The Gift of Women Page 4

  Then, there was something else very dotty that Daddy said about the beauty of our family piety. Stripping oneself before God was a Wellesley tradition, a legitimate puritan streak. But it had been planted among a race of embellishers.

  For him the embellisher bit went into Wellesley ads. My anger at him almost choked me.

  There’s nothing pressing, except my sleep. I can’t write any more now. William is reading a report on a report, or something. His glasses are on his forehead and he’s looking through the door at me. Will I wave for you?

  September the nineteenth. This next part will come recorded on a tape wrapped in the rest of the letter, Tina. I realized I wasn’t writing you anymore. I was talking to you, and I couldn’t cope with the quotation marks and etceteras if I was to let you know who was saying what and so on.

  “In any case, the more philosophical he was about the situation, the more Daddy was distancing himself from Sally and leaving her to her own devices. Same for me, Tina. The longer this letter gets, the farther I feel removed from her, but coping with her at the same time.

  “When he died, Daddy had another twenty letters, not mailed. Sally piled them up and read them in the Green Room. What fascinated her, I suppose, must have been that the more he wrote about Mummy, the more he mixed her up with Sally. That was her victory.

  “Did I get mentioned, even though they were addressed to me? Out of sight, out of mind. He apologized in the last letter. To me, that is. ‘Forgive me for keeping you away,’ he said.

  “Daddy always talked two ways at once.

  “…She was shuddering and shivering, sitting naked in front of the photograph in the Green Room, as thin as Mummy by the time they broke into the house and Mrs. Moir got back to me on the phone. I called the Helen’s Bay barracks. Daddy had been dead for days. Pickled, the police told me when I got there and I talked to them in person. He probably died happy, but my sister! They say they are used to psychotic displays, and very few suicides these days. But my sister, I informed them, had killed herself trying to sit as naked and lovely as my mother in the photograph. Their reply to that? They wished all the killings in Ulster were about something as simple as wanting to take your clothes off.

  “But wasn’t that what it was all about? I wanted to scream. Mad, repressed expression. But I kept my temper when I said it.

  “That struck them none too kindly.

  ”I took her in the car after that. I knew what I had to do. I drove the road round all those drumlins from Comber to Downpatrick. Cold cu-Cumber, Daddy used to call it when we passed it in the old days, headed for Newcastle and the Slieve Donard Hotel. Remember Miss Arthur’s line for drumlins – ‘Basket of eggs topography.’

  “Sally still sat as she liked to, with the window down and her hair pouring into her mouth. Her hand kept dragging it off her tongue. Not so she could talk. She hadn’t had a thing to say since I pushed her into her clothes.

  “She had dresses and jeans and nothing in between. No suits, nothing to do a decent day’s work in, or to make the trip. I got her a Chanel suit for a journey of an hour and a half.

  “I put her away, Tina.

  “The chief psychiatrist’s chat about lessons, exercises, relaxations, made it sound like the Insane School for Young Ladies of Quality in Downpatrick.

  “Mr. Barton, that was the man’s name, he took us round. He was proud of his pastel walls and their ‘therapeutic’ potential. But he whisked her off after trying to get her to say something. Like a potted plant the cat had peed in – she must have given him a stinking look or said something under her breath that he heard.

  “Four more days went by without a word out of her to me. I stayed in Newcastle and came every morning and afternoon. Then, she did say something. I suppose it was when she was sure I was worried enough to keep coming back.

  “‘I can’t hear the seagulls,’ was what she came out with.

  “That hurt me. The sea was near enough. Seven miles.

  “‘You’re in Downpatrick,’ I explained to her. ‘St. Patrick is buried close by, in Saul. We passed it when I drove you down.’

  “‘Why didn’t you stop?’ she asked me. ‘We could have visited him.’

  “‘If you’d asked, I would have.’

  “As soon as I said that, she began to strip and it sent me into a rage. I grabbed the belt to the jeans she was wearing, pulled it out and held it buckled to her neck. I started tightening it. But she was already smiling at the pain it must have caused her, consulting, somewhere inside herself again. I yelled at her and she went on, peeling off the clothes while I held her by the neck.

  “At that point, I was either going to go on and strangle her or let her go on doing what she wanted to.

  “I let her go.

  “But why do it in Downpatrick? She wasn’t in the Green Room – all the walls were pastel perfect. I supposed, in the end, it was a shrine near a shrine she was setting up for people to come and pay homage at. Old St. Pat in Saul had taken over from Mummy on the wall. The two of them, living out their passion for divine revelation.

  “Which doesn’t reduce my guilt or my problem at all. She could stay there forever, in ‘dementia praecox,’ as the shrink of the pastel walls says his colleagues used to call it. But Tina, could I have brought her out to the West Coast?

  “What Saints are there for me to tell her about in the Pacific Northwest? Who could give her the sacred admiration she needs. She would be just another dazed blonde, a beached log, but sinking in her madness beside girls who could still bob about, even if every man on the West Coast ran in and out of them like the tide.

  “But perhaps I’m cruel and unkind to the girls here. Let me know soon, Tina. Let me know.

  “Gerry.”

  THE DARK BARBER

  Maybe it’s the damaged leg crooked in our direction, his knee nudging my thigh as he does the back-and-sides that gives him this combat stance. Maybe ’cause he’s short he has to thrust his scissors up, or if down – like, it’s from his tippy-toes, and that seems to turn those scissors into scimitars and Afran into an assassin, not a bona fide barber. Or it’s his thunderhead of hair, sharp jaw, eyes daring every male on the street to come in for the fricassee of his scissors that keeps them all from finding out.

  “He’s incredible,” I say to his partner. Other customers, sitting and waiting for the partner, might take what I say as a promo for the impaired. But my hair is thicker. What I call my UFO – the shiny, balding disc of white skin that floats on top of my head, the tonsure I bear, like some sorry monk’s – shrinks under the blades.

  “If you like him, it happen,” says his Libyan partner and the Kurd grins. But do any of those going bald, who need his cut and follicular fill-up, see it? They stick their noses in their tabloid, like it has men’s perfume in the print.

  And so, for many moons, like wee boys my neighbour, Billy, and fellow agers squirm in their chairs and their unease always undoes what Afran, the Kurd, conjures. Then, they don’t like how he retreats to his cubby hole at the back of the barber shop, pulls a curtain across and mumbles in what must be Kurdish, or he goes on in his stammering and staggering English. There is a computer, a monitor, an office chair in there, and a Persian mat (it’s not big enough to be a carpet) on the floor. Enough to take his knees, if he prays on it. Often as not, when he pulls back the curtain to come out, he has left a plastic container rimmed with the remains of his lunch on top of the monitor. Like a silly upside-down hat with a creamy fringe at the bottom.

  At the end of the day, he takes off his white barber’s jacket and puts on a padded black bomber to go home. On his way to the bus stop, he pulls open the flap to the night safe at the Royal Bank. Holding the flap, his head bobs a few times as if he communes with the depository or addresses doubts about dropping the day’s take into its chute. Then, he crosses the road and boards the 99 Express across town. No, he doesn’t kneel and whizz home on his tiny prayer mat, but the 99 Express slices through the city, west to east.

&nb
sp; Since I pay him this much attention, and because I let him cut my hair, other customers keep asking me what’s he up to behind the curtain. As if letting him cut my hair has made me intimate with every mumble that exits his mouth in his little retreat. But being Moslem, would his little place be called a retreat, and having no idea what it means, my neighbour, Billy Barlow, declares it to be a haj, a hell hole.

  “He’s calling him again,” Billy tells me, when Afran’s voice comes through the curtain, clear as sanded glass his voice comes in, “Yes, yes, stop loss, twelff dollars and sixty sens!”

  Billy elbows me. “Twelve bucks and sixty cents…” Billy’s a Shop teacher and has chisels for elbows. “Twelve bucks and sixty cents – what for?”

  I elbow Billy Barlow back.

  “Extra payment. To stop customers losing their hair after he cuts it?”

  Billy gives a guffaw, followed by a gurgle as he swallows his gob of mockery. “Are you serious?”

  In the hot, late-summer afternoon, only three of us are in the shop. Billy and me, waiting, and the one up for the Libyan, who squirms as he listens to us. I get up and go to the curtain to ask Afran how long he will be, and there’s Afran, hunched forward in his chair, prayerfully, or like he’s passing a kidney stone, nodding and talking to his cell phone.

  “Please, I talk business to my broker.”

  The curtain whips back into place.

  “Kurds, very special,” says the Libyan to the back of his customer’s head. “Kurds and business, like chicken and egg, always hatch this or that. But Afran special, he have djinn.”

  “Gin sling, cotton gin?” Billy badgers.

  The Libyan partner eyeballs Billy. “His djinn! You like him, more hair. You not, bit maybe fall out.” Second eyeball job on neighbour Billy. “Which you like grow, money or you’ hair?” (What’s the Libyan implying, Afran offers a choice?) Then, he turns from Billy and myself to watch the soccer on the TV, set high on a bracket in the window corner, above the window box, where cacti lean west to the setting sun.

  Can Afran apply his djinn to the stock market, where human emotions and the fundamentals bash each other up and down, like Punch and Judy? On the same formula, ‘You like it, it grow,’ Afran’s key to needing less custom. As if reading my mind, the Libyan comes back to Afran. “North of the Kirkuk, Afran learn make things grow of nothing. Some dirt, some water, like Allah make man of nothing.”

  “Aha,” says I, “he’s a farmer who became a barber.”

  The client in the chair gives the Libyan a hard look, wanting him back at work on his short back and sides.

  I’d love to give him a kick in the back and sides for shutting off the info on Afran.

  As it is, I’m left to mull over those growths that aren’t cancer and watch Billy plant his feet on the metal footrest, like Butch Cassidy mounting his horse. I have had my own encounters with inexplicable growth. Like Billy, I planted my feet down once, but on the floor, wrestling with a green, wool cardigan my mother knit me. I yelled at its fake, Aran-island ribs for it to quit growing on me. Crazily, it grew, like the sheep was still alive in the wool. When it reached my knees, my mother cut it back up to my hips. Again and again, till I was too spooked to wear her gift that kept growing. I took it on a hike and threw it in a field. I screamed at it to go graze till its buttons turned back to cloven hooves. But was it me who brought the wool to life in the ugly cardigan? No way. The thing in the tips of my ma’s knitting needles, same thing as in Afran’s scissors, did the trick. Though Afran doesn’t swamp and smother me with his prodigious gift, like my mother.

  “Does he go back?” I ask the Libyan, who works on Billy Barlow’s hair, top of the head, like it’s inches higher than it is. I haven’t been back in two years to see my mother in Ireland and I ask the Libyan out of guilt.

  “He-can-not-go-back,” the Libyan says, each syllable timed to a snip at Billy Barlow’s hair. Billy’s eyes roll, but mine narrow.

  “Afran No. 1 Baghdad barber. You see Saddam hair, thick black bear hair. Afran, Saddam barber.”

  “What?” Billy almost stabs his face on the Libyan’s scissors. “And you were Muammar Gaddafi’s!”

  The Libyan gives Billy a bow, “But Afran djinn…poor Afran djinn.”

  “What about it?” Billy asks.

  “Other side of head – tail. You not like him, hair not grow; he not like you, hair stop grow.”

  “What’s that got to do with him and Saddam?’

  “Afran, like Saddam money. Not like Saddam. Soon as Afran see Saddam thin spot, he flee north to the Kirkuk.”

  “And?”

  “Saddam send army find his barber.”

  “Did Afran have a wife and kids there?” I ask.

  “Whole fam’ly. North of the Kirkuk. Safer than Baghdad City.”

  “Did the army find him?”

  “Saddam army break down door. Rifle break Afran hip, here,” the Libyan points to the breakage point. “Knee, there.” He taps his right knee, on what we know to be the leg in question, the one that swings before it lands on the other side of the barber’s chair and customer’s head.

  A voice from beyond the curtain, “I tell them when my hurt heal. I go back Baghdad,” and still talking, Afran adds, “Okay. At market, for the Honeywells.”

  The Libyan holds his scissor-free hand on Billy’s head, “That when Afran flee and that when Saddam gas his Kurdish people. Halabja.”

  “Jesus,” says Billy. “All over a barber who wouldn’t do his hair!”

  “Billy, for God’s sake, didn’t you read about it?”

  “I run and my family die without me,” voice from behind the curtain again.

  Billy sticks out his leg and taps it. “Run?”

  A sound follows, like a dull spit hitting a carpet – correction, Afran’s prayer mat, clearly visible when he snaps back the curtain and steps out. “I escape on truck. Truck driver, uncle of my wife. He take me through Kurdish country, into Turkey.”

  After that, limping emphatically, he waves us out. Billy, with his hair half cut.

  “End of trading for today!” he tells us.

  Afran makes me ashamed of my pettiness, the way I ran away from my country. Belittling the wool of an old cardigan, knitted with love, blaming it for smothering me in that love. I never truly recognized my mother’s loneliness that went into the wool for that cardigan after my father died. Now, I feel the full length of Afran’s loneliness, passing into my impoverished locks, causing them to fill the emptiness on my head the way he wishes the emptiness in his to be covered with the kisses of his wife and children.

  On the short way back to our block, Billy Barlow wants to know if I believe all that BS.

  “Every bit,” I reply.

  “The sob story – to have me pick the Kurd, out of pity for the poor turd?”

  “Don’t diss the guy, Billy. Kurds got history. Pulled across borders by Iraqis, Syrians, Iranians, pulled apart like Christmas crackers. But Kurds got these talents. Believe me, unbelievable talents.”

  Billy tells me the only thing he believes unbelievable are my wife’s delphiniums in the front garden.

  I can’t deny it. They tower over everything else, her blue Babylons of delphinium.

  Still, visit after visit, I continue my watch, to see if squirmers lose more than they pay for. Some do go to Afran, those in a hurry, who can’t wait for the Libyan. I talk to them, and true, but paradoxical – the finer the fringe, the more balding, the sooner the visit. So, I soon see them back to ask if they like Afran, but they never answer, and I can’t tell normally receding hair from hexed.

  No matter. Where my own fairy ring of flesh, that hallowed circle, used to shine, I’ve got a bristly thatch, a bit of Brad Pitt, which my wife says is a damn implant and promptly pores over the VISA bills and medical statements from our extended coverage. She has some reservations about my mother and the upcoming trip to Ireland.

  Again, when the barber shop is empty and Afran in consultation with his broker or w
atching the business channel on his monitor, placing his mug of coffee on top of it, like a crown, I ask the partner, “Can’t you tell more people?”

  “Tell? They think he crazy. And piss off customer coming. Guy in chair that day, not Mr. Barlow guy, that other guy, never come back. And Mr. Barlow think I am bit nuts for what I say already.”

  I am still obsessed with unaccountable growth, and I wonder, besides Afran’s trims that trigger it, what else around and about me grows that fast after it’s cut, well, apart from the grass, or wool on that nutty green cardigan. Those poppies! A bunch, the landlords of a rented house across our lane cut from the front lawn and threw onto the rubbish heap at the back. They reseeded real quick. I don’t know if they’re the heroin bearing kind that fill the fields in Kurdish Turkey, Kurdish Iraq or Afghanistan, but they get looked at on the heap, as if they belong to an obnoxious grow-op. Same look as Afran gets through the shop window.

  Just to show I have no objections to them in the lane, that I actually like their rabid, exotic growth, I put down my nose to test for scent, but those poppies have none, or my nose is no good. Very likely, judging by what happens when Afran’s scissors come up for my nose hairs. If they’re aimed up there for me to sniff some growth-crazy chlorophyll, I smell only antiseptic wash from the vase, where Afran plants the scissors. Then, the lobes for the finger holes just gape out of it, like empty metal petals.

  But I’m not disappointed. Forty of us regulars are now in the know, a select believer-group under the balding scrutiny of the dumb majority. On his behalf we swear he’d not harm a hair on anybody’s head. The very opposite, his scissors sow what they snip, and we boys in the know bow our heads to bear witness to our peers in the barber shop.

  LONELY RIVERS FLOW TO THE SEA, TO THE SEA, TO THE OPEN ARMS OF THE SEA

  Don Mateo sings this song, or mournfully hums under the lyrics passing through his mind for “Unchained Melody.” Even though he doesn’t understand the English floating underneath the singer’s voice and across the landscape in the movie he loved and saw ten times with the subtitles to guide him, he sings until everybody around him in the Cine Cuautla yells at him to shut the singing or they’ll shoot him.