Vanity Insanity (3 page)

I never did hear how that whole Mary procession thing turned out. My strongest informants were no longer in the church past this point. The remaining details of this story took place in the back of, or outside of, a church so homely it was actually interesting.

In 1969, Saint Pius X was not a church like the masterpieces in movies, castle-like buildings etched against a mountain by a lake around which innocent children happily run in red and blue jumpers. With its straightforward design of boxes called the church, gym, and school, Saint Pius supported its young and innocent children in ugly uniforms with a big blacktop parking lot/playground next to the big box buildings, in which they received a good Catholic education, whether they liked it or not.

When I envision the architects of the great churches of the world, I imagine them taking the buildings in as clean though challenged, like many of the churches of the late fifties and sixties in the United States. Viewing Saint Pius with its “bland blond” brick and “panic green” accents, the architects might assume that the building’s designers had come from the classrooms of the primary wings of that very school. They would probably not be aware of the fact that the church had originally been intended to be the gym, a decision that changed along the way, probably for financially driven reasons.

The school smelled of the cheap cleaner that I’ve grown to believe all Catholic schools must use. My sister used to whisper to me as she ran me into CCD classes on Wednesday nights, “Smells Catholic in here.” Whether it was the smell of cheap soap or all those captive Catholic school wretches, the scent only enhanced the mood that was created in Saint Pius X in the late sixties.

Back in the cry room sat three girls who had never met before. Fate or some higher power—and I are not talking about Sister Annunciata or Sister Mary Matthew—had brought them together. All three girls believe this. In the first grade alone were 157 kids. At Pius, at the time, the last
dribble of the baby boom had created one of the largest Catholic grade schools in the nation this side of the Mississippi River in little ole Omaha, Nebraska. The great numbers of kids, along with a once-lauded system of tracking children on ability, had severed any prior connection for Lucy, Theresa, and Marty.

Across the country at the time, public and private schools were experimenting with an interesting little educational hiccup called tracking. More than likely well intended, the tracking system was supposed to make it easier for the teacher to teach. In the end, the whole system, which practically encouraged children with learning disabilities or other challenges to stay put, was trashed as the “every child is gifted” era replaced it. One hiccup for another.

Lucy—my personal connection to Marty and Theresa—was in group three, though she is by no means average. To engage in a conversation with Lucy is both enlightening and intimidating. Her wit and wisdom, however, did not reveal themselves on an entrance test to determine group placement in first grade. They were filtered out with a much different assessment and a later diagnosis of dyslexia and a comprehensive written disability. In other words, Lucy’s smarts could only come out of her mouth. Her written world would always be challenged.

Lucy’s group three ate and “recessed” on a different schedule than other academic groups of children, which explained why she had never met or even seen tall and lean Martha Mary Monahan with long, straight, brown hair and incredible writing skills that later proved profitable. Had Lucy seen Marty prior to this day, she might never have approached the serious and often-mistaken-for-snooty first grader.

Nor would Lucy or Marty have bumped into Theresa Marie O’Brien in group two. If they had, they would have surely noticed her. To another first-grade girl, or boy for that matter, she would have been described as the “really pretty girl” admired by all. Her shiny, caramel-colored hair and bright-green eyes with dark lashes were envied by all of the groups, though she was never aware of this very obvious fact.

On that day in December back in 1969, the three girls from different groups attempted to avoid eye contact with each other for a total of three
and a half minutes. The silence was broken by Lucy’s laughter. Throughout Lucy’s life, “opportunities” came not from scholarship money or good job offers but by making the most of moments such as this one. She proclaimed, “Let’s get out of here!” All three accounts agree on this statement. Three girls who had never met one another were on a mission from God to have fun.

Lucy ran. Marty and Theresa followed, though they knew not where. Both Marty and Theresa, in separate accounts, explained that they would not ordinarily have done something like that. What with punishments and parents as they were, they would have normally avoided the consequences that could spiral from this situation. They were sure that some greater force must have been pulling them toward Lucy. Maybe the Holy Spirit, maybe the devil himself.

Lucy ran out the church door, which deposited the first graders into a corridor that surrounded the church. Another “interesting” choice of architecture. The stained-glass windows looked out into a dark corridor on the west side of the building. Sounds around the church echoed and projected, bouncing off corners and then back again. Lucy hung a left and lunged toward the window outside of the front of the church. Marty and Theresa were close behind. The girls ran to the point at which they might peek at the singers, through stained glass, of course. In a scratchy whisper, Lucy dictated, “Lift me up!” Marty and Theresa, though strangers to each other, synchronized a chair for Lucy and moved her up toward the stained-glass window.

Lucy’s wiry hair got caught on the handle of the window. As Marty and Theresa fumbled and wiggled, Lucy began to howl. Her scratchy voice echoed throughout the corridor, loud and eerie. The howling, from what I hear, did not sound human. Lucy’s voice echoed throughout the long corridor surrounding the church. The howling made Theresa laugh, which made her weak, thereby more fumbling, thereby producing louder and longer howls from Lucy.

Insiders I knew told me that the kids in the church had giggled and shrugged. A few thought the howl might have been a spiritually inspired
sign, the howl of the Holy Ghost, a term used more often at that time than Holy Spirit. Frightening and eerie as faith itself could be, the Holy Ghost had haunted Saint Pius Church. Lucy would say, “The Holy Ghost scares the hell out of me.”

Sensible Marty was able to remove Lucy’s hair from the hinge, at which point the three nearly strangers ran back to the orange-passion wall before Sister Mary Matthew walked in to check on them. They made it with no time to spare.

Three first-grade girls sitting on the floor with their backs to the wall and their hearts pounding against their ugly jumpers looked up as Sister Mary Matthew’s head popped into the room. Her brow furrowed as she looked each of them over. A look of mystery filled her face, just one of the many mysteries of the Catholic Church.

The girls were connected. That day the merry Mary procession gave them an intense connection that, for first graders, was bigger than ka-knockers and mood rings. In the days and years that followed that day, Lucy, Marty, and Theresa would meet whenever they could, after school, on the weekends. Their worlds blended even more as their classes mixed in the middle grades to create a world of ugly uniforms, super balls, troll dolls, K-tel records, and overnights at which Lucy would jump on her bed, holding a brush and doing her best impression of Jeannie C. Reiley singing “Harper Valley PTA.”

Their world was the only world.

At that time, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, Lucy, Theresa, and Marty were oblivious to the fact that Grateful Dead played in Omaha that year on February 2. The girls didn’t know that the hit song “Build Me Up, Buttercup,” with its bubble-gum rhythm, sitting in the number-three spot on the Billboard Hot 100 in February that year for eleven weeks, was actually about a dysfunctional relationship. They had no clue that a guy in Omaha named Warren Buffett, who bought his first share of stock at age eleven, had returned an average of almost 30 percent in 1969, in a market where 7 to 11 percent was the norm. The girls had never even heard of a man named Gordon Matthew Sumner, son of a hairdresser and milk man, raised in New Castle, England. Gordon turned eighteen that year.

And I know for a fact that Lucy couldn’t have cared less that the Nebraska Cornhuskers won their final seven games that year, including a victory against Georgia in the Sun Bowl thanks to golden-toed Paul Rogers, who booted four field goals. This was all in the first quarter, setting off a thirty-two-game unbeaten string that didn’t end until the first game of the 1972 season, Coach Bob Devaney’s last as head coach. He had planned to retire as coach after the 1971 season but was persuaded to stay one more year to try to win an unprecedented third consecutive national title. This, I cared about.

I’m not sure of most of the facts of this Feast of Mary story in 1969. What I do know is that when Lucy, Theresa, and Marty were brought together that day, they stayed together for a very long time, and their union affected my life.

3

Lucy Mangiamelli: Haircut, Trim
Bangs, First Communion

Saturday, May 15

1971

T
wo years after the procession of the merry Marys, I met Lucy Mangiamelli.

My mom swears that Lucy spent an afternoon with us when she was five or six while her parents moved into their home on Maple Crest Circle. Neither Lucy nor I remember this first meeting, but supposedly we played Chutes and Ladders and lunched out in the sandbox. Maybe we weren’t impressionable enough or interested enough in each other to remember that four-hour treasure of a day, but my mom seemed to think that we connected over peanut butter and jelly.

Lucy and I see it differently. We both remember our first meeting on the day Lucy was getting ready for First Holy Communion. Lucy remembers the clothes. I remember the music.

Marcia Keller, my mother and my boss, ran a salon in our basement for thirteen years. A driven single parent, she worked very hard to keep her work separate from our home, and because she didn’t want business to march past the breakfast dishes or possibly a sleeping child or two, she asked that patrons to Marcia’s Beauty Box enter the shop through the basement door. To make the route more inviting, Mom made a sign using black and what she called “a perky pink” paint and placed it just off to the north of the house, where a flower-lined path began that led around the house to the back basement door. In the spring and summer, my two older sisters weeded and maintained the pink and perky roses that lined the same path I shoveled on snowy winter days.

Marcia’s Beauty Box was everything a hair salon should be in the 1950s. Unfortunately, it was 1971. My mother put big, bold pictures of women with outdated hairstyles on the walls of her twelve-by-sixteen room with two chairs and one sink. If you had to pick a color, you could choose from two in this room: pink or black. On the wall near the door leading out to the back path was a little framed print that had been given to my mother by one of her clients through the years. The faded cartoon showed a hair stylist leaning next to her client in the styling chair, both with outdated hairstyles; the character in the chair had permanent rods all over her hair. The caption read
Ours Is a Permanent Relationship
. On the wall behind the sink was another plaque with the words
I’m a Beautician, Not a Magician
. Even though the days of stinky permanents were long over, several of her clients still asked for the tight and close curls. This time in my life can be brought back in a blink with the pungent smell of chemicals.

Most of my mom’s clients were neighbors and friends and friends of the neighbors and friends. A few of them even called her a “beauty operator.” These women, permanent and set in the ways of their hair, had been loyal to Mom even prior to the great disappearing act of my dad. My mom’s reputation was solid, since she was known for maintaining and grooming the same style repetitively for the women who wanted the exact same look, week after week. “Let the client feel comfortable with what you’re about to do to his or her most prominent and identifiable physical feature. The
nerve endings to the mops of trestles are most sensitive.” As my mom put it: “People are very particular about their hairstyles.” My slant on this: people are just weird about their hair.

In Omaha, during the early seventies, great numbers of these “permanent and set” women showed up as regulars at our basement door, and they were welcomed warmly by a single mother whose income depended upon them. She took good care of them as she organized a file of the history of each client’s hair. A green recipe-card box holding index cards sat near her combs. My mom marked the date, the hairstyle, and any special event of her clients, she said, to keep organized. I think she kept those cards to make her clients feel special. Each index card was a life. The fancy times and the hard times, the Christmas parties and the changes, the graduations and the funerals, all on a neat little index card. She would pull the index card of hair history and say, “Looks like last time we only took off an inch. What are you thinking today?” or “Your hair was permed for your party last week. Maybe we do a hot oil treatment this time. What do you think?” My mom would write notes on her index cards for the next appointment. They liked her order. They liked her style. They must have been OK with the pink-and-black decor.

The day Lucy arrived at our basement door that spring afternoon in 1971, hours before making her First Communion, I noticed her. She was livid, and as usual her hair was noticeable and wild. The tension between Lucy and her mother entered the room before they did. Her mother had felt that Lucy’s hair was out of control and un-Communion-like, so Ava Mangiamelli wanted it “taken care of” now. Lucy disagreed. Her reply to her mom was something along the lines of “OK! Fine! I’ll be ugly for my First Holy Communion if that will make you happy!”

I overheard the two bickering while I swept the hair of my mom’s earlier customer from around the chair in which Lucy would soon be “taken care of.” I had been helping my mom out in her shop for as long as I could remember. I was nine at the time, so my jobs included sweeping hair, straightening magazines, and cleaning scissors, combs, and brushes. I was the “best little helper,” my mom would tell her clients.