This seemed like a good plan to me. “But are you sure we can buy a window for a hundred dollars?”
“We don’t need to buy a window,” she said. “We can take the window out of the pantry and use that. Then we can just block that up with wood. Nobody looks out that window anyway.”
Over the next few days, we worked with uncommon focus on our project. It proved challenging to remove the window from the pantry. It had been installed with surprising accuracy. But by using an axe we found in the barn as well as a hammer and a rock, we were able to free the window from the wall. The hole that remained created a refreshing cross-ventilation that made it easier to breathe in the dusty kitchen.
Far more difficult, however, than removing the window in the pantry was creating the hole in the roof for the new skylight.
“You wouldn’t think it would be so hard,” Natalie said, as she tried to gnaw her way through the shingles with a hacksaw.
We were sitting on top of the roof. The sun was high in the sky and we were both wet with perspiration. I’d applied Hennaluscent conditioner to my hair and combed it straight back. I’d also talked Natalie into letting me henna her hair. I’d applied the pasty mud and then piled her hair on top of her head, securing it with a tight wrapping of aluminum foil. And now she was starting to complain.
“My head is so fucking hot,” she said.
“Well, just try not to think about it. The sun will really help your hair take the color.” The color we’d chosen was red.
“Well, this fucking foil is driving me nuts.” The foil was sliding down her forehead and she was constantly pushing it back up.
“So take it off,” I said.
She slid the foil off her head, balled it up and threw it off the roof. Her hair was mud-caked and slapped against her shoulders. With the motion of the hacksaw, her hair moved as one thick sheet.
Eventually, we were able to saw a nice hole in the roof, between the rafters.
“Hi, Agnes,” I said, sticking my hand down through the hole and waving into the kitchen.
“What in God’s name?” she said, looking up.
Natalie poked her face into the hole. “Can you go to the store and get us some food?” she said.
“What do you want?” Agnes asked.
“I don’t know. Something.”
“You two better fix that,” Agnes said. “We can’t live in a house with a hole.”
As it turned out, we could live in a house with a hole.
Because our measurements were approximate and our precision was nonexistent, the window from the pantry was a rough fit into the hole in the roof. We nailed it into place, using scraps of wood to seal around it. Then we added fresh shingles.
But there remained a gap. It was about seven-and-a-half inches between the roof and the top side of the window. We knew the figure, because it was the only thing we measured.
Eight months out of the year, rain fell through this gap and collected in a pot that was permanently placed on the kitchen table. The other four months, the pot collected snow. During the holidays, we took to wearing stocking caps and mittens while we prepared our feasts.
But the skylight, no matter how crude, did flood the kitchen with light.
“I really like it,” Hope commented, emptying the rain-filled pot into the sink. “It’s worth the trouble.”
Dr. F agreed. “It brings a sense of humor to the kitchen.”
Agnes didn’t agree. “It’s a disaster,” she said. Of course, she’d said this after leaving her purse on the kitchen table in the spot where the rain-pan should have been.
QUEEN HELENE CHOLESTEROL
K
ATE WASN’T LIKE THE OTHER FINCHES. SHE WAS SLIM, SOphisticated and listened to Laura Nyro and fusion jazz. She dated handsome black men and her spotless apartment was decorated with Oriental rugs and African fertility icons. She sent her daughter Brenda to ballet school. And when she divorced, she kept his name. Kate was the cLosest thing the Finches had to a royal family member.
Oh, the others didn’t think so. “Snob,” they called her. “Stuck-up cunt.” But I was in awe of her and was thrilled when—between boyfriends—she would ask me to wash her car or take down her storm windows.
When Kate stopped by the house, I changed my clothes as if going on a date. I was as charming and well behaved as possible. I pretended not to know the other members of the family.
My awe of her was based on the fact that she had exactly what I wanted in life. She was a professional licensed cosmetologist. Or, to use a name I loathed, hairdresser.
Kate was planning to someday open her own shop and I felt this was a bond between us, because I was planning to open my own chain of shops around the world and also have my own line of haircare products. I even wanted to have a line of products marketed exclusively to the trade because I was convinced that the perms on the market were too damaging to the hair shaft. I didn’t know how to make them any less damaging, but I did have some packaging ideas that would give the impression of harmlessness.
Kate had been generous enough to give me her old cosmetology school textbook. It was a hardcover with no jacket and the catchy title was printed across the pink front in swashy script: HANDBOOK OF COSMETOLOGY. Inside were black-and-white line illustrations of the many procedures that the cosmetology students had to master before earning their license to practice. It was all in there—from pin curls to permanent waves—and I was determined to memorize the book before I attended beauty school. I could not take the chance that I would flunk, so I felt my best option was to already know everything in the book. Even if some of the procedures were no longer practiced or perhaps even illegal. For example, a “cold wave” appeared to involve wires attached to the head, electricity and water.
“Working with hair” was the only thing I could think of to do with myself professionally. Becoming a doctor seemed unlikely to me now. I had nearly outgrown my desire to be a talk-show host. And even though I spent many hours each day hunched over a notebook writing in my journal because I felt that if I didn’t write at least four hours a day I might as well not exist, the idea of being a writer never entered my mind. My mother was a writer but she was also crazy. And the only people who read her poems were the depressed women in the writing classes she held at her house in the summers or friends she called on the phone. She had had one book of poems published many years before and nothing since. I knew then that I could never live like that: no money and even less fame. I craved fan letters and expensive watches. “I’ll be able to get a great boyfriend,” I reasoned, “once I’m the next Vidal Sassoon.” I even thought I might end up with a hair model in the end.
As preparation for my future as a world-class cosmetologist, I tricked members of the house and certain patients into letting me cut their hair. As it turned out, I had an actual knack for it.
But there was a problem. And the problem was finger waves.
No matter how many times I tried, I could not comb a successful finger wave into straight or even moderately wavy hair.
“Do they really make you learn this? Do they actually test you on this?” I asked Kate.
“They really do, yeah,” she laughed. “I know it’s really old fashioned, I mean nobody does finger waves anymore. But that’s hairdressing school for you. It goes by the book. Unfortunately, the book was written thirty years ago.”
My fingers were too large to make finger waves, I worried. Or I lacked the ability to contort my fingers in the required way.
This one thing, seemingly small, signaled to me the possible destruction of my dream. And I obsessed about it constantly. In the middle of the night when the rest of the house was asleep and couldn’t bother me, I lay in bed with my journal and wrote feverishly about it until my hand cramped and I fell asleep from emotional exhaustion.
One night I was particularly upset. The finger wave issue was becoming larger for me ever since I had asked Fern’s friend Julian Christopher, who owned The Kindest Cut Salon in Amherst, ab
out it. He told me the same thing Kate did, that I’d have to master them. It was an especially sweltering summer night and all the fans in the house were already hogged by other people, so I applied an Alberto VO5 Hot Oil Treatment to my hair, wrapped my head in Saran wrap and lay on my bed to try and write my anxiety away:
3:00 A.M. Can’t sleep. Am worried about this finger wave business. If I can’t get these down, there’s no way IN HELL they’re going to let me graduate. And no graduation means no certification. And no certification means NO HAIR EMPIRE FOR ME. I asked Kate and she said they have an instructor who stands over you and watches. This will make it even worse as far as I’m concerned. Because if I do somehow manage to finally do a good finger wave here on one of these Finches, the chances are just so close to nothing that I’ll be able to do it again in a testing environment with an instructor leaning over my shoulder and judging me. I hate to be judged. I hate school to begin with and tests which I cannot take, so this combination just seems like it’s completely ready to explode. Already I feel doomed. I feel like I am going to end up a busboy at the Hunan Hut in Amherst and then maybe someday graduate to dishwasher. And I don’t know how any of this has happened to me. How come I’m not getting ready for college? I’m fourteen and should be sitting at the kitchen table with my father, saying, “But Dad, Princeton has the better football team. I don’t care that Grandpa went to Harvard. Can’t I just do it my way? Like Sinatra?” Instead, I’m laying on a used twin bed with somebody else’s pee stains. I’m in my mother’s psychiatrist’s house for god sakes, eating candy canes for breakfast. Just this morning, Crazy Dr. F went into the bathroom for his daily 5 A.M. bath. He didn’t know that Poo had put the fish he won at the mall in the tub. So when he walked into the bathroom and saw the tub filled with water, he thought Agnes had suddenly decided to be a good wife and filled the tub for him. So he climbed into the tub of FREEZING cold water filled with like twenty-five fish (which I can’t imagine how he missed) and then the entire house was filled with his HOWL. How did my life take such a dismal turn? What did I do wrong along the way? Oh God, I just heard a noise. I hope it’s not a serial killer. Ever since I saw that movie Halloween I am paranoid about serial killers. Any of Finch’s patients could be one. Especially that crazy woman who owns the Blue Moon Grill in Easthampton. I just look at her and she creeps me out. She looks like she would eat a baby. Not that she’s fat. She just looks hungry in some dangerous way that can’t be explained. She’s always so nice and friendly. Exactly the disposition of a baby killer.
There was a soft knock at my door. A knock followed by the tickle of fingernails playing against the wood. It was Neil.
“Come in.”
He opened the door and stepped into my room. “Hi, Jocko,” he said, sitting on my bed, near my head.
“No, dog. You sit at the bottom near my feet or you sit on the floor,” I told him.
His shoulders slumped and his eyes softened. “Please don’t be like that to me tonight. Not tonight. I need you.”
“You do?” I said, closing my pen into my notebook and setting it beside me on the bed. “Good. Then that’s exactly what you won’t have. You deserve to need me, not to have me.” Ours had become a seesaw relationship, and right now it was all saw.
He winced, as if I’d just flicked water in his face.
Good.
“Come on, man. I just can’t stop thinking about you. You’ve got this fucking power over me. It’s like there’s nothing else in my life. Like it’s a stage, all blackened out with only one light in the center. You.”
I did like the idea that he associated me with a stage and professional lighting, but I still wanted to torture him. “Well, that’s too bad for you because I think you’re completely pathetic. You sicken me.”
I’d heard Natalie use the word sicken recently when describing something Agnes had done with a pound of ground hamburger. I’d made a mental note to add that word to my very sparse vocabulary. Right next to panthenol and back-comb.
Neil began to cry. He hunched over and brought his hands up to his face, cupping it, as if he was drinking water from a stream.
“Good, you cry. You deserve to be miserable and suffer. You’re a pathetic failure of a man. I know that I certainly don’t love you anymore.” I hoped I sounded cold and nonchalant.
He turned to me. “Please?”
“No.”
“Please?” He tried to take my hand in his. It was his attempt at begging.
I knew what he was asking. I exhaled with effort. “Fine.” I said. “This one last time.”
“Can we do it up the ass?” he asked, suddenly brighter. “I won’t use spit like last time. We’ll use something. It won’t hurt.”
“Use what?” I was suspicious of him. He’d fucked me up the ass a few months ago, and it hurt like hell. I’d told him to stop but he just kept on going saying, “Don’t worry, the pain goes away, it feels good after a while.” I wasn’t about to get into that trap again.
He scanned my bookshelves and pointed. “That,” he said.
I craned my neck around to see what he had pointed to. It was the yellow tub of Queen Helen’s Cholesterol. I was very fond of this product, which was absorbed almost instantly into the hair. Unlike KMS Repair, which tended to weigh hair down, the old-fashioned Queen Helen’s Cholesterol was light and very effective. I tended to use it at night, while I slept, when a deeper level of conditioning could be achieved.
I yanked off my sweatpants and pulled my T-shirt over my head. Now, because of the hanging basket lamp over my bed, I was lit from above, the most unflattering light, like a hamburger at a fast food restaurant.
His cock was already hard and he began stroking it to make it even stiffer.
I, on the other hand, was completely turned off as I looked at my body under the glaring white light. Not only did I look skinny, but also almost hairless. It was disgusting. If by fourteen I still didn’t have any chest hair or hair on my legs, I figured I could pretty much forget about ever getting any. My brother had hair, but my father didn’t. He was smooth. I hated that you couldn’t choose which genes you got and which ones skipped you.
“Lie back and put your legs in the air,” he said.
I did like he said and he crouched down in front of me between my legs. He reached up for the tub of Queen Helen’s and carelessly tossed the lid on the floor.
“Pick that back up,” I said. I didn’t want pubic hair in it.
He leaned over and grabbed the lid. “Sorry,” he said. Then he dipped his fingers into the cream and rubbed it onto his cock. He dipped his fingers in again and this he used to moisturize my asshole.
My hands and feet immediately started to feel cold, like somebody had wrapped belts around them. Even though it was summer, even though it was so hot you couldn’t sleep unless you laid a wet towel across your chest, I was shaking like I was freezing cold.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You’ll like this.”
He put his hands under my ass and then he plunged his cock into my asshole.
It was not fun and I didn’t like it at all. “It hurts.” This came out in almost a whimper and I felt ashamed that I sounded like that. I didn’t even know I could make that noise.
“It’s okay,” he said again. Then he started moaning and closed his eyes. “Jesus fucking Christ you’re tight.”
The more he thrusted, the less I felt. It hurt less but it didn’t feel good.
“Oh, Jesus,” he cried.
“Shhhhhh,” I said. “Shut the fuck up. Do you want to wake the whole fucking house, you idiot?”
I wanted to get up and turn the radio on so that the sounds of this, his moaning and carrying on and the slurping noise that was coming from my ass would be muffled. But the radio was across the room.
So I closed my eyes and imagined getting up and going over to it. My imagination was vivid. I could completely visualize how it would feel to rise from the bed and step onto the sisal carpet I had taken from my mother. I could
feel the scratchiness of it on the bottoms of my feet and I could feel the radio knob in my hand.
And then it was over. He pulled out of me and I was surprised by the sudden feeling of emptiness. This was followed by a wave of sadness. On the one hand, I had gotten used to the sensation of him up there, even if it made me feel really full and like I needed to take a big shit. But on the other hand I didn’t like doing it because I didn’t like him anymore and I didn’t like being on my back like that and it just seemed so weird.
He got up and walked over to the door, unlocking it and walking across the hall into the bathroom. He returned a moment later carrying one of Agnes’s pale yellow hand towels.
“You can’t use that.”
“Why not?”
“Because you just can’t. Use something else. Paper towels or something.” The feeling between my legs was repulsive. Just lying there I could feel the slickness and the very distinct sensation of his sperm leaking out of my asshole and onto my sheets, which needed washing really bad anyway.
He ended up cleaning his dick off and then my ass with my Wacky 102-FM T-shirt. It was red and tight and I hated it anyway so I didn’t care. Instead of washing it, I’d just throw it away. I’d tuck it deep into the bottom of the kitchen trash.
“You want me to suck you off?”
Instantly, my cock sprang to life. Neil had this way of sucking my cock that had addicted me to him. I’d watched him do it. It was like he slid it into his mouth between his gums and cheeks, which sounds like it would hurt, except he had really wide gums and very elastic cheeks so the feeling was incredible. I’d gotten to the point where I could come faster this way than by jerking off. In fact, with him around I almost never had to jerk off. “Yeah,” I said.
When my cock was in his mouth, he used a sideways motion with his head. So it didn’t go deep into his throat, but the part of it that was the most sensitive, the underside toward the top, this part got massaged really hard inside his mouth.