Lynda Schuster

Word Count 1818

Of all the ways one changes through the years, there was little to suggest that I would ever become like Helen, my mother-in-law. I was still in my twenties when my soon-to-be husband, Dennis, first introduced us at her eightieth birthday party. By then, she was deep into her last-act persona of a slightly eccentric elderly woman. Despite having moved to Albuquerque a half-century earlier, Helen still spoke with a Boston accent that made her sound like a mislaid member of the Kennedy clan. She lived alone, as she had for two decades since being widowed, in the small, pink stucco ranch house where she and her husband had raised their four sons. Much to the consternation of everyone who loved her, Helen also still drove. That is, until she and a fellow octogenarian motorist had a misunderstanding at an intersection that landed her in the hospital. But that’s another story.

Ours was a complicated, fraught relationship. I chalked this up to Helen’s suspicion that I was sleeping with her son—an inkling that was more or less confirmed when I later became pregnant and gave birth to a baby girl. Not that her antipathy was confined to me. Early on, one of Dennis’s brothers pointed out that Helen was very close with her ex-daughters-in-law, often closer than with the incumbents. (Three of her sons, Dennis included, had been divorced.) Which meant that if things ever went south between Dennis and me, I could look forward to replacing him with his mother.

Initially, I was working as a foreign correspondent on the other side of the planet while Dennis—a career diplomat—was posted to a different country. I didn’t see much of Helen, but all that changed after we married and I had to stop doing daily journalism to follow Dennis around the world. Until then, I hadn’t realized what an intrepid traveler my mother-in-law was. Peru, Malawi, Mozambique—no place we lived seemed too daunting for her to visit. I worried about her journeying such long distances, but nothing ever happened to Helen--aside from having a box of chocolates stolen from one of her suitcases on a trip to Monrovia, Liberia. That really got her dander up. Whatever conflicted feelings she harbored toward her daughters-in-law, Helen had an unambiguously warm relationship with chocolate.

After I managed to find a suitable replacement for the chocolate, Helen’s focus shifted to the heart of our relationship. “When,” she asked,” am I having my hair done?” This was a constant between us. Regardless of continent or country, I had to arrange a set of appointments that spanned the duration of her stay. Back then, her preoccupation seemed misguided to me. Why so much emphasis on someone styling your hair in a foreign place when you could visit an open-air market or take in a museum of ancient erotica? On the other hand, as in-law demands go, Helen’s was pretty tame. I knew one woman whose mother-in-law insisted they take still-life drawing lessons together whenever she came for a stay

In Monrovia, I drove her to a small downtown salon owned by two Lebanese brothers. The first time we went, we were greeted outside by a gang of young boys running what amounted to an extortion racket: for an outrageous sum, they offered to guard our car to keep it from being keyed—which they themselves would inflict on the vehicle’s body if we didn’t cough up the cash. I was in favor of opening up negotiations to get the price down, but Helen would have none of it. Not with an impending hair appointment. “Give ‘em the damn money,” she hissed.

Perhaps my proudest moment, though, was finding a British ex-pat to do Helen’s hair in Mzuzu, Malawi, a speck of a town five hours north of the capital. On our first morning there, we dropped Helen off at the woman’s house, then went to view animals in a nearby game reserve. Mostly what we observed were tsetse flies, purveyors of deadly sleeping sickness: hefty, vicious creatures that filled our car and left large Rorschach splotches of blood across the windows when we swatted them with a shoe. Helen, meanwhile, was sitting comfortably in curlers under the large plastic bonnet of a home hairdryer, drinking tea with milk and sugar and reading out-of-date fashion magazines from South Africa. She beamed at us when we fetched her. “How was your morning?” Helen asked, eyeing the blood and dirt and general dishevelment from our tsetse siege. Patting her newly glazed helmet-head, she added: “Mine was perfect!”

* * * *

I was too young and arrogant at the time to consider Helen’s hairdo fixation anything more than a quirk. Years later, after she had died, I went on a book tour for a memoir I’d written. And everything changed.

I’d never paid much attention to my hair beyond a regular trim and occasional application of henna to boost the color from drab mouse to a more robust rodent shade. I’d never had to. The great thing about being a print journalist was that you could hide behind the anonymity of a byline. I’m talking Old Journalism here, back when stories were filed by carrier pigeon and cable news with its well-powdered personalities didn’t yet exist. Even if a piece of writing required an author’s photograph, you could keep recycling the same old glam-shot that had you gauzily wrinkle-free and forever frozen in time. The public wouldn’t know the difference. But now I’d be speaking to live audiences, ones that could observe me in the flesh. Flesh that, in very late middle-age, seemed to have tired of doing its buttressing job and taken early retirement, leaving behind skin like latticework and body parts free to migrate southward. This was the stuff of panic.

Amid fleeting thoughts of fillers and secret face-lift tape, I had an epiphany: I could have my hair done! No need for injections or promising my first-born as collateral to pay for them. And my hotel in Connecticut, the site of my talk, had a salon.

Which was oddly deserted when I wandered in at the appointed time. In an adjoining room, a woman sat slumped in a chair, lengths of aluminum foil sticking out from her head like old rabbit-ear antennae trying to pick up television signals. I was backing up to flee when the stylist suddenly appeared behind me.

“Okay, let’s go!” she said, propelling me into another room, where she washed my hair and then deposited me in a chair alongside Rabbit Ears. The stylist dumped an alarming amount of sticky liquid onto my head, followed by Alpine peaks of mousse, then massaged the whole mess into my scalp. My hair now looked as if rigor mortis had set in.

The stylist grabbed a fistful of hair to hold under a blow dryer. Yanking my head to the right, she shouted over the din, “I usually work on the hair restoration side. You know, women with male-pattern baldness around the top, or cancer patients.” Circling the chair, the stylist set about seizing little clumps of hair, wrenching my neck first one way, then another. “We make a model of the head and pluck out some strands to match the real hair as closely as possible. It’s so real looking. You’d never know it’s a wig! Okay, going down!” she said, pushing my upper torso over my knees and hovering with the dryer. “I’m not saying they’re not pricey,” she boomed. “The better ones run you, oh, I don’t know, upwards of $2500. But they’re just beautiful! Okay, going up!”

The stylist pulled me back into a sitting position and turned off the dryer. “Sometimes,” she said, lowering her voice and looking around, “when my cancer patients don’t come back to me, I don’t know if it’s because they got better or….” She gave herself a little shake. “Okay, almost done!” The stylist jerked my head back, wreathed it in clouds of spray, then shoved me from the chair. “There!” she said. “All you need are the right products to make your hair look great!”

I tottered across the hotel lobby, reeling from cervical whiplash and the cancer story. Who’d have thought in such a setting you’d hear something so affecting, poignant even? To say nothing of unnerving. One minute you’re debating the pros and cons of root lifters—and the next thing you know, you’re deep into matters of personal extinction. All of which made nervousness about one’s appearance at some book talk seem trivial and senseless.

Still, once in the elevator, I couldn’t help but notice my hair in the mirror. Sure, it now had the texture and resilience of next-generation polymers, able to withstand Armageddon or, at a minimum, a nuclear blast. Wasn’t that the point, though, of having your hair done? Knowing it would look good regardless of what life threw at you—cancer included? The confidence! The power! Okay, maybe the shallowness, too. But here was one part of me, amid all the ignominy of aging, that I could at least control. “Helen,” I murmured at my reflection, “I get it.”

* * * *

I never got to tell Helen about this because, as I said, my book tour happened years after she died. But I was fortunate enough to spend the final day of Helen’s life with her, along with my daughter, Noa. The occasion was her ninety-fourth birthday. For reasons unknown and still discussed to this day, Helen’s sons and some of the grandchildren spontaneously decided to fly to Albuquerque to commemorate it with her. A ninety-fourth birthday certainly isn’t anything to sneeze at, but it isn’t your obvious celebratory milestone, either. There was dinner at a New Mexican restaurant, followed by a cake—chocolate, of course—with candles. And presents.

Many of the guests left the next day. Those who remained wanted to drive up to Santa Fe for lunch; Noa and I opted to stay behind with Helen. Noa was barely three years old and thrilled to have her grandmother as a captive audience. Helen gallantly endured several rounds of a board game, filled in pages of a princess coloring book, watched a Cinderella video, and allowed Noa to apply a temporary tattoo, a peace symbol, on her hand—her last living beauty treatment, as it were. By then, the others had come back from Santa Fe. We were all in the kitchen trying to figure out how many pizzas to order for dinner when Helen suddenly, and wordlessly, dropped to the floor. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage hours later.

It took a few days for all the relatives to return to New Mexico and to make the necessary preparations. I couldn’t bring myself to view Helen when she was finally laid out in the coffin for visitation at the funeral parlor before her burial. But I was told that the little peace-symbol tattoo was still on her hand.

And that her hair looked great.

Lynda is a former foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal who worked in Central and South America, the Middle East and Africa. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Granta, and Utne Reader, among others. She is also the author of two books, most recently the memoir, Dirty Wars and Polished Silver. You can read more than you’d ever want to know about her and her writing at her website with the very original name of https://lyndaschuster.com/ . She is currently working on a book about a scandalous and fabulously wealthy heiress passed over by history, a story with all the makings of a juicy bodice-ripper: sex, money, forbidden love—and, of course, a trans-Atlantic boat chase.