by Mark Falanga
You figure that someone who converses about hair as much as your wife should be able to lay a good barber recommendation on you during this time of need. She does not let you down. She pulls through by responding immediately. “Victor's,” she says, brimming with confidence.
You have heard of Victor's because that is where your son goes for his $6 buzz cuts. You call Victor and he tells you, in an Eastern European accent that you could hardly understand, that he has a busy day but that he can squeeze you in right now, if you hurry up and get there. Your wife gives you directions to Victor's, which you realize is located not far away from where you live. You take your son along to keep you company. You like doing anything with either of your kids. You enjoy their company. You rush out of your garage to avoid an alley conversation with David Golob and on the way over you drive by the Franzes' house, which is decked out with Pilgrims, turkeys, and a house-size cornucopia filled with gigantic inflated ears of corn.
You and your son arrive at Victor's. He greets your son like they are old buddies. Victor puts you in his chair and you explain the haircut that you would like from him. You have not had to give these directions to anyone for years, because Sandi knows exactly what to do. It is simple, you tell Victor: short on the sides and back and longer on top. This is the haircut that, twenty years ago, when you last gave this subject any thought, you determined you look best in.
Victor has an interesting arrangement of chairs and mirrors that you have never seen before in any barbershop or hair salon. He has placed a series of round, three-foot-diameter mirrors on the wall, directly opposite the patron's chairs when they are facing forward. He has also placed the same three-foot-diameter mirrors on the wall to the rear of the rotating barber chairs. The only curious thing regarding the placement of these mirrors is that none of the mirrors lines up directly opposite any of the chairs, on either wall. The impact on you, and no doubt on all of Victor's other patrons, is that as you are getting your haircut your view is a section of gray wall directly centered between two large round mirrors, neither of which you can see yourself in. Each barber's chair at Victor's has the same arrangement of chairs juxtaposed with mirrors. Odd, you think to yourself, but maybe that's the way they did it in Romania, or wherever Victor is from.
Victor puts a hair poncho around your neck and snaps it. He snaps it on tightly just to show you who is boss, but tells you that it is to make sure that none of the hair he cuts falls down your shirt. Your son is patiently sitting directly behind you in a waiting chair. Victor, who likes your son, turns your chair around 180 degrees, to give you the benefit of looking at him. On this opposite wall, you have several three-foot-diameter mirrors that are, as on the front wall, positioned to the left and right of your field of vision. You cannot see yourself in any mirror on any wall. You conclude from this arrangement of chairs juxtaposed with mirrors that this haircut will be a surprise until the end, a fact that you accept with confidence, because your wife has recommended Victor.
Victor now begins to work his craft on your head. He starts from the bottom on the sides and back—“Just like building a house,” you think he says to you, but you are not so sure because of his thick accent. “You work it from the bottom to the top.” He is cutting and tilting and holding your head on one side, then the other. All of this is much different from Sandi's more gentle approach, but you assume that the difference in Victor's style is due to the hair training he may have received in Russia, Romania, or somewhere like that.
During this haircut, you look mostly at your son. The alternative is a section of gray wall that is the space between two round mirrors that are located in such a way that they do not reflect your image. You make funny faces at each other and try to make each other laugh. Your son, during this haircut, is a silent observer.
Victor announces to you that he is done. No last-minute touches here. No holding the mirror behind your head and reflecting it into the mirror in front of you, because that mirror is not located so that you can see yourself in it.
You emerge from your chair after Victor disrobes you of your hair smock, which frees up your breathing to full capacity, and you walk over to your son. He is laughing. You ask him what he is laughing about and he says nothing. He is too polite to reveal his thoughts in front of Victor. You look in the mirror and realize that this is the worst haircut that you have ever gotten in your life. It is shorter than you have had your hair in the past thirty-two years and you are the first to admit how goofy it looks. After your inspection, you conclude that there is no way that Victor can improve upon this unique cut that he has just given you; there is not enough hair left to work with. And besides that, his next customer has already been seated in the mirrorless chair from which you just emerged and is getting his smock wrapped too tightly around his neck, just like it was around yours. You pay Victor and leave him a generous tip so that he is nice to your son the next time he gets a buzz cut. The tip is in no way a reward for the great job he did on your head.
On the way home, your son, who is sitting diagonally behind you in the car, begins to ridicule you and call you “oval head.” You ask why he did not say anything during this haircut to indicate to you that it was moving in the wrong direction. He says, “I don't know.” Four minutes later, you arrive home and step in the back door to be greeted by your wife, whose outlook on these matters is always overly optimistic, especially when she has a stake in the recommendation process, as she did with Victor, so you expect positive feedback from her. But she says, “Oh, my God! What happened? What did you do to your head?” Your worst fears have just been confirmed as she tells you that you have an oval head. You received the worst possible haircut that you could have gotten. It is way worse than the shaggy hair that you walked into Victor's with.
You look at yourself in the mirror now in the privacy of your own home, where you can take the time to really inspect Victor's work. You cannot do this in the barbershop because you don't want Victor or his patrons to get the idea that you are a hair boy. You realize that it is bad and that nothing can be done. You concur with your son and your wife. You do, in fact, have an oval head.
Your daughter emerges from her bedroom, where she just put her eighteen dolls to sleep, and looks at you. “Daddy, you got a bad haircut. You have an oval head,” she says innocently. You wait until ten minutes before you have to get in the limo to leave for the airport before starting to pack. You go. For the entire ride to the airport, each member of your family ridicules you for the funny-shaped head that you have and for the bad haircut that you came home with.
Lucky you, Mr. Oval Head. You are on the way to a family reunion. You cannot wait to see everyone.
Park Your Car
Your wife is on a health kick and she is enjoying going to the gym on a regular and frequent basis. Like you and the rest of your family, your wife belongs to a full-service gym, located in the suburb that is to the immediate south of your suburb. It is the gym that you bring your son to each Saturday for his glorious swim lessons with Annika. That suburb is much hipper and more citylike than your suburb. There are single people without kids living in that suburb, in large part due to the fact that there is a major university located in that town along beautiful Lake Michigan.
Because that suburb is a little like a suburb and a little like a city, the gym does not have its own parking lot. People who drive to this gym usually park on the street, as they say.
The parking situation outside of the gym is unique. The street is wide and the parking is angled toward the curb. The spots are striped. If you were parking there, you would pull into the curb with your front wheel. The parking spots are at, let's say, a thirty-degree angle, so that only one wheel touches the curb when you pull into your space. The spaces are angled so that when you are driving on the right side of the road you can easily pull into the angle of the parking spot. If, for instance, you were making a left-hand turn into the space, you would have to overcompensate for the reverse angle of the diagonal parking spaces so
that you could get in. Unless you are a very skilled driver, it is difficult to pull directly into one of these diagonal spots when you are making a left-hand turn from the opposite side of the street, especially if cars are parked adjacent to the empty spot that you want.
Each of these spaces is metered, another sign that this suburb is different from yours. The gym is a popular gym and many people drive to it. It is always busy and it seems that no matter what time you show up, even if it's 5:30 A.M., the parking spaces in front of the gym are filled. A funny thing about gyms is that people go to them to do things like run on a treadmill for forty-five minutes yet they don't want to park more than a two-minute walk away.
So on this Wednesday morning, like most Wednesday mornings, your wife makes sure that your son makes it out to the bus stop OK and gets off to school. Your daughter does not have preschool today because she is in the three-day-a-week program your wife signed her up for. Today is an off day for her. Your wife then loads your daughter into the Land Rover and off they go to the gym. Your daughter is excited to go to the gym day care, which your wife refers to as Fun Club, a term that she invented to give your daughter the idea that gym day care should actually be fun. On this morning, the psychology seems to be working, as your daughter is not crying.
On the way to the gym, the bright-yellow gas-tank light goes on, indicating that the Land Rover, which is the least fuel-efficient SUV on the face of the earth, has a very limited amount of premium-grade gas in it. Your wife sees this familiar light and, as usual, thinks that there is probably enough gas to get to the gym and back and that therefore she doesn't need to deal with the gas station now. As she approaches the gym, your wife notices the one and only spot that is available within two blocks of the gym. It is cold outside and that available spot is valuable. She races toward it while trying not to burn her last ounces of premium gasoline. The spot is not on the right side of the street but is on the left side, which means that she must wait for the four oncoming cars to pass her before she overcompensates her turn in order to efficiently pull into the only available, reverse-angled parking space. She stops, puts on her left-hand turn signal, and waits for the four oncoming cars to pass. This is the modern-day equivalent of a wolf marking its territory with urine, a demarcation that all animals know not to violate. While waiting for the four oncoming cars to pass, your wife explains to your four-year-old daughter how she scored with rock-star parking, an insider's joke she has with her friends, which your four-year-old is not as quick to pick up on as they would be.
Your wife waits patiently, because in the suburbs, even this one, people drive slowly. Three cars go past, and, as the fourth approaches, that driver, without putting on her directional, slips her minivan into the space that your wife has been patiently waiting for, with her directional flashing. Your wife cannot believe that this minivan-driving mom budged her, to lift an expression from your eight-year-old, and took the spot that was rightfully hers. She is pissed.
Your wife puts the Land Rover in park, leaving the car in the middle of the street, and jumps out to confront this overzealous mom who scored “her” rock-star spot. By the time your wife gets over to the other mom, she has just placed her second quarter in the parking meter. Abiding by the rules of screwing someone while driving, she avoids all eye contact with your wife and any acknowledgment that your wife, the person she just screwed over, even exists. Your wife gets within speaking range of the minivan mom as she is dropping her fourth quarter in the meter. “You took my parking spot,” she says. “What do you mean, your parking spot?” the other mom retaliates. “The spot that you are in now, the one that I was waiting for with my turn signal on,” your wife replies.
To which the other mom replies, “Well, that doesn't mean anything. You can't make a left-hand turn into a reverse-angled parking spot; you have to approach these spots from the side of the street that you are driving on.” She says this with an authority that sounds like she knows something that your wife doesn't.
“That's bullshit,” your wife says, loud enough for your preschool-aged daughter, who is still in the car, which is now parked in the middle of the street, to hear. “I was waiting for the space and it is mine; besides, my daughter is sick with a fever and there are no other spaces nearby. I do not want to expose her to the cold.” (By the way, that morning, half an hour earlier, when you left the house for work, you detected no trace of sickness whatsoever.)
The other mom, not to be deterred, retaliates by looking at her daughter, who is still sitting in her car, and says, “So? My daughter has diabetes; she has difficulty walking, so I have to park close to the gym.” At a loss for a rational rebuttal, but nevertheless undeterred from retaliating, your wife, whose veins are protruding from her muscular neck, says, “Oh yeah? My mother is dead and my father has acrophobia.”
The other mom puts her fifth quarter in the meter, avoids further eye contact with your wife, and walks with her twenty-five-year-old diabetic “child” into the gym. Your wife gets back in the Land Rover and slams the door. She continues driving and secures the first available spot she sees, three blocks away, which no one would describe as rock-star parking. On the long, cold walk to the gym, she tries to come up with an answer to your daughter's two questions: “What happened to our rock-star parking, Mommy?” and “Why did you get so mad at that lady?” Your wife has ten minutes to answer these questions before your daughter gets dropped off at Fun Club.
Try to Make a Phone Call
You come home from work and you are at the front door struggling to find the key, which you have probably misplaced, and you see your wife through the window. She is talking on the phone. You try to get her attention by waving, but she is engrossed in her conversation. You ring the bell and you can tell by her expression that she is distracted and annoyed by the doorbell ringing. She opens the door without interrupting her phone conversation. She does not have the time to acknowledge you, except for the fact that she is annoyed because you disturbed her train of thought during her important phone conversation.
You put your briefcase down and hug your kids. You head upstairs to change your clothes and you tell them that you will be right down. You want to change out of your tailor-reinforced wholesale suit. This is the first thing you like to do each and every night when you get home, after greeting everyone, because it somehow transitions you from being a corporate executive to being a dad and husband and regular guy, a guy who is ready to hang out with his family.
You come downstairs and your wife whispers to you, while still on the phone, “I am just wrapping up, honey.” You notice the pasta in the large pot of boiling water and it is all floating on the top. A bad sign. A sign of overcooked, limp noodles. You race to the rescue, because your wife is too busy with her important conversation to be bothered with matters as small as the pasta noodles that you are about to eat for supper. Your son and daughter both see you take control of the cooking pasta and ask if they can test the noodles, a skill that you have trained them well at, a skill that they can rely on for their entire lives because they, unlike your wife, can discern a perfectly cooked noodle. The only downside is that, when a noodle is not boiled to perfection, they know and it bothers them.
You lift a limp noodle out of the pot of water, and at that moment you know what each of their reactions will be. As you move the noodle away from the pot of water, you mentally craft the strategy that you will use this evening to try to deceive your children into believing that the noodles will taste good once they are smothered in red sauce. You have a difficult time convincing them of this because you cannot convince yourself of it, and, like you, they know a perfectly cooked noodle. The only person in your family these overcooked noodles will not matter to is your wife. She has prepared some low-carb dish for herself.
You empty the pasta pot into the colander, drain the water, and empty the pasta into a bowl that your wife placed on the counter before you arrived home. You smother it with red sauce.
You serve the pasta on t
he plates on the table and have the kids sit down. You look at your wife with an annoyed expression and she looks at you with an expression that says, “I am on an important call, one that cannot be disturbed for something as trivial as sitting down together to eat dinner.” Sometime you would like your wife to pay attention to you like she does to whoever is on the other end of this call. You and the kids start eating and your wife hangs up. She joins you.
“Who was that?” you ask. “Oh, it was Jessica. We are arranging swim class for the girls.” You are amazed by this call and others like it for two reasons. First of all, in the fifteen minutes or so of your wife's phone conversation that you partially overheard you did not hear any discussion whatsoever about swimming. Second, you know that if it were you arranging swim lessons for your daughter and her friend the call would go something like this: “Hey, Bill, what's up? Hey, I was thinking we should get the kids in swim class. What do you think?” “I know a really good swim teacher. Her name is Annika. I'll set it up for Saturday.” “See ya.”
In that hypothetical conversation, you have arrived at a conclusion every bit as good as your wife's, only she has taken twenty-two minutes to do it and you took twenty-one seconds.
You are just finishing dinner and it is time to begin clearing the table and washing the dishes. The phone rings. You look at caller ID, knowing that there is no chance that this call is for you. You are right. It is Findley, Susan. Perfect timing. You hand your wife the phone, and while you, your son, and daughter clear the table, rinse the dishes, stack the dishwasher, clean the countertops and kitchen table, and sweep the floor, your wife is working through the details of having Max over tomorrow after school for a playdate, details that must be discussed immediately after dinner during cleanup rather than, say, during the day, when both your wife and Susan are home without kids.