Chapter 50
SHAY
It was the women’s decision to cut off all of their hair. The shearing had been used as a punishment for men, a way to mark someone as a liar or a thief, and one day, when a woman was accused of a similar infraction, she said, Why not us too?
In Synanon, women were men’s equals. They were not shackled to the role of motherhood.
Their children were left to sleep in dormitories and be taught by assigned teachers, who began to slap them if they didn’t properly make their beds.
Why not us too? the woman had said, and excitement had crackled through the room, veering into mania.
Everyone wanted to be punished, the sense of the collective so potent.
They ran to fetch scissors and razors, and the hair filled three garbage bags.
For weeks after, members found strands tangled in carpet bristles, clinging to their stockinged feet.
So it was not the old man’s idea, though afterward, it would become his mandate, just like his instructions not to smoke or drink. To not speak to your loved ones. To exercise in the morning, relentless sets of sit-ups, twenty minutes of running in place.
Shay did not question any of these directives when she first moved into Riverside.
She swept the floors, washed the tall windows, did anything they told her, although Simon was adamant there was no hierarchy.
Everyone was in service to everyone else.
But after a week, Jim had brought her into the kitchen and asked her to sit in a cold metal folding chair.
An older woman pulled out a pair of dull scissors and, without any ceremony, began to hack off Shay’s hair.
Her hands folded in her lap, Shay watched the strong strands and split ends, everything that made her who she was, fall to the tile floor, and a small, frightened voice in the back of her head whispered, What am I doing here?
But how to admit it then? What would that have meant?
She did not witness a beating until she’d lived there for three weeks, a month and a half after she’d dropped out of law school, four months after she’d first spoken to Simon on the train.
I know it’s helped you, but are you sure?
Andrew had said when she told him she wanted to move to Riverside, but she’d been adamant, and he’d been conditioned to love women who told him what to do.
One frigid night, the children curled against one another for warmth in the room next door, she woke to a shuffling in the hallway, the flap of someone’s feet being dragged down the stairs.
She followed the sound, and before the basement door, she found Robert flexing his right hand, Jim pinning a man’s wrists behind his back.
Jim, whose teeth had rotted in Vietnam, whom she now talked with in the back garden every evening, who once told her that all he’d wished for every Christmas was a Gibson Hummingbird guitar.
It took her a moment to realize who the captive was, as they’d already broken Simon’s nose by then. Blood streamed down his chin.
“Get the door,” Robert said.
She stepped forward and opened it. She would think of this later, how instinctual it had become to follow an order.
Simon jerked his shoulder up, trying to free himself from Jim’s grasp, and when Jim wrenched his arm back, Simon moaned.
Jim liked to watch the street from the stoop, but she hadn’t thought of him as echoing the routine of a soldier.
Until then, she hadn’t considered he was standing guard.
“Shay,” Simon said, “I just need a week. A week to see my dad.”
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“He’s not thinking straight,” Jim said. “He needs some time alone to think.”
“Don’t—” Simon had protested, but they were already hauling him down the stairs.
Shay was left alone on the landing. Cool air crept up the stairwell, and she hadn’t realized the warmth her hair had given her until that moment, how cold you could feel in the marrow of your skull.