recliner and search, for some moments, for the sweet spot there. She watched as he perched the paper on his paunch and, with both his palms, smoothed the crimped remnants of silvery hair flat against his scalp. His scalp, she saw, silently moving behind him to fix the curtain now, his scalp was even more freckled than her chest. His hands and arms were unpleasantly mottled, too. Golf, she supposed. And no sunscreen. With the light behind his head like this, she could just make out the feathery hairs sprouting from his ears.
Of course, if Stanley looked at her, which he wasn’t doing now and seldom did – he’d have noticed her, well … whiskers. Frannie’s hand moved reflexively to the stubble of her weeks-old chin wax. She’d never mentioned the waxing to him. He’d accuse her of being vain, and he hated vain women. It wasn’t vanity to Frannie, though. It was … maintenance.
And anyhow, she said defensively to the Stanley in her head, she’d never been old before. She was trying to adjust because it felt so foreign. Like adolescence maybe. With wrinkles.
“You still dressing?” he called from behind his paper.
She scurried out of the room and reached for a blouse – any blouse – in the bedroom closet.
“Yes.”
Of course, he hated being old himself. He especially hated his cardiologist, who had pointedly told him he had “to watch.” No salt, no fat, and no Viagra.
Not that Stanley had asked for Viagra.
“No, I won’t,” he belatedly replied. “I won’t ‘spoil my appetite’ – whatever that means – for the thousandth time. I’ll eat again at 1:30 or so. Anyway,” he added triumphantly, “you know Dr. Dietz said several small meals a day.”
Rummaging now for shoes, Frannie heard the self-satisfied rustle-and-snap of his newspaper. Who could argue with the medical establishment, she thought? Not an aging dentist’s wife. But what did “spoiling your appetite” matter anyway in the long run?
And why was she still saying that?
Straightening more slowly this time, she called back, “All right. I’ll give you some chicken for now and make another plate for later. I’m having lunch with Arlene.”
“Oh, you are?” His tenor inched up a notch, edging towards the place where his little-boy whine lived and lay in wait. She imagined him padding toward the bedroom door like Sparky used to do.
Sparky, she hadn’t thought of him in years – what was her problem today?
“What time will you be home?’ he asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe 2:30 or so. Maybe we’ll drop by the St. James’ sale afterward. Pick up something for Deb Barkley. She’s in the hospital, you know.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s the matter?” The swish of the financial section put paid to Deb Barkley. “Well, don’t be too late.”
For her own thousandth time, Frannie wondered why he always said that. He’d be asleep in his chair no matter when she got home, his head against its back, the newspaper fallen to the floor, his mouth open to end-of-day dust motes.
She smoothed the blouse into the tightish waistband of her tweed skirt and ducked back into the kitchen, hurriedly arranging two plates of pale chicken, some steamed broccoli (no butter, no salt) and a piece of blackened Wonder Bread on her nice blue pottery plates, covering it all with clear plastic wrap. She stepped back and admired her work. It looked almost tasty like that. She left one plate on the counter, the other, at the front of the refrigerator, where he couldn’t possibly miss it. She could hear Elizabeth Taylor again, complaining about her spectacularly skintight white bathing suit.
“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,