Anywhere But Here (64 page)

Anyway I left.

The Saturday after my last shoot for “Sante Fe,” I made an appointment to get my hair cut. I told my mother in the morning.

“What are you going to have, a trim?”

“More like a cut.”

“Oh, Honey, no. Don’t, Ann. You’d be crazy to get more than a little trim. Why do think you got Marie Iroquois, that’s what’s cute about you, Honey. And don’t think that doesn’t matter at college, too, believe me. Really, it’s the truth, Ann.”

“I’m just telling you. For your
information
. I’m not asking for advice. I’m just saying, I’ll be gone between eleven and noon. You better find something to do with yourself, that’s all.”

What she found to do with herself was drive to the beauty shop, sit and read magazines in the front, by the window. I’d never had my hair cut since those boys chopped it off on Halloween when I was eight. Just trims. I’d always had long hair. It had seemed important.

I watched the woman and her scissors in the mirror, the little wet pieces falling everywhere. A circle of hair stuck around my shoulders on the cotton smock and a wider circle fell on the floor. The little pieces felt sharp, they itched my neck.

My mother ran up. “What are you doing? She only wanted a little bit. Oh, Honey, look. You just wanted a trim.”

They each stood over me, one of them holding scissors.

“That’s not what I said.”

“You sure did, that’s what you told me at home this morning.
You said just a little. She’s got six inches off already, it’s going to look awful. What are you letting her do to you?”

“Please sit down, Mom.” I looked at my hands lying there, on the beauty shop smock. They could have been anyone’s hands.

My mother turned to the woman cutting my hair. The woman, pivoting on one foot, leaning close, cut in quick, decisive clips. “Why don’t you at least undercut it, so it turns
under
, not up? That’s just going to flip up when it dries. It’s going to be awful.”

“I am undercutting it,” the woman said.

“Jeez, Honey, I could have taken you to the man who does me in Glendale. You should see the beautiful cuts. The girls your age come out with this full, long, bouncy hair. And it just curls. He cuts it so it goes under.” She picked up a panel of my wet hair and dropped it back onto the cotton smock. “She’s thinning it,” she said. “You’re thinning it.”

“I am not thinning it,” the woman said.

“May I ask you where you learned to cut hair?”

“Mom.”

“I’m just asking her a question. She can tell me.”

“I studied in New York and in London.”

I smiled for pretentious Westwood, where PhDs worked at the post office and my hairdresser studied in London.

“Where in New York?”

“I studied with Christiane at Michel Heron and with André.”

“Oh. I haven’t heard of them,” my mother said. “Oh, stop, please. You’re not going to take any more off, are you?”

“I’m going to shape it, so from the bangs down to the shoulder, it’s one line.” The woman gestured with her comb. “Okay?”

“Oh, God. I don’t know why you do this to me. Well, fine, it’s your life. But you just have to rebel, don’t you? You have to make yourself ugly. Don’t you see, Honey, you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

“My hair. I’m cutting my hair.”

“Are you jealous of me? Is that it? Because, Honey, you shouldn’t be. I’m your mother. I can help you. If you’d only let me. You should see the cute cuts they’re giving.”

She walked out of the border of the mirror. Then she came
back. “I can’t stand it. I can’t sit here and watch her doing that to you.”

“You’re not sitting,” I said.

The woman kept turning on one foot and snipping. The hair was now an inch above my shoulders. I turned and saw my mother in the front of the store. She sat back down in her chair and opened a magazine.

Next to me, a man blow-dried a young girl’s hair, pulling the brush tightly away from her face. The two hairdressers smiled. “Is she always this way?” The woman looked at me in the mirror.

“Just about my hair. She always wanted me to have long hair.”

The woman turned her blow-dryer on. In a minute, my hair began to look beautiful, a neat thick clean line next to my chin.

My mother appeared in the mirror again, holding her magazine in one dropped hand, moving around the chair, circling me. I wouldn’t look at her. She stared at my face in the mirror.

“You’ll just let anyone be your mother, won’t you? You let anyone but me.”

I never did hear from my father. I used to think, he might see me on TV and write me or call me or something, but nothing ever happened. I don’t know, maybe he tried or maybe he didn’t have a TV or whatever. I suppose it could have been anything.

I left lightly. Everything my mother wanted, I gave her. She kept all my baby things, my first teeth in bottles, my skates from when I was five years old. There was a work shirt she liked, I gave it to her. She pointed to things and I left them in the backhouse. Anything to get away. And when she took me to the airport, she walked me to where I got on the jet, she walked to where they wouldn’t let her come any farther without a ticket and when she kissed me, she looked at me, so I pulled out these new jeans I bought, they were Jag, and Jag was just a new name then, they were like my favorite thing, and she knew it and I gave them to her.

“You may not see me again,” she said, real softly, because
other people were passing, busy, with little suitcases, and I guess they could hear.

I stuffed the jeans in her hands and she looked at me, eyes all grateful, huge like a pet’s. But that night, when I called her from Providence, she answered the phone on the first ring, jangled, and said, Well, the pants didn’t fit her, I’d obviously bought them for me not for her and I didn’t understand the meaning of a present, I’d never learn how to give.

That night she talked about the insurance policy again, the cliffs of Big Sur. I called her back and she didn’t answer and then I called her and couldn’t find her for three days until I reached the Kellers, who told me she was out practicing on the tennis courts.

For years, I didn’t go home.

I
t was like a stone, something in me. The way a hook needles a fish, it hurt when I tried to move away from it. And then it turned and I was worse. Love sunk like that in me once. Like a hook so I couldn’t think of anyone else.

It was a long long time, too long. And I was alone, dwelling. I passed Benny’s room every day, we kept the door shut and I was the only one who went in. I said I had to clean and I did clean every day, wiping dust with a soaked rag before it ever had a chance to settle. I oiled that old wood dresser, wiped the windowsill. We’d built the house ourselves when we were married, so it showed just how many years had gone, that wood. And then I polished each one of his things. He had that fish hanging on the wall that he caught in Florida, they each had their rifles mounted over his bed, and then there were all his models. He spent hours putting those together when he was little. He had such patience. I started with the hotrods and I dusted them with a real soft piece of chamois and then I stood up on a footstool to do the planes. (He had planes and you had stars. He gave them to you—you put them up yourselves on your ceiling, those glow-in-the-dark stars. I remember because your ma was mad. She wanted me to pay to repaint. But then, later, Gram and I stood in your room once—after you’d gone and moved away—and we figured out those were real constellations. We found Big Bear and the Little Dipper, Pleiades. You must have stood by the window and copied it all down.)

I used to take his shirts and socks out of the drawers and wash
them in a special laundry. Then I put them all back where they were. I remembered exactly which T-shirt was on top that first day when I came in, and how each went underneath. It took four hours to clean the whole room and I always felt sorry to leave. I used to pick up that rock from Pikes Peak and just stand in the middle of the room and hold it. Those windows are small, I don’t know why, that’s the way they were doing them that year we built the house I suppose, so somewhere on the floor, there’d be one small square of light. I slipped off my shoes and stood on the light in my nylons and held that rock and looked down at it. It was an ordinary big rock, gray and dusty. It could have been from anywhere. But it was labeled
Rock From Pike’s Peak
and Benny had held it, like I was doing. I don’t know what I thought I’d get from that stone, holding it like that, in the sun. I looked and looked at it and saw the same thing: the dirt color, gray, the plainness. But I felt like something would come into me through my hands. I understood then the way I don’t anymore about religion. It is a matter of concentration, a promise never to let anything else come between. I had that kind of bond, then.

I don’t mean going to church and giving charity, none of that, that we still do. I mean the religion that is a private thing, trying to clean yourself out, so you’re an empty house, a dustless vessel.

I’ve lost that. That I don’t have anymore.

I spent half my day in that room for a year, the first year. Nobody bothered me much about it. Jimmy kept following his own map. We didn’t have too much to do with each other. We’d always had the twin beds that made up together to be a queen. That year, I didn’t even bother pushing them to the center in the morning. I started sleeping facing the wall. I liked that sour cold air in the crack. That’s how I was then. It tasted to me like hosts on my tongue, dust dissolving.

Then once I was in Ben’s room, cleaning, and Mary Griling was riding outside on the lawn mower. Jimmy hired her to help around the yard and I don’t know why, with the noise and all, but I dropped the rock I was holding in my hand and it fell and shattered on the floor.

After that, I didn’t go into the room. We could keep things the
way they were more by not looking than by care. I shut the door then and nobody ever went in. I drove in the car and got a rock from the quarry and taped the label on and put it back. I never once touched it again.

Time hadn’t stopped, I just had. The next year, eleven months, Jimmy went in the hospital for the heart. He was one of the first in Wisconsin to have the open heart surgery. I don’t remember anymore if I was scared. I still lived in another world; the darkness. I didn’t mind the waiting at all and in the hospital, that’s most of what it was. I didn’t mind anything as long as they left me alone. I’d settle in my chair and sink down and then I’d be off. It was as if I had work to do and when they left me alone I could take it out and begin unraveling and get started on what needed to be finished.

I thought about the leg. I worked that night over so much in my mind and every time it hurt. I was like a person with a loose tooth, running his tongue over the sore place again and again, activating the pain. If it was still there, I wanted to touch it.

We were in the trailer, Jimmy and I, the night they called. We were already asleep. The phone there was on a wall in the dinette. We both got up when it rang, we must have known, it was so late at night and we sat across from each other at that little dinette table.