The Wisdom of Hair

by Kim Boykin

“There’s lots of pictures in the hallway of the two of them in different places. Some of them were taken in Europe, I think, and then there were a lot taken at the beach, but not the beaches here, rocky beaches.

  “The drinking room smells like a bar, but it’s furnished real nice. I don’t think he had much to do with that. Looks mostly like stuff that a woman would pick out. But my God, Zora, that man is gorgeous, even in a stupor.”

  My heart felt like it was going to jump out of my chest. “I don’t think I can take much more of this, Sara Jane.”

  “He still has her things in the closet, and, honey, that woman had some beautiful clothes, I’m telling you. He didn’t have much in there, everything was on hangers from the cleaners, a couple pairs of jeans, a dozen or so shirts, and a dark-blue suit that looks like it hasn’t been worn in forever. It had dust on the shoulders, lots of it. Next time—”

  “No,” I said. “There can’t be a next time with you going in there like some kind of detective. It just adds fuel to the fire I already have for the man. Look, I need this place. I can’t afford to go and do something stupid. Tell me you’ll never go in there again. Promise me, Sara Jane.”

  “Well, you didn’t even let me tell you the juiciest part,” she said and then she was purposely quiet until I begged her to tell. “Emma…looks a little…like you.”

  9

  I woke up early the next morning and went right to work, cutting shortening into the flour. I poured a tad of salt in my hand with a dab of baking powder and dusted it across the flour before I worked a little ice water into the dough so that it was nice and firm, not sticky because that can be a real mess. I can’t tell how much of this or that I put in the bowl because I always eyeball things the way Nana taught me. It took a lot of patience on her part for me to learn how to make anything that way, much less dumplings.

  They rolled out real nice, not paper-thin, mind you, just good and thin and ready to boil. I took the pot of chicken broth out of the refrigerator and turned the stove on high. Even though it was cold, I could smell the sage and the little bit of thyme I had added the night before.

  There was just enough time to set my hair in electric curlers before the pot came to a rolling boil. It was almost seven o’clock, already hot in that little kitchen. I stood there “glowing,” as Mrs. Cathcart would say, as I dropped those strips of flour into that good broth. I settled for a bowl of cereal as I watched those dumplings swirl about for a few minutes before it was time to finish getting dressed. I remember smiling to myself that day because I was making “lovin’” for Winston. When I was little I always called it “chicklin and dumplings,” but when I was real little, I called it “lovin’” because that’s what it felt like when Nana made it special for me.

  It was strange when I first moved to Davenport, how every time Winston crossed my mind, I felt like somebody had caught me playing dress-up in my mother’s clothes. I was embarrassed but mostly ashamed that I had a little seed of Mama inside me, a seed that had taken root and was growing faster than the kudzu overtaking the trees behind my apartment. But the harder I fell for Winston, the less I thought about Mama.

  I sang a little tune my daddy used to sing about the sun coming up over the mountain, took the rollers out of my hair, and twisted it up in a little knot so that only three or four curly little tresses fell across my face. I made a pouty face and put on some bright pink lipstick I had gotten from one of the beauty-supply salesmen, then went back into the kitchen to check the pot one last time.

  I remember it was a Tuesday because that was the day Winston had his eight o’clock class. I checked myself in the mirror before I went out my front door and walked at a snail’s pace down the steps because he hadn’t come out of the house yet. I was on the second step from the bottom when the back door finally opened. He was in such a hurry, I guess, he didn’t see me until he heard the gravel crunch under my feet.

  “Good morning,” I said when he looked up at me.

  “Morning.”

  It was the first thing he’d said to me since Miss Cunningham had introduced us and it wasn’t even a complete sentence. He had never once said thank you for all of the lovin’ I spent hours making him, most everything from scratch. He said nothing more than that one little word, got into that sports car, and drove off to work. That sure wasn’t the way I’d imagined our first exchange would go. Kudzu love or not, I marched myself down to the Davenport School of Beauty, worked ’til way past six, and gave that man Spam and cold grits for dinner that night.

  That whole day was just bad all the way around. I’d been in school for two months and already had two regular clients, both of them Tuesday ladies and elderly. One lady, Mrs. Chute, didn’t have more than fifty hairs on her head, but she came every week for her wash and set. The other one was a big woman named Miss Girtha, a retired schoolteacher who always tipped me twenty cents.

  Anyway, both of them canceled their appointments that morning because of the croup. So I just sat there with the rest of the girls hoping for a walk-in to practice on and listening to Mrs. Cathcart’s husband tell stories about his old homeplace.

  Mother Hannah, Mrs. Cathcart’s mother, worked up front at the appointment desk. She was well into her eighties, and when she wasn’t nodding off, she’d walk back to where we were sitting with Mr. Cathcart and ask where all the customers were. Mr. Cathcart was always quick to promise that they’d come, but it was easy to get discouraged during the first couple months of school when the regular customers stayed away. Nobody said it, but I think all of us knew the walk-ins were hoping we’d make all of our beginner’s mistakes on somebody other than them. Still, it was depressing to see a half dozen clients trickle through the door with the twenty-three of us standing around, ready to work.

  “They always come back,” Mr. Cathcart would remind us several times during the day, “sooner or later. We’re the only place in town that’ll cut a kid’s hair for a dollar.”

  A lot of mothers brought their babies in for first-time haircuts, which Mrs. Cathcart loved. She’d ooh and aah over all of them, even the ugly ones, and give them little pieces of Zwieback teething biscuits. The kids who had teeth got animal crackers when they were done with their haircuts.

  I absolutely hated first haircuts because those babies—and they were just babies—never sat still. Everybody including me was so afraid we were going to cut one of them, and one day I did. Well, this one wasn’t exactly a baby; he was four years old with a head full of curly blond baby hair that had never been cut. When I wet it and combed it out, it was all the way down his back.

  Mrs. Cathcart was good about teaching from our textbook, but she was also good about telling us practical things. Like if you’re cutting a little boy’s curls off for the first time, be sure and remind his mother that the moment you cut his hair it will most likely be straight as a board. Forever.

  I ran the comb down his thin blond hair that almost touched the elastic waistband of his shorts and looked at his mama.

  “This is a really drastic change. Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “No, I don’t, but his daddy does.”

  “His hair’s going to be straight like it is now.”

  “I know. Go ahead, but give him the bowl cut. I’m not shaving it off like his daddy said.” She sighed like she hated to see those pretty blond ringlets go. “His daddy’s took to calling him ‘Johnny Sue.’” She took a handful of his wet hair in her hand and held it close to her face. “Those curls were just so pretty, I couldn’t never cut ’em myself.”

  I thought it was sweet the way she carried on over her little boy’s hair, like somehow those blond curls would keep her baby from growing up. But it was too late. He was strong and a terror for his mama, who had to fight him just to get him in the chair. My job was to get the cape on him, which wasn’t easy because he kept unsnapping it and laughing when it fell into his lap. When he wasn’t doing that, he was pulling the cape over his head or flapping his “wings,” as he called them. I
wanted to use those pretty, long curls to tie him to the chair. Judging from the look on his mama’s face, she wanted to do the same until he grew out of whatever phase he was going through.

  I gathered his hair in my hand like a ponytail, held my breath, and cut the length of it off. Mrs. Cathcart kept a supply of pink and blue grosgrain ribbon on hand, and if he’d been the kind of child to sit still, I would have tied a blue ribbon around the fat lock and given it to his mama for a keepsake.

  I held the little boy down by his shoulder with one hand and gave it to her with the other. “Oh,” her voice quivered. She looked up at me like the veil had been lifted. “He’s not a baby anymore.”

  As big as that child was, he hadn’t been a baby for a long time. “Stop squirming now, Johnny.” I said it nice. “I can’t finish your haircut if you won’t be still.”

  Without his baby hair to protect him, the little boy’s mama was getting really mad. “John Thomas Baldwin, if you don’t sit still, this woman’s gonna cut your ear off.”

  And then it happened. I don’t know how, I didn’t even see it, but he made one wrong move, and part of that little brat’s ear went sailing across the room.

  Now, you would think after all of the threatening that woman had done to her son that she wouldn’t have gotten so mad at me. But her baby was screaming and crying. He bled like I’d snipped a major artery, and she started shrieking at me, calling me every name in the book. Mrs. Cathcart was mortified by the whole exchange and immediately picked the sliver of ear up in a sanitized towel. The woman nearly fainted when Mrs. Cathcart handed it to her.

  “Now you get hold of yourself,” Mrs. Cathcart said sternly. “Zora, bring the first-aid kit, and tell Mr. Cathcart to bring some ice.”

  I brought the kit to her along with a large box of Band-Aids that was sitting on top of it. I expected her to bandage the boy up, but instead she took the smelling salts out of the little foil packet and waved it under the nose of the hysterical woman, who sat down on the floor but finally seemed to have come to her senses. Even the little boy had quit crying and was trying to look at himself in the mirror. Mr. Cathcart hurried out with an ice tray and cocked the handle so that the cubes spilled out on top of the piece of ear and onto the open towel on the woman’s lap.

  The woman looked at the towel like someone had put a bloody stump in her lap. She pointed to me. “You need to fire her.”

  “You ought to have raised your boy better. Even you told him to be still or I was going to cut his ear off,” I snapped.

  “I don’t care. I want you fired.”

  “Shut up, all of you,” Mrs. Cathcart screamed. “Nobody’s getting fired and nobody can cut hair like it’s a moving target. Now, you get this…this…get it on down to the emergency room right quick.” Mrs. Cathcart bound up the towel with a big red rubber band. “They’ll sew it back on good as new, but you’ve got to get over there in a hurry or it won’t take.”

  The woman nodded her head like this all made perfect sense to her. “But we don’t have no car.”

  Mr. Cathcart drove the two of them to the emergency room. The doctor said if it was a finger they could sew it back on; it wouldn’t take because the ear is just made out of cartilage. I could have told them that.

  When Mr. Cathcart came back he complained all day long about the woman being indigent, that she wouldn’t be able to pay the bill. He was afraid that the hospital would make the beauty school pay for it, or that the woman might hire one of those ambulance-chasing lawyers. But none of that happened. As a matter of fact, the little boy still came to the school even after that. Everybody snickered when they saw him sitting so still in the chair, afraid to breathe, especially when the scissors glided around his ears. If I’d been his mother, I would have let him wear the bowl cut to cover up his disfigurement, but his mama always insisted the boy’s ears were cut out, standing there with her arms crossed and her feet spread apart, daring him to move.

  Mrs. Cathcart always gave the other children who came in two animal crackers after their haircut. “One for each hand,” she would say, but she always handed that little boy the whole box and let him take as many as he wanted. I think it was her way for thanking him and his mama for not suing the school.

  Even after all that craziness I still loved to cut hair. I never cared much for doing perms because they smell awful, and I’m not great at color; that’s Sara Jane’s forte. But it was about this time I began to feel, just like Mrs. Cathcart said, that I had been called to fix hair for the rest of my life.

  10

  Back home, I didn’t listen to music much. Whenever Mama played her records, I’d put a fat rubber pencil eraser in each ear to muffle Judy Garland’s show tunes. After a while, I didn’t need the erasers to tune out the music. But beach music was different. It had a sweet, soulful sound that always made me dip my shoulders and shuffle my feet without even realizing it. Sure there were radio stations who played folks like Duran Duran, Eurythmics, and the king of pop, Michael Jackson, but if you lived anywhere near the beach in the Carolinas, beach music was still tops.

  As much as I hated drinking when I was living with Mama, it never bothered me that drinking had become Sara Jane’s and my favorite pastime. Every night the wine was cheap and cold, and went down as easy as those sweet piña coladas we used to drink on dollar night at Shag Daddy’s Beach Bar in North Myrtle Beach.

  Sara Jane and I had been celebrating again. We were always finding something to celebrate, and sometimes, when we couldn’t think of anything to cut loose over, we just turned the music up real loud and celebrated ourselves. I remember that Saturday night we were cleaning up the kitchen. General Johnson and the Chairmen of the Board’s “Give Me Just a Little More Time” was on the radio; it had become my own personal battle hymn where Winston was concerned.

  “Give me just a little more time,” Johnson crooned, “and our love will surely grow.”

  Sara Jane took the other end of my old checkered dish towel and we shagged along with the General as he belted out the chorus, pleading, “‘Give me just a little more time, and our love will surely grow. Baby. Please, baby.’” Scooping up my wineglass, I tried to drink and shag at the same time but made a mess.

  “Shuffle, ball, change,” Sara Jane reminded me when my feet stopped moving, like I knew what that meant. I just watched her feet and tried to make mine do the same.

  Sara Jane wanted to call the radio station in Myrtle Beach and request “With This Ring” by the Platters, which was her and Jimmy’s song. I wouldn’t let her because it was expensive to call long distance back then, so she settled for Clarence Carter’s “Too Weak to Fight,” which came on right after a commercial for Drink and Drown night at Shag Daddy’s and a wet T-shirt contest at another beach bar called Jimmy Mack’s.

  I knew Sara Jane Farquhar had opened my silverware drawer at least fifty times since we’d started being friends, but she never once saw Emma’s little gift I’d hidden all the way in the back. I never really expected Sara Jane to see the dress boxes that were still in the same places Emma had stashed them, but she had been coming to my place almost every day for almost three months and never once saw that little present.

  “Sara Jane, you always wash. It’s your turn to dry and put away.”

  She took a clean dishrag out of the drawer by the sink, shagging and twirling around me until she was beside the drain board. She went on and on about Jimmy, stopping just in time to close her eyes and cock her head to the side as she mouthed the chorus “too weak to fight.” I talked about school, feeling like Clarence Carter could read my mind. Every time he declared his own weakness for his lover, Sara Jane would pick up a spoon, a salt shaker, or anything else handy that she could use for a microphone and sing right along with him.

  I knew Sara Jane liked everything just so and hated to leave the kitchen undone. I’d just enough wine in me to think I couldn’t live another day without telling her about all of Emma’s things, especially that little box in the drawer behind th
e soup spoons. I knew what I was doing, sure as the world.

  “Oh, just let the dishes drain tonight,” she said, which didn’t work into my plan at all. “Let’s sit outside on the porch and finish our wine. I have something I want to ask you.”

  “Lazy,” I said, flicking dishwater at her off the ends of my fingertips. Clarence gave one last James Brown yowl as Sara Jane scooped up a handful of silverware and opened the drawer real wide, and stopped just short of putting the knives and forks away.

  “Zora, why do you have a wrapped present in your silverware drawer?”

  “Oh, that. It’s not mine.”

  “Well, who the hell does it belong to?”

  “Winston’s wife, Emma. She left lots of things here, dresses and such. I think she bought them and hid them from Winston so he wouldn’t get mad. I just let everything be. Ooh, I love that song,” I said as soon as I heard the first few bars of “Sixty Minute Man.” “Would you turn up the radio? My hands are wet.”

  “Everything?” she asked, ignoring The Dominoes altogether.

  We dried our hands on the dishcloth we’d used for dancing. I showed her the dresses in the boxes under the bed and two in the top of my closet. I really made over them because I knew it was eating Sara Jane to know what was in the little box almost as much as it was eating me.

  “Oh, my God, you just have to see this cute little angora set. It’s blue with little pearl buttons. They look like real pearls.” I didn’t have the first clue as to what real pearls looked like, but I pulled a box out of the bottom drawer of the bureau and tried to act surprised when she stopped me from opening it.

  “Zora, why didn’t you open that present?”

  “Sara Jane, it’s not mine. Besides, it’s wrapped and it just wouldn’t be right. I’ve got to tell you, I felt so guilty going through all of Emma’s stuff, I just couldn’t,” I said, like I hadn’t taken a complete inventory of Emma’s new clothes and tried on every single piece.