by Karin Cook
Mrs. Teuffel and Lainey DeWitt were concerned that Mama might need some company. They extended invitations, shouting to her across the driveway. Did she want to have tea? Go shopping? By the third week of the chemotherapy cycle, Mama was feeling better and invited them for lunch on a Saturday.
The day before the luncheon, Mama prepared recipes from that cooking show on TV. She sent Nick to the store twice and asked Elizabeth and me to dice celery and onions while she practiced her food sculptures, a paring knife in one hand, some hard, scrubbed vegetable in the other. She decorated the center of each tray with a carved radish crown.
It didn’t matter, she said, if there were leftovers. We could always take the sandwiches to school: tuna with apples, egg salad with olives, and cashew butter with honey. Some cut in thin rectangles, some in triangles, with carrots curling from underneath, like tongues.
“I hope they eat a lot,” Elizabeth whispered.
Elizabeth, Samantha, and I were lying on the lawn in our bathing suits when Mrs. Teuffel and Lainey arrived. They stopped at the edge of our blanket to say hello. Lainey was wearing all white. I could see her bra strap through her shirt.
“Getting warmed up for the beach?” she asked. Her permed hair was teased out wide. She was wearing pink lipstick, larger than her lips.
“Don’t get too much,” Mrs. Teuffel said. She stood in our sun. “Elizabeth, you especially, with that baby-fair skin of yours. Take it from me.” Mrs. Teuffel’s leathery skin was covered by a long, flowered dress and matching visor. Her charm bracelet tinkled with the silhouettes of her grandchildren. “Watch it. The sun is at its peak right now.”
They walked toward the house, weaving their way through the yellowjackets in the grass and sharing the weight of a large shopping bag. At the staircase, Lainey clutched the bag to her chest while Mrs. Teuffel put both hands on the railing to climb the steps. The apple trees were in full bloom, each white flower blushing pink in five perfect petals.
Elizabeth sat up and tested her tan, poking her arms and legs and lowering the band of her bikini bottoms. She squeezed the juice from a cut lemon over her scalp and mashed the leftover pulp along the ends of her hair. Then, she covered herself in baby oil and turned on her side, glistening.
Samantha watched her carefully and then popped the lid on her sunblock. “You’re gonna fry,” she said. She rubbed the sunblock on herself, leaving streaks in the hard to reach places.
I wanted to lean over and smooth out the lotion. Without saying a word, Samantha tilted the bottle toward me and turned on her stomach. I covered my palm with a cool dollop and began, making sure to keep a layer of lotion between her skin and mine. I started with her feet and moved up her legs, covering the swell of her calves and the dip at the back of her knees. I stopped an inch from the bottom of her suit.
“That’s gross,” Elizabeth said.
“What?”
“Touching her there.”
“I didn’t,” I said.
“Grow up,” Samantha said. “At least I’m not going to get skin can—” She stopped midsentence. The three of us sat silently, blinking in the sun. In the distance, Nick was shouting instructions to someone over a revving engine. Elizabeth turned over on her other side.
“It’s not the same,” I said, but wiped the leftover sunblock on my chest anyway.
At one o’clock, I sat up, hungry, with sunspots in front of my eyes, and headed for the kitchen.
“Bring me something,” Elizabeth said.
“Me too,” Samantha called.
Inside, the floor felt cool against my bare feet. I wrapped a stack of sandwiches in a paper towel. I heard Mama’s voice in the dining room. She was saying something about the tumor, about lymph nodes and chemotherapy. Why didn’t she ever tell me the things that mattered? I lingered in the corner near the refrigerator, holding myself still. I could see all three of them hunched over catalogs and newsletters, spread out among them on the table.
“My sister had this one,” Mrs. Teuffel said, tapping a picture with her finger. “You’d never know there was anything the matter.”
Mama studied the page and raised one eyebrow. “I don’t think so,” she said.
“Why not?” Lainey said.
“I’m just not going to buy into the commercialization of cancer,” Mama said, holding the catalog up in front of Mrs. Teuffel and Lainey. She sounded defensive, rehearsed. She cleared her throat and shrugged, “I’d just rather use one of those natural sea sponges I read about in some magazine.”
Lainey and Mrs. Teuffel exchanged glances.
“Have you looked into a group?” Mrs. Teuffel said.
“A group?”
“For support,” Mrs. Teuffel suggested. “No one can go through this alone.”
“I’m not alone,” Mama said. She arranged the magazines and pamphlets in front of her, pushing the stack back at them. “I have Nick. The girls.”
I leaned my face against the smooth wall, happy to hear her say our names, relieved that she didn’t feel alone. There was a long silence. Mrs. Teuffel chased a stray radish around her plate with her fork. Lainey folded open a catalog and set it in front of Mama.
“Frances, have you thought about a wig?” she asked gently.
“I guess I’ll have to,” Mama responded, “just in case.”
I stepped away from the wall, straining to be sure I had heard correctly. My knees felt stiff from standing so still. My heart pounded loudly in my ears. Mama with a wig? It didn’t make sense.
“Natural wigs are the best,” Mrs. Teuffel offered, leaning over to look, “like this one from China. Really good wigs are made with Chinese hair.”
Mama gasped. “Eight hundred dollars …”
“If you figure it in over a lifetime,” Mrs. Teuffel said, “that is not a lot of money.”
“That’s right,” Lainey said. “Think how much most women pay for a good haircut. If you paid thirty dollars, six times a year, you’d have it paid off in almost four years.”
“Then what?”
“You’ll have it forever.”
“I’m not going to wear a wig for the rest of my life,” Mama said.
“Of course not,” Lainey said, soothingly, “but you could keep it styled and ready for emergencies.”
Mama’s face furrowed. She seemed to have a different idea about what constituted an emergency. She started to speak and then stopped, looked as if she was searching around for something else to do or say. My legs were numb, my left foot asleep. I cleared my throat and waited for Mama to notice me lurking in the hall.
“Hey, sweetie,” she called, “what are you doing inside?”
“I’m hungry. Can I have a sandwich?”
“Of course,” Mama said, pushing her chair out from the table and joining me in the kitchen. “Take some fruit, too.”
She loaded my arms up with food and pressed me toward the door. I tried to get her to look at me, but her eyes were darting from the dining room to the countertop. I stepped onto the landing, the sun bright in my eyes, my skin stinging in the heat. Back at the blanket, Samantha was telling Elizabeth about how Jill Switt tanned her boyfriend’s name onto her bikini line using vinyl stick-on letters.
“Cool,” Elizabeth said.
“Not really,” Samantha cautioned, “they broke up.”
The bottoms of my feet were still cold from the kitchen floor. When I looked back at the house, I could see Mama’s shape against the glare in the window; she was washing dishes, her head turned toward her guests, the flash of her blond hair bobbing in conversation. Maybe I’d made it up. Everything I’d heard, the whole conversation seemed of another life.
“Hey Tilden, toss me an apple,” Nick called from the center of the lawn. He dropped the sprinkler by the maple tree and went out for a pass. I threw a small red apple at him, harder than I meant to, and hit him in the shoulder. He caught it in the crook of his arm and pretended to limp, clutching his upper body, as he walked over to the sprocket at the side of the house.
Samantha laughed and pulled apart an orange, passing around the slivers in even clumps of three. “He’s kinda nice, isn’t he?” she said, licking her arm from elbow to wrist to catch the juice.
With a sputter, then a hiss, the sprinkler rose up out of the lawn. Elizabeth and Samantha took off chasing the spray back and forth and leaping over the lowest part. Between sprints, Samantha adjusted her bathing suit, pulling it downward and snapping it under her bottom. Finally, Elizabeth stood still and let the spray hit her stomach, coming and going in both directions. They were laughing uncontrollably, their voices melding in the hot noon air. I covered my burned legs with a towel and sat as still as I could, imagining Mama in a long, black wig made of real Chinese hair.
That afternoon, when everyone had gone, I walked in on Mama doing her exercises in the pantry. She was bent over, her right arm rotating in a wide circle, a box of dried plums in her hand.
“Just a little circumduction,” she said casually. “How was your day?”
“Okay,” I said.
She put down the box, picked up a can of Campbell’s, and started over. I watched as she rotated her arm in the other direction. I studied her hair carefully—shiny with streaks of brown. It was looped under and clipped low at the back of her head with a wooden barrette. I stared at the pinkness of her part, trying to imagine her bare scalp.
“Are you going to lose your hair?” I blurted out finally.
“I might,” she said. “But it’s only temporary.” Once again, she wouldn’t look at me. She stopped and put the can on the shelf. “The Mosquitoes say we have enough hair cells to make many different heads of hair.”
She took a deep breath, her eyes cast downward along the floorboard. She seemed a million miles away.
“Will you have to wear a wig?” I asked.
“Not yet, Tilden.” Her voice was suddenly shaky. “But Mrs. Teuffel’s going to take me to get one to match my real hair just in case.”
I kicked the toe of my sneaker against the base of the wall, gently rocking the food on the shelves.
“Don’t worry,” Mama said, forcing a smile and catching my eye at last. “It’ll be kind of like having a makeover.”
BEAUTY
I hadn’t had a haircut with a name since Dorothy Hamill. And there I was, the night before my sixth-grade graduation, about to get an Artichoke. From Elizabeth. I’d gotten the idea to go short from a news story I read about a group of guys in the Midwest who shaved their heads in a show of support for a teammate with leukemia. Given notice, Mama would never have allowed that kind of cut—had planned, herself, to keep her hair as long as she possibly could. She liked hers best when it was twisted up the back. If she’d used more bobby pins, it could have been a Lobster Tail.
Elizabeth didn’t believe me when I first told her about the side effects of what the Mosquitoes were doing. I had to read out loud to her from the section under cancer and chemotherapy in Our Bodies, Ourselves as proof. Then, our pinkies linked in a promise, the way we’d have them when we were little, we made a pact to each cut the other’s hair after dinner. We voted over a selection of photos and diagrams from Seventeen and Young Miss and settled on the Artichoke because the top could be styled to spike or curl. The caption under the drawing said, For soft days and hard nights … the artichoke is the most versatile style around. I agreed to go first.
Elizabeth propped the diagram up on an empty chair and set out her tools. With her eyes narrowed in concentration, she combed my wet hair over my face, down past my chin and cut around the top of my head, just above the eyebrows. Slick brown pieces fell onto my legs and covered the floor around me like twigs. She hummed as she worked to the tune of “Piano Man.” Before long my hair was falling away from me in loose hunks. I could feel Elizabeth making mistakes, the sound of the scissors clanking fiercely, the blades cold against my head. It didn’t look anything like the artichoke I’d had at the Shaptaws. Not even upside down. Not even when I fluffed my hair with my fingers to make the top pieces stand up straight.
Afterward, she bent to the floor. “You want it?” she asked, gathering the longest pieces at one end and holding them out to me. “You could save it and make a braid.”
I knew Elizabeth would back out even before she started to justify herself. It had gotten late, the scissors were wet and beginning to jam. I locked myself in the bathroom and refused to come out. I wet down my cowlick and singed my bangs with a curling iron trying to get them to feather. In the mirror my head looked small, my eyes huge and hollow. Nothing like this ever happened to Elizabeth.
After awhile, Mama knocked on the door. “Tilden, honey, come on out,” she said. “Let’s have a look.”
“Never,” I said.
“What about graduation?” Mama asked.
“I’m not going.” I dunked my head under the running water and started over with the blow dryer.
“How short is it?” I heard Mama ask Elizabeth.
“Promise you won’t be mad,” she said. “I won’t.”
“Promise.”
“I promise,” Mama said.
“It’s pretty short,” Elizabeth said, “like a boy’s.”
“Tilden, what will make you feel better?” Mama called.
I told her that the only thing that would make me open the door was if she forced Elizabeth to get an Artichoke too.
“Will you come out if I get one?” Mama asked.
When I unlocked the door, Mama was waiting in the hall. “It looks pretty,” she said, reaching out to comb what was left of my bangs over to one side with her fingernails. She sat me down on the lid of the toilet and moved my hair back and forth under her hands. She pulled at some pieces near my neck. “We’ll just get Lainey to clean up these edges.”
Then, she called Elizabeth into the bathroom. “I want to tell you girls something,” Mama said, positioning herself between us and sitting on the edge of the tub. Elizabeth sat as far away as possible, on the counter near the sink, and kicked her heels against the cabinets.
“You’re perfect the way you are,” Mama continued, “don’t ever change anything.”
Mama said that focusing on beauty would distract us from what really mattered. It had always been her belief that beauty came in cycles. And that all women were beautiful in one of three ways: striking, classic, and inner. She said that to be strikingly beautiful meant that people would stop you on the street, do things for you that they might not otherwise do. “It is a beauty that elicits unusual responses,” she said. “On the surface striking might seem like the best kind of beauty, but really, it prevents understanding.”
Elizabeth gnawed at a hangnail, pulling it with her teeth until it bled.
“Don’t you wish for striking beauty,” Mama said, when she caught me staring at Elizabeth’s blond mane. She looked me right in the eye. “It will prevent people from seeing you.”
Classic beauty, on the other hand, was useful in that it told a great deal about a woman’s life. It meant that her lineage was reflected in her face and that over time, after she’d worn it through experience, it became her own. I remembered that Grandma had said that. Mama had come from a long line of classic beauties. Women who received their rewards later in life.
Elizabeth gazed at herself in the mirror, then over at me, looking for the resemblance. At twelve, she had already developed a reputation as a beauty. The TransAlt guys acted surprised each time she passed, as if the wind had been knocked out of them. Her blue eyes were set in close to her nose and when she smiled, her full cotton-candy pink lips stretched to expose one tilted front tooth. When we pressed our cheeks close, it was easy to see that together we shared Mama’s face. Apart, left to my own face, I felt separate, more a glint of Mama than actually part of her. I remembered overhearing Grandma say that Elizabeth had our father’s features. I stared at her, trying to tease out the parts of her face that were different from mine, looking for clues about him. Imagining him, all light and laughter, with stronger bones and thicke
r lobes.
Mama took her hair down from the twist at the back of her head and bent it up to see what an Artichoke might look like on her. She smiled at her reflection and then at me. “I’m going to ask Lainey to cut my hair, too. That way we’ll both have new looks when you start up at the junior high.”
Elizabeth looked impatient. “Can I go now?” she asked, her fingers drumming at her sides.
“Sure,” Mama said, dismissing her. Then, she turned to me and squeezed my arm. “Tilden, it isn’t about hair, you know. The only beauty to strive for is inner beauty,” she said. “That’s what matters over the long haul.”
• • •
Lainey came by at the end of her TransAlt shift. It was 9:00 o’clock, almost past our bedtime, and Elizabeth and I sat silently watching as Lainey quartered Mama’s ponytail with rubber bands and began sawing the hair just above the top band with the scissors. Little pieces sprang free. Mama pulled and measured each strand against her chin. I watched her face for disappointment. But she smiled the way she always did in the world, making it hard to know what she thought. At the end, Lainey was left holding a solid rope of Mama’s hair, like a tail. She dropped it in a plastic bag and set it aside. She glanced at the photo of the Artichoke in the magazine and went on to give Mama some layers, talking through each step. When she held up the mirror, Mama dipped her chin to each side.
“You have a wonderful line,” Lainey said. “You could even go shorter.”
Mama blew her hair out with the dryer, fuller at the top and longer at her neck.
“She looks like Mrs. Brady from TV,” Elizabeth whispered to me.
“No, she doesn’t,” I said. “It’s shorter.” To me, she looked the way the model in the magazine had looked, just the way I’d wanted my hair to look—perfect layers with a wave in back. Nothing ever came out right on me.
Lainey trimmed the jagged edges of my hair and painted my fingernails while Elizabeth sulked in the corner. It was almost eleven o’clock when Lainey left and Nick came upstairs to investigate. He appeared apologetic as if he was intruding. I watched his expression, waiting to find surprise in his face. Instead, he smiled big at Mama and kissed her hard on the neck.
