own fault. My looks. I let this happen to me. I am so stupid.

  I bury my head beneath the blankets when I hear Mom’s footfall on the stairs. The door opens and she sits down on the bed. I mutter from beneath the blankets that Vanessa and I ate a punnet of peaches at her house yesterday, which is nearly true. ‘I feel real sick,’ I say. ‘I might chuck up.’

  ‘Sit up instead.’

  I obey, and she yanks the scarf right off my head.

  ‘Vanessa did it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I let her. I didn’t want that hair any more. It was frizzy and ugly.’

  ‘It was a feature. You’ve always had that hair.’ I didn’t know that she thought anything about my hair. Mom is not angry, she just looks sad. ‘Are you sick as well?’

  I shake my head. ‘No, it’s just the hair thing.’

  ‘I guess nothing lasts forever.’ Her voice is wobbling.

  I don’t want her to cry. ‘I didn’t want to be features. I want to be normal. It’ll grow back, Mom.’

  ‘Well, we can’t leave it like this. Come downstairs,’ she says. She phones Maurice, her hairdresser, and makes an appointment for eleven o’clock. He has just got to repair my haircut. I hear her tell him on the phone what’s happened. ‘A game gone wrong,’ she says. ‘These kids do such stupid things. They don’t understand consequence. She was so beautiful and now she looks like some bald baby bird or something.’

  I stare at my face in the mirror after she says this. I never saw the beautiful and I don’t see the bald bird. It’s not that short. I’m not bald.

  Maurice does frosting and sets. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a kid in there actually in one of the seats to get her hair done, though there are usually three or four of us waiting on our moms. It’ll be a bus ride up town.

  Mom is quiet for all of the journey. She has let me wear a baseball cap and now she holds my hand tight even though I’m way too old for that. She just holds my hand and looks out the window. She sighs a whole lot.

  Maurice is excited about some riot that happened last night. For a grown man, he does look silly waving his hands around so much. He falls upon Mom when we arrive, with his phony accent, and goes on about what might happen next. Dad always says about Maurice that he is probably Canadian and a crackpot, even though I don’t think he even knows him.

  Anyway, when we get inside, Maurice completely ignores me and my dreadful hair, which is still hidden under the cap. If Dad wants to worry about something, it’s Maurice and how he kisses Mom and touches her back all the time and how they laugh together. She goes all giggly and he is all over her. Her mood is all gone in minutes. Then, finally, Maurice turns to me and demands that I remove the hat.

  ‘Ça alors!’ He pretends to faint. ‘How could such a catastrophe happen?’ One of the girls behind the till sniggers loudly. Maybe it’s about the state of my hair, or maybe she, like me, just thinks the fake-Frenchy speech and behaviour is big-time dumb.

  Mom, holding my glasses, settles down with a magazine and he ushers me to the basin. A girl washes my hair twice and I’m led back to the big chair in front of all the mirrors and Maurice, behind me, sets about his work. When he’s finished drying it and Mom comes over to hand me back my glasses I see that I have the kind of haircut that I have always wanted if only I knew it existed. My hair looks now like it belongs in a magazine. I look like I belong in a magazine. In the mirror I watch my hand touch it, just checking that it’s real, that this is not a wig.

  ‘It’s terrific. Don’t you look fabulous?’ Mom says. ‘You are a saviour, Maurice.’

  Maurice has an expression on his face that tells me that he knows lots of people think he’s wonderful. ‘It’s a simple cut, feathered. Très chic,’ he says, to the hair in the mirror, then smiling at Mom.

  It’s short but it doesn’t look like any kind of bird.

  When we finally get on the bus for the trip home I feel very happy. When Mom asks for one adult and one kid’s ticket, the bus driver asks me how old I am. I explain that I might look like I have to pay for an adult ticket, but that is because of my new haircut. While a line forms behind us, he admires my hair and says, ‘Well, it sure is pretty, missy.’

  We stop at the market and pick up the ingredients for a casserole and the dip. At home I start work on the meal. It’s been a very productive day.

  When Dad gets home the first thing he notices is my hair. ‘How about that! What happened?’

  ‘That was Maurice,’ Mom says. ‘This morning.’

  ‘On a school day?’

  ‘On a school day,’ she replies.

  Before dinner I serve the appetiser and practise reciting the pledge, with Mom and Dad as the audience. I throw in the Pledge of Allegiance, which I’ve got down pat, like a warm-up into the Girl Scout promise.

  Dad seems to be listening, they both do, but then he suddenly asks Mom, ‘Should we encourage this? What is it with militaristic organisations and young people?’

  ‘I might ask what is it with you and young people right now? You think growing your hair, wearing blue jeans and spending time with twenty-year-olds makes you twenty again?’

  We eat at the kitchen table in silence. No one says it’s good, but the meal is pretty good for a change, and then Dad goes to watch TV. After a while he comes back and orders Mom through from the kitchen to watch the news with him. He tells her she can’t avoid it forever. Even though I am too big, she pulls me on to her lap when she sits down. The news is all about the riot last night. Not far away from our home. ‘Surely you – ’ he is talking to Mom though he’s looking at the two of us on the chair together ‘ – want to be informed. Or do you really not care about what happens anywhere but inside this house?’

  ‘I care plenty. I’m not as ignorant as you seem to think. I know plenty about what’s going on. I know what I care about and where my responsibilities are.’

  He doesn’t reply, but we stay there in the same r
oom until my bedtime. I’m tired. I’m excited about taking my hair to school on Monday, and that’s what I am thinking about when I fall asleep.

  One month later Mrs Palmer issues the troop the earned badges. I collect three: for cooking, sewing and swimming, Mom helps pin them on to my green sash. Then I quickly tack each of them down with a basting stitch and use a careful overcast stitch to secure them properly.

  I model the uniform and completed sash together and Dad agrees with Mom that it looks like professional work. ‘You could be a seamstress,’ he says.

  ‘Or a troop leader.’ I make the salute.

  Dad says, ‘Or even President?’

  ‘Maybe.’ I laugh and feel very happy about Dad saying that. ‘But no one likes him.’ I’m also thinking that I’m a girl. There’s never been a Mrs President. Who would do the cooking and who would take care of the kids?

  Mom says to Dad, ‘You think we’d ever have a woman president?’

  Her new pills are working; she’s not so angry and sad all the time and the long, hot summer has already begun. It stretches out before us now in a sigh. I will wear just cut-offs and T-shirts over my swimsuit and dry in the sun after running through the hosepipe to cool off. I can see the yard sales, hear the lawnmowers of the morning, the cicadas of the afternoon, the sound of ice cubes in glasses, taste the fizz of soda-pop in my mouth. I will peel the satisfying papery layers of sunburnt skin from my shoulders in the evening. I’ll always be friends with Vanessa, forever and ever.

  Summer makes the grass grow fast. It is stubble, then prickles up against the soles of my bare feet.

  This is how I feel time passing. My own hair relentlessly wilts longer and longer until I have to brush it away from my eyes again and it begins to tickle against my neck. We go on vacation out west. Dad’s brother, my Uncle Pete, lives there and he’s really nice when we visit. I can see he and Dad don’t get on well, but Mom makes everyone laugh and we’re only there for a day.

  The Grand Canyon is amazing and too big to understand – impossible to look at all at once. You have to choose chunks of it and focus on that and then refocus somewhere else. It’s so bright it hurts my eyes to pay attention. I look without my glasses and for some reason this feels safer, like I won’t fall into this massive hole and be lost forever.

  When we get home Mom makes an appointment for me to see Maurice again. He decides to cut bangs into my hair and I look different again for a while, and suddenly I’m getting a new lock for my locker, choosing fresh school supplies at the drugstore and going with Mom to buy all new clothes from J.C. Penneys. There is the excitement of trying them on and then hanging them up carefully in my closet when we get home, imagining all the combinations I can wear.

  The leaves turn red and brown and the morning air is cool when I’m standing alone waiting for the bus the first day, nervous and eager at the same time to see my friends again. I hope that the bus is not already so full that I will have to walk all the way to the back to sit next to someone I don’t know. I hope too that my new schedule and homeroom means I can easily get to classes on time.

  The bus finally arrives and there is the swish of the doors as they open. I climb up the steps. The new driver nods as I tell him my name. A few kids say hi as I begin to walk down the aisle. It’s really noisy and then I spot Vanessa halfway along and see that she’s saved a seat for me with her books. She lifts them up so that I can sit down next to her. It’s good having a friend.

  The bus starts up.

  1969

  The Wattle

  The pumpkin outfit has been transformed by brown dye applied in speckles. My leotard and tights as well. A few feathers are stuck on to the body of the costume, to suggest lots of feathers. I have a pink swimming cap on and Mom is now attaching a semi-inflated plastic pink glove, with a hairband, under my chin – which is to be the wattle.

  This wattle is my idea. Although it is ugly, it is a realistic feature of turkeys. I’ve got a thin beak to put on as well, but will save this for when we get to the Thanksgiving party, as when I wear it I feel that I can’t really breathe.

  Dad comes down the stairs and looks through the door. ‘What do you reckon?’ Mom says. She jumps up from kneeling. She grabs the beak and puts it over my face to complete the look.

  ‘You are absolutely the cutest turkey I have ever seen,’ he says, ‘And you have the most determined mother in the world,’ he adds. ‘Nothing has ever stopped your mother once she wants to do something.’

  I pull aside the beak. ‘It’s not about being a cartoon turkey,’ I say. ‘Does it look real? I want to look like a real one.’

  Mom says, ‘I bet you’ll win.’

  ‘If I’ve done my best, I don’t care about winning. That’s what Mrs Skinner says is the right attitude.’

  ‘How’re you planning to get this amazing bird to the party?’

  ‘Same as Hallowe’en. She’ll lie down on the back seat. It’s fine. No sweat.’

  It is the fifteenth of December when I am sent home from school because I fail the eye test. The nurse phones home and tells Mom she has to pick me up. Then she gives me a sealed note to pass to the doctor when we see him. She says they are expecting me at the Children’s Hospital.

  On the way back from the doctor’s office, we stop at the mall. From the last week until Christmas Eve, Santa is scheduled to sit smack in the centre of the four concourses and we’re going to see him while I’m not at school and all the other kids are. Information-gathering, Mom calls it, this talking to all the children. ‘He’s making sure he’s got his lists right.’

  Mom reckons I could do with something to perk me up now that I am going to have to wear glasses. I’m still thinking about the consequences of the visit. Following the technician’s advice, I’ve chosen sparkly frames. ‘If you have to wear them, make them a feature,’ the woman said.

  I have accepted that this means I am going to be ugly forever. This is who I am going to be.

  The snow is deep and most of the parking lot hasn’t yet been ploughed. We find a space that used to be a handicapped space, near the entrance. You can’t read the sign any more. Mom says that makes it exempt, that today anyone can park anywhere.

  ‘Where does he get all the stuff from?’ When I speak, my breath puffs into a little cloud in front of my face, and when I draw in air it feels like a shock to my insides.

  ‘That’s why they give him the prime location, so he shops here,’ Mom says.

  Santa’s sleigh is empty when we get to it. It is huge. Mom says that maybe there’s a problem with Rudolph; she thinks she heard something on the news in the morning while I was at school. ‘He’s probably taken him to the vet for an overhaul before the big day.’

  ‘So, who pays for the presents?’ I ask.

  ‘The government. Taxes. Which is why, if you earn a lot, Santa has got more money and your kids get better presents. There’s a whole heap of book-keeping involved.’

  ‘I’d like to be a reindeer,’ I say. ‘Instead of a candy cane.’ This is for the Christmas party.

  ‘A candy cane is more cheerful. A reindeer is huge. A lot of work involved.’

  ‘I don’t want it to be like the turkey. I want to be like the other kids. I guess I could be an elf?’

  ‘The wattle was a great idea.’

  ‘It was dumb,’ I say. ‘No one got it. I looked stupid. I felt stupid, Mom. People laughed at me. I’ve got to be inedible for the Christmas party. Something not so original, I think.’

  She laughs and hugs me. ‘You’ve always been good enough to eat; you can never be inedible.’

  ‘When I have my glasses, if I get eaten by a lion, I will crunch.’

  Santa phones the house that evening, before I go to bed. I answer the phone and am very surprised when he knows my name. He says he hasn’t yet had my requests for presents, and he needs them to complete his list.

  ‘You weren’t at the mall this afternoon,’ I say.

  ‘So, what do you want?’

 
I’m trying to listen to him and think but Mom is trying to get my attention. ‘Shush,’ I hiss, finger over my mouth, just like she would if she were talking to someone very important. I tell Santa I want a Schwinn bike, in yellow or pink, and a stamping set with rubber stamps and ink. He can find the set in the big Walgreens store, behind the puzzles and games. He’ll have to go to the bike store for the bicycle.

  ‘Have you been good?’

  ‘Pretty much. Not too bad.’

  ‘Be sure and go to bed on time on Christmas Eve. I can’t drop by unless you’re asleep.’

  I tell him that I know this and that I will, and thank him for phoning, he must be very busy, but he says he wants to do the job right.

  Mom asks me to repeat word for word what he said when I hang up and says she never, ever had a phone call from Santa herself. ‘Your friends at school will be impressed.’

  I’m not going to tell anyone at school about the conversation. I’m too old for Santa. A lot of the class don’t even believe in him, but I can’t tell Mom about that. ‘I know it’s not the real Santa,’ I tell Mom, ‘that sits in the mall.’

  ‘No, of course not. It can’t be him. It’s his representative, like a babysitter when we go out.’

  ‘So, is there a real Santa?’ I ask.

  ‘Who was on the phone?’

  ‘Santa.’

  ‘Well, then,’ she says.

  There are pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars and green clovers in my bowl of Lucky Charms. It’s the sort of food Christmas elves might eat. I save the crunchy pink hearts for last but the milk fades the colour. Mommy is having coffee and fidgeting with her cigarette. Daddy is having a bagel.

  It’s the day of the Christmas party at school and I will be the best ever elf, with stick-on ears and a green leotard, with a red skirt that Mom made for me, over it. Karen Zuckerman is an elf too, so when we get to school we get to sit together. No one laughs at us. No one points.