Very in Pieces (13 page)

“That sounds fun,” I say. “I should be with Nonnie, though. And anyway, my mom has her art-department party.”

“Didn't you just say she wants you to get out more?” Britta asks me.

A girls' movie night is exactly what both my mom and Nonnie don't want for me.

“Or we could come be waitresses with you,” Grace suggests.

“The boys who major in art are woeful, Grace,” I tell her. “They're so full of—feelings.”

“I'm just trying to help.” She's looking down at her poster and adding block letters that read
EHS WELLNESS FAIR
. “Be a good old chap and all that jazz.”

“I know.”

“Especially since, well, I'm not saying she's useless, but Ramona is probably going to be useless, right?”

“Are you going to talk to her about the library?” Britta asks as she shuffles through her papers, double-checking everything.

“I thought you said it was nothing.”

“It
is
nothing,” Grace interrupts. “How's this look?” She holds up her poster. The heart is lusciously red.

“Great.” I check the time on my cell phone. “I have to go,
actually. I need to bring Nonnie in for a haircut.”

“No problem,” Grace says. “We've got this. Next up I am going to do Georgia O'Keeffe–style wavy lines. Subliminal messaging. This is going to be the most popular Wellness Fair ever.”

“Good luck with that,” I say.

“See you tomorrow night?”

“Maybe,” I say. “If I can get out of my mom's art-department party.”

“You could tell her you were going to a crazy party,” Britta says. “Then you can just come and watch movies with us. Everyone wins.”

“You're the tiebreaker,” Grace says. “Please do not subject me to a night of girls weeping over power ballads.”

“I'll see what I can do,” I say.

“Love you, Very,” Grace calls as I'm heading out the door.

“Love you, too,” I call back.

iv.

When I get up to Nonnie's room, she is sitting in her wingback chair wearing her black pants and a white T-shirt. She's put on lipstick, red, of course, and has mostly stayed within the lines of her lips, though it does bleed out into the cracks and wrinkles that surround her mouth. “Looking good, Nonnie.”

“We do have our big outing today.” She sniffs. “I would have
gone on my own but I don't trust myself on the stairs. I'm not going out of this world by falling down a set of garage stairs.” She holds out her hand so I can help her to her feet. “And it would be even worse if I fell and
didn't
snap my neck. Good God, I could be laid up in the hospital with a broken hip like a real old lady. I'd probably get stuck with a ghastly roommate who wants to share Crock-Pot recipes with me.”

“That's a very specific fear, Nonnie.”

Her fingers press hard into my flesh, she's so unsteady on her feet. I push open the door and she regards the stairs that go down to the garage, wooden and open. For sure she can read my thoughts because she says, “There are no bedrooms on the first floor of the house and I'm not going to set up one of those rental hospital beds in the den.”

“You could use my dad's office,” I tell her. “You know he offered. He said he could take some of his stuff to the college and box up the rest.”

“Dallas,” she says, shaking her head. “Thanks, but no thanks. I don't want to be stuck surrounded by all those concert posters and album covers. I will stay up here in my garret. And when it all gets to be too much, I'll pitch myself off this landing.”

“It might not work. You might wind up with that snoring Crock-Pot-cooking roommate in the hospital.” I say this but all the same I'm picturing her broken body on the floor of the garage and I shiver.

It takes us several minutes to get down the stairs. She's
embarrassed. I can tell because she isn't saying anything and she's always saying something. Once onto the concrete floor of the garage, we walk across to the door. I open it for her and she lets go of my arm before stepping out into the sunshine.

I reach for her arm and start guiding her toward my car, but she tugs me around the side of the house to see the bottle cap mural. It has evolved again, and the evening sun makes it sparkle.

“I can't decide if it's beautiful or ugly,” I say.

“That is my favorite state, that tipping point between the gorgeous and the grotesque.” She leans closer to it. “Your mother asked if we could take it down, but I told her no.”

“Why not?”

“Because it's mine.”

I look at the ground. Maybe. Or maybe it's mine. And I don't want it taken down, either, I realize. “I guess it's not doing any harm,” I say.

She looks at it a moment longer, then says, “I can't go around town in a subcompact. We'll take my car. You'll drive.”

Nonnie has a sky-blue Sunbeam Rapier with a soft top. “Your car
is
a subcompact.”

“My car is British,” she replies, as if that makes all the difference. “The keys are upstairs. I'll get myself situated.”

I open the passenger-side door as wide as it goes. There's plenty of room for her to navigate around to the door since Dad's car isn't in its spot in the middle garage bay.

I run up to her room and find the keys on a dresser next
to a picture of Nonnie dressed in safari clothes leaning against a truck and holding a monkey. It's from a photo shoot for an article she did for
Vanity Fair
. She called the monkey Nietzsche and wanted to bring it home, but was told she wouldn't be able to get it through customs.

Downstairs she is sitting in the front passenger seat with her hands folded in her lap. It makes me feel a bit like hired help.

I slide into the driver's seat. I need to let the seat back a few clicks, and then it feels comfortable, like I've been driving it for years. “I'm not the best on stick shift,” I tell her.

“Neither was I.”

I get the car started and drop it into reverse, and we lurch out of the garage. When I put it into first and try to start, I stall.

“It's a tricky clutch,” she says. “You've got to push it in all the way and then ease it out nice and slow. It senses fear.”

My second try I get it and we cruise down the driveway and turn onto the road that snakes down the hill to town.

“I was going to leave this car to you, but you might as well take it now. You don't need to be driving around in that tin box anymore.”

“Really?” I ask. I turn to look at her and hitch the steering wheel. Nonnie grabs on to the door handle.

“If we make it back alive I'll sell it to you for a dollar so you don't have to pay the estate tax on it.”

“Nonnie, don't talk like that.”

“A thank-you will suffice.”

“Thank you.”

I take us to the salon in Essex's lone strip mall: A Cut Above. The salon's owner is Carl and he's been cutting Nonnie's hair since she moved to Essex. When we come in the door, he throws his hands up like a southern preacher and says, “Imogene, what have you done to your hair?”

“Nothing,” she says.

“I can see that.”

He spins a chair around for her and I help her step up into it. Her body relaxes as she sits.

He turns to me. “Veronica, Veronica, let me see who's free for you.”

“Oh, I don't need a haircut,” I tell him.

He raises his eyebrows but says nothing.

I take the empty seat next to Carl's chair and spin it around to look out the window so I can watch the people in the parking lot. It's funny how many I don't know. In a town this small, you'd think I'd know all of them. Maybe that's my problem. Maybe Ramona is right and I stay cloistered away in my own small world.

Carl holds Nonnie by the arm. I can see just how thin her hair has become: downy like a baby's.

“Actually,” I say. “Actually I've changed my mind. I do need a cut.”

Carl grins and beckons over a woman with purple hair and a tattoo of Mary Poppins on her bicep. She looks at my long, limp hair as if she feels sorry for it.

“Cut it all off.”

“How short?” She put her fingertips on my head and turns it from side to side.

“All of it.”

She put her hands at my shoulders.

I shake my head. “I want it short-short.”

“A pixie cut?”

“Yes.”

“You're sure?”

“Yes. It's time for a change.”

“Well, there's change and then there's change. And let me tell you that I am one hundred percent on board with this because this length”—she flicks the ends of my hair—“is doing nothing for you. But I've got to be sure because I can't tell you how many women come in here, maybe after a breakup?” She hesitates to give me time to fill her in, but I don't. “So I do what they say and then I've got this woman crying in my chair because she loved her hair and it's the guy she hates. And then she hates me.”

“Do it,” I say.

Nonnie says, “Really, Veronica?”

“Solidarity, Nonnie. Who knows, if you end up losing all your hair again, maybe I'll shave my head, too.”

“Ghastly thought,” she says, but she's smiling.

The Mary Poppins girl works quickly. She braids my hair, chops it off for Locks of Love, and then comes at me not with scissors but with an electric razor.

When we're done, we sit side by side and look at ourselves in the mirror. Nonnie looks younger: like a baby chick. I look
older, and I fear it's in a soccer-mom sort of a way. The bruise is still there, a yellow echo of itself.

I reach up and feel the short hairs at the nape of my neck.

“I was about your age when I cut my hair,” Nonnie says. “Right before I moved to New York I went and got my hair cut just like this. I wanted to look like Jean Seberg, the girl in
Breathless
.”

She's told me this before: another sign of her dwindling mind, this repeating of stories. I still haven't looked up the actress.

“You look more like her than I ever did, Very,” she says. “Though you're much taller, of course.”

When we step outside, it's like my entire head is more alive. It's not just that I can feel more, though that is true, but I can hear more. I run my hand along the back of my prickly neck and get a chill. I feel more powerful, like the hair was weighing me down and now I am free to fly anywhere I choose. So where do I go?

v.

“We could go to the beach,” Nonnie says, her hand trailing out the window.

My eyes shift to the clock. It's six thirty already.

“I remember going to the beach with my mother. We'd go once a summer. We'd drive to Maryland and stay one night in a motel. All my friends thought it was quite posh. We'd
spend all day at the beach and we'd eat sandwiches that Mama had packed the day before so they were squished and soggy. I remember lying on my back in the sun. I had a blue bathing suit with white polka dots. Mama would get me a lollipop and I'd stare at the sky while I sucked, trying to see how long I could keep my eyes open against the bright sky.” She's looking out the window at her hand, twisting her wrist.

“It's getting kind of late, Nonnie. I don't know if we have time for the beach today.”

She murmurs something, but it's lost to the wind. Then she pulls her hand back inside and folds it with the other one on her lap.

“You never talk about Mom when she was a kid.”

“What's to say? She was a fat baby who grew into a beautiful girl. She had friends. She had admirers. She hated me when I moved her here.”

“Did you ever take her to the beach and have lollipops?”

She glances at me. “You know, I don't think we ever did.”

We reach a fork that would lead us to our road, but instead I go left and ease onto the highway, jarring and shaking through third and fourth gear before hitting a steady pace in fifth. My eyes flit from the tachometer to the road to my hand on the gear shift. Dad taught me how to drive standard last summer, in his old Volvo. We went to one of the parking lots on campus, and he sat with his feet out the window, aviator sunglasses covering his eyes. “It's important that you can drive a stick, Very. It's important for every girl. You never want to get stuck someplace
because you can't drive the escape vehicle.” And so we lurched through the parking lot while Dad hummed “Casey Jones” by the Grateful Dead and occasionally offered advice, all of which could be boiled down to
ease up
. Ease up on the clutch. Ease up on the gas. Ease up on yourself. When I finally got the hang of it, I drove us out of the parking lot to the ice-cream place in the old train station.

Nonnie says, “Remember when we tried to go to Canada?”

“I do!” Finally someone else shares my memories. “We stayed in that awful motel.”

“That's the type of place Mama and I used to stay.”

My cheeks get hot, but Nonnie doesn't seem put off by my comment. Instead she says, “Your mother wanted to go anyway. Just leave us there and get on the ferry.”

I glance at her and back at the road. “That doesn't make a lot of sense. What would she have done in Nova Scotia on her own?”

Nonnie looks at me as if she can't quite believe what I've asked. “I suppose you've never known the joy of traveling alone, of just setting out to see where you land. Talking to strangers. Never sure where you'll spend the night.”

It sounds, as Nonnie herself would say, ghastly.

With a deep breath, I head into the traffic circle. And stall. I push the clutch in and out and I'm trying to move the gearshift, but it just won't seem to go. My body begins to sweat with humiliation.

The car behind me honks, and Nonnie turns around and
actually shakes her fist in the air at the driver, which, for some reason, makes me laugh hysterically. Nonnie says, “Just ease it out.”