by Lynne Hugo
She might as well have been a stinging wasp, and my urge to slap was just as reflexive and wrongheaded. But that’s what I did. I don’t think I slapped her hard. It takes thought to wind up and put power in a slap. But I saw her pause and take the time to decide: yes, she would. She drew back to hit me. What had begun as a skid out of control was dropping into slow motion, something dangerous that wouldn’t be excusable as impulse.
I shouted, “Don’t you dare!” She dared. I grabbed her wrist, staggering backward under the force of her thrust. I went down, half over the coffee table, half onto the floor, between it and the couch, pulling Carley on top of me. That was an accident; I’d grabbed her wrist to save myself.
The table skittered to one side, and the couch jarred enough to knock over the ginger-jar lamp, which shattered on the cement floor. Carley screamed and started flailing, arms and legs like a windmill pummeling me.
“Let me up! Stop!” I gasped, trying to free my arms to push her off me.
Three things happened: her elbow caught me in the throat, her weight started to suffocate me, and the door at the top of the stairs opened.
“What’s going on down there?” Daddy called.
My only thought was to keep him from coming down. “It’s okay, Daddy. Everything’s fine. Just close the door.” But I couldn’t get enough air, so I was rasping.
Carley shouted, “Grandpa, she’s fucking trying to kill me,” while she thrashed, her voice trumping mine.
Daddy didn’t hesitate a beat. “Don’t know what took her so long. I’d a done it last year.” He slammed the door.
At that Carley went rigid as a death wish. Then the fight leaked out of her. She tried to climb off me, but her limbs hadn’t the will to work.
She was crying. I got my palms on the floor and managed to leverage myself to a sitting position, which bumped Carley down into my lap. I stroked her head and worked my arms under and around her. My hair fell forward over my shoulders like a blanket over the two of us, and I let it be. Carley, my baby, my beauty.
“Oh sweetheart, he didn’t mean that. He didn’t mean it.” My mouth tasted like bad milk around the lie. My father has never said such a thing to anyone. Mama’s the bigmouth.
“He hates me,” she sobbed. “I didn’t know. I thought Grandpa loved me, he let me train Charyzma’s foal.”
“He doesn’t hate you, honey. The foal was a long time ago. He may be tired of back talk or he may be tired of you not helping now, but that’s different from hate.”
Carley was having none of it. She raised her head from my lap, face smeared, eyes and nose running. “He hates me and I don’t want to stay here anymore.”
“What do you want to do? You don’t want me to marry Eddie and move, but you don’t want to stay here.”
“I don’t care. Go ahead. Marry Eddie if it’ll get us the hell out of here.”
There were twenty smart things I could have said and another twenty I could have done. But I was so tired, and this seemed like a crazy wedding gift from Daddy. I’m ashamed to say I accepted it. I thought Eddie would help me change Carley’s life, even though she was too young and dumb to know it.
“All right, honey. I’ll marry Eddie and we’ll move out of here. We’ll get a new start.”
I meet my own eyes in the mirror. I’ve cut almost the front half of my hair. Now that the wild flourish that usually falls around my face has been hacked away, I see old-lady lines around my eyes. I hardly recognize myself. A fragment from a song I used to know comes to me. “Wasted on the Way.” If that isn’t the title, it should be, at least for my life. If I could remember the words, maybe I’d know what to do. It was something like … I should’ve started long ago… . I look around the bathroom in that way you do, idly, when you’re just trying to remember something. I see the toilet seat. Up. Again.
That’s it: the words are about water. Water … or time … going under a bridge. I wait, trying to retrieve it. And then I start to hear the song from somewhere in my lost self: let water carry it away. So I take another hank of the hair Eddie loves, saw it off, and drop it into the yawning mouth of the toilet. I’ve started to hum the melody, enjoying my work, when I hear Eddie tromping upstairs and down the hallway toward our bedroom. Our beagle runs ahead to see what’s going on in the bathroom just as I shut the door to hide what my hands are doing. The door hits Copper on the side of the head. He yelps, and I have to open it to make sure he’s all right.
“Holy shit!” Eddie gapes at the hair on the floor, on the sink, on my shoulders, and my half-cut head. “What the hell are you doing? Oh no, no! What are you doing? You can’t cut off your hair. You promised.”
He sinks to his knees, frantically gathering what’s fallen, looks up at me, pleading, raising the fallen hair like a prayer in his two hands. Tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Please stop. Please. Can you put it back? You know, like make those extension things with it? Those things Chassie wants? I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Eddie stayed on his knees in the bathroom pleading apologies until Jewel’s fit passed and she put the scissors down.
“Oh my God, are you nuts?” he said then, standing and brushing hair from his pants. His voice rose, upset. “Have you gone lunatic crazy?” The dog started barking, as he did when anyone got loud. His wife’s face told him that he wasn’t being supportive, like she’d told him a thousand times he needed to be. He tried again. “I mean, you can fix this, can’t you?”
Jewel picked up the scissors. “Wait, honey,” he said. “Maybe that didn’t come out right. I’m sorry.”
Jewel sighed as if she was giving up but kept her grip on the scissors. “Eddie, I can’t fight with you anymore. I just can’t. It’s my hair, she’s my daughter, they’re my horses. It’s all the same difference.” She was looking at herself in the mirror, not at him.
Eddie was baffled until he remembered that they’d been arguing. What was it about? The checkbook was low. He’d said she should quit buying Carley food ’cause it just supports her habit—something like that? She said it’s more important than Chassie’s acrylic nails. Jesus, what else did he say? It’s a money-sucking waste to keep the horses? Yeah, okay. But not a word about her hair. “Carley? The horses? Is that why you”—don’t step on a land mine—“did this?”
She spoke slowly, like he was the demented one. “I’m a person, Eddie. I’m doing what I decide, not you. Can you grasp that?”
The glare of the bathroom lights over the mirror was hurting his eyes and making it hard to see her face well. She’d been at her folks’ house with the horses earlier and was still in her barn clothes; a faint horsey smell came from her jeans. They always ate dinner late because Jewel took care of her parents and the horses on her way home from work. It hadn’t started out that way. When they got married, Jewel was supposed to just take care of the horses, but Jewel’s mother had fussed about and with each aide the county agency sent in, and Jewel had ended up having to do the work anyway. Finally she’d figured she might as well get the pay for it. So she’d gotten certified, and now it brought in a sweet extra sum, enough that they’d bought a nicer house. When Chassie wanted to move in, they’d had the space. Jewel had been dead against it—claimed it wasn’t fair since he wouldn’t let Carley live with them anymore—but he’d argued that his daughter was no druggie and therefore a different case entirely. Not that he really believed tough love was going to change Carley’s drug habits: the truth he didn’t want to tell Jewel was that he just yearned for a normal life, and he didn’t think druggies were any more likely to change than nutcases like his ex. Jewel ought to look at her crackhead sister, Nadine, for one example. Whatever. It all seemed fairly black and white to him, in addition to the true fact that the horses took up a ton of time that Jewel could be at home, and she was spending a bunch of money on them, too. His eyes worked just fine on the checkbook deductions and balance.
“Do you get it?” Jewel said, and he saw that she’d rotated the scissors so the point was to
ward him. He didn’t know that he understood or didn’t; he wasn’t sure what she was talking about. He was dumbfounded by what she’d done to her hair and by the shears aimed at his gut. He wondered if she was high. He’d never known her to use anything.
“Yes, yes, honey, I understand,” he lied softly. “I understand. Please, just put the scissors down.”
He led Jewel’s gaze with his own to her hand, pulled her eyes down deliberately, watched her realize what he meant her to see. When she did, he saw that she was startled, and she laid the scissors on the bathroom counter. Finally he was getting her on track. Now Eddie tried to lead her eyes to the mirror so she would see what she’d done to her hair. No luck this time. She brushed past him out of the bathroom without a word, Copper at her heels.
Eddie started to follow but thought better of it when she slammed the bedroom door right as Copper’s tail cleared it. This wasn’t like his Jewel, not at all. He turned and took the five steps back to the hallway bathroom—she’d not used the one off their bedroom—and surveyed the proof of insanity lying on the counter and floor and in the toilet. The place looked like a salon that hadn’t been swept in two days. On his knees again, Eddie picked up the clumps he’d already held and dropped, and as much as he could of the rest of it, gathering and arranging the strands in his big left hand. When they made love he’d wrap his hands in this very hair and nuzzle into Jewel’s neck for the smell of it, like fruit. It was her, his wife, and he wanted to breathe her in and in and in. Before they’d married, she’d promised him she wouldn’t cut her hair. She’d promised.
Eddie had two dead parents, two child support payments (even though he had one of the children himself), a for-shit job in a mill, and an ex-wife who was a mutant cross between a bitter bitch and a dangerous whack job. (“Bipolar disorder,” according to Chassie, which Eddie considered just another piece of crap excuse. Chassie said her mother wouldn’t take the medication. Eddie said, “Well, your mother is more than one sandwich short of a picnic.” Chassie got huffy then, but the truth was that even Chassie avoided Lana when she could get away with it.) Jewel was, well, of course he loved her, but more: Jewel was Eddie’s heart, his good. He had Jewel and because of Jewel, he had Chassie and the means and place to have his son, Rocky, who was now saying he wanted to come live with them, a little fact Eddie hadn’t sprung on Jewel yet. Jewel couldn’t be going all crazy on him now.
He left her alone, figuring that was temporarily safest, while he headed for the kitchen, lifted a beer from the refrigerator as quietly as he could, opened the can, and pondered a course of action. He tried to keep his mind off her hair, which he’d carried down the half flight of their tri-level, rested momentarily on the breakfast bar while he fetched the beer, and hunted an envelope in the built-in desk. The wallpaper behind it was red with a weird yellow scroll thing at the top. He’d disliked it when Jewel picked it out, and tonight it struck him as nuts. A white business envelope wasn’t nearly big enough for all the hair, which broke his heart again. “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Jewel together again,” he whispered and, suddenly broken himself, gave way to tears.
He’d never made it past the family room couch, the blue one that Jewel had moved from the basement apartment at her parents’ house. By the time he woke in the morning, too many crushed beer cans on the table, the light in the room told him it was mid-morning. It was Saturday: Jewel would have left for her parents’ place by seven.
The small herd was grazing near the larger pond, which was in the far back pasture. April bluegrass was longest where the pond was spring-fed, although both pastures were glorious, surrounded by white Kentucky board fencing. The horses’ ears flicked occasionally toward the quiet road, out of sight. Any sound might be Her. They used to start moving to the front pasture toward the corral anytime they heard The Noise—like many, many hooves on gravel—right by the house, but Spice, a black Arab gelding, learned to differentiate. Now they waited for Spice to know if it was Her before they started toward the barn, even though Charyzma, a bay Thoroughbred, was the dominant mare and claimed the lead.
Spice raised his head, ears forward. The Right Sound. Now, walk on. When She called, lilting the sounds to summon them on the breeze, they would already be most of the way to Her. She’d start calling anyway, and She’d be carrying some apples or carrots. Sugar lumps. Sometimes Red, a roan Quarter Horse gelding, or Moonbeam, a white and black Appaloosa mare, would try to be first, which Charyzma would or wouldn’t bother to correct, but Spice didn’t care. She always slipped him an extra sugar when She was brushing him down or after She cleaned his feet. Sometimes a stone would be lodged in one hoof, up against the tender frog, and he understood what She did for him when She picked it out or removed burrs from his coat. So when She arrived, he nickered his happiness, and when She hugged his neck and kissed his face, he nuzzled Her. Sometimes when She came, She’d cling to each of them a long time. If it was warm, She might soak them with water and scrub a new scent onto them, then more water and a good rub with cloth, and finally brushing. She’d stay while the sun slid across the sky, and She’d ride each of them, maybe bareback, maybe under saddle. Spice was patient by nature, even when he and two others were waiting in the paddock while She took Charyzma in the ring to work her and then Moonbeam. Charyzma didn’t like to be separated from Moonie. But She knew about this and kept them from each other’s sight when She exercised those two. Of course She knew. She’d been there through every season since they had been colts and fillies.
She talked to them all always, and always, before She left, Her arms would be around each of their necks again, Her face against theirs, stroking them, each in turn. To make Her sound like the creek down in the woods when it played so light and easy with the rocks, Spice would nod his head softly against Hers when She put Her face on his to talk to him. He was always last before She left, and always She left with the sides of Her mouth turned up. He knew Her, too.
I Am, I Said
“GOD IN HEAVEN, WHAT happened? You’re gonna sue, right?” Mama says when I arrive to fix their breakfast.
She propels her wheelchair toward my shins as I clear the front door. She’s dressed herself, I’m glad to see, though her shirt, a big neon pink flower print, hurts my eyes. Through the open doorway, I glimpse Daddy in his easy chair. He’s dressed too, his cane propped exactly where it belongs, between his right leg and where his hand rests on the arm of the chair. He turns toward our voices.
“What’s the matter? Sue who?” he calls in without getting up.
“Sue her hairdresser,” Mama says, staring, trying to work her blowsy face from horror toward sympathy. Her own hair is no masterpiece, looking like a storm cloud chock-full of summer hail. Jowly and flushed with high blood pressure, Mama never looks well. Her brows are thin and pale, and her teeth have gone grayish-yellow. Her eyes, though, are mine, which scares me.
“Her hairdresser’s named Sue?” Daddy says. “Why do we care what her hairdresser calls herself?”
“Sheesh, Hack, I’m talking ’bout Jewel suing her hairdresser. She’s come in here with a haircut to make sweet Jesus weep. Front and sides all cut off like a man’s. Back’s in a ponytail.”
Daddy clears his throat, not one to comment on women’s hairstyles. Or perhaps he’s wondering what his hair looks like, considering that I’m the one who cuts it. After I scissor the top, I always use the clippers on the sides and back. “Lean forward, Daddy. Now to the right. A little more,” I’ll say as I guide his head with my hand. Then I trim his eyebrows and go over his face and neck with the electric shaver, erasing the fine growth that’s appeared. When I’m undoing the homemade plastic cape from the back of his neck, he’ll sometimes reach back and catch my hand to hold it against his cheek. Thank you, he might whisper, and if he does I lean in to kiss the air by his cheek.
If he could see himself, he wouldn’t find the mirror mean. His hair is a neat thatch of coarse iron over a broad face with earthy eyes, hawkish nose
, faint beard, small mouth. What is remarkable is how unwrinkled he remains, how compact his body still is. His grandfather was half Cherokee; his grandmother just an Appalachian, he says, a blue-eyed woman with farm-roughened hands. I can see a bit of the Indian in him but not in myself.
Mama took care of Daddy when he first went blind from glaucoma. Meanwhile, she went from a cane to a walker, her legs ruined by rheumatoid arthritis. He tried to take over when she first needed a wheelchair. The blind led the lame and vice versa. Mama would direct Daddy in the dark kitchen at the back of the house, where threadbare plaid dish towels languished, then as now, next to faded print place mats. “The soup’s in the cupboard to the left side of the sink. No, no, the other left side. Good. No, I’m tired of tomato. Jewel’s gotta quit buying that all the time. Pull out another can. Okay, beef noodle. Now, the opener is three steps to the right. Pull it to the edge of the counter for me.”
“Did some sicko do this to you in your sleep?” Mama says.
Here we go, I think, opening my mouth to shoot a sarcastic bullet, but her face looks strange. I stop myself and walk to where she’s parked, staring at me.
“Can we quit on the subject of my hair?” I say and try my best diversionary shot. “Here, I brought you donuts. It’s a gorgeous day. I’m opening the windows. The lilies of the valley haven’t quite finished, and you’ll be able to smell them.”
When I was young, Mama always insisted my curly hair be cut boyishly close around my head, though the fashion was long, and I wanted to look like the other girls. “You won’t take care of it,” she said. She meant she had too much else for me to do to let me take the time to fuss with myself. The dubious reward of growing it out after I turned eighteen was that both my first and second husbands fell in love with my hair. No danger of that happening now; a man would have to be as blind as my father. I risked one glance in the mirror when I brushed my teeth, and it was all I could stand. I thought it might not be so noticeable if I put what’s left in a ponytail, so without looking, I pulled it through a rubber band. Obviously, I haven’t hidden a thing.