Grounded (3 page)

I had always been a good student in the B.C. era. In fifth grade, I even won the American Legion contest for an essay I wrote about patriotism.

But in those first months A.D., I had the hardest time concentrating. I could read the same sentence ten times without getting its meaning. The words wouldn’t stay still on the page. And when I tried to do math, the numbers just danced around on my paper.

My mind was in a fog. It was like I was underwater in Doc Lake and didn’t have the energy to come up for air. When school finally let out for summer, I was glad.

My grades didn’t suffer too horribly bad, thanks to my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Staniss. She was also my fifth-grade teacher. After the crash, whenever she called on me to give a homework answer, I’d say something like: “Uh, sorry, I didn’t get that one.” And right away she’d say: “Don’t you worry one little bit, Dolly. Say no more.”

(Mrs. Staniss, wherever you are, I will always be grateful to you.)

Even when she gave me my report card on the last day of school, she put her hands on my shoulders and bent down to talk to me, face-to-face.

“What you went through last fall was a
trauma,
” Mrs. Staniss said gently. “Do you know what that means?”

“Yes ma’am,” I said.

Mrs. Staniss stared, as if waiting for me to elaborate.

“Er, I mean, no ma’am,” I amended.

“What it means,” she said carefully, “is that it could take a long time for you to feel like
you
again.”

“Right,” I said. I didn’t tell her that I’d been thinking I might never feel like me again. I felt tired and a thousand years old. It didn’t help that all the
girls in my class had stopped calling me for sleepovers and bike rides way back before Christmas. Even the boys ignored me. It was like they all thought they might catch death from me, like you catch lice from a comb you find in the alley.

“I know this has been a long school year for you, Dolly,” Mrs. Staniss continued. “You know what you oughta do this summer?”

“What?”

“Take it easy,” she said. “Get some books out of the library. Or take your fishing pole down to Doc Lake.” She paused before adding: “Just tell your mother where you’re going.”

Seven months after the crash, everybody in Digginsville knew the reason I wasn’t in Daddy’s plane when it crashed. Because I’d been grounded for going fishing without Mother’s permission.

“Fishing sounds real good,” I lied. I didn’t tell Mrs. Staniss how low my expectations were for summer. It was just another way that life A.D. was different from life B.C. Back then, the promise of summer always made me feel like an explorer ready to set sail for a new, uncharted continent. Now, summer felt like a school field trip to some place I had no interest in going.

“Or, wait a second,” Mrs. Staniss said. She started
digging through her desk drawers. “I know what you should do this summer.”

She pulled a thick red book from a bottom drawer and handed it to me. The words
PERTINENT FACTS
&
IMPORTANT INFORMATION
were embossed in gold on the leatherette cover.

“Someone gave this to me for Christmas,” she whispered. “But I think it’s a better gift for you.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, trying to look grateful as I thumbed through the blank pages.

“You can use it for anything,” Mrs. Staniss said brightly. “Write stories in it. Or keep a diary. You’ve always been a good writer, Dolly. This summer you should write. Write about, you know, everything.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll try to do that.”

Of course, Mother had other plans for me.

“Except when I’m preparing a body for viewing, I’ll be at the beauty parlor,” she told me one hour after my conversation with Mrs. Staniss. “So you can spend your summer there with me and Mamaw.”

It would’ve been one thing if I could’ve made a little walking-around money by being Mother’s full-time shampooer. But Mamaw had claimed that job for herself. She loved shampooing customers, and they loved her right back.

“Jesus take me now,” they’d say when Mamaw was giving a shampoo. “I feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

“There, there,” Mamaw would coo in response. “Be a good baby and close your eyes.” To Mamaw, everyone had become a baby doll.

By the time school let out, all of Mother’s customers were requesting shampoos by Mamaw, which left me nothing to do but thumb through boring old housewife magazines with articles like “Fowl Play: 30 Chicken Recipes That’ll Make Your Family Cluck with Pleasure!”

The only bright spot in those early summer days was when a customer came in with a kid or two. Back then, nobody had babysitters, at least not during the daytime. Any woman with children under the age of thirteen generally brought them with her to the beauty parlor.

Carlotta Coldwell always kept a refrigerator stocked with soda pop for kids. As with Aunt Josie’s business, there was no set price. Customers simply dropped a handful of change in the glass jar labeled pop money before opening the fridge and grabbing a cold Fanta or Coca-Cola.

I convinced Mother to continue this tradition.
“It’ll be good for business,” I told her. Little did I know that my first business would be born one day while drinking a root beer from Mrs. Coldwell’s old fridge.

It was the afternoon Flora Denison, a classmate, came in with her mother. I was drinking a root beer. Flora bought an orange Fanta and slumped in the chair next to me and my stack of housewife magazines.

“Don’t you hate when you have to run errands with ’em all day long?” Flora asked. She was in the same boat as me.

“Yup,” I said, sipping my root beer through a tiny straw. I was trying to make it last. Mother allowed me only two sodas per day. “And it looks like your mom’s getting her hair permed and frosted. You’ll be here for two hours at least.”

Flora made an unattractive sound as she slurped her orange soda. Mother glared at me from across the room.

“Hey, want me to do your hair in a French twist while you wait?” I asked Flora. I was trying to save us both.

“You know how to do a French twist?” Flora said, perking up.

“Yeah,” I answered. “I got so bored last week, I read all of Mrs. Coldwell’s hairstyling books.”

I didn’t tell Flora what I’d discovered: that fixing hair wasn’t all that different from tying fishing lures.

When I finished, Flora couldn’t take her eyes off her reflection in the mirror. Before the week ended, girls were coming to the beauty shop with and without their mothers, asking me to braid their hair and trim their bangs. Some brought pictures from magazines and begged me to make them look like famous actresses. Faye Dunaway and Julie Christie were popular requests.

And then boys starting coming in with baseball cards, asking me to cut their hair like Johnny Bench and Catfish Hunter.

“Let Dolly do your hair!” all the kids began saying. So that’s what I called my salon, which was just a metal stool with a swivel top in the back of Mother’s shop. I hung a curtain from the ceiling to separate my side from hers. I also found a mirror and made a sign with pictures of hairstyles I liked glued on poster board. Mother said I couldn’t charge more than one dollar a head. So that’s what I did.

I won’t claim that I was a born beautician. I had my share of disasters, starting with the time Barry
Howe came in on the first hot day in June. Barry was a boy in Wayne Junior’s class.

“My cousin Frankie from Iowa’s spending the summer with us,” Barry said, gesturing with his head to the young relative at his side. “Have you got time for a haircut while I deliver groceries for Mr. Swisher?”

“Sure,” I said, patting my metal stool and eying cousin Frankie, who had the scruffiest mop top I’d ever seen. The poor kid’s hair was worse than the rock ’n’ roll wig Wayne Junior wore for Halloween when he was in eighth grade.

“It’s a shame to hide a good-looking face,” I told Frankie, repeating what I’d heard Mother tell her customers. And then I twirled the stool around and started cutting.

A trick I learned from Mother was to turn customers so they faced away from the mirror while you cut. That way you avoided any unwanted audience participation. And if you did a good job, you could really wow them when you finished.

Well, I thought I did a nice enough job on Barry Howe’s cousin. But when I spun him around on the stool to reveal his new cut, the dang kid burst into tears.

Why? Because it turned out cousin Frankie was
a 
she
. And I’d just given her my best Marlon Brando haircut.

“I look like a boy!” Frankie shrieked.

“No, no, no,” I said, stalling so I could think up an excuse. “Maybe folks in Iowa don’t read fashion magazines. But good gosh, don’t you know this is the most popular style in France this summer? Why, yes it is! It’s just as stylish as can be.”

After Barry Howe returned and escorted his sniffling cousin out the door, Mother pulled the curtain aside and gave me an exasperated look.

“Shoes,” she finally said.

“What?”

“If you don’t know whether your customer’s male or female, look at their shoes.”

“All right,” I said.

“And if you
still
don’t know, for heaven’s sake, ask
me
.” And she yanked the curtain closed.

I grabbed my scissors and looked in the mirror. Then I took aim. Mother must’ve heard me because she pulled the curtain back again.

“
Now
what are you doing?” she asked. “Daralynn,
stop
that!
Stop
!”

But I kept going.

“Daralynn!” Mother hollered when she saw big
hunks of hair falling from my head. “What on God’s green earth are you doing?”

“I’m giving myself the same haircut,” I reported glumly. And that’s exactly what I did.

Lilac Rose would’ve been horrified if she could’ve seen the results. Wayne Junior would’ve laughed himself sick. But I think Daddy would’ve understood. He always said how important it was to follow the Golden Rule. If doing unto others as you’d want them to do unto you was the rule, then doing unto my stupid self as I’d stupidly done unto somebody else seemed only right.

I left the beauty parlor that day looking like a rat terrier in cutoff shorts.

We first heard the news from Miriam Throckmorton. She was married to Dallas Throckmorton, the local real estate agent.

“Well, I think it’s just as sweet as can be that your brother-in-law wants to live next door to you,” Miriam announced to Mother on the second Monday in June.

“What?” Mother said. She’d been combing out Miriam’s freshly shampooed hair, but this news stopped her cold.

“Haven’t you heard?” Miriam chirped. “He’ll be living right next door to you.”

“In Mamaw’s house?” I asked from my side of the curtain.

I was sitting on my stool, staring in the mirror and trying to see if I could force my hair to grow by tugging on the roots, like I’d seen Mamaw do with my Beautiful Crissy dolls.

“Not in my house,” added Mamaw. She was shampooing Mrs. Kay Beth Bowman.

“No,” Miriam Throckmorton said. “On the other side. Waldo’s bought Carlotta Coldwell’s old house.” Then, turning to Mother, she added in a loud whisper: “He told Dallas he wants to get
closer
to you.”

Mother said nothing.

“Well, he’s never married, has he?” Mrs. Kay Beth Bowman contributed from the shampoo tub. “Unlike Josie, who’s married and divorced…Well, how many times has it been? Does anybody even know?”

I knew. Aunt Josie had been married five times, judging from the wedding pictures she kept on her mantel. But I didn’t say anything.

“And Waldo’s a certified war hero,” Miriam Throckmorton added. “Of course he paid the price for it. But who didn’t?”

Uncle Waldo had been a pilot, like Daddy. But he didn’t work for Ozark Air Lines. Uncle Waldo was a fighter pilot in the Vietnam War. He didn’t fly
anymore, though. Daddy said something happened to Uncle Waldo in Vietnam that made him act nervous and a little on edge. I often wondered what exactly was wrong with Uncle Waldo, but the details were fuzzy.

“I must say,” Miriam Throckmorton yammered on, “as tragic as Wayne’s passing was in that terrible,
terrible
plane crash, you have to wonder if maybe it wasn’t God’s plan to get you and his brother Waldo togeth—O WWW!”

“Oh,” Mother said flatly. “I hope I’m not combing too hard.”

I knew what Mother was really hoping: that Miriam Throckmorton had her facts wrong. But the information was correct. When we got home from the beauty parlor that afternoon, we found Uncle Waldo pulling weeds in Mrs. Coldwell’s old perennial garden.

He smiled shyly. “Josie hasn’t kicked me out, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Mother crossed her arms and stared at his bald head. Uncle Waldo had been unencumbered by hair for as long as I could remember. Wayne Junior used to call him Uncle
Baldo
until Daddy told him to be respectful.

“I’ve admired this house a long time,” Uncle Waldo said, looking at his hands. “I don’t know if Carlotta ever told you, but I asked her to sell this place to me a dozen times. She was too old to be living alone, and I’d hoped, well…”

Uncle Waldo cleared his throat nervously. He could see Mother’s eyes narrowing. I felt a bit sorry for him, as one victim of Mother to another. Something about Uncle Waldo always reminded me of those sad-looking dogs that wear barrels around their necks.

“What I was thinking,” attempted Uncle Waldo, dropping his head even lower, “is that we might build a breezeway and connect our houses. That way, if you ever needed anything—any little thing, day or night—you could just holler through the breezeway and I’d come over and do whatever you—”

“One breezeway is quite enough, thank you,” Mother said, lifting her chin with pride.

“Oh yes, I know you had Marvin connect your house to your mother’s after the, uh, you know, the accident,” Uncle Waldo stammered. Then he spoke in a quieter voice. “But let’s be honest. Taking care of the elderly isn’t easy. I know how hard it is, believe me. That’s why I thought I could help you on this
side. You know, by fixing things. Doing odds and ends.” He coughed airlessly. “I hope you don’t mind that I’ve noticed the spring on your screen door could use a little oil. If you want it to stop squeaking, I mean.”

“I apologize if my door has disturbed you,” Mother said in her iciest voice. “I’ll add it to Marvin’s to-do list.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” Uncle Waldo put in quickly. “I just meant that, well, I’m fairly handy, you know. And I’d be happy to help out around your house any way that I could. It wouldn’t have to be anything more than that. But in time, if you discover you enjoy my company and want to—”

“Daralynn,” Mother said, “take Mamaw inside.
Now
.”

It was only then that I realized Uncle Waldo was quite possibly courting Mother.

She joined us in the house a few minutes later.

“Is Uncle Waldo going to
live
with us?” I asked.

“No,” Mother said gruffly. “But I can’t stop him from buying a house if he has the money.”

She was mad, that’s for sure. And she was even madder when he came to the beauty parlor a few days later.

“Even bald men need a little upkeep now and then,” Uncle Waldo said.

“Not much I can do to help you there,” Mother said without looking at him. She was sweeping hair clippings off the floor. Ribbons of blond hair mixed with clumps of gray and black curls.

“Hattie,” Uncle Waldo said, “I was thinking about planting some rosebushes around the gravestone. But I wanted to make sure that was okay with you.”

Mother just kept sweeping. I knew she was thinking what I was thinking: the smell of all those roses at the funeral. It really was enough to make a person sick.

Uncle Waldo smiled. “Okay, I’ll hold off on that,” he said. Then he bought a root beer for me and a grape soda for himself. He stuck a five-dollar bill in the jar and left.

“No reason to be rude, Hattie,” Mamaw said after Uncle Waldo was gone.

“You can count the hairs on that man’s head with one hand,” Mother said, dumping a dustpan full of hair into the garbage. “One
finger
, even.”

“A baby can’t help it if he’s bald,” said Mamaw, rinsing out the shampoo sink.

But to Mother, baldness was a sign of moral failing, like crabgrass and dandelions.

“And then he has to
show off
by overpaying for those soda pops,” Mother hissed. “I swear, he’s just like his sister.”

She said it like it was the worst possible thing you could say about a person. But it made me look at Uncle Waldo in a new, more favorable light. Or maybe I just felt sorry for anyone foolish enough to try to be sweet to my mother.