The Transformation of Things (9 page)

When I got home I took a shower, and for the first time in a week I blew my hair dry with my big round brush and attempted to straighten it. Still it looked awful, so I distracted myself by trying to curl under the ends with my curling iron. Then I gave up and gave in to what I already knew: I desperately needed a haircut.

There was no way in hell I was going to go back to Pierce Avenue, back to Jo. There would be too many stares, too many questions. So instead I went downstairs and I called this little salon called Cuts ‘n Stuff that I’d seen right across from the park. It didn’t appear they did a brisk business because I booked myself an appointment, under the name Jennifer Daniels, for later that afternoon. I knew the place was a little tacky, but I was also positive I wouldn’t run into anyone who might know me.

The lady whom I had an appointment with was named Cheryl, and I was a little skeptical when I first laid eyes on her. She was short and overweight, with shoulder-length, jaggedly cut hair that had chunky strips of bright red running through it. Whenever a hairdresser had seriously awful hair, I took
that as a bad sign. But my split ends were, well, so split that I was starting to have seriously awful hair myself, so I stayed.

“What are we doing today?” she asked. She chomped on her gum, blew a bubble, and then popped it near my ear. She pulled up strands of my hair and held them up in her fingers. “You know,” she said, “you should go shorter.”

“How much shorter?” I’d only had the intention of getting a trim, but for some reason her gum-chewing assessment intrigued me.

“Like seriously shorter.” She folded my hair up three times, so it went from shoulder-length to somewhere midway between my chin and my ears. “You totally have the face for it. You’re lucky. Not everyone does, you know.”

I turned my head to the side and tried to envision it. My hair had been basically the same length since high school. Sometimes I wore it curly, sometime I straightened it with a flatiron or a round brush, but the length had always been just around my shoulders.

She dropped my hair and looked at her watch. “But it’s totally up to you.” She shrugged. “It’s your hair.”

“Yes,” I said, surprising myself even as I said it. “Cut it short. I could use a change.” My words rang distantly in my ears, as if they weren’t even coming from me, but from someone else, because my brain hadn’t actually processed what I was telling her.

As she washed my hair, as I leaned my head back in the sink and heard the water rushing, rushing through my ears, I closed my eyes and remembered that morning at Pierce Avenue, that morning I’d heard about Will. When I sat up, I felt this odd sense of déjà vu, and for a minute, I was just as dizzy and disoriented as I had been that day.

I closed my eyes while she was cutting, to try to contain
the dizziness, the awkward feeling of nausea, and then when I heard the click of the scissors stop, I opened them again and looked in the mirror. My hair was short, really short, just below my ears, and angled slightly toward my face. Tears immediately welled up in my eyes because looking back at me was someone else, some entirely different woman whom I’d never met before. Cheryl frowned and held up her hands. “You said it’s what you wanted,” she said.

“I know,” I said, trying to force a smile, though the feeling, the urge to start running, just to get out of there, rose in my throat like bile.

Once I got in the car, I thought about calling Kelly. Her house was only five minutes from here, and I hadn’t talked to her since the morning I’d called her and begged for a job for Will. I knew she’d been working on a photography project, and I’d been resisting the urge to call her, as if bothering her when I normally wouldn’t have was a confession of how un-fine I really was.

But it had been a while, longer than we usually went without talking, so I dialed her number. “How you doing?” she asked when she picked up, not sympathetic exactly, but matter-of-factly, as if it was a foregone conclusion that I should still not be doing well.

“I’m okay,” I said. But I felt this haunting feeling that I wasn’t, this deep sense of loneliness and numbness that I couldn’t shake, maybe not even just my own sense of it, but Lisa’s and Kat’s, too, or my dream version of them anyway. “Anyway, what are you up to? I’m out your way …”

It took her a few seconds. Finally she said, “I’ll be here all afternoon, if you want to stop over.”

* * *

Kelly’s house was cute, a split-level that had been built out of brick back in the fifties, when that sort of thing was still in style. She had a nice lawn in the front, and a small porch, with a garden filled with impatiens surrounding it.

The inside was a little small for the five of them, and often filled with clutter. And crayons. I swear to God, everywhere you went there was a rogue crayon. I’d found a red-violet floating in the toilet the last time I was here. Maybe that’s why she thought motherhood was like being trapped in a world of crazy colors, as if Crayola had invented these tiny little waxy sticks to torture her.

I rang the bell, and I heard a thud, which I was guessing was three-year-old Jack. Caleb, nearly five, was at preschool, and I thought Hannah, who was barely even walking, was still too small to thud. In response to the thud there were screams, a barking Muffet, and the muffled sound of Kelly’s voice. I had a feeling of déjà vu standing there, the same feeling I got every time I stood on Kelly’s stoop. So much noise and so much clutter. Everything that my house wasn’t, and yet I always secretly enjoyed it here, maybe even envied it, for a little while anyway, because it reminded me, in a way, of my childhood, of the life we’d inhabited when our mother was still alive.

Kelly answered the door with Hannah on her hip, Jack hanging on her leg, and the phone tucked between her ear and her shoulder. She waved me in, and I stepped gingerly, trying not to tread too hard or bump a toy that would explode into a fit of music—every toy in this house did.

She hung up the phone, gave me a half hug that was smooshed with kid. “Give Auntie JJ a kiss,” she said. Jack obliged and Hannah tried to pull off my nose.

“Holy shit, she’s strong.” I rubbed my nose.

“Jen.” She rolled her eyes toward Jack. “He’s a sponge.”

“Sorry.”

“Go have a seat in the kitchen. I’m going to put Hannah down for a nap and put
The Wiggles
on for Jack.” She paused. “I know. I know. I’m terrible. Letting the TV be his babysitter and all that.”

“I wasn’t going to say that,” I said. And truthfully, it hadn’t occurred to me that there was anything wrong with letting the TV distract him. Jack loved
The Wiggles
—it seemed like he was watching it every time I was over, and it always seemed to put him in a trance. Toddler drug of choice, Will had suggested once, watching as Jack and Caleb’s eyes had both glazed over, as they’d cocked their heads to the side and held their mouths open.

She sighed. “Of course you weren’t,” she said, as if I was the bad guy.

Ten minutes later the house was stunningly quiet, except for music coming from the TV and, occasionally, Jack’s almost girly-sounding voice echoing along. “Your hair is short,” Kelly said, as she walked into the kitchen.

“I know.” I nodded.

She reached up and felt the ends. “But I think it’ll grow on me.” I shrugged; I hadn’t decided yet.

Kelly put up a pot of coffee and then unwrapped a few Tastykakes and put them on a plate. It amazed me to watch her, the way every motion seemed exactly right, exactly momlike, as if she’d molded herself perfectly to fit into this world, this life. I supposed it must have been the way I’d looked on the tennis court, at the club, or announcing winners at the charity auction, but I wondered, if I had stood back and watched myself, the way I was watching her now, if I would’ve looked this at ease.

“Dave said Will has been doing well,” she said.

“Yes,” I murmured, though really, Will hadn’t said a word to me about work, or about anything, for that matter.

“So tell me, how are you handling things?” Kelly asked, plunking the plate of Jelly Krimpets down in front of me. I told her about Lisa coming over with the pineapple upside-down cake and booting me out of my life. She chewed on her Jelly Krimpet and nodded. “Bitches,” she said. She waved her hand. “You’re better off without them.” I tried to ignore the I-told-you-so look she flashed at me, something almost close to a smirk. “So what are you going to do now?”

“Kat got me a little freelance work.” I left out what it was so she wouldn’t roll her eyes or laugh at me, or point out what I already knew, that it was really just glorified typing.

“So you want to go back to work?” She paused. “That’s not what I expected.”

“You were the one who asked if I was going back to work,” I pointed out, which was typical. I could never win with Kelly. “What did you expect?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I thought you might have a baby.”

I didn’t say anything for a minute or so, and then I said, “Well, anyway.” I stared at the Tastykakes longingly, trying to mentally calculate how long it had been since I’d eaten something like that. Two years. Maybe three. “This would be the worst possible time for us to have a baby.”

Kelly nodded. “There’s never really a good time,” she said. “Sometimes you just have to jump in and do it.” She paused. “Like Dave always says, ‘Shit happens, but flowers grow really well in shit.’”

“Is that like some kind of a landscaping joke?” I asked,
finally picking up the Jelly Krimpet and stuffing it in my mouth, letting the sweet, sweet jelly dull her questions. Why had I thought it would be a good idea to come over here?

“And what happened to your novel?” she drilled.

I finished chewing and shrugged. I didn’t want to tell her the truth, that I’d never even gotten past the first chapter before I’d tucked it away in a drawer, and that I rarely ever thought about taking it out again. “How’s your project coming?” I asked, wanting to change the subject, to take the heat off me.

“Good,” she said. “I’m doing flowers, for a calendar.”

I looked around at Kelly’s photos—the one aspect of her house that made it seem grown up—the black-and-white landscapes on the walls. I examined the one that hung by the fridge, a close-up of a saguaro cactus from a trip they’d taken to Arizona the year before. It was so close that the individual needles looked like fingers, reaching out for something. Her photos really were beautiful, and it amazed me that somehow she managed it all: mom, wife, artist.

“Oh, by the way, I talked to Dad. He and Sharon are coming for Thanksgiving.” I thought about the last time I saw my father and Sharon, last Passover. We’d hardly said two words to each other the whole night. Part of it was because he had never shown anything but disappointment for me, and the other part was Sharon, who was either unable or unwilling to shut up. She’d barely step foot inside Kelly’s house before she’d be criticizing everything and everyone in her path. But even worse, she pretended to do it in a nice enough way, as if she was actually paying us some kind of backward compliment.

Last Passover, she’d started in with “The dinner looks
lovely, Kel.” She’d wrinkled her long, pointy nose. “Now if only you could’ve dressed up a little more. Put on some makeup. You’re too pale without it. And Jenny, oy God, you’re too thin. Look at that waistline, Donny. You need to borrow a little from the middle of your sister, eh?” My dad—Don—to everyone but her—looked away, uncomfortable, not wanting to meet our gazes or stare at our waistlines either.

Dave had come up behind Kelly and put his arms around her. “Her middle is perfect. You can’t have any.” He looked at me and laughed, while Kelly blushed.

Kelly probably could afford to lose a little weight, but Hannah was only now just turning one, and Kelly said that with each child those last ten pounds became harder and harder to budge.

I liked my middle just the way it was—strong from Pilates and small from avoiding carbs for the last three years—despite the fact that Will hadn’t said anything in my defense. He’d just stood there, holding on to a jar of gefilte fish that Kelly had put him in charge of, looking sort of dumbstruck, the way he always was by my family.

“Anyway,” I heard Kelly saying now, and I knew I’d missed what she’d just been saying about our father, “it’ll be nice to see him.”

“Does he know?” I asked quietly. I hadn’t talked to him since I’d called him for his birthday back in early August, and even if I had, Will’s indictment wouldn’t have been first on my list of topics.

She shrugged. “I didn’t tell him.” She paused. “But you should, Jen. He’s bound to find out anyway.”

I pictured Sharon’s face contorting, her big nose seeming
even bigger as she scrunched her face up in a frown and whispered to my father, “I never liked that one. But you know Jen, she’s not too bad-looking, but she’s not a real good judge of character.”

“You’re right,” I finally said. But I had no intention of talking to my father, much less telling him anything about Will.

Eleven

W
hen I returned home, it was nearly dark, but our house was lit up and oddly alive-looking. I hadn’t given one thought to dinner, and there was no way we were going for a quick meal at the club.