Doing Scales

Haircut

Erin had cut all her hair off that morning, on impulse. Meandering down Clark Street in the sun, on her way to Max’s Deli to meet Molly for breakfast, she saw a poster of Jean Seberg in the window of a video store. Erin’s own hair fell down her back, as it had done since she was four, a green bandana clamped over the top of her skull. She had a sudden power surge, a rush of courage, and an hour later, Erin floated down the sidewalk, feeling like her cheekbones were higher, her eyebrows were nicer, her nose wasn’t so weird anymore. Everything felt lighter, sparkley. She sat in front of her mirror at home, preening, gloating, turning this way and that, in a Marie Antoinette display of vanity which Erin found deeply embarrassing when she looked back on it later. But she loved the look of her face, without all the hair around it. She stared at her reflection, confused, happy. There I am. That is my face. For the first time, Erin saw that she actually looked like a woman. A grown woman.

She strolled in to meet Zack that night at Compton’s, and he, as usual, had beat her there, and was already halfway through his first round, talking closely with Lou across the bar.

Lou cried out at first sight of her, “Erin! The hair! You are beautiful, young lady.”

Erin, still sparkley, laughed, pleased, her hand flying up to touch the new ‘do.

“You think, Lou? Is it good? You like it?”

“Turn around for me.” Lou ordered like a drill sergeant.

Erin dutifully turned. She felt bald. Nude.

Lou applauded. “I love it. Havin’ the regular?” He faded into the background, leaving Erin and Zack alone. Zack was staring at her. He had had no visible response to the haircut. Nothing. His face had gone dead.

Erin hopped onto a bar stool and met his weird dead gaze. “What’s up with you?” He couldn’t be hurt that she hadn’t checked with him before making such a drastic move! That couldn’t be it!

Zack picked up his beer, took a long swig (in a vaguely hostile way. Erin felt like he was drinking at her), put the bottle down firmly, and said, “You’re breaking up with me, aren’t you.” It was not a question.

This confused Erin on multiple levels. “Are we even going out?” she asked.

Zack repeated, “You are. You are definitely breaking up with me.”

“What are you talking about? ‘Cause I got my haircut?”

Zack imploded into glowering silence and could not be talked out of it. Erin badgered him to explain his comment for fifteen minutes and then gave up.

“Whatever, Heathcliff. Let me know when the tantrum ends.” She went off on her Seberg-ian way to play five Stevie Ray Vaughan songs in succession. For Z.

With the opening strains of “Life By the Drop”, Zack turned, looked at Erin, who was grinning up at him, and Heathcliff disappeared in a puff of smoke. Music had soothed the savage beast.

Later in the evening, Erin brought the whole thing up again. He had said, “You are breaking up with me.” They had never spoken in relationship terms and Erin had found the lack of definitions supremely relaxing. They had never been to the movies. They had never gone out to dinner. She had never seen him in a suit and tie. Nate, calling her from Riyadh, had asked her, “So, you seein’ anybody?” She had bumbled an answer, “Well, no … uh, I guess. Sort of.” Her parents had never met Zachary, and still didn’t even know of his existence. They thought she was still in mourning for Charles. Erin found it nearly impossible to imagine Zachary sitting at her parents’ shiny maplewood dining-room table, making small talk with her father, having a nice civilized glass of wine. As a boyfriend would do.

Boyfriend?

“This is my boyfriend, Zack.”

A strange pained hope rose within her, like Excalibur, and then hands suddenly stretched out, defensive. Warding the sword off.

“This is my boyfriend, Zack.”

Those hands again, pushing back, pushing back.

“So what was going on earlier when you saw my haircut? Why did you say what you said?” Erin expected a brush-off. A diminishment. Zack did not like to be pushed.

But surprise surprise, he voluminously poured out his philosophy of the social ramifications of haircuts. “Whenever a woman is going to make a big change in her life, she gets a haircut. Or she dyes it. Or whatever. Every single time a woman has broken up with me, she’ll show up with all her hair cut off. Or, she’ll get her hair cut, and then nothing will happen for a while, but I’ll know that it’s just a matter of time before I get the axe. By the time that hair comes off, she’s already made the decision to drop me and there’s nothing I can do to make her stay. It’s over.”

“Hm. Well. For me, it’s just a haircut.”

“No, it’s not. Something’s going on.” He said this as though it didn’t matter to him one way or the other.

“I just wanted to get rid of my hair, Z. I had had it with the locks.”

“Yeah, you’ve had it. You’ve had it with me.”

“Cut it out. You’re annoying me now.”

“See? You’re breaking up with me.”

“Would you get over yourself, please?”

Suddenly Zachary burst out laughing, a real laugh, a free laugh, practically bouncing up and down on his stool in enjoyment. “You are so pissed OFF right now! I love it!”

“Oh, fuck off.”

This made him laugh even harder. She hated him very much. She wanted to devour his head.

“Your face, Erin … it is so serious right now – with your glasses – You look SO MAD. It is too fucking funny.”

“Yeah. It must be hilarious.” Erin retorted, which sent Zachary into another fit. She finally surrendered; it was pointless to resist. “Okay, jag-off, okay.”

Zack reached out his big hand and scruffed up her hair. It reminded Erin of wrestling with her older boy cousins when she was a kid: there was fondness in his touch, definitely, but it bordered on being too rough.

She had no idea what was happening, felt lost.

She pushed his hand away and said, before giving it a thought, “Are we ‘going out’, you think?”

Zachary cringed. Literally. “Oh, come on, let’s not do that.”

Erin barreled on. She thought maybe it was the lack of hair that filled her with such reckless abandon. Not to mention the three beers she had already downed. “I mean, when you talk about me to your friends, for example, what do you say? How do you describe what we’re doing?”

“I don’t talk about you to my friends,” was the monotone response.

It was a slap in the face. Involuntary tears came to her eyes, as unconnected to emotion as a sneeze. She said, “Okay, that completely hurt my feelings.” She almost got up and walked out, but suddenly she was smothered in a messy St. Bernard embrace. He kissed her face, her short hair, she couldn’t move, her glasses were knocked askew.

Still holding onto her, he pulled his head back and said, at point-blank range, “I am never supposed to make you cry. You got that? Never.” Erin opened her mouth to speak, and he rode right over her: “You crying has nothing to do with You and Me.” She heard the capital letters. Like they were a corporation.

“All right, Z. All right.”

They drank their beers, Erin savoring the coldness moving down her throat. Her eyes were still moist, she could still feel his mouth, kissing her head, she had a soft opening in her solar plexus, thin threads of connection unfurling out indiscriminately. She loved Lou, she loved Stevie Ray Vaughn, she loved Sam Adams, she loved the hovering chick she noticed at the end of the bar, she loved the rowdy group of guys doing kamikaze shots behind them, she loved her whole life.

Zack said to her, with such difficulty her heart went out to him, “No – I don’t talk about you – to my friends – but not because … well, not how you took it … I just don’t want them to know about us – how we are together … ’cause … I don’t know. It’s like an invasion of your privacy or something. They’re good guys and everything, but I don’t want them looking at you and thinking … stuff about you … They know I hang out with you all the time. But that’s it. That’s all they need to know.”

She took this in, considering it, weighing it on the tiny scales of Truth vs. Bullshit, always perched on a shelf in her brain. The verdict came. “Okay. I get that.”

But her conscience pricked at her. She regularly regaled her entire group of friends with the minute details of her time with Z, gleefully upending her Zachary filing cabinets, spreading his fossils out on the floor, for all to see. Her friends knew everything: how fast he drove, the whole one-fork phenomena, how he spent half an hour showing her his new electric can-opener (as though he was from a third world country, unused to modern appliances), how he loved her to be on top, how he bragged about his nieces and nephews. Erin proudly displayed her hickeys and bruises to her friends, like a little girl showing her ruffled underwear to the adults. Erin certainly did not respect Zachary’s privacy. When her friends met him, they had a newsreel of intimate Z images flickering by, a plethora of mental pictures to choose from: Zack sleeping, Zack babbling about his rocking chair, Zack fucking her, Zack laughing, Zack lying beneath her, holding her waist, encouraging her in a soft dirty whisper, pulling her down to kiss her.

Erin was ashamed of herself.

More in this story:

The rocking chair

Answering machine messages

He only had one fork

What did they talk about