by Joey Bush
I didn’t say anything right away. I felt if I were to actually speak those words out loud it would make them true, so if I just pretended that the whole conversation hadn’t taken place to begin with, then it could be like it had never happened.
But it had. I could picture my father, the night of the party, talking to Parker, me and Tara standing across the room, giggling about whatever it was they were conversing about. That was probably exactly when it was happening.
“No,” I said. “Everything is not okay.”
“What?” Graham asked, a look of concern on his face. “What’s wrong?”
“I just need to go home.”
“Chloe.” He placed his hand on my shoulder, his eyes locked onto mine, searching my face. “What’s going on?”
“I’m okay,” I said. “I just ... I just found out something really shitty. I don’t want to get into it right now. I just need to go back to my house. Would you drive me back to my car?”
“Yeah, of course. And you don’t have to tell me what’s happening, but ... you’re all right?”
I knew it wasn’t fair of me to be so vague, but I didn’t want to say anything to him, or to Tara, or to anyone, about it just yet.
*****
Graham drove me back to my car. We sat there in the front seat of his truck for a moment, the engine idling. He reached over and held my hand.
“Well, call me if you need to,” he said. “I hope whatever’s happening gets straightened out. If I can help you at all, just let me know, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, staring out the windshield. He didn’t let go of my hand though, until I looked at him.
“You’re going to be all right,” he said. “Whatever it is.”
We kissed quickly and then said good night. I got out and he waited until I was in my own car and driving off before he left. I kept the radio off and drove in silence.
I thought that maybe I wouldn’t say anything, but then I realized there was no way I could just keep quiet about this. Then I thought that maybe I would wait to bring it up, I would think about what I wanted to say, I would be rational. But the more I thought about what my parents had done, the angrier I got. By the time I got home, I was fuming.
The lights were on in the living room, and they were in there together, drinking their wine and watching TV.
“Chloe?” Mom called. “Is that you?”
I slammed the front door.
“Darling! You don’t need to shut the door so hard!”
I stomped down into the living room. They were both on the couch.
“Good,” I said, “I’m glad you’re both here. There’s something that I need to talk to you about.”
“Oh?” My mother leaned forward and set her wine glass down on the coffee table. “Is everything all right?”
“No,” I said, barely able to keep my voice from shaking. “No, everything is not all right at all, actually. I just got back from a beach party.”
“That sounds lovely! Did you have fun?”
“Don’t interrupt me.”
“Chloe!” My father looked at me sharply. “Don’t talk to your mother in that tone.”
“No, Dad, actually, you don’t get to tell me what to do anymore! Do you know who I happened to run into at this beach party? Parker. And do you know what Parker happened to tell me? He told me that the only reason he was calling me to hang out these past couple of weeks was because you had told him to! And you promised him that if he did, you’d get him a job. Is that true?”
My father looked at my mother. My mother looked back at him and then leaned forward to get her wine glass. Enough of an answer for me.
“I can’t believe you,” I said. “The two of you. Why would you do that? Why the hell would you ever think something like that would be okay?”
“Parker is a good kid from a good family,” my father said. “We thought the two of you might hit it off.” He held his hands up. “There were no bad intentions there.”
“No,” I said. “It’s so much more awful than that. It’s not that you two thought the two of us would make a cute couple; Dad, you offered him a job if he would go out with me! So you’re basically saying that I’m not good enough—you had to also throw in employment as part of the package.”
“You know I don’t think that at all, Chloe. You know I think the world of you.”
“Oh, really? I’m suddenly finding that really hard to believe, considering you don’t think that I can get a date unless you offer something else, too.”
My mother pressed her fingers to her temples. “It’s really not like that, Chloe, okay? It’s not. I know it might seem that way, but your father and I only want what is best for you. We don’t want to see you going down the wrong path. We also want to see you happy and succeeding. Is there anything wrong with that?”
“I just don’t understand what Parker has to do with any of that. Especially if he wasn’t even interested to begin with.”
“We were trying to help you, Chloe. We thought you needed a little bit of a ... nudge, I guess. You’ve never really dated anyone before, and I just didn’t want to see you getting involved with the wrong sort of person. It’s not as though we were necessarily expecting things with Parker to be a long-term arrangement or anything, but ...” My mother shrugged. “Your father and I both agreed that he’s an upstanding young man from an excellent family and he’d make a good first date for you.”
I shook my head and looked up at the ceiling. Was this really the conversation I was having right now? “We are not in some third-world country where the parents get to arrange their kids’ marriages!” I exclaimed.
My mother laughed. “We weren’t expecting you to get married! Goodness.”
“Just stop it! I can’t continue this conversation with you because you’re not even willing to admit what you did was completely messed up! Just totally wrong in every way. There is no way you can spin this to make it right, except you don’t even see that!”
“Chloe,” my father said sharply. “I don’t think I like the tone you’re taking with us. You can be upset if you want, but that’s not license to be disrespectful.”
*****
I went into the bathroom with the scissors and before I even left myself think about what I was doing, I started to chop my hair off. I thought about that girl, the waitress we’d had in Provincetown, with the short, pink hair. I wasn’t going to dye my hair pink—not right now, anyway—but I cut it as short as I could, except in the front. I left the front pieces about three inches long and brushed them to the side. I wasn’t a professional stylist and I used a mirror to see the back, so what hair I had left looked choppy, but not bad. I studied my face in the mirror. My head felt a lot lighter now. I turned to the left, then to the right. My neck seemed longer. My jawline looked different. I liked how I looked. Without all that hair, my cheekbones seemed more prominent, my eyes larger. I’d cut more than a foot of hair off, and it covered the bathroom floor. I did my best to clean it up, and then I hopped in the shower. I barely had to use any shampoo, and when I got out, instead of having to wrap my hair up turban style, I just rubbed my head a few times with a towel, ran my fingers through my bangs, and that was that.
My mother let out a shriek the next morning when I came downstairs.
“Chloe!” she yelped, her hand on her chest. “What have you done to your hair? I thought you were an intruder for a second! Oh, my god.”
She was standing there at the counter, in her bathing suit and sheer coverall, spooning sugar into her coffee. She let go of the spoon and it clattered on the marble surface. Her mouth hung open and she blinked at me several times. She looked over at my father, who was sitting at the breakfast table with the newspaper.
“You didn’t actually do that,” she said. “Tell me this is just some sort of optical illusion. Tell me you did not cut off all of your beautiful hair!” Her voice rose with each word. She almost sounded hysterical.
“It’s no optical illusion. I gave m
yself a haircut. It’s not a big deal.”
“It most certainly is a big deal! You look like ... you look like ...”
“What? What do I look like?”
“Well, I don’t know! Like you belong in the circus or something. Chloe, how could you do such a thing?”
She started to cry.
Not sobbing, but her eyes started to well up and a tear slid down the side of her face.
“Oh, god, Mom,” I said. “Stop it. It’s just hair. Would you be crying if I had cancer and had to go get chemo and lost my hair?”
“But you don’t have cancer! If you had cancer, there’d be a reason you had to lose your hair! You don’t have a reason! You just did this because you want to spite us! What is going on with you, Chloe? I mean, really.” She wiped at her eyes.
“Mom, you’re making something out of nothing. It’s just hair; it’ll grow back. If I let it, that is. I actually like it short like this. I’ve never had short hair before, did you know that? Of course you know, because you’d never let me have short hair when I was a kid.”
“That is not true.”
“Yes, it is. You were always saying how I had such long, beautiful hair and I should never cut it. And you know what? I never did. Because that’s what I thought you wanted, and I just always went along with what you guys thought I should do.”
My mother wiped at her eyes again. “How can you say that? How can you say you never got your hair cut? Don’t you remember the mother-daughter dates we used to go on? We’d go to the salon, and then I’d take you out to lunch, and sometimes we’d stop by a bookstore after. You don’t remember any of that?”
I sighed. “Of course I remember doing that, Mom. And it was fun, I’m not saying it wasn’t. But those ‘haircuts’ were never more than just a trim, maybe adding a few layers or something. My hair has never been above my shoulders, except maybe when I was little and it hadn’t grown that long yet!”
“But I thought you liked it like that.”
“I’m not saying it was the worst thing. It’s more like ... it’s like, symbolic of everything else, too.”
My father grunted. He’d been quiet this whole time, but I could tell by the expression on his face how pissed off he was. “I don’t think symbolism has anything to do with the fact that you’ve just cut all your hair off. Where’d you do this, by the way? Your bathroom? I’d think you’d at least get it done professionally if you were going to do something so drastic. What this really is, Chloe, is you rebelling, because you’re upset. But really, your mother and I are the ones who should be upset. You’ve just been out of control this summer. First the tattoo, now the hair. Plus, this new attitude of yours, which is not appreciated. What’s next? What’s going on with you? This has to stop.”
My father’s tone was sharp, his eyes angry. Any other time I would’ve been apologizing, or slinking off to my room, but this time, I stood my ground. Maybe because I knew they were totally in the wrong, regardless of what their motives were, for offering someone a job if they’d take me out a few times.
“What has to stop,” I said, “is you two thinking that you can control my life. I’m not a child anymore. And you don’t know what’s best for me.”
My father opened his mouth to say something but didn’t; he stood up and started to walk from the room. “I’m done with this conversation right now. When you’re ready to have a rational discussion, I’d be more than happy to, but now is clearly not the time.”
He left. My mother wiped at her eyes again, shaking her head. “We just thought that maybe you’d like to go out with someone this summer, Chloe. I’ve talked to you about this before. You know that it’s something we want for you. You’ve never really had that experience before and I was just getting afraid that you’d keep putting it off until it was too late.”
“Mom!” I yelled. She jumped. “Are you kidding me? I’m twenty-one! There are some parents out there that would actually be glad if their kid was deciding to put off dating. But you guys are acting like if I don’t start seeing someone now, then I’m going to end up alone and miserable for the rest of my life, like some old maid. And I’ll have you know, Mom, that I am actually seeing someone. Oh, I doubt you’d approve of him, but he likes me for me, not because one of my parents offered him a job. And you can approve or not; I really don’t care.”
My mother paled. “That man? What was his name? The man that came to the house? With the facial hair? And all those tattoos?”
“Yes. That’s him. And he’s actually a really great person. And guess what? He wouldn’t take a job if one of you offered it to him anyway, because he owns his own business! He’s not some derelict drug addict or whatever the hell you think he might be.”
“But—”
“No.” I held my hand up. “I’m not going to argue this with you. It’s clearly something that you don’t want to accept, and fine, you don’t have to. But that’s not going to change what I’m doing.”
She started to say something else but I turned and walked out. I didn’t know where my father went, but I knew I couldn’t stay in this house right now. I ran upstairs to my bedroom and grabbed my purse and then left the house, ignoring my mother’s calls after me, asking where I was going.
*****
It took my mother almost two full days before she was able to talk to me without looking as though she were about to burst into tears. All because of hair? It seemed so over the top. Completely unnecessary. Was she really that concerned with appearances? Could she not see that I was still the same person?
Or maybe, in a way, I wasn’t, and she sensed that. I didn’t feel entirely different, but I did feel as though I was more aware of a way of life that had always been there but that I’d never been fully conscious of before. And that way of life wasn’t something extreme; it wasn’t like renouncing technology or going vegan, or deciding to live at a nudist colony or something. What it was, I realized, was the knowledge that I could be who I wanted.
Who I wanted on my terms, not my parents’. And for so long, I’d done what my parents had wanted, gone along with what they thought was best. I’d never really questioned it, until now. Why had I waited so long? In high school, when my fellow classmates were experimenting with drinking and dyeing their hair or staying out past curfew, I was dutifully completing my homework, studying at the library, doing extra credit assignments. Up until now, my greatest act of dissent had been going to art school.
But Graham liked my hair. When I showed up at his work, he’d done a double take, not recognizing me at first and then let out a low whistle. Even if he hadn’t liked my hair though, it wouldn’t have bothered me that much, because I liked my hair.
Now, though, my mother was doing her best to look at me without wincing. “Your father and I talked,” Mom said. “We’ve been quite troubled by all of this, Chloe, we really have. I know you might not believe that, but it’s the truth.”
“I haven’t been enjoying myself, either, Mom. I don’t like fighting with you guys. I also don’t like feeling as though you’re trying to control me.”
“We just want what’s best—”
“Yes, I know, you just want what’s best for me, you keep saying that, but the thing is, I don’t think you actually know what is best for me. Because we don’t necessarily want the same things, and that’s okay. Can’t you accept that?”
My mother took a deep breath. “Sweetie, I don’t want to fight with you anymore, okay? Neither does your father. We both feel like this is escalating and we want it to stop. I mean, look what you’ve done to your hair. Would you have done that if we hadn’t been fighting? If this whole thing hadn’t taken place? I highly doubt it. I don’t like this conflict. We are not that kind of family. We love each other and we care about each other. So ... so we’d like to meet this person that you’re seeing. The one with the beard and the tattoos. We were thinking he ... he might like to come over here for dinner some night. What kind of food does he like to eat?”
I c
ould tell how difficult this was for her. I smiled. “I appreciate you saying that, Mom. And ... Graham likes most things; I don’t think he’s that picky. Whatever we had would be fine, I’m sure.”
*****
Before I went down to visit him, though, I had to stop by Tara’s because she had something very important she wanted to talk about.
I drove over to her house and found her out back, sun-tanning by the pool.
“So, what was so important that you couldn’t actually tell me over the phone?” I asked, stretching out in one of the lounge chairs next to her.
She pushed her big sunglasses to the top of her head and looked at me. “Guess who’s here,” she said.
I sat up and looked over my shoulder toward the house. “Here? As in right now?”
“No, here as in on the Cape.”
I groaned. “Michael.”
“You got it. And guess who wants to get together?”
“I think I already know the answer to this.”
She grinned. “Got any plans Friday?”
“I don’t know. Please tell me you’re not meeting him on Friday?”
“He messaged me and wanted to know if I was free, because he said he really wanted to see me. So I said yes.”
“I’m not going with you, if that’s what you’re thinking.” I paused. “Or maybe I should go with you, but sit at a nearby table or something. Just to make sure that everything is okay.”
She widened her eyes. “He’s not going to do anything. At least, I don’t think he is.”
“It just seems strange to me that all of the sudden he wants to see you.”
“It shouldn’t seem that strange,” Tara sniffed. “He now realizes what he’s missing out on, and that he shouldn’t have left me for that chick, whatever the hell her name is. I can’t even remember. But ...” Her brow furrowed. “Maybe you coming along but being incognito would be a good idea. It’d be fun at least. And with your hair, he won’t even recognize you!”
I doubted he’d recognize me anyway; he’d always struck me as one of those people who didn’t really see others, unless he was getting something from them.
