“Well.” Thea folded her hands and made her face look judicial. “I’m turning seventy this year. Not fire-engine.”
Wanzie kept playing with her hair, turning Thea’s head to different angles. After a minute, a look replaced her usual pleasantly bored expression. In fifteen years, Caddie had never seen it before. Creative enthusiasm. “Hold on, I’ll be right back.”
She returned with four swatches of hair, like little rug samples. Caddie never knew there was such a thing. Hair colors, like paint chips. “Like any of these?”
The three women hovered over the snippets of colored hair. They ranged from light blondish-red to dark blondish-red. Thea pointed to the first one.
“That’s what I thought, too. Nice with your coloring.” Wanzie held the swatch to Thea’s cheek. “What about highlights?”
“Highlights,” Thea breathed, thrilled.
“It’ll make the red look more natural, for one thing, but it’ll also be pretty. Light up your face. Talking subtle, now, nothing loud, and mostly around the front.”
“Oooh, let’s do it. Don’t you think?”
“Very daring,” Caddie said. Somebody had to be the cautious one.
“I know,” Thea said, vindicated. “Very daring. It’s unanimous!”
“If you want to do it gradually, I can start you off with a rinse. Live with that a while, see what you think.”
“Live with it a while? At my age?” Thea laughed out loud. “Dye it!”
Caddie sat in the empty operator’s chair next to Thea’s while Wanzie went to work with foil strips and a bowl of whitish goo. Leafing through a magazine, she came across a feature on how many sex partners people had had. “Look,” she said, showing it to Thea and Wanzie, and they laughed at the photographs of ordinary women, not celebrities, holding up signs with numbers, fourteen, two, eight. One woman had combed all her hair over her face because her number was forty-two. Forty-two, they exclaimed in astonishment. Caddie waited, half hoping Thea or Wanzie would mention something personal about their own love lives, maybe even offer a number. But they didn’t, so of course she didn’t either. If she had, her number would’ve been four.
“Pregnancy doesn’t have to trump fashion!” read the headline for an article on maternity clothes. She held the magazine close, studying the models’ serene faces. Were they really pregnant? No, she decided; they were just wearing pillows on their stomachs. She closed the magazine, not interested anymore. She watched pregnant women on television or on the street or in the grocery store like a spy, searching for clues, a secret. She recognized her motive: it was the same way she used to scrutinize other girls in school when she was a teenager, looking for a sign of the thing they knew and she didn’t. She had the same fascination and envy now when she watched pregnant women. Longing. A kind of hunger.
She’d been reading up, so she knew it wasn’t possible to feel the baby yet, but she did. Sometimes it was like a soft, deep humming, other times a scratchy sensation. She was of two minds about everything, so it was impossible to enjoy the scratchy sensation. She went back and forth between silly personal pride in the fact that her body had worked—I did this, I functioned perfectly, my ovaries, my follicles, my fallopian tubes all ran like clockwork—and a sick, panicky dread because the thing growing inside her felt at least as much like a cancerous tumor as a baby. What was she going to do? What was she going to do? This wasn’t like a toothache, or a mysterious lump, some personal affliction she could suffer with if she chose to. Procrastination was never going to make this go away.
While Thea sat under the dryer with her head covered in foil strips, Caddie stared at her reflection in the mirror at Wanzie’s station and mulled her question, “And what can I do for you today, Caddie?” When she didn’t answer right away, Wanzie said in a more resigned tone, “The usual, just a trim?”
“I guess. Or—maybe short this time,” she said boldly. “Oh, I don’t know.” She thought of something Magill had said. They were out on the front porch and it was a blustery day, the wind blowing her hair in her eyes, in her mouth. “I’m cutting it all off,” she’d said in exasperation—not seriously, just out of annoyance—and he’d said, “No, don’t do that, your hair’s the only thing you haven’t tamed.” What did that mean? She stared in the mirror at her same old longish face, her straight-across lips and straight-across eyebrows. Did he think her hair was too wild? She tried to keep it combed and neat. Since she was a girl, she’d parted it on the left and let it go, shoulder length. Once in a while she pulled it back with two barrettes.
“How about some bangs?” Wanzie said. “For a change.” She was still infected with Thea’s daring.
“Bangs? I’ve never had bangs…”
“If you don’t like ’em, they’ll always grow out.”
“Bangs. I don’t know. I think…I’ll just have the usual.”
Wanzie shrugged. Not surprised.
An hour later, Caddie looked the same and Thea was a new woman.
“Oh, I love it, I love it,” Thea cried, turning her head this way and that in the mirror. “It’s a pixie—I look like Shirley MacLaine!”
“Almost a pixie.” Wanzie stood back proudly. “A little longer on top than a pixie, but you’ve got good hair for it, lots of body.”
“It’s so natural,” Caddie marveled. “You look so young.”
“The magic word,” Thea exclaimed, and jumped out of the chair to hug a delighted Wanzie. “It’s fabulous—you’re fabulous.”
At the reception desk, Caddie felt let down. “I should’ve done something dramatic, too. Why didn’t I? My hair’s just mousy.”
“No, it isn’t,” Thea said, signing for her cut and color with a credit card. “You have lovely hair.”
“Then it’s me. I’m mousy.” She picked up a bottle of shampoo on a shelf of hair products and set it down. Conditioner, gloss, gel, brightener, straightener. “Remind me never to buy any mousse,” she cracked, “then I’d be even mousier.” She pretended to elbow Thea in the ribs.
Thea gave her hair a playful yank. “Pretty. And you’re not mousy. You just think you are.”
“What’ll we do now?” Caddie asked in the parking lot. It was a hot afternoon, but not muggy for once; the air smelled fresh, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
“What I’d like to do is go for a ride in your car with the top down.”
“Sorry, it won’t go down. Anyway, you’d mess up your hair.” She gasped when Thea stuck both hands in her brand-new hairdo and scrambled it with her fingers.
“That’s what it’s for!” She laughed at Caddie’s shocked expression. “Let’s go for a ride with the top up, then. Come on, I’ll show you where I used to live.”
The Pontiac needed a new muffler; it sounded like a hot rod when Caddie fired it up and glided out onto Main Street. “Have things changed a lot since you were a girl?” she asked, passing city square, the heart of downtown, with its old stone banks on three corners.
“It’s bigger, naturally, more spread out. Right here, this is where it’s changed the least. I remember all these bank buildings. That tae kwon do place,” she said, pointing, “that was a candy store, it was called Emmy Lou’s. And the Triple A was a shoe store, I forget the name.”
“Where am I going?” Caddie stopped at the light at Main and Antietam, the last cross street before downtown ran out and turned into suburbia.
“My old school’s gone,” Thea said, gazing wistfully at the Best Western.
“Your school? You didn’t go to that one-room place of Cornel’s, did you?”
“Oh, my dear. I went to Miss Adams’s Academy for Young Ladies. I can’t believe it’s gone. Turn, Caddie, I’ll show you my aunt and uncle’s old house.”
They drove along the in-town part of Antietam, a boring street, nothing but parking lots and anonymous brick buildings. You only used Antietam to go the four blocks from Main to Maryland Street, which went one way the other way. Caddie noticed a sign and did a double take. “Thea, look!??
? The car behind her honked, and she pulled over to the curb. “Look—it’s Magill’s company.”
“Where?”
“There. I recognize the name, Kinesthetics, Inc.” The sign stood in front of a long, low, two-story brick-and-stone building next to a parking lot. A black glass door marked the modest entrance, and all the windows were covered with open Venetian blinds. “That’s where he makes feet.” It looked like a cross between a house and a factory.
“It looks empty,” Thea noted.
“I guess not, though. Cars in the parking lot.” But only two. Thea was right, the place looked abandoned.
“We should get Henry to take us on a tour, a field trip.”
Caddie laughed, uncertain, but Thea looked serious. “Are they on an assembly line, do you think?” She pictured the scissorlike contraptions he’d showed her, walking out in line on a long conveyor belt. “He calls me sometimes.”
Thea turned to look at her. “Henry?”
“To cheer me up.”
“Huh. And does he?”
“Yes,” she decided after a second. “He makes jokes about Christopher. I can’t help it—I laugh.”
“Excellent.”
They looked for a while longer at Magill’s sad, dusty, unkempt foot factory. Nobody was watering the dry shrubbery or the browning plantings. The place might still be limping along, ha-ha, without Magill, but it needed its heart back. And he needed it. It was so clear to her sometimes, what other people needed.
Thea’s aunt and uncle’s house was a flat-fronted brick colonial on a tree-lined street in the oldest part of town. “How little it looks,” Thea exclaimed, leaning back in the seat so that Caddie could see across her. “Oh, the willow tree’s gone. It had a long, low branch, I used to lie on it and read. That was my room,” she said, pointing at the second-floor corner. “I wonder who lives here now. No toys in the yard.”
It didn’t look that little to Caddie. And Thea’s neighborhood had aged a lot better than hers had. Early Street was run-down; Thea’s street was just old. “Do you want to knock on the door? Tell the people you used to live here?”
“Oh…I don’t think so. I wasn’t that attached to the house. My uncle got a job in Washington when I was twelve, and we moved.”
“So this isn’t really where you grew up?”
“It’s where I moved after my mother died.”
“When you were nine,” Caddie said leadingly. She wanted to hear the story.
“When I was nine.”
“Was it sudden? Was she sick?” She thought of Bea and Edgie’s mother, how she’d invited the two little girls into her big bed to say goodbye. Labelle was her name. “What was your mother’s name?”
“Grace. No, she wasn’t sick. She died in childbirth.”
“Oh, no. Was she at home?”
Thea looked at her curiously. Was she being too nosy? But she wanted to know, wanted a picture of how Thea had lost her mother, so she could…hold it next to a picture of how she’d lost hers?
“Well, it started at home—people had their babies in their own beds in those days, or at least they did in my family. With plenty of doctors and nurses around, mind you.” She put her head back on the seat. “It was a big family, plenty of aunts and uncles, and my grandparents, lots of cousins, but I was an only child. When my mother told me she was pregnant, I wasn’t jealous, Caddie, not even for a second. Because she was so happy. I remember a party in the summer on our front porch—I don’t think it was a shower for the baby, just a party, and my mother in a white dress with her stomach out to here. Laughing. We had a swing, and I remember her pushing my father in it because he wouldn’t let her swing.”
She stared out the window with cloudy eyes. “When I think about my childhood, that’s what I see. The party that summer. My mother in her white dress, and my tall, handsome father. Outside on the lawn with all the others, everybody talking and eating, laughing and drinking. The men smoking cigars. A hot summer, like this—my grandfather taking off his jacket, so then all the other men could take off theirs.”
Caddie waited for the bad part.
“She died in September, so I expect she was about seven months pregnant for that party. At first everything was fine. My grandfather had hired a nurse, and she came, then the doctor. I wasn’t allowed in; they told me to go to sleep and when I woke up, who knew, I might have a little brother or sister.” She looked down at her hands. “It was like Christmas Eve. I thought I’d never fall asleep, but I did. I didn’t hear the ambulance come and take her to the hospital. That’s where she died. I never got to see her.”
“And your father?”
“Oh, my father. He went away. He went west—that’s what people said, ‘Your father’s gone west.’ I used to think of it as desert and buttes and—chaparral, like a Western with John Wayne. My father was out riding the range on an old cayuse. I stayed with my grandparents at first, and then I went to live with Aunt Dot and Uncle Nate in this house, and they were very, very sweet to me. They had two kids, both boys, so it was almost like having two brothers. I wasn’t miserable at all. But I missed my father. I longed for him.” She turned in the seat to face Caddie, resting her reddish-blonde head in one hand. “He died when I was seventeen. In Chicago. I guess that’s as far west as he ever got.
“So naturally I went and married a man just like him—tall, black-haired, and elegant. And remote. You know what I was thinking?”
“What?”
“You and I did different things for the same reason.”
“How do you mean?”
“You fell in love with Christopher because he was the opposite of your grandmother, and I fell in love with poor old Carl because he was the same as my father.”
“No. My grandmother—she’s not like your father. I had my grandmother. You didn’t have your father, you longed for him, you said.”
“Well, either way, I think we both found men we thought could fix us, don’t you? Oh, I wish I were your age again,” Thea said, sighing. “Just to learn that one lesson while there’s still time to do something about it.”
“But—what is the lesson?”
Thea laughed, not unkindly. “I’m not sure, but I think it’s to make the break between the past and the present now, not drag it around with us all our lives.”
Was that the lesson? Caddie traced her finger through the coating of dust and yellow pollen at the bottom of the steering wheel. The clock on the dashboard was permanently stuck at ten-twenty. The radio played only AM stations and the air-conditioning came and went, same as the heat. “I need a new car,” she said.
Thea flicked her broken window button up and down. “I think you do.”
“I never got to say goodbye to my mother, either. She died in a spectacular car crash out in California. That’s what Nana called it, ‘spectacular.’ I don’t know where she got that word—it doesn’t sound like what they’d put in a police report, does it? She was working for a radio station, selling ads. I guess that was a disappointment for her, a sort of come-down.”
“You told me she was a musician.”
“Actually, I did say goodbye to her, now that I think of it. That’s—” She laughed, so this wouldn’t sound pathetic. “That’s the picture I see when I think of my childhood—me saying goodbye to my mother. In the doorway of Nana’s house, both of us waving to her. Her name was Jane. She was always leaving. She had a suede jacket with fringe, and she carried her guitar in a black case. She had long blonde hair, like Joni Mitchell.”
“And when she was gone,” Thea said, “you longed for her.”
Caddie nodded. “I had so many theories for why she didn’t want me. You know, scenarios.”
“I pretended my father had become a Pinkerton man and was working undercover. Out west.”
“I pretended my mother was a big star, she had so many shows and concerts she couldn’t come home. People were depending on her.”
“Caddie.”
“Hm?”
“Let’s go
shopping. Before we slit our wrists. Start the car and let’s go shopping.”
“Okay. For what?”
“Girly things, earrings and funky greeting cards and candles, things we don’t need. Potpourri.”
“Funky.” She turned the car around in somebody’s driveway. “I don’t know anybody who says that but you.”
“I know. That’s your problem,” Thea said with a motherly smile, and turned on the AM radio.
They wandered in and out of the book and antique stores on Federal Street, and the gift shops and small clothing boutiques Caddie rarely shopped in because they weren’t in her price range. Then, too, who really needed a pair of high button-up boots or a scarlet burnt-velvet cloak? In the end they didn’t buy much of anything, but it was fun to look. And afterward Caddie felt better, knowing she didn’t really want much from the stores she couldn’t afford to shop in.
“I used to like things more than I do now,” Thea said wistfully, fingering a printed silk scarf in a store called Ampersand. “Every time you move, when you’re my age, you leave more behind. If I live long enough, I’ll be down to my handbag and a toothbrush.” Caddie laughed. “I mean it, it’s like being a horse. The older you get, the less you feel like carrying.”
In a bath shop, they had an argument over some soaps they both liked the scent of. “Get them,” said Thea. “No, you get them.” “I don’t need them.” “Well, I don’t, either.”
Thea bought them and stuck them in Caddie’s handbag when she wasn’t looking.
“After that, I need a drink. Where’s a bar around here?” Thea gazed up and down Federal Street. “I don’t know a thing about the bars in this town, I was too young when I left.”
“There’s a café up there—it’s sort of ladylike, but I’m sure they have booze.”
“Lead on.” She took Caddie’s arm.
“Is your toe bothering you?”
“Oh, my curse. They can put a man on the moon but they can’t cure arthritis in my toe. I should have it amputated, that’s what, and Henry could make me a new one.” They chortled.