grounded back in the bed again, sleeping there. Two blasts as it heads into port. You can set your watch by those horns. Three times a day, you hear the horns as the boat comes back to Salem after each run—at noon and six, and again at midnight, on its last run of the night.
Like the muffs they resemble, the lace pillows were gathered and tied on each end. Traditionally, each pillow also had a pocket, and the women of Ipswich used the pockets to hold their treasures. Some held beautiful bobbins imported from England or Brussels, too precious to ever use. Other pockets held small pieces of finished lace, or herbs, or even small touchstones. Some hid poetry written in the owners hand, or love letters from a suitor, which were read over and over until the parchment began to tear along its creases.
—THE LACE READER’S GUIDE
WHEN I WAKE UP, I look on the bedside table, expecting to find a note. Instead I see my braid where Eva left it last night. Almost waist length the day Eva cut it, today it would reach only to my shoulders. I pick it up. The hair is fine, more like Lyndley’s hair than my own. The length shows bands of color like the rings of a tree, a summer’s sun, a winter’s darkness. At one end is a faded ribbon, tied in a double-knotted bow. At the other, fine hair curling up around it, is a dried-out rubber band Eva put on after she cut the braid from me. It is wound very tight, as if to hold everything still and together.
Hair is full of magic, Eva always says. I don’t know if that’s true for everyone, but at least it’s true for my mother, May.
May would never leave Yellow Dog Island for long. For this reason she didn’t take us to Salem for haircuts, but to a barber in Marble-head who had a shop only a few feet from the public landing.
Old Mr. Dooling always smelled strongly of stale whiskey and fried food and vaguely of camphor. He was likely to wound you anytime before noon. Rumor had it he’d once slashed a kid’s ear right off. My mother insisted she’d never believed that story. Still, May always booked our hair appointments in the afternoons, when the barber’s hands were steadier and his alcohol haze had burned off along with the harbor fog.
May’s haircuts were Marblehead’s version of a magic show. The townie kids used to form lines up and down Front Street to watch as Mr. Dooling pulled the rattail comb through my mother’s hair. With each pull, the comb would snag on something, then stop. As he reached into the mass to unwind the tangle, he would find and remove everything from sea glass to shells to smooth stones. In one particularly matted tangle, he found a sea horse. Once he even found a postcard sent from Tahiti to someone in Beverly Farms. On it were two Polynesian women, bare breasts covered discreetly by long, straight hair. I never figured out if he was sighing because of the girls and their various attributes or because of their straight, untangled hair that—although it might not have yielded treasures like my mother’s—wouldn’t have required a full bottle of conditioner for a single haircut.
The day my mother and I began to break apart was over a haircut—not hers, but mine. My mother had finished. Beezer had gone next, getting the Whiffle Deluxe, which cost $4.99 and came with a tube of stick-up for the front.
I had never liked having my hair cut, partly because of the wharf rats hanging around outside watching the whole thing and partly because Mr. Dooling’s hands shook so much. On one occasion I covered my ears with Band-Aids before we got to town, figuring they’d be harder to lop off if the barber made a mistake. But May caught me and made me remove the bandages.
Although I wasn’t fond of haircuts, they had never actually hurt me until that day. I watched as Mr. Dooling fished the scissors out of the blue gook and wiped them on his apron. The first cut sent a jolt through me like an electric shock. I let out a cry.
“What’s wrong?”
“It hurts!”
“What hurts?” May examined my scalp, my ears. Finding nothing amiss, she asked again. “What hurts?”
“My hair.”
“The hairs on your head?”
“Yes.”
“Individual hairs?”
“I don’t know.”
She examined me again. “You’re fine,” she said, motioning for him to continue.
Mr. Dooling picked up a lock of hair, fumbled, dropped it. He stopped, put down the scissors, wiped his hands on his apron, then reached for the scissors again, this time dropping them on the floor.
“Jesus Christ,” Beezer said. May shot him a look.
The barber went to the back room to get another pair of scissors, unwrapping them from their brown paper and making several practice snips in the air before he reached my side.
I gripped the chair arms, bracing as he picked up another lock of hair. I could hear him breathing. I could feel the chafing of cotton against cotton as his arm reached forward. And then I had what the doctors would later cite as my first full-blown hallucination. Visual and auditory, it was a flash cut to Medusa and thousands of writhing snake hairs. Snakes screaming, still moving as they were cut in half. Screaming so loudly that I couldn’t make them stop; terrible animal screams like the time one of the dogs on our island got its leg caught in the tractor blade. I covered my ears, but the snakes were still screaming…. Then my brother’s face, scared, pale, pulled me back, and I realized that the screaming was coming from me. Beezer was standing in front of me calling my name, calling me back. And suddenly I was out of the chair and lunging for the door.
The group of kids on the porch parted to let me through. Some of the smaller kids were crying. I ran down the stairs, hearing the door behind me open and slam a second time and Beezer yelling for me to wait.
When he reached the Whaler, I already had the bow and stern lines untied, and he had to make a running jump to get into the boat. He landed facedown, his wind knocked out. “Are you okay?” he wheezed.
I couldn’t answer him.
I saw him looking back at May, who was out on the porch with Dooling, arms folded across her chest, just watching us.
I had to choke the engine three times before it caught and started. Then, ignoring the five-miles-per-hour limit, I opened it up, and my brother and I headed out to sea.
We talked only a few times about what had happened that day. May made two ill-fated attempts to get me to see reason, taking me to town once to talk to Eva about it and the other time calling someone at the Museum of Science in Boston and asking him to explain to me that there were no nerve endings in hair and that it couldn’t possibly hurt when it was cut.
Sometimes, when you look back, you can point to a time when your world shifts and heads in another direction. In lace reading this is called the “still point.” Eva says it’s the point around which everything pivots and real patterns start to emerge. The haircut was the still point for my mother and me, the day everything changed. It happened in an instant, a millisecond, the flash of a look, the intake of breath.
For two years no one cut my hair. I went around with one long side and one short.
“You’re being ridiculous,” May said to me once, coming at me with a pair of scissors, attempting to finish the haircut and take back her power. “I won’t have it.” But I didn’t let her near me then or anytime after that.
We had family dinners every night, sandwiches mostly, because May would shop on the docks only once a month when she went to town. The sandwiches were always served in the formal dining room on the good china and were followed by a small Limoges plate of multivitamins, which my mother referred to as “dessert.” This final course could take a long time to finish, because May required us to eat the vitamins with a dessert fork, all the while practicing polite dinner conversation, something she had learned from Eva.