Absolute Brightness (3 page)

In each one of those pictures, it was plain to see she had no idea that her life would later become such a sad and sorry soap opera. Back in those days, when she was still drop-dead gorgeous and full of potential, she probably woke up each morning, put on her makeup, fixed her hair, got dressed, had places to go, stuff to look forward to, and plenty of things to smile about. But by the time I came along, smiling was how she'd trained herself to meet every situation, no matter what. Smiling had become a habit. No, smiling was more than a habit for my mother; it was who she was.

I knew other mothers, mothers of girls my age, who had fabulous lives, working husbands, nice houses, clothes, cars, Cuisinarts and microwaves, the whole split-level deal, and quite honestly they didn't smile half as much as my mother did. Even after my father announced that he was leaving us and taking up with Chrissie Bettinger, Mom kept smiling. And she smiled long after he was gone.

“It's okay, Aunt Ellen,” Leonard said, leaning over and fingering the diamond center of her wedding ring. “I guess it kinda turned out different for all of us. How many carats is this, anyway?”

I can't remember the last time my mother cried, but right there at the kitchen table over a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, tears came streaming down her face. She was quiet about it. No sobs or choking back. It was as if Leonard had found the on/off switch to her tears. And no one was more surprised than Deirdre and me. We both sat there with our mouths hanging open. I think if I hadn't been chewing and trying to swallow a meatball, I would have burst out crying myself. But as it happened, I didn't want to add the Heimlich maneuver to our dinnertime activities, so I just closed my mouth and kept chewing as if nothing were wrong. Deirdre, on the other hand, excused herself from the table, went upstairs, and didn't come back.

“I'm sorry,” Mom said into her paper napkin. “I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to … It's just … I don't know. I'm exhausted. This week and all. There's been so much. I don't usually … Why am I explaining?”

“My mother used to cry at holidays,” Leonard offered as a way of comforting Mom and making her feel like it wasn't anything to apologize about. “Also anniversaries.” And then as an afterthought, he added, “I miss her. A lot.”

We all just sat there missing people who weren't there. Then Leonard sat straight up in his chair and let his eyes pop open wide. He had an idea.

“Hey, wait a minute. Is it like the anniversary of something between you and my uncle What's-his-name?”

Mom looked up, squinted, and then blinked a few times like she was trying to see something very far off without her glasses. And then there it was, clear as if it had unexpectedly appeared on the horizon. We could see her seeing it—the date. Twenty years ago, almost to the moment, my mother had met my father.

Mom's eyes filled up with tears again, and she was unable to go on.

Leonard turned to me and in a voice that mixed urgency with unctuousness asked if we had any vodka in the house. Vodka? Why would we need vodka? I didn't get it. But then the next moment, I found myself standing on a chair in the dining room, turning the key of the liquor cabinet and pulling down a bottle of Smirnoff.
This better be good
, I thought.

When I came back into the kitchen, Leonard was standing at the kitchen sink with a head of iceberg lettuce in his hands. He was tearing away three of the large, crisp outer leaves and rinsing them under running water. He then laid these pale-green half-moons on the drain board and tamped each one dry with a paper towel. He grabbed a few ice cubes from the freezer and plunked them one by one into the lettuce cups.

“Thanks,” he said, grabbing the Smirnoff from my hand. He poured a couple of shots of vodka over the ice in one of the leaf cups and then handed it over to Mom. “I call it a Titanic, because of the iceberg lettuce. You drink the vodka, suck on the ice, and then eat the lettuce. It's fabulous.
And
refreshing. Try it.”

Mom looked incredulous as she pursed her lips to take the first sip. I thought the whole thing was insane, but I had to admit that the cocktail had already worked its first miracle—Mom had stopped crying. She was sitting there rolling around the taste of vodka and staring down at the little lake of spirits cupped in the lettuce while the ice cubes bobbed and clicked in the palm of her hand. Leonard turned back to the counter and began to fill the other two lettuce cups with water from the tap. When he was done, he handed me one of them and took the other for himself.

“Cheers,” he said. “Yours and mine are nonalcoholic. For obvious reasons. Think Deirdre would want one?”

“Definitely not,” I said.

All three of us sat there sipping our iceberg cocktail. I felt like something out of
Alice in Wonderland.

But, of course, that was just the beginning.

*   *   *

Before the end of Leonard's first month with us, he started working at the salon. He said it had always been his dream to work in the beauty business, and he couldn't believe his luck when Mom asked him to sit at the front desk, answer the phones, and make appointments. Since school hadn't started yet and Leonard hadn't made any friends in the neighborhood (and it was doubtful that he would), there was nothing to keep him from spending his free time at the salon, learning the customers' names, and expanding his duties to include tasks that were, as he described them, “up-front and hands-on.”

Right from the get-go, he acted as if he owned the place. He whistled show tunes as he cheerfully swept up the fuzzy, mouse-colored clumps of old-lady hair that littered the salon floor. He reached his fingers under the antiquated drying helmets and said with trumped-up authority: “Feels like you could stand a few more minutes, Mrs. Mixner.” He took the money at the till and made change, coffee, and small talk. He downloaded easy-listening versions of pop songs, burned CDs, and piped them through a brand-new sound system that he himself installed. He even took it upon himself to listen to the long list of ailments, infirmities, and family complaints from women five times his age.

I knew all of Mom's customers far more intimately than I cared to admit. If she was over sixty, lived within a fifty-mile radius, and could still pick up a phone to make an appointment, I knew all about her—and not just the pitch and tint of her hairdo or the cut of her fancy housecoat. No. I could also tell you the cast of her ongoing personal drama, the make and model of her car, her date of birth, the last time she had sex, the name of the guy she last had sex with, her favorite TV program, her least-favorite TV program, her movie star of choice, as well as the nicknames and habits of each and every one of her grandchildren. Despite the fact that I preferred to spend my spare time reading books and losing myself in the works of writers like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, these old gals with their high hair and caked-on makeup were, for better or worse, the universe into which I had been born. They were my people.

Leonard was now ensconced in that world and had taken over the very job that I used to have at the salon, going so far as to wear my old smock and use my old telephone headset. Whereas I generally hated anything to do with the salon and couldn't care less about the women who came and went like clockwork, Leonard loved the whole scary scene and took to the customers like hair on fire. This was as close to his idea of dying and going straight to heaven as he was likely to find on this earth.

To the average person I suppose the Hair Today salon would not seem that bad. It was just a run-of-the-mill beauty parlor outfitted in shades of dusty pink and slate gray and operating out of what used to be our garage. Nothing fancy, but not that shabby either. Back in the mid-nineties, after Mom had the place gutted, expanded, insulated, and decorated within an inch of its life, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to connect the whole shebang to the house by a snazzy breezeway. To be able to dart back and forth between the main house and the salon on a rainy day without getting her hairdo mussed justified the added expense of jalousie windows and a shingled roof; and since we weren't exactly the outdoorsy types, not one of us missed having a backyard.

As you walk in the front door of the salon, right behind the reception desk there are three drying helmets. Elderly women, rolled tight and netted, get parked there so their hairdos can cook to a crisp along with their brains. Two beauty chairs sit smack in the middle of the salon—one operated by my mother, the other one reserved for the memory of Leslie Shilts, a woman with big hair and overdecorated fingernails who used to show up twice a week until she broke with Mom and opened her own place in Avon.

The décor of the salon is modern with a nod to the good old days. The atmosphere is businesslike but friendly. The overall effect, despite the ozone-destroying hair spray and the exposure to certain chemicals that could blind a lab rat, is always to the customer's liking. Our job is, after all, to make the customer's idea of beauty come to life right before her very eyes—no matter what. If she comes in with a picture of, say, Nicole Kidman and begs us to make her look like that, Mom nods and directs her to the shampoo station. Mom never mentions the fact that Nicole is thirty years younger and still has hair to work with. She never says, “Lady, have you looked in the mirror lately?” She just smiles and gives it her best shot. That's what she's paid to do. Usually the customer leaves there satisfied even if she doesn't end up looking anything like Ms. Kidman. Everybody loves to be fussed over.

Originally the place was a beauty parlor known as The Beauty Spot. Then in the late nineties Mom came back from a big convention in Las Vegas with the bright idea to refer to the place as a “salon” and call it Hair Today. For a few weeks, everyone oohed and aahed over the neon signage out front and Mom's new leatherette smock. But soon enough life went back to the way it had always been. The only change seemed to be the way we answered the phone, which went something like this:

“Hair Today. How can I help you?”

“What?”

“I said, Hair Today. How can I help you?”

“I musta dialed the wrong number. Wait. This The Beauty Spot?”

“We used to be The Beauty Spot. We're Hair Today now.”

“Why? What's wrong with The Beauty Spot?”

“Nothing. We just changed names … Mrs. Bustamante? That you?”

“Yeah. Who's this?

“It's me. Phoebe.”

“Well, honey, why didn't you say so up front? I'm just calling to say that I'm gonna be late for my three o'clock.”

After a two-year stint as Hair Today's receptionist and part-time shampooer, I decided that the time had come for me to move on. I was sick to death of being an accomplice in destroying the ozone layer with a can of hair spray just so Mrs. Weinstein could feel secure beneath a hardened helmet of hair for her granddaughter's bat mitzvah.

I also had to admit that my idea of beauty had evolved to the point where I could no longer stand being exposed to frosted tips, perms, bouffants, or hair dyes with names like Autumn Mist and Champagne Moments. I wanted to live a different type of life and mix with a different sort of person. It wasn't that I disapproved of people who teased their hair and wore a plastic rain bonnet even when the sun was shining; I just wanted to expand my horizons. After too many hot tears, big fights, shouted ultimatums, and slammed doors—behavior that is, in my opinion, as far from personal beauty as you can get—I came to the conclusion that Mom and I were no longer compatible and Hair Today wasn't worth the trouble. So I quit.

After that, if my hair was in need of some kind of attention, I ended up at Supercuts in Asbury Park, a plate-glass palace where they played loud music and someone closer to my own age, who didn't bother with the blow-dryer because I was only going to wash my hair when I got home anyway, presided over me with a who-cares attitude. If I wanted to dye my hair (something I've done regularly since I was about twelve), I just took care of it myself in the upstairs bathroom.

Deirdre's relationship to the salon was more complicated than mine. She never actually worked at the place, and I think she always held a little contempt for the business because she had come by her hair beauty so naturally. Her long, shiny, chestnut-colored hair hung down past her shoulder blades and gently flipped under in a V. Like a prize-winning dog that needed constant grooming and a special diet, but at the same time delighted the judges and brought home all the blue ribbons, her hair was everybody's favorite. As a result, her duties on behalf of Hair Today were more in the line of advertising. If, for example, Deirdre happened to be walking down the street minding her own business, it wasn't all that unusual for her to be stopped by a woman who felt the need to compliment her hair. Naturally, the woman would ask Deirdre how she got her hair that way. Deirdre would simply smile and say, “Oh, my mom owns a salon, so y'know, it's just in the family, I guess.” Next question: “What's the name of your mom's place?” That was Deirdre's cue to flip her hair back over her shoulder and casually say, “Hair Today,” before being distracted and moving on. The woman, hoping to somehow look just like Deirdre, would make a mental note, and sure enough, the following week she would show up.

Of course, no one ever talked about this. I once mentioned that I found it inconceivable that a mother could use one of her own children as a shill.

“Whaddaya, crazy?” Mom asked me with hands on hips and her jaw set hard. “You think with my schedule I got time to think up stuff like that? Who do you think I am? Procter and Gamble?”

*   *   *

The first thing I noticed when Leonard started working in the salon was that Mom began walking around the place wearing a thoughtful expression. This was unusual, because it was more her style to appear harried and overworked and, on occasion, hysterical. Her day generally started at nine a.m. and then snowballed into avalanche proportions by noon. By three p.m., she was so busy problem solving and disaster averting, she rarely had a minute to herself. If an actual thought occurred to her, it was likely to get crowded out by the demands of her customers.