The Cubicle Next Door (23 page)

Then I shrugged into a bathrobe and surfed the Internet for a while. Finally I wandered downstairs. I discovered them in the middle of a game of pinochle. They threw their hands into the middle of the card table as soon as they saw me and hustled me into the kitchen.

“Sit down right here.” Betty pointed to a chair that had been pulled away from the table. She patted my arm then, as if I needed some sort of reassurance.

I sat. There was nothing else I could do. I was completely in their clutches.

Adele, clasping her hair dryer, elbowed Betty out of the way. “I’ll need a comb and a bowl of water.”

She unzipped a small pouch and dumped its contents onto a newly cleared space on the table. They were long thin strips of material. She turned to look at me with an appraising eye.

“You don’t have to tie me up.” I hadn’t seen any scissors, razors, or other sharp objects, so at that point I figured the best thing to do was just get it over with. “I promise I’ll stay.”

“The only thing I plan on tying up is your hair.”

At that, Betty looked up from the table. “You’re doing rag curls?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“And just how do you plan on drying them in time?”

She held up the hose attachment. “With this miracle of modern technology.”

I understood her to be playing fast and loose with the definition of “modern.”

“They don’t stay as well if you don’t sleep on them.”

“And who was it that fixed your hair when you had your eye on Mayor Fitzhugh?”

Mayor Fitzhugh? He’d been long gone from office. And long married to Miss Maggie Sims. Their small intimate wedding of 600 people was still talked about by those in the know.

Betty shot a glance in my direction. “We don’t really need to talk about that.”

Adele pretended not to hear and began separating the strips, pulling them into long lengths.

Thelma set a bowl filled with water on the table.

Grandmother appeared with an assortment of combs. “Rattail, pintail, or flattop?”

“I’ll start with the flattop and the rattail.” She plucked the big one with the rounded handle and the one with the pointed end from Grandmother. Then she dunked the large comb into the bowl. She used the rattail to separate a large section of hair on the crown of my head. She fished the other comb out of the bowl and used it to wet the hair. Then she put it down and picked up a strip of cloth.

I felt my hair pulled taut and then a rolling sensation. Another tug and then a release of tension.

Adele turned toward the table to grab another strip.

I put a hand up to my head. Felt a small bundle of hair.

Adele had turned around. “I’m tying the rags around your hair and curling it up.” She grabbed a mirror from the table. “Here. Watch how I do it.”

She grabbed another length of hair and tied a strip around the very end of it. Then, grasping the sides of the strip and the hair, she rolled it all the way to my scalp and tied the strip around it in a knot.

By the time she was finished, tufts of cloth stuck out all over my head. I looked like a 1940s shrew. All I needed was a bathrobe and a cigarette. Oops. My mistake. I was already wearing the bathrobe.

“Now we’ll set you up with the hair dryer.”

We had to move my chair so it could be closer to the outlet. And then I had to pull the card table from the living room so the hairdryer could sit close to my head. Adele placed the cap on my head, pulled the drawstring tight and then turned the machine on. It whirred in my ears and inflated, making me feel as if I were a balloon. It began to warm. And then it got hot.

Desert hot.

My scalp began to bake.

My ears started to itch.

And then it became jungle hot because I had started to sweat from places I never knew had sweat glands. My temples. My eyebrows. The inside of my elbows.

I reached up a hand to my head to scratch it, and only succeeded in deflating the cap. I took my hand away and it reinflated. I did it again, because when it deflated, it stopped blowing for a microsecond. Just long enough to feel as if that millimeter of scalp had run away from my body and plunged itself into an ice-cold mountain lake.

“Stop that!” At least I think that’s what Adele said. The hair dryer was so noisy I couldn’t really hear her.

Betty pulled a chair away from the table and placed it in front of me. She sat down and gestured for my hands. I held them out toward her. She stared at my fingernails for a while. Then she got up, rummaged around her cosmetic case, and came back with a stick, some small scissors, and a bottle of lotion.

She squeezed the lotion onto my nails and rubbed them into my skin. She waited about five minutes and then picked up the stick and tried to shove it under my cuticles. At least that’s what it felt like.

We had a tug of war with my hand.

I won.

I rose from my chair, as far as the hair dryer would let me, and then sat on top of my hand.

She kept talking to me, gesticulating wildly, but the problem was, I couldn’t hear her. And I kept trying to tell her, but she wouldn’t stop talking long enough to hear me.

Thelma finally pulled the dryer cord from the wall and I heard myself shouting, “…can’t hear you!”

And Betty shouting back, “Stop shouting!”

The cap deflated and fell, flaccid, to my head. “Sorry. I couldn’t hear you.”

Adele had untied the cap and now she removed it. As soon as she turned her back, I planned to poke a hole in it so it could never be used again. At least not on my head.

“I need to trim your cuticles before I paint your nails.” She was holding out her hand, asking for my own.

I was still sitting on it. “With that stick?”

“I have to push them back before I can trim them.”

“With that stick?”

“Yes.”

“Let me see it.”

Betty held it out to me.

I brought out my hand and took it. Then I broke it in half. Gave it back to her. “Let’s just skip that part and go straight to painting.”

She narrowed her eyes and then rose, marched to the table, picked up something, and marched right back. It was another stick and she held it up in front of my eyes. “They come in packs of twelve.”

We had a stare-off.

She won.

I gritted my teeth and suffered in silence.

When she was done pushing, shoving, and trimming the cuticles, she started on the nails themselves. Clipping them, filing them, and buffing them to a shine. And that’s when she made her peace offering. She led me to the kitchen table, sat me down, and lined up four bottles of polish in front of me. Then she sighed and pulled a fifth one from her case. “You can even have clear if you want.”

And that’s when I made my peace offering. “No, thanks. Let’s do pink.”

“Fuchsia?”

“Bubblegum.” Thirty years of slights still had to be made up for.

It took until after my nails were painted for my hair to cool down. Seriously. But when it did, Adele unknotted the strips and pulled them off. Then she ran her fingers through my hair.

“Oh, my.” Such simple words, but coming from Thelma, they spoke volumes.

“Are you sure…?”

Something in Grandmother’s voice made me grab the mirror from the table to take a look. If I had been expecting an afro, I might have been happy. Overjoyed. Might have even picked Thelma off her feet and twirled her around the room. As it was, I figured I just about had time to jump in the shower and wash all the curls out before Joe came to get me.

Unfortunately, Adele caught me by the elbow before I could start my dash to the stairs. “Don’t you worry.”

“She’d better worry. I’d be worrying.” Betty would be worrying? That was a very bad sign.

“Oh, hush. Who used to have the biggest bouffant in town?”

This was not sounding good.

She stood on tiptoe to latch onto my shoulders and push me down into the chair. “Just give me fifteen minutes and you’ll be looking like Miss America.”

Miss America 1962.

Adele took a comb from the table, separated a section of hair, and then began trying to relieve me of my scalp. At least that’s what it felt like. “I don’t think bald was the image I had in mind.”

“Your hair is limp. And fine. I did rag curls for body and now I’m teasing it to give it volume.”

I glanced at the other women in the room. They looked as skeptical as I felt.

Adele teased for another five minutes before she stepped back and surveyed her work. She put the fingers of each hand up to her mouth. Licked them. And leaning toward me, she spread her fingers across my bangs, pressing them toward my forehead.

Eww.

She combed through them, stepped away again. Licked her middle and pointer fingers and made some sort of sticky adjustment at the sides of my forehead. Then she grabbed an industrial-sized aluminum can and began shaking it so hard one of her clip-on earrings popped off.

“What is that?”

“Spray net.”

“For my hair? Does it really need that? Won’t your…saliva…just hold it in place?”

“Not for the next six hours. Close your eyes. Try not to breathe.”

I could have used a gas mask. It smelled terrible, it tasted awful, and it was doing something funny to the insides of my nostrils as I breathed. I sneezed.

“I told you not to breathe.”

“Sorry. At some point, survival instincts insist on keeping me alive.” I put a hand up to my hair, feeling with my fingers.

Adele spot-sprayed me before I could close my eyes again. Placed her hands on her hips. “Shake your head.”

I turned it from side to side.

“Faster.”

I shook my head until I could hear it creaking.

“See? It doesn’t even move.”

I didn’t think it would ever move again.

Adele returned the can to the table. “I almost forgot! The finishing touch.” She approached me, a bow in hand.

“I don’t do bows.”

“And how would you know? Now be quiet and look down.”

She practically had to drill a hole in my hair in order to make it stick. “Want to see?”

No, I didn’t. Because if I didn’t look, then I could pretend everything was still normal. But she so clearly wanted me to view her work I couldn’t say no.

“Ta-da!” She held the mirror up before me.

Hmm. I looked…like something. Someone.

“Make your neck longer.”

“We don’t have time for plastic surgery.”

“I mean, sit up straight and push your shoulders down.”

I sat up straight. Tried to lengthen the distance between my head and my shoulders. Looked at the women in front of me. They were all nodding.

“What?”

“You look good.”

“Perfect.”

“Just like Audrey Hepburn.”

Maybe. I had the short bangs. The dark hair. Maybe, if she had ever worn her hair slightly bouffant at the crown, with curls at the back and a bow in the front. Maybe.

While Adele packed her hair dryer away, Betty took over.

She reached into a pile of metal implements and brought out a pair of tweezers. Put her glasses on, leaned toward me, and squinted into my face.

“What are you planning to do with those?”

“Tweeze your eyebrows.”

“Why?”

She stood up straight and put a hand to her hip. “Because the eyebrows are the window shade to your soul.”

“Really.”

“Yes, really. If you’re expecting Joe to gaze soulfully into your eyes, you’ve got to roll up those shades! Be open for business! Now close your eyes.”

I did. Only to feel them flying open seconds later. “Ow! Ow! Ow!”

“You’re going to have to sit still if you expect me to do this right.”

“I don’t expect you to do this at all! Give me those tweezers.”

Instead of putting them into my outstretched hand, she hid them behind her back. “No.”

“Give them to me.”

“I will not.” She stared at me defiantly over the top of her reading glasses. “If there is one day in your life you are going to look beautiful, it’s today. You were not meant to sit at home every Saturday night in front of a computer. Joe is the best thing that’s happened around here since…since you were born! So if you think we’re going to just let you go to the Christmas Ball looking like something a dog’s been chewing on, then you have another think coming.”

Adele lifted her head and looked at me.

I looked at Thelma.

She stared right back.

Since I was born? Really? Because I’d always assumed Grandmother was having the time of her life when I came along. Assumed it must have been quite a shock, going from being the widowed owner of a ski shop to being a widowed grandmother, raising a granddaughter, running a ski shop. I’d always understood she did what they do up in Leadville when winter starts coming: got out the gear, laid up extra provisions, and waited until the spring thaw.

Adele winked at me.

I closed my eyes, lifted my head, and sighed. “Then I’m going to need some ice.”

Twenty-Three

A
half hour later, Grandmother approached the couch in the living room, where I was reclining without ruining my hair, and lifted the sandwich bag of ice cubes from my brow. “How are we doing?”

“
We
are doing just fine.
I
, however, am not. I think I’ll call Joe and tell him I’m not going.”

“Oh no, you are not!”

They had to threaten to use physical force to carry me to the kitchen before I agreed to go under my own power. After pushing me into a chair, Betty began unscrewing caps of flesh-colored bottles. Poured tiny amounts onto the back of her hand and then ran a finger through them and drew a line on my cheek, near my neck.

“I’m going to a dance, not a war.”

“It’s foundation cream to even out your complexion. You do have nice skin, don’t you?”

Was that a compliment? From Betty? For me?

She had taken off her glasses and let them dangle to her chest on their pearl chain. She backed away from me several steps. “Turn your head just a little.”

I swiveled my head to the right.

“Mm-hmm. The other way.”

I swiveled to the left.

“Mm-hmm. Okay. Now take this washcloth and scrub all of that off your face. You’re lucky you have such lovely, long lashes.”