She stumbles out a fetus into the cold air, her beret covering her science experiment. The salon is off a side street on Brick Lane. She opens the glass door. Bored swiveled eyes, returning disappointed.
Hi, I’m Ruth. I’ve a 2 p.m.
A gangly boy stands up from his previous place lying down on the sofa covered with customers’ coats. He wears black sweatbands on each wrist. She follows him downstairs to a room of lonely disembodied sinks. She lays her head back onto the hard curve, her legs sticking out. The hose rushing out too hot, too cold, just right. The water swishes in her ear. When he touches her hair, tears come to Ruth’s eyes. It feels like so long since she had last been touched with purpose.
Big plans for tonight?
No, no. Just staying in. Soft, breathy. She couldn’t remember how to talk, how to socialize outside of her head.
Cool, cool. She struggles up. He dabs at her with a cheap white towel, which he arranges around her neck. Like a boxer between rounds. She follows him, fragile and exposed, up the winding stairs, nervously nodding to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”
She follows the boy to a chair. There is no mirror. He fits her around the neck with the uniform black shroud. He nods at the stylist, a bored-looking Scottish woman, and returns to his post, body down on the sofa.
Tried to cut your own hair, hmmm? She lights a cigarette, running her hands through the damage, lifting up a black cowboy boot to pump her up higher in the air.
Yes. She has turned to stone. She doesn’t want to talk about it.
It looks terrible, doesn’t it? Ruth then gulps. She can’t see herself. How does she know that she exists if she can’t see herself?
The woman shrugs. What were you trying to do? She is wearing tight black jeans, from which a pouch of white flesh spills out.
Have you seen
Breathless
?
Nope.
Jean Seberg?
Suck, exhale, blank expression. She places her cigarette in the filled ashtray. It simmers along with others extinguished and estranged.
I thought it would be freeing. (I wanted to be clean. Wiped clean.)
Eyebrow cocked. More flipping through hair, looking to see how it falls. She was a woman of few words.
Just don’t make me completely bald.
The woman snorts. You did a pretty good job of that yourself. She lights another cigarette.
You want me to take it all off? Like short short?
Yes. Yes. Take it off. Take it all off.
She shrugs again.
Ruth busies herself with a magazine on her lap. Flip flip flip. Beautifulwomenbeautifulclothes. Everyone in the magazine has long hair. Long, long, lovely hair. She feels fragmented. She forgets who she is. She forgets who she was. Filled again with that destructive sense of want. Of want and can’t have. A damp blonde rain falls onto flaxen-haired maidens in party dresses. They are all lying in a bed of hay, as if they had accidentally fallen there. Ticklish, Ruth’s hair sticks, to her face, her lips, her lap, the girls’ pouty faces.
The whiz of a razor being applied to Ruth’s neck, to the sides of her head. She looked at the woman next to her. An older woman with silver foil in dark wettened hair. She overhears her talking to her stylist, a boy with a rat’s tail down his neck and tight jeans. Ruth can make out snippets. I suspect. I suppose. Oh dear.
The whir of hairdryers.
Ruth relaxes into blankness. She turns into a stone statue.
Whaddya think? Hand mirror handed over.
A more glamorous alien blinked back at her. Her eyes were planets.
Big beautiful glassy eyes offset by a startle of lashes.
Oh. She gasps.
What’s the matter.
I don’t recognize myself.
I think it looks brilliant. The woman lights another cigarette, the former abandoned to the heap of half-formed bodies. It really brings out your bone structure.
Everyone in the shop turns towards her. Who is that girl? You’ve got a wonderful head, the boy from the couch says. Thank you, she murmurs. She can feel others looking.
Walking home, she catches flashes of the unfamiliar girl in shop windows. She is unable to tear her eyes away. She poses for invisible cameras. She knows her angles. Her best sides. She keeps on patting her head, rubbing her hand back and forth. She likes the feel of it. Soft and fuzzy like a baby chick.
Agnes is smoking and watching TV when Ruth makes her entrance. Ruth hasn’t seen her in what seems like a month. She stands there waiting for her to notice that she is there.
Agnes finally looks up.
I got my hair cut.
I see. Agnes at a rare loss for words. Finally she springs up from the bed to touch Ruth’s blonde globe. She runs her fingers through it critically.
Mia Farrow,
Rosemary’s Baby
. Ruth Gordon feeding you tanas root.
I was going for Jean Seberg.
New York Herald Tribune
!
Something like that.
Wow. Agnes marvels. Now you’re interesting. You were a bit dull before.
Thanks. I think.
No, really, you’ve just changed everything.
Agnes steps back, as if to appraise her from afar. You look like a charming little boy.
Thanks a lot, Agnes.
Gawd. That’s a compliment. Androgyny is very in fashion, you know.
Ruth locks herself in the bathroom. She wants to be alone with her new self. Entranced by this strange girl in the mirror. With her radical crop she has made a radical alteration. She has cut away her old self.
Everyone in her department has to do a double-take upon her return. Oh, you cut your hair! You cut your hair! You look like a little French gamine says The Italian.
What would HE say. The shock of the new.
You cut your hair.
I know.
Whenever she saw Olly’s approach she would stare him down with emboldened eyes, her Medusa mask, daring him to say anything, anything to her or anybody else for that matter on any subject concerning her. He would inevitably scurry away, scared off by her calm eyes, her unblinking fury.
At the café. A man stops in front of her table. He looks at her as if trying to decipher something. Finally he snaps his fingers and points at her:
Bonjour Tristesse
! He says.
Yes she says. Modestly, eyes lowered, surrendering herself to his insatiable gaze.
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
she stood in tears amidst the alien corn.
— John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”
Ruth, Ruth, I need you. All of a sudden Noncy is in front of her and clasping Ruth’s wrist with her fingers. She had long cold fingers like Ruth imagined a Victorian heiress would have. Fragile and frazzled, like Vivien Leigh playing Blanche DuBois in
A Streetcar Named Desire
.
Desire, would you care to try? Desire? Desire?
You need to work the till today. Right now? Noncy sighs loudly. There’s a queue forming and I need you to ring up customers with Elspeth. Ruth, are you listening?
Oh. Okay. She smiles.
Noncy sighs loudly, dramatically and even attempts a smile back, although it looks more like a grimace. Ta.
Ta! Ta! Ta! This was a word Ruth heard everywhere at Horrids. She assumed at first it was the English clearing their throat at the end of a sentence. But Agnes had informed her that it was actually shorthand for thanks. But, like cheers, it was an English mannerism Ruth could not bring herself to affect, knowing that it would cement her position as a foreigner even further.
Ta, Elspeth smiles weakly, as Ruth hurries over to help her, wrapping up boxes of perfume in paper, placing them in the shiny Horrids bag.
It’s alright she says although it is impossible to hear her over the din. itsalright.
She began to take smoke breaks with The Italian. The Italian, blowing out reams of grayish agitation. He was a dramatic smoker, could communicate emotions with that interplay of cigarette and smoke and mouth and flame that his sticky English could not, like Ava Gardner with her dark expressive eyes. It’s cold cold, she brr brred. The weather in London was The Italian’s favorite topic, she knew. Oh, his face snarled up. Tap tap went the cigarette furiously accompanying his frantic foot well embraced in designer leather. He waved his cigarette-holding hand as he talked, pausing at times to inhale with delight, pausing for the smoke to circulate around his lungs, and then breathing out again for emphasis. He was a famous tenor mourning over his fallen soprano. He was Othello mourning his Desdemona. He was Desdemona. He was
Swan Lake
. She watched enraptured at his performance.