by Maud Casey
The woman reaches for Delia’s hand and holds it with her own. “Let’s give your palm a look,” she says, and Delia hears the tall man in the back room begin to strip a piece of wood he probably hasn’t touched in years. Delia closes her eyes, and the long fingers of the girl in the china shop reaching for the elephant return to her as if the girl were there with her now.
“You are tired,” the woman says, in a voice that is not part of divining Delia’s fortune. The woman leads Delia to a couch stuffed with rag dolls. A small doll foot pokes out of a tear in the arm.
Delia hears a rustling like paper moving across the floor. “Scorpions,” the woman says. Still, Delia leans her head back on the couch, comfortable in this place where anything might go at any moment. Delia breathes easily with this woman willing to divest herself of worldly objects after she’s worn them for a while. “Don’t worry,” the woman says, though Delia has already closed her eyes. “Scorpions carry an ancient toxin. We’ve built up an immunity over the centuries.”
The woman picks a broad-backed silver brush from the top of the crowded vanity and sits beside Delia on the couch. As the woman slowly brushes Delia’s hair, Delia does not dream the dream about Austin’s twisted face. She will not go back there. Her decision is as ancient as the scorpion toxin, one she made long before she ever met Austin. She dreams instead that she is handling scorpions, tracing their curved and rustling bodies with delicate fingers. She dreams that she holds up a scorpion to the woman in the antiques shop and asks, “What is this?” “I’m not sure, but it could be worth millions,” the woman answers as the sweet and ancient poison sinks deep into Delia, seeking out a secret beneath the sum of her experiences. She will take the scorpion and let it loose in the swirling dirt outside her neighbor’s house. Once Delia’s hands are free, she will push the leathery-faced woman in her beach chair all the way to the ocean.
INDULGENCE
TODAY is not even a holiday and we are waiting in swivel chairs side by side in front of mirrors lit by amber bulbs in a room done all in pinks at Well Hello, Beautiful. It is usually her birthday that is the occasion for visiting, but these days my best friend, Clarissa, finds other occasions—Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Saint Patrick’s Day this year. Last month she said something about the vernal equinox but then came down for a week and never mentioned it again once.
Like me, Clarissa—who informed me when she arrived that she has changed her name to Rissa, and I did give it a day’s effort, but she’s Clarissa to me—is dressed in a wraparound black robe tied in front. We are both naked underneath except for our underwear, according to the instructions in the dressing room: DISROBE FOR YOUR OWN PROTECTION. Our heads sparkle with strips of tinfoil. This process, one of Clarissa’s ideas, promises delicate highlights with minimum regrowth difficulty. “Whatever,” Clarissa says. “It’s a necessary indulgence.”
Under the bright overhead lighting, Clarissa and I both look slightly green. There are pink plastic domes attached to the backs of our chairs, whose arms are swung so the domes are not covering our heads. They hover like empty sockets over the floor in this room that smells like canned peaches. Other customers in black robes like ours sit under dryers reading magazines and consulting with salon attendants dressed in pink. The salon is a world unto itself.
“Beauty is more than skin deep!” Clarissa reads to me from the picture taped to the mirror in front of her. It is a picture of a cat with a flower-print dress on, applying red lipstick with an obviously fake paw. Clarissa slides one hand under her robe to her left breast the way she’s been doing all day. “Still smaller than a bread box,” she says of the lump discovered recently by her gynecologist during a routine checkup. I start to offer the hope that she offered me when she arrived, the possibility of the lump being fibrotic, but Clarissa has a way of talking as if to herself when she doesn’t want to hear things. “Because you’re worth it,” she reads from another cat picture. In this picture, a cat with a blush brush in one fake paw and grapes in the other stands over a cat reclining on a divan.
“Do you think this woman is ever coming back?” says Clarissa, referring to our beauty consultant, Camille. Clarissa looks down the V neck of her robe. “I definitely wore bad underwear. I think Zach took all my good underwear and then hoped I would be in an accident.” Zach is Clarissa’s most recent ex-boyfriend, whom I never met before they broke up two weeks ago. Clarissa is one of the few people I know who actually dates, and dates regularly.
“What kind of accident?” I ask, willing to contend. As long as she’s on vacation, Clarissa says she doesn’t want to talk about her real life. I can play this game too. I put on my newscaster’s voice and say, “At Well Hello, Beautiful this afternoon, due to a freak shortage of robes, a woman was required to have her hair done in nothing but her really bad underwear.”
Clarissa pretends to stick two fingers in her eyes.
“We’re getting our hair highlighted. Our underwear is not the point,” I say, seeking a little decorum.
Clarissa visits from a city bigger than this one where we both grew up. She moved after we graduated from the state college here. She’s adventurous, always going places she’s never been before. Lately, though, she says she does not feel rooted, and when she says it she uses her hands, wiggling her fingers as if they are roots settling in. She says the free packets of vitamins she gets as a telemarketer for a vitamin company have lost their charm. She says she is immune to the vitamins and they are actually making her sick now. She blames them for her current health problem. She suspects the lump in her breast is really a vitamin capsule. “I’m taking care of myself to death,” she says. She blames her love life on the vitamins too. Zach, her longest relationship, lasted a month, and on his way out he referred to Clarissa as “the perkiest woman he ever met.” Afterward Clarissa said she needed to visit somebody else’s life, so she came to see me.
“Do you think this woman forgot about us? Leaving this on too long has got to damage your hair.” Clarissa taps the sparkling silver on her head with impatient fingers.
“It’s only been twenty minutes. She said thirty to thirty-five.” I make up numbers to calm us both.
“I feel like a baked potato,” Clarissa says. She picks up a magazine filled with haircuts and flips to the middle. There is a picture of a woman in a red jumpsuit with her hair cut midear and swept dramatically across her face.
“Don’t we all deserve friends and marriage and love and children and jobs that satisfy us and good haircuts and nice clothes?” says Clarissa. “I can understand how having a few of those things might disqualify you from the rest, but really, don’t you think?”
“I don’t like that jumpsuit at all,” I say. This morning when we had this conversation about what Clarissa’s life lacks, I was the one who ended up feeling bad, which scared me because Clarissa has comforted me all my life.
Clarissa and I are longtime friends. Clarissa claims, though we didn’t meet each other until junior high, that she and I have the same first memory. For me, it is a memory of being two, on a Donald Duck swing with an orange duck bill for a seat in Oak Tree Park. For Clarissa, it is a memory of being three and a half (she’s that much older), on a Donald Duck swing with an orange duck bill for a seat in Oak Tree Park, watching another little girl, who was me, swinging on the swing next to her. These things are important, and true or not, Clarissa makes things up with the best of intentions. Once, in high school, she told me she had a dream in which God was her ex-boyfriend. I honestly believed she was that powerful; there are times even now, all grown up, that I still believe it.
Clarissa says she has come to visit my life, but here in this beauty salon we are doing what we always do when we get together—lifting ourselves out of real life even as we stare at ourselves in the mirror.
“Okay, the jumpsuit’s hideous. But doesn’t everyone deserve their health? Sturdy sinuses?” Clarissa says.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I’m relieved because sturdy sinuses is Clarissa teasin
g me. I’m a medical secretary and during my spare time in the neurosurgery clinic, I read patient files—spina bifida and brain tumors, pictures of shaved heads with stitches like the leather stitching on a baseball. Once, I read the medical report of a doctor who had just finished removing a brain tumor successfully, but with the slip of a scalpel he put the patient’s sinuses out of commission. The report stated that, in order for this operation to be successful, “sturdy sinuses are a must.” When I told Clarissa about the slipup in the operation she said, “That’s perverted.” She has a gift for malapropisms.
The irony of Clarissa’s lump is that, of the two of us, I thought it would be me who would fall victim to something like that. I often go home from my job and run my fingers slowly through my hair, checking. The first time I did it I gave myself a scare, not realizing until I asked a doctor at work that skulls are by nature lumpy. I’m still never sure. I check my whole body for lumps, sometimes mistaking bone for something more tragic. My breasts feel like tapioca, always. It’s this constant searching without results, good or bad, that Clarissa used to say made her wish she’d find something.
One day at work, as I stared out the window, I saw the wind blow a woman’s red hat from her head. A light flickered on and off where I imagine my heart must be and when this happened I thought I understood the weight of Clarissa’s constant search. I sometimes walk up and down the hall in my apartment thinking about that midair red hat against the gray sky as I check for any slight shift in my equilibrium.
When Clarissa visits, we reward ourselves. We sneak banana splits in Clarissa’s roomy purse into movies during the middle of the day. We leave the theater, hands sticky with chocolate sauce, blinking into the sun as our eyes adjust. We go to the zoo and put peanuts on the long tongue of the giraffe. We love to watch the way it blinks its huge brown eyes and rolls the peanuts slow and sexy, one by one into its mouth.
Clarissa always has a plan like movies in the afternoon or coloring our hair. In junior high, Clarissa could memorize the class schedules of her crushes easily so that she would just happen to be walking by a particular doorway when a certain class let out. She is also the sort of person who knew how to leave something strategically, a scarf perhaps, at a boy’s house so she’d have an excuse to come back later. She’s quick on her feet that way.
Clarissa turns to me suddenly and says, as if she’d never seen me before in her life, “Well, hello.”
At first I think she’s reading the neon script WELL HELLO, BEAUTIFUL sign over the basins behind us that are visible in the mirror. But then I recognize the game we’ve been playing since we first met. When we were younger, one of us was the boy and the other the girl and we’d meet for the first time, but lately we play it as two women who haven’t seen each other in a long time.
“Well, hello to you too, Lucretia,” I say, making up a name. “It’s been forever. What have you been up to?” I laugh, in an attempt to keep things light.
“Well, Priscilla,” Clarissa says, “I left this town for a city with a nightlife, a place where there’s always something to do.”
“So you like it? I, as you probably know, am fresh back from Napa Valley where I was doing Robert Mondavi a little favor and leading wine tours. It’s the life. You know, cheese and wine, wine and cheese. And you?”
“I started my own health spa. At first, of course, I was selling vitamins over the phone, but I moved up quickly.” Clarissa is straight-faced. She picks up a comb from the faux-marble countertop and plucks at the teeth with her nails.
“It sounds fabulous.” I drag the a for effect. “Did you hear I’m engaged to one of the Mondavi brothers? Proposed right there in the vineyard. He said I was the bouquet he’d been searching for all his life.” I giggle like a little girl. “The health spa?” I prompt Clarissa when she doesn’t smile.
“Very elegant,” Clarissa says. “Marble columns at the entrance, cool blue throughout.” She pauses, sighing. “Mud baths, steam baths, bath baths. And piles of fruit and specially concocted vitamin drinks served to the customers on silver platters.”
“You’ve come a long way from your small-town beginnings. And you live in a beautiful house, I imagine.”
“The most,” she says theatrically, running one finger quickly down the comb so the teeth whistle as they bend. Clarissa watches the comb as she does this, concentrating. “And I’ve had a thousand lovers and never loved a single one of them,” she says. “Yes, it’s true, I’ve escaped my small-town beginnings….”
I dread the look that comes over Clarissa’s face now, that look of helpless surprise in the face of what she is about to say or do.
“This is true,” Clarissa says, her voice part movie actress and part the drama of her own natural voice. She smiles wickedly. She watches herself in the mirror as she runs a finger along her hairline where the tinfoil begins. “And I keep myself company in my exquisitely furnished apartment with the knowledge of my own success. I don’t need a lover. I don’t need anyone, and I’ll die alone, eating kiwi and luxuriating in my own mud bath.”
“Clarissa,” I say.
“I don’t even need friends,” Clarissa says, in Lucretia’s voice because she’s electing not to hear me. “And that’s Lucretia to you.”
“Whatever your name is, enough,” I say, afraid of the lump lying in wait deep in her breast, afraid of the inoperable tumor of loneliness that lies even deeper inside. I am angry that Clarissa won’t talk about these things and terrified that she might.
“Did you decide there’s no hope for us?” Clarissa says as Camille, our beauty consultant, returns in the pink splendor of her outfit. With her is another pink-aproned woman. Emery boards and combs stick out of the pocket of her apron in a chaotic and upsetting way.
I look at Clarissa’s reflection in the mirror and almost don’t recognize her not looking back at me. Sometimes when I’m walking up and down the hall in my apartment, I wonder what interesting thing Clarissa must be doing at that moment because she would never wander the hall aimlessly.
“This is my assistant, Jasmine,” Camille says. “She’s learning the ropes. I was thinking, if you ladies don’t mind, that Jasmine and I could wash you two out together. Otherwise I’ll do you one at a time, which of course will take much longer.”
“That’s fine,” I say, immediately yielding to Camille’s subtle hint. Clarissa looks at me sideways, as if I were a stranger she happened to be watching, and gives me a look that says, When will you learn to put up a fight? She doesn’t just mean now, here at Well Hello, Beautiful. She means the way I’ve stayed in our hometown, the way I’ve settled into a job I found by accident, the way I let my fingernails and toenails grow wild and unshaped and don’t even think twice about it. No matter how often I tell her that I’m content, she won’t believe me. I never wanted to leave—but it’s always been hard to draw the line between where her ambitions begin and mine end. She looks at me as if to say, Get out of this town already or next thing you know you’ll have married Bobby Taylor who was voted most popular in high school and now works sorting Terra Cotta from Egg Shell in his father’s paint business. Clarissa’s look scorns my fairy-tale suspicion of someday finding something wonderful right here at home. Clarissa’s look says all of this to me and includes the injustice of her own life not being much better. I fear that we will both tumble into the hole of Clarissa’s fear.
Camille will do Clarissa, and Jasmine, her assistant, will do me because that’s the way these things work out with me and Clarissa. Jasmine’s fingers smell like the canned peach smell of the salon as she rests her hands on my tinfoil head, long nails gently scraping my scalp.
The four of us walk over to the pink basins on the other side of the room, where Clarissa and I sit down in reclining chairs and tip our heads back so that Camille and Jasmine can begin to unwrap the tinfoil.
“Slowly,” Camille cautions Jasmine. “You don’t want to jolt the follicles.”
Clarissa slides her foot along the linoleum floor to
mine, making sure I caught this. She has decided to be herself again.
Jasmine tests the water from the hose with her fingers before she begins to wash the excess color out. The water runs over my ears so that for a moment I can hear only my own heart, its steady, persistent beat.
When she is done she wraps a towel turbanlike around my head. Camille has Clarissa done up in the same way. We are led back to our swivel chairs in front of the mirror, and Camille and Jasmine begin combing and blow-drying and teasing our hair.
“You’re much redder,” I say to Clarissa, meaning her hair.
She looks at me, and I notice for the millionth time since I’ve known her how beautiful she is with her thick charcoal-stroke eyebrows and her big square jaw suggesting a person who would never be left with nothing to say.
Clarissa puts her hand on her throat and starts to cry.
Camille keeps combing and teasing Clarissa’s hair, having decided that I will handle this. She’s opted for the this-isn’t-happening approach.
“Sweetie,” I say, horrified by the big tear rolling down Clarissa’s cheek unchecked. Jasmine takes my face in both her hands, pointing me out to myself in the mirror.
“Done,” she says. My hair is streaked with shiny blond. Clarissa’s hair is dazzling as she finally brushes the tear away with her hand.
“I feel like a converted person,” Clarissa says, recovering quickly, as we stand up to go change back into our clothes.
I will pay with a credit card and Clarissa will pay me in cash later. While I step up to the cash register, she walks over to a large gilded mirror to look at her hair. Above the cash register is a small mirror and I can see Clarissa behind me. She doesn’t know I’m looking at her and she looks at her reflection the way I imagine she does at home, alone in her apartment. I’ve looked that way too, studying myself and longing to be studied.