“I started my own health spa. At first, of course, I was selling vitamins over the phone, but I moved up quickly.” Clarissa is straight-faced. She picks up a comb from the faux-marble countertop and plucks at the teeth with her nails.
“It sounds fabulous.” I drag the a for effect. “Did you hear I’m engaged to one of the Mondavi brothers? Proposed right there in the vineyard. He said I was the bouquet he’d been searching for all his life.” I giggle like a little girl. “The health spa?” I prompt Clarissa when she doesn’t smile.
“Very elegant,” Clarissa says. “Marble columns at the entrance, cool blue throughout.” She pauses, sighing. “Mud baths, steam baths, bath baths. And piles of fruit and specially concocted vitamin drinks served to the customers on silver platters.”
“You’ve come a long way from your small-town beginnings. And you live in a beautiful house, I imagine.”
“The most,” she says theatrically, running one finger quickly down the comb so the teeth whistle as they bend. Clarissa watches the comb as she does this, concentrating. “And I’ve had a thousand lovers and never loved a single one of them,” she says. “Yes, it’s true, I’ve escaped my small-town beginnings….”
I dread the look that comes over Clarissa’s face now, that look of helpless surprise in the face of what she is about to say or do.
“This is true,” Clarissa says, her voice part movie actress and part the drama of her own natural voice. She smiles wickedly. She watches herself in the mirror as she runs a finger along her hairline where the tinfoil begins. “And I keep myself company in my exquisitely furnished apartment with the knowledge of my own success. I don’t need a lover. I don’t need anyone, and I’ll die alone, eating kiwi and luxuriating in my own mud bath.”
“Clarissa,” I say.
“I don’t even need friends,” Clarissa says, in Lucretia’s voice because she’s electing not to hear me. “And that’s Lucretia to you.”
“Whatever your name is, enough,” I say, afraid of the lump lying in wait deep in her breast, afraid of the inoperable tumor of loneliness that lies even deeper inside. I am angry that Clarissa won’t talk about these things and terrified that she might.
“Did you decide there’s no hope for us?” Clarissa says as Camille, our beauty consultant, returns in the pink splendor of her outfit. With her is another pink-aproned woman. Emery boards and combs stick out of the pocket of her apron in a chaotic and upsetting way.
I look at Clarissa’s reflection in the mirror and almost don’t recognize her not looking back at me. Sometimes when I’m walking up and down the hall in my apartment, I wonder what interesting thing Clarissa must be doing at that moment because she would never wander the hall aimlessly.
“This is my assistant, Jasmine,” Camille says. “She’s learning the ropes. I was thinking, if you ladies don’t mind, that Jasmine and I could wash you two out together. Otherwise I’ll do you one at a time, which of course will take much longer.”
“That’s fine,” I say, immediately yielding to Camille’s subtle hint. Clarissa looks at me sideways, as if I were a stranger she happened to be watching, and gives me a look that says, When will you learn to put up a fight? She doesn’t just mean now, here at Well Hello, Beautiful. She means the way I’ve stayed in our hometown, the way I’ve settled into a job I found by accident, the way I let my fingernails and toenails grow wild and unshaped and don’t even think twice about it. No matter how often I tell her that I’m content, she won’t believe me. I never wanted to leave — but it’s always been hard to draw the line between where her ambitions begin and mine end. She looks at me as if to say, Get out of this town already or next thing you know you’ll have married Bobby Taylor who was voted most popular in high school and now works sorting Terra Cotta from Egg Shell in his father’s paint business. Clarissa’s look scorns my fairy-tale suspicion of someday finding something wonderful right here at home. Clarissa’s look says all of this to me and includes the injustice of her own life not being much better. I fear that we will both tumble into the hole of Clarissa’s fear.
Camille will do Clarissa, and Jasmine, her assistant, will do me because that’s the way these things work out with me and Clarissa. Jasmine’s fingers smell like the canned peach smell of the salon as she rests her hands on my tinfoil head, long nails gently scraping my scalp.
The four of us walk over to the pink basins on the other side of the room, where Clarissa and I sit down in reclining chairs and tip our heads back so that Camille and Jasmine can begin to unwrap the tinfoil.
“Slowly,” Camille cautions Jasmine. “You don’t want to jolt the follicles.”
Clarissa slides her foot along the linoleum floor to mine, making sure I caught this. She has decided to be herself again.
Jasmine tests the water from the hose with her fingers before she begins to wash the excess color out. The water runs over my ears so that for a moment I can hear only my own heart, its steady, persistent beat.
When she is done she wraps a towel turbanlike around my head. Camille has Clarissa done up in the same way. We are led back to our swivel chairs in front of the mirror, and Camille and Jasmine begin combing and blow-drying and teasing our hair.
“You’re much redder,” I say to Clarissa, meaning her hair.
She looks at me, and I notice for the millionth time since I’ve known her how beautiful she is with her thick charcoal-stroke eyebrows and her big square jaw suggesting a person who would never be left with nothing to say.
Clarissa puts her hand on her throat and starts to cry.
Camille keeps combing and teasing Clarissa’s hair, having decided that I will handle this. She’s opted for the this-isn’t-happening approach.
“Sweetie,” I say, horrified by the big tear rolling down Clarissa’s cheek unchecked. Jasmine takes my face in both her hands, pointing me out to myself in the mirror.
“Done,” she says. My hair is streaked with shiny blond. Clarissa’s hair is dazzling as she finally brushes the tear away with her hand.
“I feel like a converted person,” Clarissa says, recovering quickly, as we stand up to go change back into our clothes.
I will pay with a credit card and Clarissa will pay me in cash later. While I step up to the cash register, she walks over to a large gilded mirror to look at her hair. Above the cash register is a small mirror and I can see Clarissa behind me. She doesn’t know I’m looking at her and she looks at her reflection the way I imagine she does at home, alone in her apartment. I’ve looked that way too, studying myself and longing to be studied.
I think about what will happen after this necessary indulgence. We’ll go back to my apartment — shop for dinner and wine, pop popcorn, and watch a late night movie on TV, do exactly what we want — until Clarissa returns to her real life elsewhere with risk embedded in her breast and I go back to the comforting rhythm of work and home, work and home. For right now, though, watching Clarissa watch herself in the mirror, I love her in the same way I would love a landscape that is still and unselfconscious. These moments in my life are subtle as the new gold streaks through my hair. These tiny jewels are what I live for.
RELIEF
THE winter will ruin my life,” Flora says out loud, standing alone in her kitchen near the small hole that allows her to see through to her landlord’s kitchen below. “Ruin me, ruin me, ruin me.” This is one among many things she rehearses saying to her landlord. She mimes cutting her heart out and throwing it down the hole into her landlord’s kitchen. She imagines it landing, still beating, in his sink full of dirty bowls and spoons.