Leonard had a narrow face with plain Midwestern features. His mouth was tiny and unremarkable except for the fact that it was always in motion. A few freckles dotted the bridge of his nose and looked like they had been painted on for a musical performance in which he was to play a hillbilly. If it hadn’t been for his eyes, two green pinpoints of flickering intensity, you might have missed him entirely. They were so bright, they made his whole head seem bright and biggish, sitting atop a narrow set of shoulders. His eyes were what held him in place, as if the sharpness of his gaze made him appear more visible to others, more present. The way those eyes could dart about the room and flit from surface to surface made it seem as though his life had depended upon his ability to take in every single detail, assess every stitch of your outfit, calculate the distance to each exit and the time it would take to get there. He did have the most adorable eyelashes I’d ever seen on a boy, long and silky and dark, but then he may have been wearing some product.
“I see you,” he said to my reflection in the mirror, which naturally made me crouch to the floor and then drag myself into the kitchen.
I had to warn my mother. I felt it was my duty to tell her that I had a very bad feeling, the same feeling I’d had a few years ago when Dad took up with Chrissie Bettinger, an event that of course led to my parents’ divorce and to the subsequent destruction of our entire family. Nana Hertle always tried to convince me that I possessed psychic abilities. I told her I didn’t believe in such things. But when I realized that I might have prevented my father from running off if only I had heeded my nagging premonitions, I began to wonder whether perhaps I did have a special power to foretell the future after all. If only I had said something at the time. So just to be on the safe side, after Leonard was settled into his makeshift basement bedroom and out of earshot, and Mom was back upstairs in the kitchen, I grabbed her arm and said, “Can’t you see it? He’s like a freak of nature. He’s from another planet. I mean, what’s he wearing on his feet?”
“Phoebe, let go of my arm,” she said, narrowing her eyes and putting on a very cool voice. “They’re a kind of sandal. I think they call them huaraches. And you don’t know. Maybe they’re popular with the boys where he comes from.”
“Where? On Mars?”
My mother said I was pure evil and she refused to listen to another word. To get me out of her sight, she instructed me to deliver a handful of fresh towels to Leonard.
He was lying on his new bed in his basement lair. The aforementioned huaraches were kicked off, and he was gazing up at the system of pipes and wires suspended from the rafters as though he were looking at a field of shimmering stars on a summer night.
“So cool. Right? I’m going to call it ‘my boxed set.’ Get it? Boxed. Set.”
“Yeah,” I said without the slightest inflection. “I get it.”
“It’s neato.”
I felt I ought to explain to Leonard why “neato” was a word he needed to drop from his vocabulary. If he expected to make friends during his stay in Neptune, I told him, he couldn’t talk like that. He just stared at me like I had something stuck to my face.
Finally I said, “What?”
“Nothing. I was just wondering if you’ve considered a career in television news broadcasting. You have the ‘on-air’ face for it. Not exactly the hair, but definitely the face.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. He had puffed up his pathetic chest while making his brilliant diagnosis, as if to make himself appear larger or more important. But he had the puny rib cage of a kid who had survived early illness. If I had had the presence of mind, I would have responded right away by saying something brutally frank. I might have explained to him why I would never in a million years consider handing out bad news on a daily basis to an unsuspecting nation while wearing a cheerful face, a plunging neckline, and a dated hairstyle. It was a hideous idea. The fact that my hair color at the time was magenta and my left nostril was pierced with a garnet should have convinced anyone with eyesight and half a brain that I had plans, and those plans did not include an “on-air” face.
But Leonard had just arrived from Mars, so perhaps he didn’t understand the signals, customs, and facial expressions of the inhabitants of planet Earth. I decided to let it go. I opted instead to stomp up the stairs and in so doing express my impatience with the whole conversation. At the same time, I could get as far away from him as I could manage in a house so small and cramped. I slammed the door and retired to my room to read Madame Bovary. As Emma Bovary went careening around the streets of Rouen in the back of a closed carriage, making mad and passionate love to Monsieur Léon, I silently made a vow to myself never to speak to Leonard again, because as anyone could see, he was a loser.
two
OUR FIRST MEAL together was a form of early-twenty-first-century torture. Over spaghetti and meatballs, Leonard tried to figure out the situation between my parents. Why were they no longer together? Where was Dad living now that they had separated? What happened to make him leave? Was it actually a divorce? Were they planning to get back together? Mom tried to deflect each one of Leonard’s questions.
“He’s a missing person.”
“Don’t ask.”
“Could we change the subject?”
“More meatballs?”
“Enough.”
When Leonard persisted, she decided to take another tack.
“You know the way a snail abandons its shell?” she said, spooning a second helping onto Leonard’s plate whether he liked it or not. “Well, that’s your uncle. Only he moved way faster than a snail. And he wasn’t alone.”
Whenever Mom talked about my father, she never mentioned the word “divorce”; it was against her Catholic religion. But then, it wasn’t her style to say much about anything—for example, she didn’t go around explaining to people why Chrissie Bettinger, a girl whom she had given every opportunity and had housed under her own roof, ran off with her husband. Not that she had to explain a thing to the folks in Neptune; everyone knew the whole story.
For a while, Mom was big news and the regular customers of Hair Today salon were privy to a ready supply of fresh details about the breakup. But even after all the screaming and the fighting, after that morning when we woke to find all of Dad’s belongings sitting in a pile out on the front lawn, after all the lawyers had served the legal papers and the whole thing was officially over, Mom fought against the idea that she was the type of person who could get a divorce. If asked, she said she was “separated.” She once told Deirdre and me that if word got out about the divorce, it would ruin her as a hair stylist. But really, word was out, and she was in denial.
There are photographs of my mother from when she was a younger version of herself, and no matter what was going on, she always managed to smile for the camera. She smiled as she entered the room with the knotty-pine paneling; she smiled as she looked adoringly at her father, who was holding up a raw steak and wearing a KISS THE COOK apron; she smiled when she was caught with pink curlers in her blue-black hair and not a hint of makeup; she smiled in her wedding dress standing against an obviously fake autumnal backdrop; she smiled as she pointed to the Motel 6 outside Phoenix where she and Dad stayed on a cross-country road trip; and she smiled as she sat by the ocean with pint-size versions of me and Deirdre playing in the background.
In each one of those pictures, it was plain to see she had no idea that her life would later become such a sad and sorry soap opera. Back in those days, when she was still drop-dead gorgeous and full of potential, she probably woke up each morning, put on her makeup, fixed her hair, got dressed, had places to go, stuff to look forward to, and plenty of things to smile about. But by the time I came along, smiling was how she’d trained herself to meet every situation, no matter what. Smiling had become a habit. No, smiling was more than a habit for my mother; it was who she was.
I knew other mothers, mothers of girls my age, who had fabulous lives, working husbands, nice houses, clothes, cars, Cuisinarts and m
icrowaves, the whole split-level deal, and quite honestly they didn’t smile half as much as my mother did. Even after my father announced that he was leaving us and taking up with Chrissie Bettinger, Mom kept smiling. And she smiled long after he was gone.
“It’s okay, Aunt Ellen,” Leonard said, leaning over and fingering the diamond center of her wedding ring. “I guess it kinda turned out different for all of us. How many carats is this, anyway?”
I can’t remember the last time my mother cried, but right there at the kitchen table over a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, tears came streaming down her face. She was quiet about it. No sobs or choking back. It was as if Leonard had found the on/off switch to her tears. And no one was more surprised than Deirdre and me. We both sat there with our mouths hanging open. I think if I hadn’t been chewing and trying to swallow a meatball, I would have burst out crying myself. But as it happened, I didn’t want to add the Heimlich maneuver to our dinnertime activities, so I just closed my mouth and kept chewing as if nothing were wrong. Deirdre, on the other hand, excused herself from the table, went upstairs, and didn’t come back.
“I’m sorry,” Mom said into her paper napkin. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to … It’s just … I don’t know. I’m exhausted. This week and all. There’s been so much. I don’t usually … Why am I explaining?”
“My mother used to cry at holidays,” Leonard offered as a way of comforting Mom and making her feel like it wasn’t anything to apologize about. “Also anniversaries.” And then as an afterthought, he added, “I miss her. A lot.”
We all just sat there missing people who weren’t there. Then Leonard sat straight up in his chair and let his eyes pop open wide. He had an idea.
“Hey, wait a minute. Is it like the anniversary of something between you and my uncle What’s-his-name?”
Mom looked up, squinted, and then blinked a few times like she was trying to see something very far off without her glasses. And then there it was, clear as if it had unexpectedly appeared on the horizon. We could see her seeing it—the date. Twenty years ago, almost to the moment, my mother had met my father.
Mom’s eyes filled up with tears again, and she was unable to go on.
Leonard turned to me and in a voice that mixed urgency with unctuousness asked if we had any vodka in the house. Vodka? Why would we need vodka? I didn’t get it. But then the next moment, I found myself standing on a chair in the dining room, turning the key of the liquor cabinet and pulling down a bottle of Smirnoff. This better be good, I thought.
When I came back into the kitchen, Leonard was standing at the kitchen sink with a head of iceberg lettuce in his hands. He was tearing away three of the large, crisp outer leaves and rinsing them under running water. He then laid these pale-green half-moons on the drain board and tamped each one dry with a paper towel. He grabbed a few ice cubes from the freezer and plunked them one by one into the lettuce cups.
“Thanks,” he said, grabbing the Smirnoff from my hand. He poured a couple of shots of vodka over the ice in one of the leaf cups and then handed it over to Mom. “I call it a Titanic, because of the iceberg lettuce. You drink the vodka, suck on the ice, and then eat the lettuce. It’s fabulous. And refreshing. Try it.”
Mom looked incredulous as she pursed her lips to take the first sip. I thought the whole thing was insane, but I had to admit that the cocktail had already worked its first miracle—Mom had stopped crying. She was sitting there rolling around the taste of vodka and staring down at the little lake of spirits cupped in the lettuce while the ice cubes bobbed and clicked in the palm of her hand. Leonard turned back to the counter and began to fill the other two lettuce cups with water from the tap. When he was done, he handed me one of them and took the other for himself.
“Cheers,” he said. “Yours and mine are nonalcoholic. For obvious reasons. Think Deirdre would want one?”
“Definitely not,” I said.
All three of us sat there sipping our iceberg cocktail. I felt like something out of Alice in Wonderland.
But, of course, that was just the beginning.
* * *
Before the end of Leonard’s first month with us, he started working at the salon. He said it had always been his dream to work in the beauty business, and he couldn’t believe his luck when Mom asked him to sit at the front desk, answer the phones, and make appointments. Since school hadn’t started yet and Leonard hadn’t made any friends in the neighborhood (and it was doubtful that he would), there was nothing to keep him from spending his free time at the salon, learning the customers’ names, and expanding his duties to include tasks that were, as he described them, “up-front and hands-on.”
Right from the get-go, he acted as if he owned the place. He whistled show tunes as he cheerfully swept up the fuzzy, mouse-colored clumps of old-lady hair that littered the salon floor. He reached his fingers under the antiquated drying helmets and said with trumped-up authority: “Feels like you could stand a few more minutes, Mrs. Mixner.” He took the money at the till and made change, coffee, and small talk. He downloaded easy-listening versions of pop songs, burned CDs, and piped them through a brand-new sound system that he himself installed. He even took it upon himself to listen to the long list of ailments, infirmities, and family complaints from women five times his age.
I knew all of Mom’s customers far more intimately than I cared to admit. If she was over sixty, lived within a fifty-mile radius, and could still pick up a phone to make an appointment, I knew all about her—and not just the pitch and tint of her hairdo or the cut of her fancy housecoat. No. I could also tell you the cast of her ongoing personal drama, the make and model of her car, her date of birth, the last time she had sex, the name of the guy she last had sex with, her favorite TV program, her least-favorite TV program, her movie star of choice, as well as the nicknames and habits of each and every one of her grandchildren. Despite the fact that I preferred to spend my spare time reading books and losing myself in the works of writers like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, these old gals with their high hair and caked-on makeup were, for better or worse, the universe into which I had been born. They were my people.
Leonard was now ensconced in that world and had taken over the very job that I used to have at the salon, going so far as to wear my old smock and use my old telephone headset. Whereas I generally hated anything to do with the salon and couldn’t care less about the women who came and went like clockwork, Leonard loved the whole scary scene and took to the customers like hair on fire. This was as close to his idea of dying and going straight to heaven as he was likely to find on this earth.
To the average person I suppose the Hair Today salon would not seem that bad. It was just a run-of-the-mill beauty parlor outfitted in shades of dusty pink and slate gray and operating out of what used to be our garage. Nothing fancy, but not that shabby either. Back in the mid-nineties, after Mom had the place gutted, expanded, insulated, and decorated within an inch of its life, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to connect the whole shebang to the house by a snazzy breezeway. To be able to dart back and forth between the main house and the salon on a rainy day without getting her hairdo mussed justified the added expense of jalousie windows and a shingled roof; and since we weren’t exactly the outdoorsy types, not one of us missed having a backyard.
As you walk in the front door of the salon, right behind the reception desk there are three drying helmets. Elderly women, rolled tight and netted, get parked there so their hairdos can cook to a crisp along with their brains. Two beauty chairs sit smack in the middle of the salon—one operated by my mother, the other one reserved for the memory of Leslie Shilts, a woman with big hair and overdecorated fingernails who used to show up twice a week until she broke with Mom and opened her own place in Avon.
The décor of the salon is modern with a nod to the good old days. The atmosphere is businesslike but friendly. The overall effect, despite the ozone-destroying hair spray and the exposure to certain chemicals that could b
lind a lab rat, is always to the customer’s liking. Our job is, after all, to make the customer’s idea of beauty come to life right before her very eyes—no matter what. If she comes in with a picture of, say, Nicole Kidman and begs us to make her look like that, Mom nods and directs her to the shampoo station. Mom never mentions the fact that Nicole is thirty years younger and still has hair to work with. She never says, “Lady, have you looked in the mirror lately?” She just smiles and gives it her best shot. That’s what she’s paid to do. Usually the customer leaves there satisfied even if she doesn’t end up looking anything like Ms. Kidman. Everybody loves to be fussed over.
Originally the place was a beauty parlor known as The Beauty Spot. Then in the late nineties Mom came back from a big convention in Las Vegas with the bright idea to refer to the place as a “salon” and call it Hair Today. For a few weeks, everyone oohed and aahed over the neon signage out front and Mom’s new leatherette smock. But soon enough life went back to the way it had always been. The only change seemed to be the way we answered the phone, which went something like this:
“Hair Today. How can I help you?”
“What?”
“I said, Hair Today. How can I help you?”
“I musta dialed the wrong number. Wait. This The Beauty Spot?”
“We used to be The Beauty Spot. We’re Hair Today now.”
“Why? What’s wrong with The Beauty Spot?”
“Nothing. We just changed names … Mrs. Bustamante? That you?”
“Yeah. Who’s this?
“It’s me. Phoebe.”
“Well, honey, why didn’t you say so up front? I’m just calling to say that I’m gonna be late for my three o’clock.”
After a two-year stint as Hair Today’s receptionist and part-time shampooer, I decided that the time had come for me to move on. I was sick to death of being an accomplice in destroying the ozone layer with a can of hair spray just so Mrs. Weinstein could feel secure beneath a hardened helmet of hair for her granddaughter’s bat mitzvah.
Absolute Brightness Page 2
