I thought I saw how it worked: “The pieces from the bottom have farther to go, so they end up longer?”
“Exactly,” she said, looking pleased. More than once she had lit on the fact that we were visual thinkers: if you gave us directions to your house, we would map the path in our heads, a rat’s maze seen from above. When Leslie described to me a dress she had seen in the store—“strapless, with a Juliet neckline, a fitted waist, and a gored skirt”—the dress would come together as she spoke, each phrase adding a detail, until it hung there, whole, in my mind.
Still, it was one thing to visualize a task, and yet another to do it. By the time I lifted the scissors to begin, my hands were damp with sweat. I had noticed, in my short life, that people were unduly sensitive about their hair. I remembered the acts of vengeance I had wanted to wreak on a certain hairdresser back home. She’d been asked for a trim and had delivered a pixie. At least she and I had gone to different homes at night.
Leslie must have sensed my jitters. “Don’t worry,” she said, turning away from the mirror and laying a hand on my arm. “I can’t afford to get it cut in a salon. You can’t do any worse than I would do myself.”
Reassured, I started in back, lifting up a section as she had showed me. How short to make that first cut? For this, people went to beauty school. I took a deep breath and dove in with the blades. The scissors were loose and dull, so I had to make a couple of sawing attacks. I snipped further to make the ends straight, avoiding Leslie’s eyes in the mirror, but by then the hair had slipped a little in my fingers. When I let the hank go, it fell into a jagged staircase.
“I don’t know,” I told her, looking at the damage. “This might not go well.” I used the future tense out of delicacy.
“I don’t care,” Leslie said, a heartfelt dash in her voice. “It’s only hair. It’ll grow back. I wear a cap at the shipyards anyway.”
Her mood was infectious. A haircut wasn’t an epic event. Besides, the mention of the pinched family finances had struck a chord in me. I lifted another section and continued, picking up small advantages as I went along: if you pulled the scissors toward you with each snip, the hair was drawn into the blades and cut cleanly. Still, it was an awkward business. I nicked my fingers a few times. When I combed, I put the scissors in my mouth, and when I cut, I held the comb in my teeth, and soon my tongue was matted with hair. When I finished, there seemed to be more hair on the floor than Leslie had on her head. I had given her a choppy shag, the kind of cut little girls give their dolls.
“It looks pretty good,” Leslie said, turning this way and that.
I stood back and chewed my lip while she dug into a drawer for a hand mirror. After some jockeying, she got a look at the back. Her eyebrows lifted. She pushed at her hairline with her free hand.
“It looks terrible,” I said, the last word nearly a moan.
Leslie laughed. “Oh, well. Next time it’ll be better.”
“Next time? There isn’t going to be a next time!”
“Why? Didn’t you like doing it?”
I considered this for a moment and decided I had liked it quite a lot—the concentration it required, the pleasure when a section fell smoothly. “But look at the mess I made.”
“It’s not so bad, really,” Leslie said, scrunching her hair in the mirror. “It just needs time to settle in.”
Slowly, Leslie was alerting me to the subtleties of personal grooming. I had been a tomboy most of my life, and hadn’t worn a dress since the first day of kindergarten, but in those years the idea of beauty, of improving ones looks in minute ways, was like a faint signal coming in.
It was a signal I must have heard one afternoon, standing in front of the living-room windows at my mother’s house, looking out at the river—that familiar green canyon. I was twelve, and it was dusk, and so the view outside was fading and my reflection was beginning to sharpen in the glass. I had always disliked my profile, and now I turned to the side, studying my nose, the length and slight knob, which I found displeasing.
Earlier that year, leafing through a book on Roman history, I came across a photo of a cameo dug up from Pompeii, a young woman’s head and throat carved in bas-relief. That face rang a bell. I took the book to the bathroom and held it up to the mirror, turning my face to the side so our profiles were twinned in the glass. I had to admit we weren’t pretty (though she might have gone over better in her day). Our noses sloped off at an angle that seemed insufficiently acute and gave us, I thought, a doleful, insistent air.
But how did we know beauty when we saw it? Leslie had told me about Greek theorems for the ideal proportions of a building, the relationship of column height to roof slope. They were based on human proportion. What we liked in a body, a face, was what we liked. It couldn’t be explained.
Now I stared into the plate-glass window and tried to imagine a nose that would suit me better—something narrower, I thought, perhaps an upturned nubbin. But when I tried to envision this new nose, I got confused: all the parts had to work in tandem. You couldn’t just cut and paste. Then, suddenly, in a flash, it came to me: God made my nose. It must have been the best nose for me.
For whole precious moments I swung in the hammock of faith, and I wonder if what I felt, for those moments of suspended judgment, was as much about God as it was some version of my mother’s native optimism. It was a brief stoppage, at least, of the adolescent’s endless second-guessing. Just then—alone in a quiet house—it was a relief to think that nothing more could be done, that there was nothing to strive for. To be powerless was to have no regrets.
Then a dreary thought pulled me up short: I had seen a lovely baby in the supermarket just that week—caramel eyes and a mobile face—and then she turned and revealed a port-wine stain from forehead to cheek. Beauty wasn’t fair, or parceled out with any logic. I left the window, more bitter than when I began.
My mother got her share of my scouring gaze. On the weekends, she danced around the kitchen, flat-footed, singing songs from Casey Kasem’s Top 40 while I sighed and cringed. That age might have been called the End of Mercy. It shames me now to remember how ruthless I was with my mother’s pride. She was looking less and less the earthy hippie: she dressed in plaid skirts and flats, wore her hair short and permed. To look at her, no one would have guessed she once lived out of a truck. Still, I began a campaign against her scrubbed face and simple outfits, and out of some supreme restraint, she didn’t react to my barbs. Instead, she let them hang out in the air, hoping, perhaps, that I might recognize my tone and relent.
I didn’t. At all costs, I wanted her varnished, like my schoolmates’ mothers—ranchers’ wives who leaned toward peroxide and blue eyeshadow. Early in junior high, I managed to coax my mother into the bathroom for a makeover.
“See, you just need a little bit of color,” I said, guiding her to the toilet seat and fingering the hair away from her face. I swirled pink blusher on the apples of her cheeks, then stood back to survey my work: “You look better already!” My mother stared up at me, skeptical, brows lifted, head tilted to the side—the look we wear when we ask someone to be our mirror. I gave her a coat of thick, clotted mascara, my hand braced on her cheekbone, and pronounced her improved.
My mother wore that makeup dutifully for months, though she disliked the effect and the primping added time to her usual morning routine: shower, black coffee, a quick brush through her hair. I’m sure now that she would rather have spent those minutes staring out the window at the river. Instead, she went into our tiny bathroom—damp, with northern exposure—and leaned toward the mirror, an expression of mild bafflement on her face as she worked with the applicators and brushes.
My mother’s confusion filled me with a sense of expertise and pride at my influence. I was accustomed to her competence. When she dreamed of a stone pathway leading from the house to the river, it wasn’t long until she had selected the slate, found the quarry, and started hauling and setting the thick stones. So I took a certain satisfaction
from watching her squint at the foggy mirror, chin tipped down to survey her lashes, the way she glanced up now and then to see if I approved. I even convinced myself that she liked the results, but years later, when I no longer considered her my hostage in the wars of adolescence and when her makeup had grown dusty in a bathroom drawer, I asked my mother something that had been nagging me. “Why did you wear it? That makeup. You never liked it.”
She cocked her head and considered me for a moment: “Oh, to make you feel powerful.”
During the school year, while I was living with Mother and Jim, my dad and Leslie often moved from one city to another. They never pulled up stakes during the summers, mindful of my need to land somewhere for the two months of my visit, but their courtesy gave these shifts of city an unreal edge. I would leave one apartment, its arrangements fixed in my mind, and, upon arrival months later, discover we had a new address—the same watercolor prints, stereo, and director’s chairs arranged neatly in strange rooms. Until I tried it myself, during my college years, I thought moving a household was mainly a feat of imagination, an airy process by which the beloved objects floated across cities, up stairs, and into new positions.
When I arrived for the summer after eighth grade, my father pulled up at an apartment in East San Jose, a two-bedroom place on the top floor of a stucco building. (The plans for moving to Kentucky had been scrapped, never to be mentioned again.)
Since I had been expressing an interest in drama, my father enrolled me in a musical-theater program, housed in a run-down auditorium in the heart of the city. The parts were to be cast by audition, and my father helped me work on a song, the title tune from The Wiz, which we had seen on Broadway earlier that summer when we went to visit my Grandma Leila. I aspired to the kind of effortless verve that Lena Home displayed on the original-cast recording. I played that album over and over, taking note of where she added a trill, where she backed off. I might as well have been studying Van Gogh’s brush strokes. My voice wasn’t up to the rendition. I had a tendency to look up and raise my brows when I pitched for the high notes, as if they were physically out of reach; I did a growling business in the lower registers, which I tried to pass off as vibrato.
When the audition day neared, I did a run-through for my father in the living room. He sat down in a canvas butterfly chair with a cup of milky coffee and gave me his attention. “Okay, let’s pretend this is the real thing. Walk on from the wings.”
I got a knot in my stomach, but I launched in anyway, and by the end I was quite charmed with myself. I even affected a little finger snap to jazz it up.
“That’s good,” my dad said. “Your voice is strong, but I think you’re pushing it a little.”
“What do you mean, ‘pushing it’?”
“It’s okay to sound like what you are.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“A twelve-year-old with a damn good voice—”
“Thirteen.”
“What?”
“I’m thirteen.”
“God, is that right? Okay. Thirteen. Now try it again.”
The day of the audition, my father drove me to the theater.
“You nervous?” he asked, clapping a hand down on my leg so hard it made me wince.
I was beyond nervous; I felt damned. I looked out the window at kids stepping into strip-mall doughnut shops with their mothers and wondered if there was some way to swap fates. But the car sped on and I remained inside it: hot window glass, Lou Rawls crooning on the radio, my stomach in a burning knot. After a while, the dread took on a life of its own, and I lost track of what had caused it. Were we going to a funeral? To the hospital for some horrible operation? Then I remembered. We were headed for the theater. I was to sing my song.
A young woman was passing out numbers at the theater door, and my father and I waited in the seats while dozens of kids got up, one by one, to sing a scrap from “Somewhere over the Rainbow” (the ingénue hopefuls) or “Gary, Indiana” (little freckled boys with tumorlike knees). My father was sizing them up, but he knew better than to engage me in conversation. I was fixated on counting the number of bars the kids got through before they were dismissed by a voice from the balcony.
When my number was called, I took my place in what seemed like a half acre of worn hardwood, facing rows of jostling kids and the darkened balcony. I declined the services of the accompanist, who started everyone off in a murderous key, and sang a cappella, surprised from the first note at the voice coming out of my chest. Fear made me bellow. I cut the warbles and trills and went straight for the middle of the notes, hoping not to lose my way. When I got a gruff “Thanks” from the rafters, I bolted like a dog cut from its leash and joined my dad in the seats.
“Ooh, cat! You kicked butt,” he whispered, slapping me five down low between the armrests.
I sang well enough that day to get called back for one of the leads in The Music Man, but the second audition was a minor disaster and I ended up being cast as a dancer, which suited me fine. While I was tap-dancing to “Marion the Librarian,” my father and Leslie were working on the assembly line. I had only vague notions of how they passed their days. I had seen the outside of the plant once or twice, a massive building the size of several airplane hangars. Inside, I knew there were belts and conveyors, and that the cars went by at a dizzying pace. My father always spoke with gratitude of the old hands who helped him when he was a new hire, showing him time-saving tricks, picking up the slack until he got up to speed. I heard in his voice how good it was to have a friend in that place. And there were always stories about the foremen, who could make their lives difficult in small but important ways: refusing to release them for bathroom breaks, saying they couldn’t find a floater, or bucking to get them transferred to a tougher part of the line.
My father’s involvement in union politics made his position delicate. There were plenty of fervent anticommunists on the line. I was conscious that he had to play his hand carefully. He spoke sometimes of his “enemies,” and that word took on an ominous ring in the context of massive machinery. Now and then, cars slid off into the pits, their wheels having been locked in protest against line speed-ups or forced overtime. I imagined my father picking his way amid the conveyor belts, pressurized hoses, and bins of parts. It seemed like an easy place to have an accident.
For a long time I imagined Leslie and my father working side by side, but then I learned that she was assigned to a different part of the plant. By my father’s report, she learned quickly the very tasks that had given him trouble. He always spoke fondly of this, her skill with a rivet gun. I think those were good years in their lives. He and Leslie seemed very much in love, and they were comrades—doing common work, making equal pay. Together they were able to buy their first house, the old industrial worker’s dream, made real now by two salaries instead of one.
That San Jose house didn’t have a lot of character, but it had high ceilings and good light, three small bedrooms, and a kitchen, dining, and living room, all without walls. Leslie applied her considerable design talents to maximizing the space. She had a few pieces of nice furniture, handed down from her mother, and she would stand in the center of the living room with her hands on her hips, trying to decide how to “reconfigure things.” This task was approached with a kind of theoretical rigor. Rather than trying to change the way we used the house, she would change the house to fit our habits. If the laundry was piling up beside the tub, she would search for a hamper that fit in the bathroom. The television would be moved from bedroom to living room and back, following the family’s viewing trends. She favored geometric prints, abstract art, uncluttered surfaces. I had the feeling, watching her over the years, that there was a perfect arrangement for the furniture, and that one day we would find it. I say we, because I was quickly brought into the game, asked to help her shove the couch around or offer my opinions on wallpaper. I relished the sense of possibility she inspired: with a keen eye and good judgment, we could make the house into a pla
ce of function and style.
That mattered a lot to me. Though I was happily surprised that Leslie and my father had managed to rise into the ranks of homeowners and the house was nicer than I could have hoped for, the neighborhood was a bit of a disappointment. On the corner next to us was a run-down timber-frame house set back under a fringe of pines, which might have been a holdover from the days when San Jose was all orchard land. At night, shouts rang from the open windows, the man’s voice rising in pitch until he drowned the woman out. I once caught sight of what I thought were pot plants rising out of the back yard, but when I put my eye to a slat in the fence a pit bull roared up, all teeth and spittle, and I kept my distance after that. The houses across the street were neat but faded: white lava rock in place of lawns, plaster-of-Paris lions lifting their paws beside the doorways, the windows covered with scrolled wrought iron.
The neighborhood was on the border between an upscale development and a hodgepodge of modest homes. Driving to our house from the freeway, you could take two routes: one that took you through blocks of matching ranch houses, another through streets marked by graffiti and corner liquor stores. When I invited a friend home from rehearsal, I was torn as to which was the preferable approach. The first route led to false expectations, but gave our place a certain respectability by association. Taking the second resulted in a pleasant surprise when we finally pulled into our driveway, but I feared that by then our passenger might have jumped to irrevocable conclusions. Which was better: to be seen as a modest dinger to the hem of affluence or as the crowning jewel on a run-down block? These were the questions that occupied my thoughts. Somewhere along the way, I had become a great materialist. Neither of my two families, at that time, was much concerned with image. My mother put her stock in bettering the quality of human relations, and my father into the bettering of human conditions. I had a fixation with status that made up for the both of them.
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