How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane (26 page)

A rhinestone-encrusted head rises up from behind the faux-castle reception desk.

“EFF WHY EYE! YOU KNOW WE DO BIG GIRLS TOO, RIGHT???”

Let me get this straight, crown-wearing commoner, I think. You really believe that I'm going to hop up into one of those thrones and submit to having my hair cut by some chirpy-faced, perky-chested beauty-school dropout with Disney characters tattooed on her arms? If I had an
ounce of energy right now, I would fly at you like Uma Thurman in
Kill Bill
and pluck out your left—

“IT'S ‘MOM-DAY MON-DAY,' AND MOM'S ARE FREEEEE!!!!!”

—then again, perhaps I thought-spoke too soon.

“I THINK MILLIE'S AVAILABLE! SHE'S OUR MOST REQUESTED!”

Caitlin picks up a phone and then squeals into it with a level of excitement I've only ever seen on
The Price Is Right
, “I HAVE A WALK-IN!”

After a moment she hangs up. “YOU'RE GOING TO ADORE MILLIE!”

Don't tell me what to adore, I want to say. You don't know me, and if you did, you'd stop talking in that particular way that makes my spine want to shoot out of my back. But of course, I don't actually say any of that out loud. I'm far too annoyed/Canadian/passive-aggressive to do that. But the fact is that I do need a haircut, and it's not like I have a regular stylist that I'd be cheating on.
^*
Also, in some perverse way I'm looking forward to the opportunity of spreading my bad mood like a lip herpes.

A velvet doorway curtain swishes, and through it walks Millie. Not exactly as I'd pictured her, Millie's about thirty—make that forty—years older than I'd imagined. And bigger. About the size of two Caitlins and a Jenna. No Tigger tattoos on her fleshy arms, but there is bounce aplenty. And her chest is not so much perky as it is microwave-size, and restrained by what I'm guessing must be a very powerful, military-issue brassiere.

Millie beckons for me to follow her. I do, drafting behind her wide backside and taking in her peculiar smell—part sweet, part salty, part dill. Not bad, exactly, though it does make me the tiniest bit hungry.

She guides me past the race-car chair that, had I been in a better mood, I might have rallied for, and into a plain old stylist chair that's a little more my size and speed.

Millie covers me in a pink smock that's been painted to look like a princess gown. She has difficulty with the tie in the back and mumbles something behind my head—“Bool-sheet cack”—which I realize are the first words I've heard come out of her mouth, and which, if you say them quietly to yourself (as I did, several times), you come to realize is some pretty powerful profanity, filtered through her vaguely eastern European accent.

I look around the room to see if anyone has heard her. No, seems all the other stylists are occupied with their hyperactive, sugar-bombed clients.

Millie wets my hair down with a spray bottle filled with a solution that smells like straight bubblegum water and begins combing out the nest on my head. “How old?”
She juts her chin in the direction of my child, who at this moment is across the room, beaming as Jenna tosses into her hair a handful of sparkles that I will be vacuuming out of our carpets for the next eighteen months.

“She's four years old.”

Millie emits a series of staccato grunts. “
Mmh mmh mmh
,” she says, nodding knowingly, as though I've just delivered a dark and unrepeatable confession. As though “She's four years old” has told her more than she would ever need to know (like the fact that, earlier today, while trying to show me her new pill-bug pet, my daughter slammed her palm into my face and gave me a bloody nose, for example).

Millie leans over and whispers, “I don't usually do this. The little ones don't like it so much.”

“Do what?” I ask.

Millie doesn't answer; she just lays her fingers on my head and begins to massage it. Actually, not so much massage my head as assault it. She must have at some point in her life milked cows full-time, because this woman has the finger strength of fifteen dairy farmers. Of course the young ones don't like this—no child's skull could withstand this kind of force; their heads would literally explode into puffs of confetti—but me, I simply surrender to the awesome power of Millie's man-hands, resisting the urge to cry while she squeezes my temples as though she is trying to get her fingers to touch somewhere in the middle.

As I close my eyes and give myself over to Millie's massausage fingers, memories begin flooding in—like the
time I was fourteen and my friend's sister took us to see a Chippendale's show, and when one of the dancers came into the audience to hand out flowers, I gave him a dollar and tried to French-kiss the poor, frightened, nearly nude man . . . Dear Lord, I haven't thought about that in years. What's happening? Am I lucid dreaming? Having a stroke? Am I high? Or is it possible that Millie just touched my soul?

I open my eyes to see Millie now holding a large pair of scissors (regular, not pinking). She gives me a once-over.

“Not too short? Just trim?” she asks.

I nod, cross-eyed, unable to form even a word, and vaguely aware of the bad mood I came in with. What was I mad about exactly? It was important, wasn't it? Oh, yeah. My hand. The list. This place. That kid. I'm still mad about all those things . . . right?

Millie begins to cut my hair, quickly and deftly, fluttering in circles around me with the grace of Baryshnikov, if he were a 200-pound, sixty-five-year-old woman from an indeterminate eastern European country. She stops in front of me and begins to chisel away at my bangs like a sculptor, leaving me for a disturbingly long time at eye level with her terrifying chest, its cleavage so impossibly deep it seems she could store legal-size folders in there, maybe even a credit card reader.

I ask Millie—as much to confirm that I still have the ability to speak as anything else—“So . . . do you like working here?”

“Is good,” she says. “I was working before at downtown salon. I had lady who ask me to make her look like Halle
Berry. She was seventy-eight-year-old white woman. I say, I want also to look like Halle Berry. I would like also for my husband not be fekking the landlady, but you know we do not live in fantasy land.”

I am caught so off-guard by this admission that I reflexively reach for my neck like an elderly southern lady clutching at her pearls.

“Oh! And so . . . So then you came to work here?”

“After I am fired, yes. I like it very much.”

“You like working with children?” I ask.

She nods. “They dun't complain. Sometimes they cry, or make peess in their pants, but only because they are scared. I like the difficult ones, the ones who make tantrums. I tell them I am witch. When they ask if I am good witch, I say, ‘What do you think?' They dun't cry after that.”

Millie lowers her voice and leans in to my ear. “My extra-special ones,” she whispers, “sometimes I let them under wig to see.” Then she adjusts her own hair by about 45 degrees. This causes me to flinch, which I then attempt to cover with a brief coughing fit.

“Do you—do you have kids?” I ask.

She is quiet for a moment, with a silence that speaks volumes. Perhaps her children have died. Or maybe she couldn't have any. Whatever the reason, it makes me want to hold her—

“My son drop out of law school to be rapper. My daughter is on third husband. Such disappointments.” She sprays the air with Kool-Aid mist as if to cleanse it of their memory.

Suddenly, CAITLIN! comes over. As Millie turns, I catch the glint of something shiny poking out of her brassiere—perhaps it's a section of overburdened underwire gone AWOL? Or maybe it's the edge of a flask? Or a KGB-issued 9mm Makarov semiautomatic pistol? She moves too fast for me to be sure of anything.

Meanwhile, CAITLIN! whispers something to Millie, who grunt-responds, “
Mmh mmh mmh
,” and then whispers something back. Caitlin nods. Have I just witnessed a hit being ordered on someone's life? Or has some little kid plugged the toilet in the back? Rationally, I know that I'm letting my imagination get carried away. But still, my mouth goes dry at the possibilities.

Millie, still talk-grunting with CAITLIN! reaches into her smock pocket, pulls out a purple lollipop, lays it on my lap, and flashes a knowing smile my way. Is she reading my thoughts? How else could she know the dryness level of my mouth? Or that purple is my favorite flavor? I feel like I've just entered
The Matrix
, and I don't know what's real anymore.

But what's weirder is, I like it.

The door to the salon opens, and a little boy, maybe three years old, runs in. He throws himself at Millie and hugs her leg. She ruffles his hair.

“My Brrrrayden!”

Brayden glares at me—I am clearly in
his
chair. He sees, then reaches for, my lolly, where Millie left it on top of my smock. I grab it—and Brayden's hand—through the nylon material. Brayden's eyes widen in terror. Good, I think. Be afraid. And back off, kid—I ain't done yet.

Millie pats him on the head. “Go sit. Is almost time.” Brayden gives me a dirty look and slinks off to sit at the bench that I hope is still just a little bit thigh-sticky.

Meanwhile, my daughter—oh, right, I have a daughter—calls to me from across the reality chasm, her hair a bouncy halo of monstrous, sparkly curls.

“MA-MA, LOOK!”

I smile as she bounds over, reaching into my purse for a crumpled fiver, which I then shove into her hand before sending her off in the direction of the Claw Grabber Game. I don't know what Millie did to me—whether she used some form of gypsy voodoo black magic, or if maybe she just jammed her scissors up my nose when I wasn't looking and gave me a quick lobotomy. All I know is that I would give my daughter the password to my ATM card right now if it would get me an extra two minutes in the eye of Millie's sweat-cloud.

Millie spins me around to the mirror to show me her handiwork.

Although it's not the worst haircut I've ever had, it's definitely far from the best. The most I can say about it is that it's level.

I nod as if to say, “It looks amazing.”
^*
Millie grunts a gracious, “
Mmh mmh mmh
,” as if to say, “You're welcome.” I lean in to her gargantuan bosom, wishing I could stay just a little longer. But of course, I can't. She pats my head while I pop the purple lolly into my mouth, and then she pulls away. Oh, Millie, you wicked enchantress, you.

I step out of the chair and tip her (big), and as she sweeps up my hairs a thought occurs to me. “Millie,” I ask, “when you said you like the difficult ones—were you talking about me?”

She picks something green out of her teeth and looks at it, then at me. “What do you think?” Then she pulls her wig up and gives me a quick peek at her wispy bald dome underneath. And damn it all if the sight doesn't give me a huge thrill.

I grab my daughter, the volume of her six-inch-high hairdo equal to the volume of useless plastic booty that she's extracted from the Claw Grabber Game. We head for the cashier, passing the toddler who is still
BLAPATTA-BLAPATTA
'ing away on Strawberry Shortcake's paddles. Through my new, Millie-improved eyes, I begin to believe that he may have some innate talent for pinball after all.

As CAITLIN! rings us up, she asks, “SO, PRINCESSES, DID YOU HAVE A MAGICAL DAY?!” And as much as I hate being proven wrong—and believe me, I do—for once I am grateful for it. OH EM GEE, CAITLIN! IT HAS BEEN A MAGICAL DAY!

*
Those weird jagged sewing scissors that are great if you want to create a reasonable facsimile of your cousin Vern's teeth; other than that, they're totally useless.

†
A moment that may or may not have involved me saying, “Yes, whatever you want, just please leave Mommy alone right now so she can finish crying to
The Notebook
.”

*
I've never been able to make that kind of commitment because I can't handle the small talk required of the stylist-stylee relationship; I worry that, due to my captive status, I will blurt out something inappropriate, and my discomfort gets magnified in the presence of all those scissors and hot styling implements, so I just stay quiet, which then causes me to worry that I'm offending the stylist, who I'm certain is quietly resenting me as she or he works, taking it out on my hair in ways that I won't see until the next time I wash it. It's exhausting, but rather than confront my feelings around this particular neurosis, I've just found it easier to go someplace new whenever I need a haircut. It's my “Cut and Run” policy.