Playing House

by Lauren Slater

  When I look at the suit now, I can’t quite believe I once loved it, so distant does it seem from the reality of my life, my body, my shape, radically altered by meds that have packed on fat, the fat abetting me in my utter disregard for personal appearance; why even try? It seems so hopeless. This is why I have never had a pedicure and can’t see why I ever would, what with only seven productive hours to my day. My shoes, clogs of some sort that I bought in the bargain bin at CVS, are made of rubber, the insides padded with fake fur grown dirty over time. My heels are exposed, the skin there deeply creased and dead to boot, so that even in the cold of winter I can wear my bargain-bin clogs because my heels are numb to the wind. I once bought a device called “The Egg,” shaped like a dome with a raspy underside, its purpose to sand down the hardened parts of a woman’s body, the corned feet, the whitened, wizened elbows. I did not buy The Egg out of some desire to preen—not me, no never—but rather because I was curious as to how much dead skin I actually had on my heels, the looks of which I could no longer recall, completely covered with callous. I sat on the edge of my bed, tore The Egg from its packaging, and began to sand myself, watching with amazement as my skin snowed and snowed, and when I pressed down harder on my heel, whole whitened rinds of dead flesh came curling off—utterly painless, and curious too. That skin was so old it could have been from a prior decade, time encased, preserved, the body literally retaining its past. I kept sanding my heels, determined to find the pink part, the snow heaping up at the edge of the bed, and yet no matter how long, how hard I worked, I couldn’t get down to fresh flesh. I put The Egg in my bedside drawer. I got a broom and dustpan and swept myself up and into the waste bin.

  This is a confession, a way of cleansing myself symbolically, to make up for the fact, perhaps, that in real life I rarely shower. I sometimes smell, and then I shower. I wash my hair with whatever’s in the shower stall, most often some fruity concoction for kids. A few months ago I developed an abscess at the base of my spine. At first I thought I’d bruised the coccyx, but weeks went by, the pain only increased, and when I reached my hand around I felt a hot, hard lump weeping fluid clear and odorless. My primary-care physician told me I had what is called a pilonidal cyst, an infection of sorts and a bad one to boot. The next day, lying on my belly on the surgeon’s steel table, I had the cyst emptied, a procedure so painful it lies beyond language, the surgeon, with no Novocain, no anesthetic at all (“We just don’t use anesthetics for pilonidal cysts”), slicing into the boil and then squeezing its contents so hard I heard the spurt and saw, smeared on a large white cloth, blood and pus and a lot of green goo, the smell fetid and wrong. The surgeon stuffed gauze and a wick into the wound and told me to shower every day, to keep myself as clean as I could, and to come back in two weeks to have the wick removed. On the way out he handed me a prescription for Oxycontin, which I immediately filled and took four of, though the label limited the dosage to two. I lay back on my bed and watched the air swirl and eddy by my head.

  I realized, even in my stoned state, that my self-neglect had gone past the point of acceptable. I was now literally getting infected. The surgeon had explained to me that the cyst is caused when a stray piece of dirt works its way under the skin, inflaming it. I realized that, depression or no, I needed to change my ways. I realized I’d have to start devoting some time to grooming, as they say, like a normal person, stepping into the shower in the mornings and coming out with dripping hair and wrapping myself in a soft, floppy towel, depression or no; it didn’t matter. I thought of a study I’d read a long, long time ago, so long ago I could no longer recall the paper or book from which this study derived, but the gist of it had stayed with me. This study found that mood is influenced by one’s outward appearance, which had seemed odd to me and still seemed odd to me. Mood, so deep and internal, so unrelenting and unyielding: how could a skirt or some flowing fabric possibly shift that behemoth? And yet the study found that when “ADL skills”—activities of daily living, such as showering, combing your hair, attending to your skirt and shirt—improved, so too did the symptoms of depression in the subjects under scrutiny. Of course, it could have very well been the other way around, that when symptoms of depression improved, the subjects in the study were more motivated to care for their appearance. I thought of a lake I’d seen last winter, its surface completely capped with ice through which a lone fisherman had drilled a single hole and was hauling up huge trout that flapped and flopped on the frozen surface. The blood, the slick fish, the skidding sunlight—it made an impression on me because it suggested that surface and the interior that surface covered were intimately linked, and that one could not exist without the other.

  A psychologist by training and degree, I decided, in my stoned state, my cyst draining into the packed gauze, that I’d construct my own experiment on the relationship between surface—how you look, how you appear—and mood, which the surface either enhances or hides. I was a schlump, a frump, due to the remnants of depression that both robbed me of the time to spruce up and the motivation to do so. Was it possible, though, that, once spruced, my mood would follow suit? What would happen if during my “down time” I put on makeup, a swoosh of rouge or thick and black mascara that separated and extended each individual lash, lending my eyes a depth they didn’t really have? What would happen if I got some sass, some style? Beauty, after all, is not some trifle; rather, it’s a sought-after state in every culture we know of, this in itself proof of its power. I’ve seen photos of African women who adorned their necks with heavy metal rings that, over time, push down their collar bones and compress their ribs, all this for a lengthened neck. And despite the fact that the practice was banned in 1912, some, maybe just a few, wealthy Chinese families still bind their daughters’ tender feet. The Maori of New Zealand believe beauty is obtained by the intricate scrolls and swirls of tattoos that they pierce into their skin, while in Mexico and other dark-skinned nations, skin-whitening products are all the rage, whereas, in our predominately light-skinned nation, tanning products line the shelves and tanning salons are everywhere, all this zig and zag proving that there’s nowhere in the world where the concept of beauty does not exist, nowhere that people fail to pay homage to its power.

  Being your typical white, middle-class American, I know what beauty means to me, and so I set off to pursue it, but not before constructing for myself some sort of experimental design. The specifics: I’d spruce myself up every day for three weeks and observe whether or not I could alter my inward mood by changing my outward appearance. My resolve to follow this path increased when, that night, I read in our town paper an interesting, relevant ad: a woman named Sally, who called herself a “beauty consultant,” offered, for a small fee, to come to your house and teach you how to put your best foot forward, covering everything from makeup to clothes to shoes to hair and its endless shades of color. The ad seemed so tailor-made for me and my situation that I couldn’t help but think that providence had placed it in my way. So I called Sally, a peppy-sounding woman who, three days later, pulled into my driveway, her car small and sleek, the trunk popping open just as she stepped out. Walking around to the rear of her car, she pulled out two bulky black cases. I was watching from my kitchen window, but even from this distance I could see that my beauty consultant was impeccably done up, with a black furze of curls and reddened lips, her rayon slacks rustling in the wind, her floral tunic scoop-necked with a big bow in the back. I watched her come up my walkway, those cases swinging in her hands, and that’s when I thought, Oh no. What was in those cases? Was she some kind of Avon lady carrying a brand of makeup that no one had ever heard of, a “consultant” who would cream up my face with various “products” she’d then try to sell me for a fat fee? The doorbell rang and I opened it with falling faith and stepped back as Sally stepped into my kitchen. Suddenly wary and in no mood to be polite, I immediately said, “What’s in the black bags?” and Sally said, extending her hand, “Hi, I’m Sally.” Chagrined, just a little, I shook he
r slender paw, noting her nails, sculpted and painted a pearly pink. She set the cases onto the floor and said, “These? These are my before-and-after photos from various clients I’ve worked with.” I sat with her in the living room, me with my weeping, aching back boil and my dumpy, smelly clothes, and she in a cloud of lilac scent, and we flipped through the photos and designed my own personal program plan. Then Sally stood up, stepping back and scanning me from top to toe, and announced after just a moment’s consideration this one word: Hair.

  Instinctively I put my hand to my hair, felt its brittle, sun-scorched surface, and I nodded in agreement. Hair. We started there. Sally made the appointment, some fancy salon, the type I’d never of my own volition set foot inside of, especially because the appointment slot was set for ten o’clock, smack-dab in the middle of my daily despair. So when the day and time for the appointment rolled around, I could barely drag my carcass from my sleep-warmed sheet, where every inch of me longed to stay. I heard my doorbell ring and then, “Yoo-hoo? Yoo-hoooo?” accompanied by the clickety-clack of Sally’s stiletto shoes coming to haul my sorry ass out of bed and into the stylist’s seat. “I’m not up for this,” I said, still prone on my pillow, and she said, “Now you are,” finding my arm beneath the blankets and literally pulling me up and marching me towards her car, me, still in my sleepwear, which didn’t much differ from my daywear. Once I was in her Honda, Sally shoved my feet into the bargain-bin clogs she’d grabbed on our way out of the house and then said, “Stinko. Shoes are next.”

  The salon was far away. We drove down highways, over underpasses, and under overpasses, the roads circling and serpentining, the sky above the hard blue of a gem, the salon’s parking lot oddly empty, the salon itself in a circular building, all spiral staircases and dizzying display racks of dozens of different shampoos, conditioners, curl creams, mousses, gels, sprays, the air inside scented, water falling from a bank of rocks into a reflecting pool lined with luminous stones so smooth and pearly I wanted only to touch one, to hold it against my heart, as if it might bring comfort, as if I could somehow palm my own pain, and in doing so shape it, or erase it.

  Sally knew everyone in the salon, or at least it seemed that way. I was ushered to a changing room, told to take off my top and replace it with a crinkling black gown that snapped shut and then, for extra measure, tied at the waist. The gowns, clearly, were made for slender women, my bulk straining the snaps, so the fabric pulled at my chest and left visible gaps that I wanted to hide with my hands but could not. “Yoo-hoo,” Sally called, tapping on the door of the changing room. So out I stepped, into the misty, sweet-smelling humid air, led, then, to a circle of chairs, each one holding a woman dressed in an identical black gown, the women’s heads all tipped back into deep basins while slender men worked their scalps into luscious lathers. “This is Albert,” Sally said to me, directing my gaze towards the man who would first handle my hair, and I gave him a wary, embarrassed smile. Sally, peppy as ever, patted the seat while Albert held my elbow as I sank into the leather chair and then felt myself tipped backwards into the basin’s black bowl, Albert adjusting the water’s temperature, suds exploding on my head, and then his fingers, ropy and strong, working the soap through my strands, front to back, tipping me ever so slightly forward to get the fuzz at the nape of my neck, a feeling so fine, this was, my whole scalp kneaded as if it were dough and might rise with just the right type of touch, and so I was soothed. The stone in my heart softened and rocked in a tiny interior tide pool. Behind my closed eyes, fish flickered and fronds bent and went with the waves of light, making swirls and shadows on the insides of my lids. Comfort. I hadn’t expected to find it here, but here it was, in the soap, the streams, the strength of the fingers moving the skin of my scalp so all the blood pooled at my feet, cold and coagulated, all of it warmed up and came coursing through me, and then he was done and turbaned me with a towel, and I opened my eyes, a single bead of water sliding down the side of my nose, which Albert patted dry so softly with the edge of a terrycloth towel.

  Now to the stylist’s seat. Andrew, the stylist, looked about sixty years old. “He’s the best here,” Sally whispered to me, and I nodded but found that fact odd, because Andrew had a whisker-grizzled chin and a head of wild unkempt hair, his shirt untucked and earrings lining the ledge of both ears, tiny stones of red and turquoise, purple and blue. Andrew stood behind my seat and looked at me in the mirror. He then walked around to the front of the seat, knelt, and almost reverentially cupped my face between his two raspy hands, moving my head left, now right, studying something about me but what it was I didn’t know. I suddenly felt embarrassed, felt as if he could see past my skin to the dull nothing that made me me for so many hours of the day. And as if to confirm that this in fact was true, Andrew suddenly nodded crisply, sprang to his feet, and, without asking me what kind of cut I wanted, picked up scissors that looked preternaturally huge to me, like something out of a storybook, clack-clacking as he aimed them at my locks, which I’d never much cared for but now, faced with their demise, suddenly did. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Wait, wait.” So Andrew stopped in mid-motion, the huge silver scissors frozen and glittering, and I said, “Aren’t you going to ask me what I want?”

  “You don’t know what you want,” Andrew said, his eyes piercing and fiercely intelligent. He was correct. I had no idea what sort of style would suit me nor had I had any idea, until now, that I harbored, in some subconscious place, feelings of affection for my hair. “Let me take care of this,” Andrew said. “I’ve been cutting hair for thirty years.”

  And then he went to work. He dove into me, lifting me up in layers, splicing me sideways, and cutting with complete confidence, long, wet locks falling onto the floor. I eyed them with a rising tide of fear: Would he leave anything at the end? Was his idea to stubble my scalp, so my inside mirrored my outside, a wrecked ruin, not a single softening streak? Snap snap, said the scissors, again and again, dark and dripping hanks falling to the floor as Andrew muttered, Thick, a remark about my head or my hair, I wasn’t sure which. Andrew circled and serpentined, spun me around in my seat, pumped me up, then down, then swung me once more around and then, suddenly, with no slowing, no sense of a conclusion coming, just all of a sudden he stopped. The scissors stopped. My hair, which had before fallen past my shoulders, now came in close to my neck, stopping at the nape, which, for the first time in years was bare and touched by the breezes of many people moving past, the mist in the air landing lightly on me, the air so dewy even my arms were moist.

  Andrew circled my seat slowly, slowly, with great ceremony, moving me around until at last I fully faced the mirror and could see what he had done to me, my hair, still damp but drying now, released from the weight of its long length, all cowlicks and curves, my bangs gone, my face in a frame of waves. “You like?” he asked and, then, without waiting for a reply, he took the towel he’d draped around my neck and used it to tousle my locks, saying, as he did, “You won’t ever need to blow this style dry.” He set the towel down. “Lauren,” he said, standing behind me now, leaning in and down so our faces were side by side in the mirror. “Listen to me, Lauren,” he said.

  “I’m listening,” I said, and indeed I was.

  He was so close I could smell his cologne. His voice had a commandeering quality. “Lauren,” he said again, “you have heavy hair.”

  I nodded. Sally, standing a little ways off, nodded too.

  “All that weight,” Andrew said.

  I suddenly wanted to weep. It was as if he knew about the stone inside me, as if he were speaking not about my head but my heart.

  “I’ve released you,” he said, “from all that weight, and now,” Andrew said, suddenly springing up like a jack-in-the-box, “and now, look what we have here.” He cupped the back of my head while tweaking a curl, pulling it past its kink, and then letting it loose so it fell back into perfect position. “I’ll bet you never knew how stunning you were, under all that weight,” Andrew said.

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nbsp; “She is stunning, isn’t she,” said Sally, smiling, her arms folded across her chest.

  “Stunning?” I said. That seemed a bit of an overstatement. I’m forty-nine and lined in all the wrong ways. I’m a good eighty pounds overweight. Stunning, impossible, but improved, that could certainly be. Weight weight weight, that word weight kept going through my head. And then, suddenly, it was as if everyone had disappeared. I lost the sounds of the salon, the sounds of the waterfall and the cash register, the sounds of hot hair dryers and women whispering. Suddenly there was just me and my mirror, which I now leaned into, my reflection looming up, zooming up, the curls so curly, my hair dark brown veined with a glossy sweet silver, the look light and alive, my face indeed framed, the pink seam of a new side part making my nose and my mouth and my eyes seem somehow softer, with sparkle. I blinked. Still there. I reached up cautiously to touch my hair. Then I put my hand on my still damp head and pressed down, hard, seeing if I could squelch the sudden spirals; they bounced back. They would not be banished. I gave Andrew a twenty-dollar tip.

  At home, alone at last, I faced my unmade bed, the sun gushing in through the bank of windows, tree shadows swaying on the floor. I had been lightened of a load, my head, and by extension maybe my mind, as well, restyled. And yet I still felt my stone, only was it, could it be, that it was somehow smaller? I picked up a hand mirror, a flea-market find, silver-backed, pearl-handled, the glass flecked here and there with spots. I brought it to me and, before I could study my brand-new face, I set it down and headed for the bathroom, where I turned on the shower and stood under its spray, the jets of water running down my bare back and clearing it of prickly hairs. Instead of stepping out, I then turned on the tub, shut off the spray, and before long was standing ankle-deep in wet warmth. Slowly, so slowly, I lowered my heft down into the filling cavern, the water roaring as it spilled from the single spigot and frothed against the basin’s blue sides. When had I last taken a bath? And why was I taking one now? On the way out of the salon I had purchased a big green bar of goat’s milk soap and bath beads of every color. Now I poured the beads in and watched as they melted, giving the water a glisten it didn’t ordinarily have. Careful not to wet my new do, I leaned back and planted one foot firmly on the tub’s tiled wall so that my leg was out of the water, a dripping limb oiled and slick. Using my husband’s razor, I, for the first time in years, shaved my legs, discovering, as I did that, despite my weight, I still had the curve of a calf, the soft silk of an inner thigh. I shaved my second leg and discovered these facts times two. I stayed in that tub a long, long time. Then I carefully toweled off and put on a dress. I felt, well, lovely. The material swept over the bared landscape of my legs, so smooth to the touch. And where was my depression now?