I remember once when Ruthie had just turned three. I was in the kitchen, I’d just finished putting everything in the pot for stew, and the carrots were such a deep orange, the peas such a deep green, and I’d gotten a beautiful loaf of peasant bread and it lay on the cutting board looking so … French. It was time now to just wait for the smell, my favorite part. I’d put in a few extra cloves, stuck them into a whole onion, in a line like a careless necklace. I took off my apron and came out into the hall and Ruthie had lined up all her dolls and stuffed animals along the wall and she was sitting before them on her little wooden step stool, holding a book in her lap. “What are you doing?” I asked her, and she said teaching school. I said Oh, and I went into the living room and read the paper—well, I looked at ads for the fancy brassieres, read the recipes and the arts page—but mostly I was listening to Ruthie “read” her book about birds, one of her favorites. “Some birdies fly high in the sky,” she said, in a high, clear voice that was learning pleasure. “Some birdies live in the nest.” And then, ad-libbing, “with their mommies.” I put down the paper and leaned back in the chair and thought, I can never be anywhere else. There is nothing that comes close to this. Outside, it snowed; fat, lazy flakes, drifting with soft intention toward the place they were meant to land.
I mean to tell you that I was mostly content, Martin. I carried on sometimes, I know, but I was mostly deeply content.
But now I want, well, I don’t know, I guess I want a shared something with you. I want you to cook with me, to do a marinade for the swordfish while I do the salad. What have you been working for, Martin, if you don’t get the chance to do these things? I know you’re not domestically inclined; I know you’ll never take up needlepoint or quilting like some men do. But Martin, could you please just think about stopping work to see what happens? We are so lucky to have that option, why don’t we use it? I don’t want to go to Greece or Tuscany or do any of that fancy traveling stuff. I always hated traveling, you know that, the notion of figuring out how many pairs of underpants to bring used to make me depressed. You must be thinking that I’ve changed my mind, that I’ve begun to love travel, look at what I’m doing now. I know exactly how your face looks if you are thinking that, too, and the place in your cheek where your tongue is. But this doesn’t feel like travel to me. It feels too much my own to be like travel, if you know what I mean.
So with our free time, if we get to have it, I wouldn’t want to go anywhere. I just want to be able to sit down after supper and look at what’s at the movies we can walk to. I want to take an afternoon to search out wildflowers—or, here, Martin, to look at fast cars. Wouldn’t you like to do that? Instead of sitting at some meeting in an overly hot conference room, wouldn’t you like to test-drive a Viper? We could do that, I’ll wear a silk pantsuit and those three-carat earrings you gave me, they’ll believe us.
I have a memory of my mother taking me outside in the rain. I don’t think I could have been more than five. She’d been cleaning the windows with vinegar and newspaper, and I’d been sitting at her feet for the pleasure of the squeak and the smell. She had her cleaning kerchief on her head, a bright yellow triangle knotted at the base of her neck. It started to rain and she stood at the window watching, with me hiked up on her hip. She was quiet for a long time, but then she all of a sudden ran outside with me, whooping away. It was just pouring, but her face was directed right up to the sky, and she twirled me around and around and started singing some show tune really loud, I think it was an Ethel Merman song. I’d never heard her sing before. And then we came in and dried off and I never heard her sing again. Not once, not even under her breath, along with the radio. And the thing is, I believe she had a beautiful voice. I believe my memory is correct in this.
I am so often struck by what we do not do, all of us. And I am also, now, so acutely aware of the quick passage of time, the way that we come suddenly to our own, separate closures. It is as though a thing says, I told you. But you thought I was just kidding.
Martin, while I’ve been writing, the sky has changed from a pastel yellow pink to a dusky purple and now it’s hard to see. But this dark is beautiful, too. It really is.
Love,
Nan
Today I woke up and felt the old pull of sadness back. It’s like a robe that is too heavy, weighing down my shoulders, dragging up dirt as it follows along behind me. This was disappointing. I thought I’d escaped something.
I went to the window, looked out at a sky that seemed hopelessly vast. There were thick gray clouds overhead, swollen, pregnant-looking. I closed the drapes, went into the bathroom, washed my face, looked up into the mirror, saw the gray reappearing in my hair, and began to weep. Then I sat on the edge of the bed and gritted my teeth and thought, I am not going to do this anymore. I am so tired of collapsing into this state of grief this achy regret about my thinning, graying hair, my wan-colored skin, my failing eyes and uterus, a year on top of a year on top of a year. A woman a bit older than me told me she recently found a hair under her chin and it terrified her so much she got in her car and drove for fifty miles—nowhere, just around in circles. It was a black hair, she said, stiff as a whisk broom. When she came home she locked the bathroom door and got out her eyebrow tweezers and pulled the thing out. She said she looked at it for a long time, and then she flushed it down the toilet—flushed it twice. After that she spent a good fifteen minutes checking her face for more hairs. She said she had heard about this happening, testosterone landing on the female shore, but she thought it would surely not happen to her. She was blonde, fair-skinned, had barely ever needed to shave her legs. She said it was literally horrifying, that her heart beat so hard when she found that hair she thought for a moment about going to the ER, but elected instead to drive around in circles, then come home to tweezers and a locked door and a fervent prayer that this was a one-time phenomenon, that it would never happen again. It’s so humiliating, she told me. It’s like you’re being punished for something and you’ve no idea what you’ve done wrong except age. She didn’t really hear what she said, she didn’t hear the natural acceptance in her voice of the idea that aging is a crime. But I did. And when I heard it in her, I saw it in me.
But this morning I sat on the bed and I thought, I’m not giving in to it. I’m just not. And I took out the yellow pages and I looked for beauty parlors. I found one listed on the same street as the motel I was in, and I checked out and drove to it. It was a big, bare-looking place, highly polished wooden floors, a hypermodern reception area, unrecognizable music playing, hairdressers visible in the back with the bored and slightly hostile faces of the fashion model. The prices were outrageous. It looked, in short, like a good place. I asked if anyone there could do a color. The receptionist, wearing mostly her bones, but also a black blouse, a very short black skirt, black tights, black shoes, and deeply red lipstick, checked around and said Robert could do me in about twenty minutes. I said fine. She gave me a dove-gray robe to change into, very soft and smelling vaguely of some exotic perfume. Then I came out and sat next to a woman about my age who looked like she was in for color, too—she had the same incriminating line of gray beginning. She looked up and smiled at me, and I smiled back, then asked, “What are you having done?” “Highlights,” she said. And I said that’s the thing where you wear the tinfoil, right? and she said Yes, that’s the one where you sit around looking like an alien reading a magazine. I said I’d thought about that, but it would mean a commitment to permanent color, instead of my temporary cover-up. She said, “I’ll tell you what, I wish I’d never started this crap. I like gray hair. I always liked gray hair on other women. But when it happened to me, I ran right in here and got it colored.”
They called me then, and a kind of pouty-mouthed young man draped me in silver plastic and said, “So what are we doing today?” I was going to offer my usual apologetic request—lately, when I go to the hairdresser, I always feel badly that I’m not a more exciting client, but all of a sudden I just got mad
. (I also got a hot flash at the same time, which seemed sort of perfect to me.) I got mad for all the times I’ve had these snobby people work on me and not see me, stand over me yanking at my hair with their face turned away from me, chatting with another stylist. I said, “Well, I’m not doing anything. You, I hope, will figure out a way to get the gray back in my hair.” I almost covered my mouth in amazement after I said this. I hadn’t known I was going to say it, I really hadn’t. But I realized at that moment that I did want my gray back, because in getting it, I’d be losing something else that I never really wanted in the first place: a corrosive sense of falseness, moving from the outside in. A sense of shame. Robert lifted up a strand of my hair as though it were dog shit. “Well, what’s on here?” he asked. And I said whatever the last hairdresser had put on it. He said well that wasn’t he. I said it certainly wasn’t, that obviously coming to him once was quite enough for anyone. It had gotten very quiet in the shop. People had stopped working; the stylist at the end station had turned off his blow-dryer to listen better and his client sat still, looking out through hair that had been brushed forward over her face. And then a man came out from the back room, dressed in the standard black uniform. He had a way of walking that let me know he was the owner, or manager, or something. He kept his face turned slightly to the side; evidently no one was quite worthy of a full glance. “Is there some problem here?” he asked. And I said yes at the same time that Robert said no. The boss man raised his eyebrows, smiled a smile that looked as though it could be chipped off his face and used to open a can. “Well,” he said. “Would it be something I can help with?” I said yes indeed. I said he could train his employees to be a little more human, to understand that when you came into a beauty parlor you felt naked. And if you came into a beauty parlor when you were fifty you felt naked and invisible both, which was a very odd and terrible feeling they might want to be sensitive to, especially since older women tended to tip a lot better than younger women. From the reception room, I heard the sound of applause, the sound of one person clapping. It was the woman waiting for highlights, I was sure. The man asked, in a kind of tired way, what was it that I wanted, exactly. I told him I wanted the gray back in my hair. He said well that was easy, all I had to do was let it grow. I said no, I wanted all the other junk that had begun fading to get off of there right now. He said they could try, but he couldn’t guarantee anything. I said what else is new. He said pardon me? I said what else is new, you never guarantee anything, do you know how many times women go home from the beauty parlor and weep? He said he doubted that happened very often. The woman with the hair combed over her face pushed it aside and said, “No, Henry, you’re wrong. It happens all the time.” Henry turned to her in a very careful way. “Has that happened to you, Lucy?” he said. “You’ve never told me you’ve been unhappy with anything we’ve done here.”
The woman wanting highlights came into the room. Her cheeks were flushed a very nice pink, and her gaze was fastened onto Henry like headlights. “It’s happened to me,” she said. “Four or five times in the last year.” “Well,” Henry said, laughing a little, clenching his fists in a way that made me think it was so he wouldn’t finger his collar. “How can we know that if you don’t tell us?” I said he didn’t understand, that it was just a very intimidating thing to sit in a chair and have someone work on your hair. He said he didn’t think it was so intimidating, it was just a matter of a client being open to change and new experiences. He said people make much too much of a haircut, it was no big deal, it was just hair—if you didn’t like it, it would grow back. I said oh yeah well why didn’t he just sit down and I’d work on his hair. He said you don’t think I’d do that, do you? I said I know you wouldn’t. And he told me to get up and I took off my drape and got my purse because I thought he was throwing me out, but what happened is he took my drape and put it on himself, then sat in my chair and told me, go ahead. I stood stock-still. I felt like my insides were taking the express elevator down. He turned toward the mirror, looked at himself, ran his fingers through the sides of his longish hair. “Really,” he said, looking into the mirror at me, “go ahead.” There was not one sound in that place, even the music had been turned off. Finally, I said, All right. Fine, I said. And I put down my purse and told Henry, “Over to the sink, please, I’m going to shampoo you first.” He went to the sink and leaned back and I used the little sprayer to wet down his hair and I asked if the water temperature was right, which I thought was the least I could do. “Very comfortable,” he said. I shampooed him and then I wrapped a towel around his head—rather inexpertly, as it turned out, it fell off as soon as he stood up. But he just picked it up and rubbed his head for a minute, then settled the towel on his shoulders and went back to the station. I asked to see what was available for me to use. Robert opened his drawer. There were all kinds of scissors, five or six combs, a couple of brushes. I picked out a comb and a pair of scissors and Robert shook his head violently but Henry said, “No. Leave her alone.”
I combed Henry’s hair for a while and then I held up a piece of it. I stood there for the longest time with the scissors open but then I just couldn’t do it. I put the scissors down and said, Oh, just forget it. Never mind. He caught hold of my wrist, gently, and said, I want you to do it, go ahead, it’s perfectly fine. I looked around the room and thought for a moment about whether or not I could get sued and how angry Martin would be when he called our lawyer, who did not have a good sense of humor. He was a good lawyer, though, fierce, he hardly ever lost a case. I picked up the scissors again, took a deep cut of Henry’s hair. Then another. Then I said, “So how are things at home?” “Oy,” he said, waving his hand. “Don’t ask.” And we both smiled.
I finished cutting his hair and it looked pretty terrible when I was done. It looked like a bad pixie cut. I said I’m sorry and he said, forget it, he kind of liked it, it certainly was different. Then he said, now it’s your turn and I said you know, maybe I will just let it grow out and he said that would be the healthiest thing to do. He stood up and we shook hands and he gave me a sample bottle of clove-scented shampoo. The place was still absolutely quiet. I knew it wouldn’t be after I left. I also knew that Henry had just done some terrific advertising for himself.
I got in the car and sat there for a while thinking. Then after I started driving I kept looking at my hair in the rearview mirror and it looked really terrible and I kind of wished I’d just kept my mouth shut and gotten my usual color done. But it seems some other part of me has taken hold, has grown huge and suddenly, like mushrooms after a rain. So my hair will look terrible for a while. Cost of admission to a better club, that’s all.
Dear Martin,
I’m staying in a little place in northern Minnesota that is like a cabin/motel. There are six small, detached units: a little house for everyone, and everyone gets a tiny front porch, too. There’s a kitchenette stocked with mismatched dishes and pots and pans, so I went to a grocery store to get some supplies. The notion of cooking again seemed appealing; you get tired of eating out. In addition to which I was eager to eat off the blue willow plate, there was one of those in the cupboard—a coffee cup with pansies, too.
When I got to the grocery store, the oddest thing happened. I found it very, very difficult to buy anything. I would pick something up, then think, no, it’s Ruthie who really likes pineapple. No, Martin is the one who loves London broil. I wanted to get something special, a real treat, something I liked to cook and liked even more to eat, but everything I picked up, I put back. Finally, I leaned against the dairy case and thought, well, come on, Nan, what do YOU really, really like? And then I thought, my God. I don’t know. I’ve forgotten.
Would this happen to you, Martin? If you went into the grocery store looking for something to make just for you (well, I know you never cook for yourself, but pretend you do), would you just walk right over and get everything? I think you would. I think you’d go right up to things, pick them up, pay for them, take them home, cook
them and eat them with no sense of anything but pleasure. I guess you’d watch TV while you ate, or read the paper. There would be nothing tangled up inside you, no guilt and despair trying to work their way into the lettuce and baguette and breast of chicken. It is a case of feeling that you deserve things, that they are there for you; and it is something women seem to struggle with, almost without exception, and I don’t know why. I don’t know why men don’t struggle with it. I don’t know where your sense of entitlement comes from. Well, yes I do. It comes from the way you were raised, from everyone telling you, one way or another, that yours is the earth to inherit. That’s true, Martin, and you know it, and there’s no need here for any anger. I mean, I’m not angry, don’t you be. I’m just wondering. I really am. I am just wondering and wondering and wondering. Goddamn it. All our lives, we hand it over. All our lives, we
Well, maybe I am a little angry. But it’s not at you. It’s more of a class action suit type thing.
Anyway, I stayed in that store for the longest time, walking up and down the aisles, thinking, Well what? I actually got pissed off at myself, you’ll probably be happy to know. Finally I went over to the meat counter and bought the biggest turkey they had. And then I got all I needed for mashed potatoes and green-bean casserole and cranberry sauce and stuffing and pumpkin pie and my spirits started to lift. There was a radio in the cabin, and I was thinking, I’ll find a good station, turn it on low, and I’ll cook with utensils that are all new to me. And when the turkey is in the oven, I’ll sit on the little sofa with my feet up and read Family Circle and Woman’s Day. Maybe I’ll make one of the crafts they show. I was feeling so happy about my plans, kind of excited.