“Miss Bunny,” Mama said. “Don’t worry about that. Go wake up Raleigh. Miss Bunny, you don’t sound like yourself. Is somebody helping you with your medication?” Then my mama paused, pitching her voice through the air and not through the telephone. “Chaurisse Witherspoon. Please tel me you are not on this telephone.”
I eased the phone back onto the cradle and pretended to be asleep. I lay in the bed, kept up al night by the weight of my grandmother begging to keep her legs, stil hoping to be pretty to someone.
My last stop at the mal was the drugstore. There are two kinds of pretty, my mama always said. Natural Beauty, which is whatever your mama gave you. Everybody can’t be that lucky, so for us, there is Pretty in a Jar. This was for people average or worse, who could use time and cosmetology to put ourselves together. Sometimes she cal ed it “bootstrap beauty.”
In the cosmetic aisle of SupeRx, I laid my hand on an eye shadow crayon. Drawn to the color, I turned it over in my palm, trying to remember where I had seen this particular shade of green before. The gold letters pressed into the side said buried treasure, but that didn’t ring any bel s.
Above the display was a little mirror so you could hold products up to your face and imagine what you would look like with the color rimming your eyes.
It took me a second to register that the girl in the tiny mirror was actual y me. My mother, exhausted by grief and worn down by my pleading, had given in and final y al owed me to augment my hair. That’s the term we used when we talked about it to customers. You never used the word fake.
False, though kinder, was on the forbidden list, too. What my mother stitched on to my head was sixteen inches of synthetic fibers, dark and shiny like motor oil. I moved the eye crayon from my cheek to my hair. Leaning my neck forward, I let the hair swing forward before snapping it back. I smiled at my reflection and repeated the motion. It was beautiful, that hair.
I was just about to go for another toss when I heard a weird noise over my left shoulder. I wasn’t sure what it was. Maybe it was a stifled sneeze, a little shriek, or a gasp. Embarrassed to be caught admiring myself in public, I turned to see a silver girl dropping a tube of cuticle remover into her bag.
“Silver” is what I cal ed girls who were natural beauties but who also smoothed on a layer of pretty from a jar. It wasn’t just how they looked, it was how they were. The name came from a song my mother sang sometimes when she was getting dressed to go out somewhere special. She sang along with Arethra Franklin at the end: “Sail on, silver girl . . . Your time has come to shine. Al your dreams are on their way.”
I never had much luck with the silver population. They were never al -out mean to me, unless you count the one that hemmed me up in the girls’
room at National Six at a matinee showing of Purple Rain. For the most part, silver girls were polite, especial y if their parents knew mine, and especial y if my mama did their hair, but none of them ever took me in, told me their secrets. Take somebody like Ruth Nicole Elizabeth Grant. I’d shampooed her hair once every two weeks for almost three years, but I didn’t know that she was going with Marcus McCready until she strung his class ring on her add-a-bead chain, and even then I had to ask whose ring it was. She answered me in an offhand way that let me know that this was as far from a secret as you could imagine.
Silver girls liked to be friends with each other, keeping al their shine, which, in my opinion, was a little bit selfish. Silverness was catching, but it could only be shared girl to girl, and this could only happen if both parties tried real y hard. Sharing a boyfriend with a silver girl wouldn’t make you silver; that would just make you a slut. But let’s say in the past you’d never had much truck with girls your own age because you had been cooped up in either a limousine or a beauty shop al your life. If that person was you, and you could make friends with a silver girl, she could teach you how to shine.
QUIET AS IT’S KEPT, augmented hair makes you brave, like sweet wedding champagne that goes straight to your head, turning you into a bolder, prettier version of yourself. Knowing the silver girl was watching, I dropped the eye crayon in my purse, feeling like a good girl gone bad. “Hey.”
The silver girl licked her lips but didn’t speak. She looked so scared that I checked behind me to make sure that the manager wasn’t standing there. “What?” I said once I saw that no one was behind us but an old man selecting a pumice stone. She kept staring in my direction, eyebrows up, and taking shal ow breaths through her mouth. I turned, looking al around until I saw what she saw: a smal video camera mounted above the emery boards. “Oh,” I said.
The silver girl stil didn’t move. She stood there like Diana Ross in Mahogany, holding a pose for that crazy photographer guy. Even though this was a bona fide emergency, I couldn’t help noticing that this silver girl was especial y gorgeous. I wanted to kiss her, just on the cheek, where she had smeared fuchsia-colored rouge. I know a lot of people get into redbone girls, but what I love to see is a dark brown girl with a pretty face and lots of hair. This girl had a good twenty inches of the real thing, thick and heavy. A Barbie dol dipped in chocolate, she was the silverest girl I had ever seen.
“Empty out your bag,” I said. “Just put everything back.”
She didn’t move, but I did. I groped down in my flea-market Gucci and pul ed out the eye crayon. For good measure, I also dropped the box of Dexatrim that I was planning to pay for at the front desk like a regular person. The silver girl stood motionless, stil posing for that invisible photographer. I reached for her purse, sliding my hand inside her LV (a nice fake) and found a foil chain of Trojans, pink nail polish, and a package of bath salts that looked like something you would give as a gift to your teacher.
“What’s wrong with you?” I said. Final y, she did something, even though it was something stupid — zipped up her bag just as the manager stormed toward us, almost tipping a display of Sea Breeze.
“Come with me.” The manager was probably my mother’s age, with marcel ed waves and a slick coat of foundation. Its creamy smoothness ended just under her chin.
“We don’t have to go with you,” the silver girl said with a flip of her hair. “We haven’t done anything wrong.” Another toss of her tresses — that’s the word that came to mind. This was storybook hair. So pretty it made both my hands itch.
“Open your bag,” the SupeRx lady said to the silver girl.
“She doesn’t have to do anything,” I offered. “She has civil rights.”
“Both of us do,” said the silver girl.
I smiled at the word both. “I wil cal my parents,” I said. I was grandstanding now. Maybe I was stil under the influence of my new hair, but something about the moment didn’t feel quite real. It was like we were in a movie, a comedy starring the two of us, where she and I were equal y beautiful, equal y charming.
The manager ignored me and rummaged through my purse anyway. When she was done with my belongings, she moved on to the silver girl, but you could tel she had lost her hope of punishing us.
“You owe her an apology,” I cal ed out as the manager went back to the counter after tel ing us to get the fuck out.
As though we were square dancers, I linked my am through the silver girl’s. This close, I smel ed her perfume. Anaïs Anaïs, the same as mine.
Her beautiful hair stank of cigarettes. “You smoke?” I asked. On the busy sidewalk in front of the mal , teenage girls walked by in intense clusters.
The silver ones talked only to each other, but the regular girls looked at everyone they passed, hoping to see something that would change them.