The Wisdom of Hair

by Kim Boykin

  “Now hush, child,” she said. “I love you so. You’re mine, just like Sara Jane. There was just some terrible mistake somewhere along the way and it took a long time for you to come to me. But you’re here now, where you belong, and I swear I’d rather die than to see you suffer like this.”

  “Did he hurt you?” Sara Jane said as she looked up in the rear-view mirror for my reaction to the question. “If he laid a hand on you, I swear Jimmy will beat the shit out of him.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” I said. “There was this man…and he said…I don’t know, awful things…and Winston just sat there, drinking…and drinking…not saying anything to him…Oh, God, he doesn’t love me.”

  “Jimmy ought to beat the shit out of him anyway.”

  “Zora,” Mrs. Farquhar cooed, “your family loves you so. Please don’t give this sorry excuse for a man another thought.”

  “But—” I began.

  “But nothing,” she said. “Everything’s going to be all right. We’ll make it so.”

  I shook my head and turned my face away. “But I think I’m pregnant.”

  *

  Sara Jane and her mama didn’t take me to my little apartment. They took me home with them. I stayed in the guest bedroom with a homemade quilt Sara Jane’s great-grandma had made for my bedspread and pillows Mrs. Farquhar had embroidered with little fall leaves. They brought me meals on a silver bed tray, and I ate food that a sick person might eat, like grits and dry toast, chicken broth, and Jell-O. For some reason, they gave me lots of ginger ale to drink. I reckon I was so sick inside my heart over the whole mess with Winston, they thought this kind of food would be good for me. And then there was the baby.

  I’d missed my period two weeks ago, but didn’t give it much thought because it was a lot like Mama—painful, just showing up whenever it had a mind to. I didn’t even let myself wonder if I was pregnant, and if I had, I would never have told anybody. Nana always said it was bad luck ’til a woman was through her first three months. I can’t say I was surprised; as often as Winston and I did it, I was bound to get pregnant. We never used anything and he never asked me if I was on birth control, so I figured it was all right by him.

  I wasn’t real sure how I felt about a baby. I wasn’t thrilled, but I wasn’t upset. I thought my feelings would be determined by Winston’s reaction, which isn’t the way things should be at all. Maybe in some sad way, I thought the baby might make up for the baby he lost with Emma, and the three of us would all just live happily ever after.

  Mrs. Farquhar had her family doctor come by the house and check me. He told me he hadn’t made a house call in ten years and hadn’t done obstetrics in twenty, but that he could never say no to Nettie Farquhar. He was nice, talked a lot, tried to make me feel comfortable while he examined me. I answered his questions in a voice just above a whisper and never looked at his face.

  I could have just used the home pregnancy test Mrs. Farquhar put on the dresser; there was no reason for him to come. The way Sara Jane and her mama fussed over my broken heart made me feel like I needed a doctor, but doctors don’t heal that kind of hurt.

  “Well, Zora, you’re healthy, there’s no doubt about that, and you’re pregnant, too, there’s no doubt about that, either.” He took his specs off and rubbed the bridge of his nose, then folded his hand under his elbow and looked at me. “I know you’re not married, and you know, these days you don’t have to have a baby if you don’t want to.”

  Now I thought that was the craziest thing I’d ever heard. It wasn’t the baby’s fault that I made my bed with a man who could never be a daddy. Even though I wasn’t real crazy about having this baby alone, the thought of doing away with it never crossed my mind. I was just pregnant, and hadn’t given any real thought about life nine months down the road.

  Mrs. Farquhar was in the room the whole time he examined me. When I didn’t answer his question, she sat down on the bed and stroked my hair. “Zora, honey, how do you feel about this baby?”

  “I don’t know,” I whispered where only she could hear, “but I’m not doing away with it if that’s what he means.”

  “Don,” she said, “Zora’s fine?”

  He nodded.

  “She wants this baby.”

  “She’s a young girl. I only brought it up because I thought I should. No offense intended.”

  “None taken,” Mrs. Farquhar said, and she thanked him for coming and walked him to the front door. She returned a few minutes later with more ginger ale and a giddy look on her face. “We’re gonna have a baby.”

  She hugged me, and I think she was relieved that I didn’t know any other way than to let the life inside me just be. I puffed up a little and started to cry. I did that a lot in the beginning, just like the crying girl. Everybody blamed it on hormones, but a part of me grieved for what Nina and Harley had and how happy they were about their baby.

  “My daddy died when I was nine, and I know what it’s like growing up without a daddy…it’s just…awful.”

  “This baby,” Mrs. Farquhar said as she crawled in bed beside me and put her arm around me, “will have family, real family, who will love him as much as a body can possibly be loved. Or her. This child will be so loved because you are loved.”

  She sat there with me and told me about her pregnancy with Sara Jane. She also told me about when she lost the twins and how important it was for me to take good care of myself. About that time, Sara Jane came in with some lunch, solid food—turkey noodle soup made from the Thanksgiving carcass and a grilled cheese sandwich.

  Mrs. Farquhar had missed the Day-After-Thanksgiving sales on my account. She told Sara Jane and me that she was going to run to the mall for just a little while, which meant she’d be gone for at least three or four hours.

  After she left, Sara Jane and I talked about everything except Winston. She told me the bridesmaids’ dresses had come in, and that her dress would come from Atlanta just five days before the wedding.

  “Mama’s counting on you moving in with them.”

  I hadn’t given any thought as to where I would go or what I would do. “Sara Jane, I can’t do that. You all have done everything for me. I just can’t.”

  “She really believes that you and the baby are going to live here,” she paused. “Come on, Zora. You need a place to stay, and Mama and Daddy will need you after the wedding. You know how she loves to do for us. It’ll break her heart if you say no.”

  I knew I had to do something. I couldn’t just lie there anymore like I was sick. I had to get up and make some decisions for my baby and me.

  “All right,” I said. “But I’m gonna work and pay my own way. The State Board’s next week, and I can probably still get that job at Ronnie’s if I want it.”

  “Do you want me and Jimmy to go to the apartment and get your things?”

  “No, I will. It might take me a while, but I’ll go. I’ve got enough clothes to last three or four days in my suitcase.”

  “Mama took your things out of your suitcase to wash them. I saw the dress,” she said, looking like she wasn’t sure she should have mentioned it. “I know it must have been beautiful before you ripped it up. What do you want me to do with it?”

  “Burn it.”

  31

  “So you’re just leaving, is that it?”

  I hadn’t heard him come up the stairs. He was standing in the doorway; I turned my back to him.

  “Don’t go.”

  I shoved the wine rack and crystal glasses hard up against the wall and taped up everything that was mine in the pasteboard box.

  “I know something happened that night with John because he’s trying to kick me out of the English department. But I don’t know what happened with you.”

  He was behind me, close enough that I could feel the warmth of his body. But I felt nothing.

  “Look at me, Zora.” I turned to face him. “Talk to me.”

  “I hate you. Get out of my way.”

  “Zora.”

/>   “Damn it, stop saying my name.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you never say it.”

  “That’s not true.”

  He put his arms around me. My stomach pulsed hard. I couldn’t breathe. My heart beat like a washing machine; the sound had migrated from my center to my head, pounding in my ears.

  “Get out of my way.”

  “Talk to me.”

  I wretched in the kitchen sink and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

  “Get out of my way.”

  “My God, what did I do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I don’t remember.” He touched my face. “Whatever it was, I’m sorry.”

  “You did nothing. You always do nothing. It’s too late.”

  “Why?”

  “If you cared anything about me, you wouldn’t have let that man talk to me the way he did. If you cared, you would have come after me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I was so stupid to think I could ever be anything other than a distraction so you don’t have to think about Emma.”

  “Emma? This doesn’t have anything to do with Emma. I was just—”

  “Drunk. I know your kind because my mama brought home men like you all the time. You know how to drink and screw real fine, but you don’t know the first thing about how to love.”

  “Please. Don’t go.”

  “Get out of my way.”

  “I know you’re pregnant,” he blurted out. “The man at the desk didn’t throw the note away.”

  I wanted to kill him. I closed my eyes and tried to hold the words inside.

  “Well then, you know that I have to leave. That’s what Emma did. She left your sorry ass so you could drink yourself to death.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Emma was pregnant, just like me. She was leaving you. Wasn’t she? Because you’re a drunk.”

  “Shut up. You don’t know that…”

  He was so wounded, it was easy to push by him. I went into the kitchen and climbed up on the counter to find that little box and finish him off. It sailed across the room as hard as I could throw it, aimed straight for his head. He dodged the box. It hit the wall and the rattle fell out on the floor by his foot. His hand shook as he picked it up, and it wasn’t because he was hungover. He held it in his hands and closed his eyes.

  “All this time I thought you were drinking and grieving over her. I know what it’s like to love somebody like that and somehow that made it okay. But you weren’t grieving, were you? You were a drunk before Emma died, and you’re a drunk now. You’ll never change.”

  I made two more trips down the stairs with clothes and shoes while he just stood there like he was the dead one.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, as I started out the door with the rest of my things.

  I looked around the apartment one last time and saw my old rag doll, Myrna, lying on a little wicker chest I’d used for a coffee table. Without saying another word, I snatched Myrna up and started out the door. Since the night Mama gave her back to me, it had gnawed at me where Mama had found her. I threw the last of my stuff in the floorboard and the minute I laid Myrna on the seat beside me, it all came back.

  The day the police came to tell us my daddy was dead, Mama saw the car pull up in the driveway. She came running out of the house, screaming and crying so hard she collapsed on the ground. The sheriff and Nana took her inside. I was just nine years old; it was terrifying, watching them put her to bed.

  Myrna was on the parson’s bench in the hallway near Mama’s room with some other dolls. I picked her up, pressed her against Mama’s chest, and wrapped her arms around the doll. She just lay there, staring out into space, trembling, running her fingers through Myrna’s hair.

  I was heartbroken over losing my daddy, and even though Mama had never cared for me, I was worried about her. I didn’t realize the doll was gone until a few weeks after the funeral. I looked and looked for her. Sometimes, after Mama had been drinking, she’d laugh and tease me. “Wonder where that old rag doll of yours up and went?” Then she’d stumble about the house pretending to search for her. “Why, she must be a magic doll because she just up and disappeared.”

  I knew it was Mama’s lie about me that made my daddy kill himself, and now I knew she had stashed the old doll to punish me for his death.

  The sound of Winston trying to open the truck door brought me back from that place in my mind that makes old wounds fresh. He was crying, begging to me to unlock the door or roll down the window. I took one last look at that pretty face and pulled out of the driveway.

  32

  I stood back and watched the people who loved Sara Jane pamper her day and night, preparing her for the wedding. It reminded me a lot of that old movie Liz Taylor starred in with Richard Burton, how everyone was rushing about, trying to make everything, including Cleopatra, absolutely perfect for Marc Antony’s arrival. I know Nana Adams would’ve had herself a belly laugh at such a fuss being made over a ceremony that, when you got right down to it, amounted to two people saying two words to each other.

  Most of the four hundred people invited to the wedding sent their best wishes along with a gift. There were so many wedding presents that Jimmy and Mr. Farquhar moved everything out of the living room and into the garage. The living room looked like a fine department store full of pretty gifts set out on row after row of eight-foot-long tables. Folks came by every day to drop off their gifts and to look at all of Sara Jane and Jimmy’s pretty new things. They oohed and aahed over everything, especially the grand prize, a Waterford crystal vase that was so big Sara Jane said it would make a good champagne bucket.

  The wedding director and owner of the Bridal Barn, Tiny Ellison, got her panties in a knot when she found out that Sara Jane’s dress was bought in Atlanta. But Mrs. Farquhar smoothed everything over by ordering the bridesmaids’ dresses from Tiny and asking her to direct the wedding, which was the biggest one in Davenport that summer and maybe the biggest one ever.

  Tiny was no stranger to big weddings, having directed the governor’s son’s ten years ago. She made out like the governor himself had sought her out, but the truth was that Tiny happened to be the bride’s favorite aunt. So that was her credential to direct the biggest social event in Davenport and one that she reminded us of constantly.

  Tiny would say, “we did this at the governor’s mansion” and “we did that at the governor’s mansion” all the time. Sara Jane and I got sick of her flaunting that around, but we didn’t say anything. Tiny insisted on bringing the bridesmaids’ dresses by Sara Jane’s house for us to try on because she didn’t want anyone to walk into the store and see them before the wedding.

  “There are those,” she said looking up at me with straight pins in her mouth, “who’d come by my shop for no other reason than to get a peek at these dresses. Lord knows, I’ll do whatever it takes to guard the integrity of this wedding.”

  There were seven bridesmaids in all, me and Sara Jane’s cousins from North Carolina. All of us gathered at the Farquhars’ the Saturday before the wedding to try on our gowns that Tiny had altered. She swore it was a bona fide miracle that we even had dresses because they had been shipped to her store in Christmas red when they were supposed to be emerald green and had to be reordered just three and a half weeks before the wedding.

  We all giggled and whirled around in those satin gowns that made swishing noises as we walked down the aisles in the living room between the gift tables. I didn’t know anything about being pregnant, that I wouldn’t really start showing until about midway through the fifth month, and I was sure my dress would be too small. It was a little tight up top, but other than that, it fit perfectly.

  Tiny left around five o’clock with those seven dresses locked away in Bridal Barn garment bags and a look on her face like she was on a mission from God. She said that she and her most trusted assistant, Myrtle, would have the alterations done by Wednesday and to call her at
home if anybody wanted her to open the shop special for them because the Bridal Barn was always closed that day for the midweek prayer meeting.

  Although they were cousins, none of the bridesmaids were anything like Sara Jane. Two of them married into some religion that believed in having lots of kids but didn’t believe in dancing, and the other four were in college. I was glad when they all headed back to their respective homes, which left just Sara Jane and me.

  “Are you gonna take me out or what?”

  “Oh, gosh, Sara Jane, I’m sorry. I didn’t think about throwing you a bachelorette party.”

  “Come on, let’s go someplace, just for a little bit. We’ll tell Mama we’re going over to Jimmy’s.”

  “The doctor said that I can’t drink,” I said as I put on my coat.

  “Well, then, I’ll have to drink for both of us.”

  We drove to Myrtle Beach because we wanted to go to Shag Daddy’s. It was on a street near the beach with rows and rows of bars. But Sara Jane must have seen something she liked on the sign, because she whipped the car right into the parking lot of Jimmy Mack’s. There was a line of girls a mile long, which didn’t appeal to me at all.

  “There’s never a line. What in the world is going on?”

  “Strippers,” Sara Jane said with a wicked grin.

  “Sara Jane. I never—”

  “Well, neither have I. Come on, I’m getting married next week.” She made the pouty smile, which always makes me say yes to her. “Jimmy’s buddies took him out tonight to the Discotheque Lounge, and you know they have naked girls there. Let’s just go in and see what it’s like. I promise if it’s awful, we’ll leave.”

  “Any brides tonight?” A skinny little man with no shirt on and a tuxedo walked through the sea of women.

  “Right here.”

  “Sara Jane.”

  “I just want to look, I’m not going to buy anything.”