2
I’d been using the same dry cleaner for years—a little place on Bachelor Street with one small, cross-looking man behind the counter. But he never gave a sign that he’d laid eyes on me before, so this morning I passed him my receipt without a word and he accepted it silently and went to take a dress from the rack. This was my official Parents’ Night shirtwaist, light gray. For the wedding itself I planned to wear my best outfit, a silk-like dress in a darker gray. (I don’t do well with colors.) Debbie had offered to help me shop for a mother-of-the-bride dress, but I didn’t see the point in paying a lot of money for something I’d wear only once.
I hung the shirtwaist from a hook in my car, and I was just about to settle behind the wheel when I happened to glance toward the place I’d parked in front of: Sheila’s Hair Salon. I hesitated. Then I shut the driver’s-side door again.
It was a tiny salon. One chair. No wonder I’d never noticed it before. And not a person to be seen. “Hello?” I called.
Footsteps approached from the rear of the shop, and out came a youngish woman with very brightly dyed pink hair that hung to her shoulder on one side but was slashed off above her ear on the other side. “Oh,” I said. Then I said, “I don’t actually have an appointment…” I was backing toward the door as I spoke. “Maybe I’ll phone later and—”
“That’s okay; it so happens I’m free right now,” the woman said. “What did you want done?”
“Um, some kind of…um, fluffing? For my daughter’s wedding? But I really—”
“I can do that!” she said. “When’s she getting married?”
“Tomorrow. Plus today there’s a rehearsal dinner.”
“Oh, cool! Have a seat,” the woman said.
She waved toward the chair, and I got into it. It had been years since I’d been to a beauty parlor, but I seemed to remember that first there’d been a sort of settling-in process where they took my purse and stashed it someplace close at hand. Not here, though. I sat erect with my purse standing upright on my knees, and I felt more like an applicant than a customer. Meanwhile, the woman was circling me. She picked up one strand of my hair and then let it drop, as if it hadn’t quite passed inspection. “What do you think: a little trim?” she asked me.
“No!” I said. Not only had Max implied that my hair was too short as it was (jaw level, more or less), but also I worried that this woman might chop it off asymmetrically. “Just something to show I tried,” I told her. “I don’t want people to think I didn’t care enough.”
“Right,” she said. She took a folded wrap from one of the shelves and shook it out and draped it over me, purse and all. “How would you feel about a bit of a tint?” she asked me.
“No, thanks.”
I have that kind of blond hair that just sort of gradually fades, and I could only imagine how garish I’d look with anything else. “If you could pouf it out a bit, is all,” I said. “Make it not so much hanging down.”
She said, “Sure.” But she sounded disappointed.
The reason I stay away from beauty parlors is, I never know what to talk about there. I mean, those places are real gabfests! The last time I went, I was in high school—I did say it had been years, right?—and I remember I was in the middle of getting a sort of beehive arrangement for junior prom when I heard the customer next to me say, “Well, I finally got to lay eyes on the Other Woman.”
The beautician said, “Ooh!” and stopped with her scissors in midair to give the customer a goggle-eyed stare. “How did that happen?” she asked.
“They were coming out of Morgan Millard together. They were laughing away, all cooey-dovey—didn’t even notice I was standing there, thank God.”
“Did she look anything like you?” the beautician asked. “You know how I always say the husband tends to go for the same type of woman all over again.”
“Not a bit like me. Kind of mousy, in fact. Mousy brown pageboy. I am a lot more attractive, if it doesn’t sound stuck-up to say so.”
“Well, there you are,” the beautician said. “What can I tell you.”
What could I tell my beautician to compare with that? was my question. I was a skinny seventeen-year-old at the time, with a full set of braces. Since I’d entered the shop my entire conversation had consisted of “Gail Simmons? Four o’clock?” after which I had handed over a magazine photo of the style I wanted. Period.
So after that visit, I just cut my own hair. It’s not that difficult, really; just a matter of remembering that you need to cut the back a little shorter than you would suppose in order to make up for how you’ve drawn it forward.
It seemed nothing much had changed since then. Sixty-one years old now, going on sixty-two, and I sat through a shampoo, a combing, and a ridiculous amount of blow-drying in total silence. When the beautician swung my chair around to face the mirror again and asked, “What do you think?” all I said was, “Looks good,” even though it didn’t. (A kind of sphinx hairdo, to be honest—a wedge shape at either side.)
“Will this be a big wedding?” she asked as she lifted my wrap off.
But I could tell she’d asked only to fill the silence, so I just said, “Nope,” and handed her my credit card.
Then I heard my ringtone as I was signing my receipt, so I made a big show of rushing to the door as I pulled my phone from my purse. Oh! Debbie. Out on the sidewalk I said, “Hello?”
“Mom?”
“Hi, Deb. Have you finished your Day of Beauty?”
“No, no! Goodness. We’ve only just gotten to our pedicures. But I wanted to call and tell you that Dad has arrived way early.”
“I know that,” I said.
“And he has a cat with him.”
“I know that.”
“You know?”
“He came to the house,” I said. “I just happened to be home because…and he showed up with his cat, wanting to stay in my guest room.”
“Great! Because no way can he stay with me. Kenneth’s allergic to cats.”
“But I don’t want him!”
“It’ll only be for one night. Or two at the most, depending on how late things run tomorrow.”
“Two! He was planning to stay at your place on your actual wedding night?”
“So?” Debbie said.
I knew that challenging tone of hers. I backed off a bit. “At any rate, now it’s me who’s got him,” I said. “Aren’t I lucky.”
“It won’t be so bad.”
“But you know how he always takes a place over. Little messes everywhere he goes. Besides which, don’t forget he’s turned vegan.”
“He has?”
“It was his New Year’s resolution this year, remember?”
“Well, what of it? You’re not supplying his meals, after all. Today there’s the rehearsal dinner and tomorrow the…Wait, did he mention he was vegan when he RSVPed for tomorrow?”
“How would I know?” I asked.
I was getting into my car. It had heated up enough inside so that I could feel my two fans of hair wilting on either side of my face, which was probably for the best.
“In any case,” I said, “he’ll need lunch today, and then breakfast and lunch tomorrow, and maybe breakfast the day after, even, if he’s really not planning to leave straight after the wedding.”
“Never mind; he won’t expect you to cook for him.”
“Sure, he’ll be all ‘Don’t go to any trouble for me,’ and ‘I’ll just find something on my own; never mind,’ which of course means he’ll haul out every possible item from my fridge and then leave it all on the kitchen counter.”
Debbie stayed silent, which was her usual tactic whenever I complained to her about Max. I made myself shut up. I said, “Anyway. How’s your Day of Beauty going?”
“Going well,” she said cheerfully.
“I just got my hair done myself,” I told her. “I took the day off, in fact. I have nothing else to do for the entire rest of the day.”
“Well, good,” she said briskly. “See you this evening!” And she hung up.
I looked at my phone for a moment, and then I put it back in my purse. Poking forth from my billfold, I happened to notice, was the freebie I’d been handed with my receipt at the beauty parlor—a sample-size foil packet. I plucked it out to examine it. Remarkable Rouge Co., it read. Instant youthful glow for cheekbones and eyelids. I tore the notch at one corner and took a sniff of the contents. Kind of fruity-smelling; not what I would have chosen. I squeezed a bit on my fingertip and dabbed one cheekbone, but when I checked in the rearview mirror it looked as if I’d merely been careless with some mayonnaise. I wiped it off. It seemed there were tears in my eyes, but I couldn’t say why. I dropped the packet back in my purse and started the car.
* * *
I hadn’t given Max enough credit, it turned out. When I got home I found he’d fixed a nice lunch for both of us: grilled cheese sandwiches and a salad, with almost no mess to be seen. He waited until I actually walked into the kitchen before he lit the burner under the grill pan, but the table was already set and the salad was already dressed. “Grilled cheese?” I asked. “I thought you’d gone vegan.”
“Not all that vegan,” he said. “I guess more what you’d call vegetarian.”
“Oh, good,” I said.
I draped my rehearsal dress over one chair and sat down in another. I was thinking he might comment on my new hairdo, but when he turned from the stove to look at me he said, “Gaily-girl! Have you been crying?”
“What? No!” I said.
“It looks to me as if—”
“I don’t know why you ever went vegan in the first place,” I told him. “We human beings are not a naturally vegan species.”
“Well, I’m sixty-five years old, remember,” he said. He turned back to the stove. “My doctor says I should start living more proactively. He’s got me walking two miles every morning and cutting down on my salt and doing geckos.”
“Doing what?”
“Like, when you tighten all your pelvic floor muscles and then relax them,” he said.
“Oh, Kegels,” I said.
“Right. Kegels.” He slid his spatula under a sandwich and gave it a flip. “Tighten your pelvic muscles three seconds and then relax three seconds, tighten and then—”
“In fact, I’ve just now done one,” I announced.
“Yes, me too,” he said.
We both snickered.
I’d forgotten how cozy it felt sometimes, hanging out with Max.
But then he had to go and point his spatula at me, very instructive and all-knowing. “Of course you’ve been crying,” he said. “You’re losing your only daughter. It’s completely understandable.”
“I’m not losing her!”
“In a manner of speaking, you are,” he said.
“No, not even in a manner of speaking. She’ll be twenty minutes away from me, exactly like before, and she’s adding a guy to our family whom I get along with very well.”
“But he’ll use up all her time,” Max said. “And he’ll expect her to come to his family for holidays and such and you’ll practically never see her again.”
“You are so absurd,” I said. Then I said, “Where’s the cat?”
“Wasn’t she in the living room?”
“Not that I noticed.”
“One thing I was thinking,” he said. He was sliding a sandwich onto my plate. “If you do decide to adopt her, I believe they have preventive injections these days for severely allergic people. In case you’re worried that Kenneth can’t visit here anymore.”
“It hadn’t so much as crossed my mind,” I told him. “There’s no way I’m going to adopt her, Max. Put that notion out of your head. But since she’s here at the moment, what does that mean for the next time Kenneth comes to dinner or something? How long does dander hang around, actually?”
“I have no idea,” Max said. It didn’t seem to worry him much. He dished out his own sandwich and then returned the grill pan to the stove and sat down across from me.
“Dander,” I said thoughtfully. “It’s such a peculiar word, when you consider it.”
He helped himself to the salad and then passed the bowl to me.
“One of those words where if you say it several times in a row, you start wondering if you made it up,” I said.
“Although there could be a little problem with their kids,” he said.
“Kids?”
“If they inherit his allergy.”
“Then I’d just have to have nothing to do with them, I guess.”
He stared at me. He seemed to think I was serious.
“So here’s the drill,” I told him. “We’re meeting at the church at five thirty. Debbie and Kenneth, and Kenneth’s parents, and Elizabeth, his sister. She’s the maid of honor. And then two bridesmaids, Bitsy Taylor and Caroline Byrd. You remember them from Debbie’s college days.”
“I do?” Max asked.
“You do. And Kenneth’s uncle—Jason? Jonas?—is best man, and two of Kenneth’s friends are ushers but I don’t know their names; and you and me and my mom.”
“Your mom’s going to be in the wedding?”
“No, but she doesn’t want to miss anything.”
“That’s quite a crowd,” Max said. He took a bite of his sandwich.
“Not really, compared to most weddings,” I said. “And it won’t be super-formal. Debbie’s thirty-three years old, after all.”
“So? Nowadays, that’s nothing.”
“Right, but you can see how all the usual froufrou would be kind of beside the point, at this stage. So no puffy long dress with a train or whatever, and no flower girls and no choir. Just the church organist playing something or other unnoticeable to fill the airwaves, I gather.”
“Am I supposed to walk her down the aisle?”
“The organist?”
“Debbie. Like, she and I walk down the aisle arm in arm and I give her away?”
“No, no, she’s walking down the aisle alone. Kenneth will be waiting for her at the altar, next to Reverend What’s-his-name, and you and I will be sitting in the front pew, on the left—the bride’s side. Kenneth’s parents will sit on the right.”
“Are Kenneth’s parents still married to each other?”
“Why, yes.”
“But even though you and I are not still married, we’ll be sitting together?”
“Unless you object, for some reason.”
“No, I was just thinking that people might misunderstand,” he said.
“Misunderstand in what way?” I asked.
“Won’t they think we’re still married, too?”
You had to wonder, sometimes, how on earth Max’s mind worked.
“I couldn’t tell you what they’ll think,” I said. “In any case, the way the minister’s going to word it is, ‘Who is it who blesses this couple’s choice?’ Not ‘Who gives this woman away?’ You see the difference: she isn’t really ours to give. And then you and I stand up and say, in unison, ‘We do.’?”
“How do we work that?”
“Work what?”
“How do we make sure we’re in unison?”
“Um…”
“I think we should hold hands,” Max said.
“Hold hands?”
“That way, I can give your hand a squeeze so that both of us begin speaking at exactly the same instant.”
“Fine,” I said.
“Although people really will think we’re still married if we’re holding hands.”
“Max,” I said, “the guest list for this wedding is shorter than for some dinners I’ve been to. Everybody attending knows our entire family history.”
“Kenneth’s family doesn’t. I’ve never even met them.”
“I’m sure by now they’ve been brought up to speed,” I said. “This salad is delicious, by the way.”
“Why, thank you. I was impressed that you had hearts of palm in your cupboard.”
“I did?”
“Shoot,” he said. “Maybe I should have checked the expiration date.”
“You know I don’t believe in expiration dates,” I told him.
“Remember our wedding?” he asked.
“We didn’t have a wedding,” I said.
“We most certainly did. We had a lovely private ceremony in city hall.”
“Ah, yes. You wore jeans and a dashiki,” I said.
“You wore all black, with black tights.”
I polished off the last of my sandwich and wiped my fingers on my napkin. “So, the rehearsal dinner itself,” I said, “is not what you’d call a formal occasion. I mean, it’s in a nice restaurant, but there won’t be any toasts or speeches or anything like that.”
“They’re saving that kind of thing for tomorrow,” Max suggested. “For the banquet after the wedding.”
“Not so much even then,” I said. “You know our Debbie. She’s been pretty good at reining things in.”
Max chuckled approvingly.
I said, “Did you show the cat where you were putting her litter box?”
“I’m sure she’ll figure it out,” he said.
I glanced toward the powder room. “With the door shut?” I asked him.
“Oh,” he said.
I stood up and went to open the door. The litter box sat next to the toilet, filled with kitty litter but pristine. I continued into the living room. “Cat?” I called.
Max followed me, saying, “Kitty-kitty-kitty?”
I climbed the stairs and went into the guest room, figuring that that would at least smell familiar to her, since Max had stowed his things there. No sign of her, though. So next I tried my own room, where I found her asleep on my pillow. She raised her head and stared at me. “Aww,” Max said. “Look at that: she deliberately chose your bed.”
I scooped her up and handed her to him. “Show her where her litter box is,” I ordered.
“Sure thing! Come with me, sweetie-pie,” he told the cat.
“And for God’s sake, leave the powder room door open!”
“Will do,” he said. He left.
I walked over to the bureau and checked my hairdo in the mirror. It was less sphinxlike, but it still stood out a bit on either side. So I crossed the hall to the bathroom and dampened my comb and ran it through my hair till it hung vertically. My face looked perfectly normal, as far as I could tell. I don’t know why Max thought I’d been crying.
* * *