Isle of Palms

by Dorothea Benton Frank

  “Here’s the deal, Anna: I get a job. I’m gonna be the receptionist. I make ten dollars an hour, okay? I gotta get out of the chat rooms, you know what I mean?”

  “Lucy!”

  “And I wanna buy gifts and things to sell, like those things that go on ponytails and pretty little baby barrettes and . . .”

  “Lucy!”

  “What?”

  “I can’t take that kind of money from you!”

  “And just why not? Shit, if I’d left my money in the stock market, I sure woulda lost that much in a week! I figure you’re a better investment than a company I can’t watch and don’t know what the hell they do anyway. What the hell is Enron anyhow?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  Do it! the little voice said.

  I took the plunge from the top of Mount Everest.

  “Yes. It is a yes. But only as a loan.” I’m gonna throw up, pass out, and die.

  “Deal!”

  I was a trembling and shaking sack of anxiety as I signed the lease. Lucy was perfectly collected, walking through the new space like a foreman, chatting away with Marilyn about the layout.

  “I should have brought a darn pad of paper,” she said. “Next time.”

  “Take mine,” Marilyn said.

  All I could think was, What have I done? What the hell have I done?

  Get a grip, Anna.

  Screw you, spook, I said silently to my inner compulsive gambler.

  Getting a grip meant that I had to start whipping the new space into shape. How long would it take? To my complete amazement, Lucy seemed to have that all under control. She might have looked like a cone of cotton candy, but let us not forget, O Danny Boy was a contractor. Still, it was surprising to listen to her spit out recommendations on amps and socket placement and on and on.

  I was about to open a salon of my own? Was I completely off the wall? No. I wasn’t. Only partially. And I’d like to know since when a tough little nut like me started getting so sentimental, but I couldn’t help watching the movie in my head, the one from seventeen years ago. It could have been yesterday that I opened the door at the infamous House of Hair for the first time.

  It was in the mid eighties. With my beauty school diploma in one hand and a want ad from the Post & Courier in the other, I pushed open the glass door to the House of Hair on King Street in Charleston. The blow dryers were deafening. “I Will Survive” was blaring full tilt through the stereo speakers. Another warning on my life unrecognized. I just wasn’t that smart. I was so insecure I could hardly keep my shoes on my feet.

  I looked around. In the salon area, there were about a dozen stylists in black pants and white shirts. Their arms and round brushes seemed to be everywhere at once. In the reception space there were two couches, some chairs, and a coffee table stacked with well-worn current magazines and women flipping their pages, not reading a word.

  I tried to stand straight against the counter and appear poised. First impressions lasted forever and I wanted mine to be good. I waited for the harried receptionist to hang up the phone. She looked exactly like the front office person at a hip salon should. Great haircut, short and blunt, so gelled you could see your face in it. Well, almost. Dramatic makeup, tight clothes, great body. Too much jewelry. No gum. Very cool.

  “Nope, sorry, nothing until next Thursday, Mrs. Akers. I know, I know. It’s terrible. No, it’s been wild here! Yes, I know! You’re right!”

  She looked at me and rolled her eyes. “How about Stacy? No, I promise, she’s very gentle.” Just a minute, she mouthed to me. “Okay, I have you booked for a manicure with Stacy at four o’clock this afternoon. Sure. I will. Bye-bye!” She hung up the telephone and took a deep breath.

  “Jeesch! You’d think her cuticles were like the queen mother’s or something! Okay! Sorry for the wait. Do you have an appointment?” she said, as though she asked that all night long in her sleep.

  “No, I’m here for an interview?” I said.

  “What are you—desperate?” She looked at me as though I was the one with the eighteen coats of blue mascara cemented to my lashes. “I’m just kidding!”

  “With Harriet? For the assistant’s position?”

  “She’s probably in the back sharpening her teeth.”

  While I wanted to giggle I thought it better to keep my place. I just nodded my head and started to go to the rear of the salon to look for Harriet.

  “Hold on a second! Come back here.”

  I thought I had done something wrong, like maybe she had to announce me or something. I was instantly washed with embarrassment.

  “What?” I said.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Anna,” I said.

  “I’m Kelly. Listen to me, I’m gonna tell you something. Harriet’s gonna hire you on the spot. Don’t worry about that. I know her. She goes through assistants faster than I go through boyfriends. Know why?”

  “Because she’s demanding?”

  “Because she’s got a worse personality than anybody I ever met. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and meant it.

  That interview and career path came after Jim and I filed separation papers and I’d finally moved back to Daddy’s house. Trixie had closed the wallet when Jim told her we were breaking up. I mean, if shortly after the death of your husband, your son announced he was gay and his marriage was over, would you pay all the bills for his wife?

  But there weren’t a million options for me. Bartender? Hostess? Waitress? Salesperson? When I found out that it only took six months to complete the required course of study in South Carolina, there wasn’t another alternative that made sense to me. Cutting hair was something I actually liked. Daddy wasn’t thrilled about me becoming a hair stylist. I think he thought I should go to a liberal arts college and maybe teach school or something. But I was stubborn about it, deciding that I was going to do something I enjoyed. Gardening had taught me that you shouldn’t spend too many hours a day doing something that would make you miserable.

  That’s how and why I eventually found myself standing in Harriet’s House of Hair looking for Harriet the Beast. Great. Have a nice life.

  After asking two people who gave me sorrowful faces in sympathy, I remember I saw Harriet for the first time sorting permanent rods in a rolling cart. She was about forty, rail thin, dyed red hair, no fingernails to brag about. I remember thinking that her heels were too high for a woman her age. Frankly, she was slightly tacky.

  “Harriet? I’m Anna Abbot and I was hoping I could talk to you about the assistant’s job?”

  She looked me up and down and without a trace of any sort of pleasantry she said, “The broom’s over there. Sweep up this hair and we can talk while you work.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “You ever been arrested?”

  “Heavens, no!”

  “You’re hired. Minimum wage, don’t hustle tips, hours are ten to six, Tuesday through Saturday. You gotta work late before all holidays, understood?”

  I nodded my head.

  “If I catch you stealing products, you go to jail. Got it?”

  “Good grief! Do you have a problem with that sort of thing?”

  “I got trouble you can’t imagine, girl. What’s your name again?”

  That was the end of her personal interest in me and the beginning of my career as a stylist in Harriet’s Kremlin. Tough interview.

  I got trouble you can’t imagine, girl. Seventeen years later, those words were still ringing in my ears. Everything had all happened so fast.

  Freaking Lucy. There I was with this wild woman Lucy planning my new life. We stayed there until eight that night, drawing and redrawing the space until we were happy with it. She went home to call Daddy and I went home, unplugged my phone, and slept like the dead.

  The next morning, I decided to call Emily, Jim, Frannie, and of course Daddy and tell them what I had done. First, I dialed Emily’s dorm room.
She was there and sound asleep. It was only six-thirty in the morning. I was so excited I had forgotten to check!

  “. . . Hello?”

  “Emily? Baby? It’s Momma.”

  “Whaddayawant? Whatimeisit?”

  My darling child didn’t sleep, she went unconscious. Rousing her wouldn’t be easy, but since I had her on the phone, I decided to go through with the conversation.

  “I’m sorry, baby. I know it’s early, but I’m so excited I had to call you!”

  “’Kay. ’Sup?” (Translation: Okay, what’s up?)

  “I just signed a lease on my own salon! Can you believe it?”

  “Ma! You’re losing it! You can’t!”

  Ma? When did I become Ma?

  “I certainly can and I did!”

  “’Ja rob a bank or sumpin’?”

  Something had undermined her ability to enunciate.

  “Yeah, I won the lottery. I can’t wait for you to see it! What’s the date you’re coming home?”

  “Oh, fuck!” There was a moment’s delay and then she said, “Okay, I’m back. I dropped the phone.”

  “What did you say?” I couldn’t believe my ears. She had never used that sort of language.

  “What? I said, Okay, I’m back. I dropped the phone, okay? No big deal, Mom. God!”

  Well, at least she said Mom.

  Over the last two weeks, when I couldn’t sleep, I would roam Emily’s tiny new room as though it were a wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, huge and endless, touching her new white wicker headboard, the tiny flowered pillowcases and quilt I had chosen for her, the mountain of choices I had made.

  What if she didn’t recognize it as a new beginning? What if she didn’t care at all? And down deep inside I worried, in a dark place I kept behind a locked door, that it was too late. Not by much, but too late nonetheless. Too late for her and for me together.

  Thirteen

  Tangled Liberation

  IM and Frannie cheered when I told them the news about the salon and cracked jokes about the robbery. “You are some big operator, Anna Abbot, I am so proud of you!” Jim said. “What can I do to help?”

  “I’m good right now, thanks.”

  “Too bad the guy didn’t shoot Harriet in the tongue,” Frannie said.

  “No kidding! Know what she did? Listen to this . . .”

  I told them how she had called me back and how she went crazy when I told her what I was doing. I could see them shaking their heads.

  “God bless the child that’s got his own,” Jim said.

  “Sing it to me, Jimmy!” Frannie said and started singing in our ears.

  “I’ll call y’all later!” I said and we hung up.

  Then I called Daddy and told him about everything. You would think that signing a lease on a salon would’ve been the main thrust of our conversation, but it was that I had done it without his consent that seriously irked him.

  First, we talked about the robbery at Harriet’s. As he listened to the details, he was blowing air like Old Man Winter. You see, Daddy didn’t sigh. He blustered, puffed up his cheeks, and blew a northeast wind. As we talked, Channel 5 was probably issuing emergency small-craft warnings.

  “Merciful God,” he said, “you’re lucky you didn’t get killed! What’s become of this world?”

  “You’re right,” I said. “The guy was probably looking for money for drugs. I mean, it wasn’t a very smartly planned robbery. Just a lone villain.”

  “I mean, what kind of a man wanders into a women’s salon, pulls a gun, and scares the daylights out of everyone?”

  “A creep who knows how much cash goes over the counter on any given day. Daddy, we had over a thousand dollars in the drawer. We always do. Harriet does business like crazy. Hell, a bottle of shampoo alone could cost twenty dollars.”

  “Gee-nimminy,” he said and let out another gust. “I don’t think I have spent twenty dollars on all my shampoo in five years! And, I expect you’ll be selling this kind of thing as well?”

  “Actually, what lines I can sell remains to be seen. There are all sorts of rules about how many salons a vendor can sell in the same area and I won’t be the only salon on the Isle of Palms.”

  “So much the pity. Well, I’ll see you around dinnertime—Lucy’s invited me over.”

  “Okay, good, maybe y’all can help me figure some of this out.”

  “Sounds like you don’t need my advice.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  Great, I thought, here comes a mood.

  “By the way, did you take the money Lucy offered?”

  “Daddy, I’m not sure what to do about this. She wrote a check to the broker for two months’ rent for the salon without me even realizing or thinking about what she was doing. Does this make her my partner or what?”

  “If you really want my opinion . . .”

  “I do!”

  “Yes, but you had no problem signing a lease without even running it by me. . . .”

  “Daddy? I’ll admit it was unusual. . . .”

  “Yes, and a terrible gamble that could backfire in your face. . . .”

  “Look. I don’t want to sound disrespectful to you, but since I’ve been in this business for my entire adult life, maybe I know something about it that you don’t. I mean, I need support here, not criticism.”

  “You know it all, don’t you? You don’t need my advice. Go find yourself a lawyer.”

  “Come on, Daddy. Talk to me.”

  He was such a child.

  Dead silence.

  “Come on.”

  “All right, if it was me, I’d set up a separate account for your business. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “Then you should probably incorporate your business and use Lucy’s money as a loan to the business, not a personal loan. Keep it simple, legal and clean.”

  “Right. Then if there’s a problem the business is liable, not me personally.”

  “Well, any half-witted lawyer on Broad Street would sue the dickens out of you too, but it helps to keep your personal life and the business separate in case of an audit. The IRS loves to find stuff like that.”

  “Right.”

  We hung up and I thought about what he had said. My stomach had been very uneasy for the past forty-eight hours. Between the shock of the robbery, Harriet’s fury, and most of all the lease, I didn’t know what to do first or next. I had a terrible amount of work in front of me and it seemed I took one brave step forward and then one whimpering step backward.

  Finding out what kind of merchandise I could manage to sell was only one detail of a thousand. My immediate future would mean hauling around a very irritating long list. And I did need a lawyer.

  I scratched my head and looked around my living room. I still had a few moving boxes to unpack, but most things had been put away in a somewhat organized fashion, which is to say that at least I knew where everything was. In a small house there were only so many places to hide.

  I decided to walk over to Lucy’s house and see what she was doing. Maybe she would invite me to dinner too and I could help her cook or something. I wasn’t interested in cooking alone and I was more than a little overwhelmed.

  I saw her working at her computer on the kitchen counter so I rapped on her screen door.

  “Stick ’em up, doll, and nobody gets hurt,” I called out in a manly voice.

  “Lord! I didn’t even hear you coming up the steps! Come on in! Look at this!”

  I imagine that what I expected to see was a website for used salon fixtures but what she showed me was something quite different. She was online at a site called Love@AOL.com. I had heard about these places on the Internet where you could advertise for a boyfriend or a long-lasting relationship, but I had never seen any of them. There it was. A guy named Antonio, in his bathing suit, leaning on a Harley, wearing sunglasses, smiling wide, trying to look casually irresistible. He was so pumped up macho you could almost smell the coconut in his
suntan oil.

  “Look at his bio!”

  “Sorry,” I said, “I was staring at his biceps.”

  “ ‘Likes dogs, opera, walking in the rain . . . ’ ” she said, clutching her bosom and letting loose a breath of carnal longing.

  “If he doesn’t have the sense to come in out of the rain, why would you . . . ?” Suddenly I was a little annoyed with her. Wasn’t she seeing my father?

  “He’s just trying to show how sensitive he is! God, Anna! When’s the last time you dated anybody?”

  She had me there. “I had a date last year, I think.” I knew my voice had a trace of defensiveness.

  “Well, honey, this is how you meet people in this techno age. Nobody goes to singles bars anymore. That’s so sleazy! This gives you a chance to email back and forth and see what you think about someone at a safe distance. Email tells you a lot about someone, you know.”

  There was a dish of celery sticks on the counter and I helped myself to one. I’d still take a singles bar any day of the week.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Seems like a good way to meet a whack with a chain saw.”

  “Oh, Anna,” she said with another sigh, this one a sigh of despair for the state of my non-affairs. She brightened and said, “Here, I’ll show you my ad!”

  “You have an ad on this thing?” I hoped my eyes weren’t bulging.

  “Yeah,” she said, “look!”

  Click. Click. Exhibit A—there was Lucy, in a hat and sunglasses, leaning on a Porsche (she did not own a Porsche), wearing a tell-all tank top, grinning like a hyena, right there on the Internet, for all the world to see. The description below her picture read: Everybody Loves Lucy! Single, tall, with curves in all the right places, loves to cook, slow dance, and laugh. Thirty-ish, M.S. in social work, never married. No more jerks, please. If you are a mature, professional, successful male, interested in a long-term relationship and maybe someday marriage, then I’d love to hear from you!

  I gaped at the monitor. “Lucy! Good Lord!” I said a silent prayer that my eyeballs wouldn’t fall out of their sockets onto her granite counter.

  “What?”

  “You’re divorced . . . ”