“It’s from a movie called Sunset Boulevard,” Nora said, inhaling deeply and letting the smoke drift luxuriously from her nostrils. “It’s one of the great movies of all time. Gloria Swanson said that line. Next time it’s at an art theater, I’ll take you.”
“Huh,” Peyton said, poking at the curling strips of bacon and the scrambled eggs on her plate.
“These are cold,” she said to Chloe in the kitchen.
“They wasn’t cold at nine o’clock,” Chloe replied, not looking up from the beans she was stringing.
“Well, couldn’t you have put them back in the oven?”
“I could have, but I didn’t,” Clothilde said. “You ’sposed to be up way before now. Your daddy gone out to his office two hours ago.”
“So what? Nora was late, too,” Peyton said mulishly. “She didn’t get home till the middle of the night. I heard her come in.”
She looked at Nora, who looked back levelly.
“So I did,” she said. “And when you’re thirty you can come in at dawn if you want to. Besides, I like cold eggs and bacon. I hardly knew there was any other kind.”
Defeated, Peyton nibbled at the bacon, making an ostentatious pyramid of the eggs.
“I was going to ride my bike down to Nana’s today,” she said. “But it looks like it’s going to rain for the next hundred years.”
“I’ll take you later,” Nora said. “Right now we are going up to my room and I am going to fix that hair. Don’t argue. It looks like a bird’s nest caught in a windstorm.”
Peyton followed her up the stairs to the big back bedroom without protesting, mainly because her hair did indeed look like a fright wig. She had told herself repeatedly that she did not care how she looked; Ernie had said that true beauty came only from the soul, and that had comforted Peyton for several years. But she did care, and she hated herself for it.
Nora sat her down in front of the mirror at the old walnut dressing table that had been there ever since Peyton could remember. Formerly it had worn only yellowing antimacassars and a vase of dried baby’s breath from someone’s unremembered nosegay. Now it was littered with bottles and jars and flagons and tubes and brushes, and smelled of spilled powder and some kind of fresh, bitter cologne. Like mock oranges, Peyton thought. Despite herself she studied the array of cosmetics. She had never seen anything like them. There had been none in this house but her father’s aftershave since her birth.
“I’ll show you what they’re for after,” Nora said, moving her and the chair beside the window and bringing a towel to drape around her shoulders. “Right now it’s show time. Holy shit, Peyton, I can’t get a comb through this. It’s like a briar patch. Go wet it good and let’s go from there.”
Peyton did, holding her head under the taps in the old lavatory in this unused, unfamiliar bathroom. It was cavernous, chilling, and filled with a wavery green underwater light, and there was nothing in it but the big clawfoot bathtub and the lavatory and a yellow-stained toilet. But Nora had dragged in a table to stand beside the lavatory, and it held bath powder and deodorant and tubes and bottles, and a wicker basket full of gigantic rollers. There was also a pot of white chrysanthemums sitting on the top of the toilet. Hair sopping and senses open and pulsing, Peyton went back to her chair and sat down.
Nora combed out her tangled hair gently and walked around and around her, studying her head from all angles. Peyton did not speak. She looked fixedly out the window, into the soaked, abandoned rose garden that had been her mother’s pride. Now you could tell only that a large square had been dug out of the lawn, its edges now blurred with crabgrass. It made her sad, and she closed her eyes against the garden and the rain.
“Peyton, do you like Audrey Hepburn?” Nora said from behind her.
“Better than anybody,” Peyton said. “I sat through Breakfast at Tiffany’s three times.”
“I did twice. You know what I think we’ll do? I think we’ll cut this hair into a kind of Audrey Hepburn cap. Very short and pixieish, a little curly. It would look wonderful with your features and your long neck. And it would be a snap to take care of You game?”
“Yes,” Peyton whispered, with the sense of leaping blindly into a bottomless abyss.
She kept her eyes closed while Nora snipped and patted and studied and snipped some more. Somehow it was not like the ministrations of Mr. Antoine. As she worked, Nora talked about her night in Atlanta.
“Well, first,” she said, as if Peyton had asked, “I went to the movie. It was at the Peachtree Art Theater out in Buckhead. La Strada. Have you seen it?”
Peyton shook her head mutely, trying to imagine herself walking alone into an Atlanta movie theater after dark. How did you know whom to sit by? What did a masher look like? It was Aunt Augusta’s term, and though Peyton knew it was ridiculous and outdated, she did not know what else to call a man who touched you and unzipped his trousers in a movie theater. According to Aunt Augusta, any man who was not there with his family was suspect.
“No,” she said.
“It’s another of the truly greats, kiddo. You’ve got to see it. Maybe I’ll take you to a matinee. It’s on for a couple more weeks, I think. OK, so then afterward I walked up the street to Buon Giorno’s and had my clam linguine and a bottle of awful, wonderful Chianti. That’s a red Italian wine, very raw and gutsy.”
“I know what it is,” said Peyton, who didn’t. The only wine she knew was the thick, cloying scuppernong wine her grandmother made every autumn. How could anyone in his or her right mind drink a whole bottle of that?
“Did it make you drunk?” she said.
“Nope. Wine doesn’t make you drunk if you sip it slowly, and drink it with a meal. Unlike some other things I could name.”
“You mean like Tom Collinses?” said Peyton, who had overheard the cheerleaders talking about drinking them at the annual football banquet at the Henry Grady Hotel in Atlanta.
“God, no. That’s pure swill. I mean like Scotch. Gin and tonic. And rum. Mostly rum, good old mule-kicking, fire-breathing Cuban or Barbadian rum.”
“Does that make you drunk?”
“Like you wouldn’t believe. But it’s a fine way to go. Well, so then I went down to this little place by the bus station that has the best Dixieland jazz I have ever heard outside New Orleans. And I danced and whooped and hollered till about one, and then I came home.”
“By yourself?” Peyton squawked. “Down by the bus station? Aunt Augusta would die!”
“Which is why we aren’t going to tell her, isn’t it?” Peyton could hear the smile in Nora’s voice. “Besides, I wasn’t by myself. I went with somebody I met at Buon Giorno’s. “He’s the one who knew about the place.”
“He!” Peyton’s head was literally spinning with the enormity of it.
“A soldier who was eating his dinner alone. So I joined him. It’s more fun to eat Italian with somebody. He was on his way to Fort Benning and had to catch a two A.M. bus anyway. So we figured we might as well hear some jazz before he left, and dance a little.”
“You picked up a soldier and went to the bus station?”
Aside from sitting down on a bare toilet seat in a public restroom, going to the bus station was the number-one taboo in Aunt Augusta’s pantheon of crimes and misdemeanors. Prowling soldiers were unthinkable.
“For God’s sake, Peyton, he was all of eighteen years old, and homesick for Tennessee. He was a sweet boy. I wouldn’t have gone with just anybody. You get so you can tell who’s OK and who isn’t very quickly. We had a wonderful time, and he paid for the whole thing, and I kissed him good-bye and put him on a Trailways bus. We both enjoyed it. I really have to do some instructing with you, I think.”
“I don’t want any instructing in stuff like that,” Peyton said. “What if you catch something?”
“You mean like the clap? You don’t catch that from kissing, any more than you can from sitting on a toilet seat. I’m not crazy. Wait a minute now….”
She produced a bulbou
s handheld hair dryer and aimed it at Peyton’s head, fluffing and making finger waves and gently ruffling the hair at the back of her neck. Until the hot air hit her, Peyton did not realize that her neck was completely naked. She looked down. A mat of wiry hair lay inert on the floor under the chair.
“You cut it all off,” she wailed.
“Yep. Now look.”
Nora stepped back and Peyton looked.
A thin deer of a girl with a short tousle of hair looked back. It was its own color again, with tendrils and points framing her face. Something Nora had done to it made it shine softly, and it was somehow fuller than usual. It did not lie flat on her small head, but had curve and lift and bounce to it. Speechless, Peyton turned her head this way and that. The girl in the mirror was no one she knew, but unlike the succubus produced by Mr. Antoine, she was…interesting. Somehow older, yet with a face and neck of tender, unfinished planes and shadows. She lifted her chin and smiled tentatively. The changeling smiled back. Pretty? No, assuredly not. But for the first time in her life Peyton could see what she might look like as a woman. Somehow she had not ever really wondered, had, perhaps, never really thought she would get there.
Nora smiled down at her silently. She lifted one eyebrow: “Well?’
“I…gee. I don’t know. It isn’t me, is it?”
“Yes, it is. It’s you like you ought to be. That stuff on your head was like a dead muskrat lying up there. This sort of sets you free. Don’t you see? Lord, I can really see your father and your grandmother in you.”
Peyton, who had spent her entire life searching for signs of her mother in her undistinguished visage, felt something inside her lighten and lift, as if she had tossed out a heavy burden. At least she looked like someone now—if not her mother, then just maybe her mad, beautiful grandmother, her blade-featured father.
Her smile widened in spite of herself.
“Nobody at school has hair like this,” she said.
“Precisely,” Nora said. “Peyton, take it from one who knows. You aren’t ever going to look like Brigitte Bardot or Jackie Kennedy. Not going to happen. Don’t waste your time wishing. Go with what you’ve got. It may not ring many bells at school, but I assure you there is a world beyond Lytton Grammar School, and it’s a hell of a lot more interesting. You’re going to shine in that world like a star. It took me a long time to find that out. See what I’m doing for you, kiddo? I’m letting you in on the tricks of the trade early.”
“I feel naked.”
“In a way you are naked. You’re not hiding behind hair anymore. Hair is a powerful thing, sweetie pie. A headful of it will hide you. Cutting it off means you’re offering yourself to the world.”
“I don’t want to do that!”
“Already done. OK, hold your face up. I just want to see something.”
Peyton did. She felt the kiss of a big soft brush on her cheeks and temples and the tip of her nose. She felt a feathering of something along her closed eyelids. She felt a faint slick over her mouth. Feeling the same sick fear that she had felt at the Max Factor counter in Atlanta, she opened her eyes.
It was her, or at least this new her, only more so. There was a wash of color on her cheekbones and across the bridge of her nose, very faint, as if she had been in the sun for an hour or so. Her eyes were…real eyes. Deep and alive. You could see the translucent gray of them. Her grandmother’s eyes. Her mouth was the pink of the inside of a shell.
“Is it makeup?” she breathed.
“Yep. But it’s Peyton’s kind of makeup, not Seventeen’s or your sainted Aunt Augusta’s. Your makeup always ought to look like you’re not wearing any, even when you’re old. Your bones will carry your face, don’t you see? And your eyebrows.”
“Nobody will know me.”
“They’ll be falling all over themselves to get to know you,” Nora said. “Come on, let’s go try it out on somebody. Is your daddy in his office?”
“No! Not yet,” Peyton squeaked.
“Chloe, then.”
“She’s gone home. She works only half a day on Saturdays,” Peyton said gratefully.
“OK, then it’s going to be your grandmother. I promised, anyway. Dump that afghan and put on some clothes. Your chariot awaits.”
Peyton tiptoed down the stairs, looking sidewise at her reflection in the glass of framed photographs of sundry blank-eyed McKenzies and Peytons. Over their dead faces her own flashed, alive and utterly alien. She went into her room and put on her room and put on her blue jeans and one of her father’s old shirts. Then she took them off and pulled out the slim blue pants her aunt had selected, and the white sweater set she had gotten for Christmas and never worn. The sweaters were too big, but somehow the drooping amplitude of them was all right with the long neck and the small shining head. She pinned up the waistband of the pants and put on her sneakers and went hesitantly out into the kitchen.
“Miss Hepburn, as I live and breathe,” Nora said, smiling. She had changed into tight, faded blue jeans like a boy’s, and an enormous sweatshirt that said “U. of Miami Crew.” Someone had scrawled a gigantic S in front of the “Crew” with what looked to be Magic Marker. It had faded, but you could still read it. Peyton blushed. Nora saw her and grinned evilly.
“There is hardly a soul in all of Lytton over the age of fourteen who hasn’t done it at one time or another,” she said, and she brushed her heavy hair out of her eyes. They dashed through the rain to the Thunderbird, tethered like a restless roc at the curb. Peyton scrunched herself into the passenger seat, loving the sleek, feral feeling of the car, seeing that its pink fenders and hood shone like the northern lights in the gloom, piercing, almost painful to the eyes, even more so on this gray street of winter-smeared white houses and drippling old oaks.
“What do you call this pink?” she said to Nora as the little car leapt forward away from the curb and skimmed into flight.
“Somebody I used to know calls it vagina pink,” Nora said.
Her grandmother was in the kitchen, as usual, stirring something musky and pungent in a pot. There were bunches and skeins of the herbs she grew and dried littering the oilcloth-covered table. Oh God, Peyton thought. It’s one of those tea things that she’s going to make me drink. One day she’s going to kill me.
She dutifully drank the potions her grandmother gave her, mostly because no one else would and she felt sorry for the old woman. Her grandmother would never tell her what they were supposed to facilitate. She would say only, “Well, so far you’re healthy and safe, aren’t you?”
Healthy, yes, Peyton would think to herself. But safe? Never safe.
Her grandmother heard them come in and turned from the stove. She looked first at Peyton, and a slow smile warmed her wild hawk’s face.
“Well, here you are at last,” she said. “I’ve waited a long time for you.”
Then she turned to Nora. “It’s nice to see you again,” she said, almost formally. “Will you stay and have a cup of tea?”
Peyton stared at her. She had never heard her grandmother be polite in her life. Vivacious, maybe; joyful or wrathful or full of a kind of angry glee. But never merely polite. It was as if she had faded like an old photograph. Peyton knew Nora was taken aback, too. This was not the exuberant elemental force she had met in the park the day before. This was an old woman dimly minding her manners.
They sat down before the kitchen fireplace. It was blazing high against the cold rain. Agnes McKenzie brought cups of the steaming brew and slices of seed cake almost shyly, as if offering them to royalty. She sat down then and sipped her own tea, looking down at the oilcloth tabletop.
There was a silence, and then Nora said, “This is good. It’s herbal, isn’t it? What is it, exactly?”
“Oh, a little of this and a little of that. It’s a good end-of-winter tonic, my mother used to say.”
“I think I can taste rosemary, and maybe—what? Fennel? But the rest is a mystery.” Nora smiled. “So is it going to perk us up?”
Agnes McKenzie looked full at her then. Something flashed out of the gray eyes and then sank back below the surface.
“It’s going to give both of you just what you need,” she said.
They were silent again, sipping. Finally Peyton could stand it no longer and said, “How do you like my hair, Nana?”
Her grandmother studied her.
“You’re not our little girl anymore,” she said. “But you’re who you’re going to be now, and that’s a start. I can see the shape of you like a minnow in deep water. Or something in the long grass. Something wild and shy, but the power’s there. Oh, yes, it is. I always knew it would be.”
“Power?” Peyton said, appalled. She did not want power any more than she wanted wealth or celebrity. She would, she thought, settle gratefully for the old anonymity, so long as no one laughed at her anymore.
“Oh, yes. It’ll be a long time until you grow into it, and it won’t be any easy journey, but power.”
“Is it good power?” Nora said interestedly, looking first at Peyton, then at her grandmother.
“It depends on who guides it,” Nana said. “I plan to be on top of it like a duck on a june bug, but I’m not going to be able to go all the way with it.”
“Why can’t I be in charge of my own power?” Peyton said resentfully. She was accustomed to people’s talking about her as if she were not there, but not these two women.
“Because you don’t know how,” her grandmother said, looking at Nora. “You’ve never been in charge of your own life. They haven’t let you be. It’s geeting to be time, though.”
Abruptly she got up from the table and said, “Peyton, come on in the pantry with me. I need a load of firewood.”
Peyton rose to follow her grandmother. Nora half rose, too.
“Won’t you let me help?” she said. “I don’t want to feel like company.”
“But you are,” Agnes said, and smiled faintly at her, and went out of the kitchen with Peyton trailing behind her.
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