LAYERING

We are in the back yard, on the lawn. It is August, and very hot. It is hard to move, and hard to think of a reason to. Yesterday my stepson, who is twelve years younger than me, came in to the room where I was sketching. He is staying alone with us for the month of August, a first. He did not look at what I was doing, he never does. He seems to feel that the things I do are terribly private. He kept his eyes away from my paper—I was doing a sketch of a weed I had pulled up from the garden, roots, dirt, and all—and asked me where he could get a haircut. Jonathan, his father, gets his cut in the city now, so I don’t know any good places nearby. There is a terrible little dive in the village, I tell him, with a fly-specked barber pole on the front porch, and girlie calendars on the wall. I walk past it on the opposite side of the street, it gives me the creeps.

Frank asks me if I will cut his hair. I cut his hair when he was nine years old, a small boy. He hated the sight of himself afterward, and his mother called up Jonathan and told him I was presumptuous. That was eight years ago, and Frank is now taller than I am, with a devotion to sun rays and his track team. He has wide shoulders and narrow hips and long legs and he is very, very tanned. He goes running in the evenings, and when he returns my dog starts out across the lawn, thinking those rapid, steady footsteps might belong to a cat burglar, or a second-story man. Halfway across the lawn she begins to wag her tail and then sits down and yawns, pretending that she knew all along that the footsteps belonged to Frank, who loves her.

I told Frank I would cut his hair, but later. I could not have sounded eager, because when we went into the village in the afternoon he walked over to the dive to make an appointment with the calendar collector, but it was shut.

We were on our own for most of the week. Jonathan travels a lot. Frank went to his tutoring in the mornings, and I sketched. After lunch we went up to play tennis on the red clay court up in the woods. Each day we promise that next time we’ll really work on it. We have to keep propping up the posts that hold up the net, and the net itself is full of holes. The surface is soft, and there are pine needles all over it, which makes for exciting bounces. Frank’s serve can tunnel right under my feet, when it goes in, but he’s erratic, and I still beat him 6-1. Most of his shots go out, but he’s faster and stronger than I am, and he gets to everything. I just send the ball back until he gets impatient, tries for a winner, and hits it into the net. It won’t be too much longer that I can beat him.

After we played tennis that day we walked back to the house through the pine woods. It was high midday, and most of the insects were quiet. There were a lot of crows walking around in the field, having a meeting. My dog spends most of her time disrupting their meetings, she is nearly a professional at this, but this time she was down by the house in the shade, her raspberry tongue hanging out.

We went down and lay on the back lawn, underneath the ash tree. Even the lawn gave off heat, even the grass was hot. My dog came over and lay down next to me. I rubbed her nose and she lost control. She rolled over onto her back and opened her mouth like a crocodile, and showed the whites of her eyes.

“You are wacko, Beedle,” Frank said, digging his knuckles into his eyes. Beedle flipped herself over toward him and wagged her tail, on her back. Her tongue fell out sideways on the grass.

“Where’s Dad?’” asked Frank.

“Houston,” I said.

“When’s he coming home?”

“Tomorrow or Thursday.”

I closed my eyes and began to go to sleep. There were cicadas in the trees all around us. It was past midsummer, all right, we were heading into fall. One of the trees along the fence, a swamp maple, was showing yellowy-orange. I lay without moving, my head toward my shoulder, my legs crossed at the ankles.

“So, are you going to cut my hair?” Frank asked.

I was asleep, and reluctant. I opened my eyes and closed them again. “Sure,” I said. We listened to the cicadas. I started to go back to sleep.

“Now?” asked Frank.

“Sure,” I said.

Frank brought out an old wicker armchair and a comb, and I got out the scissors. I started cutting. I don’t know why I first thought I could cut hair—no one ever taught me—but I’ve been doing it ever since boarding school. I have always cut my own. By now, if I’m not particularly good at it, at least I know what I can do. Men’s haircuts are always trims. You just shorten everything. If it’s layers, you shorten each layer. If it’s a bowl cut, you get a smaller bowl. Frank’s hair was very thick, and had lots of layers. I started out at the top, using the comb to pull up a clump and let it fall. I thought this looked very professional, though I don’t know why barbers do it. In any case Frank had no mirror and couldn’t see I was doing it so I stopped and began snipping. My dog came over and leaned against my leg.

“Hi, Beedle,” I said. I stopped and rubbed her.

Frank sat very straight. He was wearing only a pair of red basketball shorts, and he was perfectly tanned, all over his shoulders and his arms and his legs. His legs were crossed at the ankle, like a good child.

“You know how to do this, don’t you?” he asked.

“Hey,” I said, “what kind of question is that?” Snip, I went, snip. I wondered if I were cutting it too short. “Just tell me how you want it, man.” Sometimes Frank and I talk the way we think black people talk, sometimes it’s other ethnic groups. I don’t know why we do this.

Frank put his hands back, pulling at his hair. “I want it pretty short over the ears,” he said, pulling at it. I started out on the right side, above the ear. His ear was perfectly brown, like the rest of him. Frank had his ear pierced in the spring, and his girlfriend gave him a diamond stud. He is very good-looking, but he has a round, honest face, with raised eyebrows, and that diamond stud looks out of place, as though he were trying to pass for a cad.

I pulled the hair away from his ear and began to cut it. Snip, I went, snip. I kept brushing at his ear. It was very soft: ears are always soft. No one has tough ears. I tried to keep my fingertips away from Frank’s ear, but they kept brushing at it. I pulled out big hanks of hair from the top and the side with the comb, and gave good professional swipes to them, straight-edge cuts. Then I had to do the back of his neck. Frank bowed his head, his back still very straight. There were bits of clipped hair on his shoulders, a lot of little brown hairs littering those straight, perfectly tanned shoulders. It was very hot, and the hair was sticking to his skin. It was so hot we were both sweating, very lightly, but everywhere. Everywhere there was any touch on our skins at all the skin responded by glistening and turning moist. So all those hairs stayed on Frank’s tanned shoulders.

Frank and I have always gotten along, it’s his younger sister I fight with. Jonathan wouldn’t have dreamed of leaving me alone with her. Once, though, I made Frank cry. He dropped all three plates of spaghetti he was carrying, after assuring me everything would be fine. I yelled at him, never imagining that he would cry: he had been so certain of things the moment before. I felt bad for weeks. He was nine years old, and was kind to me when I apologized.

One of the cats came and jumped into Frank’s lap. They don’t ever stop to think if you want a cat in your lap, cats just jump in. Frank laughed and started to stroke him. “Did you think I was lonely?” he asked the cat, “did you think I was missing a cat? It’s too hot to have a cat in your lap, didn’t you know that?”

The cat lifted his head and closed his eyes. He knew better than to listen. This is a messy blond cat who sheds, and hairs come off with every stroke. Now they floated aimlessly in the heavy air, and Frank’s legs began to have little blond wisps on them.

Sometimes I cut Jonathan’s hair, too. Every time I touch his hair I stroke his head, so that it is a nice, long doting session. I am allowed to touch his ears, and follow them around the curve and blow into them to clear them of the clipped hair. Jonathan lifts up one shoulder to ward me off: I’m supposed to be just cutting his hair.

“No degenerate behavior,” he says, but he loves it.

I had not been looking forward to spending August with Frank: I thought he was going to be a belligerent teenager, playing the radio loudly all over the house and using the telephone all the time and complaining about everything. Wrong. All he’s been is nice, carrying things in from the car without being asked and helping with the animals and cutting the lawn without griping and being tutored in the mornings and studying in the evenings (which is why he’s with us for this month). He does everything without griping, with real grace, in fact, and I began to feel very silly, all my preparations for war, all my ultimatums and decrees, how I would quell him if Jonathan were away and there was an uprising. Instead I got this calm, mild, good-natured kid. I was ashamed of myself. I’d snapped at him in the beginning, just to open hostilities. “Don’t bounce that ball in the kitchen,” I had said, sounding like someone just before they grab the axe.

Frank shook his head and took the ball outside. “Don’t get so crazy,” he said.

In the back I tried to follow the curve of his head. That’s the way it was layered, and I trimmed each layer. Frank put his hand back and felt it. “There,” he said, “and there. Isn’t it too long?”

“Ah’ll cut it fo’ you,” I said, imitating someone from Mississippi, “Ah just doan’ want to cut it too short.” I was afraid of that, afraid that he would hate what I had done to him.

I clipped along the back of his neck. Frank tucked his chin in and dropped his head as though he were in church, a young penitent. The hair along the back of his neck was soft and fuzzy, a different texture from the rest. It was golden brown, and the skin just underneath it was not tanned, but pale and very soft. Each time I took a clump of hair, my fingers rubbed against the back of Frank’s neck.

“What are those insects?” Frank asked.

“Katydids.”

“But what’s their real name?”

“I don’t know how to pronounce it. Keep your head down.” I pushed gently at his head.

“You know when I went into the city last week?” Frank’s voice was a little choked, from keeping his head bent down so far. “I was walking along Park Avenue and I saw a car parked in front of a building, all loaded up with suitcases and things, a station wagon. There was a man getting out of it, and a woman, and there were two kids in the doorway of the building. I don’t know what made me think of it, but all of a sudden I thought she’s not their mother. I kept watching them, even after I’d passed them on the sidewalk I kept turning back to look at them.”

I kept on clipping Frank’s hair.

“What did she do?” I asked.

“She just waited by the car. The man went over to the children and brought them back to the car.”

“And did she kiss them?”

“I don’t know,” said Frank, “by then I was too far away. But I kept thinking how strange it must be for her, to be in the middle of someone else’s family.”

“It must be strange for the kids,” I said. Frank uncrossed his feet, then he crossed them again, left over right this time. “Well,” he said.

“It makes me crazy sometimes,” I said. “I take it out on you. But it isn’t you.” I have never told Frank that I love him.

“It’s okay,” Frank said, pushing his hair away from his forehead. “I mean, you’re fine.” He cleared his throat. He was trying to put me at ease.

I had gotten to the front. “Do you have a part?” I asked.

“Do I have a part?” Frank was outraged, disgusted with me. “Je-sus. How long have you known me? I have always had a part.”

“Well, part it, then,” I said, clicking my scissors in the air as though I had other customers waiting. He parted it, and I began again: snip.

“You’re done,” I said at the end.

“Would you brush the hair off my shoulders?”

I began to brush the hair off Frank’s shoulders. He sat perfectly still. The sweat, that fine film of moisture, kept the hairs sticky and heavy. They moved a little bit when I brushed them, but they didn’t fly lightly into the air. The palms of my hands, the tips of my fingers were damp, too. It was terribly hot. The skin I was brushing was no kin to me. His flesh was from another woman’s body, a woman who still will not speak my name. Frank’s shoulders are perfectly tanned and smooth, he is the youngest of young men, with not a mark on him. I brushed at him and brushed at him, and began to laugh.

“Mon, you look a wocko mon,” I said, talking like Bimini. “You look like a crazy mon. You grow de brown hair on de head, de brown hair on de back, de yellow hair on de legs.” I began to sing “Yellow Hair,” to the tune of “Yellow Bird.”

“Yeah, well, who’s wacko around here,” Frank said. He stood up, brushing at himself, all around the back of his neck. He is five inches taller than me now. I stooped down and started petting the cat, who had been deposited on the lawn. The dog pressed against my leg, lobbying for more attention. Frank went into the house for a mirror. I crouched next to the animals, feeling strange. My dog rolled heavily onto her side, and lifted her front paw, tilting her chin to one side.

Frank came out of the back door, letting the screen slam behind him. He had my silver-backed hand mirror stuck in the top of his shorts, like a gun.

“Well?” I asked.

“Good,” he said, “but I want the back shorter. I want it to look like Dad’s.”

“Okay,” I said, “get back in the chair.”

Again I bent over his hot back, sweeping each wisp of golden-brown, downy neck hair very carefully into a little clump, and carefully, very carefully, bringing the scissors alongside them, evenly, so that the cut would be straight, and so that the points would not prick Frank’s skin. I was trying not to touch Frank’s damp, innocent skin.