Boy, Snow, Bird(13)
I was new to champagne, but as soon as I tasted it, spark after golden spark, I thought, well, there’s magic in this water, no wonder Mia said to wish on it.
“So when are you due to blow the secret world of blondes wide open? I keep walking into stores and waiting for some official-looking person to take me aside and inform me I’m not welcome in their establishment. It hasn’t happened yet, but I can’t go on like this.”
Mia refilled our bowls. “You can’t go on like this? I can’t go on like this. This piece has me petrified. It’s my first big piece after a year and a half on the ‘cat stuck up a tree’ beat. My dad’s giving this journalism thing another three months to take off before he sends me to Chicago to run another one of his damn hotels. I keep telling him and telling him that I need more time, that it’s not so easy for women in this field, but he just says: ‘Don’t give me that! You’re a Cabrini! And this is 1953! Stop making excuses!’ And I say to him, ‘Yeah, it’s 1953 and down South there’s still a nice little system going, it’s called segregation.’ And he says, ‘How about just showing a little gratitude that you’re not colored?’”
“One of his hotels?” I said. “How many does he own?”
She shook her head. “Excuse me, but that’s not the point. The point is I’ve been assigned a piece of froth—oh, look, it’s a catty article about blondes written by a brunette—and I want to use it to pull the rug out from under their feet. But the more I write up my notes, the more it all just looks like a pack of playing cards.”
“Well—show me what you’ve got.”
She pulled a couple of typed pages out of her pocket. They had been folded into quarters. I opened them out and read.
You want the scoop, and I’m going to give it to you. But let’s make a deal first. How often have you read an article all the way through to the end and said to yourself: “I don’t know where this chump gets the nerve to show up for work in the morning!” I’ll tell you how I get the nerve, and if you don’t buy it, you don’t have to read another word of it.
Here goes: I’m a brunette from a long line of brunettes. We’ve never really had anything to worry about. After all, gentlemen marry us. But something happened to me when I was ten years old. My hands began to draw distinctions between the sacred and the profane. I watched them and made notes. My left hand was part of me, it belonged to me, and it only consented to touch things I considered beautiful. If Peter Pan had visited me, I’d have given him a thimble with my left hand. I wrote letters to my best friend with my left hand. When I was reading a book and found that a line or paragraph moved me in some way, I’d touch the words with my left hand.
My right hand was an object, it belonged to the world, and I used it to manipulate other objects. Putting my clothes on, pulling my socks up, holding on to the standing pole in the bus, and so on.
I looked up from the page and said: “Mia, this is wacky.”
“Oh, absolutely. But that’s what happened.” She had a little pot of nail varnish out on the tabletop and was painting the fingernails of her right hand blue. “I support you if you want to quit already.”
“No, I’m in—I’m in.”
It was around that time that my parents got divorced. My clothes and books and posters were divided up. Some were put into a room in my dad’s new apartment and the rest stayed at home (which suddenly became new too, without him). My dad said: “Don’t cry. Aw, what are you crying for? What’s happening right now isn’t a bad thing. It isn’t good, either—it’s normal. Okay?”
My mom said: “Yeah, listen to your dad.”
That summer we had a heat wave that killed a lot of people. “More than a thousand?” I asked my dad. He said yeah. “More than TWO thousand?” He said yeah. I was chicken, so I stopped there. That summer Jesse Owens was in all the papers with that gold medal he won representing our country in the Olympics. That was the year the Abraham Lincoln Brigade volunteered to do the right thing by Spain and help fight Franco. And all the while there was the theater of my hands. It was theater, in that it was the performance of something that was true, and as such, I believed in it with all my heart but was also able to come to the end of it at a moment’s notice. The whole thing was set up as a transaction: My hands were giving me a show. There was my left hand, dangling limp for most of the day—my parents took turns asking if it hurt—and there was my right hand, weary from gripping and pushing and pulling and lifting for two. When I asked my hands to end the show, they wanted payment. My right hand made me promise to “see far” and my left hand made me promise to “remember what is said.”
I gave them my word. And I’ve kept it, partly from a fear of a repeated mutiny. Add a third action: “Write it all down,” and it seems to me you’ve got yourself a journalist of some kind.
All right, if you’re still with me, thanks for staying. I write these words with a fifteen-dollar wig on my head. Wheat-sheaf blond, that’s what it said on the tag. So this is a bulletin direct from the secret world. The first thing you learn is whom to beware of. They’re exactly the same people you had to beware of as a nonblonde. The kind who think they know what you are and don’t mind telling you all about it.