by Laurie Fox
In a matter of minutes, the ladies anointed Great-Nana “Queen of Cooke.” Her batteries recharged, Nana rose from her wheelchair and took two regally faltering steps in the direction of Betty, the proprietor. It was then I realized that she could walk when she wanted to, that the body still worked once it got properly revved up. No wonder Great-Nana’s flights of fancy on the balcony had threatened to result in bona fide sprints across the sky. She had a will that could bend steel, not to mention those bothersome laws of physics.
“Make me red again, Betty! Flame red, bloodred, cardinal-sin red.” Nana patted her faded, frizzy tresses. “Delicious-apple red, the lacquered red of Chinese boxes. Hell, make me communist red. Just do it!”
Betty, a heavily pancaked bottle-blonde and the youngest of all the ladies, escorted Great-Nana to her station. “Get on the love train!” she sang with a Liverpudlian lilt.
Once installed in Betty’s swivel chair and swathed in terry cloth towels, Nana swiftly dozed off, soft humming sounds issuing from her nose. When she stirred from her nap forty minutes later, her tresses were as red as cows’ blood.
“Triple, you’d better call the fire department,” Berry said, shaking Nana’s shoulders. “Your head’s on fire.”
Great-Nana brushed the sleep from her eyes and stared at her reflection in the booth’s deco mirror. “Oh Christ,” she said. She inspected the back of her head in the pink plastic mirror that Betty held up behind her. “Well,” she said finally, “it’s a dog’s dinner, but it’s my dog’s dinner!” She smiled widely, revealing a smear of magenta lipstick on her teeth.
The hen’s den of ladies closed in, fondling the new do. Not only was the hair fire-engine red but it was cropped short. A tight, bright crimson cap. “Isn’t it divine?” Betty crowed. “Isn’t it the last word in red?”
Berry squeezed Betty’s arm. “I want one, too,” she said. “But black, make mine black.”
“Your curls,” I pleaded. “Your gorgeous curls.”
“You don’t have any sovereignty here,” Nana chimed in.
“Okay, Ber,” I conceded. “And while you’re at it, I might as well do something with my rats’ nest.”
Which is how we spent the afternoon in Cooke: reading Hello! and Woman’s Own, and having our hair snipped and dyed. While Berry and I went under the scissors, Great-Nana entertained Gaston, who had dropped by with individual slices of blackberry crumble, plastic cutlery, and paper cups of hot chocolate. What was he doing here, I wondered. They excused themselves to the front of the shop, Gaston pushing Nana’s wheelchair like an old hand.
Berry, in the booth next to me, was in the decisive hands of Betty, who swiftly sheared her thick locks. I wanted to weep—why is the sight of cut hair always so painful? When Berry’s ink-colored do was finished, it looked, well, ghoulish. Maybe it was the sculpted peaks that ran from ear to ear, like a sideways mohawk. Berry dubbed the style “the Statue of Liberty,” and dared anyone in the shop to hate it. We were, to a woman, speechless.
In contrast, my new cut was on the subtle side: short but unruly—pixieish you might say—with raspberry highlights that mimicked my real color, only more fiery. I felt more exposed than usual and yet I enjoyed the current of air tickling my ears, a familiar lightheadedness. As I shrugged off my oilcloth smock, Great-Nana was set before me like a magistrate. She examined me closely, then covered her mouth. While she didn’t gasp out loud, it appeared that she wanted to.
“What is it?” I questioned. “What have I done?”
“It’s him,” she said flatly. “You’ve become him.”
I paraded over to the full-length mirror at the front of the shop, and struck a rakish pose: hands pressed on hips, jaw thrust at ceiling. Then I saw what she saw and gasped too. With my emerald tights and olive-green boots and my hair clipped in shaggy, razor-sharp batches, I resembled Pan—the Pan who graces picture books. And here I’d been thinking “Mia Farrow in the sixties,” or, more heroically, “Joan d’Arc.” But Pan? I’d never had an interest in becoming his doppelgänger. If anything, I was his antithesis. This would never do.
Great-Nana sensed correctly that it was time to leave the salon and motioned us outside, Gaston in command of her wheelchair. Why Gaston was sweet on Great-Nana, I had no idea. For one thing, he was a young man of seventy while she was firmly planted in her nineties. Yet the two seemed to share an unshakable confidence in the world, the becalming idea that nothing stays the same for long. This single idea could take the sting out of a bad marriage—or a haircut, I presumed. Which explained their steady laughter over the red fright-wig that had landed on Great-Nana’s head. Gaston and Great-Nana couldn’t stop going on about how “daft” she looked and fracturing themselves in the process. Berry made plain her displeasure with Gaston for usurping her job of promenading Great-Nana around town, and sulked openly on the street.
We ended up at the local graveyard, where Gaston felt we could enjoy a measure of privacy. He helped Nana onto a stone bench while Berry took a seat on a small stone crypt. I rested atop an ornate headstone inscribed with three heartbreaking lines—
CYCLOPS
BELOVED PUSS
1910–1910
—and wondered how the kitty had succumbed. When next I looked up, I saw Gaston running around Nana in circles, her shawl flapping behind him like Superman’s cape. Beguiled, Nana flung her woolly hat in the air and cried, “Bravo!” Just as quickly, Gaston returned the shawl to her shoulders and her hat to her head, and gave her a peck on the cheek. Now short of breath, he hobbled off in the direction of the bakery, turning around every few feet to wave at us.
With the departure of Gaston/Gus, we Darlings were thrown together again. Nana hardly had the strength to call Berry and me over to her, and resorted to fluttering her hanky like a flag. Forming a tight, tribal circle with Nana on the bench, we took a few minutes to warm our bones. Finally, Nana drew herself up, the famous bosom rising, and asked to be transferred to her wheelchair again. Berry had the honor of fixing her in place.
“Well?” I asked, greedy for details on Gaston. “It looks like you have a beau.”
“You cheeky monkey,” she said. “He knew Sidney, that’s all.” Nana rearranged her woolly hat so that her newly cropped hair stuck out in little bunches like a clutch of red posies.
Sidney Farrington had been Great-Nana’s first and only husband; all the other suitors were, in her parlance, paramours, and a few lucky chaps, mon amours. Sid hadn’t lasted long. Having been truant for the birth of Jane, it was little wonder that he made infrequent appearances in Nana’s reminiscences. It’s not that he’d expired early, though by now he was most certainly dead. Instead, he’d been as mercurial as Pan and headed off to sea around the time Great-Nana got in the family way. It wasn’t the Royal Navy that seduced Sid—careerism was not his thing. Rather, the life of Gauguin had served as his inspiration and he’d left his post as trainee accountant at Rigby & Platt for painting and the South Seas. Initially, Nana had been drawn to Sid’s pragmatism, which she felt would stand in high contrast to her own artistic nature. Once married, though, Sid began to show his true colors: a dabbler in oils and at boxing and boating, he turned out to be a daredevil who could have gone head to head with Pan. Great-Nana had been both irked and secretly delighted, for her excursion to The Neverland had suffused her with a joie de vivre that wouldn’t quit. But the couple would be thwarted when it came to making a decent income if they both proceeded down creative paths. Hence, Sid had begrudgingly stuck it out for a while at Rigby & Platt—until the couple’s Sunday morning lovemaking bore fruit. In fairness to Sid, Great-Nana would only say this: “He had a little talent.” The heartache that resulted from Sid’s desertion was more or less eased by the arrival of Jane, a “perfect baby” who quickly took up residence in her mother’s vandalized heart.
And thus Great-Nana Wendy poured everything into her child: all the grief and confusion, but also the tenderness and euphoria that are the result of “befriending” men. And lest w
e forget, she endowed her daughter with a certain something extra—the mechanics of flight. Jane would be equipped. No matter whom she met or whom she loved, she’d have the know-how of happiness. The daughter would have a discipline to fall back on, though falling had been the last thing on her mother’s mind.
BY late afternoon, a heavy mist enshrouded Cooke. We welcomed the change, the darkly poetic mood. Berry and I slouched on our bench in silence while Great-Nana hummed what, to our ears, was a nonmelody—a dissonant, renegade song.
“She’s doing her mysterious thing again,” Berry whispered.
“Your Triple works on her abstruseness like a hobby,” I teased.
“I heard that, dear,” Nana stage-whispered back.
Berry bowed her head, her gloomy eyes drawn to the dots of light from Nana’s rings.
“And what’s wrong with being a little mysterious?” Nana protested. She arched a penciled-in brow.
“It’s just, I don’t know, Triple,” Berry said. “Mystery and fantasy take people away.”
“Away?” Nana repeated.
“Like nobody’s present in this family for very long. People go off. People always find something better to do.” Berry snapped off the head of a wildflower and mangled it with her fingers.
I examined the gravestone of a dead baby, hoping to recede from the conversation. Great-Nana, however, remained admirably composed, ready for the ideological duel. “So when I hum something unfamiliar, that makes you, what? Anxious, dear?”
“Pul-leeze, Triple, drop the therapy. Berry pursed her lips in a classic pout. The moussed peaks shooting out from her scalp made her look especially severe.
“Perhaps you don’t care for my singing,” Nana observed. “But just when did your mother ever leave you? I’ll wager that you can’t come up with a single example. In fact, she’s been present on all fronts—physical, emotional, geographical. Eternally on call. Now, if you want a good example of someone who’s been left behind, look no farther than your great-great-grandmother. They say her daughter did such a rollicking good job of leaving her, no one else need ever try!”
Great-Nana, who’d been unflappable up to this point, now whipped around like a shark in her wheelchair.
“Nana.” I forced myself to speak up, then discovered I had nothing material to say. Nervous, I readjusted her shawl, fussed with her off-kilter hat. Berry and I waited for someone to change the subject.
“Young lady,” Nana said at last, a gnarled forefinger cutting the air. “When you think people are going away, perhaps they’re simply visiting their memories. When you get older, you’ll know what I mean. At thirteen, you’ve very few memories to visit. But I envy you. You’ve got a lifetime of memories to make.”
“I’m not going anywhere, Triple. Not in a bus or a boat or a balloon.”
“Somebody’s feeling awfully sorry for herself.”
“Oh man, you just don’t get it.”
“Then help me get it,” Nana said, her gravitas emanating from a frightfully deep well. “Give it to me straight, man.”
Berry regarded her great-great-grandmother; it took her a moment to find her voice. “It’s just, people think I’m going to mess up their trip.”
“Oh, I see.”
“You do?” Berry asked, caught off guard.
“So tell me, old thing,” Nana said. “What’ve you done to get yourself uninvited?”
Berry pulled at her cheeks, then shook her head back and forth, as if regretting a lifetime of blunders. “Oh that’s easy. I’m, you know.”
“No, we don’t, actually. Astonish us.”
“I’m not a nice person,” Berry whispered.
“Hogwash!” Nana hissed. “If you’re not good, I’m a codfish. Perhaps that’s not the best analogy, dear, for I truly am a codfish!” Berry smiled in spite of herself. “And what’s so great about being nice, anyway? Tell me one blinking thing.”
“I dunno,” Berry answered. “You get chosen for stuff. You get liked.”
“Oh, you get liked,” Nana iterated. “Did I ever tell you what Carl Jung told me in confidence, before he said the same thing to all humanity?”
Berry joggled her head, the shellacked points on her scalp strangely immobile.
“When I was at sixes and sevens—” Berry looked puzzled. “When my parents were upset about me having adventures that would trump Huck Finn’s, I went and—Oh, never mind, you know about my childhood.”
“Doesn’t everybody?” Berry pointed out.
“Hush. As I said, when I was at a loose end, I visited Carl—we had the money in those days. Well, Dr. Jung gave me a look that could fill a textbook, then ever so patiently he explained how I was split in two.”
Ah, the Carl Jung story. How had I filed it away so successfully?
“Split?” Berry said.
“Yes, divided into the Good Wendy and the Genuine Wendy. Dr. Jung convinced me to fuse the two halves.”
“With a blowtorch?” Berry cracked.
Great-Nana smoothed the nap of her wool stockings with a gloved hand. “‘Wendy Darling,’ Jung said, ‘I would rather be whole than good.’ Now doesn’t that sound like piffle?”
“Yeah, a piffle sandwich,” Berry giggled.
“Well, it’s not. It’s probably the best wisdom Western culture can buy. What Jung meant, of course, was that just being good will get you in trouble—”
“How’s that?” Berry interrupted.
Great-Nana grew tall in the wheelchair. “Because that’s only half the picture. If we suppress what Jung calls our shadow—traditionally, the awfully nasty part of us—we end up as terribly flat creatures.”
“Excuse me, Nana.” I stood up then, not knowing what came next. “Don’t you think Berry already excels at, you know, being difficult?”
“No doubt she does, dear. What I’m trying to tell her is that being all shadowy or all goody-goody won’t work, won’t get her far. But being whole—being kind and generous and thoughtful, and being an occasional pain in the arse—now that has legs!”
“Triple, I’m confused.” Berry was pacing now, fully engaged. “How do I, like, handle both things at once? How do I deal with my, you know, shitty feelings, and then let out my so-called niceness? I don’t even know what is it, let alone where the fuck it is.”
“Berry!” I shouted, but it was too late: Great-Nana was sheltering my stormy little daughter in her arms.
All too quickly, though, Berry tore away from Nana’s embrace. “Leave me alone. I’m not nice, so none of this amounts to a hill of beans. Unless you’re talking fat, farty beans. To be whole, you gotta have all the parts, right?”
In a gesture that rivaled Mummy at her most dramatic, Berry threw herself onto Great-Nana’s lap, instantly flattening the points of hair jutting from her head. After recovering from the blow, Great-Nana thumbed her nose at Berry. This seemed inappropriate, but then appropriate was another country, one rarely visited by us Darlings.
“Berry,” I said, “she can’t withstand your weight.” Berry was and always had been a small thing—but never dainty, never light on her toes.
“That’s another defect, Triple. My jumbo weight.”
“Well, elephantiasis runs in the family,” Nana said dryly. “I didn’t want to bring it up,” Nana said. “I wanted you to find out for yourself.”
“That I’m a mutant?” Berry said.
“No, that your particular shadow—your true power—is not your nastiness. Rather, your shadow is your goodness. You’re one of those rare creatures whose shadow is the light. That’s why you’re having such a tough time of it. You need to integrate your, let’s say, pissy self with something you haven’t yet acknowledged—your sweetness. Sweetness can be formidable, too.”
“Triple, there’s no way I’m nice. No way.” Berry rolled off Great-Nana’s lap and stood before her, hands remodeling the raven peaks on her head.
“Sweet Jesus.” Nana sighed. “What’s the worst that could happen if you were, God forbid, a nice
child?”
Berry shifted her weight from hip to hip, each hairy leg taking turns. “I dunno,” she said finally.
“Embarrassed?” Great-Nana asked pointedly. “Found out?”
Berry bit into her cheek, nodding vaguely.
“Well, now we’re getting somewhere. All you girls forget the most crucial things,” Nana said softly. “When in doubt—when you perceive that no one in the world is present for you—you must learn to mother yourself. One should never expect one’s real mother to take care of such things. We mothers are all too wracked with doubt ourselves.”
For the second time in an hour, Berry leaned into the fossil-thin arms of Great-Nana. As the sun dipped below the horizon Berry clung to her great-great-grandmother, taking some of the shawl for herself. In search of a cup of coffee, I made my way back into town, leaving the eldest and youngest Darling to conspire about how to be good in the face of evil, and how to be formidable in the face of goodness. The whole business frightened me, I must confess, for I hadn’t a clue to my own power, always living safely at the intersection of kindness and duty. You might say it was time for me to get run over.
X
BERRY managed to skip the whole Pan affair—or should I say Pan skipped her? When her period arrived at the regrettably late age of fourteen, we finally sat down together and discussed the ABCs of menstruation, sex, and death (the latter being her topic of choice). I took this opportunity to fess up to the truth about Peter: his hunger for new stories, for annual Spring cleanings, for the company of young women—precisely in that order.
“So you’ve read the books?” I asked casually, ambushing my daughter the same evening the first rush of blood darkened her jeans. The wind tore in from the north and beat against the sliding-glass doors to her bedroom. (We’d removed my old French windows, which blocked the sky, she said.)
“What?” she questioned sharply.