Robin's Book
by Anna Tuttle Villegas

What charms clients without exception is not what Robin learned in Frederico’s College of Hairstyling.  There she was an A student although (she will frankly confess if the conversation lends itself) Robin had little success in high school.  Even Frederico himself fell in love with her as one does with a bad romance novel’s plucky heroine, aware that infatuation’s revelations are semaphores rooted in one’s own needy life.  Robin is charming; all her clients lean into their appointments with the stockpiled anticipation they reserve for therapists and arty foreign films.  They are never sure they know what has transpired in the hour or two they spend in Robin’s chair, but her clients are certain the cut or the style, the weave or the highlights, are transformative.  That Robin chitters on in cheerful oblivion, her gentle fingers teasing their wet scalps, her velvet knuckles brushing their bare napes, is exactly the point.  In Robin, if nowhere else, they place their faith.

Malva: 9:45 

            Malva is late; she is consistently late for everything.  She doesn’t guess that Robin, a quick and subtle study, books her fifteen minutes beyond the given slot, has done since Malva’s third appointment some seven years ago.  A coworker had suggested Robin as the requisite antidote to Malva’s self-inflicted purple dye job, homage to her then-husband Buddy and his company’s Halloween fest.  Malva’s memory still conflates her purple hair, longer and forced stick-straight then, with the acute and sickening revelation that Buddy was carrying on with a much older woman, the organizational manager at his business. 

At the moment of her first appointment, Malva had been game to poison her husband with antifreeze or shave her head balder than Buddy’s.  But Robin explained the extreme difficulty of coaxing dark hair to take on purple dye, praised Malva’s efforts, and restored as nearly as chemically possible Malva’s brunette color, all without having to shear more than an inch.  When she tried to put Robin’s reparation into words, the closest Malva could get was conversion: instead of going home to plot Buddy’s painfully extended death, she went straight to her attorney and filed for divorce.  Since then, a good five inches of retro flip ago, she’d been, every five weeks, punctually late for her appointment with Robin.  She wouldn’t miss Robin’s shampoo and trim for all the antifreeze in Detroit.

            “Hey, Malva!”  Robin waves to Malva from her station at the back of the salon.  “Come on back!  How ya doin’?” 

Robin has the cutest gesture, a beckoning flip of her pale thin wrist, which makes Malva wish that Robin were her daughter.  Or older sister.  Or mother even.  Come on down! is what Malva hears.   I’ve been waiting just for you!  Like a used car salesman’s come-on, except that Robin’s voice, the high, lilting end of pleasant, stops just short of phony. 

“Hi, Robin!” 

Malva knows she can’t match the sincerity of Robin’s vowels, not beyond divorce at fifty-four and thirty pounds overweight, so she makes up for what she fears Robin would see as dourness with sincerity:  “How are you?  Your hair is darling!  Tell me what color!”

Robin rolls her head; her pink hair, the color and thickness of a punk Barbie doll’s unleashed pony tail, bounces on her shoulders.  “You think?” 

“Really, really sweet on you, Robin.”  The thing is: the color is sweet.  Robin’s round face, her slivers of pinked eyebrows, are a relief from every pedestrian convention of Malva’s day.  “Refreshing.  Such a treat!” 

“My bangs are too short.”  Robin takes Malva’s leather backpack and sets it under the counter of her station. 

“I don’t think so,”  Malva insists.

Robin touches Malva’s elbow, steers her to the sinks.  “How you been?”

“Fair to middling.”  Absurd colloquialisms spill from her lips when Malva chit-chats with Robin.  She finds she cannot help herself.  More, she finds she treasures her own words, post hoc, as if she’d become a channel for the otherworldly creature she would be had only she been granted Robin’s sturdy certitude about her own fate.  “A little of this, a little of that.”

“Oh, me, too,” Robin concurs, her round face somber, good- natured. 

Malva eases into the black vinyl chair; Robin tips it back.   “You know that yin and yang thing?  What goes around comes around?” 

She’s not new-age enough to be sure, but Malva suspects Robin’s got something mixed up.  She will never correct Robin; she admires her guileless ability to complexify the simplest notions.  Voting, for instance, which Robin refuses to do on principle.  Budgeting, which Robin defines as making prompt monthly minimums on a multitude of charge cards.  Always, Robin’s gobbledygook is thick with implication.

“Absolutely.  Know it like the back of my hand.”  

Malva shuts her eyes as Robin dampens her hair with a jet of warm water.  If she opened them, she would be looking right into Robin’s naked armpit, as dear and vulnerable as the rounded tummy of a puppy. 

“Something good happens, something bad.  Like with Dave?  He had that accident in his truck, the two-by-fours falling off—I said, babe, it wasn’t your fault—and you know what?”

 Malva breathes the lemony shampoo Robin uses and sinks deeper into the chair.  That this girl, Robin is twenty-nine, but she definitely remains a girl, spends her professional life exposing herself so, a small breast brushing Malva’s shoulder as Robin’s fingers massage shampoo into the hairline, captivates Malva, who hasn’t worn a bathing suit in three summers.

“He’s gettin’ insurance payback for how the tailgate got all bent up!”  Robin grins, squirts conditioner into her palms.

“That’s great.  You won’t have to work so many Saturdays after all?” 

“Yes.”  When Robin emphasizes the affirmative, she enunciates three syllables, tonally distinguished, like wind chimes.  Malva has practiced this in the shower, singing them out.  When Robin says yes, Malva gets chills.

“Just the split ends today, Malva?”

“More of those, huh?”

“Not so many.  Not like some I’ve seen.”

“Maybe a few more bangs?”

“Hard to separate those bumper bangs, isn’t it?”

“I like them, but I lose them, you know, when I—“

“Sure.  Up you go.”

Too soon, Malva’s shampoo and rinse is over.  Today, for two cents, she’d book for color—something outrageous enough to be time-consuming—to stay three minutes longer at the sink.  She’d forgo a senior staffers’ meeting or a partners’ convocation at her firm to dawdle with Robin.  But Robin’s next client, a trim redhead, is waiting already, and Robin is wrapping a towel around Malva’s hair and leading her back to her station. 

The phone at the front desk rings.  Pat, the salon’s owner, calls out for Robin.  “It’s for you, hon.”  Malva resents the redhead, the phone calls.  She wishes Robin were all hers, like Peter’s pumpkinned wife.

“Sorry, Malva! I’ll just be a minute.  Dave’s got my car today.  He’s calling about when we trade.  Okay?”

“Take your time.” 

The upside of Malva’s perpetual tardiness is that Malva can be endlessly patient anticipating her time with Robin.  Sometimes another client’s styling will go long so Malva has to wait.  She enjoys this actually: reading up on the Laci Peterson murder case in Robin’s outdated People and watching her work, so content in her skin, so brilliant and birdlike.  The waiting redhead, her impatient page-flipping and leg-crossing, stains Malva’s pleasure.

Today, to match her pink hair, Robin is wearing hot pink wedged sandals.  She crosses the salon floor as gracefully, Malva senses the comparison is cliché and incomplete, as a ballerina on point.  Malva knows that Robin is not a ballerina, of course, and probably dances barefoot at the raves she and her husband, Dave, attend every so often.  What Malva believes is that Robin could have been a ballerina, or a starlet, or even a television news anchor, if she’d only wanted.  Robin knew, married to Dave straight out of high school, that she was meant to style hair.  Now, further educated, she removes hair, the unwanted kind, from upper lips and eyebrows and who knows where else. 

Robin herself had Liz, from the next station, wax her upper lip (“It’s so dark; it’s too gross!”) to be able to speak with authority about what her clients would undergo.  Several times she’s encouraged Malva to have a wax—just a bit between the eyebrows--not because Robin is drumming up work for herself, she’s clearly booked to the hilt, but because Robin understands women: how so much rests on the presentation of one’s best face.

Malva’s face, reflected in the wall-length mirror facing the cutting stations, looks platter-round.  She sucks in her cheeks and turns her head.  It’s the cap of wet hair, she consoles herself, which creates the illusion of size.  Robin has told her she has a cameo face.  Nobody has ever complimented Malva in just these terms.  Because she believes Robin to be truthful, Malva tries to see the cameo here in the salon’s see-all lighting, but it’s easier at home in her second bathroom’s mirror where the sconces are mounted low for a shadowy effect, some contractor’s savvy concession to female home-owners.

“Sorry, Malva,” Robin says.  She places her hands lightly on Malva’s shoulders and squeezes.  “So just a trim today?”

“Just a trim.  Those split ends?”

“Oh, your hair’s great.  So thick!”  Robin lifts Malva’s hair with her fingers, lets it fall.

“You arrange the car swap?”

“Dave’s going to come by.  Thank gawd!  I don’t have any extra time today.”

“Not even a lunch hour?”  Malva is motherly, or how she imagines she’d have been, if she’d ever had a child.

“I brought a salad.  Between my one and my two, I’ll be able to sit down.”

“It’s good to be booked, though, right?”

“Oh, sure.”  Robin snips.  The wisps of Malva’s ends, her petulant DNA, sprinkle the nylon cape with which Robin shrouds her clients.  “I can always use the money.”

“Maybe next time I’ll have you do something dramatic.”

“You think?”

“Straightening?”  Malva nods to the redhead, her classy, shoulder-length hair which doesn’t, in Malva’s opinion, need a trim.

“Oooooh.  That’s so hard on hair.  I wouldn’t do it.  These curls are awesome!”

“The bane of my beauty life.”

“No!  Straightening though?”   Robin sets her scissors down.  She pulls strands of hair out from Malva’s temples, gauging their length for a match.  In the mirror, Malva’s reflection resembles a winged Frisbee.

“Not if you say.”  Malva shuts her eyes.

“I wouldn’t.”

“Then I won’t.”

“We could feather this, shorten the back?”  Robin fluffs Malva’s wet curls.

“Maybe I should color it…go pink.”

“Auburn?”

“There’s so much grey.  In my temples?”  Malva touches the side of her head; the trim ends slide from the cape.

“You don’t have grey.  Hardly see it!”

“Time marching onward.”

Robin giggles.  “That’s what my mom says.”  She’s uncoiling the cord to the hair-dryer.  Malva has five more minutes maximum in the haven of Robin’s station.

“How is your mom?”

“I told you about her boyfriend?”

“He won’t get a job?  That one?” 

Robin’s mother is an aging hippie who left home when Robin was just a toddler, figuring that a high school math teacher—Robin’s father—would do better by her daughter than an itinerant potter, which is what Robin’s mother became.  When Robin discusses her mother, it’s clear that Robin plays the parent.  Sometimes Robin’s mother asks straight out for rent money, or a bus ticket, even a summer nightgown. 

“Yeah.  He’s got some kind of pyramid thing going.  Mom wanted Dave and me to invest, but I just couldn’t, you know?”

“That’s wise, Robin.  Even if it’s your mother.”

“That’s what I told Dave.  A ticket from Portland, that’s one thing.  But I just couldn’t—“  Robin raises her voice above the hum of the dryer with a lack of inhibition Malva could never muster.   “I just couldn’t give it to her, when she was just going to turn around and give it to him.  You know?”

The redhead has stopped turning pages.  Malva feels her listening.

“You think she’ll stay with him?”

“I don’t think.  She never has before, with the others?   But she’s getting older.”

“Aren’t we all.”  The conversation has come full circle.  Robin turns off the hair-
dryer.

“You’re doing great, Malva,” Robin says, toying with the hair on the crown of Malva’s head. 

For five minutes, Malva’s hair will be just perfect, fresh from Robin’s hands.  Then it will deflate or go haywire, and she will yearn for this moment when Robin is laying on hands, when Malva is looking okay.

            Lynda:  10:30

            Lynda’s summer is boring.   She hears the word with the inflection, bow-ring, her eighth graders used when she read them “The Road Not Taken” before the state-mandated competency essay, a deadly topic on decision-making and conformity.  What the topic yielded was a battery of obligatory reminiscences about regrets for quitting soccer or forging the signature of inebriated parents.  Lynda, for sure, could have written a textbook on bad decisions (choosing the wrong men would easily edge out all contenders), but she thought the essay prompt backward-looking for the penultimate week of eighth grade.  Lynda and her students were primed to look forward by the first of June: forward to overdosing on late-night trash television, sleeping in, or loitering in Nordstrom’s shoe department (Lynda’s favorite pastime being shoe shopping, enthusiasm she shares with Robin).  Summer, Lynda feels with all the misdirected devotion of a veteran public school teacher, is the season for all ages to be released from second-guessing.

The sandals she’s wearing now are yesterday’s prize find: half-priced Kate Spades with straw-wrapped heels and slender straps from which her enameled toenails peek prettily.   Lynda uncrosses her legs, swings her knees to the side so the heavy-set, dark-haired woman who’s standing at the counter tipping Robin will be able to squeeze past her chair to the salon’s door.  This woman—Lynda feels rare and generous sympathy—is wearing purple suede Birkenstocks, the style half the teachers in her middle school sport to the same pathos.  Lynda is positive that Robin would never wear, never even consider wearing, such dumpy shoes, but she’s also positive that she hears affection in Robin’s goodbye: “Thanks, Malva!  Have a super day!”

Robin greets Lynda with affection, too, and the keen eye of a sister shopper.  “Sweet blouse, Lynda!”

“They had more…some light blue ones, too.  At Campbell’s?”

“Wow!  Maybe I’ll run over tomorrow, if I have a break.”

“Busy, huh, sweetie?”

“Oh, yes.”  Robin frowns, bunching her pink eyebrows.  Then she winks; her face smoothes itself.  “Come on back!”

“It’s so hot!”  Lynda stands, checks her stomach’s profile in the mirror as she follows Robin to her station.

“I know.  We had the back door open, but my allergies went ballistic, so we had to close it and turn up the air.  Does it feel cool?”

“In here, it’s fine.  You take anything?”

“For my allergies?”

“Yeah.  Claritin?  Allegra?”

“Nooooh.  I don’t like to take anything like that, daily, you know?”

Lynda doesn’t know; she’s an ameliorative drug consumer of the first class.  But for Robin she says, “I know what you mean.  Dope up your body, and pretty soon you don’t know what it’s telling you.”

Robin’s laughter is a reward.  Lynda’s proud that she’s earned it so early into her color and trim.  “See my sandals?”

“They’re darling.  They make your feet so pretty.”

“Don’t they?”  Lynda does not deflect compliments.  She catches them square in the center of her psychic mitt and extends them, winding up like an outfielder who’s got plenty of time to lob the ground ball to first.  “You’ll never guess how much they cost.”

“You got them in this town?”  Robin tugs the little straw bag from Lynda’s hand and sets it on the floor at her station.  “Those?  I don’t believe it.”

“On sale.  How much do you think I paid?”

“I don’t know.”

“Just guess.”

“Fifty bucks?”  Robin waits for Lynda to sit, then capes her.  “Naw,” she smiles as she snaps the cape around Lynda’s neck.  “Want to take these off?”  She touches Lynda’s earrings, old Smith Corona typewriter keys, the letters L and M, which Lynda bought in college when she thought she’d become a journalist.  “They’re so cute!  Seventy-five?”

“Forty.”

“Wow.”  Robin touches her elbow softly.  She slips her small foot from her hot pink sandal to pump the chair higher.  “My limit’s twenty these days.  Dave says I have too many shoes.  Guys, huh?”  She drapes a towel around Lynda’s shoulders.

“Oh, yeah.”

“How’s Mr. Right?”  Robin turns to her counter to the alchemy which keeps Lynda’s cursedly mouse-brown hair the exact shade of autumny red she’d always wished it until she found Robin and this one wish came true.  Most women, Robin has told Lynda more than once, choose red, but on Lynda it looks totally natural.  Now it’s their secret, sort of, and Robin doesn’t even bother asking if Lynda needs to look at the new color swatches.  Lynda loves that there’s one place in her begrudging life, here in Robin’s chair, where somebody knows what she wants and gives it to her with such bubbling joy.  “He still more fun than a bucket of monkeys?”

Lynda should feel embarrassed, she’s revealed two other Mr. Rights to Robin over the past year, but she won’t succumb.  She slips the earrings into her lap while Robin dampens her hair.  The letters R-O-B-I-N circle the bottle in square, childlike print. 

“Let’s just say he thought I had too many shoes in my closet.”

The truth is, the latest Mr. Right didn’t want to invest in Lynda’s shoe collection, which Lynda thought cheap and petty like most of her boyfriends turned out to be.  When she tallied it up, she’d spent more time, money, and energy blackening salmon and tossing arugula at her apartment than he’d spent taking her out to eat.  She doesn’t tell Robin this, though.  Robin, who works her pretty butt off year-round, even when Dave’s collecting unemployment during the winter layoffs and housing slumps, might be disappointed in her.  Lynda can’t have that.

“How’s Dave doing?”

“He’s great.  Dave’s always great.”  It would take an impossible gymnastic contortion for Lynda to see Robin’s face, so close to her neck Lynda can feel her breath and the sprinkles of the spray bottle both, but she’s sure Robin is glowing.  Lynda glows, too, for the first few dates, but she just can’t keep it up.  And Robin’s been married since she was eighteen.

“Still driving to Diamond Cove to build houses?”

“His boss has him closer this month.  You know the subdivision on Eight Mile?  The Oaks?”  Rubber gloves snap against Robin’s hands.
 

“Oh, sure.”

“He’s framing twelve houses.”  Robin parts Lynda’s dampened hair and begins to squeeze on color, strand by strand.  “He’s so jazzed!”

“I’ll bet.” 

With a gloved fingertip, Robin rubs color along the part in Lynda’s hair. “Except I can’t get him to finish the bathroom.  We have to brush our teeth in the kitchen sink!” 

Lynda fixes on the picture of Dave which Robin has taped to the mirror above her counter.  He’s a nice looking young man, which makes him and Robin a nice-looking couple.  Robin with her pink hair, Dave with the tattooed bicep.  Lynda dated a man with a tattoo once, or once that she knows of, but she’d held her breath throughout each date, sweating that the dragon tail or eagle wing or whatever it was would come inching out of his collar at the wrong moment and reveal her bad taste to the world.

Robin’s as proud of Dave’s tattoo as she is of marrying just the right hair color to the difficult complexion of a client.  This, too, wrings Lynda’s heart with envy and admiration and a sense of unworthiness.

“Poor baby,” Lynda says.  “Shoe-maker’s child.”

“Dave’s dad is an electrician.”  Robin’s voice is deadpan.

“Just an expression.”

“Mmmm.”

“It means--” Lynda won’t let Robin think she’s hoarding any special wisdom.  “It means that when somebody does something day in and day out, like a profession, he doesn’t want to do it at home. When he’s off-duty?   So the shoemaker’s child goes barefoot?”

“Oh.”  Robins sets her bottle and brush on the counter.  “Where’s my comb…”  She shuffles through a messy pile of her VISA and MasterCard statements, lifts a dog-eared checkbook, and extracts a comb.  “Gotcha!”

 “So Dave’s tuckered out from framing houses, and he doesn’t want to go home and work.”

“Uh.” 

Lynda’s not making the most of this teachable moment.  It’s she, not Robin, who is failing analogy.  In just a moment, Robin will peel off her gloves and leave her alone to let the color complete its magic.  Lynda feels as if the period bell is going to ring before she’s finished detailing an assignment. 

“Sweetie, let’s take you.  When you’ve had a long day, say twelve clients having bad hair days, and you get home at night or you’ve finally got a weekend, what’s the last thing you want to do?”  The teeth of Robin’s big comb plow Lynda’s scalp like stubby fingers.  She shivers. 

“Cook dinner,” Robin answers without a missed beat.  “I’m so glad that Dave likes to cook.”  She rolls her eyes.  “I just want to put my feet up and watch my programs.”

Lynda waits; her student expects this to be the right answer.  Like so many trimmed ends, she sheds her instinct prohibiting the creation of false self-esteem with reward for poor effort.  Robin sets her timer, a goofy-looking egg-face which is meant to suggest Humpty Dumpty.  She wipes her hands with the edge of the towel draping Lynda’s neck.  Her smile is reflected by the mirror framing them both.

It was a stupid point anyway, Lynda tells herself.  “Me, too,” she agrees.  “Didn’t you love this week’s CSI?” 

Watching Robin fuss around the front desk  answering the phones and joking with Pat as she waits for the color to set, Lynda wishes her sandals made her happier.  They’d make Robin happy, if she’d spent only forty dollars for such enviable shoes.  Robin is always happy, whether she’s got the right answer or not.  She’s happy after a weekend spent snowboarding with Dave, whose daredevil antics provide gist for customer icebreakers.  She’s happy walking her enormous German Shepherd, Klondike, whose picture resides in a pink ceramic frame (“I LOVE MY BABY”) book-ending the washed-out color chart on the counter of Robin’s crowded station.  Robin is happy with twenty-dollar sandals, or a half-finished bathroom, or a simpy watercolor recreation of a Mary Cassatt from her wishy-washy mother.  Without trying, Robin is amused and pleased and enchanted by virtually everything in her circumference.  Robin is a glass-half-filled girl; Lynda is, admittedly without self-recrimination, a glass-half-empty kind of person and always has been.  The admiration she feels for Robin intrigues Lynda because, face it, an objective observer would not find Robin’s condition particularly blessed.  There’s the secret, Lynda suspects: finding satisfaction in not much, in what is clearly not enough.

At twenty minutes, Humpty Dumpty rings.  Lynda stands and moves to the shampoo sinks.  Robin meets her.  “Are we just trimming?  An inch or so?”

Lynda thinks: what does this girl do best?  What would make her happy, right now, broken analogy mended?  “Take off four.”

“Wow!  That’s awesome!  Below the ear?”  Robin touches an earlobe and runs her finger along Lynda’s jaw line.  “Shorter in back, longer here?”

“Let’s do it.”

“Cool.”

Shampooed and reinstated in Robin’s station, Lynda watches Robin’s thin arms in the mirror.

“Got some wispy little ends here.  Like baby hair.”  Robin smiles.

“Uh oh.”

“Swim cap maybe?”

“Probably…and the chlorine.”

“So killer on hair.”

“Yeah…I don’t want to stop swimming, though.”  Lynda can’t bear to think of lost muscle tone, falling flesh.  Her life is a long regime of upkeep: hair, body, shoes, body, hair.  She covets the Hershey bar Robin will have with the latte Pat will bring her on their break.  Sugar kick, Robin calls it.  The girl is a wisp.

“Course not.  They’re just here, underneath.”  Robin tickles the hair on Lynda’s neck.  “Nobody will ever see ‘em.”

“That’s the ticket.”

With green plastic clips, Robin loops most of Lynda’s hair on top of her head, then combs out the hair from the bottom, snipping it square.  “Four inches.  You’re not gonna change your mind?”

“Nope.  My mind’s made up.  Go for it.”

“So what happened to...Carl, was it?”

“He just—“  Lynda won’t publicly discuss the details of her final blow-up with Carl, ignited when he’d expected her to pay half the rent at the condo in South Tahoe during what was to be their shared vacation. At  least three other teachers from Lynda’s school have their hair cut at this salon, where the unadvertised but more titillating service is the extrapolation of gossip.  Not by Robin, bless her little soul, but by clients who have the patience for month-long games of telephone, transmuted so that the plots grow sticky with static until the players shift their antenna from the message to the messenger, where the real story resides.  “He just couldn’t…ante up.”

“Emotionally you mean?”

“Right.”  Lynda means this.  Her father’s threadbare adage, Put your money where your mouth is, translates emotional fulfillment into—if not exactly cash money—financial commitment.  She’s not dissimulating when she agrees with Robin.  If Carl really thought Lynda was such a great gal, he would have paid for the damn condo and the damn sandals without squawking. 

“I’m so lucky,” Robin chirps, unclipping the next layer of Lynda’s hair.  “That’s what I tell Dave.  I just feel so lucky!”

“Ahhh.”

“We went to that new casino last weekend, Indian Springs?”

“I think I’ve heard of it.  Up 49?”

“Yeah.  Just to take a drive, but we ended up gambling.  It’s so nice!”

“You won.”

“I did.”

“You are lucky, Robin.”

“You know, I just feel lucky all the time.  I told Dave, ‘Dave, honey, give me sixty dollars.  No more.’”

“And he did.”

“He did.  And I won at the dollar machines.”  Robin stops cutting and meets Lynda’s eyes in the mirror.  “Two hundred and twenty dollars.  The dollars just kept coming.  Dave was laughing like crazy.  I was holding my shirt up, this little middy thing with no room, to keep them from rolling all over.”  Robin shakes her head and unclips the last of Lynda’s hair.  “I must have looked like some dope, dollars bouncing off my tummy.  It was so cool.”

Lynda doesn’t gamble with her own money.  She remembers losing a blind date’s money once, a tall man in Hush Puppies who’d been pleased to keep his hand on her hip when she fed coins into the machine, not so pleased when she’d exhausted his coins and she’d firmly taken his hand from her waist at the evening’s end.  She can’t imagine Robin looking like a dope, even with the silver ring in her flat white stomach exposed.   “I never win.”

“Never?  Not even a raffle?  A bet?”

“Maybe a bet…never get paid, though.”

“Bummer!  Don’t you just want to scream when you win a bet and nobody pays?”  Robin hands Lynda a mirror.  “Short enough?”

“Nice.  Better than nice.  It’s super.”

“Cool.”

Robin squirts sweet-smelling gel onto her hands, strokes it through Lynda’s hair.   Lynda’s cheekbones are higher, her face made more angular by the shorter cut. 

“Fun plans for the weekend?”  Robin asks.

Lynda has a dinner date tonight, the out-of-town brother of a man with whom she used to teach.  As Robin uncoils the hairdryer, Lynda fast-forwards through tired gambits: jobs, shared acquaintances, books read and vacations taken.  She’s dated so many men for so many years, her lines are predictably dead end.  She figures maybe, just this once, she’ll shut down the barometer that calibrates willingness to spend.  Maybe, just this once, she’ll forget about projecting a svelte aura of disinterest and wear loafers instead of heels, have the chocolate mousse for dessert, say yes to a movie the next night.

“A date.  Yet another date.”

Robin combs though Lynda’s hair.  The sleek strands extend and then fall windblown into a perfect frame around Lynda’s face.  Such a good cut, Lynda thinks.  Robin raises her voice above the hairdryer’s hum: “Oh, it’ll be a nice time, won’t it?”

“Hope so.”

“I wish—“ Robin’s pink eyebrows wrinkle.  “I wish you could find someone like Dave.”  She flusters; the hairdryer slips. She redirects it.  “I don’t mean like Dave exactly.  Like I  am with Dave, you know?” 

Lynda might cry.  Her hair shines so perfectly.  This child is angelic.

“Well.  Perhaps I shall.”  Lynda tries for perky.

“Perhaps you shall!” repeats Robin, delighted.  “Perhaps you shall!”

Outside the salon on the sidewalk in the searing sun, Lynda steps around a fragile lady whose white hair has sprouted into an off-centered cone.  In the nick of time, Lynda thinks, then feels truly ashamed.  She flattens her embroidered teal blouse—she might skip over to Campbell’s and pick up one in light blue for Robin, a six probably, just because.  Lynda vows to herself she will, Robin-like, think only good thoughts.  For at least eight hours.

Frank and Christine 12:00

            Christine’s son Frank drives her to a shampoo and style with Robin every week.  Frank is retired, but it’s not as if he has oodles of extra time without obligation, not with the recording studio set up in what used to be his wife’s upstairs study.  His wife has declared herself his ex-wife, and Frank has embarked on a second career burning CD’s for any shaggy musician who will rent the office-turned-studio for an hour or two.  He marks his Day Runner for Thursdays at 12:00—Christine reminds him every week when he drops her off—with Mom/Robin in red ink.  The truth is that Frank looks forward to seeing Robin as much as Christine does.  When he leads his frail mother into the salon, her arthritic hand locked onto his forearm like the hook of an elegant cane, he is made to feel knightly, not the dashing white-hat on the horse with the flagged tail, but a gentleman astride a sturdy, well-shod buckskin.

Robin meets Frank and Christine at the door.  She smiles up at Frank while she transfers Christine’s hand from Frank’s arm to her own.  “Hey, Frank, what’s up?  It’s hotter than heck out there.  Come on in!” 

Christine seems to stagger, something Frank is saddened to note she’s doing more of.  Robin steps closer to his mother, lets the old woman’s weight sway against her own frame.  The salon door closes behind them.  Christine steadies herself. 

Frank nods to the line of chairs for waiting clients.  “Mom?  I’m going to wait here.”

“Yes,” says Christine, who hasn’t distinguished Frank’s words.

For speaking with his mother, Frank has adopted a mummer’s code to underscore his meaning, flying hands and rolling eyes, a dipped shoulder or two-fingered victory sign.  He’s noted gratefully that Robin, too, has evolved her own stylish and uninhibited sign language for conversations with Christine.  He’s seen Robin touch her nose and cross her eyes or run a hand down the side of her slender hip, then wag it furiously at Christine, whose shut-eyed laughter expires in the garble of a strangled cough.  Robin handles Christine deftly, putting a Kleenex into Christine’s hand, turning to shake her head no to Frank, regularly startled out of his chair by advances in Christine’s decline.

Some Thursdays Frank will leave Christine in Robin’s care and drive his mother’s car to the garage across the street to have the oil changed or the tires rotated.  He drives the Chevy Lumina on their outings to “keep the motor tuned,” in his mother’s language.  Frank’s no mechanic; he takes the car out only because it seems to help keep Christine tuned.  Since she cannot drive, the second-best choice seems to be transporting her about town in her own car in which the familiar dips and swells of the straining vinyl seats and the hothouse scent conjure the illusion of independence.  Seeing the route to Robin’s salon (whatever Christine can see of it, Frank isn’t sure) from the familiar frames of the Chevy’s windows must be comforting to Christine.  Frank is game to keep his mother comforted, even though he prefers his Toyota’s stick shift to the automatic transmission of Christine’s Lumina.  He doesn’t know what other choice he has, really.

Robin holds Christine’s hand between hers.  “We’ll be fine if you have something you need to do, Frank.”  She strokes Christine’s palm with the repetitive touch she might use to calm a small child, though Christine has told Frank Robin doesn’t have children and doesn’t yearn for any.

“Not today, no.  I’ll wait.”

“Something you want to do?”  Robin teases.  Christine cocks her head.  She’s caught the spirit, if not the letter, of Robin’s question.

“I’ll just sit here and watch you two look beautiful.”

“What’d he say?” Christine asks.

“He says you’re BEAUTIFUL, Christine.”

“I don’t want it to look blue.  I could never suffer that look.”  To Frank, Christine looks as if she’s going to cry.  Robin puts her arm around Christine’s shoulder and hugs her, a hug much tighter than Frank himself would give.  She whispers in Christine’s ear.  She raises one of her hands and strokes it through his mother’s hair, the back of which has been flattened by the car seat.  His mother is shrinking. 

Frank wishes he’d thought to do what Robin is, combing through the cottony white clumps with her pink-tipped fingers, rounding the gauzy shape.  Course that’s Robin’s business, isn’t it; he’s just a son.   “I’ll just—“ Frank flips his thumb to the chairs by the salon’s front desk.  “I’ll be here.” 

Robin winks at him.  “We’ll be fine.” 

She steers Christine to her station.  One at a time, Robin detaches his mother’s curled fingers from the strap of the black pocketbook—Frank suspects that’s not what Robin calls it—which holds the artifacts of Christine’s life.  Once, anxious that Christine might arrive late for a blood panel at the hospital lab, Frank had hurried her from Robin’s care so quickly they forgot the pocketbook, laid aside after Christine had fumbled Robin’s payment from the sheaf of crisp bills she’d kept rubber banded in her wallet for as long as Frank could remember.  Robin didn’t forget.  She brought it by Christine’s house just as Frank was leaving, saying something to his mother about knowing how lost Christine must have been without what was in there, that it was no trouble to run the purse by after work as she’d done.  It wasn’t about fattening her next tip from a helpless old lady, either, Frank was certain.   Robin meant what she said; she meant it when she told him that she and Christine would be fine.  Frank could see that for himself.

“Now Christine, what are we doing today?”  Robin’s voice carries above the flurry of noise in the salon.  Frank splays a magazine across his lap, some picture saga of the rich and famous, but he doesn’t read.

Robin brings her mouth close to Christine’s ear.  When Christine makes as if she’s going to climb into the chair, Robin whispers to her again.  Hand in hand, they cross the salon to the shampoo sinks.  It seems as if Robin lifts Christine—her hands are under Christine’s armpits—and settles her into the chair as one would a toddler.  Frank doesn’t think Robin could possibly be strong enough to lift his mother.  His lower back pains him after he’s levered Christine in and out of the car for a morning of junkets, and he must outweigh Robin by seventy or eighty pounds. 

There Robin is in all her pink glory, brushing out the hair of his mother who never in Frank’s memory has worn a pair of slacks or shown her face without lipstick.  Christine came to Robin long before she’d lost the ability to drive.  The first time he’d brought his mother to the salon, after the accident with the neighbor’s cat on the neighbor’s lawn, Frank had been flabbergasted.  Not by Robin’s hair or clothes.  Lord knows Frank had seen enough of that on the Rolling Stone covers of  musicians whose cartoonish look appeared harmlessly lackluster. 

What captured Frank was watching Christine with Robin.  Christine’s home of nearly forty years is a testament to the selling power of door-to-door alarm experts.  Christine screens telephone calls and doesn’t open the front door, period, which is why Frank has a set of keys to his mother’s house on his own key ring.  After Robin introduced herself to Christine that honeymoon appointment, his mother had reported her as green-haired and nearly naked but a darling girl and didn’t Frank think Christine’s hair looked better than it had in years.  Frank had joked: as long as she doesn’t turn it green.  To which Christine had replied she might try it, old dog learning new tricks.  Robin’s balm brought the willingness out, Frank knew.  He could feel it himself: a tonic. 

            Robin manages to shampoo Christine’s hair without bending her backward into the neck rest; Christine complains the half-sitting, half-lying position the other ladies adopt for their shampoo gives her vertigo, and Robin obliges.  She bends over Christine, whose thin, dampened hair bares strips of her scalp, giving her a dreadlocked look from which she’d probably get a kick.  A nimbus encircles them both.  Frank fishes in his pocket for a handkerchief to dab at his eyes.

            “Pat!  Call 911!  Now!  Fast!”

            “911?”  Pat reaches for the phone.

            “Frank!” 

Frank is out of his chair.  He skids on the glossy magazine.  He begins to fall, catches himself, and lopes across the salon floor to his mother’s side.

“Mom?  Mother?”

Christine has slackened, wilted into the vinyl chair, where the neck rest now receives her head.  Her eyes are open, her mouth twitches, slowly.  Robin holds Christine’s face with both palms.  “Frank?”

Frank and Robin exchange a look.  Not shock or disbelief, Frank will remember later, after the funeral which Robin will attend with her husband, Dave.  This was to be expected, their look says.  This is not so bad.

“Christine, honey?”  Robin whispers again and again into Christine’s ear. Christine’s hands levitate: one to Frank’s cheek, one to Robin’s.  Robin catches Christine’s hand as it falls.  Frank is not so quick.  His mother’s hand hits the slick nylon cape and slides.

“Take her hand, Frank.”

Frank picks up the limp hand.  Already the ropy veins are relinquishing their job, smoothing themselves.  Christine eyes shutter, open once, close.

“Frank?”

Robin kneels. Frank kneels.  He breathes the lemony scent of the shampoo in Christine’s hair.  He lays his head in his mother’s lap.  Robin’s shoulder brushes his.  Eyes shut, Frank pulls the handkerchief from his pocket and nests it in Robin’s lap. 

By the time the paramedics arrive, Robin has combed Christine’s white hair into soft curls and settled his mother’s pocketbook into her lap.  She holds Frank’s hand while Christine is wheeled from the salon. She gives him a tight hug in the parking lot, and Frank’s fingers fit into the hollows between Robin’s ribs as he hugs her back.

Some weeks later, after Frank has finished sorting Christine’s papers and is bagging Christine’s clothing for the Goodwill, he realizes that it’s Thursday, almost noon.  Frank has no reason to expect that Christine’s appointment time is free, but he pulls Robin’s pink business card from his wallet and dials the salon. 

Yes, his hair is getting longer than he’d like, he tells Robin.  Sure, she has time next week.  She thinks about Christine every Thursday, she wants him to know.  Frank believes this.  He imagines Robin writing his name in her book as she speaks, her loopy, childlike handwriting stretching across the blue-inked lines of the appointment box, filling it completely.