Whitegirl

by Kate Manning

  “I’m not stringing him,” I said.

  But was I? My mother told me years later that Jack had called them in Conestoga off and on, looking for me. They didn’t know where I was, they said, they wished they did. He called Claire’s once, too, and she said—because I asked her to—that she hadn’t seen me for months. She thought I was in Paris, or maybe Rome. I was glad I hadn’t been the one to answer the phone, glad Claire lied to him that way; it seemed easier.

  At the time I didn’t consider that Jack would really feel anything about me leaving. I had no idea he still carried a torch for me, which was my mother’s theory, years later. He was just trying to save face, I thought, telling people that I would be back. Maybe he believed he loved me but he would see immediately that he didn’t, not really. He would soon have someone else, like snapping his fingers.

  “You should at least call him,” Claire said. “Poor guy.”

  “He’ll live,” I said. “Trust me.”

  I didn’t think about Jack again. He was in the past. That’s what I thought, anyway. It was time to think about Charlotte. What I needed. Sleep, a job. Definitely a haircut. My hair was all the way down my back, childish and dull, it now seemed to me. New York women had coiffures, and style. I leafed through magazines and shopped for a new way to look. I concentrated on getting a haircut as if it would change my life.

  And it did change my life, my haircut.

  Claire said you could get one for free at Vidal Sassoon Salon. They wouldn’t charge you to cut it, but you had to let them do whatever. You would be a test model for the haircutting students at the Sassoon School, like a lab monkey. They would snip away, with their novice scissors, practicing on your head. Vidal himself supposedly would do the critique.

  I didn’t care what they did to me. They could shave me. They could lawn mower my hair. I was heading for something. Not Vermont. Not California. My vague direction seemed to be toward trouble. Toward something not very well thought out, surely ending up in the sucking ooze-pond of sin and regret that my parents warned me about. I didn’t care, as long as it was new and different.

  Late one afternoon I headed toward the Sassoon Salon. Sassoon Saloon festoon a baboon. Walking toward Madison Avenue from the subway I made up rhymes to ward off panic. Croon a soft tune at Sassoon’s Saloon. I worried that I would be grotesquely out of place, a laughingstock of the Sassoonerites, in just my pea coat and jeans and my too-small muscle shirt featuring silk-screened Vermont dairy cows. And this cornfield of hair down my back. Perhaps I was just some kind of hogan, as Jack would say. Thinking about him and his expressions, I was glad to be far away, in the thrilling city. That afternoon the late sun hit the buildings and the April wind whirled the garbage around, newspapers and plastic bags sailing giddily up. Every other woman on the jam-packed sidewalks of midtown had on skirts and hosiery. Their hair was right. They had suits and dark lipstick. Handbags. They did not look like hogans or escaped children running from their parents or their boyfriends. They did not have on cow T-shirts.

  At least the ones I looked at did not. I was not really noticing the old ones, or the Chinese ones, the fat ones or black ones or Mexican ones. The women I was checking out were white, around twenty, like me. They were thin. Looking at them was like research for me. I was deciding how to fit in, what kind of shoes, what kind of hair, who looked good.

  I noticed and was wary of all kinds of men. They said things to me in the street. New York men were always muttering. They were not like the men in the Sierras of California or the Green Mountains of Vermont. They scared me. The Spanish ones made hissy noises or kissed their lips. Hey, mami, they said, Ssssssss. Passing a scaffolding of white construction workers I could hear clapping and hooting, whistles of wolves. Guys in fancy suits, most of them, whatever their ilk, didn’t say anything; still, I saw their eyes sliding sideways at me. Black men were the ones who talked at me most often, who stopped before I passed them, arrested mid-step, standing there staring me down. Take it to the limit, blondie, lookin’ fine. I would like to get to know you, oh, I’d like to make your acquaintance. Sometimes the things they said were funny: Your baby gonna need a daddy, why not me? Sometimes they just said Unh. Unh, unh, unh, as if they had just tasted something delicious.

  This was not my imagination. It didn’t happen that much to Claire, who was beautiful. Her dark hair was long now, cascading down her back. If we walked together she was amazed at how often I got hassled. I didn’t know why it was so, whether it had to do with me: What I wore? Or whether it had to do with them—because they hated white people? because I was extra white? I knew this was not the kind of thing to talk about, even to Claire, or remark about. There was a newspaper column I read when I first got to New York, in the Times, by a black man who got sick of white women grabbing their purses when he passed, as if they thought all black men were muggers. I felt mad for him. I tried not to even touch my purse when I passed a black man in case he would think I was grabbing it in fear. I tried to look straight ahead, maybe smile pleasantly to signal I was friendly and not a racist. But I couldn’t help flinching from strangers, taxi drivers who said You’re very beautiful, looking at me in the rearview mirror, guys in bars asking the time, asking for a light.

  And I couldn’t help, I confess, liking that they looked at me. I was terrible and vain. Preening inwardly. You know you look good, one guy said to me. You love it. I did. I was noticed. I needed that. It was all I had, I thought. At least they noticed me.

  When I got to the salon, about fifteen women were waiting to be chosen. There was a big piled-up red hairdo next to a straight blue-black sheet of Chinese hair. There was a starched white head, a curly brown pelt, and a girl with dozens of tiny pale braids close to her scalp like a black child but she was a grown white woman. This was a fashion at that time but to me it didn’t look right. You could see the exposed scalp, the color of newborn mice, and all the veins. She stared at me. “You’ll get picked,” she said, and I admit I thought she was right. I would get picked. It’s not like something I controlled, so why not? I’d get a free haircut.

  All the women waited politely on chairs with purses on their laps. They read the magazines. But I sat on the floor in a corner away from them and wrote a letter in my head. Dear Mother and Father, You would hate it here. It’s loud and the air is one big bus fume. There is no sign of God that you would recognize. Surely it would be some comfort to you to know I feel Him watching me just constantly as usual without giving me any breaks. God is telling me right now that certainly I should not let this man coming toward me with his comb and clippers cut my hair all off. I don’t mind homosexuals. I know you do. This guy with the scissors, he’s friendly. He’s joking with all the women waiting to get haircuts. He’s looking every one of us right in the eye and smiling in a friendly way. What is evil?

  I was just daydreaming this, wondering if I’d ever get the guts to send a letter at all, even a postcard to say: “Don’t worry, I’m fine.”

  The man with the comb was getting closer to me. I could see him glancing over, while he was talking to the others. Eventually he crouched down in front of me, sitting back with his heels flat. He had black hair, chin length, that he tucked behind his ears every few seconds with a C-shaped motion of his fingers.

  “Hi,” he said, “I’m Kevin.” His smile was lovely. Safe and quiet. His manner was like that of an animal trainer, serene, reassuring. I said hello. He squinted at me and lifted my chin with two fingers, so I felt the end of a fingernail in the soft underskin of my jaw. He tipped my head left and right. I was tempted to open my mouth, show him my fillings. What if I whinnied like a horse? I thought, and imagined what he’d do then. For some reason I thought he’d laugh.

  “You are very beautiful,” Kevin said. He felt my hair, slipping it back and forth in his fingers like testing a fabric. “Your hair is amazing. The color.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What style are you looking for?” he asked.

  “Just do whatev
er,” I said, shrugging. “Isn’t that the rule? We let you just, cut?”

  “Come with me,” he said, pulling me to my feet.

  The other women in their chairs watched. They wished they were going with Kevin. We went in the back of the salon. The student hairstylists were waiting there, wearing green smocks like hospital scrubs.

  “This is—” Kevin said, and looked at me.

  “Charlotte.”

  “Charlotte. She’ll be our model tonight. I’ll cut her, and then the other volunteers will come in for you to work on yourselves. I’ll do the critique, and I’m looking to grade you on choice of style, how the style you choose goes with the customer’s face and overall type. And of course, execution.”

  He was going to cut me. He had said execution. It sounded grim, but I had a fatalistic urge about this haircut. They could do whatever they wanted to me.

  Kevin sat me down and put a cape around my neck. He brushed my hair and I closed my eyes. It was very soothing, to be brushed. I know why animals like it. My mother used to hold me on her lap and brush my hair, talking. Your lovely hair, my Charlotte. She’d sing quietly. “Swing low, sweet chariot,” or “Michael, row the boat ashore.” They were just soft songs, me in my mother’s lap. Nothing more, though, no idea of what the songs were really about, or where they came from. Comin’ for to carry me home.

  It’s only now that I think this way.

  I was in a kind of trance, despite the bright light and mirrors, the students in a half circle behind me. I listened for the sound of the scissors.

  He cut off nine inches. It fell in dead furry hanks onto the floor. He talked to the beauty students while he was cutting, about the shape of my face, the way my hair grew. I didn’t listen to him. My hair was gone. Somebody was sweeping it into a mangy yellow pile. What was left hit the top of my ears. I couldn’t say anything. I look like a palm tree. Or a boy.

  Kevin spiked my head up with clear gel. My neck, when he took off the cape, was long as the neck of a goose. “Well?” he said.

  “Well.” My lip trembled, as if I’d been punished.

  “You look amazing,” he said, in his kind animal-trainer voice. “Come and talk to me after class. I’ll just be twenty minutes.”

  I went back into a mirrored office to wait with tears in my eyes. It was just hair, I told myself. I guess I had liked it, pridefully, more than I had admitted. I believed what they said about it, Like spun gold, in the fairy stories and the magazines. A woman’s hair is her crowning glory, my mother said. It was seemingly my only glory, if it was, actually, a glory. I didn’t have another, as far as I could tell.

  “Don’t cry,” Kevin said, when he finally came in. “Your hair is even more beautiful now because it surrounds this face, which is extraordinary. Trust me.” He asked me some questions. He was interested in my experience as a child in the California beauty pageants. He wanted to know had I ever done any modeling.

  Yes, I told him. At home I did the garden club fashion shows with my mom and the church ones. Once I was in a catalog. It made me throw up. I didn’t say that, but I remembered it, the photographer rolling his eyes while I leaned over and vomited, and my mother whispering at me to just cooperate!

  “Did you enjoy it?” he asked me.

  “It was okay,” I said. “Yeah.”

  “I’d like to have this cut photographed. It’s extraordinary,” Kevin said. “If you photograph well you could have a career. You have a Look. I’m serious, let me know if you’re interested.” And right then he offered me a job in Vidal’s salon, which I took. I was a kind of hostess, answering the phone, making appointments, greeting clients. In my short hairdo, I helped women in and out of their haircutting capes. I made coffee and served chocolate lace cookies on doilies. I shopped for clothes with my pay. I bought three different colors of Charles Jourdain pumps with heels that caused me to be six feet tall. I bought black things, jackets and sweaters, jeans, skirts, eyeliner. I saved just enough for rent money. Claire and I got an apartment in the far East Eighties, a neighborhood of singles’ bars and Laundromats and Germans.

  Claire was doing better. She stopped sleeping around and started going to school at New York University, waitressing on weekends at the Whiskey Dog Saloon on Second Avenue. This was a good job for her because there was something about carrying trays of drinks, with the smell of spilled alcohol on her skin like perfume, that kept her from drinking so much herself. She was getting better about that. She had a new boyfriend named Carl. He was from North Carolina and worked for an investment firm in Midtown with around four names that I could never remember. Claire and I called it Pork Belly and Sow. Carl was bland, yet nice. Just what Claire needed. He laughed at her jokes. He called her “sugarlips,” and held doors open and always insisted on walking on the street side of a woman so that should a bus or a taxi splash through a puddle or jump the curb, it would be he, Carl, that was soaked or flattened grimly and killed gallantly and the woman would be saved. Claire appreciated gentility. She was studying history and was never going back to Cabot College. Claire thought maybe she could be a lawyer like her father. “Only without the little bow tie,” she said.

  As for me, it seemed I would be a beautician. Kevin started training me that spring. He took me along on various photo shoots where he did hair and makeup. This seemed like the right profession for the daughter of an Avon lady. I knew my way around the brushes and combs and pins and gels by instinct. I was nineteen years old, without much of a plan other than to see what happened, but everyone kept telling me: Charlotte, you should model yourself. On whom should I model myself? I would say back to them. The idea of modeling was terrifying to me. All I could think of was my pageant smile, how long it lasted, hours and hours of rictus of the cheek, my teeth flashing. Being a model was the same as being a pageant contestant as far as I could see. I would throw up behind the runway.

  Kevin talked me into it. “In modeling you don’t have to be cheerful,” he said. “Not constantly or even often.” He talked about beauty and fashion as if it was some kind of art. Fashion is the way we show our souls, he said. Our moods and feelings. A great model is a model who communicates a vision of the soul, a vision of who we are, how we live, what we value, what we hold as beautiful. I never heard anyone talk the way he talked. He was a kind man, and smart.

  “Charlotte, girl, you need to use your gifts,” Kevin said to me one night after the salon closed. I was sweeping up hair, watching all the colors of curls and snips mixing in my dustpile. I was growing mine again.

  “I don’t think so,” I told him.

  “My dear, do you want to be sweeping hair all your life? Or do you want to take the world by storm?”

  “Sweep hair,” I said.

  “Bullshit,” he said. Then he talked to me soothingly, cajoling. It was sweet talk but of course with him, vis-à-vis me, there was no bedroom agenda. He was safe. So when he kept telling me I was a natural, I was lovely, I was born for the camera, I liked it, the way animals like being brushed. He was feeding me treats, compliments like biscuits.

  “I don’t like to be stared at.”

  “Then get yourself some Coke-bottle glasses, wear a sackdress and jackboots. You’ll be hiding till you’re old. They’re staring at you now, my dear. You turn heads. It’s a law of nature.”

  Kevin finally got me to go down to Chelsea with him to have some pictures made. A photographer stood me up against a white drape and asked me to tilt my head, look backward over my shoulder, look up, look down. He snapped pictures without conversation. It was quiet except for the strange bird sound of the camera shutter advancing the film.

  It was amazing to me how I loved it. Right away I did, even just shooting portfolio shots, the first time. I liked the way the light felt around me, warm on my skin and face, with everything black around the edges, the camera clicking in the dark. The glare made it hard to see the rest of the room, the photographer snapped in shadow, so I couldn’t see his face. I felt free, as if I were alone. I combed m
y hair with my fingers and closed my eyes.

  “Let your face tell a story,” said the photographer. He put music on so I would move around.

  I let my face tell the story of singing in church with my sister when we were small, how we were carried away by the words and the feelings. What wondrous love is this, O my soul. All I had to do was imagine that certain song and it appeared on my face. In the photographs from that first shoot I am smiling. I am relaxed with my eyes closed, or flirting right at the camera. My head is back laughing. My hair is short. I look to be about fifteen years old. Pictures of a happy girl.

  Later, when my career really was rocketing along, it got harder. My face told the same stories over and over and got tired, wooden. Photographers said: more mystery, more sultry, more wholesome. But those were just words, without stories. I didn’t do that as well and it showed. Still, that first time, there was something there. Even I could see it.

  I was pretty in those photographs. Young. I knew nothing.

  Kevin took the prints without my knowledge to the Wilhelmina Agency. He was a friend of Wilhelmina’s. I got a contract right away and quit working for Vidal. I did runway work and magazine shoots and for a year the Estée Lauder people signed me up to be “the face” of their makeup. Later I was the Charlie Girl, for the perfume. I went to parties with movie stars and politicians. I went on a date with the son of the Aga Khan and another one with an English rock star and one with Warren Beatty. Actually a few with him. I met Milo again, at a party in a nightclub. All because of a haircut.

  8.

  The next time I heard of Milo Robicheaux was on television. It was after I had been in New York a year, some Saturday in January. Having stayed out until four or five in the morning, I woke up at noon. My head was crawling like some kind of ant farm of pain, with all the intricate passageways of blood vessels and chambers throbbing. I resolved again not to drink anymore. I was hungry but I had resolved again not to eat anything. I turned the TV on and got back in bed, watching with the sound off and my head crawling with hangover. I eventually noticed footage of a mountain, white trails snaking down its slopes. This was Innsbruck, Austria, and the TV showed big banners over the finish line. Olympic skiing, 1976.