The Wisdom of Hair (2 page)

“I’ll be home directly, and we’ll cut the cake,” she said.

I knew that was a lie because she was already slurring her words and there was no cake.

“Sure, Mama. Just be safe.”

She cocked her head to the side and looked around me to see herself again in the full-length mirror duct taped to the front of the bathroom door. Her long, slender fingers ran over the black satin lapels and then reached inside her jacket and pulled her breasts up as high as they would go. She arranged her wares until she’d achieved the maximum cleavage for a B cup, and sighed.

“
You
don’t have this problem.” She raised her eyebrows at me like I’d been playing dress-up with her breasts and she wanted them back. “How do I look?”

“Beautiful,” I said, because she was beautiful.

“I do look good.” She turned sideways, eyed her long legs and smoothed her hand over her round bottom. “You’d look good, too, if you fixed up now and then.”

Mama’s definition of my fixing up was making me play Liza Minnelli to her Judy Garland. Up until I was eleven, I let her cut my hair short once a year and spray it jet black with Halloween color she bought every November on clearance. I was so excited when she dressed me up like a child star and pulled the kitchen chairs in front of the TV so we could watch
The Wizard of Oz
together. I watched her mouth every line Dorothy Gale spoke with
great expression. By the time Dorothy declared there was no place like home, Mama was almost two pints into the story and sobbing because she’d been robbed of her Oscar for
A Star Is Born
.

As crazy as that sounds, she wasn’t always like that, not when my daddy was living. But she was never the kind of mom who wore the macaroni necklaces you made her or showed up at your elementary school play sober. She got worse after Daddy passed, so bad my uncle Heath took her to the state mental hospital in Columbia to see what was wrong with her. Other than drying her out, there was nothing the doctors could do for her. They sent her back home with a diagnosis my uncle wrote down because he couldn’t remember the word
narcissistic
, much less pronounce it.

“Bet you’d like to go out with me. We could do your birthday up right.” She opened the closet, pulled out two hangers, and dangled them in front of me—black satin hot pants and a halter top with a cowl neckline that plunged close to navel level.

“I made this to wear on Oscar night the year
Cabaret
came out. Bet you anything it’ll fit you. What do you say?”

The last time I saw Mama in that outfit, she didn’t come home for two days and when she did, two things were obvious: She’d danced the feet out of her thick black fishnet stockings and someone had roughed her up. I was only eleven years old, but that was old enough to know, no matter what it cost me, I didn’t want to be a part of her charade anymore.

“Just be safe.”

*

It was just
after three in the morning, and she wasn’t home. As much as I tried to make out like I didn’t care, I did. With every
minute that passed, the worry inside me grew. I told myself to go to bed, but it’s just as easy to worry upright as it is laying flat in the bed. I pushed the door open to her bedroom. Costumes puddled on the floor, a mass of cheap satin and sequins she’d stitched together herself. The Tampa cigar box she used for a jewelry box was running over with cheap dime-store trinkets men had given her or she’d bought herself with money we didn’t have. The room smelled like Ambush, her favorite cologne, thick and musky and nauseatingly sweet.

I sat down at the dressing table eye to eye with myself, took the clippers out of the drawer, and plugged them in. They vibrated in my hand; the sensation traveled up my arm and settled in my brain.

It didn’t matter that I was smart enough to go to college. It didn’t matter that I’d been accepted to the best beauty school in the state three hundred miles from home. It didn’t make a stitch of difference that my high-school English teacher, Miss Cunningham, had found me a place to stay rent free there so I could become a cosmetologist in six months. By process of elimination, I was the only fool left on the mountain who would take care of Mama, and shaving my head wouldn’t change anything.

I turned off the clippers about the same time she stumbled through the front door with a present, the first one she’d given me in years—and his name was Bob.

“It’s her birthday,” Mama gushed, her red lipstick smeared all over her face, while Bob groped her. “
Happy birthday
,” she said completely out of character, more like Marilyn Monroe.

“You gonna tell her?” Bob propped himself up against the wall
with a proud smile. Mama shook her head, elbowed him, and giggled again. He motioned for me to come closer and didn’t seem to notice I’d traded my clippers for the baseball bat I kept just inside my bedroom door.

“Go to bed, Mama.”

Bob leaned forward, almost toppling over, before he righted himself enough to get the words out. “How about a three-way for your birthday?”

I slammed my bedroom door and wedged the ladder-back chair under the doorknob, because mountain houses don’t have locks, and if they do they don’t work since nobody ever uses them. My hands were shaking so, I could barely dial the telephone number.

“Miss Cunningham?”

“Zora?”

“I’m sorry to wake you.”

“What’s wrong?”

Miss Cunningham had offered a thousand times to rescue me from the little bit she knew about my life.

“I can’t stay here anymore.”

There was a long silence, so long I was afraid she’d gone back to sleep.

“Do you want me to come get you now?”

I had a tiny flash of what normal might be like. Miss Cunningham would be on my doorstep in a matter of minutes, and we’d salvage my birthday. We’d bake cupcakes in the middle of the night, the kind she used to bring to my senior English class. The feral sounds coming from Mama’s bedroom were interrupted by the crack of a hard slap against bare flesh. Mama screamed. I
cradled the phone on my shoulder and grabbed the bat. Before I could move the chair away from my bedroom door, her scream dissolved into laughter.

I tightened my grip on the bat. Why couldn’t I just say yes? “Tomorrow.”

“Are you sure?”

I knew what she meant. Could I leave the mountain? My homeplace? Could I really leave Mama?

“Tomorrow,” I said over the animal noises in the next room. “First thing tomorrow.”

“I’m proud of you, Zora.”

I wasn’t a crier, there was never much point to it, but my nose stung like someone had swatted it. Even after all those years of waiting for Mama to grow up, there was still enough child left in me that ached for a mother who said things like that, or, at the very least, wanted to protect me from the Bobs of the world. I started to hang up the phone when I heard her voice.

“Zora?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Happy birthday.”

Bob was gone
when I got up the next morning. I’d debated on whether to leave Mama a note or just leave, but she was up early, and I didn’t have a choice. When I said I was leaving, I said just that. She tried to guilt me into staying, but she was too hungover to muster any look that might change my mind. Still, the part of me that was ready to bolt toward freedom wrestled with the sticky part of me that was terrified for her. I could feel her wanting a drink as she took attendance in her mind. My real daddy—dead. Daddy Heyward and Daddy Leon and Nana—dead. And me, her only child, leaving her alone. Something she feared more than death.

Miss Cunningham pulled up to our little house on the side of the mountain in a Toyota Land Cruiser; you didn’t see too many of those kinds of trucks back in 1983. She wore a pink Izod polo and a short khaki skirt that showed off her country-club tan.
Mama eyed the gold chains with coin-looking charms dangling from Miss Cunningham’s neck.

“She don’t belong,” Mama said under her breath.

But she was one to talk standing there in an exact replica of the gold brocade outfit Judy Garland wore on the
Ed Sullivan Show
in 1965. Miss Cunningham pushed her sunglasses back so they rested on top of her head and gave me a hug. When I introduced her to Mama, she reached out to shake hands, but Mama wasn’t having any of that.

“You must be very proud of Zorie.” Miss Cunningham was from up north, and if she liked you, no matter what your name was, she’d put an “ie” on the end of it. Mama nodded without a smile and then looked at me like she wanted to know who in the hell Zorie was.

There wasn’t much to load into the jeep, just an old American Tourister suitcase and two boxes Mama would throw away for spite if I left them behind. By the time I closed the back of the truck, Mama was looking at Miss Cunningham like she could cut her heart out and eat it cold for supper.

“Bye, Mama.” It was a wonder those words came out of my mouth.

The pleading in her eyes made me look away, my mind screamed,
Today Mama will take care of herself—so I can have a little piece of life for myself
, punching every word so hard my body quaked. But Mama was trembling so over the fear of being alone, she didn’t seem to notice.

For the first time since Nana died, she took me in her arms. Her nails dug into the tender part of my arms. The sorrow I felt for her bonded with the pain shooting up toward my shoulders, her
nails drawing blood. I ached, so I buried my face in her long, dark hair, breathed in the smell of honky-tonk smoke and baby shampoo, and waited for her to turn me loose.

She let out a little whimper and ran into the house. I didn’t go after her. I got into the truck as Miss Cunningham closed the door behind me. She smiled and pressed her hand against the glass before she walked around and got into the driver’s seat. In the quiet, as we started down the mountain, I wondered if she knew what it was like to leave home without the blessing she wanted and needed. I wondered if she thought I was stupid for helping Mama be so weak and dependent.

As we neared the place halfway down the mountain where Daddy and Nana were laid to rest, I felt a hitch in my belly that bubbled up from my heart. It settled in my throat, quivering, pulsing hard. If I’d started crying, I would have never left.

“Zorie, did you want to stop and say good-bye?” It’s bad luck to point at a graveyard, but Miss Cunningham didn’t know any better.

I rubbed the acorn in my pocket for good luck, once for her and once for me, and shook my head. Leaving was not as easy as I had pictured it. I blinked back tears and sifted through her cassettes until I found the Stones’ cassette tape,
Emotional Rescue
. I cranked it up and hoped Mick Jagger’s noise would distract me from thoughts of my loved ones and what I was doing to Mama.

“Do you think I’m bad, leaving her like this?”

Miss Cunningham turned down the volume and looked at me long enough to make me nervous before she fixed her eyes back on the winding blacktop.

“You’ve looked out for your mom for a long time.”

“She doesn’t look crazy, does she?”

“No, but from what you’ve told me she’s not the kind of crazy you can just pop a pill and be okay.”

“She was bad after my daddy died, and awful after Nana passed last year.”

“Where does the Judy Garland thing come from?”

Miss Cunningham let the silence fall between us the way she did in class when she knew one of her students knew the answer to her question. But what my daddy told me about Mama’s obsession couldn’t have been right.

He said she was sad after I was born, but it wasn’t my fault. Some women just get that way. He borrowed his brother’s truck and drove almost forty miles to Asheville so she could see
The Wizard of Oz
at the drive-in. At the time, they didn’t have a TV set and neither of them had ever seen a movie before. So just the idea of going made her perk up a little bit.

Daddy said the minute Judy Garland filled up the screen, he felt a change in Mama, like the moment Dorothy opened the door in her black-and-white world and there was Oz in living color. He said Mama was happy again and whatever came with that was fine by him. The only problem was Mama didn’t stay sweet and innocent like Dorothy Gale, she latched onto Judy Garland herself, and after Daddy died, she lived the Appalachian version of the tragic star’s life to a
T
.

“I’m sorry, Zora. You don’t have to answer that.”

“I really don’t know why Mama’s that way; she can’t sing a lick. Can’t afford the pills, but she drinks like Judy, has the same luck with men.”

The way I said it made Miss Cunningham laugh, which was
good because if she’d been quiet much longer I would have told her the truth. Mama’s craziness was my fault.

Near Jocassee Gorge, we passed a scenic overlook I’d gone by a thousand times and hardly noticed. The mountains looked like a giant green goblet filled above the rim with blue sky and foamy clouds. Part of me ached to turn around and stay because I never loved them the way I should have. But they were always beautiful and wild and too much like Mama.

“People like your mom don’t change, Zorie.”

“And you’re not mad at me for going to beauty school?”