1981
I remember.
When I was a girl, I loved going to the beauty shop. It had light blue walls, I think, and a radio. I sat under the dryer wearing a pink smock, reading the latest issue of Vogue, and listening to…what was her name?…to one of my friends talking about her latest boyfriend. It was nice.
Kay’s is nice, too. The woman in charge comes to greet us; she has bright yellow hair and thick glasses and she says hello to me, not just to the woman who brought me (should I know her?) the way a lot of people do. And she wears a nametag on her pink smock so that I always know her name; it says “KAY” with tiny purple flowers entwined around it.
Even though I’ve only lived in this neighborhood for…well, for a few years (I remember that I grew up in Williamsburg and brought up my children in Canarsie; I remember those years very well), Kay’s looks like all the beauty shops I ever knew. Once, I remember, I went to a new one, and it had deafening music and strange machines and tall boys talking loud and winking at the others when they thought I didn’t see. (I know I’m old. I can’t help it. They’ll be old one day too, and why don’t they understand that?)
Kay smiles at me, takes my coat and my pocketbook, and helps me sit down in one of the chairs while the woman who brought me goes and sits in front of the salon and starts reading a magazine.
“And how are you today?” Kay says while she puts a towel around my neck and then covers me with a flowery cape to protect my clothes. I’m fine, I say, although we both know I’m not fine at all. I’m disappearing. Bit by bit.
I don’t know why and neither do they. The doctors, I mean. Tests are inconclusive. (You see? I can understand these things; I’ve got a Masters in History, after all.) They say it past me, to the woman who lives with me, who says she’s my friend Isabeau. (I remember an Isabeau, but she’s young and slim and has two lovely children, not elderly and sad like this woman.) But I listen. And sometimes I remember.
Kay chats to me while she dampens my hair and takes out her scissors. I had beautiful hair (I have photos), thick and brown. Jack used to run his hands through it and beg me not to cut it, although long hair wasn’t the fashion and I really looked better with short. Now, I look in the mirror and it’s all dull gray and I can see parts of my scalp showing through; it makes me want to cry, more than the wrinkles and the pieces of my life that have disappeared.
I start to get up, to get away from the mirror, but the moment I start to move Kay swings the chair around so I’m looking instead at the TV set that’s been set up high on the back wall. “There,” she says. “You don’t mind facing the wall, do you? It’s so much easier for me.” She chatters on, about her friend’s daughter who is pregnant and miserable; about how the weather has been unseasonably icy and why do they call it global warming when things are getting colder?
Beneath the TV set, a young Asian girl with a sour expression works on the nails of an old woman with bright orange hair (am I that old? Surely I’m not that old) and nods, and says we’ve ruined the world and that one day we’ll wake up and all the oxygen will have disappeared from the earth. She says it with satisfaction.
On the TV, a man walks around the streets of a foreign country (because nobody else is speaking English), and stops in a marketplace and talks to a man who is frying foods in a little booth, and tries some of the foods, although it looks extremely unappetizing. (Let Julie eat what she wants, I told Jack when he tried to make our daughter eat her vegetables, and what does she look like again?)
“There you are!” says Pat (no, not Pat, that was the woman who cut my hair when I was a girl, this is Kay, it says so on her name tag). “Ready for the dryer?”
Kay puts a pillow on the chair so I can sit comfortably and settles me in. She puts a magazine on my lap and brings over a small can of ginger ale, placing it on a table next to the chair. “There,” she says. “We like to make our ladies comfortable. Ready?”
I nod, and look up at her. She takes her glasses off and smiles, and wait, something is wrong—her eyes are striped, completely striped through the pupils and the iris and whites, all green and silver. I want to call out, to warn somebody, but I don’t know who here will help me and then she pulls the dryer over my head down like a giant upside-down cup and turns it on.
Something hums and grabs my head and my brain and where am
I smell morning and hear eggs frying and there is sunlight coming through the gauze kitchen curtains Julie! it’s a school day young lady do you know what time time time is on our side and her eyes are getting cold it’s cold outside please stop blowing bubbles in your milk round like a hairdryer yes honey your tie is on the hanger does he still love love me do don’t tease the bye baby bunting have a good day at the office, dear, and don’t forget and there he goes and she goes and they go and it’s quiet and oh the baby’s crying but what is that sound and where did everyone go and what was I going it’s all going it’s all
“There now,” a voice says. “That didn’t hurt a bit, did it?”
There’s a woman standing over me wearing a smock with flowers and a tag. I suppose it’s a name tag, but I can’t read it, it’s just squiggles. I’m in a…a…someplace with a lot of women and it looks nice, but something is missing.
The woman smiles at me and bends down. “It’s all right,” she whispers, and her eyes are pretty stripes and somewhere under her voice is something, a hissing or a crackle. I can’t tell what it is or what she is. “I can’t,” I tell her. If I could only. But. “I just can’t. They’re missing.”
“Don’t worry,” she says. “We’ve got them. We’ve collected them from you and many like you, and we’ll keep them safe long after you and yours are gone.” She puts on a pair of glasses and raises her voice. “Now, let’s go back to the chair and I’ll comb you out.”
She helps me up and takes me to a chair. I sit, and look at the old woman in the mirror, and wonder who she is.
