Carol Prisant - Catch 26 - A Novel

“Ah cain’t weah that.” Elizabeth fake-laughed, all coy and all jingly and all Southern-belle. “It’s a scandal to the jaybirds!”

“Neither can I, Liz,” she thought, unbuttoning the top button of her skirt.

She clicked the TV off, dabbed a little powder on her forehead, buttoned her gray jacket and grabbed her next-to-best purse, calling as she hurried past his chair, “I’m leaving now, Stanley. Do you mind if I take the Ford?”

“Unhhh. He cleared his throat.

Had she made the bed?

She would check when she got home.

Arlene, her fold-up reading glasses set neatly beside her plate, took a careful mouthful of hot, fried lasagna and turned to look around.

“Lots of business women here,” she said.

And that was when Frannie registered her hair.

“You’ve got a new haircut, Ar! And it’s a different color, too, isn’t it? Let me see!

Almost shyly, Arlene turned her head.

“It’s wonderful! What did you do?”

“Do you really like it?”

“Like it? I can’t believe it!”

Years ago, when they’d been girls, they’d sworn to let careless Nature take her course. It had eventually become a running joke between them, that they’d go cold-turkey together. Live a natural, even organic old age.

But now, here was Arlene with this … fine new hair: all lustrous and silky and waved: all fawn-colored, pineapply fluff, and Frannie felt obscurely that her best friend was cheating. Cheating successfully, too, because something about this haircut – or was it the color? – seemed so perfectly suited to her coloring, her eyes, her neck. Her neck. Her hand flew to her own as she flashed on this morning.

And now here was Arlene, looking so … young.

“Who did you go to?” she asked.

Arlene leaned in, dropping her voice.

“I’ve found this new hairdresser. Linda Thorpe told me about her. She flies into St. Louis from New York a couple of times a month, I think. She’s at The Hair House on Clayton. It’s new.”

A few tables away, a man with a mid-winter tan had turned and seemed to smile their way. At Arlene? At her? Frannie swept her glasses off her nose.

Pathetic, she thought.

“Tell me her name?” she asked offhandedly. “Maybe I’ll try her out.”

“Who?”

“That genie who did your hair. Unless it was a man?”

“Not a Jeannie, you dope. A Randi.” Frannie snorted and rolled her eyes. She was used to Arlene’s sense of humor. “And she’s a woman.”

“‘Randi?’” she mused. “That’s an odd name for a girl. Does she spell it with an ‘I’ or a ‘y’?”

“I think with an ‘I’.”

“Maybe her parents weren’t aware of the double entendre,” she added.

They chuckled together uncertainly. Arlene realigned her silverware.

“Maybe it’s short for Miranda,” Frannie suggested, pleased at having sucked some useful morsel from the usual vacuum of her mind.

“Yes, I’ll bet that’s it. You always know things like that, Fran. Words like that.”

Arlene cupped the bottom-most waves of her hairdo in her palm and fluffed up them the tiniest bit. (Frannie might be smart, the gesture implied, but Arlene had prettier hair.) “Anyway, I wouldn’t count on getting an appointment. She only comes here one day of every month or so, and I know she’s really busy when she’s here.”

Was Arlene a little prickly or was it her own, very peculiar, mood?

“I don’t mind waiting for a month or two, Ar. After all,” she lifted a hank of tired, dark hair. “It’s not as though I haven’t lived with this for years.” She made a face. Arlene smiled.

“Well, don’t tell anyone else on the planet or neither one of us will ever get an appointment again, Fran. And I should tell you that she’s only at The Hair House a few days a year, though I hear she does lots of famous people in New York: Victoria’s Secret models. Sometimes Barbara Walters!”

“Really?” Frannie was impressed.

“She told me that it’s a worldwide franchise and she owns two. Ours, here in St. Louis, and one in New York.”

“Really?” Frannie was doubly impressed. New York!

Arlene seemed mollified. She leaned back in her chair.

“Ready for dessert?”

On her return, Frannie found Stanley asleep in his chair with his “second lunch” still in its transparent wrap in the icebox. She hung up her coat, tiptoed to the bedroom and perched on the edge of the crisply made bed. (Good, she’d remembered.)

Opening her handbag and fingering through her worn brown wallet, she found it: the beauty shop’s number on the back of a Nordstrom’s receipt. She could, of course, wait a month or six weeks if she wanted to. She’d just had color, after all. Still …

She reached for the phone.

“Hair House.” The nasal voice of a twelve-year-old bored receptionist.

“This is Mrs. Stanley Turner. I’m calling for an appointment with Randi. Arlene Mann gave me her name?”

“Hold on a minute. I’ll check the book.”

A longish pause, during which Frannie heard the dull whirring of … blow driers?

“What did you say your name was again?”

“Frannie Turner. I’m friend of Arlene Mann’s.”

Muffled conversation.

“Hold on a minute, would you? I have to check something.”

“Fine.”

It was a full twelve minutes by the nightstand clock, in fact, during which Frannie cleaned scraps of dog-eared papers and receipts out of her wallet and counted her change in her lap and, after that, wandered over to the closet wall to gaze, possibly for the thousandth time, at her cherished print of “Primavera”.

She’d bought it in college, just before her last art history finals. It was a superb reproduction. It had been expensive, too, but she’d treated herself – not just because the image was head-spinningly beautiful, but because the owner of the store had taken the time to point out that Botticelli’s original painting actually represented love, marriage, and fertility.

Love. Marriage. Fertility. She and Stanley had gotten married before she’d had time to do anything with her precious art degree and, of course, married women didn’t work back then. She regretted not having used her education now, she’d enjoyed those classes so. But this print still gave her visceral pleasure, and reminded her every day that art and beauty were the truest joys in a disappointing world. More than once, “Primavera” had saved her.

The phone in her hand sizzled to life.

“Well, you’re really lucky, Mrs. Lerner.”

“It’s Turner.”

“Awesome. Really awesome! Randi says she can fit you in tomorrow at 2:00!”

“Tomorrow! Oh, I am lucky. Thanks so much! So I’ll see you then. Oh, wait.” She was an idiot. “Where are you?”