LESS BULK, MORE HEIGHT by Linda McCullough Moore
Driving down Main Street, half of which is boarded up and half of which is plastic-fronted, I can only avert my eyes. Time was, this town was something. Leonardson’s Fine Clothing, with full-length mink coats in the front window, The General Pershing Hotel, with an original oil portrait in the leather-seated lobby and white linen on the tables, even in the coffee shop, The Avenue Theater where the Vienna Choir Boys came to sing, for pity sakes. We had four 5&10s. In a row. You could spend all afternoon downtown just looking. I’ve come to town to see my enemy, my sister Eileen, one more time before I die. They say I’ve got six months. They say, Settle your affairs.
I decide to walk a bit and spy a parking spot, right in front of the McDonnell Funeral Home. Funeral parlor was the term when I was growing up. Home. Parlor. Take your pick. They both euphemize the thing to death. I can see from where I sit there’s the better part of an hour left on the parking meter. Might as well use it up. I crawl out and calculate my options. There’s a boutiquey dress shop on one side and a pet shop on the other and in the middle, the funeral home. I walk over to the door. If it’s open, I go in. If it’s not, I go next door and get a party dress, and two doors down, I’ll buy Eileen a snake. I’ve been making choices just this thoughtfully for my whole life.
The funeral home is open, but nobody seems to be minding the store as I step inside the quiet vestibule. I tiptoe back a long, carpeted corridor. Nobody’s turned the soft lights on, the softer music, they’ve not unleashed the secret scents. From somewhere in the back, I hear a radio, rock music, maybe rap or punk – whichever one it is that makes you feel so good the second that somebody turns it off. At the end of the hallway a small, free-standing stand bears a PRIVATE sign I am inclined to disregard, but on my right I see through the large doorway, a soft satin-covered casket. I walk in as respectfully as my sore arches will allow. The body, if I’ve got the right euphemism here, is a woman. An elderly woman, for all the powder and crimped curls. She must have been well over ninety. Well. That’s all right then. Not necessarily for her, but for the rest of us. I subscribe to the crafted myth that just so long as you are very old, it is okay to die. Still, she’s so alone.
Where are her people? There should at least be organ music padding the beige walls, lowering the too-high ceiling. I look down at her, but can’t work up a smidgen of reaction. The room seems emptier than if she were not there.
On a side table there is a little religious display. My first thought is that it’s things for sale. A white Bible, a prayer book, a rosary, and what I take to be a picture of Jesus. It looks like Mary combed His hair.
I walk over to the guest book, read the name. Miriam VanGorkin. I don’t believe it. I had a woman named Miriam VanGorkin for tenth grade English in this town, a hundred years ago. This town is littered with the remnants of my life. Miriam VanGorkin had forgotten more vocabulary words than most people ever learn. She cast me in the school play, Cheaper by the Dozen, as the maid. I had to borrow an authentic maid’s uniform from 1920 and stay two hours after school for practice for eight weeks. I had one line: “You can’t have ice cream till you finish your lima beans.” On opening night I crept onto the stage in my antique get-up and my talcum-powdered hair and said, “You can’t have your lima beans until you finish your ice cream,” and kicked myself the whole way home. And that’s what I remember of Miriam VanGorkin. That and the vocabulary word, maudlin. There should be more than that.
A vacuum cleaner starts up in the hallway. I stick my head around the doorway and a dressed-up woman in high heels switches off the loud machine.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t know anyone was here.”
“No, that’s all right,” I say. “It’s good. I like the sound. Mrs. VanGorkin was my English teacher in tenth grade. I just stepped in.”
“That’s real nice you kept in touch for all that time.” I let it go. I hate to disillusion people.
“I used to live in this town,” I say stupidly. “This used to be Paul Short’s, and then Mahoney’s.”
“Before my time,” she says. “I just moved here last summer. Started working here in June.”
“How do you like it?”
“It’s all right. Not much night life in this town.”
“You should have seen it fifty years ago. We didn’t get pizza till 1965. My junior high school was built in 1870. The library used to close at four o’clock.” She’s stumped.
“So, what’s it like?” I say. “Your work, I mean.” If you stay at home, or only go on errands that have reasons, you never realize the world is full up with people out there doing every sort of thing.
“I do the make-up, the hair, some facial build-up, clothes – help people choose – and then I do a lot of the reception, phone, the non-cosmetic stuff.”
“So you’re a hairdresser, then?”
“Was. I mean, I did go to beauty school.”
“I’ve been thinking,” I say, “I should do something different with my hair. I’ve always cut it myself, which if you look at me is not hard to believe.”
“You need less bulk. Here and here.” She reaches out and scrunches up the two sides of my hair. “And a little height on top.”
“I suppose it’s crazy, I mean, to even ask if it might be possible for . . .”
The front door opens with a sudden suck of air and a black-suited man slides down the corridor towards us. He looks like he’s on one of those moving floors they have in airports. He doesn’t seem to bend his knees.
“Hello,” he says. He’s very somber. Just in case. “Is Miss Ives helping you?”
She was about to cut my hair, I want to say, but stop myself in case she wants to keep her job.
“I just came in,” I say. “I have someone who’s going to die, and I was wondering about how you do all the arrangements and all.”
“Come right this way.” His voice grows sadder still. I try to imagine him watching TV, laughing at a funny show, cheering at a ball game. It doesn’t work. You wouldn’t want to be his wife. You wouldn’t want to be him.
“Oh, no, thanks,” I say. “I think I found out everything I need to know. Thank you.”
Once back out on the street, I breathe in the nicest bit of air. Across the street I see a beauty shop, HAIRSAY. Walk-ins Welcome, the sign says. My kind of place.
“Less bulky on the sides,” I parrot walking in the door. “More height on top. Please.”
I sit down in a chair and take my glasses off, like I’ve been doing it all my life. They treat me like a regular, make pointed comments on the weather and the news, and chat among themselves like we’re all friends. What’s more, they do just what the lady said. Snip. Snip. Less bulk. Puff. Puff. More height. Fifteen dollars later I walk out smelling like I’ve been conditioned.
“Thank you,” I call out. “I might come back some time.”
“You’d better, girl.”
I cross the street, walk past the dress boutique, don’t even nod in the direction of McDonnell’s, but head straight for the pet shop. I’ll buy Eileen a cat. She will be so surprised.
Linda McCullough Moore is the author of a novel, The Distance Between (Soho), written as Eliza Osborne. “Less Bulk, More Height” is taken from Moore’s novel in progress, Worldenough and Time, from which another excerpt appears in Queen’s Quarterly. This is her fourth appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.