Chapter 21 #3
I gave up. I said, “She’s retiring in the fall and she wants the board to hire this other person in her place, this Nashville person. And the Nashville person is asking to bring in her own assistant. So I’m thinking I should just quit before they fire me.”
“Excellent,” Max said.
I turned to look at him.
“Your great talent is for teaching; you know that,” Max said. "Dealing with all the kids who are scared to death of math.”
“You’re forgetting that teachers make no money, though,” I told him. “Why else did I put in all that hell time getting my master’s degree?”
“So? Now that Debbie’s finished law school, you can go back to doing what you’re good at.”
“It’s not that simple,” I told him.
Still, it was nice of him to say that I was good at something.
But then he changed the subject. “Guess I might as well bring in the cat supplies,” he said. And he went on outside, leaving the front door open behind him even though the air conditioning was on.
I turned back to the cat. She was a bread-loaf shape in the armchair now with her front paws folded beneath her, and when she saw me looking at her she shut her eyes lazily and then opened them again.
Max came back with a sack of cat kibble stashed in a brown plastic tub, a larger sack of kitty litter swinging from his free hand. “Where do you think for the litter box? Kitchen?” he asked me.
“No, not the kitchen! Good grief! The powder room, I guess.”
He headed toward the powder room. Of course the front door was still open. I went over and slammed it shut.
When he returned he had collected his duffel bag from the kitchen, and he started up the stairs with it. “Sheets in the bathroom closet?” he called back to me.
“You won’t need sheets; the bed’s already made up,” I said.
“Ha! It’s a good thing my mother’s not alive,” he said. “You remember how she couldn’t countenance a guest bed with unfresh bedding.”
“Oh, she couldn’t, could she?” I asked in a mocking tone. “She couldn’t ‘countenance’ it, could she?” I was climbing after him; I had just recalled that the bed was covered with old photographs that I’d been going through for a display at Debbie’s reception. “Manners for the Mystified,” I said.
“Huh?”
I swept into the guest room ahead of him and started gathering the photos, completely messing up all the sorting I’d been doing. “Why, look at that!” Max said in a marveling tone. “Us at Bethany Beach.”
He had picked up a wallet-size photo that was lying on one pillow, all crinkly-edged like olden times.
Max and I very young and unformed, and Debbie as cute as a button in one of those bathing suits with a ballerina skirt.
I wasn’t going to use that one; Kenneth’s mother had specified that the photos should be four-by-sixes.
Still, Debbie looked so darling! She had those dusty pale freckles she always got in the summer, that magically faded away every year by Thanksgiving.
I took the picture from Max and stared down at it.
“You should go back to wearing your hair long,” Max told me.
“Mutton dressed as lamb,” I said.
“What?”
I added the photo to my stack of photos and turned to leave the room with them. Then I glanced back at Max. I said, “You don’t think I lack people skills, do you?”
“Hmm?” he said.
“Marilee feels I lack people skills.”
“Is that a fact,” he said.
But I could tell he wasn’t paying full attention. He had set his duffel bag on the bed and started unzipping it.
“I mean, I know I’m not Ms. Social Butterfly,” I told him, “but in a lot of ways, I hold that school together! Look at during Covid times: I was the only one who went in to work every day. Dealt with the mail and the service people and even let this one pushy father come in for a tour. With all the windows open, of course.”
“Right,” Max said. He drew a cylinder of wrinkled khaki from his duffel and unrolled it—a sports coat. He held it up to examine it.
“It takes real restraint to talk face-to-face with a man who wears his mask below his nose,” I said.
Max said, “Here’s a thought. You know how in the area where I live, there are all these senior citizens. These people who’ve settled on the Eastern Shore after they retired. So what I’ve always thought is, someone should open a grocery store called ‘The Singles Bar.’ Get it?”
I said, “The…?”
“Everything would be available in single-size portions. One carrot, not a whole bag. Two doughnuts, not a dozen. Six spears of asparagus.”
I said, “Um…”
“Think about it,” he urged me.
“Think about it in what way?” I asked.
“Think about opening a grocery store on the Eastern Shore.”
I stared at him. “You do feel I lack people skills,” I told him.
“No, I just meant—”
“First you say I’m so good at curing math anxiety, but then you tell me to get a job selling asparagus! Is that what you really think of me?”
“No, see,” he said, “this is where you always go wrong. You just…take something I say and run with it, just totally misinterpret it. There’s no reasoning with you!”
“Have it your way,” I said. Then I said, “Well, I’m off to the cleaner’s. Bye.”
“What—now?”
“Now,” I said.
I left the room. I went downstairs and collected my purse and went out to my car.
Wouldn’t you know he had parked so close behind me that I had to perform about six maneuvers before I could take off.
—
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.