Nora, Nora

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  She ran warm tap water over her hands, slicked it onto her hair, and fluffed it out of its limp helmet. Perhaps, she thought, it will be all right after all. It has some curl in it. Maybe it will sort of frame my face. In her mind she saw soft, tumbling waves drifting around her head, full and shining. They would make her eyes larger, soften the severe planes of her face, make her thin mouth bloom. She knew, as she looked back into the mirror, that she hoped to see her mother there.

  Medusa still looked back, this time with the snakes.

  Peyton took a deep breath to push down the nausea, said aloud to Medusa, “I don’t give a shit,” and walked into the kitchen.

  Clothilde was washing the breakfast dishes, her dark hands slipping birdlike in and out of the sinkful of steaming suds. She turned to look at Peyton and dropped the Fiestaware creamer into the water. Peyton heard it shatter on the porcelain.

  “Peyton, what in the name of God you done?” she breathed.

  “Obviously, Clothilde, I have cut my hair. Maybe you’ve heard of haircuts?” Peyton said with a cold aluminum brightness.

  “I heard of haircuts,” Chloe said. “That ain’t no haircut. That look like you took a lawnmower to it. Your daddy gon’ have a fit. Your Aunt Augusta gon’ have a conniption. What was you thinkin’ of?”

  “I was tired of it,” Peyton said airily. “Pigtails are for babies.” She could almost feel the phantom pain in the ragged ends of her hair. Misery rose like bile, threatening to swamp her.

  “Well, your daddy gon’ grow you up real quick,” Clothilde said fiercely, and then her dark face softened. “Why don’t you go try to do something with it, maybe wet it and push it back behind your ears, and let me tell him. Get him used to the notion. You can get Miss Freddie at the beauty shop to even it up some tomorrow afternoon. And it’ll grow back. We just needs to get used to the idea of you without that hair.”

  “Where is Daddy?” Peyton said in the new bright voice.

  “He out in his office. He giving the Sunday-school lesson this morning. You know, Peyton, you got that pretty straw hat Miss Augusta bought you for Easter last year. You look real pretty in that hat. Why don’t you wear it this morning? Maybe with your blue dress. You look real grown-up in that dress.”

  “I’m not going to Sunday school or church, either,” Peyton said. “I’m tired of that, too. I’m going to read all day. Sunday is a day of rest.”

  She turned and stalked out of the kitchen before Chloe could reply, and got the paperback copy of Nine Stories that Ernie had given her for her birthday, and went into her room and closed the door. Seymour Glass would understand.

  She waited all day for her father to come to her room, to knock, to open her door and come in, to see, finally, what she had done to herself; waited for whatever he would do. She had no idea. She had never done anything so overtly grotesque before. She was afraid of his anger, but she was more afraid of simple, cold contempt. By suppertime she could stand it no longer, so she smoothed the ragged spikes as best she could and went into the living room, where her father sat with the Sunday paper, the television set flickering soundlessly in the corner. Her father had lit only one lamp, the bridge lamp that stood beside his cracked leather easy chair, and in its pale glow she could see only the side of his face, in profile. It was still and empty. An effigy.

  “Peyton,” he said, not turning his head. His voice was mild and weary, nothing more. But it cut her to her heart.

  “I guess you want to see it,” she said, striving for the hard-edged airiness she had found that morning in the kitchen. “We can have the big unveiling.”

  He turned his head and looked at her then. He was silent for a long while. Peyton felt tears like acid rising in her throat. She knew she would rather die than cry, and also that she probably would.

  “Whole lot of crying going on lately,” she said chattily to herself.

  “We haven’t taken you very seriously, have we?” Frazier McKenzie said at last. His voice was still weary, but there was nothing in it of shock or anger. Perhaps it might still be all right.…

  “Daddy, it was a mistake, I don’t know why I did it…” she began, and then clenched her teeth shut over the tears.

  “I don’t care about your hair, Peyton,” he said. “We can get that fixed; Augusta is going to take you into Atlanta and get you all prettied up. It’s that you were so unhappy, and needed attention so much, and we didn’t notice it—I didn’t notice it. I wish you had come and talked to me about whatever is bothering you instead of chopping off your pretty hair, but I’m not exactly the kind of father a young girl comes running to, am I?”

  The tears began to spill over Peyton’s lower lashes.

  “I’m not unhappy,” she quavered. “I don’t need attention. You’re a good father, Daddy. I don’t know why I did it. It just seemed all of a sudden something I needed to do.…But it looks pretty awful, doesn’t it? I look like Medusa.”

  “You don’t look a bit like Medusa,” he said, and he smiled slightly. Even the smile was tired. “You’re a pretty girl. I think you’ll be a pretty woman one day. But we’re going to have to make some changes. Augusta was right. You’re at the point now where you need a woman in your life on a long-term basis. I can’t be that to you. Sometimes I think I can barely be a father. You’ll be thirteen in—June, isn’t it? You can’t be a child anymore. You can’t just run wild.”

  “I don’t run wild,” Peyton whispered, the unfairness of it loosening the tears again. “I’ve never run wild in my life.”

  “No, you haven’t,” he said. “It was a bad choice of words. But you’ve got to grow up some, and you’ve got to do it the right way. You may not care now, but you’ll want friends and a social life before long, and you’ll need to know how to take on some of a woman’s responsibilities sooner or later. It’s got to start now, and I can’t do it, so your Aunt Augusta is going to. It’s George Washington’s birthday Tuesday, and your aunt is taking you to Rich’s for a hairdo and some clothes and maybe to lunch at the tearoom. They have these fashion shows at lunch, I think. You may be surprised to find that you have a good time.”

  “I won’t,” Peyton cried, panic rising in her chest. It was too much too fast, too awful, too big a punishment just for cutting her hair.

  “You will,” he said, and he turned back to his newspaper.

  Peyton went back to her room and threw herself across her narrow bed and cried in the winter twilight, knowing that the change was upon her and it was going to be terrible past imagining, and that she and she alone had summoned it with a pair of kitchen shears.

  3

  Peyton went to school the next day with a scarf tied under her chin. It had been her mother’s; she had found it in the cedar chest that sat at the foot of the mahogany bed in the big bedroom. It was cream silk, splashed with huge red poppies and green vines, and must have looked festive and exotic on her mother. On Peyton, it looked almost shocking, like a whore’s finery on a baby. But it was better than the hair. Peyton had it all planned: she would tell people she had an earache and had to keep the cold air off of it. “We’re going into Atlanta tomorrow to see a specialist,” she would say.

  But no one asked, no one except hulking Arlene Slattery, who was known to be a retard.

  “What you got on a head rag for?” Arlene asked.

  “I have an earache,” Peyton said. “I have to keep the cold air off it. We’re going into Atlanta tomorrow to see a specialist.”

  “Huh,” Arlene breathed adenoidally. “I didn’t know it was cold.”

  “Well, that’s what Dr. Sams said to do,” Peyton said huffily.

  “Huh,” Arlene said. In her world a visit to a doctor for anything less than a bull goring or a tractor crushing was as unimaginable as being invited to Buckingham Palace.

  No one else mentioned the scarf, and by the time Peyton reached her front walk that afternoon the damp winter sultriness was making her head sweat under the scarf, and her mangled hair itched fierily. She jerked the
scarf off, scratched her head, and started into the house. Then she changed course and trotted up the street to the Methodist parsonage. She went through backyards so no one would see her. When she came into the toolshed Ernie and Boot were waiting for her, drinking Coca-Cola. Peyton stood still, heart surging up into her throat, and assumed the old Betty Grable bathing-beauty pose.

  “Taadaa!” she cried gaily. Even to her ears it sounded shrill and crazy.

  “Holy shit!” Boot said reverently. “You done won the stupidest prize for the next two years. You looks like a picked pullet. What you go and do that for?”

  “So I could win the stupidest prize for the next two years,” Peyton said, wrinkling her nose like Debbie Reynolds.

  “Well, it ain’t no contest,” Boot said. “Lawdy me. What you daddy say? What did Mamaw say?”

  “They said it was very becoming,” Peyton said, looking perkily around the toolshed.

  “Then they crazy as batshit,” Boot said mournfully.

  Peyton looked up under her lashes at Ernie, who was sitting still and looking back at her. She knew he could flay her alive if he wished.

  Ernie cocked his fuzzy head and closed his eyes to slits and tilted his head and studied her as if she were a museum exhibit. Peyton waited for annihilation.

  “You know, it’s really not bad at all,” he said finally. “I think it suits you. You need to get it evened up a little, but I think when you get used to it you might like it. Yes. I think you might look quite chic. Better than just pretty, really. Perhaps you’re going to amount to something as a woman after all. I had just about given up hope.”

  Peyton felt trembling gratitude swell in her chest, and a kind of hopeful disbelief. Could he mean what he said? Of course not; anyone could see how she looked. But Ernie had never spared anyone’s feelings before, in all her experience of him.

  She smiled, a silly, quivering smile.

  Boot simply stared.

  “Well, you little people run on now,” Ernie said. “I’ve got to take Mama to the dentist. Maybe this time he’ll drill her tongue out.”

  Boot and Peyton laughed, and it was suddenly all right again: the Losers Club found its proper place in her firmament, and her life bowled on.

  It was early. No one would expect her home for a couple of hours yet. Peyton decided to walk down the highway to see her grandmother. She was forbidden to do this; the Roosevelt Highway, which ran through Lytton, was always thick with Atlanta-bound traffic. But she knew that there was a footpath through the tall weeds on the other side of the railroad tracks, and she followed that. The walk took only about ten minutes. The little wind was cool on her neck. Her grandmother would understand, even if she didn’t like the hair.

  She found Agnes McKenzie in her dark, cluttered cave of a kitchen, icing tea cakes. They were almost the only thing that Nana cooked well, but they were sublime. She always made them for Peyton at Christmas, and on her birthday. A sweet vanilla smell told Peyton that there was another sheet of them in the old black woodstove. She stood still and breathed deeply. This was the very smell of childhood, rich and simple and succoring.

  Her grandmother did not turn around.

  “Knew it was you,” she said. “Saw it in the washtub this morning. Saw that you could do with a mess of tea cakes, too. We’ll talk about it terreckly. Right now I need you to bring me some more wood in from the pantry.”

  Peyton went into the pantry shed that opened off the kitchen. The wood basket stood there, along with a pristine electric stove and a new washer and dryer. Frazier had given them to his mother two years before. She had never used them.

  “You’ve got arthritis in your hands; I see you rubbing them,” he had said in exasperation to his mother. “Why won’t you just give the stove and the washer and dryer a try? Cold wash water and heavy iron stove lids are going to cripple you.”

  But Agnes McKenzie had simply thanked her son sweetly and gone on with heavy, red-hot iron and dark soapy water. Only Peyton knew why.

  “I see things in the fire and the water,” Agnes had told her once. “The bad things in the fire and the good ones in the water. It’s how I know things.”

  Peyton picked up an armful of lightwood and went back into the warm, dim kitchen.

  “If you saw me in the water, that’s good, isn’t it?” Peyton said to her grandmother. Agnes turned and looked at her, and then smiled her V-shaped kitten’s smile. In the dimness she looked perhaps thirty, a smoky-haired, ocean-eyed thirty. Beautiful. Wild.

  “Oh, child,” she said. “Look at you. I wondered what it was. I knew you’d lost something. I saw that in the fire. Come sit and we’ll have some coffee and tea cakes. There’s not much that good strong coffee and tea cakes won’t put right.”

  Peyton took the thick cup gratefully and sipped the steaming coffee. It was as black as ink and as thick as the peat bogs in Agnes McKenzie’s distant wild mountains. She didn’t like it very much—it was sludgy and bitter on her tongue—but no one else let Peyton have coffee. It made another bond with her grandmother. She always drank it in this house.

  “Do you hate it?” Peyton said to her grandmother.

  “I pretty well do,” Agnes said. “You look like you been whupped through hell with a buzzard gut, as our old washwoman used to say. But that doesn’t matter. It won’t last. You’re going to be a handsome woman. You’ll have the look of the MacLarens about you. You’re going to look a lot like me, I think, when you get really old. And that’s pretty good, if I do say so myself. What bothers me is why you did it.”

  “I don’t know,” Peyton said miserably. All of a sudden she was desperately, achingly tired. She realized she had been counting on her grandmother to say that she looked fine.

  “Big change coming. Is that it?” Agnes said, pouring more coffee.

  “You mean becoming a young woman and being proper and all, I guess,” Peyton said. “Everybody’s going on about it. ‘You have to change, Peyton.’ ‘You’re a young lady now, Peyton.’ ‘You won’t have any boyfriends, Peyton.’”

  “You think making yourself ugly is going to change that? You’ll grow up, my heart, ugly or not. Whacking off your hair isn’t going to stop that.”

  “Well, it just might put it off awhile,” Peyton said, stung.

  Her grandmother laughed. It went with the rest of her, deep and rich and somehow streaked with fire.

  “Don’t think so,” she said. “I see that it’s right on top of you.”

  “Do you see what’s going to make me change? Daddy and Aunt Augusta are making me go to Rich’s tomorrow and get styled and buy some new clothes. I think that’s just the beginning. Aunt Augusta was going on about dancing school.…”

  “Can’t you dance yet, Peyton?” Her grandmother smiled. “I could dance as soon as I could walk; I still do it; it’s like playing with the wind; it’s like running in water in the sun. But I guess we aren’t talking about Augusta’s kind of dancing. To answer your question, I do see a woman in your life, for a long time to come. Yes. That much is clear.”

  “Is it Aunt Augusta? Is it you?”

  “I don’t think it’s Augusta. I wouldn’t allow that, in any case. I’d run her off if she leaned too heavy on you. I know how to do that. And no, it isn’t me. There’s not enough time for that. I don’t know who it is, only that she’s coming.”

  “Did you see her in the water or the fire?”

  “I saw her in a bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup.” Her grandmother smiled and reached out to touch the murdered hair gently. “I don’t know what that means. It doesn’t feel like it’s bad, though. Only…very different. Maybe I’ll see more of her later.”

  “Will you tell me when you know?”

  “No,” her grandmother said, pushing the hair off Peyton’s forehead. “I don’t believe I will.”

  When she got home, she found the kitchen dark and the breakfast-room table still not set for supper. The house was very quiet; she could almost hear, as well as see, the dust motes dancing in the l
ast of the afternoon sun on the stairs. She listened hard, in faint unease. She could not remember many afternoons when she had come into this house without the great, warming sense of Clothilde close by.

  Then she heard the burring grumble of the old Electrolux upstairs somewhere, and she followed the sound up.

  She found Chloe vacuuming the thin-worn carpet in the big upstairs back bedroom that they had always called the guest room, only Peyton could not remember any guests ever being in it. It would have been her room if she had not clung to her small one downstairs. Her father slept in the big front room that had been his and Lila Lee’s. He had disturbed nothing of it except to remove, or have Clothilde remove, Lila Lee’s toiletries and hairbrushes from the dressing table. Peyton did not know what had happened to them. She often thought she would like to have them, and would ask for them, but somehow she never did. It would be too awful to find that they had been given away, as her mother’s clothes and shoes had been, to the Salvation Army.

  Buddy had slept in the other front bedroom, and its doors were kept closed, except for when Clothilde went in two or three times a year to clean it. Peyton did not go into it. She scarcely remembered what it looked like.

  A thought rooted her in the doorway. They were making her move upstairs. It was a part of Aunt Augusta’s ladyhood campaign. She darted into the room, calling to Clothilde, who did not hear her. Peyton shouted and then reached out and touched Clothilde on the back.

  “Sweet Jesus Lord!” Clothilde squalled, starting violently and dropping the vacuum cleaner. The snake of its coil thrashed wildly on the floor. “Peyton, you like to scare me to death. Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I did,” Peyton said. “You didn’t hear me. What are you doing, Chloe? Because if anybody thinks they can make me move up here, they’ve got another think coming.”

  Clothilde turned off the Electrolux and straightened her back, moving her shoulders gratefully.