Dearest Dorothy, Help! I've Lost Myself!

by Charlene Baumbich

  With her forearm, Maggie spun Gladys’s chair around so that Gladys’s back was toward the mirror. Then, comb in one hand and scissors in the other, Maggie leaned her own face in close to the mirror. She studied her eyebrows, first raising one, then the other. She delighted in having ambidextrous eyebrows, a rare gift, indeed. She hadn’t quite gotten her brow pencil filled in evenly today, and it was distracting and annoying her every time she caught a glimpse of herself. She took the small-toothed end of the comb and rifled it through her brows a few times, then slicked the teeth ends across the top of her brow hairs, trying to get them to match the errant pencil line. “Hopeless,” she said aloud.

  “I beg your pardon,” Gladys said.

  “Oh, I wasn’t talking about you or your hair, Gladys, I was talking about my misfit eyebrows. Some days I wish I could just be a character in Snow White and have the La Feminique Hair Salon & Day Spa mirror tell me I’m the fairest of them all, or at least fair enough, eyebrows not withstanding.” Maggie saluted the mirror with each eyebrow, then winked at herself before turning to face Gladys’s back to begin the haircut.

  “Maggie Malone, the more you say, the more you make me nervous to be sitting here while you’ve got a pair of scissors in your hand. How about you just concentrate on your paying customer so I can get on with my day.”

  Signaling she was about to begin, out of habit, Maggie snapped the scissors open and closed a few times, right next to Gladys’s ear, causing Gladys to whip her head toward the direction of the sound. Maggie took her pinky fingers, rested them on each side of Gladys’s head, turned it forward again and tilted it downwards. “Don’t worry, Gladys. You have my complete attention. In all my fifty-plus years as a stylist, I haven’t lost an ear yet.”

  “This would be a terrible time for Partonville to have the mayor bleed to death over a beauty shop incident,” Gladys said, “what with the impending . . .” Gladys stopped herself, saying just enough to hopefully get Maggie to bite, which she did.

  “Impending what?”

  “Impending anniversary celebration.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of Partonville!”

  “What anniversary?”

  “Since I dedicate a good portion of my time reflecting on Partonville’s past, it has not escaped my attention that Partonville will officially be one hundred thirty years old, come November. It occurs to me that since that is so close to the annual Pumpkin Festival, we could combine celebrations, maybe draw in more outsiders to showcase our town. You know, . . .”

  “Gladys,” Maggie said, jumping into the middle of her sentence, “you do not need to turn your head to the side for me to hear you. Although I have never lost an ear, if you keep wagging your head around while you talk, you’re liable to walk out of here with the first chunk of bald scalp I’ve ever left on the back of a head—aside from T.J. Winslow’s son who asked for it that way when he was about four, on account of he’d cut his own bangs down to the scalp. ‘Just shave it all off,’ he said. It’s not what he wanted, but his mother had a stern eye on him to make sure that’s what he got. Up until then, that child had the most beautiful curls I’d ever seen.”

  Gladys slowly inhaled, then loudly exhaled. “I find I’m just very honored to be the mayor during such a momentous occasion.” Maggie opened her mouth to say Momentous? Sounds more like an invented occasion to me. But she decided to just keep her trap shut. Gladys continued. “If my dear late husband Jake had survived the crash, he’d still be the mayor. In fact, he’d still be alive.”

  Maggie’s scissors suddenly stopped snipping while she untangled that odd arrangement of words. “You must miss him very much, Gladys,” she replied after a few seconds.

  Gladys was quiet for a long spell, especially for Gladys. Maggie tilted Gladys’s head slightly toward the left, continuing to work on her neckline. “You know,” Gladys finally said in a shaky whisper, “today would have been our anniversary. Rather than having Jake to spend it with, all I’ve got of him is the mayoral post he left me with, that is at least until his term, my term, is up, in February—although I imagine I will get officially elected then. If I didn’t have the town to run, all I’d have is . . .”

  Never before had Maggie, or anyone else for that matter, seen this side of Gladys. Not even at Jake’s funeral, where Gladys had been so busy bossing everyone around at church, making sure his arrangements were just so—so busy that no time was left for her to grieve. Maggie had even overheard Arthur lean over and say to his wife, Jessie, “I reckon Jake don’t have his hands crossed right to suit her either, but then there ain’t much he kin do about it now!” No one had ever doubted who wore the pants in the McKern household, and after Jake’s death, the townsfolk decided they might as well just let her finish officiating the term, since she’d already been doing it anyway.

  Gladys sniffed and Maggie froze in place, completely lost as to how to respond to an unguarded Gladys, a Gladys she’d never met before, not in all their decades of knowing each other. Sarcasm, barbs, bossiness . . . those things she expected from Gladys, knew how to put up with. But not this. She set her scissors and comb down and said she was going to go get herself something to drink. “Would you like a beverage, Gladys?”

  “That would be fine,” Gladys said, leaving her head hanging down long after Maggie had given her reason to keep it that way, something that didn’t go unnoticed by Maggie before she backed away. In fact, she couldn’t help but silently stare at this sorrowful site for quite some time. Gladys appeared to Maggie like a slain giant. For the first time, Maggie was getting a glimpse into Gladys’s tender spot, which many were convinced she didn’t have. Without raising her head, Gladys brushed the little hairs off her lap that had landed on the purple drape cloth, then she moved the drape to the side to reveal her handbag, something she never left unattended—what with all those “hooligans negligent parents are raising today.” She unsnapped the top of her bag and retrieved a packet of tissues, then pulled one from the pack. She swiped at her nose a few times, sighed, swiped a few more times . . . then her shoulders shook, but she made not a sound. Then she blew her nose and swiped again, tucking the tissue inside her purse and snapping herself back together. And yet, she still did not raise her head. All of this Maggie saw.

  An idea popped into Maggie’s head and she quietly scurried to her back room, filled the hot pot with water and plugged it in. She opened the cabinet door above the towel cabinet and retrieved a box of scones she had hidden away, cellophane wrapper still in place. She went to the reception area, got two purple mugs from near the coffee pot, which of course had her new logo on them, the same logo she’d had tattooed on her ankle the year before, which had set the Happy Hookers’ meeting into complete turmoil upon its discovery. According to Maggie, the logo was an open pair of upside-down scissors that supposedly created the letter A in SPA! “It’s so obvious!” she’d told them. But to this day, none of them could see it. No matter; it delighted Maggie.

  By the time the water was nearly to a full boil, which really took less than a minute or so in the little hot pot, she’d also opened a package of hibiscus tea bags she’d ordered. She arranged everything just so on a serving tray, setting the tea bags in a small bowl that she placed on a silver-foiled paper doily. (Purple and silver were her shop’s current colors, which she changed every few years, never wanting to be bored with her working environment.) In a final burst of kindness and creativity, she went to her aromatherapy display and opened a spendy bottle of rosemary, a fragrance that was reported to give you clarity and energy, thinking this might help cheer up Gladys. She put a dollop on a nearby testing paper and set it under the doily. She gave the tray a once-over, smiled with satisfaction at how quickly she’d been able to pull together such a delightful and beautiful pick-me-up, then headed back to Gladys carrying the tray before her as though it held the queen’s crown.

  “Here we go,” she said to Gladys, who had retrieved a magazine and was thrashing through the pages in a disgusted
manner.

  Gladys looked at her large-faced wristwatch when Maggie set the tray down. “If I had known you were going to spend an hour preparing an entire banquet rather than just getting us a cup of coffee, I’d have certainly declined your offer in favor of getting on with the haircut. I have an important appointment in thirty minutes with the managing editor of the Partonville Press. Let’s just get on with it. I’m not thirsty anymore anyway. And what is that awful smell? I guess you’ve forgotten about my sensitive sinuses!”

  Without a sip or a nibble by either one of them, Maggie picked up her scissors and comb. In sixteen minutes flat, wherein not a word was uttered by either of them, she was done with Gladys—cut, blow-dry, curling iron, comb-out and bill collection. As soon as Gladys departed, May Belle walked in.

  “Welcome to the Twilight Zone,” Maggie said. “You’re just in time for hibiscus tea and scones. Let me reheat the water.”

  5

  “No replays of the last few days, mister. Understand?” Katie smacked Josh’s lunch money into his open palm. “You either let me know ahead of time you’re staying late at school and need a ride, or get yourself on the bus. And if it’s going to be the late bus, let me know that, too. What good is it for me to get you a cell phone if you don’t use it? If you’ll recall, by the time I got that one call, drove to Hethrow, picked you up, brought you home, made dinner, took a shower and got to bunco, I was exhausted and barely on time. Not to mention I was worried sick about you when you weren’t on either bus—and didn’t answer your cell phone! But I let it ride, thinking anybody can mess up one time. But now, Josh, this type of inconsiderate behavior has come to an end, hear me?”

  “Mom, I’m sixteen years old. Maybe if I took the Lexus to school or had my own car, this wouldn’t be such a problem.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s not like you were in the middle of something, Mom. You’re not even working. And it’s not like important things can’t just crop up. After all, that’s what you told me all the nights you weren’t around when we lived in Chicago.”

  He had pierced her with truth. But then, she’d been the sole breadwinner since her louse of a husband had left her for a younger woman—at least that’s what she’d always told herself until she’d faced the truth not long before they moved to Partonville. Fact was, she’d partly kept herself busied up running from her own emotions, so much so that she hadn’t even realized she’d been shutting out her son.

  She was, at this moment, caught in the crosshairs of several truths. However, she quickly decided to split those hairs and exercise her parental authority. She narrowed her eyes and sucked in her cheeks. “I think there’s a slight difference between feeding us and playing a pickup basketball game, Joshua Matthew Kinney. And as for you having your own car, perhaps getting a part-time job would help you be able to afford one.”

  “Come on, Mom. We both know you can afford to buy me a car. Do you know how uncool it is to have to ride the bus?”

  “Do you know how uncool you will be when you’re grounded for a month if you continue speaking this disrespectfully to your mother?”

  Josh looked at the kitchen clock as he stuffed the lunch money down into his Levis’ pocket. “I gotta go. Let’s just plan on this: until further notice, I’ll either catch a ride home with friends, or I’ll be on the late bus.”

  “Either way, you will be home by the time the late bus should be arriving. Clear? And if you’re riding with somebody, I’d like for him or her to come into the house and introduce him- or herself. I don’t like the idea that I don’t even know the people who have my son’s life in their hands.”

  “At the moment, Mom,” he said as he opened the door, “it seems you’re trying to keep me from having a life.”

  Katie heard the faint sounds of a bus coming down the gravel road as the door slammed behind him. Knowing their driveway was one-eighth mile long, she lurched to the door, opened it and yelled after him, “You better run your little butt off, Joshua, unless you feel like walking four miles to school today!” She, too, let the door slam behind her as she stepped back into the house. Then she tromped over to the cabinet where she kept her carafe. She filled it with the rest of the coffee, turned off the coffee maker, grabbed her mug and dedicated herself to a Chaos Room lock-in. She was sick and tired of the mess.

  Three hours after Josh had left for school, the Chaos Room was officially more chaotic than it had ever been. Katie had decided to begin with the two boxes labeled “AUNT TESS PAPERS,” getting the worst task over first. She’d briefly scanned each paper, then set it on one of the piles she’d strewn across the top of nearly everything else in the room. The biggest pile was thankfully that of “things that don’t matter,” which she was going to toss back into one of the now empty boxes and haul downstairs to discard. But before she did that, she found herself sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, legs outstretched in front of her, trying to bring order and sense to the most important mound: correspondences between her mom and Aunt Tess. She had, in her sifting, discovered several more bundles of letters and an occasional orphan mixed in with either paid bills or hospital records, two other piles she’d decided she needed to study once more for family health history before pitching. But even though she’d promised herself she was just going to get all the letters in one place for now, and not dwell on them anymore until after the entire room was in shape (a matter of priorities and discipline, she’d told herself), she could not stay away from them.

  No matter how many ways she’d arranged and rearranged the letters, it was simply impossible to organize them into any timeline. She’d even tried to arrange them by lines of conversation, but that didn’t always work either, since references to intervening phone calls took the sisters’ discussions off on different tangents. Contrary to her initial belief, she now thought no letters existed for the year between her mom’s move to Chicago and the first letter in this collection. Although her mom mentioned her loneliness, she never shared any news about her dad, who had died before Katie was born. Katie had been hoping the letters would render at least a few morsels about her father, her parent’s marriage. . . . She’d often grieved that she’d never even seen a photo of her dad, whose own parents had died when he was young. Her mom had been deft at deflecting personal questions about her dad, saying it hurt too much to talk about him. “So brief. So much pain” was about the most Katie ever got her to say. That and that he was very sensitive. Although Katie had inwardly grieved—and on occasion also questioned—the lack of photos and stories, she’d fled from the prickly feeling their voids sometimes gave her.

  What remained consistent about the letters, however, were odd placements of capital letters and mentions of the Core Four Covenant. She’d all but made herself bonkers first conjecturing that like many vanity license plates, you could actually pronounce these letters if you spoke them aloud. Since they weren’t always in the same order, she tried speaking them every which way. All she ended up discovering, though, was that she sounded like a donkey with a speech impediment and spoke nothing but gobbledygook. In a giant DUH! of enlightenment, she finally deduced that the capital letters must be initials. After relentless sleuthing with this new agenda in mind, she found herself feeling dumber than the speech-impaired donkey when it became evident there were only four sets of initials: CW, TW, DW and DC. Next logical deduction: they must comprise the Core Four in the covenant. But who were these people, and what was their covenant?

  Hungry and suffering from a backache from sitting on the floor for so long, she looked at her watch and was shocked to discover it was 1:00 P.M. She’d now been in the Chaos Room for nearly five and a half hours! It was time for a break, that is if she could get her midlife body to stand up. But first, one at a time, she turned each sub-stack of letters face down, then piled one stack on top of the other so she could tuck them all into a large manila envelope she’d set aside for this purpose. It wasn’t until she’d turned the last stack over that she saw the P.S.
on the back of a letter from her mom. “Oh, how I pray that Katie’s dad can one day—even from a distance, if only for the briefest of moments—at least see his only daughter, covenant or not! She has his beautiful and kind eyes, you know.”

  6

  Ever since Earl had awakened, he’d been asking May Belle if it was time to mow Dearest Dorothy’s yard. “No, honey,” his mother had patiently repeated several times now. “It’s still too early. You don’t want to get folks fussing at you for waking them up with the sounds of a lawn mower, do you?” Earl shook his head back and forth. “It won’t be that long now. Dorothy called last night and said she’d be over for mid-morning coffee today. When she gets here . . . when she gets here, Earl, you can ask her if it’s time.” May Belle smiled at Earl, her beloved forty-five-year-old son, her only child. He was determined, loyal, kind and the joy of her life. He was also retarded, which made him the worry of her life, since what would become of him when she was gone? But one thing she never wondered about him was whether or not he loved his Dearest Dorothy, who was, next to his mother, his favorite person in his entire world, which had never, not even for a vacation, been larger than Partonville. Earl needed things kept a certain way, which was simple.