DING-DONG-DING-DONG.
Mikie’s doorbell did not actually make that sound. It was more like the sound of castanets because the little hammer inside the bell got muffled by dust bunnies and his mother liked all things Spanish so she left the Castanet sound.
Ding-dong-ding-dong.
But the ding-dong sound was in my head as I stood there pressing the button, and had been since I left Mysterious Ways Hair with Nardo waving and shedding tears of joy over my new look, if not his shame in creating it. Ding-dong would not leave my head ding-dong.
Finally the door opened.
“Oh my goodness,” yelped Mikie’s mother, Brenda. She rushed out to the stoop and gave me a big hug. Brenda was just shorter than me now, and a lot smaller in bulk, so my being consoled and mothered by her as if I had shown up bloodied and battered was all the more humbling.
“Mikie,” she called as she dragged me in out of the public’s gaze.
Mikie came hopping down the stairs, stopped on the last one, then echoed his mother’s concern. Echoed it with a laugh, however.
“Elvin, you got a perm?”
“I did not get a perm,” I snapped.
“You got a perm, Elvin,” Brenda said.
“I did not get a perm! Nardo said he was not giving me a perm. I asked him if I was getting a perm, and he assured me that I was not getting a perm, and I believe him. We are friends. His mother dated Jimi Hemingway, and when I asked him if I was getting a perm, he swore to me that I was not getting a perm, so I did not get a perm, he did not give me a perm, and I do not have a perm.”
“Oh Elvin,” Brenda said, very, very, very sympathetically.
“Stop that,” I said.
“If it’s not a perm, Elvin, then what is it?”
“It’s a wave!” I said, rushing past them both, down the hall, to the bathroom. “A wave, anybody can see this is a wave, a wave.”
They followed me down the hall and huddled together in the doorway.
“Oh Elvin,” Brenda said again. It was like being stabbed in the stomach with a hockey stick when she did that. Only she seemed to be in as much pain over it as I was. “I did that when I was pregnant. My God, how I cried....”
“I am not crying; I am not pregnant; I am big boned. I am splashing water on my face because I am hot, not for any other reason.”
“Didn’t they have any mirrors there, El?”
It is one of the few truly reliable things in life that the word up can have two or more syllables when you need it to. “Shut uh-uh-uhp.”
I splashed lots of cold water on my face, but it only continued getting hotter. We could make tea off my face now. Mikie’s mother went away toward the kitchen. Perhaps for tea bags. I continued splashing, and took a good hard look at myself in the mirror.
I stopped splashing my face and began madly scooping handfuls of water onto my head, then stroking my hair, flattening it down, matting it down.
And watching it sproing back up again. More water, more water. I increased the pressure, slapping myself pretty hard now—and a more deserving head slap was never administered—in a desperate attempt to get the hair back flat to the head where God intended it to be. But the more I slapped, the more the hair worked against me. The weight of the water kept it down for roughly a second before all those curls—waves!—literally bounced back.
“Wow,” Mike marveled, “you’re actually making it worse.”
God, he was right. It was getting taller, tighter, stronger. If I flattened it any more, it would be an Afro.
“Brenda,” I called desperately.
She came running back to the bathroom. “Yes, hon,” she said in that voice that made me feel sorry for the poor chump she was talking to.
“Can we... wash this out, please? Can you help me here? With... this?”
I thought she might cry. “Elvin. Do you know what perm is short for?”
“It is not a perm.”
“Whatever it is, it is permanent. You can’t wash it out; you have to grow it out. We might possibly be able to do something about the dye job, though, if that’s any—”
“It is not dyed. Highlighted. It is just highlighted, to bring out my natural color....”
“To bring out Frankie’s natural color,” Mike said.
I turned on him like a badger. “Who said anything about Frankie?” I demanded. “What are you pulling Frankie into this for? Frankie’s not even here. He’s not, is he? What could any of this have to do with Frankie? Frankie doesn’t even know Nardo, right, which makes you look pretty foolish right about now, Mike.”
“Sorry, El, jeez. It was just that you looked a little bit like him for a minute there. Or at least your hair did.”
Helloooo?
I turned away from Mikie and toward the bathroom mirror once more. Had it worked? Was Mikie toying with me?
Could I really, in any way, resemble Frank? Was Nardo a genius after all? I looked myself straight in the hair, to give myself an honest summary.
Maybe. The hair was still wet from the struggle and not quite right because Frankie doesn’t do the wet look, but maybe. Turn this way just a bit, no, too much, back the other way a little, then, maybe. Squint. Head down. “Turn that light off for a second, would you, Mike?”
“What are you doing? You look like you’re practicing to stare somebody down, or pick somebody up.”
“Good. Dangerous, yet alluring.”
“If you say so, El.” He clicked off the light.
There. There it was. Frankie. Or, anyway, Frankie’s slightly shorter, heavier, darker, blurry brother.
But close enough. I clapped once and rubbed my hands together.
Which brought up the light like a clap-on automatic light.
And clap-off, no more Frankie. I looked like myself. Except with hair that Barbie would have been proud of in the 1960s. Oh, and fatter. The hair made me look fatter. I slumped.
“Jeez, Elvin,” Mike said. He could take no more, came right over and pulled me physically away from the mirror and out of the bathroom with a tight arm around my shoulders. He led me straight into the kitchen and sat me at the table. Brenda put the tea on. I like tea. I like Brenda.
“Stop staring at my mother, El, and talk to me. What is wrong with you?”
“I don’t want an uncle.”
“What, so you did this”—he gestured at my head—“to scare him away?”
“I’m serious, Mike.”
“Maybe you should be less serious.”
Brenda brought tea. I thanked her seven times, until she left the room.
“It is serious,” I told Mike, “and you know it.”
“Right, so okay, it is a shock to have him show up after all this time. Make the best of it. It might turn out great.”
“He wants to tell me things.”
“Good. You should be told things.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be told things.”
“Oh, there’s no maybe about it, Elvin; you do not want to be told things. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hear them anyway.”
“You don’t seem to understand. I don’t want to.”
“Consider the possibility that he may have good things to tell you. Like, maybe your insanity is a specific family variety, and he’s nuts too and brought the cure with him.”
“There is no cure.”
“You’re hopeless, you know.”
“That’s what I just said, isn’t it?”
“Give the guy a chance, El.”
“No. He has suspicious hair, he is too skinny, and he took my mother away from me on a Sunday to go to church, and that is not how our Sundays are supposed to go.”
“Hmmm.”
“What, hmmm?”
“Maybe that’s what you’re afraid of. That he’s going to steal your mother away because he reminds her of your father.”
“Oh,” I said, standing up so quickly that my chair skidded across the room and bumped into the refrigerator. “Oh, that’s just stupid. One, why would I care, if some guy wants to spend a little time with my mother? And two, no way is some stranger going to come along and steal her away from me. No chance.”
I was losing track myself, of whether I was doing myself any good here or not, but I was getting concerned. The pressure of events, of the last couple of days, was mounting. The dead uncle, the hair, church, it was all gathering in my head and gumming up the works badly.
“The point is, you are worried that Alex is going to shake things up.”
“I don’t like things shaken.” My voice was approaching normal now.
“I know. But I think you’ll be making a mistake if you don’t give your uncle a chance. Maybe you’ll enjoy getting to know him. Maybe you’ll learn more about your history and stuff.”
“Lucky me,” I said. “People chase all over the world trying to trace their roots. I have roots that come tracing me.”
“You’re magnetic,” Mike said with a big smile as his dog ambled into the room. Mike had the only local copy of Grog’s scary little reproductions. She looked like a hairy tropical fish or something, but she had a surprising charm that made her seem cuter. And smarter. Possibly because he named her Maryann, rather than, say, Grog. He scooped her up and the two of them grinned at me.
“Thanks,” I said. “But honestly, Mike, if Alex has tough stuff to say to me, I don’t think I am going to be able to take it.”
“Let’s test you out then,” he said. He stopped grinning. Maryann did not. “Elvin Bishop,” Mike said with such convincing gravity that I started sweating instantly, “I am sorry I have to tell you this, but as your hair is drying, it’s looking more and more like a Nerf ball.”
Well. Well then.
“Well then.”
“Just trying to help, El.”
“Thank you, Michael.”
“Oh no.”
Brenda came scurrying into the room. “Did he call you Michael?”
“I’m afraid he did.”
I didn’t often call Mikie by his full first name. Apparently this had some meaning.
“Calm down, Elvin,” she said.
“I am very calm,” I said as I shook Mike’s hand.
“Right, sure,” he said, pulling his hand away from me. “Except that you are never calm. So when you do this, when you pretend to be calm, when you call me Michael and shake people’s hands and stuff... you’re not fooling anybody, Elvin.”
I patted my Nerf ball head. “Please don’t worry. I’ll be fine. I probably just need a nap.”
“Yes,” Brenda said, putting an arm around me and giving a good hard squeeze. “I think maybe if you just go home and lie down for a while, I think you’ll feel better when you get up.”
I nodded, and headed for the door. Then I thought of something and walked back to Mike and leaned way down close to him.
“How come your dog is so much better than mine?” I said.
I didn’t wait for an answer. Whatever my point was, I had probably made it.
The fresh air was good, but really there is only so much fresh air can do. I was actually getting more wound up and not less as I approached my house. What was I going to say to Alex? More to the point, what was I going to listen to? God stuff? Was he here to save my soul? If he was, then could I just surrender it, leave it right there on the floor, and walk away quietly so he could take it and be gone?
The quickest and easiest way to have him gone was what I was interested in, and though I knew that was unfair, I couldn’t change my mind.
And that was the state of my mind as I swept through the front door, confident that me and my hair could hurry things along.
Except there was nobody there. And as far as I could tell, neither my mother nor Alex had been there since I left, since they went to church several hours earlier.
They certainly should have been home by then. This was inexcusable, and it had to be all his fault.
Mikie was right. Alex was a dangerous threat to my way of life, intent on turning everything upside down.
He did say that. He did.
And now Alex had even spoiled the relaxing nap I was supposed to have for myself. The downward spiral was dizzying.
Right. The first order of business was to get my hair sorted out. I couldn’t be bossing people around the house and telling somebody to get lost and stamping my authority over everything with everyone marveling at my new head. Brenda said it couldn’t be washed out, but that was because she had had a perm, the poor thing, and I had a wave.
I marched that wave directly to the bathroom, dropped to my knees at the tub, and threw the taps on full force.
Once my head was soaked, I groped around for shampoo. I grabbed this bottle of bright green stuff with a pump top, and I pumped and pumped away until my head felt like a great big, frothy trifle pudding.
But it didn’t smell like that. It smelled kind of appley, and herby. It smelled lovely, in fact. As I worked it through, I started to get some of that relaxation I was hoping to achieve with my nap. I was doing a bang-up job of it too. I would even go so far as to say that my massaging shampooing technique was the equal of Nardo’s. And the scent of my hair product beat his by a country mile.
By the time I rinsed the shampoo away, watched as I washed that Nardo, and that Frankie, and that Alex, too, right out of my hair and down the drain, I felt like a new man. I also felt like I couldn’t stop humming that song, “I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair,” because once you think of it, it’s in there like a tick. I stood and dried my head vigorously with a towel. Then I picked up the bottle of green shampoo and brought it right up to my nose and breathed deeply.
Honestly, it made me feel so good, so cool and collected.
I read the bottle of my new favorite grooming secret.
“For a shiny and flea-free coat.”
This kind of bothered me at first. I started barking out loud at the bottle in my hand. “Dog shampoo! Flea shampoo! I was already shiny and flea free. Everything else was a mess, but I was definitely shiny, and I was definitely flea free.”
“Aloe Vera and Apple Mint Flea-Repelling Aromatherapy for Dogs.”
“What is apple mint? There is no such thing as an apple mint. Aromatherapy? Dogs don’t need aromatherapy because everything is aromatherapy as far as a dog is concerned.”
There was an urgent banging on the bathroom door and an urgency to my mother’s voice behind it. “Elvin? What’s going on? Are you all right? Who is in there with you?”
What do you say?
“I am fine. There is nobody in here. I am talking to the aromatherapy dog shampoo. You forgot to tell me that you bought aloe vera and apple mint aromatherapy dog shampoo, and so we are just in here getting to know each other now.”
There began some muttering on the other side of the door as my mother tried to explain my erratic behavior to my uncle.
As they talked, I finished towel drying my head, then checked the mirror.
Why do I check mirrors? Why do I subject myself?
Something not unlike a dog whimper came out of me as I took in the results of my long, busy day of careful attention to my hair.
“Are you shampooing Grog, Elvin? Please tell me you are shampooing Grog.”
She was hoping against any possibility of hope. No matter how creative she got with the aromas, if I had Grog in the bathroom, and if she had come in contact with even a drop of water, the whole house would smell as if the toilet was backing up.
“No, Mother. I will show you what I’ve been doing.”
I reached for the door, but not before pausing and taking one last good, long, fortifying sniff of aloe vera and apple mint.
“Hi,” I said as I slung open the door.
It was really kind of a treat, the little squeal of horror that came out of my mother at the sight of me.
I pressed my advantage. “You see what happens when you leave me alone on a Sunday?”
“Jee-yeez,” Alex said. “What happened to you?”
“This is what the dog shampoo did to me,” I said. “And if I were you, I wouldn’t get sniffy about anybody else’s hair.”
“Well,” he snickered back, “up until now I’d have agreed with you.”
I decided to focus instead on my mother’s face. It was frozen, a squinched-up mask of crisscross lines peeking through her fingers.
“Elvin Bishop,” she muffled through her hands, “no dog shampoo did that to you.”
“Ah-ah,” I said. “Flea-repelling aromatherapy.”
“I am afraid it is going to repel a lot more than fleas.”
She slowly allowed her hands to slide down her face to reveal... a mighty effort to keep from laughing. She was biting so hard on her lip it looked like it might burst.
“Hey,” I said.
She stopped fighting. “Elvin, sweetheart,” she spluttered, and rushed me with open arms.
I ducked, and squirmed past her into the hallway.
“Come here,” she said, pursuing me.
Alex wisely got out of the way, flattening himself to the wall before I did it for him.
When she finally caught up to me, I was a quarter of the way up the stairs and she brought me down like a wildebeest.
But once she had me, she was a little kinder. She grabbed me, hugged and held on to me in a way that not only surprised me, it made me feel suddenly very, very important, and warmed. And worried.
“Why do you have to do these things to yourself, ya big nut,” she said.
“Well, duh,” I said, talking over my shoulder at her because she still had me tackled and pinned from behind. “I think the big nut bit should be your first clue.”
It was getting just a bit difficult to breathe. My arms were pinned to my sides, the edge of one step was creasing my chest, and another dangerously close to my groin. I wasn’t in a great rush to get up, however.
“Why did you get permed?” she said close into my ear.
“It’s not a perm; it’s a wave.”
“Why did you get waved?”
“Because I was afraid my hair was going to look like Alex’s hair because of genetics, genetics that you have been deviously and quite sensibly hiding from me for all these years, and I wanted to head it off at the pass.”
“That’s not what Alex’s hair looks like naturally.”
“Why would somebody do that to themselves on purpose?”
“You did yours on purpose.”
“No, I didn’t, actually.”
“Whew,” she said. “That’s good. And neither did Alex.”
Just then the phone rang. From the other room Alex offered to get it, but Ma said no. She kissed me on the back of the head, then got up. “It’s like kissing a Nerf ball,” she said.
Next thing I knew, Alex was there. I had flopped myself over and was sort of sitting, sort of lying on the stairs.
“How’s it going?” he said cautiously.
“Fine. Where’d you take my mother all this time?”
“We went to church, as you know. Then we went out for some lunch. Then for a walk at the water.”
I could hear my mother’s phone call going on in the background, weaving in and out of our conversation and making concentration a bit iffy.
Ya, Brenda, he was here when we got here. I know... horrendous...
“Out for some lunch, huh? And for a walk by the water? Water is nice. I like water.”
No, no, he’s fine. As fine as he gets, anyway. You know... he doesn’t tend to cope well....
“We tried to call you, to invite you, but you weren’t here.”
I know he does. What can you do about it, though? Oh God, I remember, you cried and cried....
“Elvin, I want to spend some time with you,” Alex said, interrupting himself, and myself and my mother and Brenda. Compound rudeness.
“Why would you want to do that?” I said because, really, I wondered why he would want to do that.
“Because,” he said, but he hesitated too long and I wasn’t about to give him the chance to make up something on the spot.
“Because maybe what you actually want is to spend time with my mother. Because maybe that is why you came here at all. I don’t have anything to offer you. Maybe you just need to get through me in order to get to my mother and spend time with her.”
“Elvin?” Ma said as she came back into the room. Her tone was both indignant and sympathetic. She was one of the great multitaskers, my ma. “Are you grilling Alex, just because we were gone for a while today?”
“You were gone for much more than a little while, I’ll have you know.”
“You know, it is all right for me to actually go out and do something every once in a while, Elvin. Believe it or not, I do have a life, you know. Or I used to, anyway.”
“Don’t say that. You did not. You didn’t have a life; you had me.”
It was getting more serious, my habit of saying things that did not in any way help my cause. I did manage to raise a good hearty laugh out of my uncle, however, which then began my mother laughing, which blended into a comfortable sound that made me uncomfortable, so I joined in just to spoil things.
The three of us were there laughing, and I think Ma believed it to be a big, sweet family moment for us because she came right up to me and squeezed me hard and warm, then went over to Alex and squeezed him not so hard but every bit as warm.
What was going on here, with them? This was giving me the shivers.
“Anyway,” Ma said, “you’ll be getting your turn tomorrow. Alex wants to take you out for the day.”
“What?” I asked with too much vigor. “What? Anyway, I can’t. I have school tomorrow, remember?”
“Not tomorrow. I don’t want you to go to school. I want you to go with Alex.”
Oh my word.
She couldn’t want me to skip school. How could she want that? No mother wants that, not even my mother.
“Mother,” I said dramatically, “you know I cannot skip school tomorrow. I have band tomorrow. You know full well that the band cannot go on without me. So thank you but no thank you; my music is my life. Good night and good-bye and have a safe drive home.”
“Band?” Alex said, enthused. “Band? You’re in a band? I knew it. You have music in your blood, you know. I was in a band, me and your dad, when we were around twenty, twenty-one, called the Hairy-Handed Gents. We were great. We warmed up once at an outdoor summer concert before a Harlem Globetrotters exhibition. And now you... I just knew it... your dad would be...”
“He plays the tuba, Alex,” Ma said, as if she were straightening him out.
He was undeterred. “Tuba, cool, that’s great. I was a bass player, you know, so we’re kind of in that same area there, you and me, giving the music some body.”
Nothing is more embarrassing than taking praise that is way off the mark. Like fish that comes to your table with a whiff of ammonia, you have to send it back or it will come to haunt you later. Trust me on that.
“The body they wanted me to bring to the music was the one that fit snugly inside the brass anaconda that is the tuba. I have the traditional tuba body, rather than any aptitude for it. I oom about six times per song, and I pah about five. Sometimes if I’m bored I don’t even blow, I just grunt into the mouthpiece and it sounds pretty much the same. And I can’t even count how many times I have been told that I make virtually the same music every day after lunch without a tuba in sight, and so I should sell the horn and just march along with the band a capella, so to speak.”
This prompted my mother to swoop toward me with her great mother wingspan extended majestically to come and comfort me whether I liked it or not. Only Alex got to me first.
He stepped right up to me, stood for a few seconds staring at me with smiling, sad, glassy eyes. Then he put both his hands—which were rather hairy, in fact—on my shoulders and squeezed very hard. Very hard.
“Ouch,” I said, but very politely since even I could recognize that this was supposed to be a positive thing. I said it like I was just checking. “Ouch?”
“You are a fine guy, Elvin, and I’m sure a fine musician. The Hairy-Handed Gents would have been proud as proud to have you. Proud as proud.”
Me and my tuba sounds had silenced a few rooms before. Even brought a few to tears. But the feeling I was getting now, and what I was almost seeing, was beyond that. Ma looked like she was simultaneously having a tooth pulled and watching me accept a Grammy Award. Alex was suddenly choked out of speech altogether.
“No school tomorrow,” she said softly.
“Okay,” I said, as much out of fear as anything.