The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [95]
“A little color can give it body. Would you like to try blond?”
I nodded.
“I love adventurous women!” she said and poured warm water from a pitcher over my head.
My hair still had no body, lay weak and limp. And I’d just spent as much as a fur muff on a style that outmoded my hat. I stopped at Crescent’s to buy a new hat and bought one each for Olea and Louise. They met me at the front door of the house.
“Why Clara, you’ve …”
“Colored your hair,” Olea finished for Louise. “It certainly is … yellow.”
“But it’s so … big,” Louise said, gazing up. “That pompadour.”
“It is too big, isn’t it?” I had to duck to get through the door with the hat on. “I don’t know what I was thinking.” The flurry of hair activity had made me feel better, and I didn’t need to tell my friends about the goings-on on Mallon Avenue or that I couldn’t plug the hole I felt in my heart.
“It must weigh as much as Lucy,” Louise said.
“The cat might have added more style,” I said, and they both giggled. I did too, the three of us removing the hat and the frame, laughing at the idea of the cat, all balm to my aching heart. This was what friends were for.
The message at the First Presbyterian Church in Coulee City that next Sunday morning spoke of exile. “Being banished, expelled, sent out, is one of the deepest kinds of human suffering,” the pastor noted. “Imagine the Israelites wandering in the desert. It is not of our doing that we are freed from such bondage. God gives ‘the desolate a home to dwell in.’ ” He quoted a Psalm.
Olea leaned over and said, “In Hebrew the verse is translated, ‘God sets the lonely in families.’ ”
“What an odd verse,” I said. I wondered how she knew the Hebrew version, but Olea rarely shared her history. She was who she was now, a semiretired furrier, a woman interested in European furniture and birds, and apparently a student in Hebrew.
Olea shrugged and whispered, “In Exodus, when the midwives disobeyed the pharaoh, faced their fears, and did what God commanded, it says God gave them ‘families of their own.’ Family is apparently pretty important to the health of the soul.”
I looked at her, wondered if she knew she spoke wisdom as though it were a morning greeting, gracious and simple and deep. She’d already turned back, paying attention to the pastor.
I thought of my mother being expelled from the farm through an unnecessary foreclosure, how lonely she looked the day I left, even surrounded by her children. I thought of her family not letting her speak of one of her greatest accomplishments, how they were held captive by the past, how she was exiled from herself in that way.
Maybe I was as well.
Our lives took on a languid pace, no real ups or downs. Boarders came and went. We hardly noticed them with the separate outside entrance. Most worked for the railroad and were gone for several days at a time. Louise collected the rent from our boarders, who took the rooms and ate one meal with us. Louise complained about her bunions, so took fewer walks with Lucky. I noticed she’d make trips to her room, come out and say, “Now what did I go in there for?” then return. She might do it two or three times before remembering. Maybe she’d always been that way and I only noticed because I was around her more now, listening harder, because that’s what families did for each other.
Olea had her eyes checked and got spectacles. She said I should get my eyes checked too, that I might need glasses. I didn’t like the tiny lenses. They looked … froglike. “You’d squint less if you had them,” she told me.
“I don’t need them yet,” I said and found a magnifying glass I pulled out whenever Franklin’s letters arrived. Franklin and I corresponded with no declarations of anything but Affectionately yours.
These were days of servicing, I called it, doing menial things to keep the system running, like oiling the plow each fall to deter rust. I lived a life without drama or trial and should have been gleeful.
The New York Times arrived weekly and gave us things to discuss through the week. When I saw the article about experiments