Spirit Level

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“BE GENTLE WITH BONNIE,”
Verna says to me. “No rough stuff. She’s had a bad week.”

I nod and snap on the latex gloves. I don’t always wear gloves, but to be honest, there’s a big difference between massaging your own scalp and massaging the scalp of someone who clearly doesn’t own a hairbrush and hasn’t showered in weeks.

Bonnie eases herself into the chair in front of the sink with a sigh. She has left her enormous backpack—the kind you’d take on a two-month wilderness hike—beside one of the three chairs in the tiny salon. The filthy pack is festooned with grimy scarves, a couple of crocheted hats and what appears to be a collection of souvenir key chains—the Big Apple, Disneyland, the Eiffel Tower, London Bridge. Everything is attached with huge safety pins, like the ones you see on kilts. The pack is held
together by a couple of bungee cords. A battered metal water bottle is stuffed into one of the side pockets.

“How you doin’, hon?” Bonnie says to me as she leans her head back over the sink.

“Good,” I say. “I’m good. How about you?” I test the water on my wrist. Too hot and the client screams. Too cold and they shiver. It doesn’t help that one person’s hot is another person’s lukewarm.

Bonnie sighs again as the warm water reaches her scalp. “Glad it’s summer. Easier when it’s nice out.”

I nod, as if I know what it’s like to sleep in one of Seattle’s many parks. I don’t even like camping, which is kind of an obsession in the Pacific Northwest. And I’m pretty sure Bonnie doesn’t have a tent or a nice Coleman stove or a home to go to if the weather is bad.

Damn. The water must be too hot, because Bonnie groans as it hits a spot near her left ear.

“I’m sorry,” I say, but before I can adjust the temperature, she says, “It’s okay, hon. Just a little altercation with a beer bottle.”

I peer at a spot right above her ear and see a gash that should have had stitches. Another thing I’m sure Bonnie doesn’t have is health insurance. The cut is healing, but it must be really sore. I work around it after I add the shampoo, but Bonnie still winces every now and again. Each time I say “I’m sorry,” she says “It’s okay, hon.” I try to be gentle, and by the time I’ve finished shampooing, conditioning and massaging, Bonnie is snoring lightly.
As I wrap a towel around her head, careful not to rub the cut, she wakes up and smiles at me. One of her incisors is missing, but her teeth are otherwise in remarkably good shape. She winks at me. “Floss after every meal. That’s my motto.”

I help her into a chair in front of the mirror. “Thanks, Harry,” my mom says. “I’ll take it from here.”

I spend the morning doing what I’ve done every Sunday morning since I was about twelve—shampooing, conditioning, massaging, getting clean towels, making coffee. I’ve also been in charge of the music since I got an iPod a few years back—every week a different playlist. This week it’s Motown, and everyone sings along. Me, Mom, Verna, who owns the salon, and all the women who come for the best scalp massage in town, a free haircut and a cup of awesome coffee. Once in a while I sneak in some of the stuff I listen to, like Alt-J and Spoon, but most of the time the playlists are pretty mainstream. Classic rock, some country, Broadway show tunes. I actually like it all.

“
Stop in the name of love
,” Bonnie bellows, one grubby hand thrust out from under her cape, palm forward like a traffic cop. “
Think it o-o-ver
.”

Shanti, the woman in the next chair, who is younger (and cleaner) than Bonnie and dressed in a black micro-mini and a pink skank top over a lacy white bra, stands up suddenly and belts out, “
Haven’t I been good to you
?
Haven’t I been sweet and true?”
Everybody cracks up.

It’s like this every Sunday at Verna’s salon, which is called simply that: Verna’s Salon. Not
Cut and Dried
or
Shear Madness
or
Mane Attraction
, thank god. My mom started working here when she was my age—seventeen. She says Verna saved her life. She was panhandling outside the salon and Verna took her in, fed her, paid her to sweep up hair and make coffee, gave her a place to live and taught her to cut hair.

Verna’s eighty-two now and still running the salon. Lots of people think Verna and Mom are mother and daughter. They do kind of look alike: short, wiry, strong. They both have blue eyes and curly blond hair. Mom wears hers to her shoulders; Verna’s is cut really short and is mostly gray now. I don’t know what Verna saw in the kid sitting outside her shop all those years ago. I’ve asked her, but she never gives me the same answer twice. Once she told me it was because Mom looked like her dead sister. Another time she said she liked the fact that Mom was reading
The Bluest Eye
while she panhandled. Verna is a huge Toni Morrison fan. Maybe she just needed someone to help out in the shop that day. She was a widow, with no kids of her own. Never really wanted them, she claims. And then this hungry, angry, smart runaway turns up, and Verna takes one look at her and opens the door of her life. Just like that.

By the time I was born, when Mom was forty, she had a PhD and a good job, teaching sociology at a community college, but every Sunday we went to the salon
and helped Verna look after her “Sunday ladies”—most of them women who couldn’t afford the price of a good meal, let alone a shampoo, cut and blow-dry. The salon is my second home, and Verna is the only grandmother I’ve ever known. Ever since I can remember, I’ve loved the smell that clings to her pressed jeans and plaid shirts—peroxide, perm solution, hairspray, singed hair, the vanilla candles she burns to mask the other smells. A few years ago, she stopped doing perms and color.
Too many chemicals
, she said. But she still smells like the salon. Which is fine by me.

I started sweeping up hair when I was about five. No one asked me to do it; I just wanted a job, like everyone else, and I was a bit young to mix up hair dye or wield the scissors.
Here you go, Broomhilda
, Mom had said when she handed me a kid-sized red broom and dustpan.
Knock yourself out!
The Sunday ladies loved me. They brought me hard candies that I wasn’t allowed to eat, and I hugged them and climbed into their laps while Mom cut their hair. When I was a bit bigger, Mom got me a stool and let me help her with the shampooing. To me they were just “Verna’s Sunday friends,” not drug addicts or drunks or prostitutes or bag ladies. I knew that Bonnie had been a chartered accountant until her drinking got the better of her.

And Shanti? She’s a second-generation Sunday lady. Her mom was murdered by one of her johns a few years back. Shanti’s real name is Rebecca, and she has three
kids, all by different men. The oldest boy is autistic. When she first told me about him, I thought she said he was artistic (I couldn’t hear her over the running water), so I said,
That’s great. You must be really proud,
and she turned around and slapped me. Hard. Mom yanked her out of the chair and took her outside, hair dripping, and straightened it all out, but I’ll never forget that slap. The sting. The sound. The way everyone in the salon froze. No one had ever hit me. Not even a swat on the bum. It made me wonder about Shanti’s kids. Whether they had stopped being astonished at how an open hand feels on bare flesh.

Today Shanti (
It means peace
, she told me once) has brought her toddler, a little platinum-blond boy named Rocco, who spins himself around in the third chair while I wash Shanti’s hair. When he flies off the chair, he doesn’t cry. Maybe he knows better. He just shakes his head a couple of times and crawls up into Shanti’s lap. I keep massaging Shanti’s scalp (“Harder,” she says) and listen to Bonnie, who is telling my mom about a guy with five hundred children. Which is impossible. Fifty, maybe. But five hundred?

“Was he, like, a crazy Mormon or something?” I ask.

“You mean a polygamist?” Mom says. “Not all Mormons are polygamous, you know.”

“I know, professor,” I reply. “I stand corrected.” She frowns at me, but honestly, it’s Sunday. Can’t we skip the sociology lecture?

“How’s your guy?” Shanti asks. “What’s his name again?”

“Byron,” Bonnie pipes up. “Like the poet. Mad, bad and dangerous to know. Right, Harry?”

“Right,” I say. “He’s definitely all those things.” Although Byron is none of them.

I’m used to the Sunday ladies knowing about my life. They signed my cast when I broke my arm when I was seven and congratulated me when I won an essay contest last year. They’ve always taken a huge interest in my love life, such as it is. All the way from Trevor Miller in eighth grade (not good enough for me was the consensus, based on his failure to bring me flowers and chocolate on my birthday) to Byron, my latest. What they don’t know is that Byron moved away two months ago—across the country to New York, where his dad got a job managing some big-deal dance company. He could have stayed in Seattle for his last year of high school—his parents gave him that option—but he chose New York over me, so I broke up with him. None of that “We’ll Skype every day” shit. Long-distance relationships are doomed to failure. Everyone knows that.

But the worst of it is that Byron wasn’t just my boyfriend; he was my best friend. It sounds like a cliché, but it’s true. We met in kindergarten and bonded over the finger paints and our shared dislike of apple juice. And when our moms realized that we lived across the street from each other, they became best friends too.
So basically, Mom and I were both devastated when Byron and his family moved away. At first my friends called and texted, trying to get me to talk, to come out, to do something other than stay in my room and cry. I ignored them all, and eventually they stopped calling. Even my good friend Gwen gave up, and she’s the most tenacious person I know, next to Mom. Gwen’s gone for the summer now anyway, visiting her dad.

Mom catches my eye and says, “I’m ready for you, Shanti.” She knows how much I miss Byron. She also knows I don’t want to talk about it. Not with her. Not with anyone.

I pluck a sleepy Rocco from Shanti’s lap and curl up with him on the old loveseat in the waiting area. I feel the way a lot of the Sunday ladies look: old and tired and ill-used. I put my head on the little pillow embroidered with the words
I am not afraid of storms, I am learning to sail my own ship
, close my eyes and let sleep bear me away. The last thing I hear is the ladies singing a fine rendition of “Respect.”