Let Down Your Hair (13 page)

Twenty-five minutes into my mother-daughter shopping trip, and I still hadn’t got the first dress off its hanger. For some 
bizarre reason, it seemed to be tied on with a pair of thin black ribbons.

“So have you got it on?” Emmeline called through the door.

“Not yet,” I said. 

Embarrassed and desperate, I yanked out the ribbons with my teeth, took the hanger out and pulled the dress over my head. It was snug and steel-blue, with three-quarter sleeves, and it fell to an inch above my knees.

Emmeline peeked in, looking me up and down with a professional eye. “Check out that
figure!
So what do you think?”

From the neck up, the woman in the mirror looked like me, with my jagged hair, small chin and 1980s glasses. From the neck down, I looked like a stranger. My bare calves seemed long and graceful, and the snug wrap of the dress shrank my waist to a handspan between neat, rounded buttocks and breasts. The only familiar thing was the beige bra sticking out of the neckline.

“Do you like it?” said Emmeline, hanging another dress on the back of the door.

“It looks good, but it … it doesn’t look like
me
.” I poked the exposed bra undercover, and it sprang out again.

“That’s definitely you in there, babe. And take it from me, you look
fan
-tastic. Try the black one.”

She unhooked the thin black ribbons from the hanger with two deft flicks, handed me the black dress and stood back, plainly intending to stay while I put it on.

“Um,” I said, feeling like a prude and a coward, “could you maybe wait outside while I change?”

“Oh!” Emmeline seemed taken aback. “Sorry, babe.” She retreated outside and closed the door. “When I go shopping with a girlfriend we share a cubicle when we try things on. More fun, less lining up.”

I peeled off the blue dress and put on the black one, which was so tight it showed every seam in my underpants. This time more than half of my bra was on show.

“How’s the black?”

I hastily stripped it off before she asked to see it. “Not as good.”

“Let’s just take the blue, then.”

I put my own clothes back on and we joined the line for the checkout.

“So where do you shop, babe?” said Emmeline, and I knew from how she spoke that she meant clothes, not groceries.

Embarrassment squeezed my throat. The one time I’d gone shopping, I’d been so overwhelmed that I’d taken refuge with Ryan in a corridor. “Um, I don’t. Not really.”

She frowned. “How do you mean, you don’t?”

“When my clothes wear out, Andrea goes through her old stuff, and if there isn’t anything that fits me she asks her friends or goes to a charity shop.”
Where you could buy two or three dresses for the price of one fruit salad
.

My stomach dropped as her features took on a terrible, familiar expression. The saucer-eyed horror of Jess and Sumeet, on the face of my long-lost mother. The world clouded over. Somewhere through the clouds the sales assistant spoke, but her words sounded faint and far away.

Emmeline took out a Visa card, and the sight of it cut through the fog. I pulled the wad of notes from my pocket, and she pushed my hand aside. “Put it away, babe.”

“That’ll be $380,” said the sales assistant, folding the dress into tissue paper.

Three hundred and eighty dollars for
one dress?

“Christ,” said Emmeline in a shaky voice as we headed for the exit. “Tell me you’re joking.” It took me a second or two to realize she meant Andrea, not the price of the dress. “She never bought you
anything
new?”

I shook my head. “Not if she could help it. Buying new things is mindless consumerism.”

Emmeline shook her head as if she couldn’t take this in. “She was pretty bad when I lived with her, but that’s just … just … it’s
child abuse
. Oh babe, I’m so sorry.”

Child abuse?
Once, everyone grew up wearing hand-me-downs, and people mended old clothes instead of buying more. Now children in the third world suffered genuine abuse to make cheap clothes for Westerners.

Had Jess suggested that not having new clothes was
child abuse
, I might have said these things out loud; now they sounded smug and self-righteous, even in my head. This was my mother, and I knew it wasn’t my clothes that upset her, not really. She meant my life, the life she’d abandoned me to when she gave me to Andrea and left. Part of me wanted to hug and reassure her, but my fingers closed tight around the money I’d offered and replaced it in my pocket.

We stepped onto an escalator, and our silence lasted the whole way down.

“Can I ask you something?” said Emmeline, as we stepped off. “Why do you call her Andrea? She’s your grandmother.”

I shrugged. “Because she’s her own person, not just my grandmother.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake.” She rolled her eyes. “She tried that one on me, when she had her femmo epiphany.
No more ‘Mom’
, she said, and spun some crap about not defining women by their relationships. Don’t buy into it, babe. Call her what she is.
Grandma
.” She said the word with a kind of vicious relish. “Or Granny. Or better still,
Nanna
. Call her
Nanna
.”

She flashed a smile, as if we were two naughty schoolgirls, but her eyes were bitter. Envying Emmeline her spirit, I looked away, remembering the one time I’d called Andrea
Grandma
.

“What about you?” I said lightly, as if it didn’t matter. “What should I call you?”

“What do you want to call me?”

Mom
. “What you want to be called. Your real name.”

“My real name’s Emily. Andrea changed it to Emmeline when I was ten.”

“After Emmeline Pankhurst, the first suffragette.”

“Something like that.” She steered me into a lingerie shop. “I changed it back when I turned eighteen. Just call me Emily. Or Em, if you like.”

Swallowing a lump of disappointment, I followed her to a section called
Exclusive
. “She changed my name to Sage, actually. I didn’t even know you called me Sadie.”

“She called you
Sage?
” said Emmeline, incredulous. “What? Oh, hang on. The blessingway ritual.”

“The
blessingway ritual?
”

“Some hippy shit where they rub sage leaves on you. She wanted me to do it after you were born, and I told her to shove it.” She glanced at my chest, and picked out four sets of luxurious lingerie.

I shut myself in a cubicle and checked my watch again. Forty-five minutes now since the nurse in Ryan’s ward said to call him again in an hour or two.

The topmost set of lingerie was turquoise with gold embroidery. I put on the bra, trying and failing to imagine Andrea naming me after the herb in a blessingway ritual. Or being told to “shove it” by a child. By anyone. What had she been like, before her “femmo epiphany”?

The matching brief was a G-string. Emmeline had warned me to try it on over my own underpants, but even through them the string felt like a cheese wire dissecting me.

Emmeline peeked through the curtains, and I covered myself with my arms. “So how’s the—” She cut off with a gasp and whipped her head out, overlapping the curtains behind her. “Oh babe,” she said, in a hushed voice, “I’m
so sorry
. You should have just
told
me!”

Confusion tightened my arms around my body. “Told you what?”

She peeked in again, dropping her voice to a stage whisper. “That you were shy because you hadn’t been to Brazil.”

“
Brazil?
” I said, bewildered.

“To mow your … lady garden.”

Mow my … Oh. I looked down. Either side of the underpants hung a fringe of dark gold curls. My skin began to prickle. I’d written an essay in second year on how razor manufacturers doubled their market by convincing women their body hair was ugly and unhygienic. In my essay, I’d called this “shameless profiteering”; now, with my overgrown “lady garden” in full view of Emmeline, I felt repulsive and ashamed.

“When did you last have it done?” she asked, in an understanding whisper.

I was tempted to feign girlish embarrassment for letting things get out of hand, but her gaze had moved on to the fuzz on my legs, and the thickets of curls in my armpits.
Her pants have to be that baggy to hold in all the feral pubes and leg hair.
My cheeks flamed, and I clamped my arms to my sides. “Actually, I … I’ve never had it done. Any of it.”

“
Never?
” gasped Emmeline, in the tone she’d used for the words
child abuse
. “But what about Ryan?”

Her eyes were like headlights, flooding me with shame. I wanted to put a paper bag on my head and rip out every hair on my body. “
Ryan?
How do you mean?”

“When you guys … you know.”

Her coy smile opened up a new, humiliating vista of possibility. I’d never considered how my body hair looked to Ryan. The first time he’d seen it I’d been too distracted to remember most young women waxed it off.

“He didn’t care. At least, I don’t think he did.”

“Oh, babe,” said Emmeline, worldly and kind. “Of course he cared. They all care. But he didn’t say so, and that’s the main thing. It means you’ve found yourself a gentleman.”

She gathered the lingerie strewn around the cubicle, oblivious to the terrible pit opening in my stomach. Maybe Ryan had been secretly revolted by my body hair. But then I remembered lying on Andrea’s desk, and the softness in his face when he’d told me I was beautiful.

Longing for him seized me. Why hadn’t I left a message with the ward? He might be awake now, eating breakfast, getting ready to go home.

“I’m sure some men don’t mind hair,” I said, almost sure I believed it. Almost.

Emmeline gave a small, jaded laugh. “Yeah, OK, so you get weirdos who like hairy women and huge women and whatever, but I’m talking about normal men. And normal men like their women hairless.” She stooped to pick up the last bra and hung it over one arm. “Trust me on this one. It’s what they grow up with on internet porn.”

She closed the curtain, her words wearing down the wall I’d built between Ryan and Other Men. Other Men learnt about sex from internet porn, and expected real women to look and act like tanned waxed actors with implants.
Ryan’s not like that
, I told myself, but even in my head I sounded hopelessly naïve.

Emmeline was waiting by the exit, a glossy bag of lingerie in one hand. “Now for the hair.” She didn’t specify
which
hair.

We boarded the escalator, my heart sinking faster than the steps. The mirror by the handrail convinced me my ragged blonde head needed professional help, but that was quite different from letting someone rip out my pubic hair.

We steered into a salon called Klever Kutz. The name reassured me a little. Had it been Wily Waxes I would have fled for the carpark. Inside, the air was filled with droning dryers and a spectrum of chemical smells.

“Hi-ii!” chirped Emmeline at the woman behind the counter. “Is anyone free to do a Combo Deal 2 and a wash, cut and blow-dry?”

The woman consulted her schedule. She looked barely out of her teens, and had gum wedged in her cheek. “For both of you?”

“Just for Sadie, here.”

I smiled weakly, pretending I knew exactly what a Combo Deal 2 was and ordered one every month. “Um, yeah,” she said, “should be no problem. Shona! You free to do a Combo Deal 2?”

A second teenager looked up from a head covered in tabs of aluminium foil. “Sure,” she said, glancing at a timer on the bench among her arsenal of scissors and bottles. “Come on through.”

We headed to a small room out the back, with what looked like a stretcher bed resting against one wall, by a machine full of bubbling pink gel which I assumed was some kind of styling product.

Shona took out a plastic spatula and what looked like short white bandages. “I’ll do your legs first,” she said. “Pants off.” Only then did I realize the bubbling pink gel was liquid wax.

Prickling with horror, I backed toward the door. “I never said I wanted to be waxed,” I squeaked.

“Come on, babe,” said Emmeline. “It doesn’t hurt. Not
that
much, anyway.”

I shook my head emphatically. “It’s not the pain,” I lied, “it’s that I’m not … I don’t actually believe in it. Waxing, I mean.”

Shona looked bewildered. “You don’t
believe
in it?”

But Emmeline’s eyes narrowed. “This is a
Nanna
thing, isn’t it? What’s the femmo line on waxing again?”

“It infantilizes the body,” I said in a small voice. “Makes women look like pre-pubescent girls.”

Emmeline sighed and raised her eyes to the ceiling. “What a crock. So that’s why men shave and wax their backs, is it? Fuck that. People have been doing things to make themselves look good forever. In caveman days, we stuck bones in our hair; these days we wax and get plastic surgery.”

In a tutorial or essay, I would have argued and ranted; here in the waxing room, I couldn’t seem to speak.

Emmeline draped an arm around my shoulders. “You’re twenty-two years old, Sadie. Cut the apron strings. Most girls your age have been waxing for years.”

Shona looked more bewildered than ever. “So are you having it done, or what?”

“Come on, babe,” coaxed Emmeline. “Think of it as a present for Ryan.”

Ryan
. His voice filled my mind, telling me I was beautiful, even though I had ugly glasses and bad clothes and hair on places other than my head. Maybe Emmeline was right. Maybe he secretly wished I waxed, like a normal woman, but was too polite to say so. Maybe he’d love it.

I mustered a feeble smile, and undid the button on my pants.

Forty painful and humiliating minutes later, I hobbled out for my haircut. Another woman eased my neck into a big porcelain horseshoe and sluiced my ragged hair with warm water. “So what did you get up to last night?” she said.

As I struggled for an answer, Emmeline stepped in. Slumped in blessed silence, I listened as she chattered and advised, from the very first snip until the straightening tongs slid through a sleek chin-length bob.

By the time we left the salon, it was over two hours since I made the call to the hospital. Definitely time to get back to the penthouse and call the ward again. We took escalators down to the floor where we’d come in, and I strode towards the doors.

“In here, babe,” Emmeline called from somewhere behind me.

I turned and saw to my alarm that she was standing outside an optometrist’s.

“You hate those old glasses of Andrea’s, don’t you?” she said, with an understanding smile. “Let’s chuck them out, and upgrade your look for your new, post-Nanna life.” Her knowing, conspiratorial smile faltered as she picked up that something was wrong. “You OK, babe?”

I reminded myself that this was Emmeline, not Andrea, and it was safe to tell her the truth. “It’s just that … I was hoping to get back to the penthouse soon and call Ryan.”

She looked mystified. “Why from the penthouse, babe? Did you leave your phone there?”

I swallowed. “I don’t actually have a cell phone.”

“You
what
?” Emmeline gasped the way people always reacted to this news—as if I’d told her I lived in a cave. Then her expression became cynical. “Hang on. This is another Nanna thing, right?”

I nodded and she shook her head with a sigh of disgust. “We’ll get you a cell phone. For now you can use mine.” She pulled out her pink smartphone. The wallpaper picture was of herself in a plunging floral dress, smiling seductively over one shoulder. “You know his number, don’t you?” she said, unlocking it.

I nodded again, took the phone and dialed.

“Hi, you’ve just failed to reach—”

My hopes deflated. I hung up, not wanting to leave him another message in front of my mother. I considered calling the hospital, but then she’d want to know why he was there. The thought of explaining everything that had happened, here in a shopping mall, made me edgy and self-conscious. And then I’d be speaking to that cranky ward sister, with Emmeline listening in.

I gave her back the phone. Ryan would know I’d been trying to call him. I’d called twice and left a message. By now he’d probably got it and left me a voicemail at the penthouse.

“Didn’t pick up?” said Emmeline, in sympathetic tones. “Try again later. And in the meantime …” With a flourish of a manicured hand she waved me into the optometrist’s.

Memories of Ryan from the day we bought my new glasses welled inside me. I studied the racks of frames, only half-listening to the conversation Emmeline was having at the counter.

“So,” Emmeline was saying, with a wheedling, winsome smile, “she can get them straight after her eye test?” 

“Depends on her prescription,” said the man behind the counter, turning faintly pink.

“Do you need my optical prescription?” I said, digging in my bag. 
“Because I
’ve got it in my bag.
” I handed the battered slip of paper to the man.

“Yep,
” he said, studying it, 
“we
’ll have those in stock for you. Come on through and we
’ll measure you up.
”

Two and a half hours after I’d called the hospital, we finally got back to the penthouse. I half-ran to the guest room, checked the voicemails (none), and dialed the hospital again. I was put through to the impatient woman in Ward 2 East.

“He’s been discharged,” she said, her tone making it clear that I was keeping her from more important things.

My heart stalled, caught between delight that he was better and a creeping sense of unease. Why hadn’t he called me? Did he get my message? Then it hit me: his phone was probably flat.

“So he’s gone home?” I pictured him plugging his phone in the recharger and sitting down to drink tea with Shell.

“We don’t release that information.”

“Oh. OK, then. Sorry.”

She said an abrupt “Goodbye,” and hung up.

I sat on the bed, pondering the news. Ryan’s place was only twenty minutes from the hospital by train. How long ago did he get out? Could he still be on his way? Maybe he’d dropped his phone in Andrea’s office, and it was still locked up inside, along with my wallet. Ryan and Shell didn’t have a landline, but they both had their own computers. Whatever had happened to his phone, he’d be able to access his emails once he got home.

I grabbed the laptop, logged in to my email account, and started composing my message. Without going into too much detail, I told him I’d cut my ties with Andrea, and had tracked down my mother at last. I added Emmeline’s number and address, said I was missing him and wanted to hear from him as soon as possible.

After three deleted attempts to type “I love you”, I signed off “Love, Sage” and pressed
Send.
Minutes later, Emmeline poked her head around the door.

“Hey babe,” she said, her eyes bright. “Are you ready to try on your new clothes?”

“Sure,” I said, closing the laptop and following her down the hall to her bedroom.

The bedclothes on the king-sized bed were a dazzling white. On it were the three glossy bags that held our purchases for the morning. A door off to one side was open, and the bathroom beyond was gigantic, tiled in black marble, with a double shower, a spa and shiny twin sinks.

“I’ll just be in here,” Emmeline said, slipping into the bathroom with a wink and closing the door behind her.

I put on a new set of lingerie and donned the steel-blue dress. When I said I was ready, Emmeline returned and sat me down at her vast dressing table. She slid off my glasses and made up my face with sponges and feathery brushes. Then, in a final flourish, she washed her hands and opened the box of contact lenses.

“Hold still.” She pulled back my eyelids, one at a time, and inserted the lenses. “How do those feel?”

I felt like I had grit in both eyes and a film of grease on my face. After a few minutes of blinking repeatedly, I managed to open my eyes properly. Everything looked vivid and sharp, and much brighter. “Not too bad. I can still feel them, though.”

“They take a bit of getting used to.” Emmeline crossed the room and opened the doors to a giant walk-in wardrobe. One entire wall was lined with little shelves in which sat rows and rows of fancy high-heeled shoes. “What size are your feet?”

“Size 8.”

“Perfect!” She sounded exultant. “Same as mine. Let’s pick you a pair of shoes.”

My mother surveyed the little shelves with an expert eye, and selected a pair the color of a Band-Aid, with alarmingly high, spindly heels.

“Nude pumps. Classic and discreet, like you.”

She laid them by my feet, then opened a drawer and tossed me a pair of skintone pantyhose. With a jittery smile, I put both items on and rose unsteadily to my feet.

“My God,” said Emmeline, in a hushed, awed voice, looking me up and down. “You are stunning, babe. I’m taking a photo right now and sending it to Ryan. He is going to die when he sees you.”

She pulled out her smartphone, took three shots from different angles, and went through her call history to find Ryan. Before I could protest, she’d texted them through, her face beaming like the midsummer sun.

I watched her toss her phone in her bag, wondering what Ryan would make of those photos. Still beaming, Emmeline linked her arm through mine and led me to the mirror.

The reflection in the changing room had looked like a stranger, but with my head grafted on top. This time the reflection was a total stranger, from the sleek golden bob to the four-inch heels. My face was heart-shaped, like Emmeline’s, with a small, shapely mouth, but my eyes were now a brilliant, cornflower blue.

“So what do you think?” said Emmeline, letting go my arm and stepping back. “Better than the look
Nanna
picked out?”

I stared, and the woman in the mirror stared back. “That’s not me.”

“You mean that
wasn’t
you. That’s you now, babe. And you are
smokin’.
”

I took a step closer to the mirror, and almost toppled off my pumps. “How do women
walk
in these?”

“Practice, babe.” She linked her arm through mine again. “Lots of practice. You’ll be fine. Let’s head back out.”

“Like
this?
” The eyes and mouth of the stranger in the mirror dropped open in dismay.

“Of course!”

She steered me through the door, and I tottered at her side through the penthouse and out to the elevator.

“Where are we going?” I said, as we descended.

“To get you some shoes of your own,” she said, with a winning, girlish smile. “And a couple of tops, and a jacket, and some jeans. We hardly got started this morning!”

We stepped into the ground floor lobby, and Emmeline opened the glass door. “And don’t stress about Ryan,” she added. “You can use my phone to ring him any time you want.”

Out in the street, two chatting teenage girls stopped mid-sentence to look me up and down. I shied behind my mother, feeling exposed and self-conscious, silently wishing them away. The girls exchanged a glance and walked on, but a few yards later they peered over their shoulders for a second head-to-toe scan.

Emmeline glanced my face. “What’s the matter, babe?”

“Those girls were staring at me.”
Check out the hairy dyke pretending to be a beauty queen. What a try-hard
.

Emmeline nodded wisely. “They were. And you know why?”

“Why?”

“Because they were trying to find flaws in your appearance.”

“
Flaws?
” I looked at my reflection in the window. “Why?”

“To prove to themselves that you’re not as great as you think you are,” said Emmeline, as if confiding something weighty and profound.

I gaped at her. “But I don’t think I’m great!”

She threw back her head with a silvery laugh. “That’s not the point, babe. The point is you look gorgeous. Too gorgeous. And when a woman looks too gorgeous, other women feel threatened. They make themselves feel better by finding some cellulite, or telling themselves you’re arrogant. Or stupid. Rise above it, babe. Now, let’s find you some shoes.”

She led me down the street. I hobbled and wobbled, but gradually my strides grew steady. When at last I felt brave enough to look up from my feet, I found myself surrounded by staring faces. Women, contemplating me with furtive resentment. Men, less furtive, staring at my figure and face with appreciative disbelief. One of them even crashed into a bollard as I passed.

“Welcome to the world of being beautiful, babe,” said Emmeline with a grin. “How does it feel?”

Part of me wanted to run away and hide. But another, newer part of me was sparkling with triumph, because I wasn’t a loser any more. I was stylish and stunning, the center of attention, an object of jealousy and lust.

“You know what?” I said. “It feels great.”