Vanity Insanity

by Mary Kay Leatherman

  The day Lucy arrived at our basement door that spring afternoon in 1971, hours before making her First Communion, I noticed her. She was livid, and as usual her hair was noticeable and wild. The tension between Lucy and her mother entered the room before they did. Her mother had felt that Lucy’s hair was out of control and un-Communion-like, so Ava Mangiamelli wanted it “taken care of” now. Lucy disagreed. Her reply to her mom was something along the lines of “OK! Fine! I’ll be ugly for my First Holy Communion if that will make you happy!”

  I overheard the two bickering while I swept the hair of my mom’s earlier customer from around the chair in which Lucy would soon be “taken care of.” I had been helping my mom out in her shop for as long as I could remember. I was nine at the time, so my jobs included sweeping hair, straightening magazines, and cleaning scissors, combs, and brushes. I was the “best little helper,” my mom would tell her clients.

  This comment made me blush and cringe at the same time, since my grandfather had told me on more than one occasion that I was the man of the house and that my mother needed me to be strong. No pressure there. That’s something I would never tell a child under ten.

  Sensing the tension, Mom asked Ava Mangiamelli if she would like a cup of coffee up in our kitchen and a chance to look through books of children’s haircuts, allowing the hot-headed Italian females some time to cool down. What this did was leave me alone with the younger of two fiery women. The silence was broken as soon as Lucy realized I was in the room.

  “My very best friends, Theresa and Marty, and I are making our First Communion today,” Lucy announced as if she had prepared a speech.

  “Oh,” I replied. I wasn’t really that impressed. I had made my First Communion the year before.

  The song “Knock Three Times” by Tony Orlando and Dawn was playing on the black radio that my mom kept on the windowsill. The outdated, black radio was always a bit of an embarrassment to me. The louder you turned the volume, the louder an irritating static boomed with the bass in the background to any song. I couldn’t complain, though. Even though the décor of Marcia’s Beauty Box was antiquated, the music was always up-to-date. Mom was pretty good about playing WOW, the station my sisters and I listened to.

  “My dog’s name is Grandma,” Lucy proclaimed.

  “Oh.” I acted disinterested, but I smirked at the implications of that name for a dog.

  “I saw The Aristocats. It was dumb.” No comment. “My brother Subby got in trouble for seeing The Exorcist.”

  This time I was impressed. “How did your parents find out?”

  “He slept with the lights on all night and then finally confessed out of fear.”

  “Of the devil or your parents?”

  “My parents. Where do you go to school?”

  “Franklin Public.”

  “Oh. I go to Saint Pius.”

  “Oh.”

  “You don’t talk much.”

  “My grandpa met Bob Devaney once.”

  Lucy’s face showed that she had no idea that Bob Devaney was the coach of only the greatest football team ever: the Nebraska Cornhuskers.

  “Did I tell you about my dog already?”

  When Lucy and I later talked about that first meeting we remember, she had to mention my brown corduroy pants with my brown K-Mart zipper shirt. Hey, brown goes with brown. She gloats as she recalls her elephant bell jeans with a purple smiley-face shirt. Big wow. Me, I remember the music.

  My entire life, I’ve looked to the music of the day as an anchor, tying me to my memories. Songs, good and bad, have entangled my calendar, and the strong association of a song can carry me back to that moment, either good or bad, in a second. The opening measure to the song “Dream Weaver” by Gary Wright connects me immediately to the first kiss of my adolescent career with Julie George, who turned out to be disappointingly ditzy. I guess that would be both good and bad.

  Somewhere between a possessed, prepubescent girl—I’m not talking about Linda Blair from The Exorcist—and a phenomenal season for the Huskers, Ava and Mom came back, well coffeed and slightly calmed. Ava still felt that something must be done to the mop on Lucy’s head. Lucy still felt differently. Ava won.

  Ava and Lucy were two peas in a pod, even though they did not approve of sharing the same pod. Ava was a tiny woman who usually got her way. Lucy was a carbon copy, though she would vehemently deny it. Lucy came from a true Italian family. Her father was Italian. Her mother was Italian. Enough already. She was the baby girl following four brothers, all of whom were admired by my sisters and others for their dark lashes, big, brown eyes, and great stature. Louis Mangiamelli was a tall, handsome man, and his boys followed suit. Lucy—short, feisty, and blunt —resembled her mother though she was the only namesake of her father. Louis, Lucy. It works.

  “OK, we’ll keep the back messy but do something with the sloppy bangs.” If Ava felt that she was meeting Lucy halfway with the issue of her hair, she hadn’t considered the serious outcome of such a request. Lucy, also oblivious to what might come of such a combination, actually smiled as though she had won. She had always wanted long, flowing hair like her friends and Marcia Brady.

  My mom and I were both aware that cutting the bangs of a person with frizzy and wiry hair is not good. And furthermore, leaving the rest of her hair wild was not a great combination with pinhead bangs. But Mom stuck to her philosophy: let the client make the call. Fifteen minutes later, Lucy’s bangs were trimmed.

  As Lucy and her mother got ready to leave, her bangs began to dry and slowly creep up her forehead like little worms on the sidewalk after a big rain. By the time the duo was at the door, Lucy’s bangs were one-quarter of an inch at best. Lucy’s hair looked really bad. Even though I had only spent thirteen minutes talking with her, something told me that Lucy would not like her hair. And as has most often been the case with my instincts about Lucy, I was right. She hated it.

  As Lucy and Ava walked out of Marcia’s Beauty Box, another strong woman entered the room. My life has been filled with a great number of strong women. Octavia was an old friend of my grandma Grace, who had lived in Fremont, Nebraska. My mother, who grew up in Fremont, had started doing hair in Fremont before she moved to Omaha in her early twenties. Once my mom moved to Omaha, Grandma Grace and Octavia were loyal to Marcia, making the half-hour drive once a week to Omaha to have their hair done. They would then do lunch and head home to Fremont, looking good, feeling good.

  When Grandma Grace died, Octavia continued the routine, claiming that no one else could do her hair right. For the sake of vanity, the drive was worth it. She stayed with what she knew was good.

  On that spring day in 1971, I stood as a witness to the brief exchange, while sweeping the shrapnel left under the chair. Octavia looked down at Lucy. Lucy looked up at Octavia. Two strong winds. Two radical jet streams in a Nebraska spring. As James Taylor’s voice crooned from the little black radio about some tough times in his life in the song “Fire and Rain,” maybe I imagined it, but I would swear the two cocked their heads to the side, raised one eyebrow each, and looked away. Almost mirror images.

  While Lucy’s world was focused on her First-Communion hairstyle and POW bracelets, Octavia was dealing with the recent death of her husband of forty-two years. At sixty-six, she was learning to drive herself to new places and praying for the souls of all she knew at daily Mass at Saint Patrick’s in Fremont. Warren Buffett was keeping an eye on the American economy as it was experiencing current account deficits, which led to the Dollar Crisis in 1971. Later that year, the Nebraska Cornhuskers would win the game of the century on Thanksgiving Day, a game that went up and down with more thrills than a roller coaster. Johnny “the Jet” Rodgers played in that game. On the other side of a big ocean, young Gordon Sumner was training to become an English teacher at Northern Counties Teacher Training College in England.

  And a strong little girl and a strong older woman made great efforts to look good in my mother’s basement.

  4
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br />   Evelyn Perelman: Jerry Curl, Relaxer

  Friday night, October 20

  1972

  What I remember more than anything else was how she smelled.

  Mrs. Perelman, the mother of my best friend, A.C., would enter a room and fill my head with a beautiful scent that triggered the pleasure center in my brain. Of course, it made me feel very uncomfortable as an eleven-year-old in the presence of his best friend’s mother, feeling so strange. I always squirmed and found a reason to leave whenever I saw her. Later I realized on a date in college that the fragrance she always wore was White Shoulders. I couldn’t date that girl again because of the strong smell association. Dating my best friend’s mother? Just weird.

  Evelyn Perelman was an anomaly. And not just to me. Something of a mystery always hung around her. She was tall and beautiful. She was a black woman in the white side of town. She was quiet, intelligent, and serious. Few people knew her well, yet she was very warm and approachable if you were ever able to engage in a conversation with her. My mom was one of those lucky ones, or perhaps one of the few who did not look critically upon a black Catholic woman married to a white Jewish man, living on the west side of Omaha in the late sixties and early seventies.

  That cool Friday night in October of 1972, Evelyn and A.C. Perelman showed up at the front door of our little, white house. Few if any clients that I remember ever entered the front door except for Grandpa Mac. Evelyn Perelman had a standing appointment with my mother one Friday night a month. Because of her heavy schedule as a microbiologist at the Med Center, Evelyn was unable to have her hair done during the workweek. I suppose she could have come on Mom’s busy Saturday shift, but I always assumed that she preferred not to be around the other women. My mom, an oddity herself as the only single parent that I was aware of, and Evelyn Perelman found an ally in each other, I guessed. More than likely the two enjoyed their girls’ night, and I know A.C. and I never complained about it. A.C. Perelman could hang out as long as our mothers talked; we always hoped they would get into a long, serious, and deep discussion.

  This week, when the doorbell rang, I raced to the front door as always. As I turned the knob, A.C. exploded into our tiny living room doing his best imitation of our most recent hero, the one and only Flip Wilson. “Hey, what you see is what you get!” The eleven-year-old, imitating Flip Wilson’s Geraldine persona, wiggled his body as he walked in the room and flashed his lashes up and down at me. “Heya, Killer. This pink dress I’m wearing? The devil made me do it!”

  I snorted and hit him. Mrs. Perelman darted a disapproving glance at A.C. as she greeted my mother. A.C. was notorious for his silly imitations and stupid antics, but I think the black accent and extreme cultural stereotype, more than the feminine whiles, perturbed Evelyn. A.C. and I were unaware of the racial tension in our city and most other cities even though the adults were hyperaware of the awkward relations between black and white people at that time. It had only recently occurred to me that A.C. was both black and white—chocolate milk—and I envied his unique birthright.

  Before The Flip Wilson Comedy Hour started, I quickly pulled A.C. into the kitchen to show him my mold garden that I was growing for my science project.

  “Man, Ben, you’re going to get some major extra credit for that!”

  My mom popped her head in the door and interrupted our serious discussion. “This may be your last night to go out and play since winter is around the corner.” My mother scooted us out the door as she spoke. “You can look at that another time and watch Flip Wilson on the snowy Fridays when A.C. and his mom come by. Now go. Grab your windbreaker, Ben. And don’t go near the creek.”

  My mom’s words hung in the air around us like anxious moths at a light. Not like we hadn’t heard the warning every day for the past two weeks. The words forced us back to the reality that a twelve-year-old paperboy had disappeared weeks earlier. His bike had been found down by Papillion Creek. Next to the boy’s bike was the bag of newspapers, not one of which had made it to its destination. Many phone calls to the Omaha World-Herald from paperless homes led to a phone call to the parents of Johnny Madlin, which ignited the nightmare they must be living as we stood in my safe little living room.

  Just before the bad thing at the creek, before the unspeakable and reprehensible crime, my buddies and I spent any non-school-or-chore moment down at the bed of the creek. A.C., Will Mangiamelli, and I led the younger boys down by the creek bed as we orchestrated our “projects,” as A.C. called them; A.C. was our idea man. We shed our shirts and our childish games as A.C. directed us to build tree forts and underground forts and commiserate until our moms called us. As soon as breakfast was forced down our throats, we grabbed food, tools, and pitchers of ice water so that we were equipped for the day of building and scheming. Whatever we could sneak from our homes—boxes, stools, a transistor radio, utensils, and old Playboy magazines that Stinky Morrow smuggled from his father’s stash in the back of his parents’ closet—became treasures that the group praised. Though we didn’t know it at the time, pending testosterone was quietly beginning to pump through our veins; we only knew that we felt eager and alive. Daily we prepared to fight the enemy. We were brave in defending our territory, all the while hoping that Lucy Mangiamelli and her friends were watching us from the backyards, admiring our naked upper bodies that were anxiously anticipating manhood.

  No one wore a watch at the creek, so our mothers whistled and rang bells to call us home on perfect summer nights to wash our faces and hands and eat dinner as quickly as we could so we could race back down to the creek with coffee cans under our arms to catch fireflies before we were summoned again for the night.

  The creek was a perfect place to play as a kid.

  It was also, evidently, the best place to abduct children on the way to their afternoon jobs of delivering papers. Johnny Madlin’s red banana-seat bike had been found by the creek several miles south of our neighborhood, and consequently, the children of Maple Crest subdivision were thereafter warned daily and emphatically: don’t go near the creek. The very nature of the warning had most kids worried that the creek itself was guilty of snatching the boy and harboring him, waiting for more children to come. But I knew differently. I loved the creek. The creek was no criminal.

  Speculation would continue for years about the case. Most agreed that the boy had been abducted. Some thought his body had been swept away in the creek and just never found. Still, a few believed that Johnny might have run away. Though views were inconsistent, the reality around the speculation was clear: we were no longer allowed to play by the creek.

  A.C. and I opened the door into the dark, cool Friday night. I forgot Johnny Madlin for the moment as I embraced the night air. I loved the fall. The fall meant two things to me at that time in my life: sweatshirts and football. The sweatshirt was important since I had spent the summer and most of September feeling self-conscious about my skinny arms. Chicken arms, A.C. called them. I would remind him that chickens didn’t have arms and that the expression was supposed to be about legs. My sister Tracy would laugh and say, “Are you worried about the girls looking at your arms? Don’t worry. They aren’t looking at you at all.” I was still relieved to be wearing long sleeves again.

  Beyond the sleeves, fall signaled the best sport ever known to mankind: football. Football meant Friday nights lost in high-school games and Saturday afternoons lost in college games. I couldn’t get enough. I thrived on the intensity every week as the analysis of the past victories and losses still lingered in the crisp fall air and the anticipation of the next set of rivalries made my eyes widen with excitement. Living in a home as the only male surrounded by fits of estrogen and an overabundance of nail polish, I held the conversations about the games in my head as though I were one of the sports announcers commentating on a game.

  A.C. and I were heading out to throw the football to each other when we heard a group of voices coming from the other side of the cul-de-sac. The streetlight in front of the Webbers�
�� created a silhouette of a large group of kids gathered beneath it. As we walked toward the gathering place, I zipped up my green windbreaker. Winter was knocking.

  I knew once winter hit, I would not see most of the kids under the streetlight, who were from different grades and schools, till the first nice spring day in late March or early April. That’s how winter worked for us. Nice weather and vacation from school meant going outside. Division was gone when we were in our yards. I liked that. The kids of the Maple Crest cul-de-sac were a gang of convenience.

  Fifty-two kids living within a two-block area usually gathered in the cul-de-sac down by the Webber home. I’m not kidding. One time Mrs. Webber counted us. She said we had a full deck of cards. That is, if you counted the handful of babies, who never came out to the cul-de-sac, and a few older kids who were too cool to hang with us. But nonetheless, we had fifty-two kids in the Maple Crest area that summer.

  At any given time, a group would be gathered, usually with bikes. We were always planning. One summer we built an underground fort behind the Mangiamellis’ backyard fence. From five feet away, you couldn’t see anything but dirt and weeds. That was the plan. Once upon it, you could see the square opening in the large piece of plywood covered with dirt and weeds that served as our roof. A ladder would take you down to the secret room where we usually planned other things. Another year we had a trash carnival, probably one of our stupidest endeavors, though you wouldn’t hear me say that around Lucy, who planned the whole thing in the great, altruistic hope of cleaning up our neighborhood and having fun.