Haircuts

Michelle Tang Jackson

“Baby don’t let my hair grown long.” That’s what Vick had said to Eileen when they were cocooned in thrift story afghans, rolled into each other’s weight, hanging heavy in that hammock back in Wisconsin. The chill reluctantly gave way to spring as Vick and Eileen’s winter white feet wandered from woolen sock hibernation and onto the softening ground, seeking the eagerness of grass.

“If I were ever sick, I know my family wouldn’t come. Promise you’ll visit and keep me from looking too scraggly?” said Vick. Eileen smiled into Vick’s jaw line, enjoying the emerging prickle. She kissed it and tucked the words “You can count on me,” into Vick’s ear.

Eileen held this though, warming it like the scissors in her hands. She reached back and retrieved a memory of bare legs in the gangly grass, warm Sam Adams, the abandoned kite that Vick had rescued from their favorite gingko in Heritage park. Eileen pushed the soft forelock from Vick’s brow. The once sun-browned and indignant expression had been replaced not by a look of restfulness but an unsettling pallor—as if someone had taken Vick’s visage and draped it lifelessly over a dress form. Eileen twisted the brown curl between her fingers and gave it a clean snip. Her fingers traced Vick’s jawbone. Rested a fingertip in the divot of his chin. Her hands traveled over the papery hills of Vick’s hospital gown, her hands saddening for Vick’s body—his muscles were forgetting, those countless months of labor and weights and injections of T were wilting. Vick’s small hand rested beneath hers. She laid her finger’s cheek against the spot where a thick band of silver used to cleave.

Eileen reached for where her own matching ring arced cold against skin and thought about the first weekend after they moved to Sacramento—the street fair, a Jamaican man with his legs wrapped around a small steel drum like a lover who preached Marley into the coppery afternoon. Vick’s still curved body masked by an oversized jacket and a sneer of distrust. But Vick had been taken by Eileen’s hypnotized hips and begged her hand into his and they began dancing right there in the middle of all those people, not caring. She remembered the gold-toothed man who called out to them from his woven Mexican blanket, spread with pawnshop treasures. He held up two rings on a cord, winking as Vick and Eileen had collapsed to their knees and slipped the circles onto a tangle of fingers, the man blessing them in his tongue. Anointed with sunlight. This was good enough for them.

The ring now sat in a drawer that contained Vick’s blue’s Dickies, a white t-shirt, a pair of small tough work boots. Vick had been annoyed when Hospice present him with the thin gown, “The last time I wore a fucking dress was 1967—and I didn’t like it then either.” But he had acquiesced, knowing it made things easier for everyone.
Eileen’s hands worked their way through the budding curls, pruning the unruly tufts. She found the naughty cowlick wandering north of Vick’s temple. She ran her thumbs over the knots of bone at the base of his skull. Eileen swept the snippets from the back of Vick’s neck, revealing a patch, girlish and soft and forgotten. She put the scissors down on the nightstand and gathered the clippings that had scattered, but her hand stalled below Vick’s clavicles and soon she was curled up next to Vick in the rickety bed, her face pressed salty and warm into his chest. And she listened, wondering as she often did, as to why this terrible thing had sprung up in a place where there weren’t even breasts anymore. But she let Vick’s heartbeat wash over her and in the spaces in between rhythms she tucked the words, “Baby, you can count on me.”