The Wisdom of Hair

by Kim Boykin

  I ran my fingers over the beads that were not the loud, flashy kind. They were the exact same color as the dress, and they made the dress look like something out of Vogue. I could tell he wanted me to rush into the bathroom and try it on, but I didn’t. The new creature inside me was battling the old creature.

  “I saw the invitation on the refrigerator. I want to take you,” he said, as he reached for my hand and held it in his and kissed it, making sure he was truly forgiven. “To the dance.”

  I was in and out of that dress in a matter of seconds.

  26

  “Baby, is that you?”

  I didn’t say anything at first. I thought about my letter she had scrawled return to sender on and how sick I felt when it came back to me. I wanted to slam the receiver down hard so she could see how it felt, but I didn’t. “Baby?” she said again like I hadn’t heard her the first time.

  Mama wanted something all right and wanted it pretty bad because she’d never called me baby before.

  “Mama.”

  “Hey, there. How you been?” she asked like we were picking up not where we left off but from a long, long time ago when things were just okay between us.

  “Fine.”

  There was a long silence. I could hear the alarm clock ticking away the seconds. I lay down on the bed and twirled the phone cord around with my fingers, first one way, then another as she went on about a grease fire at my uncle Heath’s fish camp and how Simpsonville had gotten their own Dairy Queen.

  “So how’s school?”

  “Fine.”

  More silence.

  “Dody Haskins shot and killed Miss Bertha’s dog last week and caused a big stink with everybody taking one side or another. I’m telling you, it was a real mess. I told Cindy Bates that I…”

  “Mama?”

  “What, honey?”

  “You sent my letter back.”

  No answer.

  “When I tried to call, you hung up on me.”

  Still no answer.

  “And now you just call me up and start talking like we do this every day?”

  “Zora May,” her voice was shaking. “I ain’t had a drink in six weeks and no man neither since Butch left.”

  I’d hated her for so long that it was hard to hear her talk like that and harder still to think of things changing. “I’m sober,” she said again, which set my heart to hopscotching across fine lines that had the mama I’d always wanted on one side and the mama I hated on the other. “And Butch, well, he’s gone,” she said like I hadn’t heard her the first time.

  I didn’t know who in the hell Butch was, probably just some man she’d taken up with since I left. I thought about the others that came around our house and how she lived for them, the way she ate up their attention like it was good and sweet even when it wasn’t. I remember watching her make over them like they were the end all and wondering why she couldn’t do that for me, not even once.

  “What do you want, Mama?”

  “I want you to come home.” She choked up a little bit. “I know we got things we got to get straight, things I got to make right, and I’m wanting to do that, Zora May, I am. Your uncle Heath’s going to loan me this truck so I can come down there, on your day off, and we could have a little bite to eat, talk things out. I’m different now. Better. I know Nana’d be proud. I know I didn’t give her much to be proud of when she was living, and you know your daddy…”

  She said his name and broke down completely. It had been ten years since he died, but sometimes the wound was still fresh and deep.

  “Mama, don’t cry. Listen, I’m off Wednesday afternoon, you can come then.”

  “I got a surprise for you,” she said with that little hitch she gets in her voice whenever she cries.

  “You don’t have to bring me anything, I’ll see you Wednesday.”

  “Okay. Zora May, I know I said Nana’d be proud of me, but I know for sure she’d be proud of you going to school.”

  I couldn’t breathe. I felt like someone was standing on my chest and if I heard another word about Daddy or Nana or the new and improved Mama, I was going to die. “I have to go now. Bye.”

  “Bye, baby.”

  I hung up the phone and felt awash with guilt because I knew Nana would never be proud of what was going on between Winston and me. I remember her shaking her head over every stray man Mama brought home, but Nana never said a word because she knew our souls were crushed the day Daddy died, especially Mama’s. I think in a way Nana felt sorry for Mama because she was so desperate to find a man to take my daddy’s place.

  Mrs. Cathcart didn’t say anything when I was late for work that day. Mama had messed with my mind and my heart so that nothing went right that morning. I mixed the wrong color three times in a row and was ready to just give up. Then my customer said she’d wasn’t real sure she’d look good as a blonde and that she thought it was the Lord’s way of saying so. So I gave her a cut and set, and she tipped me two dollars.

  I stayed pretty busy most of the day. It must have been a school holiday or something because we had so many little kids come in for haircuts. The only bright spot of the day was when Nina came in and brought the wedding pictures, which were beautiful, but some of the girls thought she brought them by just to rub their noses in her wedded bliss.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked as I leafed through the photos.

  “Good, real good. You’d think nobody’d ever had a baby before by the way they treat me. I can’t lift a finger around Harley or his mama. They’ve been so good to me.”

  “I think it’s a boy,” I said, because Nana had always said if you carry them low and out front, it’s sure to be a boy, and Nina was definitely out front.

  “I don’t care, long as it’s okay. They say I’m due the end of February, so we’ll find out soon enough, I reckon.”

  Nina didn’t stay long. I watched her as she went from booth to booth showing her pictures and talking to the girls. Somebody asked if she was going to work after the baby came. She said she couldn’t imagine leaving that baby all day even if her mama kept it.

  I loved the way Nina stroked her big belly and giggled when that tiny baby tossed about inside her, and the way she glowed like a new bride and a new mother should. Seeing Nina made me think a lot about my own mama, thoughts neither Daddy nor Nana ever allowed me to think about because they loved me so good. The one question I kept coming back to over and over again was, why didn’t Mama ever love me that way?

  27

  It was two o’clock on Wednesday afternoon when I came home from school to find Mama sitting there on the steps to the apartment. She’d always fussed over herself so that she never looked anywhere near her age, but that day she looked plain, dressed in an old pair of jeans and a white cotton blouse with the shirttail out. Her thick chestnut hair was pulled back in a simple knot and she didn’t have a speck of makeup on.

  She got up, dusted off her fanny, and then wiped her hands on her pants leg like she might shake my hand. Before either of us could say anything, we had our arms wrapped around each other, and I held her while she cried. Her hair smelled like baby shampoo instead of honky-tonk smoke. My heart beat a little faster because somewhere in me the tiniest fiber of hope for her to be a real mother was still alive.

  She held me at arm’s length and looked at me with clear eyes like I was something precious.

  “I ain’t Judy Garland,” she said laughing and crying at the same time.

  “I know, Mama.”

  “I can’t even sing.” She wiped away tears and stood up straight so that she was almost as tall as me. “Ain’t had a drink in almost seven weeks, and no men friends, either.”

  “That’s real good, Mama.”

  “I’m so glad you said I could come,” she said, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. “It took me hitting bottom, honey, but I’m here, I’m here with you now.”

  I don’t know why I didn’t cry. Maybe it was because I wasn’t sure I could believe what
I was seeing, Mama there all penitent, wanting to make things right between us. I put my arm around her slight frame and we walked up the stairs together side by side. She’d take one step and then another, looking at me like it was hard for her to believe, too.

  “Oh, this is pretty,” she said like she had to say something nice. “You got your sitting area and kitchen, and then your little bed and bath. Yeah, this is right pretty,” she said, running her hand along my kitchen counter. She stopped when she got to the wine rack and two crystal glasses that sat next to it and looked at me and smiled.

  “It’s not much, but it’s been nice to have this place so that I don’t have to work a second job and go to school. A lot of the girls have to do that. Two of them had to drop out,” I said, putting my jacket and purse on one of the hooks by the front door. “I’m going to change out of this uniform, Mama, so just make yourself at home.”

  She didn’t sit down. I heard her walking around my little place over and over again like she was afraid to settle in one spot. When I came out of the bedroom, she was pulling a good-size box out of her big shoulder bag and was trying to straighten out the bow that was mashed.

  “Oh. You want your surprise now? I wrapped it. Go on, now. Open it.”

  “Mama, I told you not to get me anything.”

  I tore off the bow and took the tape off from one end of the box and then the other. It was just an old pasteboard thing that said McKerrin Drugs on the side, but when I opened it and pulled back the tissue paper, I was a little child again. “Where did you find her?” I pulled my rag doll out of the box and held her close.

  She smelled earthy, like she had been in a cedar chest for a long time. Me and my daddy and her were best friends when I was little.

  “You used to set her up by that old oak tree out back by the shed and have tea parties, didn’t you? What was her name? It was Myrna, that’s right, ain’t it? That’s what you called her, Myrna. Like Myrna Loy.”

  “Where did you find her?”

  Mama’s chin quivered and she looked away. “I’m trying to make amends, honey. It was bad for me to take and hide her right after your daddy passed. That was real bad of me and I’m sorry.”

  She stood up and began to pace the room again. “And look at you drinking now. I reckon you’re past eighteen.” She ran her hand across the top of the wine rack like she could use a drink herself. “Imagine that, and fancy wine, too. Maybe it’ll do more for you than it did for me, ’cause drinking never done me no good. Took me a while to figure that out, though. You got a man friend?”

  She gave a little laugh when she saw me blush. “’Course you do. Pretty thing like you. By the time I was your age, you were five, going on six. Couldn’t have no more kids after you come along. Didn’t need none, though. Had you, and your daddy.”

  I told her I needed to start dinner and explained a little about my arrangement with the owner of the apartment. She said she wanted to help and that she’d learned how to make biscuits since I left, that it took her two five-pound bags of flour to get them right, but now she could make them as good as Nana’s.

  She rolled up her sleeves and got busy proving it while I fried some chicken and creamed some potatoes. After Mama finished up the biscuits, she took the strings off of some pole beans and talked about home. She didn’t say what she was doing now, she just went on and on about how pretty the fall had been and how the apples were gone but that it had been a good crop that year for the farmers.

  “You thought about coming home?” She pulled biscuits out of the oven that looked like a picture. “You’ll be graduating soon. I know I’d like it if you was there with me.”

  “I don’t know, Mama. I talked with a fella about a job here.”

  “Is he your boyfriend?”

  “No, Ronnie owns the nicest beauty shop in town. He’s real nice, and I have friends here now, too.”

  “Oh, you always kept to yourself at home. Didn’t have many friends.”

  My head snapped back like I’d been slapped; she didn’t have a clue as to why I was embarrassed to bring people over to our house. “Are you still at the shirt factory?”

  “Hell, no,” she said with that sideways grin I always loved to see whenever she teased my daddy. “I was supposed to get the next supervisor job that come up, and they passed me by and give it to that Mason girl. Berton Rollins took me in the back room because he seen I was all mad, crying. Said not to worry, that he could fix things for me with the higher-ups. Felt me up right there but never did what he said he was gonna do, so I quit there. I’m working for one of them rich ladies that used to come up the mountain during the summer, but she’s retired now. Stays on up there all year long.”

  “What do you do for her?”

  She put her hand over her mouth and with a sly look on her face, she told me that she cooked and cleaned for the woman, which was right funny for two reasons. One, Mama never cooked much of anything the whole time I lived at home, and she sure never cleaned.

  “She’s from Chicago. Don’t have good sense. You should see how much she pays me for just one week, more than I ever made at the shirt factory, and in cash, too.”

  She caught me up on everybody back home while we fixed our plates and didn’t take one bite until she saw the look on my face when I tried those biscuits. She was right. Nana would have been proud.

  “I got to leave out before dark,” she said as she took the last bite from her plate. “This was real nice, wasn’t it? We’ll have to do it again real soon.” She looked at me, trying not to tear up. “You know I come to say something. Do you think we could let the kitchen sit for a while and just talk?”

  We went over to my little couch and sat side by side. Mama sat on her hands and stared at the floor. Every so often, she looked at me and smiled like she was trying to get up the nerve to say whatever it was she needed to say. As much as I used to wish terrible things for her, it was hard to see her so uncomfortable. I picked up Myrna, straightened her yarn hair, and waited.

  “Well, I guess I told you more than once I hadn’t had a drink in a long time. I got to thank getting let go from the shirt factory for that,” she said, looking up at me to see if I remembered she said she’d quit. “I didn’t drink none when I was growing up and not much at all when your daddy was living. Then Heyward come along and…Leon, and I was as much of a sot as they were. Looking back, I know I stayed that way because they sure looked better when I was drinking, especially Heyward. Sometimes I just shake my head and wonder if there’s anything up there when I think of laying with that man.”

  “He was a sorry-ass drunk,” I laughed. “But he was a nice sorry-ass drunk. I remember thinking you’d be upset when he died.”

  “Hell, no. I made you get one end of that old couch he pissed all over, I got the other, and we put it on the trash pile out back. It made a right good fire, remember?”

  “And we bought a new one the very next day.” I wiped a tear away.

  “And Leon, well…” Neither of us was laughing anymore. “But what I come here to say—about your daddy—”

  I felt the color drain out of my face. A wave of nausea shot through me. I was nine again, sitting on the little bench in our backyard listening to Mama and Daddy fighting. I couldn’t make out what they were saying because their words were jumbled up together in all the shouting. When they stopped, dead silence filled the whole mountain. Not so much as a cicada uttered a sound.

  Daddy stormed off. I ran after him. He stopped and scooped me up in his arms. He held me so tight I could hardly breathe. Then he put me back down and told me to mind him and stay put. The dry grass from the drought crunched under his feet. His shoulders jerked up and down as he walked away. He was crying hard.

  “Nothing’s been right in my life since your daddy died, nothing. Now, I used to think it’s because I keep picking the wrong man. I thought I was trying to fill that big hole your daddy left inside of me when he passed, but that ain’t so.” She was crying hard. “I loved my Boyd, oh
how I loved your daddy, Boyd.”

  I broke down and held her while she sobbed from the pain of trying to right the past. I stroked her hair like Nana would have and kept hoping what was happening between us would suddenly feel right but it never did. I was still mothering for both of us.

  “Anyhow, I come to set things right. To say what I done and make my ’mends.”

  There was a hole inside me worn deep from trying to decipher the horrible argument I’d overhead. I always thought if I understood what really happened that last time I saw my daddy, then somehow his dying would be easier to take. But as I looked into my mother’s eyes, suddenly I didn’t want to know what really happened that day when, as one of the boys I went to school with put it, my daddy hugged a train. I shook my head, but the words wouldn’t come out. Stop. Don’t say it. Let it lay.

  “He could never pay me enough attention, nobody could. I was mad at him. I told him you wasn’t his. That I’d laid with his cousin, but it wasn’t true. He didn’t have to do what he did, he could have looked in your eyes and known it wasn’t true.

  “I ain’t lying no more.” She shook her head violently and took a tissue out of the box. She blew her nose and tried to smile. “I think you always knew he done it because of me. I know I’ve always been such a mess because I couldn’t admit that, but I’m better now. I come to say I’m sorry for all the bad things I done. And I’m sorry for being so weak, for never taking care of you any better than I did.” She touched my hand and I jerked away from her like a hot stove.

  “Thanksgiving’s in a couple of weeks. Come on home and we’ll cook up a storm.” Her voice sounded warm and soft like a kindergarten teacher’s on the first day of school. “I’ll take you into town and help you find a job fixing hair. If that don’t work out, I know they’re hiring at the shirt factory.”