“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said, unwinding my scarf and piling my layers on an empty swivel chair beside the stylist’s station. The crumpled clothes looked shabby in the gleaming, mirrored room, like something you’d find under a bridge. I was wearing pretty much everything I owned. This little jaunt was the first time I’d left the house in weeks, and let me tell you, you could die out there. A band of polar winds high up in the atmosphere held the city hostage, locked in a bitter freeze. I exhaled experimentally, relieved to no longer see my breath.
“No, no—you’re fine,” the stylist said, glancing at the appointment book lying open on a stand beside her. The book was out of keeping with the airy environs, gilt-edged and leather-bound, like you’d find in some big man’s library. I peered over and saw that the facing pages were densely filled with script. How old-fashioned! I wondered if the library look was the latest anachronism. When would the young stop rooting around in the past, like a trunk, for some necessary accessory? Even my boy Paul was not immune. He said some very nasty things to me when I sold his record player a few years back. I said his big bushy moustache made him look like a Chicago cop.
“Take a seat,” Moira offered, smiling. The stylist’s name appeared in my head like writing on a card. I slunk into the low chair and tried to look tough while she draped me in a smock. My eyes were a rabbity red. “Water, tea?” she asked.
“Champagne!” I said wildly. I was pretty sure this was going to cost a fortune anyway and needed a drink. I hate haircuts—I have a mortal fear of them, in fact—but this Moira had been recommended to me as having divine powers. Indeed, she looked annoyingly like an angel, her cropped hair dyed a futuristic blue-white that said forever young. She was wearing a kind of plastic sheath dress with a lacy flounce collar. Soon the drink sparkled in my hand and I relaxed.
“So, what are you thinking?” Moira asked, serene behind my shoulder.
“Oh, just to freshen it up,” I said lamely. “Nothing too drastic.” Moira ran a hand through my shoulder-length strands and frowned. The whole effect was staticky and grey, a cloud of bad weather I’d been standing in for years. I felt her tap the bald patch at the back and reddened. “I’m ready for something new,” I croaked. “But not too new!” Though I had laid waste to vast tracts of my life and once even set fire to the place I lived in with my son, it was as hard for me as anyone to let go of what I had.
“I understand,” Moira said. She spritzed my hair with something that smelled leafy and clean. I scanned the counter reflexively and wondered if there was anything to steal. “We can talk through it. With new clients I always like to begin with a consultation.”
I felt a rush of gratitude, or maybe it was nerves. I hadn’t been to a salon in a long time, and never to a place like this. The mirrors made it hard to see where the room ended or began. Usually I just snipped at my hair with kitchen scissors above the tub whenever it started to feel like it was strangling me in my sleep. I never kept any of the appointments I made—it was just nice to use the phone—and had no intention of keeping this one, but the super had turned the heat off. When I woke up a few hours before, my breath had filled the basement apartment with cold little puffs that hung around like Christmas baubles. It was a nice effect, but spooky, and I was glad to have to bundle up and hurry out.
Though the level in my glass looked undiminished, I could feel the celebration of champagne. It was like a lot of people knocking back drinks and smashing their glasses on the walls of my belly and brain. I wanted to party. “I have a very important event tonight,” I said, nodding while Moira brushed me out. “An opening. People are coming into town from all over to see my paintings.”
“You’re an artist!” Moira laughed, a sound like silver bells hurrying something special over snow.
“Yes,” I said, sipping the lovely fizz. “A painter.” I did not feel bad. Though I don’t have much experience with such things, I imagine that everyone lies to hairdressers and that the hairdressers are secretly glad. What was I going to tell her? That some weeks or months before I’d lost my lousy job, which in truth I’d liked fine and might even once have been good at, taking calls on the pesticide hotline? That I’d spent Christmas watching game shows on my neighbor’s couch? People did not want to hear it. This verbatim from my own son, who had not spoken to me in years. I don’t want to hear it Ma, Paulie said, though I had apologized and tried to explain. When you have been around a while, the world starts to look like a lot of people yelling their heads off with their hands clapped hard over their own ears. I probably wasn’t listening either. I’d leaned in close to catch my useless husband Harold’s last words, his very last on this earth, and they were, I swear, I won’t say it again.
“What kind of paintings do you make?” Moira asked, holding a color swatch against my cheek. I was grateful for the mirror. It was easier to speak to someone when I could see we were on the same plane. I met her eyes for the first time. I want to say they were white, but like light is, a combination of every color you could see. I smelled lilacs.
“I paint people the way their dogs see them,” I said. It felt almost true. Warmth expanded in my chest, and the room, already bright, grew brighter. In the mirrored walls I fancied I could see large and luminous paintings, swimming slightly as if underwater. “It’s not true that dogs see only in black and white,” I said, understanding something for the first time. The paintings were made up mostly of different shades of yellow and blue, and a whole spectrum of impossible grays, like you find in a pigeon’s wing. Though the portraits were blurry (dogs tend to be nearsighted) or in some cases entirely featureless, the sitters were instantly recognizable as themselves. My boy Paulie was there, and Harold, and poor Lynn, who sat beside me for years working the lines, until she drank diazinon and died. Even that bastard super had his mug on the wall, a riot of strokes that conjured a smell. You couldn’t say if any of them were beautiful or ugly. Personality lay loose about the person in sketchy folds, like drapery suggested by a master’s hand. “People look nothing like what they think,” I said, and the breath I drew next was like a window opened in a stuffy room.
“Oh, I agree with you there,” Moira said. “If my clients could see what I saw, they’d save themselves a lifetime of grief.” She laid both hands on my shoulders and smiled. “Now, tell me. What do you want?”
I trembled. No one had asked me this for a long time. After a pause I said, “I want it to look completely natural. Like nothing has been done—but something has occurred. Something wonderful.” I explained that I was afraid of change but wanted desperately to be changed. I was out of control but could not let go. I couldn’t bear another inch of sudden loss. I wanted to look exactly like myself, but also like that Mexican actress in the detective show. Of course, my own hair was not curly or dark—I knew that, I was not blind—but I felt it shared some latent attitude, a kind of no-nonsense kick-ass come-and-get-me that could be brought out with subtle layers or the right shampoo. I wanted something low maintenance. Really—I just wanted to be able to tie it back when I went to the gym. I wanted to go to the gym, or at least to go outside. I wanted out of that hellscape basement where I’d woken a few hours before, my face frozen to a crust of vomit the same shade as the luckless carpet, and I was sorry if she could smell it on my hair. I wanted to quit drinking and call Paulie and have him meet me on a bench someplace warm. I wanted my hair to form a strong unbroken rope that I could use to swing from place to place, or escape from a tower, or lift a man up through a window to my room at a great hotel. I wanted a compliment. I could tolerate only the barest touch-up and trim.
“Do you have a photo?” Moira asked. “Sometimes it’s helpful to have a picture.” I rustled under the smock and unzipped my soiled fanny pack, then handed her a crumpled image.
“Sorry it’s small,” I said, wiping my nose. My head in the photo was no bigger than a thumbprint, tucked above Paul’s tiny shoulder, my hands locked at his waist. I’m crouching while he stands, on a long green tongue of lawn, and the sun is going down behind us. Against the blaze my hair glows like a struck match, a halo of fly-aways catching the light.
“What do you like about this picture?” Moira asked carefully.
“What do you mean?” I said, embarrassed, pulling it down into my lap.
“I find it’s helpful to ask,” she said. “So that we’re seeing the same thing. Sometimes people like the way a cut flatters a jawline, for example, and I have to explain they have a totally different face shape.” I looked down at the picture.
“Her eyes,” I said. They were speck-sized and hard to see, but I could feel them looking out.
“Yes,” Moira said. She sounded pleased. “I think we can do that.” She began to part my hair into sections with a comb, painting each piece with an acrid paste before tucking it briskly in a foil. She was methodical and absorbed. I was unbearably tired. I closed my eyes.
Harold had taken the picture right after he finished laying the lawn. I hadn’t known that grass came like that, rolled up in living rugs, and was as astonished as five-year-old Paul to see the strips unfurled and patted onto the topsoil one at a time. It was easy and hopeful—a new life. It had all been over so soon! The passing sun warmed a stretch of fresh grass, released a sweet green smell, was gone. I should have paid more attention. I should have let Paul play on the unrooted turf that afternoon, tear around at its hour of perfection. Don’t fuck it up! I had said, to myself, or him, or both. The angry way I said it was less a warning than a curse. It turned out it wasn’t even our grass. Harold had stolen it from a big shipment at the garden center where he worked. Some of the guys came a few days later and hauled it away. I should have known then. A sick man will steal the strangest things. After Harold croaked, they took the house too. Paulie and I moved to one shoddy place, another. I came home late. I came home early in the morning and let him pour a whole box of sugar into our cereal and milk. He was a good boy. Was it so bad that I wanted to have a good time? Life grew like ash on a cigarette if you forgot to breathe, till with a shiver, it fell. So what I didn’t put out the flames? I remember the acrylic bedspread in our temporary digs looked finally alive, dancing hot as merry hell. So I liked a drink. So I liked to heat what happiness I had and watch it burn.
My ears were warming like something in a pan. I opened one eye. Moira had set me under a lamp and was tucking my packaged hair into a loose-fitting plastic cap. “There,” she said. “Quite the artist!” I opened the other eye, considering. The way the cap folded out and covered my ears, I did look a little like that Dutch guy. When I got out of here, I thought, maybe I really would get myself a box of paints. Lay out the colored tubes and start. I could make a mess and see later if it meant something. Moira disappeared to wash up. I dozed under the lamp, cozy as a nested egg. The room dimmed and brightened through my half-lidded eyes.
“Let’s get you washed,” Moira said. She led me to the bowl. I leaned back. The recessed edge of the basin held the crook of my neck like a hand. “How’s the water?” she asked.
“Great,” I answered. My scalp tingled under the warm rush. Her fingers were firm, familiar. They sought and found. I didn’t want it to stop.
“Does that feel good?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, flexing my scalp into her hands. I was afraid to open my eyes. Her movements grew more urgent, almost violent. In the dark, I sensed another Moira, a winged and deadly creature hunting at night. My head was a small animal caught in her jaws. A whole life ran under its skin. I was in the grip of the angel Azrael, awed by her command of beauty, as well as her ability to catch and cleanly kill.
Back at the station, Moira took out the scissors. “Wait,” I said.
“Don’t be frightened.” She combed and measured, parting the wet strands. My hair hung in two straight curtains round my face. “All this,” she said, lifting one side and letting it fall, “is already dead. So why not let it go?” Fat tears gathered in my eyes. My vision quivered. The clean blades shone. With a shudder, I remembered the emptiness of my apartment. It had been so empty when I woke and glowing with that chill, illuminated air. It was as if I had already gone. “Look at me,” Moira said. I did. A sound escaped and I almost stood, as at the return of an old friend. Her hand at my shoulder held me steady. The scissors snipped and I felt lighter, then felt nothing at all.
Afterward, she handed me a round mirror so that I could examine the back. I turned the glass this way and that, admiring. When I held it at a certain angle, the facing mirrors showed the two of us in an infinite sequence of receding images. I could not stop smiling. I looked—how to put it? I looked like a person with a place to go.
“Please,” I said, swiveling in my seat to clasp her hand. “Please come with me tonight. It wouldn’t be a party without you.” Though I had lied and been afraid and lost the thing I loved most, I felt certain that my true life, the next, would come easily after this.
“I’d be delighted,” she said.
—
Our heels clicked in unison along the pavement outside. It was still cold, but the brilliant, bearable kind that made the stars glitter in their velvet case. I didn’t know exactly where I was going but was sure I would arrive. People were glad to be out on the streets, walking in pairs. There was a buzz, as at the hour of crossing when people are going out and going home. We turned a corner and I saw the gallery across the street, lit up and marvelous like a pharmacy at 3 a.m. The big bright window was full of people I knew and many I didn’t, all holding glasses of champagne. I lifted a hand to my head. I was ready.
“Oh!” Moira squeezed my arm suddenly. “Before we go in, can I take a photo? My followers love a Before and After.”
“Anything,” I said. I leaned obligingly against the brick of a corner store. It was hard to remember much without my hair, but the tug of the past made me frown. “What about before?” I asked. It struck me that I’d missed it, an opportunity, a necessary step, a demand. Maybe, I thought, it had happened when I wasn’t paying attention.
“You don’t need to worry about that anymore,” Moira said. She was already holding up her phone. “This is after.”
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Olivia Parkes is an artist and writer based in Berlin and Iowa City, where she is currently a candidate for an MFA in Fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Zyzzyva, Electric Literature, and The Masters Review, among other publications.