THE MUSIC OF HAIR by Joe Meno
After the first week of winter, in which the horses froze beside one another like man and wife, side by side, I was sent to mi abuela’s, the oldest member of our family, to hide. It was so cold that our town took the weather as a curse, and when all the horses were found in their stalls frozen together, all of them, standing up with their heads bowed down, pressed tight against their horse husbands and horse wives, it was reasoned that I had better leave that place before I started any more trouble, because it was now clear that the hand of God was upon me.
Only a few nights before, I had been caught kissing two men at the same dance: mi tia’s fiancé and Ramirez the rancher, a married man.
I was sent then, to mi abuela’s, who was said to be ten years older than the century, and the richest woman in Mexico. All my life, I had heard stories of the large white clay mansion that she owned on the outskirts of Matamoros, where, each spring, our horses were brought to be sold. That winter the horses would bear no foals, so the spring would be just as hard and dry as the winter had been, a winter where we had made soup for two months from the same crust of left-over bread and prayed for Poppo the old pig to drop over dead, so that we might have something enjoyable to eat in the end, and wishing that at night was like wishing your own older brother or sister to be dead. I was sent to mi abuela’s because I had just turned twelve and was getting plump and round, along my cheeks and in my front and my back. I had woken up with the long black eyelashes and loose hips of a cantina singer overnight, my father said, his eyebrows knitted like a thorn bush of worry. It is time for you to learn of womanly-things, mi dulcita, my candy.
Mi abuela had married a politician when she was young, a handsome man who had worn a big gold cravat beneath his neck all his life, to display his office and royal intelligence, and, many years later, after his death, when the cravat was finally removed, there was found to be a great green and white ring stained into the skin and which, the doctors reasoned, may have done him in by lead poisoning. Mi abuela never left the clay mansion because she was afraid for her life, even after thirty years. My grandfather had warned her that if he should die before her, and she should try to take another man, he would have her murdered where she stood or slept. He had plans for such things, he warned, and the day before he died, he reminded her, by running a single finger beneath her neck and whispering, “Sssssssssssssss,” like the last of her breath. Mi abuela was a beauty like me. She had eyelashes like lariats and legs as strong as the stone columns of a Spaniard’s house and she knew how to dance months before she could speak.
I had one chore and one chore only at mi abuela’s and that was to comb her long white hair. Her hair had not been cut in over seventy years, not since her wedding, and was so long that she had to keep the ends of it in a gold satchel when she moved about the house, slung about her shoulder like a jeweled purse. Her hair was white, so white I imagined it was the color of what happened when you died. When she wanted to walk outside and feel the sun on her face, a boy or two, usually a pair of the young stewards or farmhands would have to follow her, holding her hair like bridesmaids, as she strode just ahead of me, pointing out the different flowers with names I had never heard before and which I thought she had made up just for me . . . Sweet William . . . Heart’s-longing willow . . . Devil’s foot clover . . . Absent Husband . . . In the garden, then, we would rest beneath a large, pink- and white-budded tree that she said was called Maiden’s Dressing Gown, mi abuela on a small wooden stool – her, small and light and elegant as a glass doll, and me, standing behind with her golden, jeweled combs that must have cost more than the entire ranch my father owned, and out of arrogance and a sense of betrayal, I would be clumsy. Each hair that I combed from her head and which ended up in my hands was a day more I was told I would have to spend with her, listening to her stories of cripples in love, and dishonest soldiers who could still act with dignity and valor, and war – in her stories, there was always a war on.
In the afternoon, with the sun like a white ship in the blue port of the sky, she would close her eyes and I would brush her hair and the peacock, who was named Gordo, and who was fat as a goose, would strut about, and once, when I was clumsy, thinking of what magic a peacock feather might bring, I plucked a very long hair from mi abuela’s head and she smacked the back of my hand and said, “Now, now you’ve done it, Carmella. Now you’ve done it. Your cousin, Diego, is soon to be dead.” I looked at her confused and she blinked and said, “All the fates of your family are written here,” and then, carefully, she closed her eyes and ran her fingers through the soft tangle of her long white hair.
The next day, just as she said, a telegram came, and the carrier, a boy with a uniform as white and dustless as an angel, held the envelope out and mi abuela shook her head, and the boy opened the letter and began to read and it was just as she had said. Diego, my oldest cousin, was dead.
* * *
At the end of the spring time, my father gave me the decision of whether I would like to stay in the cool white clay mansion or come back and help with the work on the ranch, and I decided to stay, not because I was lazy, but because mi abuela had promised me that my first love was soon to make an appearance, and she had found it written in a single dark strand of her hair, which was my strand, the strand that was me and my life, and running her fingers along it, like a young harpist, she only nodded and said, “Your first love will come soon enough, whether or not you want it,” and I decided I would much rather a city boy to fall in love with than a boy from the country. After she told me, I began to dream about the boy who was the telegram carrier, in his white uniform, dustless, clean as a photograph in a Spanish catalog or cinema star magazine, who I imagined would come to the front gate each day, bringing me packages and letters he had stolen, especially for me: a tea set, white patent leather shoes, a telegram from a soldier to his wife proclaiming his undying love and then her reply back saying, “We will be together so soon, so soon, if we can only wait, if we can wait.” In this way, I imagined I would find my first love, and soon then, he would break my heart when he told me he had been promised to marry the daughter of the head telegram carrier, and I would sit in the shade of the garden, for the rest of the summer, resting my head on the peacock’s tail, deliciously heart-sick with scorn, agonizingly beautiful in my dutiful and weepy day-dreaming.
It was my first cousin, George, a boy four years older, who had spent most of his life, spoiled, in the States, who instead came to the front gates. He was very tall and narrow, like a hangman’s cactus, full of angles and burrs, and his yellow eyes were hard with a kind of frightened meanness, much like a dog that had been severely beaten. There was a patch of white hair on the side of his head, about the size of a child’s hand. Also, there were rings of dirt under his mouth and scabs beneath his ears and he seemed to sneer without meaning. He had been accused of stabbing a boy back in his town, and had been sent to live with mi abuela until his father, a local politician in the long tradition of our family, had his boy’s name cleared, a task that would take some time as it was explained to me.
Without a word, George came through the front gates with his red suitcase in hand, and setting it down, spat at my feet. Then he pinched my cheeks and said, “You are a fat one, little girl, huh? You must take after your peasant mother, eh.” It had been ten years since my mother died, found in a ditch at the very ends of our ranch, with her knitting needles, held tight in her hands. Less than one year after her death, in the same spot where she had been found, a water spring sprung up, churning silver and white, saving my father in a most dire time, the Year of the Drought, and it made me suspect that my mother had not died, but had allowed herself to be martyred for us all, and now she was a ghost, and even though I could not see her, I was sure she was still out there smiling and knitting and humming, and even as long as ten years later, it was impossible to hear her name without crying.
It was very hot, out by the gate, far from the shade, and the dust and the tears from hearing my mother’s name made clay in my eyes and I became as angry as a heart-sick amputee in one of mi abuela’s war stories, and I picked up a sharp stone and meant to wipe the smile from my cousin’s mouth, but he was too quick, and grabbed my hand at the wrist, and pulled me close and I could feel the hotness of his breath like another pair of hands on my neck, and I did not mind them there, no, but they were very heavy, very heavy, searching for something surely they would not find on me, and I heard mi abuela on the stairs of the big house, stomping her feet, clicking her tongue and whispering, “Already there is trouble here, I see.”
In the shade of the garden, the next day, as mi abuela slept and I gently combed her great mane, I followed the path of the dark hair which was me, and saw, just along the middle, where it was crossed, tangled with another hair, a much shorter one, nearly hollow with its whiteness, and at once I knew it was my cousin, George, who was meant to fall in love with me. I held that spot in her hair for hours, that very tiny knot, feeling my heart swollen with love, a sinking horse cart in the mire of my chest, and when she awoke, mi abuela knew what I had been doing by the joyful, fevered look on my face. She shook her head and said, “You need not worry. You will be heart-broken soon enough, dulcita.”
At night, then, for weeks, George would stumble about the house in the dark, drunk, marauding the antique cabinets and gold-handled bureaus for unopened bottles of Spanish wine or liquor and any jewelry he found fit to steal, which mi abuela was smart enough to leave in a trail, bottle by bottle, brooch by brooch, extending out into the safety and darkness of the garden. The clay mansion was large enough so that he might crawl about the house in a stupor all night and still he might never find the room where I was supposed to be asleep, and yet, I sat beneath the soft white sheets waiting, tense with ignorance and desire, half-hoping, in my heart, praying, that he would never, ever come to me, and still at the very ends of my toes, and in the palms of my hands, and behind my knees, wishing, wishing he would somehow stumble his way to my room and then fall before me.
It was during one of mi abuela’s naps, as I stroked her hair in the darkness of the Maiden’s dressing gown tree, that my cousin let his intentions be known, as was his way, without any subtlety. He crept up behind me and bit my ear and, pulling on my hair, which was long and black as a grave, he whispered, “You make me find you.”
I understood at once what he meant. Hidden in my room, I took all the dead strands of mi abuela’s hair, stolen from her magnificent combs and brushes, and tied them into a nearly invisible and endless rope, which ran about the clay floor of the house and ended in a loop around my tiniest toe.
As night made its entrance, banging against the windows, barging through the curtains and doors, my cousin, too, stumbled about drunk, invisible line in hand, and soon enough, his face was hiding down at my feet, whispering, “Carmella, Carmella, you let me find you. You let me. You let me . . . ”
In this way, we spent the rest of the summer, him looking for me, grasping the line in the dark, me, hiding; the many rooms of the house becoming our rooms, until the house was our house completely. Mi abuela did not say a word, though I was afraid the entire time she knew exactly what we were doing.
One night, as I hid in the dark of an old soldado’s foot chest, the invisible line tight in my hands, I felt the rope go limp. Winding it along my fingers and hands, I saw it had been cut somewhere. I followed it along, in the dark, whispering, “George, George,” until I found where it was tied to the doorknob of the maid’s room and from behind her door, I could hear the half-hidden murmurs of two people laughing. I stood outside the room and knew mi abuela did not approve of what had been happening and this, this was her way of scolding me.
Still, the next night I thought to use two lines, one for George, one for mi abuela to snip or to do with what she pleased. In the dark, no one came to my door. When I crept down the hall, I found mi abuela had tied her own lines, dozens of them, and somewhere in the house was poor George, bumping about, mumbling either my name or the maid’s helplessly.
* * *
The end of the summer came soon enough, and I was told I would be returning home, and still, George had not asked me to get married. In fact, when he learned I was being sent home, he altogether stopped speaking to me. Everything I did seemed to make him angry. If I left him a basket of flowers, he would tear them to pieces and leave them in my bed. If I left a note telling him how I missed him, begging him to meet with me, he would leave it for mi abuela to find, so as to embarrass me. He seemed to enjoy seeing me cry and would do all he could, cursing my mother’s name, just to see me sob. Then and only then would he kiss me, saying, “You are only pretty when you are crying.”
At the end of it, some days later, his father sent word for him to return home as well. But instead, he stole mi abuela’s old red convertible from the stable, persuaded a peasant girl on the road selling peaches to join him for a ride, and disappeared down the coast, never saying good-bye to anyone, certainly not me. As I had wished, I spent my last few days, with my head in mi abuela’s lap, heartsick as a cinema star, and she whispered the names of other boys I would love, like a very old song, just for me.
Joe Meno’s stories have appeared in TriQuarterly, Washington Square, Other Voices, Gulf Coast and have been broadcast on NPR. His most recent novel is How the Hula Girl Sings (HarperCollins) and his online serial, The Secret Hand, runs through Playboy magazine at playboy.com.