The Slippery Year

by Melanie Gideon

  “That’s nice,” said my mother. “Who’s Ryan? Her boyfriend?”

  “Ryan O’Neal. Her father? Love Story? You know, never having to say you’re sorry?” I said.

  “Oh, I loved that movie.” She smiled a soft private smile as if all the secrets of the world were lodged in the corners of her mouth. It made me feel terribly left out.

  “But how would I get to California?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry,” my mother said. “If the O’Neals want to adopt you, your father and I can cover the cost of the plane ticket.”

  But it wasn’t Tatum I wanted to be. I really wanted to be Addie Loggins, the character she played in Paper Moon. Was there ever a more kick-ass girl? Cigar-smoking, undershirt-wearing, swindling-widows-out-of-their-last-dime Addie Loggins?

  There was only one small problem. There was nobody in America who looked less like Addie Loggins than me. But I would fix that. I showed my Uncle Tommy, who was a hairdresser, a picture of Tatum. She was dressed in a tuxedo, holding the Oscar.

  “Like this,” I told him.

  “But she’s a blonde,” he said, sweeping my long hair up into a ponytail. “And her hair is straight and fine. It won’t come out like that.”

  “Just do it,” I said.

  “You look like a carp,” Uncle Tommy said sadly when he was done, looking with dismay at my black curls, like hundreds of apostrophes scattered on the linoleum. He was right. I did look like I had jumped species; my head was too big for my body now. I made a noise that was something between a squeal and a squeak.

  “I think she looks nice,” my mother said, resting her hands on my shoulders.

  She tried to fluff up my hair but had little success, as it was a quarter of an inch long. That’s how short Uncle Tommy had to go to get it straight.

  “You look like Cher. Doesn’t everybody always say that to you? That you look like Cher?” my mother reminded me.

  “She looked like Cher half an hour ago. Now she looks like she has a bad case of lice,” said my father, grimacing. This would reflect badly on him, the daughter of the town’s pediatrician with nits.

  About six months later a large manila envelope came in the mail. When I saw it was postmarked California I knew exactly what it was—Tatum had finally written back! Nobody had believed she would, but I never gave up. Instead I spent countless hours fantasizing about my new life in California. Tatum’s bedroom would have a shag carpet and beanbag chairs. We would wear denim wraparound skirts, peasant blouses and white go-go boots. There would be some hardships, of course. I would have to develop a taste for papaya, as Californians consumed great quantities of the sticky orange fruit—that’s how they stayed so svelte. Most of my daydreams centered on me getting off the plane and stepping onto the tarmac where Tatum and Ryan waited for me.

  “We look so much alike. We could be twins,” Tatum would say.

  Ryan would throw his arms around us both. “Let’s go to Hollywood and Vine and grab a bite.”

  I tore open the envelope. Inside were three glossies of Tatum O’Neal and she had autographed each one with a black Magic Marker. The first was a photograph of her as Addie Loggins, wearing that funny little hat. The second was of Tatum holding a bat in Bad News Bears. And the third was a smaller snapshot of Tatum sitting on Ryan’s lap. It said: For Melanie, XOXO, Tatum.

  It made me sad, that last picture. In my house eleven-year-olds didn’t sit on their father’s lap.

  “I’m very sorry I lost faith,” said my mother.

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  I could afford to forgive my mother because my status had changed. I had gone from lowly twin with horrible haircut and deluded fantasies to favorite daughter who, due to pluck and persistence, was now in regular correspondence with famous child actor.

  Buoyed by the photographs, which made me a celebrity for about a week, I continued to write to Tatum for a year, first suggesting, then pleading, then begging for her to write back to me. But I never got any response.

  I stopped making Uncle Tommy cut my hair, or maybe my mother wisely began taking me to somebody I wasn’t related to. My father was never my pediatrician. Why would my uncle be my hairdresser? Hair is just as much about life and death and transformation as height percentiles and having to deliver to somebody the very bad news that they are going to have to get a shot today.

  It’s dinnertime by the time I make it back to Oakland. Despite Julie’s dire warnings to not put anything on my head, I am now wearing a cloche so Robin won’t see my straighter-than-straight hair. I look like Ali McGraw in Love Story—at least that’s what I tell myself. Four days from now when I can wash my hair and put product in it, I’ll look normal. Until then I won’t leave the house.

  “What’s up with the hat? It’s seventy degrees out,” says Robin.

  “Brr,” I say.

  Robin has beautiful Eileen Fisher hair. Do you know what I’m talking about? The Eileen Fisher models with the gray hair? But it’s to-die-for gray hair. By this I mean straight and swingy and blunt cut and it makes you look so young and hip. It’s a fabulous look, one that will never be mine.

  Ben and Robin’s daughter, Sadie, stampede into the room.

  “Why are you wearing a hat indoors?” says Ben.

  “Because lots of people wear hats indoors in California,” I say.

  This is true and this is a lie. Lots of people who are twenty-four, not forty-four, wear their hats indoors.

  “We’re not allowed to wear hats in school,” says Ben.

  Sadie nods in agreement.

  “Go away,” says Robin to the kids.

  “Now, how bad is it?” she says to me.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Just show me. You can’t screw up straight hair,” says Robin.

  Robin has no idea I’ve been faking it all these years.

  “Yes, you can,” I say.

  “Well, you’re making it worse, wearing that hat. Now you’ll have hat head on top of a bad haircut. Go home, wash it, style it yourself,” says Robin. “You’ll feel better.”

  “Excellent idea,” I say, thinking of the next four days I’ll spend hiding in the house.

  After I get home and stick dinner in the oven, Ben and I walk up the street to our secret place—a tree stump that has an unbelievable view of the Pacific. He brings a Moleskine notebook so he can sketch things: leaves, the bay, poison oak. I bring a mug of wine so I can forget things: the fact that Tatum O’Neal never wrote back to me but still I went on loving her and to this day love her still.

  Ben decides he wants to sketch me. I am not in the mood to be sketched, but perhaps it will put me in a better mood.

  It does not:

  “Where’s my hat? You didn’t draw my hat.”

  “I drew what was underneath your hat.”

  “Does my hairline really look that?”

  “You have a big forehead,” he says.

  “Yes, but has it gotten bigger? Since you’ve known me?”

  What I’m asking him is Has my hairline receded? The Japanese Thermal Straightening has definitely thinned my hair out.

  Ben sighs, which means yes, but I’m not stupid enough to say so. He has learned this particular sigh from his dad.

  “This is a ridiculous hat,” I say.

  “It’s a girl’s hat,” he says, thinking I’m about to suggest that he wear it.

  “It’s called a cloche,” I say.

  I take off the hat.

  “Wow, your hair’s straight,” he says.

  “Not that straight,” I say.

  “No, it’s really straight. Like a—like a—I can’t think of what it’s like,” he says.

  It’s windy and my hair begins to whip around my face. Just like that, six hours, $150 gone. I feel liberated and then I panic. I slap the hat back on my head again.

  “I know. Your hair is like a wall!” he cries.

  “No, it’s not,” I huff.

  “It is. It’s like two walls hanging do
wn from your face.”

  I take the hat off again.

  A few summers ago my mother and I had a conversation. We were talking about what happens after you die. I told her that now that I was a mother I wanted to believe in heaven. I needed to believe in heaven. She told me that at sixty-seven she no longer believed in heaven, but she finally understood why we were here.

  My mother runs a psychiatric ward. Daily, she walks the borders between what’s seen and unseen. She is the kind of person you would want to have around in an emergency: clear-thinking, unafraid and compassionate. She is not, however, touchy-feely. She is not one of those mothers who send out Christmas letters highlighting their daughters’ accomplishments. She is a Rhode Islander. She says “bah” for bar and knows how to get every bit of meat out of a lobster, and she eats all the lobster, including the green and red gunk. What I’m trying to say is she’s the real thing.

  On that balmy August night, she told me the reason she was here was to have children. To do her part in ensuring the human race went on. And that was it. When she died her family would remember her and she would live on in their memories for seventy years at most, and then she would be forgotten. She would become one of the ninety billion people on this planet that had lived and died before her. The end.

  I thought this was one of the most romantic and beautiful things I had ever heard my mother say. It didn’t seem futile to me, her way of thinking. It was what you would come to after a lifetime of never taking the easy way out; never wishing you were somebody else; never trying to pass for something you were not.

  At forty-four, I feel the current of that river pulling at me. I am one of six and a half billion people currently taking their turn at being alive on this planet. One of billions trying to make sense of their lives, their heartbreaks, their regrets, their greatest loves, their bad knees, and their beloved children sitting in front of them who will one day be part of the billions who have come before and have long since been forgotten.

  This is unfathomable. And it’s the truest thing I know.

  Down below us San Francisco is buried in a fog so thick you wouldn’t even know a city was there. But here on this hillside the stars are coming out and the breeze smells of granite and hamburgers.

  “Home,” I say to Ben.

  He tucks his notebook into his pocket and slips his hand in mine.

  February

  TWO THINGS I KNOW FOR SURE BUT WON’T TELL MY SON AT THE PRESENT moment because I don’t want to rub it in are that once you become an adult you hardly ever cry or vomit. I won’t tell him this because right now he is doing both. Crying, because even though it’s two months after our dog died, he feels even more bereft than he did right after he received the news, and vomiting because he’s got the flu. The good thing about being nine is you can puke into a bucket and not get any of it on the rug. The bad thing is you still occasionally puke out of your nose.

  “You won’t vomit out of your nose when you’re an adult,” I tell him.

  “Yeah, right,” he says, wiping his nose.

  “I’m not kidding. Something closes. Some passageway that connects your nose to your mouth.”

  I’m making this up. How do I know why you stop vomiting out of your nose once you become an adult?

  “Then how do you breathe?” he asks. “If the passageway closes up?”

  “You hardly breathe at all when you’re an adult.”

  I am not making that up.

  We lie on the couch together and watch Avatar. That makes him feel better but it makes me feel worse. There are so many things I have to do right now, like get earthquake insurance and learn to knit. I am always in a hurry. The other day when I was in San Francisco some guy told me I was walking too fast.

  “Walking that fast should be against the law,” he said.

  He got my attention. The laws in San Francisco were completely different than those in any other American city. For all I knew it was illegal to walk too fast in the City by the Bay.

  “L’Arte del vivere con lentezza,” he continued. “The Art of Living Slowly.”

  “Excuse me, but what language are you speaking?”

  “Italian.”

  “Well, then. Prego,” I said proudly.

  I had recently learned that prego means thank you, not pregnant. I’ve been dying for an opportunity to use it in everyday conversation.

  “Speed-walking is not good for you,” he said.

  “Are you okay?” I asked him.

  He-was-speaking-very-slow-ly. I wanted to wave my hand at him to speed him up but I thought this would be rude. I did, however, wave my hand at him in my imagination and a little smile crept across my face.

  “See, you are happier already,” he said.

  He handed me a piece of paper.

  Bruno’s Slowmandments, I read at the top.

  “Bruno?” I asked.

  “No, I am just a follower. Read number seven, please,” he said.

  I scanned the page: Avoid being so busy and full of work that you don’t have time for yourself and the delight of thinking about nothing. Also, avoid using contractions (this is scribbled in pencil).

  I handed the piece of paper back to him, saying, “Thanks, but no. This isn’t my kind of thing.”

  “Yes, I can see that. That is why I stopped you,” he said pleasantly.

  “I think you have mistaken me for a native Californian,” I said.

  “I do not think so,” he said.

  “I’m from Rhode Island.”

  He looked bewildered.

  “Rhode Island is right next door to New York, assuming you don’t count Connecticut. We have very similar accents; I say things like tawk and dawg and cawfee and cawl for talk and dog and coffee and call and the point is we don’t do anything slowly. We’re incapable of it.”

  Delight in thinking about nothing? Please. I didn’t even take baths.

  He thrust a clipboard at me. “Would you sign this? We are trying to make San Francisco an official Slow City.”

  The thought of San Francisco being slower than it already was—was terrifying. People cross the streets so slowly here it’s an act of aggression. In New York City people hustle. I was in a cab once that purposely hit a man who jaywalked. The driver actually sped up in order to hit him. I learned my lesson. You run or you die.

  “Sorry, but no,” I said.

  “You don’t want to live a better life?”

  I shook my head. Slowly.

  He shrugged and walked away. I watched him stop a woman on a bike. Within a few minutes they were chatting like old friends. She opened her fanny pack and pulled out two Odwalla bars and they sat down on the grass. Their heads bowed together, they began reading the Slowmandments. It was noon. They would be there until dusk.

  “I’ll think about it,” I shouted to the man, feeling abandoned and a little sad.

  Why couldn’t I be more like the woman on the bike? Trusting. Curious. Willing to share her snacks.

  I’ll be right back,” I say to Ben.

  “No.” He grabs my arm with desperation. “What if I have to throw up again?”

  I point to the bucket. “I-just-have-to-go-to-the-bathroom.”

  I try and speak like the Slow Living guy, haltingly and without contractions. I have to admit it feels good. My anxiety at being trapped in the house with a sick kid dials down a few notches.

  “When are we going to get a new dog?” says Ben.

  And then it shoots up again.

  Ben asks me this at least once a week. My standard line is “It wouldn’t be fair to Bodhi if we got another dog so soon,” but I know this line will only be good for a few months and then I’ll have to come up with another one. The truth is that as much as I miss Bodhi I don’t want to get another dog. I like the freedom: nobody doing his duty on my carpets; no more kennels, no vacuuming the dog hair.

  We have a Bodhi shrine. It’s a marvelous shrine. It’s like having Bodhi without the Bodhi. For a while it was under our dining room
table. It consisted of his dog bed strewn with twenty pounds of dog food. Ben spent a lot of time under the table, lying next to the dog bed, sifting the dog food through his fingers, and I spent a lot of time praying the dog food wouldn’t attract mice. Just yesterday we had to relocate the shrine because we had ants, we had ants, we had ants. It’s a much cozier shrine now. There is a box containing Bodhi’s ashes, a photograph of him in a meadow in Maine, and a farewell note saying:

  I love you so much and I miss you, too. I hope you are

  having a good time in heaven.

  Love,

  Ben, your beloved trainer

  Yes, I’m not proud of it, but under a great deal of pressure I invented a new heaven. A heaven just for dogs where all they do all day long is run and chase squirrels and eat Woofy Pop. How many heavens will I have invented by the time Ben is grown? That Slow Living guy was right. We need to slow down. We need to avoid being so busy and full of work that we don’t have time for ourselves and the delight of thinking about nothing.

  I have not thought about nothing in a very long time. I have no idea how to go about it and the thought of it exhausts me—another thing to put on my to-do list that will never come off—but then it strikes me that Ben thinks about nothing quite a bit and he is pokey as well. There is a role model for the Art of Living Slowly right under my nose! And so begins my secret study of nine-year-olds. After weeks of careful observation of fourth graders in their various habitats: soccer games, birthday parties, the bathroom, car pool and playdates, I have come up with my own list of what I call The Ninemandments. These are guaranteed to slow you down and bring you much delight if you choose to live by them.

  THE NINEMANDMENTS

  1. Thou shalt begin every sentence with the phrase “No offense, but …” When you’re nine it’s okay to insult people to their face. As long as you preface the insult with “No offense, but,” no offense can be taken. As in, “No offense, but you suck at four square.” Example: You are waiting in line at the pharmacy. The gentleman in front of you does not decline to talk to the pharmacist, as all polite people should when there is a very long line; instead he opts to talk to the pharmacist extensively about his low blood sugar. Is it contagious? Can he pass it on to his wife? Is it safe to have sexual relations with his wife while experiencing low blood sugar? You say, “Excuse me, no offense, sir, but you suck at picking up your medication at Rite-Aid. This is a pharmacy, not a doctor’s office.” Some situations require two applications of the “no offense” offense, such as: “No offense, buddy, but you’re not at death’s door. You’ve got low blood sugar. Eat a Butterfinger.”