Revenge of the Paste Eaters (16 page)
I may not have had a long, flowing mane of hair during the daytime, but at night, in my bed, I knew exactly what to do. I would slip quietly out of bed, creep up beside the UnWee’s crib, and nab her baby blanket, ripping it out of her still clenching and unclenching little fingers. (I often thought she should have been a cat.) I would beat it back to my own bed, and there, in the privacy of my own fantasy, I would drape her baby blanket around my head, tie it with a scarf, and I had it: thick, thick,
thick
, long hair. It came to my waist and beyond. It weighted down my head, it flowed down my back, it was soft and . . . black, where I was (pale pink, to the untrained eye). I was a fair young maiden on a ship, flirting demurely with pirates, or an Indian princess . . . I probably would have worn my created hair to school, left to my own devices, but once again my mother stood in my way.
Get that rag off your head, Cheryl . . .
Because there was danger that my life might have passed without trauma, the haircare industry invented home perms. “Perm” is short for “permanent,” and the first home perms rivaled pestilence and disease in the damage they could inflict on a child’s head. First I had to wash my hair, and then I had to rinse my hair in some chemical solution that removed its will to live. Then I was tied to uncomfortable wooden chairs in the kitchen, covered with a drop cloth, given one small handkerchief to save my eyes, and told to sit still. My mother would soak little sheets of paper in some ammonia solution, pick out four strands of my hair, wrap it in the paper, and then twirl it around little plastic bones that she secured to my head by driving them into my scalp with her thumbs. The ammonia solution would leak down my forehead toward my eyes, and my job was to mop without moving. Once all of my individual hairs were wrapped in bones, she would douse my head with yet more ammonia solution, wrap cotton around my forehead and in front of my ears to keep my face from scalding, and then she would set the stove timer.
I was not allowed to move while the solution perked on my head. I could probably have talked to my mother, had she not wandered off to do laundry or something equally boring.
When the timer went off she would come back and rinse my entire head, and then she would pour a neutralizing solution over it, which—with any luck—would stop the burning. Then she tore all of the plastic bones out of my head, sorted out the papers, and rinsed my hair some more. Even at that, as I remember I could not comb my hair or do much of anything but sit around with a towel wrapped around it for another hour or so while it “set.”
In exchange, my friend could tell I’d just gotten a new perm for five days based on the smell in my hair alone.
My hair responded to a perm by not so much curling as becoming . . . crinkled . . . in texture. What it did was frenetic and intense, but it bore only a passing resemblance to a “curl.” Other girls I went to school with had mothers less skilled in the art of torturing their daughters, and their hair fried. Their overpermed hair turned brittle and lifeless in color, and often all they could do was wait until it grew out.
I fought with my hair most of my life. I grew it long as an adult, only to discover I didn’t enjoy combing out the snarls around my neck any more than I’d enjoyed having my mother do it. And while each time I grew it out I imagined that
this time
it would be thick and sleek and my inner beauty would begin to break out . . . It never happened. I have a great many strands of quite fine hair, but the difference between a lot of nothing and not much of nothing is not all that obvious. My life became much calmer when I understood that my hair almost always does about the same thing, and the easiest solution was just to let it do it. I’m almost never mistaken for a little boy anymore anyway.
I never did get my port-a-pit chicken. It was a fund-raiser, put on by good-hearted people trying to do something nice to support a friend. We had somewhere else we had to be long before that overcommitted chicken would have been done, so we let our cooks know we were leaving, left our money as a contribution to the cause, and went on. But I still think back fondly of that little girl with her fine, thick, borrowed hair. It makes me wonder wistfully whatever happened to that wonderful blanket . . .
We sold my father’s truck
(automatic transmission,
independence,
personal freedom
all standard options,
no extra cost)
because he could no longer
see well enough to drive,
and because none of us
wanted his battered reason
making decisions on the road.
Still, somewhere in my mind
there is his big black truck
with four blankets neatly folded
in the back (for padding
and hauling) and six two-by-fours
all cut exactly the right length
to stabilize the rototiller;
his little wooden box collection;
the rubber band that held his maps
the extra pair of sunglasses
perpetually thrown on the dash;
and the John Deere baseball cap
that hung in the back of the cab.
This was my father.
This
was
my father: since then
we have taken him apart,
dismantled him one piece
at a time. Discarding
the trappings of his life
to save it.
i have learned any
number of things about my friends long after the fact—or, not necessarily about them, more about what they really think of me. I will be cruising along in a relationship, quite comfortably ensconced, and we will be reminiscing about the first time we met and my new, comfortable friend will laugh and say, “You know, the first time I met you, you were really being a bitch.”
Imagine watching my jaw drop.
Yet, it’s happened again.
I have no recollection of such bitchery. We were all to meet for dinner at my house and one contingency of the crew was (because it’s tradition for lesbians) late. I am one of the few card-carrying lesbians I know who can actually sit down and calculate what I need to do before I arrive at a selected location and how long these combined tasks will take, so that my truck and I arrive at the chosen location on or just slightly before the precise clock stroke originally agreed upon. If my friends tell me to be at their house by 6 p.m., I will be there by 5:55. Ready. With gas in the tank, money in my pocket, and (and this is the bone of contention) every firm belief that my friends will be equally present and prepared to begin our adventure.
I was once identified as the weak link on a camping/ biking/stargazing trip because I lived so far away, and I was reminded several times that I needed to arrive at the departure location precisely at 6 p.m.—earlier if I could—because we had miles to go and promises to keep. I arrived at my friends’ house at 5:47. One had driven away to perform some emergency recycling, and the other was pondering their as yet unpacked suitcase. I’m sure those thirteen minutes made all the difference. I spent an hour and a half sitting on the curb, whimsically thinking about all of the wonderful last-minute emergencies I could have tended to in my own life, those mere sixty-five miles away, had I only realized that “By six at least—earlier if you can” meant, “Oh, give or take, about eight.”
However, the specific bitchy moment I don’t even remember and my friend has since forgiven me for involved another crucial element that weakens my assertion that she misremembered. She reminded me,
“You were hungry.”
Don’t
make
me wait to eat when I am hungry. Don’t
even
pull into my drive forty-five minutes after we were supposed to leave for the restaurant without having three flats, a broken wrist, and a heartwrenching tale about being beaten and left as roadkill by rabid bikers to defend your tardiness. Every time I have ever had to wait for you before I could eat will come up. A
long
, dramatic (and not all that even-tempered) description of why gas-pumping, cash-getting, people-picking-upping,
and
errands truly are NOT negative-time components that will allow a sixty-minute drive to remain a sixtyminute drive . . . This will come up. The right way to plan your life so you need never inconvenience me again will come up. Friends who know me well have intimated (gently, of course) that I can lose my sense of humor when I’m hungry.
My dear friends will warn new companions, “Don’t mind Cheryl—she’ll calm right down after we feed her,” while new companions think to themselves,
This woman is a raving bitch.
It can happen. My sense of moral outrage can be pushed to the point that I am overcome by righteous indignation, I am galvanized by the truth of my vision, and I resort to a teaching method known as Slash and Trash. It may seem like a simple inconvenience to everyone else, but I have the depth and breadth of understanding to see how this singular disregard for my personal needs is indicative of probably fatal character flaws, flaws that need to be exorcised and cauterized by the purity of my wrath.
This may explain why so many of my friends, when they sense they may be a little late, greet me with a big grin, a warm hug, and a little package of crackers.
after the show ferron
walked right past me, close enough that I could have reached out and touched her.
We had all taken time off work and piled into the good car to drive from Kalamazoo to Lansing to see her, and the trip—while conveniently beneficial for us all—was a birthday present for Rae. We listened to Ferron CDs all through the drive, and all through the drive Rae giggled like a little girl and crooned about becoming “Mrs. Ferron.” All through dinner at the Tuba Museum Rae lusted after women in the restaurant, but in her heart she stayed true to Ferron. By the time we reached Creole Gallery there was nothing Rae could do but grin, and when we copped seats in the front row, right next to the stage, Rae went into a sort of misty, grinning trance. Ferron came on. Ferron sang Rae’s favorite song (“Girl on a Road”). Rae’s goal in life, all evening, was to have Ferron sign her T-shirt.
Rae is shy. She is not shy all of the time: she appears to succumb to sudden bouts of shyness that attack without warning, undermine her determination, and leave her standing a step or two from her goal, unable to reach it.
I can be reserved, remote, unwilling to commit, “Peckish” . . . but I am not, in comparison to Rae, shy.
So when Ferron walked past me I did not reach out and touch her: instead I said, “Could you sign my friend’s T-shirt?”
And she did. She was very gracious (although, I suspect, not overwhelmingly pleased). We all told her we had enjoyed her concert, and she went on to wherever she had been going before I interrupted her.
In retrospect I would probably not make a request like that again. I made a presumption of . . . ownership, really . . . that does not exist in the real world. I assumed, since I had just spent two hours listening to her music, her stories, and her life, that there existed some sort of intimacy between us that—however real to me—is curiously one-sided. Although she moved me deeply with her work, there is really no way to adequately say that in a two- or three-minute offstage conversation while she struggles valiantly to get away from me. It is the curious relationship of a performer to her audience that when the performance is over, there are a hundred people sitting in the audience thinking, “Her life is just like mine—we have this, this, and this in common, I’ve felt the same exact way about that, we are bonded, Ferron and I, over this shared experience,” and there is one woman on the stage thinking, “Well, at least they laughed in the right places.”
She didn’t know that Rae took a night off work to come see her. She didn’t know the trip was a birthday gift from her friends. She didn’t know that Rae loves that particular song because it speaks to her own life and leaving her family in Oklahoma. She didn’t know that of all of the songs she has written, the one that speaks almost mystically to me appears to have been written out of an experience that echoes through my own life. She didn’t know my friend had set her goal for the evening as getting Ferron to sign her T-shirt.
I don’t know Ferron from the woman in the moon. Until I saw her in concert, I didn’t even know she was Canadian—I thought she lived in Wyoming. And while I presume to have all of this knowledge about her inner soul, which I have divined from her performance and her work, the truth is, beyond “Could you sign my friend’s T-shirt?” I didn’t have anything to say to her that would have spanned the distance between what I wanted to say and what was socially appropriate. What you are thinking is,
When I broke up with my last girlfriend I listened to your second album over and over again until the grooves turned white,
*
and what you say is, “I’ve been a big fan of yours for a long time.” What you think is,
The very first time I went to Festival I heard that song and somehow you and that song are inextricably linked in that and every Festival experience I’ve had since,
and you say, “I saw you at Festival!” You sit for two and a half hours and listen to this woman pour out her most intimate secrets, and at the end you are ready to say, “
Okay, I’m ready to begin a relationship with you, I think we should be friends, let’s go have coffee and I’ll tell you a little about me and we can make this sharing thing work
,” and what you say is, “I really liked your concert/readings/ work/songs/last CD.”
I have been reflecting on what it must be like to be a cultural icon. Hard, lonely work. They give themselves away to strangers, and they stay strangers. They have all of this emotional intimacy surrounding them, willing—needing—to be shared . . . But they can’t share it, except perhaps in the most unusual situations, because it’s an illusion, a one-way mirror.
It occurs to me that that is the part of concerts and public readings and performances of all variations that I dislike, that moment when you realize, “Yes, but—
she
doesn’t know
me.
” And the myth of intimacy is shattered, and I go home.