The Love Act
Chaz Reetz-Laiolo

1

By the early 1980s, my mother had taken her baccalaureate, quit her nursing job, and scooped my brother and me from day care in hopes of opening a natural foods store with two partners she’d drummed up (men who, before the doors opened, blew the start-up money up their noses). These were optimistic times, riding a chunk of cash my father’d relented on, as sick as we were of his one-and two-thousand-dollar disbursements every six months. Money we’d erupt into the streets with, paying off back rent, gas accounts, one-two-three, bills slap in the palm out the window of our Volvo. My brother and I rode upright and buoyant in the sunlit backseat, headed for the finest clothes boutique in town where we’d pick out a shirt, maybe a pair of pants if Mother could finesse the owner. We’d spend it in a day. No pensioning. I recall touching the fine cloth of an imported shirt hanging in my closet, the rest of my shirts flung to the far end of the rod. Hearing the neighborhood kids in the street, I pulled an old t-shirt over my head, paused in the doorway for one last look at the shirt, near shivering, and shut the light, three steps at a time down and off the porch. This was Oregon , but Ashland , Oregon . Translation: Mondale/Ferraro, Keep Tahoe Blue, Shakespearian Oregon .

My mother befriended a beautiful stylist named Jeanette who cut our hair during these flush months. Popular music pulsed through her low-modernist salon. No blue cylinders of comb water, no white-smocked barber, no pornographic magazines stacked on the television I’d encountered when lucky enough to avoid my mother’s bowl cut. Jeanette and the other women’s feet barely grazed the floors. Their hair shaped like exotic birds. One of the stylists, holding a plait of her customer’s hair up in the sunlight from the window: “I’ve never seen anything so shoulder length. I mean, who did this to you? Your husband?”

Enjoying the invisibility of children in such places, I’d smuggle cookies and finger sandwiches laid out on trays, and gulp down Perrier. I’d watch the wealthy women in their capes, the men in suits who’d sit with their eyes closed, flirting with their stylists. I’d study their gestures, unconsciously mimicking them, then later, alone, I’d sit in my room crossing my legs, brushing the air aside, laughing boldly with women I had not nor ever would meet.

Some days, knowing my mother would be elsewhere, I’d stop in, claiming I’d expected to find her at the salon. Jeanette would muss my hair or seat me in front of the mirror and clean around my ears—a service which the first time terrified me because I imagined I’d be expected to pay. But I became accustomed to this luxury and started arriving more and more regularly. If Jeanette was with someone, I’d hang around shooting off phrases I’d heard pass among the clientele, watching her bottom, faintly sickened and exhilarated by the panty lines under her skirt. Then make it out the door with a pocket full of cookies, the bell dinging as I bolted onto the sunlit sidewalks.

Jeanette had me take two photographs of my mother, who was beautiful, but possibly because my brother and I were born when she was still a child, had never become more than a beautiful girl. One you’d expect to see in a small town. Long straight hair, never shorter than the middle of her back. No make-up. A gap between her front teeth. In the first photograph she’s in a salon chair, tissue around her neck, body concealed by a black smock. Her youthful face, her matte wet hair are disembodied. They appear more like illustrations than authentic body parts. As though this drawing of her face will accompany the word “expectant” in the dictionary.

In the second photo, my mother poses in the shock sunlight in front of the salon. There is a grandness to her stature, the picture having been snapped from the height of an eight-year-old. She wears silver leggings. Her head pitched back, arms raised in some sort of Egyptian space-age dance, her red hair cropped in a tousle of short spikes. She’s nearly unrecognizable; like in the black-and-whites I’d seen of her as a teenager in South Dakota experimenting with lipstick. Jeanette’s leg and arm remain blurred in the foreground. Either out of fondness for my mother’s mane of hair, or through some gift of foresight, Jeanette had refused to participate in the cutting. At one point while my mother’s red hair stained the floor, Jeanette smoked a cigarette inside the salon, something I’d never seen her do before.

She and Jeanette began going out nights, dancing. My mother, who had been (maybe still is) waiting for some stroke of life luck, must have felt as if everything was coming full circle. These jubilant nights—dancing in the arms of out-of-town businessmen—far as they were from the small rental we still slept in, would be life from here on out.

Of course the money was running out, my father refusing her phone calls.

About the time I realized the natural foods store would never open—which could’ve been weeks in delay, I was a child—I overheard her on the telephone. “Well I can’t very well sell my hair anymore, can I?” she said. “Jesus, Patti, why didn’t someone tell me?”

After a brief dismayed period when she simply couldn’t come to terms with the hemorrhaging of money—our apartment stacked with wholesale boxes of bulk grain, almonds, pastas; the landlord cupping his hands to look through the windows at my mother sitting alarmingly still on the sofa—she started interviewing for jobs. The positions in the newspaper were menial: clerks, personal attendants, retail. She’d been so close to owning something of her own. Now, seated with her hands folded in her lap in front of a desk, her hair grew out awkwardly.

I was selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door for a school contest. I’d stick to the wealthy neighborhoods, the high houses set into the hills, dragging my hand along the sides of Mercedes and Jaguars as I came up the driveway. I was well versed. “Some are quite sophisticated,” I’d shoot off. “And at one-third the newsstand.” Always my prospects would raise their eyes from the list of titles and smile, shocked. Occasionally a woman would cover her mouth or reach for and touch my arm.

I’d ready the coupon book they received as a gift with a subscription.

One afternoon my mother and I stood waiting in the lobby salon of the only four-star hotel in town. She didn’t say anything as the staff bustled about without noticing us. Then, as if suddenly awakened, she went to the counter and negotiated a walk-in that even then I thought she’d pass a bad check for.

“There,” she said, sitting, taking up a magazine, crossing her legs. “That wasn’t so bad, was it? Tea?”

She folded something in her hand and refolded it, running her fingers along its edge, and in the gloss and color I recognized one of the coupons from the subscription gifts. When she saw me looking she crossed her eyes and made a face, something she did when we were joking, then slipped it into her purse. She looked around. “It’s not as nice a place, is it?”

I sat motionless.

One of the beauticians winked at me over top of her customer’s head. Did this woman know something I didn’t? Something I should’ve known or been able to see clearly? As if spoken in a foreign language, it was directly in front of me and altogether invisible.

When my mother was seated in a salon chair, I watched, sitting on my hands. A short, bone-faced woman matadored the smock over her. She stood behind my mother, touching her hair, conferring with her in the mirror. I couldn’t hear anything for the noise of hairdryers. The two of them went back to the sinks, my mother’s legs switching from under the smock. She snuggled her head into the contoured neck of the basin, only her chin and the tip of her nose visible. The bony woman rapped on a dividing wall, and a young Latino girl came out chewing, wiping the corners of her mouth with her thumb and forefinger. She didn’t look old enough to have a job. She patted her hands on her thighs, then washed them quickly in the sink next to my mother’s inert body. When she came over and tested the water in the basin, my mother sat up quickly and smiled at the girl, then I didn’t see her face again until I returned from the lobby.

I had to move; I went out and walked the carpeted hall under a huge tinkling chandelier. My head pitched back, I turned so the thing rotated galactically overhead. Only when a bellhop grazed me did I become self-conscious again, believing both the counter men, in ties and vests, were watching me. I nodded expertly to them and cruised as nonchalantly as I could past a young girl holding her mother’s leg among their suitcases, jumped down a set of stairs, through a pair of double doors, and leaned finally over a railing toward the empty flat surface of the indoor swimming pool. Deck chairs were stacked against the ferns. I felt for the bottom of the water with my eyes, the softened white bulge where the floor rose to the shallows. I climbed to the middle rung of the rail, my knees pressed to the top, and leaned out into the soundless wobbling light.

A man’s voice startled me. “What’re you waiting for?”

I’d not seen him lying on a towel, bare chested, as if he were sunbathing. I stared, exhilarated by his talking to me.

“Somebody ought to swim in the thing, we’re all paying for it,” he said. “And god knows the rooms are a disgrace.”

“Ours doesn’t even have cable.” I don’t know why I lied, or what it meant to me for a hotel room not to have cable television, but when his laugh echoed in the hollow walls, I smiled.

“Where the hell are we?” he said. “ Oregon ?”

I looked at his tan legs crossed at the ankles and at the heaviness of his body, his hands behind his head. He stared off over the water, at a woman in uniform passing back and forth in one of the dim rooms above us, vacuuming. I made a dismissive gesture and sloughed off up the stairs.

Through the salon’s glass doors, my mother seemed both delicate and unnatural, seated too upright in her chair. She didn’t look at the women grouped around her. Two of them examined the back of her head peering in on an animal. I came through the door; they all looked at me briefly. Except my mother. She remained still, her eyes looking in the mirror at the customers who sat waiting, some turned to watch.

One of the women looked again, pushing hair aside, her mouth turned down. “Just eczema, I think.”

“Just?” the bony woman said.

“It’s worse when I’m stressed,” my mother said.

I looked up, thinking she’d turned to me. But she hadn’t. They were still the four of them all looking at each other in the mirror.

“I’m sorry, I should have said,” she went on.

“No, no,” the third woman said.

“It would have been helpful,” the bony woman said. “You’re probably used to it but I’m not. I’m definitely not. I think Maria will finish you.”

The two other stylists looked at her dubiously. “Maria will finish her,” she repeated. She patted my mother on the shoulder in what seemed to me a very strange gesture.

My mother said something I couldn’t hear, looking up at the woman, who was turning away. She spoke again, but the woman didn’t respond. She watched her interrupt the girl who was shampooing another customer, and then looked quickly toward me. She smiled without parting her lips and tried to wave, but the smock tented over her hand.

2

“No, he wants to keep that surfer look,” my guardian said from the swivel chair, his hairdresser, Sherry, tousling his hair as she looked over at me.

“What a heartbreaker,” she cooed.

I got up and looked out the glass front door of the Mane Attraction, at the wintering parking lot, our lone car, sooted from the salt roads. Then the two hairdresser’s cars, and, farther out, a row of secondhand cars with snow on their hoods sitting for sale. Tractor-trailers wheezed through their gears on the roadway, dwindling into the smudged distance. In the few days since I'd arrived in Iowa , it had snowed eighteen inches while I sat in the house watching HBO. When Tim, my guardian, got home from work, we’d hustle out in the cold to dinner at a pool hall where he had league matches. I’d watch the silver-haired men shoot deliberately from ball to ball, cracking their necks between shots, bantering. Sometimes they’d have me rack for them, get a wild game between matches. Or I’d shoot on the dollar tables with women who frequented the place. Women in outdated clothes whose breasts and perfume would smudge my cheek when they hugged me. We’d gone to the mall for winter clothes one weekend and I’d watched the other teenagers milling outside the theatre, their hands tucked in the back pockets of their girls’ jeans. And even in the arcade, I stood over the shoulders of a few kids my age as if waiting for a turn at the game they played, in hopes of striking up a conversation.

“It’s no beach out there, is it?” a second beautician said, snapping her gum. She sat in her own chair, filing her nails. There were no other customers.

“I can’t believe school’s not canceled,” I said.

“So Tim says you’re from the West Coast,” Sherry said.

“ Oregon .” I looked at her and the other woman for response. “I was born in California .”

The second beautician held her hand out to look at her nails. “Just say California , sweetie.”

A week later I revisited the Mane Attraction, driving the unfamiliar roads in the old pick-up I was allowed to use. I barreled through the slush, risking the tail end, savoring the loose exhilaration of it drifting along the edge of control, sliding to a halt at stop signs—or through them.

I’d started at the high school on the north side of town. The bell ringing through the halls, I’d duck into the chaotic bathroom—boys pushing at each other, talking pussy, eyeing the new kid—and wash my hands, giving myself just enough time to check my collar for dandruff. Then in class with the teacher tapping away on the chalkboard I’d lean forward on my desk, glancing back quickly at whoever sat behind me, to inspect my shoulders. (Even now when lovers go for my hair I lean away; still a boy; still watching my mother as the shampoo girl moved a footstool around to cut her hair).

Because I was early for my appointment at Mane Attraction I walked out in the bleak cold of the used cars, leaning to peer in a few of the windows. The interiors looked stiff and dusty and unused. A salesman shuffled out with his hands in his pockets, and I waved him back to the modular building.

“I’m just waiting for a haircut,” I said.

He smiled and motioned over at the salon without moving his head, the way a person does when they’re huddling the heat into themselves. “I hear you,” he said. “I’d be over there every day if the wife wouldn’t catch on.”

I stomped my boots in the door of the Mane Attraction and waved briefly to Sherry. Then looked around at the bare rectangular room, the heavy rear end of the other hairdresser, disappointed. I’d allowed myself to explode the beauty parlor into something grander, had moved Sherry through it elegantly if not boldly or erotically. It was actually quite cold and undecorated, thin carpet by the door and linoleum under the chairs. Everything smelled of candy hair products. The building may have been an office once.

I watched Sherry in the mirror, dropping the hydraulic chair to her height, bringing the back of my hair up in her fingers. She was small, as I’d remembered, her clothes were girlish, as if she was trying to keep up in a time that was not hers.

“Don’t tell me you want to cut this all off,” she said, smiling, “cause I won’t do it.” She held up the spray bottle to warn me and shielded my eyes. “Imagine you’re in Hawaii .”

It was the first time I realized music was playing. Piano and saxophone rung out a lazy “White Christmas.” She picked through my curls, tugging my head, and I kept my eyes closed.

“All this snow would be water,” I said.

She made a sweet sound in her throat. “They’re not gonna stand a chance around here.”

She drew my wet hair up between her fingers, scissored dark clumps that fell down my apron. I glanced at them in my lap for dandruff. Then at her hands working, her thin waist where her shirt was tucked in and then rose over her breasts that pressed against me intermittently. For some reason the photographs of her children along the edge of the mirror reinforced my adolescent idea of her as a sexual woman—not that she had a home life, kids storming the house in the afternoon, a husband she breakfasted with, but that she was someone who had had men between her legs and had the desire to be found attractive. With no other objects of affection, I’d spent nights with her hovering idyllically over my new bed.

“Do you like cutting hair?” I asked her.

She nodded, her head tilted sideways, still cutting. Then she looked up at me, stopped working. “You know, I’ve never had anybody ask me that, but I do.”

She combed my bangs down my forehead to measure, and I looked at myself and felt I didn’t look my best but I smiled to her anyway.

“You know, I really like running my hands through people’s hair,” she said.

“Jesus Sher,” the other stylist said. “It’s a kid; you’re not interviewing for work here.”

“I do, though. I don’t know why. Is that crazy?”

“I understand,” I said, wanting to.

She laughed. She stepped back over me and messed up my hair in her hands, her fingers pressing my scalp. I closed my eyes and imagined the jostling of my head as the movement of both of us bumping along in the cab of the truck, crossing a field, maybe in springtime…no, evening, a summer evening—why not—along a river reflecting the moonlight, fireflies thrusting over the silvered grasslands where, in the sweep of our headlights a deer nimbly disappeared, as we were, together.

3

At twenty-two, never having been to Europe , or for that matter New York , I had a thousand dollars in my duffel folded into a La Guardia/Heathrow itinerary. In the dome light of the Greyhound across Pennsylvania , I found myself taking my passport out, flipping the empty pages soon to be filled with foreign stamps, even pretending to hand it over for inspection to the seat back in front of me.

Twice the lights of New York hazed the hilltops in front of us. Then in the headlights mile markers hovered brightly over the roadside. New York 110 miles. New York 63 miles. And already mighty and visible and trembling against the sun-fallen sky.

A bell rang over the barbershop door, and the barber—a lumbering white-smocked man with a bulbous broken blood-vesseled nose—looked over his shoulder at me from his swivel chair. Another man, in a fireman’s uniform, kept talking, arranging himself in the mirror. “I mean, if I gotta spell it out to her, this is gonna be some romance, right?”

“I’m not the one to ask,” the barber said. He rotated his chair to where I’d sat. “Here for the magazines?”

I pointed the one in my hand toward the fireman to make sure I wasn’t cutting in.

“He gets a haircut every day,” the barber said.

As the air came out from under the smock he’d thrown over me, a meter maid passed on the street. I realized I’d forgotten the change.

I went out the door with paper around my neck and the smock flapping, hustled a few quarters from my pocket, and turned straight into a woman carrying groceries. She made a noise of fright. “Sorry,” I said. “Excuse me.” She smiled at me in the smock. I puffed its plastic wings with my arms in some sort of joke for her. It seemed completely natural to be out in the city in the cape. I didn’t like having to re-enter the barber shop though. The barber made an effort of it, rousing himself from the chair again, still talking with the fireman about an Italian vacation he was planning. They spent a few months every year, he said.

“Maybe we’ll be on the same flight,” I ventured.

“I live in the South,” the barber said shortly. He motioned toward the empty chair. “I can talk and cut at the same time.”

“Actually I just need my neck shaved,” I said. “Can we—”

“A haircut costs $16.” He pointed to a chart on the wall listing different male cuts. Crew Cuts, Ivy Leagues, Long Hair.

“You can’t just shave my neck?”

“Yeah,” he said. “And it’ll cost you $16.”

4

I hadn’t spent much time in automobiles in Italy . As the interpreter moved through traffic, connecting quarters of the city that, as a subway commuter, had seemed to me like a system of ponds, I began to connect them one to another. I’d hoped when we set out that he’d simply take me to a prearranged salon. Possibly that the agency would pay. But without looking at me from the side view mirror, the interpreter said, “And my friend, my pleasure. Where do we go?”

At the salon I sat rigid as the interpreter and stylist talked. The interpreter had gone for coffee while she washed my hair, then failed to return until midway through the cut. Flopping in the vacant chair next to me, he winked. “Looking very good.”

I regarded him from the corner of my eye. “Well, I told her exactly what I wanted.”

He laughed and spoke to her and she laughed—but politely, for him. He stood and held his cigarette in front of her mouth. She hesitated, then leaned forward, smiled sheepishly through the smoke at him. He watched her exhale, his hand on my shoulder, eager to offer another drag, but she insisted he sit.

The whole place was black, modern. Great orchids stretched from the countertops like miniature giraffe. It was striking, the resemblance to Jeanette’s salon. Even a young boy in school uniform, who’d several times been scolded by his mother when he lost a handle on the orange he was tossing from hand to hand, and watched it roll under my chair, smearing color across the black floor.

A male employee escorted a customer past and ribbed my stylist gently. I understood only Americano. She tried to continue working but couldn’t help glancing at me in the mirror. I smiled with my lips together. The interpreter called something after the man, and the schoolboy looked up, surprised at the exchange. He stood and craned his neck. The interpreter spoke in a loud slow unaccented Italian, covering his heart for effect, trying to egg the stylist on, but she only made brief eye contact with me in the mirror and went on with her work. She combed my hair down around the ears and flat against my head, then stooped to focus on a point in the back, pushed it up with her comb, and studied it again. I edged up in the chair. There was a roar of laughter from the man in the back. The kid stood again. Then in the quiet the stylist said something to the interpreter. She motioned to my head, and from under the smock I actually brought my hand back and felt my head.

“Marca de diavolo?” the interpreter said, rising from the chair. “Black hair? It does not look black to me,” he said loudly and in English, so no one understood him. He laughed anyway.

“It’s a birthmark,” I said. “My father had black hair.”

One of the other stylists, a woman, came over and stooped to look for herself. I shifted uncomfortably in the seat.

“She wants to know if you color it,” the interpreter said.

The woman picked up several cut pieces of hair from my apron, squinted at them, then rolled them in her fingers until they fell separately into her palm.

“What’s she doing?” I asked.

The interpreter shrugged me off, watching her. He said something and she smiled to herself, laughed finally, then clapped her hands clean as my stylist pulled the smock off unannounced and stepped back, waiting for me to stand.

“Eighty?” I said to the stylist at the counter. I looked at the interpreter, who shrugged.

The stylist said something to him that seemed annoyed.

He replied, gesturing apologetically toward the window where it was displayed:
Primero ₤ 50,000.

One of the other stylists looked up at us from her cut. She raised her voice across the salon and there was a quick agitated back-and-forth.

“Never mind.” I counted it on the counter, then threw another twenty in, waving the money away.

The woman took only the eighty.

“Sir,” the interpreter said, his hand on the extra money. “You don’t need to.”

“No, please.” I moved his hand from it.

“It is not custom.”

The stylist said something that I spoke over.

“Of course she can. Please,” I said to her. “It was a pleasure.”

I squeezed the money into her complacent hand, held it there, nodded. She looked at the interpreter helplessly, and I pulled her hand closer, reached up her wrist with my other hand. I tried to get her to make eye contact with me, but she spoke to the interpreter.

“What did she say?”

He looked from my face to my hand, still holding hers. “She’s sorry if you’re angry with the price.”

She looked at me.

Over her shoulder, several of the clients and stylists sat watching. The boy had come out nearly to the middle of the room.

“No,” I said. “Forget it.”

I took the wadded bill from her hand, held it up between my thumb and forefinger for the boy to see. Then gulped it into my mouth exaggeratedly, brushed my hands together expertly like a stage magician, and opened my empty mouth to him.

5

In my late twenties I find myself circling the life of my toddler daughter. Even attempting to cohabitate with her mother, reinventing our failed love life, when it was made clear my role as father would be otherwise small and uncomfortable.

For nearly a year, the house floated injuriously through the celestial whiteness cast by our daughter. I often lingered in her room after putting her down for the night, replacing her books on the bookshelf, preparing a morning diaper on the night-lit changing table. I’d look over her dark egg-shelled eyelids, listen to her warm breath releasing, then stretch out on the floor and doze, the street lamp out the window breaking apart into sleep. Anything to avoid the endless arguments that awaited me downstairs.

Our own sleep was mainly cold, a draft of unfinished arguments, as we tossed under the blankets, our shins bumping and retreating. Or I’d flee in one of the cars and park in an unfamiliar neighborhood. (I once looked up to see Oregon on an iridescent street sign and burst out laughing; it seemed impossibly distant now.) I covered myself in jackets and slept until early dawn, when I’d have to run the engine for heat. Couples would emerge from their houses as if from Disney movies, kissing on the porch, and I’d think very melodramatically that it would be a long time before I had another woman. I’d stretch my face out in the rearview, looking for something I no longer saw in myself. It seemed clear my efforts to weather cohabitation to be with my daughter would eventually be obscured by my leaving. I would be an absentee father, with a child growing up outside his home. I’d often start ill-fated conversations with women in grocery lines, or over the opened door of my car, asking for directions to a place I knew well, only to harass myself with the disappointment of the interaction for days.

It was on a morning like this, eating breakfast in the car, that I watched a young woman hurry through the rain with her purse over her head, open a salon, enter, and glow the lights onto the grey street. She stood in the humid window taking off her shawl, shaking it, squinting out at cars raising walls of water toward the gutters. It was winter, northern California . Under storm clouds the row of buildings seemed very low and dark, though it must only be the way I’m remembering it, like night. It must have been 9 a.m. Opening so early struck me as wasteful and somehow romantic. As if the place would remain vacant a few hours, the young woman alone, mooning over the books or sweeping the place. Maybe she would dance by herself, twisting from mirror to mirror.
A man ducked under her awning and peered into the torrent like a wet cat. He propped up his collar. Then turned, startled, when she opened the salon door behind him. I hit the wipers to see them better. She motioned him in, but he refused, gesturing down the street. He was just getting out of the rain. She went back in and he raised his shoulders and ducked into the rainfall, splashing with each footfall.

I ran across and peeked in the door, and then came into the loud music before she realized I was there. “Oh,” she said, covering her heart.

“Sorry,” I said. “Are you not open?”

“No, of course.” She hurried to turn the music down. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Rockin’ and rollin’ in here.” I wiped the rain from my eyebrows, trying to smile as she looked me over. My disheveled appearance probably wasn’t reassuring. I hung my jacket and rolled my sleeves to the elbow to cover the wrinkles. Then, flattening the chest a bit, tucking the shirt around my waist, I said, “I may as well be sleeping at the office these days.”

She gave me a pained look.

“Actually, do you have a bathroom?”

She motioned to a door and stood awkwardly by as I passed her.

“Oh.” I stopped. “Do you have any appointments?”

She nodded. Her face was younger than I’d imagined.

“Good.” I turned but stopped again. “How much?”

“Seventy-five.”

“Seventy-five?” I tried to act casual, patting my front pockets. “Do you take cards?” I hoped she wouldn’t; I could say I’d be right back with cash, and disappear.

“Of course.”

Out the bathroom window were a few sodden dumpsters in a courtyard shared with a restaurant. No exit. Seventy-five dollars was a full day’s work at both my jobs (one doing yard work for the mother’s sister, and then at night, after putting our daughter down, crossing town to feed and bathe and carry to bed, in odd repetition of my rituals with my own little girl, a grown man with cerebral palsy). But I was here, splashing water on my face in the bathroom. I’d sent out résumés for better work. Maybe through some act of grooming or care—through some love act—the woman could hold my fears at bay, if only for an hour.

She massaged my head for several awkward minutes before I realized this was part of her service. I was able to relax, my neck waning in her hands, but was never able to forget where I was. I had never been in a salon alone before. Only her working, and me, watching her crane her neck to work the top of my head, or scratch her own part using her third finger as she stood back and looked at my thinning hair. We were both quiet, the place cold; some of the rear chairs remained in near darkness. I listened to the scissors shear through a tall stand of my hair and puffed the lap of the smock to clear the hair to the floor. Her ankles. Next to her, another hydraulic chair. Cars passing in the rain. Twice, someone stopped under the awning before making a break for a car.

“I keep thinking they’re gonna come in,” she said. We both smiled toward the door where the back of a woman stood in the oily window. “I wish they would. I should probably switch all the lights on.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I kinda like being in here alone. It’s nice. Makes it feel like we’re at your house and you’re just cutting my hair. This is a very fancy garage,”

I hoped she would laugh, but she only smiled.

“I don’t think there’s anything I like less than hair salons,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows at me and snorted. We both laughed in the mirror.

“I’m serious. Rather be at the dentist. I feel like everybody’s watching me and that I have something wrong with my head. Even now, with nobody else around, every time you stop I watch you in the mirror to see if there’s something wrong.”

She put her fingers on the top of my head like a claw and turned it a little. “Seems like a perfectly good head to me.”

“I know, it’s juvenile. I don’t know, do you like cutting hair?”

She didn’t look up, and I thought she would let it die. With her head tilted, combing my hair through, she said, “It’s work. And you know, it’s creative. In some ways. Or I keep it creative.” She looked up at me as if to affirm something she was about to say. “I call the women who come in Milady. The boss doesn’t like it, but it’s all right. They like it. And some of the men I jokingly say, Milord, how is the gentry today?” She smiled to herself, working again. “People will always need haircuts, I guess.”

“Milady.” I smiled.

“That sounds totally ridiculous doesn’t it?” Her hands fell to her side and she looked off toward the dim back end of the place. “I rolled my car last week—it’s all I think about. I rolled my car, and all I could say into the backseat, to my dog was, ‘Hang on Buster, we’re going over.’”

She laughed outrageously, put her hand and comb to her mouth to stop herself, but her body convulsed without her consent until finally, a deep breath, wiping a few tears from her cheek, she said, “Oh, do I like cutting hair?”

At home, I hopped the fence and went around to the back door where I stopped briefly in the heavy drops from the eave and watched through the window as my daughter in her long sleep shirt came and went, dragging an open umbrella. She scrunched her nose at me when I came in, and we both looked at her mother talking to her, and hadn’t noticed I’d come in.

“—down and eat your breakfast.”

I shot my daughter a look and squatted, and she ran to me and took me around the neck. “Papa hair,” she said.

“You went out and got a haircut?” her mother said. She snorted. Tossed a spoon in the sink.

I looked up at her over our daughter’s head. “It came with the room at the Hilton.”

She looked at the two of us, the girl like a chimpanzee on my chest now, and me dodging her hand with my head.

“You look militant.”

“You trying to cut my hair too?” I said to my daughter. I growled at her and showed my teeth.

She shrieked, kicking up on my hip to reach my hair.

“You wanna cut it?”

She stopped and leaned back to look at me gravely in the face, then up at my hair, nodding, trying then to touch it in a more delicate way.

“You think you know how?”

“Yes.”

I stood her on the kitchen table, pushing her food away. Held my hands up in front of her as I inched away. “Don’t move, you’re up very high.” Her little body oddly levitating in front of me.

“Chaz, get her off the table. She’s gonna hurt herself.”

“No she is not,” I said, rummaging the drawer by the sink and finding, holding up for her mother the scissors. “If anything, she’s going to hurt me.”

Our daughter stood perfectly still, hand extended for the scissors, teeth chattering with excitement.

“You are absolutely not going to do that in my house.”

Without looking away from our daughter I said very clearly, “We’re gonna learn two things today. One, how to cut Papa’s hair. And two, how to use the vacuum.”

She tested the scissors using both hands. Her eyes lit. And as I bowed my head I heard the metal shearing, felt the first tug at my scalp. I leaned into her, my eyes closed, holding to her legs until her small concentrated breaths lifted me and I drifted, stolen of my weight as I’d once seen a horse rescued by crane from flooded ground, its legs hanging free and weak and miles long.

Chaz Reetz-Laiolo is senior editor of the new arts and letters magazine Cadillac Cicatrix. His work is available or forthcoming in Fourteen Hills, Folio, and Quarterly West.

“It must have been 1995 cause I'd moved back up to Iowa from Texas and was stuffed in that back bedroom with the woman who never did her dishes and I’d have to pile them on her bed to shock her into action. I was working the kitchen of Carlos O’Kelly’s with the ovens and the steaming dishwasher and that small green-gloved Mexican, God if I knew his name; he was the only one who wore checkered cook pants, the rest of us just undergrads and a couple management types who knew this was where they were going to end up. With the heat, there wasn’t one of us who didn’t sit in the walk-in drinking beer on breaks. We called it our porch. And all of us would go in and sit on the frozen stacks of meat and listen to the radio reporting how livestock were perishing in great numbers out in the fields with their hooves up in the dead air, the leather of their bellies exploding like shotgun fire. Popping like balloons. The short order raised his beer. ‘Dumb cows.’”