“It‘s the magic of plants,” I say.
She shakes her head no in some disbelief.
“Yes,” I whisper. “It’s henna. It will make your hair beautiful, silky, soft.”
She smiles slightly. She can’t help being a little amused. She has been awakened for this, she says, forced down the cold hallway into this cold room for this?
“That’s right,” I say.
“An appointment at the beauty parlor? Jesus, Vanessa — the magic of plants — what’s wrong with you?”
“I’m not kidding,” I say. “You’ll feel better.”
I put on a pair of rubber gloves. She just stares.
“This is some outfit,” she says. I am standing in my underwear, rubber gloves on up to my elbows.
“Shh,” I say, dipping my hand into the warm glass jar, the warm paste of plants. I smooth it on, beginning at the roots and gradually working down.
“I like this,” she smiles. “This isn’t as bad as I thought.”
I rub the henna into her hair. I feel the bones of her skull, the line of her neck. I touch her lovely curving back. I cradle her head, feel its bumps. I find my mind drifting. I find myself thinking that I would like to hold this head forever. I work more diligently.
“This feels good,” she says. “Do I get a mud pack next?”
“I wonder how you’ll look as a redhead,” I say.
“What?”
“Well, will I like you as a redhead? Want to hear a redhead’s stories? Want to sing Billie Holiday songs with one? You know.”
“You’d better not make me a redhead.”
“Didn’t they have I Love Lucy in Venezuela?”
She grins.
“Lucy, Lucy!” I say.
“Yes, Ricky?” she shouts and then does Ricky’s part, too, in the Spanish I love to hear.
She becomes weary, bone-tired, suddenly. “Don’t make me a redhead,” she says sternly.
“Don’t worry. We won’t leave it in long.”
Her head is nearly completely covered now. The smell of henna fills the bathroom. It smells of luck to me, of long life.
“Shall we henna this?” she says, touching the fine hair under my arms. She laughs. “Let me have those gloves.” I submerge them in water. She takes them off my hands and puts them on.
“Will I like a redhead?” she asks as she puts her hand into the jar. “This stuff feels good,” she says. Delicately she applies the paste to each tiny hair, and the plant warmth radiates through my body.
“I think I will like a redhead,” she says.
“It tickles,” I say.
“It’s not working if it doesn’t tickle,” she says. I step back for a second.
We are so at ease with each other at this moment, so happy, so much ourselves here, green everywhere, so natural, that we almost forget that this all must be strictly timed, that we must watch the clock, that it cannot go on forever.
She turns to me abruptly as if she can read my thoughts. Her hands are covered with henna. I’m turning away from her when she grabs my arm, leaving her large handprint. Her eyes are black and fierce. Her hair is plastered to her head, a warrior’s ancient helmet. She’s hurting me. “Don’t make me love you,” she says bitterly. “Vanessa, please — don’t make me love you,” she begs.
Part Five
On the train home, on the way to the last Christmas in that string of Christmases, where was the sign, the clue? The impossible blizzard, the closed road, the red bird in the snow, the man in the black coat? Where was the symbol that in its perfection would have told us to prolong our gazes, extend our thank-yous, hold our embraces a moment longer?
We were all students on that train, it seemed — exhausted students, silly students, students in love — nothing unusual, and as the train pulled out of Poughkeepsie and followed the frozen Hudson toward New York, some talked of the exams which in their minds they were still taking, again and again, perfecting each answer. Others slept. Some must have dreamt of home. I was thinking of Marta who was Hying now into a different winter. Henna still stained my hands and arms. I had made no attempt to get it off. It would be a month’s separation.
Snow had begun to fall. The snow wrapped around the old train like the wings of an angel, and my thoughts shifted to my mother. I was flying headlong through the December night into her favorite season. It was the only time of year when she could lift herself out of the pull of her work and become for a month someone quite different. Some star rose up in her, a perfect, luminous shape, and she seemed to us intensely happy as she shopped and baked and wrapped presents and mailed cards. We had seen it many times now. Each year my father would follow her around asking her not to push herself so hard, begging her to rest, reminding her how easily she tired. December was almost always followed by a January filled with misgivings, depression, lack of focus, lack of feeling sometimes — sometimes worse. She never listened to my father. “It’s Christmas!” she would say, as if that explained everything, and she would continue her frenzied preparation. “Shoo!” she’d say to my father as he persisted. “Shoo, Michael.” These words always bothered me, the way she batted him away, the way she wiped her brow, though it has taken me a long time to figure out why.
For one month each year my mother and my grandmother would become friends. They sat side by side, putting cloves in oranges, hanging boughs of pine, discussing the Christmas Eve dinner. Each December my mother tried to assume some of those practical, worldly mannerisms. There they sat, the two of them, contented, shoulder to shoulder in our kitchen one week before Christmas — my grandmother laughing with the woman who had ruined her son’s life, and my mother festive, manic, in a flowered apron, asking my father, of all things, to be sensible. Journeying in opposite ways around the world, each year they met for a month on some magic, neutral ground where they embraced and forgave. My mother must have missed her own mother very much; she clung so tightly to my grandmother’s rigid life.
There were other miracles: the dark house transformed magically into a house of happiness and light, a place where gingerbread men walked from the warm oven in happy rows, a house that rang with laughter and music and bells, a house where a perpetual fire burned, giving a dramatic warmth, the smell of pine flooding the whole living room.
The star that rose up in my mother at Christmas seemed to hang over our house, protecting us. We were all happy, I am sure of it, even Father. He would sit for hours at the piano and play the songs of the season, asking for requests.
“We Three Kings,” Fletcher shouted from another room.
“Un Flambeau, Jeannette, Isabelle,” my mother cried.
“Oh, please play ‘White Christmas,’” I would sigh. I would sit on the piano bench next to him and turn the pages when he nodded. Often he would slow it the hard parts to ensure he touched the right notes. His touch was tentative, is in life. I watched his hand as he reached his long finger up to a black key where it lingered for a moment and then pulled back. For hours I would sit lext to him, watching him, listening to his halting Yuletide songs.
“We’re quite a team, you and I,” he would smile when he was finally done, touching my back lightly, applying just the slightest pressure. He looked into he other room, lost in some melancholy melody—“Away in a Manger” or “Silent Night.” I could feel the snowy bones of his hand still on my back even is I was losing him. I looked into his eyes, those remote, cold fields. I studied them hard as I tried to comprehend the mystery of love, for, as we sat there on he piano bench — my father, far, far off and then back, then far off again, then returning to discuss his ideas for a hot punch with port — I loved him fiercely, inreasonably.