Chapter Twenty-Eight #3
“He was so embarrassed about it! He thought it looked bad. He hoped it looked okay. He wanted my opinion. He was worried what you were going to think of it, Margaret.”
“What I was going to think of it?” Now my voice was high and squeezed.
Rainey showed us the text. Sandrine read it aloud. “ ‘Be honest! Oh my God, I look like a pruned hedge! Or a hedgehog. Margaret loves my hair. What if she hates it?’ ”
Sandrine and I looked at each other. “The Taco Time call,” I said.
“That’s not a breakup,” she said.
“Oh my God,” I breathed.
“I told him he looked fantastic,” Rainey said. She showed us the texts. You look fantastic. And then your reply: Honestly? And then Rainey again: She’s going to love it, and then the tiny heart of your reaction.
Oh, Mars. Oh, oh, oh.
That was it. That was all. But it was the most immense all to both Sandrine and me.
“I want to see the picture,” Sandrine said, and so Rainey found it and turned her phone so we could.
And, Mars! There you were. You were in your car.
It must have been immediately after you left the salon.
You must have been experiencing that post-bad-haircut panic we all have, in desperate need of reassurance that we haven’t drastically wrecked ourselves.
I could see a streetlight behind you, and the dome light of your VW above, two glowing moons.
And your hair did look a bit like a pruned hedge, and it did look a bit like a hedgehog, the most beautiful hedgehog I’d ever seen.
A bit uncertain, a bit worried, a bit goofy, and so very beloved.
“Rainey, oh my God. You have no idea what this means.” Sandrine had started to cry. With relief, you know. With utter relief. You called her about your hair!
“Really?” Rainey said.
“Thank you, Rainey. Thank you for telling us.” Now I started to cry, too. With relief, with a new hope, because we hadn’t broken up, had we? You didn’t think so.
We launched our bodies onto a surprised Rainey, group hug. What if she hadn’t told us? What if she hadn’t shoved aside her second thoughts and taken this maybe-risky chance to share? We all hold the pieces to one puzzle, don’t we? Your haircut, Mars. Your bad haircut was such a fucking gift.
We lifted Rainey right off her feet. She still had her phone in her hand, and so you, that photo of you with your funny flat hair and sweet, vulnerable eyes, bobbed and lit in the night around us.
You shined, we all did, tiny, tiny, so very small and momentous, under the spectacle of the universe, the starry blanket deserving our awe and astonishment.
Thank you, Mars, I silently said toward that dark patch of sky. That’s all it looked like, but just because something is invisible, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
I was hoping for rain, but that didn’t happen. There was no storm. There was just a hedgehog haircut, and Chester giving me a giant bear hug as we all stood in the parking lot before we got in our cars, Santiago buckling Norty into his seat in the new CR-V.
“You should try to get that thing in a rocket,” Chester said.
“My phone?” I was teasing him. I knew what he meant.
“Put it on a real record, and get it sent up.” He loved this whole idea, the record of you, golden.
“I’m pretty sure that won’t happen,” I said. “I’m not exactly Carl Sagan.”
“Are you kidding? There’s been lots of stuff that’s gone to space. Ben!” he shouted. “Tell her some strange shit that’s gone to space. Eleanor Roosevelt’s watch, or something?”
“Amelia Earhart’s. Astronaut Shannon Walker wore it up. You’re thinking of the hair samples of presidents that Enterprise is taking up,” Ben called.
“Lots of musical instruments,” Sandrine piped in. “Saxophone? Flutes, guitars, bagpipes…”
“A didgeridoo,” Santiago added.
“Didgeridoo doo. Didgeripoo poo,” Norty said. When is a poop joke not worthy of a chuckle, I ask you.
“Didn’t Legos go up once?” Rainey asked.
“Legos and…Wait. You guys will love this.” Ben pointedly looked at me and Maurice, who leaned against the back of his truck. “Pizza delivery.”
“You’re kidding me,” Maurice said.
“What? No way,” I said.
“I think it was Pizza Hut? In 2000-something. They filmed the guy eating it. A Russian cosmonaut. If I remember right, they even got the logo painted onto the ship.” Ben unzipped his backpack, retrieved his windbreaker, and put it on.
“We’ve got to tell Dad he’s thinking too small with those baseball caps,” I told Maurice.
“Seriously, though. You’ve got to get that thing up there,” Chester said.
“Hello, NASA? This is Margaret,” I joked. My project wasn’t even a thing. It was just stuff on a phone.
“Can you even imagine?” Sandrine said. “That was his real dream, ever since he was a kid. To blast off into space.” I remembered. Also, this: A dream should be respected.
“A Buzz Lightyear toy…” Ben was still thinking.
“Don’t you know anyone, Lil?”
“That was a million years ago. Everyone’s dead. Cool idea, though, Chesty.”
“Ooh, ooh,” he said, doing his best gorilla. I wished I’d recorded that. “Well, you have to put it on a record, at least.”
It seemed pretty much impossible, Mars. But tell that to Carl Sagan. And after that night, after a second miracle on Tiger Mountain, tell that to Margaret Vittorio.
“Hey, is that rain?” Sandrine said. “I felt a splotch on my head.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Maurice said.