Price of the Haircut_Stories

by Brock Clarke

  “Thank you for teaching us a valuable lesson,” he said.

  “You’re welcome,” I said. At this, Sharon started crying again. I thought she was still crying about Torina and about the racist things she had just said and how I’d driven her to say them, and so I reached over the table and put my hand on her arm and said, “It’s OK, it’s OK,” but she started shaking her head. Sharon was still crying, but the crying was light, and I could see a smile breaking its way through the sobs. She was happy, or close to it, and I asked, “What is it? Why are you smiling? Is it because we’ve been misunderstood again?”

  She wagged her index finger at me, as if to say Yes, that’s it. You’ve hit the nail right on the head.

  “Dad, it’s like magic,” Katherine said. She leaned across the table and put her hand next to mine on her mother’s arm, and then Sam reached up (he was still sitting on Sharon’s lap) and put his hand on her cheek, and there we were, the three of us, laying our hands on Sharon, and for a moment she was like the Blarney Stone without the kissing.

  “What’s like magic?” I asked Katherine.

  “We are,” Katherine said.

  Aaron was still standing there, and clearly uncomfortable with this outpouring of family emotion, and so to avoid watching us, he kept turning back to his customers, as if to make sure they hadn’t forgotten that they were racists. But soon, Sharon quit crying and we took our hands off of her, and Aaron sat down at our table and said, “I have a proposition for you.”

  I knew what was coming next. Sure enough, there was a diner down the block—Mickey’s, whose owner and customers were known for their rabidly conservative politics, and Aaron wanted to us to teach them the kind of lesson we’d just taught at Salsa’s. So we went, the next week, and it happened to be the same week we had to put my mother in the nursing home, and so Mickey’s customers (AARP members, one and all) thought our argument about whether my mother would survive through the New Year and whether we could afford it if she did—thought it most timely and thought-provoking, and they pledged to update their living wills, right away. Then they hired us to go to the Friday fish fry at Saint Agnes’s church hall, except it wasn’t at all clear what we were supposed to do there.

  Sam felt this lack of direction deeply and kept asking, “What are we doing here?” When I couldn’t give him a good answer, he made a big, loud point of asking who the guy was on the cross (there was a crucifix on the hall’s south wall) and I said, “That’s Jesus,” and Sam happened to be in a particularly foul mood that night and said that Jesus was “stupid,” Jesus was “made up,” Jesus was “ugly,” and we kept shushing him and saying, “Even so, even so,” and the people at Saint Agnes’s thought this was a masterful sermon on the power of blind faith, and so on and so on. And while we still had our family problems, still couldn’t forget the ways in which we’d hurt each other and how our lives together hadn’t worked out the way they were supposed to—even so, as long as we were being misunderstood, we were happy, happier than we’d been in a long time. It was more than happy: we started feeling extraordinarily blessed in our misunderstandings, and we also ended up getting quite a reputation in our city, making an extra dollar or two, so much so that on our sixteenth wedding anniversary Sharon and I could afford a sitter for the kids and go to dinner at the Rio Bamba.

  The Rio Bamba was the nicest restaurant in town—all low lighting and red, plush, well-upholstered chairs, and waiters dressed to the nines. It was the first time we’d been there, the first time in over a year that we’d been to a restaurant without the kids, and it was also the first time we hadn’t been hired to go out to eat since we went to Tegucigalpa’s two months earlier. Sharon looked lovely, and I told her so, and she thanked me, but other than that, we didn’t seem to have much to talk about, and so we sat there in silence, and the silence became so deep and awful that I knew I had to say something, and so I told Sharon, “You look lovely.”

  “You already told me that,” she said. And then: “We were married sixteen years ago tonight.”

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “Do you remember what we promised each other that night?”

  I did: they were the standard vows—that we would always love, honor, and cherish—and I recited them at our wedding, and I recited them at the Rio Bamba, too, without any problem.

  “Did you mean what you said back then?” Sharon asked.

  “I did,” I told her. “I truly did.”

  “I did, too,” she said. “But what about now? Can you say the same thing now?”

  Oh, if there were ever a time when I needed a big public misunderstanding, then this was it. Because I knew the answer to Sharon’s question, and the answer was: No, I can’t say I’ll love you forever. I have no right to even talk about love, after what I’ve done to you; after what I’ve done to you, I’m not even sure what love is, anymore. But these are not the kinds of things you say to your wife on your sixteenth wedding anniversary, and so I let my teacherly instincts take over again, turned the question around on her, and asked, “Can you say the same thing now?”

  Sharon didn’t say anything, and neither did I. We just sat there and stared at each other, stared long and hard, as people do when trying to understand each other for the very first time.

  That Which We Will Not Give

  On Thanksgiving, when the Murray family gathered at the house on Wasson Road, there was always a time when—after the food had been served and consumed; after the table had been cleared; after the Murray women had washed the dishes, and the Murray men had sat at the table and wondered as a group why they had eaten, say, so much of the creamed onions when they didn’t even like creamed onions; after the Murray women had returned to the table, taking off their yellow rubber gloves (they wouldn’t wash a dish without first snapping on a pair of yellow rubber gloves) and, with their faces pinched, looking very much like physicians just after conducting a particularly unpleasant invasive exam; after each after-dinner proposal (to have another drink, to play a board game, to go see a movie, to take a walk, to do something) was made and then rejected—then and only then would one of the children ask, “Do you remember that Thanksgiving when Mom asked Dad for a divorce and he wouldn’t give it to her?”

  This was in Cincinnati, Ohio, on the east side of the city, in one of those formidable brick Victorian houses that you couldn’t dynamite off its foundation and that had pocket doors long since removed, for fear, maybe, of something being hidden behind them, and gas instead of wood fireplaces, because of the inevitable termites in the wood or soot buildup in the chimney or inconsistency in the heat. It was Mr. and Mrs. Murray’s house, the house in which their children, Dudley and Penelope (they were twins) and Winslow, had grown up. The Thanksgiving that Mrs. Murray had asked for a divorce and Mr. Murray refused to give her one, Penelope and Dudley were thirteen, and Winslow was five. That Thanksgiving, they’d eaten their meal, but Mrs. Murray and Penelope hadn’t cleared the table, and the turkey carcass and the untouched watery cranberry roll and half-eaten pumpkin and apple pies were still there in front of them, as if in reminder of some unfinished business. Throughout the dinner, Mrs. Murray had, at regular intervals, asked her husband for a divorce, and each time he had said no. Mrs. Murray had been asking for a divorce and Mr. Murray had been refusing to give her one for months and months, and the children knew this, knew also that their mother almost always got what she wanted, and so they had begun to view their parents’ divorce with a sense of grim inevitability, as if it were not a matter of if but when, which was why Dudley (he was always the impatient one and years later caused a big scene at the IGA by cursing at the cashier, who, Dudley claimed, was making the already-long line longer with her “fucking small talk”) finally asked, “Dad, why don’t you just give it to her?”

  At this, Mr. Murray—who was always playing fiery Tybalt or bloody Coriolanus or one of the tortured Richards or Henrys in his community theater’s production of this or that play by the Bard and, because of that,
had a taste for bombast and a distaste for clarity—stood up, pushed back his chair, and shouted, “Because a divorce is that which I will not give!” Everyone laughed at this, even Mrs. Murray, even Mr. Murray, who was not a man who laughed at himself: they laughed and laughed, and when they were done laughing, they assumed their normal post-Thanksgiving roles and Mrs. Murray didn’t ask for a divorce again, and indeed, divorce wasn’t ever mentioned in the family except at Thanksgiving, when they told the story.

  THE STORY COULD be different, depending upon who was telling it and which part of the story they chose to emphasize. Because, as mentioned, Mrs. Murray had been asking for a divorce and Mr. Murray had been refusing to give her one for months and months before that famous Thanksgiving dinner, and while Mr. Murray shouting, “Because a divorce is that which I will not give!” was the last word, the most definitive word, it was not the only word.

  For instance, there was the time, about two months before that Thanksgiving, when Mrs. Murray was asking Mr. Murray to give her that divorce and he refused, and this infuriated Mrs. Murray. And so she started throwing books at him, books that had been passed down in the family from generation to generation, heavy oversized clothbound books that no one had read and no one would ever read—Memories of a Grand Duchess, The Recollections of a Yankee Whaler, The History of the Ohio River Valley Coal Mining and Transport in Pictures. Mrs. Murray chased him from room to room, hurling these books at him as she ran, until she finally cornered him in the pantry, where Mr. Murray put his arms over his face and withstood the barrage until there were no more heavy books, only paperback romances that Mrs. Murray refused to throw at her husband.

  “Why?” Penelope asked at this moment in the story. She was sixteen at this point. “Why wouldn’t you throw the paperbacks at Dad?”

  “Because they were too small,” Mrs. Murray said. “Too soft. They wouldn’t have convinced your father to give me anything. Besides”—and here there was always a happy look on Mrs. Murray’s face—“I thought I might want to read those books again, and I didn’t want to ruin them by bouncing them off your father’s hard head.” At that, Mrs. Murray walked to her husband’s end of the table and rapped on his head with her knuckles, to prove just how hard it really was and how lucky her fragile Jacqueline Susanns and Danielle Steels were to not have been hurled at it.

  Penelope liked this part of the story—not because of the happy look on her mother’s face as she knocked on her father’s head, or that her father let her mother do it, with a smile that was so full of begrudgement that it couldn’t really be called a smile, but because Penelope had never been much of a reader, couldn’t remember the difference between a metaphor or simile, and in ninth grade had been demoted from the advanced to the regular English section at school, and this part of the story told her why and that the demotion needn’t trouble her. The image of her mother throwing those books at her father to no effect at all must have told her something about the uselessness of literature that she already knew or suspected, and every time Penelope heard this part of the story she felt less bad that she hated to read and swore anew that whatever she did when she grew up, it would not require reading: no, she would not pick up a book again, not ever, but would instead become, say, a dental hygienist, because she herself had perfectly straight, startlingly white teeth and felt so sorry for people who didn’t.

  THE FAMOUS STORY once, early on, almost got Winslow into trouble. He was in the fourth grade, only nine years old, and his class was to take a trip to the Indian burial mounds north of the city, the sort of trip that requires irrefutable proof of parental permission and emergency phone numbers and such. Winslow had been to the mounds twice before, and his mind had already focused on what was beneath the mounds—the bones and spirits of the noble Shawnee, and if, as the rumor had it, you stomped hard enough on the mounds, the Shawnee underneath would rise up and tell you to stop—and so he didn’t hear at first when his teacher asked for an emergency number, and so she had to ask it several times, and finally Winslow, unhappily pushing the ghosts of the Shawnee aside, shouted, “An emergency number is that which I will not give!”

  This stopped the class: they as a group looked at him in confusion, and so he began to explain about that famous Thanksgiving, and what his mother had asked for and what his father refused to give and what he had shouted. His fellow students seemed satisfied by the explanation—already Winslow knew that if one was going to survive as a student that one had better be satisfied by any explanation, no matter what it was or who was giving it—and drifted back into their own Indian mound reveries, but his teacher, Mrs. Wolfson, wasn’t so satisfied. Her face peeled back in dismay, and her nostrils—already piggish—flared into small cave openings, and suddenly she was more frightening than all the Shawnee mounds in southern Ohio, and Winslow said, “Aw, I was just kidding,” and then to distract her, he gave a series of emergency numbers, all of them made up on the spot. Mrs. Wolfson seemed grateful for the distraction and dutifully took down the numbers and never asked again about his family story. But even so, Winslow had the distinct impression that there was something wrong with his family and their story, and vowed never to speak of it again, and he also vowed to act as though it were not his story, and not his family telling it every Thanksgiving, after dinner. As far as Winslow was concerned, for a few minutes on the fourth Thursday of November he would be among strangers, strangers who were telling a story that had nothing to do with him.

  THEN THERE WAS the business with the ties. Before she’d started hurling books at her husband, Mrs. Murray had, for a month or so, worn his ties. Because Mr. Murray had a huge disdain—a physical revulsion, really—for women who wore ties, and refused to patronize restaurants where the waitresses donned them as part of their uniform, and once, during one of his plays—a modern interpretation of As You Like It in which Rosalind pretended to be a male bond analyst in a three-piece suit who has drinks after work at the Yale Club—the actress playing Rosalind adjusted and fiddled with her double Windsor knot so obsessively that Mr. Murray (he was playing the usurper, Duke Frederick, who, in the new version of the play, was one of the duplicitous higher-ups at Goldman Sachs) began making involuntary gagging noises and had to run off the stage in the middle of the third act.

  “Was it because you thought she was a lesbian?” Dudley always asked at this point in the narrative. He was the type of boy, and then man, who asked questions and indeed conducted normal conversation as though he were an investigative journalist or a combative cross-examining lawyer. “Are you saying that you hate lesbians?”

  “No, that’s not the issue at all,” Mr. Murray always said, but then he never did say what the issue was.

  In any case, when Mr. Murray refused to give his wife the divorce she wanted, his wife started wearing his ties—the broad-striped old-school ties from the old school he never actually attended; the paisley power ties he wore to the monthly regional-manager meetings for First Bank of Ohio; the ancient-looking monochromatic wool ties that his Anglo-Saxon forefathers probably wore while herding sheep or shoveling peat or some such thing. This went on for two months. Mrs. Murray wore the ties everywhere—to her job as director of charity and giving at the Episcopal diocese, to restaurants and cocktail parties, even to bed—and Mr. Murray never said a word against the practice. It’s true that he seemed to have lost his appetite and fifteen pounds over those two months, and it’s also true that when his wife started wearing ties to bed, he stopped sleeping and in the morning you’d find him at the kitchen table, pouch-eyed and on his fifth cup of coffee, asking, “Who knows what time it is?” But still, he never spoke out against it or denied his wife access to his tie rack, and when she had worn the final, rattiest frayed tie in the collection, she began throwing books at him instead and never wore his ties again, and for that matter, it had been years and years since he had even seen her wear a shirt with a collar. When Mr. Murray pointed this out, in the years after the famous Thanksgiving dinner, Mrs. Murray would once again
rise from her chair and go to her husband’s end of the table and they would make a big mock wrestling match out of her trying to yank off his tie (all the Murray men wore ties to Thanksgiving dinner, even when they were Murray boys) and him trying to prevent her, and this, of course, made everyone laugh, too.

  DESPITE BEING BOMBARDED with books and terrorized by neckties, Mr. Murray became quite fond of the story, and found, after several Thanksgivings had gone by after the first one, that he could not help taking the lead in telling it, the same way some men can’t help telling the story of how they survived the Bataan Death March or why they stopped voting in presidential elections or how they nearly became the first man to invent, copyright, can, and mass-market the baked bean. In his telling, Mr. Murray omitted the ties and books, and began simply by telling everyone how much he had loved Mrs. Murray from the first time he saw her, how beautiful she was in her wedding dress, how he was so lucky to be married to her (at this point in the narrative, Mrs. Winslow smiled at her husband, then excused herself and left the dining room), and then skipped right to the part where Dudley had asked, “Dad, why don’t you just give it to her?” and Mr. Murray had responded, “Because a divorce is that which I will not give!”

  Mr. Murray would then notice that Winslow had fallen fast asleep, head down on the table and drooling. For him, his father shouting “Because a divorce . . .” seemed more like an alarm clock than a call to arms. And not a very effective alarm clock, either, because Winslow stirred and moaned, but didn’t awake: it was as though he heard his father faintly, from a great distance, as if it were part of someone else’s dream calling to his own. No, the thing that always woke Winslow was not his father shouting what he shouted, but his brother slapping him hard in the back of the head and saying, “Wake up,” and then slapping him again.

  It should be said that while Winslow’s nickname was Win, his brother’s nickname was Dud, and Dud had always resented Win because of it. But the story of brotherly antagonism is familiar and overlong; we won’t lengthen it here, except to say that the boys fought, and Penelope tried to bring peace to the table, and Mr. Murray sighed through his nose and regarded Winslow sadly. He had no worries about Dud, his older son, who listened closely and carefully to the story no matter how many times he’d already heard it, and who even chanted the famous words along with his father when the time came. No, Dud would be just fine. It was Win—skinny, distracted, sleepy, bored—that Mr. Murray was worried about. Clearly, this story didn’t mean to his younger son what it meant to the father himself, the way a baked bean might be a diamond to the almost baked-bean baron, but just a baked bean to his almost baked-bean heir.