The Wisdom of Hair Read Online Free Page A

had some sense and a little piece of steel wool that day. Maybe things would have been different.
    I took a swig of sweet tea out of a glass I’d brought from home, marched myself into the bathroom, and scrubbed the toilet twice. The old tub was a sight with I-don’t-know-what stuck in the drain: hair, dead bugs, dust, and dirt. A bunch of old
Glamour
magazines were stuffed in a basket; one was opened to the “Dos and Don’ts” page. I flipped through the May issue from four years ago and tried to twist my hair up like the model’s on page fifty-three, but it didn’t look good.
    I took an armload of those magazines into the living room and arranged them on the coffee table by the couch before I started on the tub. After a while, the bathroom looked nice, except the floor looked like the toilet had overflowed at one time. A piece of the linoleum was torn off, and there were wavy lines in the exposed plywood. I got down on my hands and knees to see if it was as bad as it looked, thinking maybe I could find a little secondhand chenille rug to cover it up, maybe a blue one to match the walls that looked like they might once have been the color of robins’ eggs.
    It was hot for early June. Between cleaning and getting myself all revved up over Winston, I was tired. I turned my face in the direction of the box fan wedged in the bedroom window, and closed my eyes. The breeze blew across my face and ruffled about under my shirt.
    When I opened my eyes, I noticed a box hidden under the bed. It wasn’t a pasteboard box like you might store winter clothes in when you were sure spring had finally arrived. It was crimson with fancy gold letters across the top that were slick to the touch.
    I don’t know how I knew it was Winston’s wife’s, I just did. I also knew it wasn’t right to even think about looking inside, but I couldn’t help myself. So I closed my front door that was propped open to air out the musty old place and pulled down the shade on my solitary window before curiosity killed me.
    The box was from a little shop in town called Serendipity. There was a layer of dust on the top of it, and not thinking that I’d just spent all morning cleaning, I blew the dust into the air. My nose stung like someone had swatted me. I sneezed twice and got on with my plundering.
    The box opened easily, like Pandora’s must have. The receipt was on top of the prettiest dress I have ever seen. I have to say I felt guilty going through a dead woman’s things, but that didn’t stop me from taking the dress into the bathroom and locking the door. I’d never touched silk before that day. I drew it up to slide my arms in and let the slippery fabric ripple over my body. The dress was the color of the sky at sunset, a perfect fit that felt like a whisper across my body.
    I looked in the tiny medicine chest mirror, but not in the primpy sort of way I had earlier. It was more like the fearful expressions of those bwanas in the old Tarzan movies when the jungle drums suddenly stopped beating. I took that dress off, wadded it up in a ball, and sat on the toilet in my underwear.
    After a while, I folded the dress up and put everything back the way I found it. The receipt had fallen into the bottom of the box.$194.56. Even today that would be a lot of money to pay for a dress, but in 1982 it was a fortune. Before I was done cleaning, I found several more boxes from other stores, all full of pretty things Emma had bought and squirreled away for herself.
    I left everything where I found it. I’d caused myself enough trouble just by trying on that dress. But I did step out for a little while and walked to a hole-in-the-wall of a grocery store on Main Street. Along the way, I passed three of the shops Emma liked to frequent and felt myself blush hard, like somebody might look at me and know what I’d done. Some boys about my age were sitting outside the pool hall. One of them whistled at me, trying to turn my head, but I’d seen their type