The Slippery Year

by Melanie Gideon

  “Wow, lucky dog,” says the cashier, when she sees all the loot. “What’s the occasion?”

  “Last supper,” I say under my breath.

  “Does he always drool like that?” she asks.

  “Labs drool,” I tell her.

  “Maybe you should get him checked. Take him to the vet.”

  “That’s a very good idea,” I say.

  I make a quick stop at the bakery and get some treats for us—some Christmas tree cookies. This will be the first Christmas Ben has ever had without Bodhi.

  Ben knows that Bodhi’s been steadily declining and is ninety-four in people years, the same age as his great-grandmother, and that he may go suddenly at any time, but we haven’t told him we’ve paid someone to come to the house and finish him off. Our plan is to send Ben on a playdate and when he comes home tell him Bodhi passed away while he was busy playing Star Wars Lego Wii. This is probably not the right thing to do; perhaps he’ll be scarred for life, but we don’t think he’ll be able to bear the premeditated part of it all. I’m pretty sure he’s going to grow up and become a Do You Feel Like Making Poo? person. If he were a Do Your Business person we’d tell him the truth. Thank God, he’s not.

  We are given lots of advice from well-meaning friends: make Bodhi’s passing a ritual, play music, light candles, write something and read it out loud. One friend tells me to clear the house of the dog’s things beforehand so you won’t be triggered every time you walk past his dog bed or empty water bowl. This last suggestion makes the most sense to me (I’m thinking of Ben), but I can’t bring myself to do much of anything but sit there in a chair while waiting for the vet to arrive. I begin crying as soon as the doorbell rings.

  Bodhi is lying in the hallway sleeping off last night’s binge but he wakes at the sound of the doorbell. He lifts his head and looks at me. I am trapped in his look, just as he is trapped in his body. It’s the look my father gave me in the car, when I was running away. It’s the look that was on my face the first time I saw my husband walk into a room. It’s the look Ben gave me this morning when we insisted that he pet Bodhi one more time before he went on his playdate.

  The vet has brought paperwork and a nurse.

  The vet says you are doing the right thing.

  The vet says this is the last great act of love.

  My husband carries Bodhi from the hallway into the dining room and places him gently on a blanket. We feed him more treats and the vet gives him the first injection. Within a few seconds he stops eating from my hand and becomes very, very still, but he isn’t dead yet.

  I won’t bore you with what we say. We say what every person says when somebody they love is dying.

  The vet gives him the second injection.

  Go home, Spot, I whisper in Bodhi’s ear.

  The nurse and the doctor carry him away, wrapped in the blanket. After they have driven off, I open the front door and I leave the front door open all day long.

  January

  I HAVE ONLY ONE NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION, TO AGE GRACEFULLY, WHICH IS really code for lose ten pounds because every woman knows this is the secret to aging gracefully. It doesn’t matter how old you are if you still look good in a pair of yoga pants. Size 6 = power, happiness and joy. Size 10 = much less power, happiness and joy I hate that this is true.

  The best I can hope for is to put on a pair of yoga pants and look okay as long as I wear a longish shirt over the yoga pants. My friend Kerri, who manages a boutique, tells me the shirt I’m talking about is called a tunic and lucky for me tunics have made a comeback, but I can’t bring myself to buy one. They make me think of Bea Arthur and Maude, so instead I wear my husband’s Van Halen World Tour T-shirt inside out.

  I thought that caring less about how I looked would be one of the benefits of getting older, much in the same way I am currently deluding myself into thinking that by the time Ben leaves for college, higher education will be free. Caring less about how I look is certainly an option, but a painful one because when I care less so does everybody else and then I am mistaken for a sixty-year-old. Take for instance what happened a few years ago when my sister Sara came to visit.

  Sara is eight years younger than I am. She had a completely different childhood than mine. Once we all left for college, she became an only child. She had it easy—her cross to bear was being too popular. How nice it must have been for my parents to have a daughter whom everybody adored. I’m sure it was the life they had always dreamed of: one perfect child who loved Pop Rocks, Sean Cassidy and the cello.

  Sara tells me my parents used to introduce her by saying, “And here’s our Sara.”

  It’s the “our” that kills me. When my parents introduced the three of us older girls it went something like “This is Rebecca; she’s taking advanced calculus. Oh, yes, and those two whacking each other over the head with their Sasha dolls are the twins.”

  You can’t hold Sara’s charm against her. She emanates light. I would emanate light, too, if my name didn’t mean darkness. I have always meant to ask my parents what’s with naming Dawn and me after musical acts of the seventies and giving our sisters classic names out of the Bible? I mean why didn’t they go all the way and just name us after fashions popular at the time, like Maxi and Hot Pants?

  Ben was only three the time Sara came to visit us in California, and he was starstruck every time she spoke to him or looked his way. I figured he was confused because Sara and I looked so much alike. Was she his mother or his aunt?

  Sara wore no makeup. Nor did she need any. She was so stunning and fresh-faced that I became convinced I could pull off the same look. I put my mascara away. I eschewed lipstick for Vaseline and off we went for a walk around the block.

  Soon we ran into a woman and her husband.

  “Oh, my God,” the woman squealed. “You two look so much alike!”

  I beamed and hooked my arm in Sara’s.

  “Your daughter is beautiful,” gushed the woman to me.

  “Have you thought about where you want to go to college yet?” she said to Sara.

  Her husband saw the stricken look on my face and pinched his wife’s elbow discreetly. “I don’t think they’re mother and daughter,” he whispered.

  “But they look so much alike!” said the woman.

  “That’s because we’re sisters,” said Sara.

  “Honey, we should go,” said the husband.

  “But you look so young,” said the woman to Sara. “You could be in high school.”

  “I’m thirty. In order for her to be my mother she would have had to have given birth to me when she was eight,” said Sara, trying to prop me up.

  I was so devastated I would have fallen to my knees in the middle of the street had Sara not been holding on to me. The weird thing was I didn’t feel like my mother. I actually felt like my father. This was worse than being mistaken for my mother, as my father was nearly seventy.

  “I wasn’t saying she looks old. It’s just that you look so young,” repeated the woman to Sara, flashing me a dirty look as if it was my fault she had been duped.

  I don’t want to dupe anyone. I don’t want to be one of those women who from the back looks twenty but from the front looks like Jessica Tandy. At the same time, I want to look good for my age but not so good that people wonder which procedures I’ve had done. In short I want to look like the best version of my real self. I want to be at peace with the fact that I am forty-four and this is what forty-four looks like and it looks pretty good!

  I do a bang-up job of feeling this way until I make the mistake of picking up More magazine, which tells me “this is what forty-four looks like” and it doesn’t look anything like me. Forty-four in More looks like twenty-two and I’m back to square one, trying to lose ten pounds and wondering how in God’s name anyone ages gracefully.

  I never thought it would happen to me. When you’re fifteen and twenty and twenty-five and thirty-five and you look younger than you are, you think this will always be the case. You’ll ne
ver look your age. Until one day you do. But you don’t quite get it. You keep forgetting. You keep walking around thinking you’re passing for thirty until one day it hits you that unless you put a great deal of effort into it, unless you wear lipstick and mascara and exercise seven days a week you are for all intents and purposes invisible. People look past you and over and around you and above you, except the women your age, who are staring right at you, taking in your shoes and your hair and your face and your clothes and wondering, God, I hope I don’t look as bad as she does. And what’s with the husband’s T-shirt? Why doesn’t she wear one of those cute new tunics that are in style?

  My friends and I search for our lost selves everywhere. We look in the backs of teaspoons, in the elevator doors right before they close, in the mirrors above the produce in the grocery store and in the lyrics of the songs that played at our weddings. Where is that plucky girl, that lustful teenager, that optimistic young woman, that tenderhearted young mother? Where have they all gone?

  Occasionally, if we are lucky, we catch a glimpse of the woman we are becoming. This woman is our future; she is the one who has been aging gracefully inside of us. She is more than her body. She is more than her face. She is, as James Salter wrote, a woman whose “dreams still cling to her … related to long-necked creatures, ruminants, abandoned saints.”

  I love these lines. I love this woman. My deepest hope is to track her down and convince her to move into the apartment that houses my soul before I die. I would do anything to get her to inhabit me. I would even lie and tell her I have a three-bedroom with a four-bridge view instead of the threadbare studio where my neglected soul currently dwells.

  I should go to church. Find a religion. Meditate. Hike every day. Get a new dog. Take magnesium. Drink carrot juice. And above all, stop looking in the mirror. Because when I do I notice the ridge. The ridge on my head that I really, really should do something about.

  Do you know about Japanese Thermal Straightening? If your hair is straight, chances are you have no idea what I am talking about. But if you are like me, half Indian and half Armenian, someone who has fought her thick, curly hair all her life, you know exactly what I am talking about and you know that this procedure is prohibitively expensive (to the tune of $600) and addictive. Once you start Japanese Thermal Straightening your hair it’s very hard to stop.

  What is this ridge? It’s the three inches of new growth on the top of my head. The Japanese Thermal Straightening grows out like a perm, only in reverse. Instead of straight on top and curly on the ends, my hair is curly on top and straight on the ends. Take my word for it when I tell you this ridge makes it difficult to continue passing as a naturally straight-haired woman (especially when it rains, is humid, is windy, the sun shines, somebody coughs or there is any sort of a breeze), and that is the whole point of doing Japanese Thermal Straightening. Passing.

  If you are saying to yourself What’s wrong with you, I would love to have a head of curls like yours, then you obviously have straight hair. The rest of you, calm down. I am not about to spend $600 getting my hair straightened, which is why I am on my way to Chinatown, where I can get it done for $125 with tip. As I’m walking past St. Mary’s Square, I call my sister Rebecca, who lives in New York City and who is probably at this moment sitting in some hair salon getting her hair straightened, too. We are on the same hair-straightening cycle, much like we used to get our periods at the same time when we were teenagers.

  “I’m on my way to get my hair straightened,” I tell her.

  “I just got mine done,” she says. “My hairdresser used to work for Sally Hershberger.”

  She always tells me this.

  “Yes, but mine only costs $100.”

  I always lower the price.

  “That is so unfair,” she says. “Maybe I should fly to California to get my hair straightened. Even with the flight it’d be cheaper. Is your hair falling out yet?”

  Rebecca and I used to be equals on the fashion front. This was twenty years ago when she was at Smith College and I was at Emerson College and we both weighed 120 pounds. Then she moved to Tribeca. Now she weighs 105 pounds and is a lawyer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I won’t tell you what I weigh except to say it’s slightly more than 120 pounds.

  “I’ve got to go. I’m here,” I say.

  “What’s the name of the salon?” asks Rebecca.

  I look up at the sign. I’ve never noticed the name of the salon. I just know the phone number and street.

  “Express Hair Salon, with an X,” I say. “Like ‘X-Press.’”

  More silence in which Rebecca thinks Are you fucking kidding me and some more silence in which I am thinking but not saying the same thing.

  “The lady just saw me. She’s looking at me through the window. She’s beckoning me in,” I say.

  “She remembers you?” says Rebecca.

  They absolutely remember me. I have been coming every six months for the last seven years.

  Julie sits me in a chair.

  “Hello, hello,” she says. “You have an appointment?”

  “Nine,” I tell her.

  “You’re smart to come early.”

  We laugh. We joke. She brings me a nice cup of tea. Then she parts my hair, lifting up the layers, peering underneath, and says, “Your hair is very, very frizzy.”

  “Not so frizzy,” I say.

  “Frizziest hair I ever saw. You have a nice tan, though,” she says.

  She’s trying to figure out my ethnicity. She’s wondering if I’m African American. Japanese Thermal Straightening does not work on African American hair.

  “Thank you,” I say, which is easier than saying it’s not a tan.

  You can have many conversations at one time at the beauty parlor. Besides race and class we are also talking about money.

  “Your hair is very resistant,” she says. “Especially here in the back.”

  In the back where I can’t see and I’ll just have to take her word for it.

  “I’ll have to do it two times,” she says. “Two applications. What time do you have to be home?”

  “Three. I have to pick up my son from school.”

  “No problem, we’ll have you out by three.”

  Yes, here is my secret shame—the lengths to which I will go to look unlike my true self. I will be sitting in this chair for the NEXT SIX HOURS.

  “How much?” I ask.

  “$150. We only take cash. The ATM is across the street.”

  It’s gone up twenty-five-dollars but it’s still a deal.

  “You go to a fancy salon in Union Square, you’ll pay $500, $600,” says Julie.

  “That can’t be right!” I say, as if this is news to me. I’m afraid she’s about to raise the price. “Who could afford that?”

  Metamorphosis is not a linear process. At least for me it’s not. It’s dull and it’s boring and it takes many, many years. It consists of my teaching myself the same lesson over and over again until I finally get it right.

  The first couple of hours are fun. I feel a little manic, but pleasurably manic, as if it’s the night before I’m traveling to Paris and I have to get up at three in the morning to leave for the airport. I think about popping an Ativan. Instead I crack open my six-hundred-page novel. When I look up, it’s noon and the Chinatown streets are bustling. I can smell shrimp dumplings and kung pao chicken but I can’t leave and partake of any of these delicious treats because my head is swathed in a ball of Saran Wrap. I eat an entire bag of ginger chews and the hours slowly tick by.

  At two I say to Julie, “I have to pick up my son. Across the Bay. In Oakland.”

  At two thirty I say, “I have to leave now.” They are still flat-ironing my hair.

  At three I am nearly in tears, frantically calling Robin to ask if she’ll pick Ben up from school along with her daughter, Sadie.

  “What are you doing?” Robin asks. “Something fun and indulgent, I hope.”

  “I’m getting my hair done,” I say.


  “Lucky you,” she says. “Take your time and have fun!”

  Finally I’m finished.

  “You know the rules,” says Julie. “No washing for four days. Do not get your hair wet. Do not sweat. I suggest you sleep on your back. Do not go out in the wind. No barrettes, no bobby pins, no headbands, not even tucking your hair behind your ears.”

  Or else I will walk around for the next six months with an ear-shaped indentation in my hair. Oh, well, at least the ridge is gone and my hair is straight. So straight my features look distorted. I tug at the roots, trying to get some volume.

  “Don’t do that,” says Julie. “You’ll ruin it.”

  She smears her hands with silicone gel and plasters my hair back to my head.

  “There—straight.”

  “It’s really, really straight,” I say.

  “You husband will love it,” she says, whipping off the cape.

  This wasn’t the first time I tried to make myself into somebody I wasn’t.

  When I was eleven I fell in love with Tatum O’Neal. Well, maybe it wasn’t so much love as it was infatuation. I wanted to be her and if I couldn’t be her …

  “Maybe I could just move in with Tatum and Ryan,” I said to my mother.

  I was trying to prepare her, you see. I had written to Tatum a few weeks earlier suggesting that very thing. That I could be a sort of super-duper pen pal who would not only write to her every day but was also available to come live with her in her bedroom. Kind of like a twin, I suggested.