Elisa Albert - How This Night Is Different - Stories

“Oh, hey. I almost forgot!” I open up my bag and produce a small gold box, tied ornately with red-and-gold ribbon, which contains a single Godiva truffle. Fucking eight bucks. “I thought this would be appropriate,” I tell her. It’s a sincere wish (Yes! Sincere! Fuck off!) that her life with Dov (and with God, I suppose) be a sweet one. And also a nod to her soon-to-be-disposed-of hair.

She grins, takes it from my outstretched hand. “Thanks.” Then she turns it over and scours the box for assurance that it’s Kosher.

I open up Hairdooz to find that it’s comprised of full-color head shots of women with extreme hairstyles, each accompanied by a horrible pun. “Oh my God — this is priceless! Rachel, look at this.”

She narrows her eyes at me, curls her lip, adopts a singsong tone. “Let’s play a game. Can you tell me which two words in your last statement were problematic?”

She has a thing about taking God’s name in vain. And Rachel, crap.

“ My God doesn’t mind if you invoke His presence at the scene of such high kitsch,” I tell her, holding up the first page of Hairdooz, where a picture of a woman with unnaturally straight hair is attended by the caption “Ironed Maiden.”

“You have a relationship with God!” she squeals. ”Baruch Hashem.”

That must mean something along the lines of “Hallelujah,” because she says it whenever things go well for her. We made the two o’clock show— Baruch Hashem! The light seems to be turning green for us— Baruch Hashem! Dov and I are getting married— Baruch Hashem!

“‘Beyond the Fringe,’” I read, turning the page to a picture of a woman with thick bangs covering her eyes. “Like you.”

Nikki, our stylist, materializes from behind a curtain and dives right in, massaging Ra-chel’s scalp with her fingers. “Hey, baby. God, look at this gorgeous hair. What are we doing to it?”

“We’re takin’ it allll off,” says Ra-chel, affecting nonchalance. The last time I heard her string those words together, she was referring to her masterminded plot to streak Home-coming sophomore year of high school.

I hold Hairdooz up for Nikki. “Cream of the Cropped,” I tell her, pointing to the image, a modified bowl cut.

”Really?” says Nikki, horrified that Ra-chel would do away with so much healthy, beautiful hair.

“Don’t ask,” I say, turning the page to a picture of a woman with sharply angled layers. “Be Blunt,” it said, like live commentary. Although it might be fun, I reconsider, to hear Rachel try to explain the concept of modesty, taken to the nth degree, to Nikki, who is wearing a micromini and navel-baring tank top.

Ra-chel just nods, looking equal parts determined and terrified.

“Wow! ’Kay. Customer’s always right. Let’s get you washed.” Nikki leads her to the row of sinks and helps her into position while I flip pages with increasingly lame captions like “What About Bob?” and “Wanna Shag?”

There was this one Halloween, circa tenth grade or so, when neighborhood guys thought it would be hilarious to smear the girls with Nair instead of the usual shaving cream. I was Carrie that year, wearing the requisite prom dress, tiara, and long blond wig, all of which I had found at a thrift store and doused thoroughly with strawberry syrup. Rachel was Robert Smith from the Cure. She teased her dark hair into a spiky inviolate mass and powdered her face all white and found black lipstick at CVS. We crushed and snorted some of her little brother’s Ritalin, which, in combination with the couple of beers my dad didn’t notice taken from the fridge, put us in a nice state. Neither of us remembers much of the evening, but when it was over, Rachel had a giant bald spot on the left side of her head, where someone had gotten her with the Nair, which, of course, we had assumed was simply shaving cream. I, with my Carrie wig, had been protected.

You would have thought she’d been gang-raped, she was so inconsolable about that bald spot. Which I admit looked freaky and pretty terrible, but still. The pitch and intensity of her tears, the weeping over that patch of missing hair, the cursing out of the “provincial motherfucking assholes” who had nothing better to do than this kind of “infantile desecration”—it was horrible. I hugged her and promised her over and over again that it would grow back, it would grow back, it would grow back, but she just kept wailing, “When?” “When?”

When Ra-chel returns, her hair is dripping and she looks small, as though seen from a great distance. I watch her closely, trying to tune out the echoes of her fifteen-year-old voice, begging me to tell her when her hair would grow back. When?

“You know what I’m thinking?” she asks me as Nikki snaps a monster-size bib around her neck and begins to comb out her hair.

“No,” I say. Most often now I have no fucking clue whatsoever what she’s thinking. “What are you thinkng?”

“I want to say the Shehechiyanu, ” she says. “Will you say it with me?”

“Explain,” I say. In my lap Hairdooz is open to a picture of a woman who looks like she’s put her finger in a socket and died wearing her huge frozen smile and stair-step curls. I keep my hand over the caption and challenge myself to come up with a good one, but give up characteristically quickly and look at the one printed: “Crimp in Your Style.”

“It’s the blessing of firsts, I guess,” she says. “For special moments. When you feel the miracle of life and are grateful for having reached this day.” Clearly she’s been coached in the answer to that one.

“Oh,” I say. I am trying to be happy for her, I am trying to be happy for her, I am trying to be happy for her. But do I want only her happiness? Or do I want her to stay as she was, as she’s always been, with me? And if she isn’t unchanged, if she’s no longer mine, do I care about her happiness at all?

“I just want to be true to my heritage,” she told me when she got back from that first, influential retreat. “I just want to find out what it means to be Jewish. I just want to live my life to its fullest potential.”

“Cool,” I’d said. “But why can’t you just go take a Landmark Forum life-skills seminar like everybody else?”

Now I smile broadly at her. That I sit here and hold her hand and say nothing while she blesses her choices is not too much to ask, is it? No, it is not. I’m a fucking bitch, is the truth. “Bring it.”

She reaches over for my hand, and I catch Nikki averting her gaze. “Baruch ata Adonai,” Ra-chel begins, and that part I recognize from my family’s once-a-year visits to temple, but the rest is fuzzy and fast and doesn’t really register. At the end she opens her eyes and squeezes my hand.

“Amen,” I say, using up what feels like the last of my breath, hoping I don’t invalidate her prayer, cancel her out.

Nikki has finished combing out Ra-chel’s hair and is brandishing a shiny pair of scissors. “You sure about this?”

It’s that speak-now-or-forever-hold-your-peace moment, but I let it pass, looking at Rachel’s reflection in the mirror, committing her to memory.

Then, amid all the other shedding and casting off and walking away redone, Nikki holds out a ponytail of Ra-chel’s hair, opens gaping scissors around it maybe four or five inches from her head, and works them closed like a gnawing animal.

The big clump of hair flops to the ground around our feet, and I gather it into a plastic bag for some unlucky kid with cancer. Then Nikki begins to snip away, with a smaller scissors now, fashioning a cute shag that will never see the light of day. I continue looking through Hairdooz, Nero fiddling, with an insouciance I have to work hard to maintain. On the last page is one that makes my heart skitter: a picture of a faceless woman with extraordinarily long hair. It falls like water past her shoulders, down her arched back, past her waist and out of the frame. “So Long!” it says blithely. Never say good-bye, I’ve heard; good-bye is final. Say “So long” instead, and hope to meet again.