Sherry's Hair

by Gianna De Persiis Vona

Sherry spends a lot of time thinking about her hair. If she should cut it or leave it long. If she does cut it, how short should it be? Then she thinks about how she spends an awful lot of time thinking about if she should cut her hair or not, and what does this say about her. As a person. There are a lot of other things she should be thinking about. Like global warming, and plastic bags, all of those plastic bags, and paper cups too, that get thrown away into the landfills. And war. There are people being killed in Africa, and Iraq, and other places, people who don't have enough food to eat. Places where people do horrible things to each other, to kids even, things so bad that when she reads about them in the newspaper it makes her feel sick and fearful in the pit of her stomach, like maybe life is more frightening than should be allowed. Yet, despite how she feels when she reads about these things, or hears about them on the public radio station her best friend's mom is always playing, all she can manage to think about is her hair and if it will look bad short, because that is what she really wants, to cut it short. But she's afraid that she'll look like a boy, or look stupid. One would be just as bad as the other. She will be sixteen in a few weeks, and while this isn't terrifically old, she figures it's old enough that she should stop spending so much time thinking about her hair and spend more time thinking about things that really matter, like plastic bags.

In her house, they keep their old plastic bags in another, bigger plastic bag under the sink, to be recycled if her mother ever remembers to take them to the grocery store, which she never does. Unless it's a really gross plastic bag from the bottom of the bin, with moldy vegetables in it; then it just gets thrown away. Whenever Sherry has to put something in the garbage, she is faced with these bags, which are so abundant she often has to reach down and stuff them back into the bigger bag. As she does this, she imagines, just for a second, how there are millions of other houses across the country with just as many plastic bags under their sinks, and how even if she looks like a boy if she cuts her hair short, the bags will still be here. They will still be a problem.

Sherry's best friend, who she isn't talking to right now because they have had one of their bad fights, says that if more people don't stop thinking about their hair and start worrying about the things that really matter, then the entire Earth will be uninhabitable by the time she and Sherry are old. They'll have to live in a plastic bubble, is what Zarina says, and Sherry knows this is true because it's what they teach her in school, and it's what her mother says, and it's what she reads in just about everything. And yet no one seems to really care. Everyone just keeps on going about business as usual, driving big cars, throwing away plastic bags, and acting as if the layer of smog that hugs them all is just for pretend. But when it comes down to it, Sherry has to admit that she spends more time worrying about her hair than she does about anything else, so she guesses she is just as guilty, and that this must be the "public apathy" Zarina's mother is always complaining about.

Sherry thinks Zarina's mother is all right. Her name is Connie, but she likes everyone to call her Pansy. Sherry isn't sure why. She thinks Pansy isn't any better of a name than Connie, but she tries to remember to switch, even though she and Zarina have been friends since the second grade and Connie has only been Pansy for the last four or five years. Pansy wears long skirts, doesn't shave her legs, and never seems to do anything exactly specific, though she claims to make her modest living selling her beaded jewelry. But Sherry has never actually seen her sell any, so she wonders about it sometimes, where Zarina's mom gets the little money she has.

Her own mother works all the time just to support the two of them; full time at Wells Fargo Bank is barely enough. They get by all right, but it's not as if Sherry can just go out and get whatever she wants. It's not as if she'll be getting a car for her sixteenth birthday. Her mom gets up early every morning and goes to work, stays there all day long, and comes home at six o'clock complaining that her feet ache and that she's sick to God of coming up with things to make for dinner. Pansy, on the other hand, is always breezing in and out, but to no place in particular, and she never complains about her feet, only of hot flashes. She complains of those a lot, and Sherry and Zarina, when they aren't fighting, roll their eyes and giggle and then Pansy says, "Just you wait, girls. Just you wait."

This is what she and Zarina had that fight about, the environment. Sherry had spent the night. She didn't sleep well because Zarina's brother Zeek, whose room is right next to Zarina's, fell asleep with his television on and Sherry kept waking up to the dull sound of explosions and gunfire. For just a moment, in her sleep-addled brain, she would think they were under attack and would wish desperately that she was at home, because if this was war, she wouldn't want her mother to be alone. Then she would realize it was just Zeek's television and she would fall back asleep. So she was tired and cranky the next morning and just wanted to eat her breakfast cereal, which was honey-sweetened granola, nothing like the stuff she can get at her own house, and Zarina wanted to talk about politics again and how even if she did have her license and enough money to buy a car, which was clearly a hypothetical situation, as she had neither, she would choose to ride a bike instead. Sherry said what bullshit that was, that it was sure easy for Zarina to give up driving when there was little to no chance of her being able to get her hands on a car until she made enough money to buy one for herself, but that if someone was to offer her one, it's not as if she would say, No thanks, I've got my bike.

Zarina snapped at her that not everyone was so fucking apathetic, and that some people actually cared, actually had high morals that they were willing to stick to if it meant helping to preserve the planet for just a little bit longer. Sherry said she just wanted to eat her damn cereal, and pointed out that Zarina had yet to give her a definitive answer on whether or not she should get her hair cut. Zarina snarled that all she cared about was her fucking hair and why didn't she just go fuck herself, which was out of line, and probably meant that Zarina was about to start her period, because that's when they have their worst disagreements.

Sherry decides she's going to just do it. Get her hair cut. She'll take the risk, and that way, she'll know one way or the other if it's going to look OK. Then she can start thinking about something else. Usually she gets her hair cut every four months or so at the Supercuts downtown. All she ever gets is a trim anyway, so what does it matter if the hairdressers are any good? But this is important. It's an important cut, so she calls up a fancy place with a French-sounding name and asks how much they charge. It's fifty dollars for a haircut. Sherry hangs up and feels depressed for the rest of the day. She only has fifteen dollars of her own, not counting the money in her savings account that's for college some day and which she isn't allowed to touch. She can't ask her mother for fifty dollars just to get her hair cut. Her mom gets her hair cut at Supercuts, too, and it never ends up looking very good, so to ask would be selfish.

On Friday night, Sherry asks her mom to give her a ride over to Frisco's house. Frisco is her other best friend. He keeps his hair in a sharp Mohawk that he stains a variety of colors with Easter-egg dye because he can't afford real dye. If she was to ask Frisco for an opinion, he would just tell her that to spend more than three dollars on your own hair is consumerist and lame, and that she should just let him have a go at it with his electric razor. Which is why she is glad she has more than one best friend, and also why she decides to go over to Frisco's house. Zarina hasn't been speaking to her for the entire week, and she has been forced to endure the daily humiliation of a public-school education largely on her own.

Without Zarina to help her pass the time, Sherry becomes incapable of expressing her boredom. The depth and tangibility of it. She can almost smell it, somewhere between the stale, sour stench of someone else's sweat and a rotten cherry. It lies heavily on her, and though she only weighs one hundred and twenty pounds, it's as if her flesh is made of brick. Sometimes, especially when she is at school, she gets so sick of being told what to do, so incredibly sick of the senseless information that her teachers continue to shovel down her throat like tasteless gravel, she feels as if she could start a fire with her own rage. It's been a bad week. She is ready to go under the blade.

Frisco's grandmother and Sherry's mom talk for a while in the living room. Apparently Sherry is not the only one feeling desperate this week; the adults decide that they both need to get out and why don't they go to the movies together? Sherry's mom, whose name is Ellen, hasn't had a date in seven months, and Frisco's grandmother, whose name is Bianca, is Catholic and still dresses in black even though her husband died about ten years ago. As far as Sherry is aware, she has never even had a date. Ellen and Bianca laugh about this together, how they might as well just join a nunnery for all their luck with men, but their laughter is the kind that doesn't sound like very much fun. Then they each have a glass of port, and they laugh some more, in a giggly, girlish way, not so strained. Frisco and Sherry sit on the couch and eye the bottle of port.

"Do you kids want to come?" Bianca asks. She stands up, straightens her skirt, and dabs at the corners of her eyes with a piece of tissue she pulls from the pocket of her skirt.

Sherry and Frisco look at each other. They both know that it is important to react with the correct inflection. If they sound too dismissive, too eager to be alone, then Ellen and Bianca will suspect something and insist that they come. But if they are ingratiating, sound loving and caring enough, like they really want Ellen and Bianca to go have a good time, but they would prefer just to rest at Frisco's house, have some pizza, and maybe watch TV, then Ellen and Bianca will leave without complaining that Sherry and Frisco don't ever want to do anything with them, or that they are up to no good. "Naw," Frisco says, "we'll just kick it here. There's a show on TV we want to watch." He smiles beneath his Mohawk, his special grownup-appeasing smile, the one he uses on Sherry's mother when she begins to show unease at his appearance, the one he uses on his grandmother when she tries to force him to go to church.

"Yeah," Sherry says. She almost slips up and says, You guys will probably want to see something stupid, anyway. This would be the wrong thing to say, because her mother would take offense, and bring up the fact that they used to go to the movies together all the time and now they never do, so she stops herself and says, "Besides, Frisco and I have this project due for school on Monday. We should work on it. Right, Frisco?"

Frisco agrees with Sherry, that they probably should work on this project, as it is due on Monday, and so Bianca and Ellen finish their port, drop the glasses off in the sink, and leave, arm in arm. Bianca and Ellen don't do things together very often, only when Ellen is really desperate. Otherwise she thinks that Bianca is too much of a Catholic to make very good company. Not that she doesn't admire Bianca, the way she took Frisco in when his parents decided that they preferred crank to parenting, the way she is always involved in community causes, helping the homeless, helping someone. But those priests, Ellen will say to Sherry sometimes, though Sherry wishes she wouldn't because it's just one more bad thing to think about along with the plastic bags. How can she still stand to be a Catholic? Ellen will continue, despite her daughter's blank expression. How can anyone be a Catholic with those priests? It seems there's a new one every other day, some new report of another boy-molester. Ellen isn't an activist by any means; she's just a Democrat, and that's about as far as she takes it, but she does have her scruples, and any religion that shields men who like to molest little boys is not worth even considering, in her book. Sherry agrees with her mother, but she doesn't say so because she would rather not talk about it. Her mother is always trying to talk to her about things she would rather not talk about. It's one of the worst things about their relationship.

The first time Sherry and Zarina and Frisco got drunk, off of some gin they filched from Ellen's liquor cabinet, Frisco started to cry and told them that he had been raped by one of his father's friends when he was six years old and that he had never told anyone. Then he threw up and passed out on the bathroom floor. Zarina and Sherry sat next to him beside the toilet while he snored, his Mohawk limp and ragged. Sherry's teeth were chattering, but neither of them mentioned it. Afterward, when Sherry's mom found the empty bottle, she was grounded for a week and threatened with all sorts of unrealistic punishments, like boarding school and a lifetime under lock and key. Sometimes Zarina and Sherry talk about Frisco's confession in hushed tones. They wonder if they should say anything to Frisco about it, or not; or tell anyone, or not. But they never do. They're not even sure if Frisco remembers telling them, and, they suppose, if he wanted to talk about it, really, he would say something when he wasn't drunk. So Sherry really does not like thinking about Catholics and their church, and how Frisco must feel every time his grandmother tries to force him to go to church again. How he must feel all the time actually, with a secret like that. It's things like that, things like the thought of Frisco being hurt by his father's friend, that make her chest tight and hollow-feeling, that make her think she will never fall in love, never have children, never stop being afraid.

Now here's Ellen off to the movies arm in arm with Bianca, who she has nothing in common with. Ellen's closest friend has recently abandoned her for a love interest that she met online. It seems like everyone is meeting online these days, yet Ellen can't even figure out how to turn on the computer; which means, as far as Ellen can tell, that her chances for a love life are growing farther and farther away by the nanosecond, or something like that. Ellen used to have a nice tight circle of divorced friends, all of them burdened heavily with single parenthood. But times are changing, and most of her newly-divorced friends, though single, have actively-participating ex-husbands. Not like Sherry's father, who abandoned them when Sherry was only two, disappearing into the Alaskan wilderness, either to find his soul or to avoid child-support payments, Sherry has never been quite sure which. And now the friends who've been divorced longer are beginning to remarry, they are getting out there, dating, and meeting men that they actually like, who actually like them. So it is that, at the age of forty-six, Ellen has hit an all-time low, off to the movies on the arm of Frisco's grandmother, because her best friend is in Detroit somewhere meeting up with Mr. Wonderful and she has nothing else to do on a Friday night except beg her daughter to hang out with her or spend the evening at home alone, getting drunk and petting the cat.

As soon as Bianca and Ellen climb into Ellen's '94 Ford sedan, Frisco and Sherry pour themselves generous helpings from the port bottle. If they are going to steal liquor from anyone, Bianca is always the best source, because her eyesight is failing and she has a difficult time remembering how much was in any given bottle to begin with. Sherry and Frisco are free, now that the adults are gone, and they both feel the thrill of being in the house alone. It rushes over them like a nicotine high. They grin at each other and run for the bathroom.

"You sure about this?" Frisco asks. He's cranking some of his punk music on the stereo, music that Sherry doesn't really like but pretends to because Frisco is her best friend and she wants him to think she's as cool as she thinks he is. They are standing in front of the bathroom mirror. The mirror is topped by a wooden plaque of Jesus with blood running down his face from his crown of thorns.

"Can you take Jesus down?" Sherry asks. "He's giving me the creeps."

Frisco stands on tiptoe to take Jesus off his hook and places him face down next to the sink. "There. Just don't let me forget to put it back up or Grandma will kill me. She'll make me go to church every Sunday for a year." He stands behind Sherry and lifts a lock of her shoulder-length hair. "Are you ready?"

Sherry thinks fleetingly of the fifty-dollar haircut she could be getting at the French-sounding salon if she had any kind of life at all. "Yup. Go for it," she says. And Frisco does.

When Bianca and Ellen return, two hours later, Frisco and Sherry are sprawled on the couch watching television. "Oh my God!" Ellen screams, and slaps her hands over her mouth. Ellen is still wearing her work clothes, an inexpensive pants suit that makes her look heavier than she really is, and Sherry notices that the pants are beginning to wrinkle and bag around the knees.

Bianca, whose black kneesocks always begin to slip down her legs around this hour, exposing the pale, dry skin of her calves, throws up her hands in supplication and rolls her eyes in the direction of the Lord. "I'll get you a drink," she says to Ellen, and pats her firmly on the shoulder. "These kids today, there's nothing to be done about it. Nothing to be done."

© 2008 Night Train and respective authors/email support AT nighttrainmagazine.com