chapter sixteen
Her Terms
I tried not to dwell on my missed Valentine’s Day opportunity, but it was hard, especially since Mother and Aunt Mary had plans for the night. The downtown merchants were hosting a Valentine’s Day dance at the Elks Lodge, and from the sound of things, the entire adult population of Spring Hill planned to attend. Mother had ordered a dress off the Internet, and she’d found a great pair of strappy black heels on sale over at Landis Lane. Mother and Aunt Mary didn’t have dates (they never have dates), but Aunt Mary claimed there might be some nice single men there.
Early Saturday morning, I was awakened by sobs. I tiptoed downstairs and stood outside Mother’s bathroom door, debating whether or not to knock. Finally, I did. “Yes,” said Mother. Gently I pushed open the door.
“What’s wro—?” I stopped myself. Mother held a brush so thick with hair it looked like a small rodent.
“Get a paper bag,” Mother ordered.
“A paper bag?”
“I’m saving it,” she said flatly.
“Saving what?”
“My hair. I’m saving every strand of it!” she snapped, as if I were somehow missing the logic in this idea. Once her hair was safely tucked in the paper bag, Mother left for work, and I began to notice the familiar warning signs.
My swinish gluttony never attacks without warning signs. As I showered and dressed and styled my hair and drank my very last Pounds-Away, I noticed my palms were sweating. While I waited on the front stoop for Miss Bertha, guilty food fantasies darted around in my brain like bats. My heart had that heavy, pulling-down feeling, the kind you get when you’ve just failed a test or lost something valuable (or consumed an entire Domino’s pizza by yourself).
Miss Bertha and I were almost to Heavenly Hair when I blurted out, “I need to buy another get-well card!” I couldn’t tell Miss Bertha about Pounds-Away any more than I could tell Mother. They’d both vehemently disagree with my drastic weight-loss measures.
“Honey, the salon’s real busy this—”
“I won’t take long, I promise. I swear if you don’t stop, I’ll—”
“Oh, all right, calm down! You and Richard have
got
to stop spending so much time together. His dramatic streak’s startin’ to rub off!” she scolded. Miss Bertha turned her car around in the Dairy Queen parking lot, and my eyes locked on the giant ice-cream -cone sign out front.
“Hurry,” I said, as if contraband Pounds-Away were some powerful antidote to the Dairy Queen.
That night Aunt Mary showed up at our door wearing a black silk dress and a bright red wrap. She did look very stylish. “Mother’s in the bathroom,” I said, letting her in. “She’ll be out in a minute. ” I didn’t bother telling Aunt Mary that Mother’d spent half her day sobbing in the Heavenly Hair bathroom.
Mother sobbing
is practically an oxymoron.
“Rosie, do you
ever
wear anything besides sweats?” said Aunt Mary. “You know they add at least ten pounds.”
I ignored her and tried to return to focusing on my homework. Usually, I do homework in my room, but since Mother would be gone, I’d brought everything downstairs.
“It just kills me—that sour, puffed-up look you get every time I come around,” Aunt Mary went on. “A respectful niece would
answer me
instead of sitting there with her head in a book. I can tell you’re not really reading, Rosie. Your eyes aren’t moving. When people read their eyes move.”
I was just about to let my tongue off its leash when Mother, still wearing her slippers and bathrobe, scuffed into the living room. Around her head she’d wrapped some red fabric that was supposed to be a turban. I think.
“What on earth, Rose Warren? You do realize we’re due at the Elks Lodge in fifteen minutes? Why aren’t you dressed? And what’s that awful thing on your head?”
“I tried to call you on your cell,” said Mother.
“Tried to call me for what?”
Mother looked ready to cry again, and I could tell she was having a hard time getting the words out.
“Aunt Mary, her hair is falling out!” I said sharply, a distinct tone of
duh
in my voice. Mother’s face crumpled, and she dashed toward the kitchen. Aunt Mary shot me a look as if I were somehow responsible for the side effects of doxorubicin and followed her. I didn’t bother going after them. I knew I’d just be relegated to the sofa again. Similar scenes had been played out repeatedly in my life: There is a crisis of some sort; Mother and Aunt Mary huddle together and whisper about it; I wait just out of earshot and try to figure out what might happen next.
A few minutes later a somber Aunt Mary headed out the front door. I listened to her heels click down the sidewalk. She didn’t say good-bye—not that I cared. I heard Mother’s bedroom door snap shut. She didn’t say good night.
Around midnight I needed some air, so I went to get the soggy newspaper off the front lawn—it’d been out there all day. In order to put the paper in the recycling bin, I had to go into the kitchen. And since the bin is right next to the pantry, I opened the door and peeked inside. On the shelf was a fresh bag of innocent nacho chips. Just next to it was an entirely vulnerable jar of mild salsa. This time Mother had labeled both with a pink sticky note: PLEASE DO NOT EAT OR THROW AWAY.
I grabbed a Coke from the fridge. A person couldn’t very well consume spicy salsa and salty chips without something to drink. My heart raced, and I could feel the rush of prebinge adrenaline.
The point of no return,
I thought.
This is it. Right here. This is that
point where you put the Coke back in the fridge and the chips and salsa back on the shelf. You go upstairs, wash your face, brush your teeth, go to bed.
Kay-Kay Reese would’ve done this. Aunt Mary and Mother and Richard would have done this, too.
In a game of
he loves me, he loves me not
, I put the chips back, picked them up again, put them back, picked them up. I got all the way to my room with the Coke and the chips and the salsa, glanced at the treadmill, then hurried downstairs again. Carefully, I reattached Mother’s note and put everything back where it belonged.
This afternoon, Mother dropped me off at Dr. Cooper’s for my appointment with Mrs. Wallace. “You’re not staying?” I asked when she pulled up to the curb. She shook her head, which was covered with a blue velvet hat, a gift from Miss Bertha (so much better than the turban).
“I’m gonna run over to the hospital and see Peri for a minute. I won’t be long. I just want to say hidy and drop these off,” she said, patting the stack of
Enquirer
s on the seat.
“Are you gonna fix her hair?”
Mother shook her head. I knew this meant Mrs. McCutchin was too sick to have her hair fixed or her neck shaved.
I hadn’t even warmed up the ripped vinyl chair in Mrs. Wallace’s office before I started spilling my guts. I told her about going to the basketball game alone. I told her all about my almost date with Kyle Cox. I told her about Mother’s sudden hair loss and the completely freaky, weird, saving-her-hair-in-a-paper-bag thing and the subsequent sobbing attacks. I
almost
told her about Saturday night’s salsa dance, but something held me back. Instead, I pushed out a fake cough and handed her my homework—the one reason I could think of that Kyle Cox might actually like me:
I have nice hair.
Kyle said so.
Mrs. Wallace glanced at my so-called list. Clearly, she wasn’t impressed. “We’ll discuss this next session,” she said, slipping the paper into her Rosemary file. “First, I want to hear more about what happened with your mother.”
I took a deep breath and let it out again. “Well, Mother has seemed fine up to this point. I mean, she didn’t say all that much about the cancer, but with my mother, the roof could fall on her head and she’d say she was fine. That’s just how she is.”
“I see,” said Mrs. Wallace. “So she’s not opening up about her feelings yet.”
“
Yet?
No, you don’t understand. There is no
yet
. Rose Warren Goode doesn’t ever open up about anything.” I thought about what Grandma Georgia had said.
She reorganized her dreams the way some people clean out closets—threw the old ones out and hung new ones in their place.
“So she
never
talks to you?”
“Oh, she talks. I mean, she’ll tell me what’s for dinner or talk about her decorating ideas for the house. . . .”
“But she doesn’t talk about her problems.”
“My mother doesn’t have problems,” I said sarcastically.
“Look, it’s not like I want every gory detail of her life. But I’m fifteen, about to turn sixteen. There are things I need to know, especially now. And if she’s . . . you know . . . really sick, then . . .” The words caught in my throat.
Mrs. Wallace waited, but I couldn’t speak. “You’d like to comfort her,” she finally filled in for me. I nodded and grabbed a tissue.
“Sounds like you and your mother want things from each other that neither of you is willing to give at the moment.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, wiping my nose.
“Well, your mother bought you a treadmill. She’s tried to help you lose weight, but—”
“What’s
that
got to do with anything?”
“Rosemary, what’s it like for you when your mother and aunt pressure you to diet and exercise?”
“It’s like I’m not good enough just the way I am. Like all the other good things I do in life—good grades and working at the salon—like none of that counts because I’m fat.”
“And does their nudging make you lose weight?”
“Obviously not.”
“What I’m saying is your mother’s battle with cancer is somewhat like your battle with weight. She’ll have to handle it on
her
terms.”