I have the same date every six weeks with a bottle of Clairol hair dye in just your shade. Of course, it’s the color of trees and autumn bark. I’m hiding the signals of winter ahead. You are in a place I’ve never been–under the snow and the leaves and the dust, or maybe, just maybe, above them all.
Beside me is a huge stack of old towels to clean up the mess as I ponder my silly efforts at thwarting the progress of time. I should have better things to do than this. On paper I’ll admit my age, but I want the mirror to lie when I slip and steal a look.
Our bathroom scenes in peach and pink are fixtures in my psyche, lampposts really. I go there to huddle in soap bubbles and steam, to surrender to what’s unchangeable. I’m six again and you are fifty-seven. Your half-a-century’s gone, mine just trying its legs. “Don’t touch,” you say, “this stains.” The liquid looks like licorice streaks but smells of building a brand new house. Fresh paint and the unmarked wall that will soon be welcomed into the ruts of the real world. I play with all your perfume bottles, little trumps in a stinky world, the tin of beige powder that smells of sweet dust and a wish. “Pinch your cheeks to fake red blush,” you say, as if you discovered a trick of the gods. I run my fingers through piles of your lingerie–little pieces of silk that say a bit of want lingers in a sound, wise mind.
“Don’t do this to your hair,” you quip. “Once you start, you can’t stop because the roots give you away. See these stripes? These silver things? They look like a skunk’s back. You’ll be wasting a whole day every six or seven weeks–like playing Bridge with a henhouse of crotchety rumor machines when you could be reading a poem.” I’m mesmerized by the light touch of your lessons.
A year or so ago, the time came: “To dye or not to dye.” I was a shriveled queen in some Elizabethan court. Of course I decided to dye the pale finger of death shaking its wild appendage straight at my nose. “Gray,” my stepmother said, “is a color for people who no longer try, no longer take pride in their looks.” I fought her advice like a yeast infection that always wins once the battle begins. And now I pay for wasted hours and hear you say, “I told you so.”
Where is that place, that creaking porch swing place, where you learn the fade is part of the painting’s charm? I put my feet up on the toilet seat of a poem and try to recall the moment you switched from chestnut to gray and put your makeup in the drawer. That moment that says I’ve stopped running from Father Time; I’ve settled into his lap. I’m pacing myself toward death, collecting my wrinkles like shells on the beach.
The box says, “Apply to roots first.” The liquid stings a tad–lemon on a week-old cut. Just as I’ve lathered my rubber gloves with the motor oil of this feckless wish, the telephone rings, catching me right in the middle of my lie. If you weren’t dead, I’d say it was you. The caller leaves no message. It was you. You’re gone, but not gone, never gone. I hope I always hurt this much when memories come flooding back, for the teardrop waters what’s here.
Painting the presence of gray is something that you’d call me on. It is not in keeping with the person I say I am–a writer who faces the fade with shoulders square, who doesn’t vomit at the sight of grief. “All these storms across your path . . . and you can’t stand a silver thread . . .” I hear you laughing at anathemas.
“The silver,” you say, “could be from wings of a dove.”
