“So you don’t work anymore?”
“I’m taking a couple of days. I really do know how to handle my business.” Ava tried not to sound as irritated as she felt. Her mother meant well. She wanted to help. Ava wanted her mother to know the happiness she deserved. But god knows if happiness wasn’t in her mother’s reach at least Ava’s own happiness could be a comfort. Maybe her mother would see that the same darkness that seemed to swallow the unlucky and follows you no matter where you are or what you do (different place, same sorrow) was not inevitable. At least not all the time. Though Sylvia was right about so much, this time she could be wrong, and life could hum on a different frequency and in a different speed. Finally, finally and once and for all, Sylvia could witness the miracle, the common magic you know is out there, but you have to see for yourself to believe.
29
Lana called the shop Hair-Apy, like therapy for hair, but the name was too strange and confusing, didn’t roll off the tongue. Lana hadn’t wanted the small town country twang of Lana’s as her business name, but nobody ended up calling the place anything but. The salon was in the middle of Pinewood’s nearly deserted main street beside what used to be a five and dime though no new stores, no twee boutiques or coffee houses had moved in. The only remaining businesses were a thrift store full of leftover garage sale junk on the sagging shelves, a vacuum cleaner repair shop that doubled as the owner’s home, and a few storefronts with blacked out windows, empty except at election time. In the coming years, the town hoped to lure tourists into staying a few hours, maybe even overnight on their way to the high country towns of Boone or Blowing Rock. There were plans for festivals, concerts and a whole slate of good feeling days that would distract from the empty parking lots at the furniture mills. Look a band! A parade! Move along folks, nothing to see over there.
Lana was a good hairdresser, and she had a steady flow of clients—most of them older, since she refused to learn to crochet braid or any new weave technique. Let them go to Charlotte or Raleigh for all that, she said. It wasn’t that she didn’t care. She cared about her business and her customers and she’d done what she could to Oprahize, as in be like Oprah, to entice her clients into coming back. In the eighties she bought black lacquer mirrors and painted the salon walls a royal-looking purple with black trim. On every wall she’d hung posters she had framed of white women with flipping wings of hairdos, fuzzy feather duster head shots she was sure made the place look modern. The uptown feel would not be complete without soft music, a cart with crystal-seeming glasses and tea or wine (perhaps) and while you wait, might you be interested in a homemade mix tape? Doug E. Fresh, Michael Jackson, Frankie Beverly and Gladys Knight side by side at last, all for the bargain price of three dollars apiece. She’d even hired a palm reader, but some church people objected. Spiritism they said. The same people who looked for signs and portents in the flight of birds and put red pepper in their shoes before any long trip had the nerve to call her out. Lana didn’t care about church. She was done with that long ago, but she did care about money. In the nineties she’d amassed a lending library of black-authored books. She charged only a dollar per loan, but pretty soon her stock was low and she couldn’t fine, scold, or harass her customers for the missing books that she had bought secondhand herself. In recent years, she considered for a quick minute selling the Indian and Korean hair so many women used for their weaves and extensions. But she couldn’t and wouldn’t. The sight of those see-through plastic bags of hair, 100% human, the sticker boasted, sewn into a weft with the occasional gray hair in the black or brown track, reminded her that a real woman not yet old enough to gray more than a few fine strands had sold the hair off her head. The whole business, the whole idea of the business depressed the hell out of her. But like one of her customers told her, she had hair, she could afford to be depressed.
Lana had not wanted the salon to be like the utilitarian, ugly places that looked more like a back of the grocery store more than a spa. She had had enough of spare, dark rooms that screamed ugly poverty and frugality from her childhood. She was done with absolute necessity and no beauty just to delight the eye. Her mother never had the time or energy to think about how their space looked. The poor must make do, that was to be expected, but Lana wanted the calm of spending time somewhere with aspirations, somewhere that wanted to be better. That meant no yelling, no cursing and no cheap food in her establishment. In some salons the women know the McDonald’s menu by heart and order their breakfasts and lunches by memory get me a number eight with no mustard. If Lana got her own Wendy’s or McDonald’s she ate it when the shop was empty and in the back office in a room no bigger than a broom closet.
You might think that a place, a room, a house can’t save you, but don’t believe it. When people tell you that, they either don’t know better or don’t want you to know. In your own space that you arrange and brand with the yellow comb and brush set you set out for show, the soft off-white curtains you love to see billow out into the room, a spirit entering, the bathroom paint you spend a weekend deciding on (Crescent Moon or Churned Butter?). These are not just things, of course not, but totems, a reckoning, a low level mathematical equation a young child could do that proved what you’ve amounted to, the sum of everything.
The shop was closed on Mondays, but Lana spent the day cleaning and paying bills. But not tonight. All she had been able to manage that evening was staring into space into the dark void of Main Street. Lana heard a scraping and then a turning lock in the front door. She’d been so fixed on the void, she hadn’t even seen Sylvia approach. Lana heard Sylvia’s heavy steps coming down the hall and she almost called out to her. She could count on one hand how many times Sylvia had used the key she’d given her years ago.
“You look so pretty sitting there in the window,” Sylvia said.
“You need some sleep. My pretty days are gone. Sit down.” Lana pointed to the couch.
Lana was not young and not young-looking, but she was changed, not in a twinkling though it felt that way at times. Some older women would not accept looking like the middle-aged and old women they were. Not Lana. She was not brave, but she had no idea how not to look old. Under no circumstances would she stiffen her face with surgery, and she sure as hell wasn’t doing the clowning of makeup some of her peers chose. It was no bargain to trade looking old for looking plastic like some ventriloquist’s dummy.