By Sara Marchant
We went, my mother and I, to get haircuts. The previous appointment was still there, standing in front of the mirror, talking. This woman’s hair made her look like a pretty Afghan dog; her large green eyes did little to compensate for wearing clothes too dowdy for a woman in her forties. The stylist fluttered around nervously, her curly black hair disheveled, her small dog, barking with anxiety, twining around everyone’s feet. Later, the stylist would tell us that the green-eyed woman had been talking for two hours.
Mom sat in the chair, received the apron, and we all listened to the previous appointment, a white evangelical woman, talk about Jesus saving her from a rattlesnake the week before. She stepped out her kitchen door, right on its middle, and it wrapped around her ankle, striking. She said, “I don’t want to alarm you ladies,” but she was the one she was reassuring.
James Baldwin said, “White is a metaphor for power.” White evangelicals seem to take this as encouragement lately. That is, they would if they knew who James Baldwin was or what he wrote or what his work signified with its mere existence.
I know nothing of my hairstylist’s belief system. I know about her children, her grandchildren, her boyfriends, the kind of clothing she shops for and that she likes those excursions where people drink wine and paint. She knows that I am an atheist Mexican-Jew who teaches critical thinking and hasn’t much patience. And she knows my mom will talk to anyone about anything and comes from the generation that will never tell strangers that her family is Jewish. My mom finds it convenient (and by that she means safer) to be Catholic outside the home because of things like World Wars I and II and the Shoah.
The white evangelical woman was sure that it was Jesus who saved her from the rattlesnake, but it sounded like Jesus was her name for her Adidas and thick denim jeans.
She really didn’t appreciate me pointing that out. Standing, one hand on the doorknob, she talked and talked and talked the entire duration of my mother’s haircut.
Then it was my turn. The hairstylist and I helped my mother from the chair and walked her across the room. The white evangelical woman didn’t break verbal stride, but her talk abruptly devolved from her personal relationship with Jesus into an indictment of Catholicism. The stylist paused, her hands shaking, a probable sign that her belief system includes Catholic teachings or did at one time. The hairstylist studied my mom intently, worried for her I believe. She underestimated my mother’s intense distrust of institutionalized power and her particular dislike of priests. (Ask my mom how many times priests sexually harassed or assaulted her in her youth. Or better yet—don’t.) Mom knew how to deal with the white evangelical woman’s bigotry. She placated her, she played along.
My haircut commenced.
While the hairstylist and I discussed the fact that my hair was growing according to our plans– Meryl Streep’s hair from The Devil Wears Prada— I could hear the White Evangelical woman getting bolder. Her statements (because her entire belief system, to her, are absolute statements) oozed closer to objectionable. My mother stopped placating her; her responses now tended toward, “Well, dear, if that brings you comfort …”
“She’s handling her so well,” the hairstylist whispered as she tried to clip up one side of my hair in order to cut the back. “I’m so relieved.”
Just then the rhetoric got louder, more paranoid. The liberal elites were coming for this woman’s religion, they were coming for her faith; they were the reason this country was in such a mess, such a lack of values; the liberal atheists were the ones letting riff-raff into the country, dangerous foreign elements.
My body turned to solidified rage. My blood was lava oozing through fury.
The hairstylist gave up with the hair clips when the third one flew from her shaking hand. She grabbed both my hands and guided them to the weight of my hair.
“Hold this up, okay?” She grabbed her clippers. “I can’t—”
She was applying the clippers to my neck when White Evangelical woman said, “And of course, you can’t trust the world to be safe for honest Christians anymore. Anywhere you go, anywhere, could be filled with atheist liberals who want to take down my cross. They could be anywhere.”
“That’s right,” I said, pulling the hair straight up from my head with both hands. “We are everywhere.”
“Oops.” The hairstylist had run the clippers up the complete length of the back of my head.
“She’s joking, right?” the woman asked my mom.
“Oh no, dear,” Mom said. “She’s not joking at all.”
“We are everywhere. We are sitting in this very chair, in this very room, listening to your nonsense.” It felt like the stylist might have taken my hair down to regimental length. “And thus far, I’ve listened to your nonsense very politely. But no more.”
My mother giggled nervously in the corner; the small dog ran out of the room.
“I didn’t mean to offend your daughter,” the woman said. She let go of the doorknob to wring her hands.
“Well, you did,” I said as the rest of the back of my head was shaved.
“She’s joking, right?” The woman just couldn’t get it that we weren’t like her. “She’s just joking.”
“No, no,” Mom said. “No, dear. She’s dead serious.”
“Well, I’m sure she’s not one of the atheist liberals who are taking down my cross.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. Still holding my hair, yanking it really. “Every day, I wake up and I say to myself, ‘What cross can I destroy today? What cross is just asking for it?’”
“Now she is joking,” my mom said. “That’s called sarcasm. She’s got much better things to do. She’s a very busy woman”
“I didn’t mean to offend anyone.” The woman’s voice was thickening with tears.
“You didn’t, dear,” my mother said. “Don’t cry, you have such pretty green eyes.”
“I am offended,” I said. “You offend me.”
The hairstylist removed my hands from my hair, tried to comb it down over the shaved parts. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “It looks great. I can fix it.”
“I am offended that you would assume that everyone shares your stunted beliefs. I am offended by everything you said. I am.” I turned to the hairstylist. “Did you just shave the back of my head?”
“It looks great!” She patted me on the shoulder.
The White Evangelical woman was trying to stifle tears, still insisting she’d meant no offense, that she didn’t understand what had just happened. Why was I being so mean to her?
That week, in my critical thinking class, we’d gone over DARVO. Deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. I promised myself, this would make for a great object lesson for my students. Eventually, I could explain it calmly and rationally. Right then, though, I wished for a nearby cross to destroy. I was capable of ripping it apart with my bare hands. I wanted to pick my teeth with its splinters after biting this woman’s head off.
My mother was helping the White Evangelical woman to the door, still telling her not to cry. Mom opened the door, gently pushed the woman through it and shut it in her face. The little dog ran back into the room.
“I thought I’d better show her out,” my mother said, “before you started quoting Tom Waits.”
“‘Come down off your cross, we could use the wood.’” I said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
The hairstylist scooped up her dog and dropped into the shampooing chair, cuddling him on her lap. We all three sat and looked at each other for a while. I couldn’t stop touching the back of my shaved head. It felt naked, exposed. It should have made me nervous; it should have made me empathetic to those who feel they require some sort of magical protection from the dangers of our world. It didn’t. It made me feel belligerent, powerful, capable of pulling crosses from the raped earth and chopping them to firewood with my anger. Maybe I should have thanked that sad, bigoted woman. She knew not what she’d done.
Another work of James Baldwin’s contains an epigraph having to do with the biblical story of Noah and his ark, God’s promise that the water would recede. I’ve no pity for that woman’s tears. What weight do her tears have compared with the tears of the “foreign element” she described? The tears of the children in cages, the tears of the mother’s writing their names and birthdates in Sharpie ink on the flesh of their babies in hopes of having a chance at reunification when the children are wrenched from their arms, the tears of the sick ones dying in the hielera? I save my sympathy for the more deserving, but I do wish I could go back and confront that woman again, using language that maybe she’d understand.
God gave Noah the rainbow sign: No more water, the fire next time.
Then again, maybe she wouldn’t.
Sara Marchant, a prose editor at Writers Resist, received her MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California, Riverside/Palm Desert. Her work has been published by The Manifest Station, Every Writer’s Resource, Full Grown People, Brilliant Flash Fiction, The Coachella Review, East Jasmine Review, ROAR, and Desert Magazine. Her work has been anthologized in All the Women in My Family Sing, and by Running Wild Press. Her novella, The Driveway Has Two Sides, was published by Fairlight Books. Her memoir, Proof of Loss, was published by Otis Books.
Photo credit: Forsaken Fotos via a Creative Commons license.
Stunning!