Jessie- 2010
The first thing I do is get my hair cut off. The first thing after we get home, I mean. The drive only takes a few minutes, especially at the speed Eddy is going. Neither of us says a word. Albert just sniffles and stares out the window at the trees and fields flying by.
We find Grandma and her church friends, Mrs. Ross and Miss Evans, sitting stunned at the kitchen table. Mrs. Ross gets up and hugs me.
“He’s gone, honey,” she says, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue, her voice wavery. “He was gone before the ambulance got here.” She lets go of me and envelops Albert, who tries for a second to squirm away before he gives up and goes limp.
“I don’t know what on earth he was thinking,” Grandma says. She stares past me and doesn’t move when I bend down to put my arms around her. Her hair has come out of its usual tight bun and is framing her shocked white face with gray waves. “I thought he was done with that years ago. He’s not said a word about it since…” she trails off. Eddy and I exchange a look.
While Eddy pulls a chair up beside Grandma I glance out the window and see Esmeralda THOUGHT THIS WAS A COW AT FIRST; PROBABLY OTHER CLUES I’M MISSING INDICATE IT IS INSTEAD A HORSE (CHECK) grazing in the garden, peacefully nibbling on the beans. Her dappled gray coat is glowing in the sun. I slip out the kitchen door, intending to just put her into the pasture before she ruins any more of the vegetables. I can’t bring myself to take her back into the barn.
“Hi Ezzie,” I say to her. After what she’s seen I half expect her to go galloping off, but she bumps me with her nose and lets me stroke her neck and take her halter. We walk to the pasture gate and I escort her through. Then I latch the gate and keep walking. Without thinking about what I’m doing, I head down the driveway. Just before you reach the main road there’s a narrow trail that cuts across our field and leads into town. I follow the trail as it runs beside the river. I watch the quiet water burbling along, listen to my sneakers crunching the gravel. Birds are swooping around the trees and singing like it’s a perfectly normal afternoon. I pass by the little strip of woods at the edge of our field and keep going past the Miller’s pasture. Tall grass waves in the breeze and three black cows pause their grazing to watch me. Before I’ve figured out where exactly I’m going the trail has met the main road into town, and I’m standing outside Darlene’s Hair Hut. I open the door and go in.
Darlene sticks her head out of the back room and smiles at me when she hears the bells on the door jingle. She doesn’t have any customers and says sure, she can give me a cut.
“Hot date tonight, honey?” She laughs, and sits me in the revolving chair so I face the mirror. I tell her what I want. She stops snapping her gum, and stares down at me. Then she turns the chair back around so she’s looking me directly in the face.
“Sweetie,” she says, “I believe you better think about this.”
“I did think about it,” I tell her.
It had not crossed my mind until that very second.
She takes a piece of my long blond hair and examines it, her forehead furrowed. Then she looks at me again.
“Now Jessie,” she says, “I know good and well you’ve never had more than a trim since you were just a tiny thing. What’s made you decide to do something like this?”
“I just want to,” I tell her. “I want a change.”
“This’ll be more than a change,” she says, letting my hair drop down my back again. An escaped tendril tickles my cheek and I swipe it away. “This ain’t something you’ll be able to undo once it’s done. How about we start out with just a few inches? Take off a little weight, give you some layers?”
“If you don’t want to do it, Darlene, I can go over to the Mayflower and get it done there,” I tell her.
“Oh, God no,” she says quickly. “I’ll do it, if that’s really what you want. I ain’t letting you go over there, Donna’ll have you looking like a streetwalker when she’s done, and she’ll fry your hair right off your head to boot. If you’re bound and determined to do this, we’ll do it right.”
“I’m bound and determined,” I tell her. I take one last look in the mirror at my long shiny blond hair, and say goodbye.
She won’t let me watch, which is fine with me. It seems to take hours for the washing and cutting and dying and drying. Darlene chatters on and on about her shop and her customers and her kids, but I can’t process what she’s saying. Her reedy COMMA? broken-glass voice blends in with the running water and the snipping scissors and the razor buzzing my neck. It’s all one fuzzy blur. She doesn’t seem to notice that I’m not listening, and when she clamps the hair dryer hood down over my head the sudden mindless roar in my ears is a relief. Now I can think about what happened yesterday.
I was stretched out on the couch in the living room reading Catcher In The Rye when Grandpa appeared in the doorway. I bent the cover back quickly so he couldn’t see what I was reading but he didn’t pay any attention to my book.
“Jessie,” he said, “come down to the barn with me. I need your help with something.”
“Yes sir,” I said, which was always the only correct answer for Grandpa. I didn’t ask what he needed help with in the barn. Grandpa had changed considerably in the past few years. He was smaller and more stooped and a lot more forgetful and absent than he’d been when I was a kid, but we’d been raised to never question our elders and that was a hard habit to break. I just put down my book and followed him. Evening was falling and even in mid June there was a chill in the air. Snake Mountain loomed darkly behind the barn, blocking the last rays of the sun.
Esmeralda nickered at us and I reached over the stall door to scratch her ears. IS THE STALL DOOR OUTSIDE? THE LADDER OUTSIDE? IF INSIDE, PROBABLY NEED MORE DETAIL ABOUT THEM GOING INSIDE FIRST
Grandpa looked at me.
“Now, Jessie,” he said, “You are not to tell anyone about this. Do you understand?”
That made me stare at him. I couldn’t think of a secret mission he could possibly need me for. His blue eyes bored holes in me from behind his glasses.
“Yes sir,” I said. “What is it?”
“I need something from the loft and I want you to get it. With this arthritis I can’t go up the ladder like I used to.”
“Oh,” I said, relieved it was so simple. I started climbing the wooden slats that led to the loft. “What do you need?”
“I want my box, that big pine box with the lid and latch. It’s towards the back, behind those old milk bottles.”
I stopped climbing, stared down at him. “The snake box? What do you want that for?”
He gave me the narrow-eyed look he’d always used to make us shut our mouths and do what he said.
“Don’t worry about what I want it for. Just get it.”
I reached the top of the little ladder and stepped into the loft. It was dark and creepy up there, cobwebby with strange shapes looming along the wall. There was a little window on the far side but it was so grimy only a tiny bit of murky light could filter through.
“Do you see it?” called Grandpa.
“Not yet. I can’t see anything,” I called back, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. “Be careful,” he said. “Do you want me to get you a flashlight?”
“That’s okay,” I said, finally able to make out boxes and crates from the shapes against the wall. “Here it is.”
It was right where he said it would be, behind the old milk jars. A rectangular wooden box, gray with age and dust, covered in spider webs. I grimaced and tried to knock them off, then pulled it out and half drug it towards the ladder. It was heaver than it looked.
I leaned over the edge of the loft, saw Grandpa looking up at me. “I don’t know how to get it down,” I said. “This thing’s really heavy.”
“Drop it onto the hay,” he said, so I drug it along until I was above the bales of hay and pushed it off.
It landed on the hay and rolled off into the floor with a thud and an explosion of dust that made Ezzie snort and thump against her stall. I came back down the ladder and joined Grandpa as he examined the box.
“Did the fall hurt it?” I asked.
“No, it’s fine,” he said. “It’s in good shape.”
I knew I shouldn’t ask.
“You’re not going to put snakes in it, are you?”
He looked at me. “I am going to do the Lord’s will, Jessie, and that’s all you need to know.” He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and started cleaning cobwebs off the box.
“Grandpa, why would He want you ADD:TO find snakes for that box now? Hasn’t it been…years since you used it?”
“We do not question the Lord’s will, young lady,” he said, with that no-more-questions look. “And do not say a word to anyone about this. Not one.”
I opened my mouth to say I didn’t think it was a good idea, it sounded dangerous, maybe we should talk to Grandma or Eddy. Then I thought better of it and just nodded.
“Get on back to your schoolwork,” he said, and I turned and ran out the barn door, leaving him with the box in the murky shadows.
“Are you ready?” asks Darlene, making me jump. “Hold onto your hat!”
She spins my chair around to face the mirror.
I don’t even recognize the woman staring back at me. Darlene is watching, breathless, probably afraid I’ll burst into tears. I study this mirror stranger, no round-faced little girl looking 12 instead of 16, but a grown woman with big blue eyes and a triangular face, short jet black hair spiked all over her head. She appears to be at least 20.
I’ve turned into someone else. It’s exactly what I want.
“I love it,” Darlene says, giving me a hand mirror and whirling me around in the chair again so I can see the back. “Don’t you look older!” She snaps her gum, eying her own poof of frizzy dishwater-blond hair in the mirror. “I’d have give anything for that hair you had, honey, but this is… perfect!”
I can’t say anything. All I can do is smile at the strange exotic woman in the mirror who is smiling right back at me. Darlene takes my cape off and shakes it so the blond strands float down to the floor and join the impossible mountains of hair heaped around my chair.
“I don’t know what your Granddaddy’s gonna say, though. Just please don’t tell him I did it.”
The bell on the door jingles and Darlene says, “Well, hey, Mrs. Pearlman. You’re right on time, I just finished up with Jessie here. Don’t she look like a new woman?”
Mrs. Pearlman says, “Oh, Jessie, honey, I am so sorry about your poor grandfather…” then stops dead in the middle of her sentence when she sees my hair.
“Your grandfather?” says Darlene, looking at me. “Jessie, what’s happened to your grandfather?”
They are both staring at me now. Mrs. Pearlman clutching her prim black handbag to her ample chest with her mouth hanging open would be funny under different circumstances. I start digging in my pocket for money and Mrs. Pearlman regains her voice.
“Jessie Jordan, what on earth have you done to your hair!”
I feel exactly like I’m in sixth grade again and she’s caught me reading a novel inside my math text. I shove some money at Darlene, mutter to her to keep the change, and run out the door. They are both watching me out of the big front window as I dash down the sidewalk and I have to keep running, towards the river and the trail leading back out of town because I’m finally starting to cry.