Ron
Trudy sits in a shaft of golden light filtering between the intertwined bougainvillea of pink, purple and red. We are seated
on the outdoor patio at one of my favorite lunch spots in Palm Springs.
If I had entered this restaurant looking for the Trudy who left the house this morning, I would not have recognized her. A
stranger might, at first glance, mistake her for an overworked Orange County real estate agent who had come to the desert
for a spa weekend and a few drinks.
As I do every three weeks, I got my hair cut and styled late Thursday morning. I brought Trudy with me to continue keeping
her—pardon the pun—out of Teddy’s hair. My cotton candy coif, of course, has not changed since I was a boy, and Gaspar knows
how to cut and curl, dry and spray without one follicle looking as if it has ever been touched. I pay him an arm and leg to
keep me locked in a look that has become my signature of safety.
When Gaspar had asked Trudy if she’d made an appointment—eyeing her wash-and-set while keeping the straightest of faces though
there has never been a straight bone in his body—her face flushed, and she hid her head behind a fiddle-leaf fig in the corner
of the salon with a copy of Vogue, which I’m sure she’d never set eyes on before. And when Gaspar’s assistant offered Trudy a glass of champagne, she waved her off, Trudy’s face reading, What heathen drinks at eleven in the morning?
Then she FaceTimed Ava—who was again lounging by the pool—to show her where she was, and Ava screamed, “Makeover, Grandma!
Do it!”
“Oh, I couldn’t.”
“You could.”
“Really?”
“Go for it, Grandma! New you!”
As the salon began to fill with an assortment of clients that made the cast of The Birdcage and Absolutely Fabulous seem like The Waltons, Trudy suddenly nabbed a flute of bubbly, and then another, her unease slowly sloughing away, layer after layer, like the
rattlesnakes that sun on the backroads to Whitewater Preserve.
Gaspar eventually took a seat beside Trudy, taking her hand in his, and he asked her not about her life but her hair, which—as
we know—is the root of all our issues.
I sat in a chair opposite Trudy as she told this stranger about her dead husband and her spur-of-the-moment trip to Palm Springs.
“Palm Springs is old-school glamour,” Gaspar said. “Let my work serve as the souvenir of your visit here.”
Trudy emerged two hours later with soft layers, a swept bang and an auburn glow, leaving six inches of damaged hair behind
on the floor and about thirty years behind in the mirror.
I emerged three hundred fifty dollars lighter in the wallet.
“I feel so . . .”
Trudy stops, touches her hair and then her glass of rosé.
“. . . wicked,” she finally finishes.
I chuckle. “Well, you know, Elphaba and Glinda were both beautiful, even if one was green.”
Trudy’s brows contort. “Who?”
“Wicked?” I ask. “The musical? The movie? The origin story about the witches from The Wizard of Oz?”
She shakes her newly coiffed head. “Oh, I’ve never watched any of those. Witches are evil. My faith didn’t allow my children
to celebrate Halloween. It’s a celebration of darkness.”
I hold my neck stiff to keep my head from shaking in disbelief.
Have you met your granddaughter? I want to ask.
“You must have celebrated Halloween as a child?” I say. “And watched The Wizard of Oz?”
“We celebrated Halloween when we were very young, because of Mama,” Trudy says. “It was one of the few good memories I have
with Teddy, but Daddy put an end to that. I had to always be Daddy’s little girl. I didn’t want to disappoint him like Teddy
did.”
Trudy takes a sip of her wine and then pulls a compact from her purse. She studies her new reflection.
“I don’t even recognize myself,” she says. “What will people back home think?” Trudy combs her hair with her fingers, deflating
the volume, making the layers less noticeable. She pushes her glass of wine away. “I shouldn’t drink.”
“Jesus drank.”
“Not on a Thursday afternoon in the light of day!”
“My mama used to always say, ‘Nothin’ good ever happens after midnight.’” I check my watch and smile. “It ain’t midnight yet.
We got time.”
Trudy hesitates.
“No one is watching.” I wink. “It’s okay to have a little fun.”
Trudy’s face droops. “No,” she says. “It’s not. God is watching. God is always watching.”
I tilt my head at her. “I have to ask, is this a game you play with yourself? Happiness versus guilt? Because I’ve played
that game for a very long time, too.”
Trudy opens her mouth to reply, but the waiter approaches.
“Have you decided?”
We have yet to crack our menus.
“I’ll have the chicken tenders and french fries,” Trudy answers.
The waiter laughs. Hard.
“Oh, honey, this isn’t a Cracker Barrel, and we don’t have a children’s menu,” he says. “In fact, we hate children in our
restaurant. Sneezing. Sticky fingers. Spilled lemonade. We spend twenty dollars for their six-ninety-nine order. Did you read the menu?”
I smile. “We’ll both have the Nicoise salad. Thank you.”
As the waiter departs, Trudy asks, “Why do you all speak like that?”
“Like what?”
“So . . . sarcastic. So . . . cutting.”
“We’ve learned to use humor as a way to laugh at the cruelty of the world,” I explain. “It lessens the pain. It gives us a
way to make sense of life. It also brings people in when we want, or keeps them at a distance. It’s long been the gay man’s
secret weapon, sort of like mayonnaise is to straight people when they cook.”
“See? You all are just so honest. It’s uncomfortable.”
“And you all,” I say, “are just so boring. That’s uncomfortable.”
“Now you sound like Teddy.” She sniffs. “Telling me I’m living in drag.”
“Are you?”
Trudy shakes her head, utterly confounded by my challenge. She puts her hands on the edge of the table, and I think for a
moment she is going to push herself to her feet and flee.
“I’m doing the best I can,” she says instead, sounding defeated.
“Are you?” I ask.
“I am!” Trudy suddenly cries. “Stop pushing me!”
Diners turn our way.
Trudy looks away, grabs her wine and takes a healthy sip.
“I’m sorry,” she finally continues in a tone between a whisper and a confessional. “I guess I just thought that I’d be different
as a grandmother. I’d be better than I was as a parent . . . more giving . . . more forgiving.” She searches her hands. “I
guess I thought I’d be a better parent than mine were. I wanted to be, but I’m . . .” Trudy pauses “. . . worse. Ava laughs
at me. My children avoid me. I’m trying, but I’m incapable of change. I’m trapped.”
“You couldn’t be any worse than your father was to Teddy,” I say.
Trudy lifts a shaking hand and touches her face. It’s like she’s checking to see if she’s wearing a Halloween mask.
“Oh, no,” Trudy mutters as the entertainment takes the stage. “Not a drag queen. I hate drag queens.”
“You came to the wrong town,” I say.
“Good afternoon, Palm Springs! I’m Lulu Lemon!”
A drag queen in a bright yellow dress and matching wig appears. She seems to immediately sniff out Trudy’s discomfort.
“Ma’am?” Lulu asks, pointing toward our table. “Did you know that Palm Springs is rumored to have more drag queens per capita
than any other city in the US?”
Trudy’s face is paralyzed in horror.
“Don’t worry, honey, I don’t bite,” Lulu says. “Hard.”
The crowd laughs. Trudy is unmoved.
“You look like you just caught me wearing flats,” Lulu continues. “Nothing? Not a laugh? Okay, well, I hope the song I’m going
to sing gets some sort of reaction from you. It’s an oldie but goodie. As most of you know, Palm Springs is the mid-century
capital of the world, and today I’m going to perform some classics from that era. A little mid-mod mood music for lunch and
Modernism Week. A little something by Rosemary Clooney. Maestro?”
Music begins to play.
Trudy shakes her head. “I’m leaving. I will never understand why you all have to dress in drag.”
“We all don’t dress in drag,” I counter. “Just like we all don’t watch The Real Housewives and believe that every straight woman behaves like them. There are as many different types of gay people as there are straight
people. But drag is a form of entertainment. It’s an elevated art form for us.”
“Teddy has always been like . . . this,” she says, gesturing to Lulu, who’s swaying to the opening notes. “So flamboyant. And now you all perform that . . . that show. I looked it up online.”
“It’s a celebration of friendship,” I explain. “It’s actually saved lives. It saved mine.”
Trudy pushes her chair out to leave just as our salads arrive and Lulu begins to sing “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.”
Without warning, Trudy bursts into tears and races from the restaurant.
“I’ve never been a fan of fish either,” the waiter says.
I follow Trudy outside. I find her on the ground, collapsed into a heap, leaning on a wall, weeping into the facade of the
restaurant.
“Trudy? What’s wrong?”
She refuses to look at me. She continues to heave, her body convulsing.
I stand over her awkwardly, cooing, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” massaging her shoulders until her tears and breathing finally
slow.
I lean down, grab her chin and force her to look at me. “What’s going on?”
She finally meets my gaze, mascara running down her cheeks.
As the lyrics of the song dance in the air, Trudy tells me a story about her daddy that eventually brings me to tears and
to my knees as well.