by Claire Cook
The kiddie area was in the back corner of the room, and my siblings and I had all practically grown up there. It was really just a slightly raised platform, partitioned off by a short Tuscan-style fake stone wall and a wrought iron baby gate. My avocado green Easy-Bake oven was still in there.
Esther Williams would unroll her mat on the matching avocado green shag rug and plop the DVD player down on the wall. She’d exercise along with a DVD—sometimes yoga, sometimes tai chi, sometimes Solo Salsa with Sizzle. Then she’d watch an Esther Williams movie, maybe Million Dollar Mermaid or Dangerous When Wet. After that, she’d flip through a magazine or take a nap. If any kids showed up, they’d just play around her. It wasn’t like she got in anyone’s way.
Four hours was a long time for a hair color. In fact it was eight times longer than the Clairol professional directions recommended. But about three or four years ago, I’d just finished brushing on Esther Williams’s color. I covered her hair in a clear plastic cap to build up the heat and accelerate the color. I tucked cotton under the elastic to absorb any drips. She made a funny sound.
“I don’t feel so good,” she said. She had one hand up by her shoulder, like she was pledging allegiance.
She didn’t look so good either. She was having a hard time catching her breath, and she was all fluttery and anxious. I called 911 and went back to hold her hand until the ambulance came.
While we waited, I thought hard about rinsing off her color. On the one hand, I didn’t want to be responsible for killing her. On the other hand, Esther Williams was a tough cookie. If she made it, I knew she’d be the one to kill me if her hair fell out.
In the end, I was afraid to risk a rinse. I followed her out to the ambulance, then got back to work. Four hours later, a cruiser pulled up and a cop walked Esther back into the shop. He waited while I rinsed off her color and styled her hair, then drove her home. She said it was the best damn dye job she ever had. And so now she always sat for exactly four hours.
I took the last pink plastic roller out of Esther Williams’s hair and started teasing it with a rattail comb. After I got her the volume she liked, I gave her enough aerosol spray to last her for at least a week.
“You’re gorgeous,” I said when I finished.
“What else is new?” she said. “Okay, now give me some eyes.”
I gave her some eyes, smoky eyes at that. Almay color cream eye shadow in Mocha Shimmer, Bobbi Brown long-wear gel eyeliner in Black Ink, and NYC eyelashes. They were self-adhesive, but I added some extra glue anyway, just to make sure she didn’t lose one before I saw her again. Next came lots of Maybelline Great Lash mascara in Very Black. Then I gave her some lips with Max Factor Lipfinity in Passionate.
“Now go get Lucky,” Esther Williams said.
My father had been trying to get people to call him Lucio since he’d opened this salon thirty-five years ago. But he was still Lucky Larry Shaughnessy to almost everyone in Marshbury, Massachusetts.
“Sorry,” I said the way he always told me to. “He’s off getting ready for the staff meeting.” The truth was he was tiptoeing around, hiding from Esther Williams.
“Handsome hunka burning man, that dad of yours. Don’t let anyone tell you different. What’s he need meetings for? He could sell this place for a million bucks and retire until his next life started up.”
The parking lot alone was probably worth a million bucks. My father’s raised ranch, with the Italianate columns, two-tiered fountain, and attached salon he’d added, overlooked Marshbury harbor. It was just about the only waterfront property on the street that hadn’t been ripped down for midrise condos with street-level shops. Even though the house and salon had been there the longest, they looked more like intruders with every passing year.
“Yeah,” I said. “But then who would he boss around?”
“Me.” Esther Williams put her glasses back on and leaned into the mirror for a closer look. “I keep telling him. He should try an older woman once before he dies.”
THE FRIDAY STAFF MEETING was our family’s version of Sunday dinner. As soon as we closed the salon and everybody got there, my father called in the pizza order. That gave us about twenty minutes to tend to business before the food arrived.
Even if you weren’t related, you stayed for at least a slice of pizza. And sometimes the stylists who weren’t working arrived early, so they could experiment. Two of the newest stylists had been there for about an hour already today, practicing updos on each other. Now they both looked like they needed to find a prom fast.
“Woilà,” one of them said, pinning down the other’s final curl with a bobby pin.
Mario and I looked at each other. “Woilà?” we both mouthed.
My father came in through the breezeway door, wearing a long white tunic over bell-bottom jeans. This is a challenging look for a man to pull off, especially one over seventy, but he managed. He was flipping through the day’s mail, separating the letters from Realtors and developers from the pack. “Barracudas,” he said. “They’re all a bunch of barracudas.” He crumpled up the unopened letters and threw them into the wastebasket behind the reception counter.
He put the rest of the mail down on the counter and started snapping his fingers, alternating hands the way beatniks did when they heard a good poem in the ’60s. “Hear ye, hear ye,” my father said. “The court’s in session and here comes da judge.”
This was our signal to arrange our chairs in a semicircle around him. I put mine down as far away from Sophia’s as I could get. My father stopped snapping so he could finger the cornicello that hung from a thick gold chain around his neck. It was made out of bright red coral capped in a gold crown, and it was shaped like a horn. Maybe if we were really Italian I’d know whether cornicello was actually even the word for horn.
I knew there were pedophiles and bibliophiles, even Francophiles. But my father was the only Italiophile I’d ever met. I thought it might be partly the businessman in him: an Italian hair salon just sounded way more glamorous than an Irish one would. I mean, how much money could you really charge at Salon de Seamus, especially if you lived in the part of Massachusetts everybody called the Irish Riviera? But he’d also spent his very first honeymoon with his very first wife in a borrowed house in Tuscany. The Lucky Larry Shaughnessy and Mary Margaret O’Neill Italy Experience had had an irrevocable impact on him, not to mention the first names of all his future children.
“Any more wedding news?” Angela asked Mario.
Mario turned to Todd. Todd was Mario’s husband, our accountant-slash-business manager, and along with Mario, one of the two fathers of Andrew, my nephew and the groom-to-be. Ours was not an uncomplicated family.
They both shook their heads. “Just that Amy’s parents are driving them crazy,” Mario said. “They wanted a simple wedding, but things are getting more out of control every day. Apparently they like to do it up big in Atlanta. I still can’t believe they’re having it at the Margaret Mitchell House.”
“Will you get to watch Gone With the Wind?” one of the stylists asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think it’s right before the vows.”
“Tell me again,” my father said. “Are the bride’s parents queer, too?”
“Of course they are,” Mario said, even though they were really just Southern. “By the way, Dad, Donald Trump called. He said he wants his hair back.”
There were lots of unusual things about our family, not the least of which was our father’s hair. It was actually darker than The Donald’s and painstakingly styled by my father. Every morning he started with a handful of thickening mousse. Then he pulled it strand by strand across the top of his head. Finally, he filled in with a spray designed to “Cover Your Bald Spot Instantly.” Maybe his shiny brown eyes and the swagger in his step took your attention away from the fake hair on his scalp, since he’d still managed to attract three ex-wives.
“Is Mom going to the wedding?” Angela asked.
I held my breath, the way I a
lways did when my mother was mentioned in front of my father.
“She’s the grandmother. Of course she is,” Mario said. “At least I think she is.”
My father grabbed his cornicello. He really believed it warded off the evil eye. “Okay, that’s enough,” he said. “Back to business.”
Tulia pushed the front door open. Her three kids came running in to hug their grandfather around the knees. Mack was wearing a red T-shirt over his bathing suit and carried a red toy train. Maggie and her doll were both dressed in blue sundresses. Myles and the wagon he was pulling were both yellow. I leaned over and whispered to Mario, “Is she actually color-coding her kids, do you think?”
“Maybe. I’m surprised Dad didn’t try that with us, he’s such a control freak. I’d be the one in therapy, saying, ‘It all started because everybody but me got to be a primary color.’”
Todd laughed, and he and Mario exchanged one of those married looks I vaguely remembered. “It would make a great memoir,” Todd said. “I Was a Secondary Color: A Shocking Story of Sibling Abuse.”
Tulia’s mother came in right behind her and headed for a chair. “Sorry,” Tulia said. “Mike had to work late, and I forgot it was Mom’s week for the meeting.”
“No skin off my nose,” my father said. “They’ll be working here soon enough anyway.” He peeled the kids off him, and they headed over to the kiddie area.
When people first meet us as a group, we probably should give them a diagram. Even then they might not be able to get us all straight. It’s just the way it is with big, messy families. I tell everybody to take notes—there might be a test later.
It didn’t help that we all looked so much alike. My father’s children all had thick brown hair and pale skin, plus big eyes and, most of the time, big smiles. His ex-wives looked pretty much the same, except for the hair, which ran the gamut from gray to gold.
Sometimes when I was explaining my family to people, I’d call my father’s ex-wives A, B, and C to simplify things. Mary, who was Angela’s, Mario’s, and my mother, was A. Tulia’s mother, Didi, was B. Linda, who was Sophia’s mother, was C. It also simplified things that, after a rocky transition from B to C that included some minor hair pulling, Didi and Linda worked in separate salons and went to the weekly meeting on alternate Fridays. My mother didn’t go at all. She lived a few towns away and had gone back to school to become a social worker as soon as she left my father, which was shortly after he started fooling around with Didi, his second wife-to-be.
My father was looking particularly dapper these days. This probably meant his fourth ex-wife-to-be was somewhere in the wings. I just hoped if she ended up working for us, she at least knew how to give a decent haircut.
“Now where were we?” my father asked.
“Nowhere yet,” I said.
“Angela,” my father said. “Sophia. I mean Bella. You’re a beautiful girl, but you have to learn to watch the big bocca talk.”
“That would be mouth,” Mario whispered.
I elbowed him.
“How’re we doing in the moolah department, Toddy?” my father asked.
“Not bad, Lucky, not bad at all,” Todd said. When it came to handling his father-in-law’s political incorrectness and annoying nicknames, he’d come a long way. “We’ve got most clients booking their next appointment before they leave the salons. We could use some more action in product sales though.”
“People don’t want to pay the prices,” Angela said. “Project Runway killed us. I mean, how do you convince people that Aveda hairspray is worth the money, when they were on TV raving about a two-dollar can of Finesse Très Two?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It can work both ways. Everybody knows Maybelline Great Lash is the best mascara, but I spray paint the outside gold before I put it in my case, so my clients think I’m using all high-end products.”
“Do you really?” Mario asked. “I didn’t know that. That’s a great idea.”
I struck a pose. “Lots more where that came from,” I said.
“Yeah, right,” Angela said.
“Bella knows everything,” Tulia said. “Hasn’t she told you yet?”
“Sure she does,” Angela said. “She even managed to airbrush an entire crowd at once this week.”
I wondered if all big families who traveled in a pack turned on their own like this. I knew enough to wait it out and not rise to the bait. Eventually they’d start picking on somebody else. I probably would even have kept my big bocca shut, except I caught a glimpse of Sophia. I really wanted to wipe that smirk off her face.
“Well,” I said. “I know enough. In fact, someone approached me this week to see if I wanted to create a makeup kit.” I reached for details. “You know, to be sold.”
“You mean that guy hitting on you at the college fair?” Mario asked.
“If anybody does a kit, my Tulia should do a kit,” Tulia’s mother, Didi, said.
“He was so not hitting on me,” I said. “He just thought I was talented.”
“Sure he did,” Angela said.
“That’s not a bad idea,” Todd said. “I bet we could get the companies to kick in some product samples. I mean, why not, it would be free advertising for them. They might even pay for placement.”
“What if we added recipes?” Angela asked. “You know, spa cuisine?”
My father was snapping his fingers again. “I’m loving this,” he said. “The Salon de Lucio Beauty Kit. All soft and Romany, maybe tied up like a toga. When they open the box, it’ll be like they died and went to Italy.”
I cleared my throat. “Excuse me?” I said.
“Sophia can add something about celebrity makeup, since she’s got all the high-profile clients,” my traitor brother Mario actually said.
“Bath salts and massage oils would be good, too,” Tulia said. “And I love that gel that turns hot when you rub your hands together.”
I jumped up, since nobody seemed to be hearing me. “Hello-oh,” I said.
“I have a great recipe for lemon mayonnaise. You can use it for a hair mask. Or eat it, obviously,” Angela said.
“Stop,” I yelled. “Stop, stop, stop. Stop.”
Everybody stopped.
“I’m sick and tired of everyone taking everything away from me,” I heard myself saying. “It’s my beauty kit. It’s my life. It’s my…”—I looked right at Sophia—“…husband,” I said.
And then I ran out.
5
THE TEARS I WAS FIGHTING DRIED RIGHT UP AS soon as I saw Craig in the parking lot.
Craig started up his Lexus as soon as he saw me coming.
I bent down and picked up a rock.
In his haste to get out of the salon parking lot, my ex-husband burned some serious rubber. That couldn’t possibly be good for his little leased tires.
“Go lease a brain,” I yelled after him. Finding my inner bully was surprisingly exhilarating, so I threw the rock at his car. It bounced off his rear license plate with a satisfying clunk. I brushed my hands off and headed for my own car. The sign in the front window of the salon mocked me: SUMMER BLOWOUT. Ha.
“They’re not your kids, Bella,” I said to my rearview mirror. “Forget about them.”
I pulled out of the parking lot and took a right. I’d been repeating this over and over to myself like a bad mantra ever since Craig had said it.
It was the thing that really got to me. I mean, I’d written off Sophia. I’d written off Craig. But I wasn’t sure I’d ever forget about the kids. For almost ten years I’d spent Wednesday nights and every other weekend with Craig’s kids. And every other holiday and every other school vacation and half the summer. I’d caught colds from them and helped them with their homework. Craig and I had taken them on almost all our vacations. We’d decided not to have kids of our own pretty much because of them. Actually, almost completely because of them. Neither of us thought it was fair the way fathers just moved on to the next set of kids.
At least my father
had never done that. He’d just rolled us all into his next family. Except my mother, who was the only one who’d resisted, who’d carved out a new life of her own. But, idiot that I was, I’d gone along with Craig. I’d even managed to convince myself that Luke and Lizzie were essentially my kids, too.
Ha. They’d blown me off completely as soon as their father dumped me. Luke had another year of college left, and Lizzie would be heading off to her freshman year soon. I could have helped her pick out things for her dorm room. I had much better taste than her real mother. I could have helped her shop for clothes. And makeup. Lizzie’s hair was probably a mess by now. Anybody could be cutting it.
Wait. Sophia was probably cutting Lizzie’s hair. I put on my blinker and pulled over to the side of the road. Sophia was cutting Lizzie’s hair.
I just sat there, on the side of the street, for a while. Maybe five seconds, maybe five minutes, maybe an hour. I didn’t bother to notice, because it didn’t really matter. I mean, it’s not like anyone would have missed me.
I knew I needed to get a grip. Wallowing like this was not my nature. I was strong. I was confident. All my life you could practically hear me roar. I wasn’t even all that freaked out when, a little over a year ago, my husband of ten years packed his bags and told me he needed some space.
There was a part of me that was relieved I didn’t have to be the one to say it. We’d been drifting apart for a while, making lots of snide remarks, just not really liking each other much anymore. I thought some of it might have to do with Lizzie getting ready to graduate from high school. Craig’s kids had preexisted our relationship, so they’d always been part of the deal. Now we’d have to figure out what, if anything, we were without them.
Looking back, it was odd that Sophia started spending more time with me then, not less. You’d think I’d be the last person on earth she’d want to be around once she’d set her sights on my husband. But in the months both before and after Craig moved out, she stopped by and she called. A lot. Maybe if she couldn’t be with him openly yet, the next best thing was being with the person who was still technically married to him.