Grounded (2 page)

I hid the dolls under Lilac Rose’s twin bed, but Mamaw still managed to find them. She liked to drag a dozen or more dolls down to our living room and talk to them for hours. Most days when I came home from school, she asked me to play dolls with her.

“I don’t
like
dolls,” I always said.

What I liked was fishing at Doc Lake, but Mother wouldn’t let me go there. After the crash, she kept me on a short leash. I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere on my own except to school and back.

During Christmas vacation I started bugging Mother to let me go to the funeral home with her. She was preparing for her new career as a hair stylist for corpses.

“I can’t have you distracting me,” Mother said when I asked the first time.

I was helping her put an electric blanket on my bed. That blanket, a carton of malted milk balls, and the new edition of the
Guinness Book of World Records
were my only Christmas presents that year. (I could tell already that holidays were going to be slim pickings in the A.D. era.)

“I won’t distract you,” I promised. “I just want to help. You don’t have to pay me or anything.”

“Who said anything about
paying
you?” Mother replied. “Besides, you don’t even brush your own hair. Why would you want to learn how to style other people’s hair, especially when they’re dead?”

She had a point. Hair had never interested me like it did Mother or Lilac Rose. They could spend an entire Saturday night curling Lilac Rose’s hair with Dippity-Do.

“Think about this,” I tried again. “What if there’s a terrible disaster, and you have a whole bunch of bodies to pretty up? You’d need an assistant. Even Perry Mason on TV has his secretary, Della Street, to help him.”

“Humph,” she mumbled as she smoothed my bedspread over the lumpy electric blanket.

I followed Mother downstairs. She stopped in front of the thermostat and studied the dial.

“Really, you should
think
about it,” I warned darkly. “Something really
big
could happen where you’d need my help.”

“Is that a fact?” Mother said without a trace of enthusiasm. She dismissed the notion that I might ever be of help to her as she turned the thermostat down to fifty-eight degrees. Then she turned on the television and waited for Perry Mason to come on and save the day.

The next funeral was in the middle of January. To my surprise, Mother let me go with her to help prepare the body for viewing.

It was Carlotta Coldwell, our next-door neighbor on the other side, and the owner of Carlotta’s Cute Cuts, the only beauty parlor in Digginsville.

“Everyone’ll be looking at Carlotta’s hair,” Mother said when we arrived at the funeral home. “So it’s got to look nice. Just watch closely and you’ll see how this is done.”

Mother was bossing me as usual, but I knew she was the one who was nervous. This was her first real
client and only the fourth dead person she’d ever groomed.

Mrs. Coldwell’s thin body was stretched out on a wheeled cot in the basement of Danielson Family Funeral Home. Her eyes were glued shut and she was wearing a plaid wool suit. She looked like a dead bird that somebody thought would be funny to dress up in people clothes.

“All right then,” Mother began. She was opening a small aqua suitcase filled with hairbrushes, combs, bobby pins, and curlers. “Most older ladies look good with a little height in their hair. So I’ll take these big rollers—you want to use four of them—and, starting an inch or two from the hairline, curl the hair back. Then you take three rollers—one on each side and another in the very front—and curl the hair under, like this.”

“Four back, three under,” I repeated, watching her work.

“That’s right,” said Mother. “And you never have to mess with the hair on the back of the head.”

“Why not?” I asked.

Mother stopped rolling Mrs. Coldwell’s hair and glared at me like I was an idiot. “Because Carlotta’ll be lying in a
casket
,” she said.

“Oh, yeah. Right.”

“Now,” Mother said, resuming her rolling, “if this were anybody else, I’d probably have started with a shampoo and blow-dry, and then used some hot rollers. But Carlotta’s hair’s so brittle from all the years she dyed it, I hate to risk damaging it, especially before her funeral.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And if this were a gentleman,” Mother continued, “he’d likely need a shave and a trim.”

I remembered how she’d trimmed Daddy’s sideburns that night at the funeral home.

“Just tidying up,” Mother said, matter-of-factly. “This isn’t the time or place to give someone a completely new hairstyle, though God knows, most people could use it.”

She stepped away from the cot and admired Mrs. Coldwell’s rolled hair. Then she pulled a tiny pair of scissors from the suitcase and began cutting the flyaway hairs that had escaped the rollers. Mother’s face had the same look of calm concentration she’d had when she was curling Lilac Rose’s hair and grooming Daddy and Wayne Junior in this room less than three months earlier.

I remembered the hours she’d spent that night,
petting their faces and stroking their hands. Maybe I should’ve touched them, too. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t believe that was
them.
I couldn’t believe the whole thing had happened. I couldn’t do anything but float above myself and watch, just like I was doing right then with poor old Mrs. Coldwell. Big help I’d be to Mother with her new business.

“Now,” Mother said, “we have to be sure her fingernails are clipped and clean because she’ll be holding a Bible.”

“Okay,” I said.

Mother leaned down to examine Mrs. Coldwell’s nails. Then she frowned. “I better redo Carlotta’s manicure. This color she’s wearing is way too orangey for the suit she picked out. Daralynn, run home and get my bottle of Pink Blush nail polish.”

When I returned, Mother was removing the rollers and teasing Mrs. Coldwell’s hair into a big silvery cloud.

“See how easy that was?” she said, clearly pleased with her work. “Four back, three under. That’s all you have to remember.”

It took me a while to get the hang of it. I had to steal some of my dolls back from Mamaw to practice. But by the time the daffodils started coming up in
Digginsville, I was almost as good as Mother at styling hair. And by that time, she was getting requests from living people to do their hair, too.

That’s when Mother decided to open a beauty parlor.

“You should call it Hattie’s Hair Hut,” I suggested. “Or how ’bout From Cradle to Grave?” I was just trying to be helpful.

But Mother snapped at me. “It’s not going to have a name. It’s not going to be
that
kind of place.” She was sitting at the dining room table surrounded by a pile of unpaid bills.

“What’s it going to be then?” I asked cautiously.

“Nothing fancy or showy,” stated Mother, who despised anything that could be construed as attention seeking. “Just a place where people can get their hair cut for a reasonable price. That’s all.”

Mother described her new business as a public service for Digginsville. But even I could see the real reason sitting right there on the dining room table: We needed money to pay our bills.

So with the insurance check she got in the mail, Mother bought Mrs. Coldwell’s old beauty parlor. It was just three blocks from our house, right next door to the post office. Without even hanging up a new
sign, people began stopping in before or after picking up their mail.

As a hairdresser, Mother was no-nonsense. I suspect some customers appreciated this. Others probably missed the chitchat and gossip that always floated around Mrs. Coldwell’s shop.

My mother had never been a gentle touch, but the plane crash combined with her new business of styling corpses reduced her bedside manner to zilch. Occasionally I’d hear an “Ow!” or an “Easy now, Hattie.”

“Beg your pardon,” Mother always apologized. “I guess I don’t know my own strength.”

I sure did. Nobody was stronger than my mother. And if a customer tried to console her—even just to say whenever they saw an
air-o-plane
flying overhead, they thought of Daddy—Mother would respond with tense politeness: “Have you ever thought about curling this section of hair right here? It might look better with a little bend.”

And that would be that.

Mother paid me a dollar for every head I shampooed. Until school let out, I could work only on Saturdays. Mamaw worked the other days. She liked being useful. And we all liked the fact that the beauty parlor gave us something new to talk about at dinner.
But the air inside our house felt dead, even when we opened the windows.

So when it started getting warm again that first spring A.D., the three of us began sitting outside on our porch after dinner—until the sounds from Aunt Josie’s house drove Mother back inside in a rage.

Aunt Josie was Daddy’s only sister. Her given name was Joanne Cecilia Oakland. When she was eighteen, she had it legally changed to Josie Oakland.

“I wanted something sassier,” Aunt Josie told me once when I asked her why.

Sassy. Saucy. Flashy. Trashy.
These were some of the words I heard used to describe my aunt. Only my father, Aunt Josie’s younger brother, seemed amused rather than offended by her sense of style.

One time, years earlier when we were on our way to a family gathering, I heard Daddy tell Aunt Josie: “Sister, I believe a bird is building a nest in your hair.”

“It’s a
hat
, Wayne,” Aunt Josie corrected. “And it’s from New York City, if you must know.”

Daddy just laughed. But it was that kind of pronouncement that made me adore Aunt Josie. Truth was, I worshipped her.

Aunt Josie was the self-appointed fashion expert in Digginsville. But her real job—the one she got paid for—was based in her home, a rambling Victorian, four houses down the street from ours.

Her business was called The Summer Sunset Retirement Home for Distinguished Gentlemen. It operated on a trio of related principles:

1) Aunt Josie needed a reliable source of income.

2) There were plenty of old men who had no one to take care of them.

3) Aunt Josie loved men.

She didn’t mind cooking or cleaning or even sharing her home with them, provided they made a monthly donation to the house. Aunt Josie didn’t charge her
gentlemen
, as she called them, a set fee. They simply gave her what they thought was an appropriate sum for living in the bedrooms scattered on the second and third floors of Aunt Josie’s house.

Aunt Josie had a starched white nurse’s uniform she wore without the benefit of a nursing degree. Her gentlemen couldn’t seem to tell the difference. Neither could most flu bugs.

For more private matters, Uncle Waldo was on hand to help with sponge baths and other matters of personal hygiene. Uncle Waldo was Daddy and Aunt Josie’s older brother. He’d been living in the attic of Aunt Josie’s house ever since he came back from the Vietnam War six years earlier.

Everyone knew Aunt Josie took good care of her guests. Whereas other old men in Digginsville tended to look raggedy with their tangled gray beards and rumpled clothes, Aunt’s Josie’s gentlemen were always tidy and clean shaven. They even smelled nice, thanks to the lavender spray Aunt Josie used when she ironed their clothes.

It was no wonder Aunt Josie had a waiting list to get into The Summer Sunset Retirement Home for Distinguished Gentlemen. Her residents were the best advertisement, of course. But she also took out a weekly ad in
The Digginsville Daily Quill.
The ads always said the same thing:

No question about it, Aunt Josie believed in sweetness. She served her gentlemen dessert after lunch and dinner, and dumped a full cup of sugar in her pitchers of sun tea. (That was the tea she drank, not the stronger tea she used to dye her hair red.)

When the weather warmed up, Aunt Josie liked to spend evenings with her gentlemen on her front porch—or the
veranda
, as she called it. The men
listened to the radio while Aunt Josie ironed. She’d cut a hole in her screen door long ago so she could run extension cords from the living room to the porch. That’s how she managed to iron and play the radio on her veranda.

“It’s a fire hazard,” Mother muttered when the music first began wafting down toward our house that first spring after the crash. “Not to mention a public nuisance.”

This was an evening in April, not long after Mother opened her beauty parlor. We were on our front porch after dinner. Mother was hemming a flower-print dress while Mamaw was rocking a baby doll. (She’d found the stash of dolls I’d tried to hide from her in the back of my closet.) I was stretched out on the porch swing, digesting another Salisbury steak TV dinner.

“It’s not just the music,” Mother grumped. “She’s got them playing cards and dice games every night.”

As if envisioning another family tragedy, Mother reached over from her metal chair and stopped the porch swing with her hand.

“If I
ever
hear of you going down there without my permission,” she said, her eyes meeting mine. She didn’t have to finish the sentence.

Mother knew how fond I was of Aunt Josie. I admired her flashy way of dressing with those big earrings and talon-like nails, always painted bright red. She was eight years older than Mother, but a hundred times more fun. She’s the one who taught me how to play Crazy Eights. She was also one of the few people who didn’t bring me a stupid doll after the plane crash. She gave me ten tickets to the Rialto Theatre in Norwood.

“Invite a boy to go see the movies with you,” she’d said.

Of course I didn’t even bother to ask Mother if I could do such a thing. I knew she’d say no. Some of my best friends were boys, but I wasn’t allowed to do things with them—not even go fishing. Mother said sixteen was the age children from good homes began dating. (Never mind that Wayne Junior had been taking girls on swimming dates to Doc Lake since he was fourteen. I knew because I followed him.)

Mother was still grousing about Aunt Josie and her music that spring evening when the devil herself came sashaying down the street from her house, her long red hair bouncing to the beat of her high heels clicking on the sidewalk.

“Hattie, I think it’s flat-out
fantabulous
that you’ve
taken over Carlotta’s beauty parlor,” Aunt Josie hollered up to Mother from the base of our porch steps.

Mother didn’t respond.

“And I know you’re doing a bang-up job,” Aunt Josie continued. “
Everyone’s
talking about it. I’m going to have to come down there myself and get a summer cut. You think you can squeeze me in?”

Mother finally deigned to respond. “Sorry, Josie,” she said, holding a hand up to her ear. “I’m having a hard time hearing you with all that noise coming from your house.”

Aunt Josie laughed. “Frank Sinatra is not
noise
. He’s music. And my gentlemen just
love
listening to music.”

Mother smiled sourly in Aunt Josie’s direction. Compared to her tarty sister-in-law, my mother looked like a church organist with her jet-black hair pulled back into the tight knot she always wore at the base of her thin neck. She evil-eyed the extra flesh escaping from Aunt Josie’s catalog-ordered dress as if to say,
See? That right there is what eating dessert twice a day does to a woman’s body!

“And how’s your sweet mother this fine evening?” Aunt Josie asked in her soothing voice. “My goodness, you look fresh as a daisy in that housecoat.”

Mamaw looked across the porch for guidance. Mother nodded, as if granting a child permission to speak.

“I’m fine, thank you,” Mamaw offered tentatively.

“And how ’bout you, Miss Daralynn?” Aunt Josie hollered. “You found yourself a boyfriend yet?”

Mother cast a lethal look my way.

“No ma’am,” I responded, my entire body ablaze with embarrassment.

“Good for you!” Aunt Josie cheered, pushing a tumble of red curls over one shoulder. “Be a career girl, like me.”

It wasn’t the response I expected from Aunt Josie. Then again, nothing Aunt Josie said or did was predictable.

“Say, Hattie,” Aunt Josie called. “What do think about planting some purple coneflowers around the gravestone? I think that’d look real pretty, don’t you?”

Mother didn’t answer. We hadn’t been to the cemetery since the day of the funeral. That was fine with me. Seeing that stone with all their names on it would make it seem final. Permanent. Set in stone.

“Black-eyed Susans would be pretty, too,” Aunt Josie said from the sidewalk.

Silence. Mother’s eyes were fixed on her sewing.

“Okay, then. Have a good evening, y’all,” Aunt Josie hollered as she turned to walk back toward her end of the block. And then she added: “Oh, and Hattie, I
am
coming in for that haircut. I want you to give me a real stylish look for summer, okay?”

“When you-know-what freezes over,” Mother muttered under her breath.