Why had she picked me? I wondered. What in my demeanor provoked her?
“I want today to be the day you decided to say yes.” She slapped her palm against the table. It was a slap of excitement-her fury was gone-and it made me think of Aspeth; if Aspeth had witnessed this scene, this would be a gesture she’d imitate later, the fervor of it. Even if I didn’t know the reason, I was glad that Ms. Moray had chosen me to freak out on because I would only tell Martha about it, I wouldn’t spread it all around the school. “Will today be the day?” she asked.
I swallowed. “Okay.”
“You don’t sound certain.”
I was supposed to say Yes!–to really shout it-but I didn’t. It wasn’t that I was unwilling to humor her, more that I was unwilling to lie. Did she actually think, if I cried out enthusiastically, that it would mean anything? Wasn’t she a little old to believe that a person could transform her outlook in the span of ten minutes? Before, her comments had seemed like a misunderstanding of me, but they’d had a relationship, even in their inaccuracy, to my life. This part of her presentation had nothing to do with me at all; she was acting like a football coach, or a motivational speaker. I’d had this thought before but never explicitly and never with sadness rather than disdain. As I looked at her agitated, hopeful face, I thought, You’re not that smart.
She came to my dorm that night, knocking on the door around nine o’clock. Martha was at the library, and I was eating graham crackers and reading Glamour. She didn’t wait for me to open the door but turned the knob herself and stepped inside. Seeing her in the threshold was both surprising and perfectly natural-since I’d left her classroom, my head had been pretty much continuously buzzing with pieces of our conversation, and her presence felt merely like the physical manifestation of what I’d already been imagining.
“I’m not interrupting, am I?” she said.
I stopped chewing. “No.”
“Here’s what I want.” I could feel the energy coming off her body-she’d had an idea, she’d decided something, she’d walked briskly through the cold air across campus-and how it contrasted with my own inertia, my bad posture, the crumbs dusting the front of my shirt. I sat up straighter.
“I want you to cut my hair,” she said. “I’ll give you a grade for it. And that’s how you can make up the paper. Whatever grade I give you for the haircut replaces the F.”
I looked at her and felt, suddenly, extremely tired.
“How’s that for a deal?” she said.
“Um, okay.” Of course I was going back on my vow to stop cutting hair. She was my teacher, and I had no choice, but even if it had been someone else, another student, I still wouldn’t have said no, and I didn’t over the next few months. For a while, I kept saying yes and then I’d say, What about in a few days? and I wouldn’t follow up, and sometimes I’d say, You know, your hair looks kind of complicated and I wouldn’t want to mess it up. Still, the last haircut I gave wasn’t until well into my junior year.
Ms. Moray grinned. “You’ll see that this is no favor on my part. My hair desperately needs to be cut.”
I hesitated. “You want me to do it now?”
“That’d be great. I brought the tools.” She reached into her bag, took out a brush and a pair of scissors-of all the people whose hair I cut, she was the only one who ever provided her own-and held them up. “I imagine these’ll do the trick. Should we adjourn to the bathroom?”
It wouldn’t have occurred to me, but I was relieved by the suggestion; having her in my room made me uneasy.
I carried a chair into the bathroom and set it on the tile floor between the stalls and the row of sinks. Ms. Moray sat. I stood behind her, holding one of Martha’s towels. It would be weird to put it on her, to pat her shoulders or touch her throat. I walked in front of her and handed her the towel. “Here,” I said. “So the hair doesn’t get all over you.”
“Ah,” she said. “Very thoughtful. Excellent customer service, Ms. Fiora. Should I be getting my hair wet?”
“You don’t need to.” Standing behind her, I told myself that hair was just hair. I could pretend she was someone else.
She bent her neck forward. I saw that she had a mole, a tiny tan bubble just below her hairline, and I felt a wave of repulsion. I could smell her hair, a distinct human smell, not the perfume of Aspeth’s shampoo. At the crown of Ms. Moray’s head, the hair was clumped together in darker, moist-looking bunches. Either she hadn’t washed it lately, or it got greasy fast-probably, to be fair, it got greasy fast, because her face was greasy, too. I began to brush. Ms. Moray’s hair was thick, thicker than it looked, which meant it would take longer to cut. But I would be careful, I wouldn’t rush it. The situation called for thoroughness-the fact that I was capable of doing this well made doing it well an obligation.
We didn’t speak. I think she’d have liked to, but I gave her no encouragement, and as the minutes passed, I could feel her becoming calmer, settling into the lull of her own stillness. I did the back, the right side, the left, then came to the front and made sure it looked even. I brushed it all once more, to see if there were any stray long pieces. It was 9:45, then 9:50, and I could hear people returning to the dorm for curfew at ten. What was Ms. Moray thinking as I cut her hair? She was twenty-two years old then-I found this out later in the year because in March, she brought us cupcakes for her twenty-third birthday-and her mind was a city I couldn’t yet imagine.
But later I could imagine it; I could see her as having been in a clearly recognizable stage of her life. She was a young woman who had moved alone to a different part of the country, and she must have been acutely conscious of all these factors-that she was young, that she was a woman, that she was alone; her happiness, if she was happy (I have no idea if Ms. Moray was happy), must have felt so tenuous. This is why, looking back, I am almost sure that she bought the silver book pin for herself. To have done so would have been the act of someone trying very hard. On the afternoons when I used to gaze at it, fastened to her button-down shirts or turtleneck sweaters, while she sat at the head of the table or stood at the chalkboard, when I thought of all the ways she might have obtained the pin, that’s the one possibility that didn’t occur to me. To think it would have seemed unbearably depressing, it would have seemed pathetic (it is, of course, a mark of my own youth at the time that to try too hard struck me as so sad, as if the world were not full of many greater sorrows), and it might have elicited from me true and continuous sympathy instead of mere intermittent pangs.
When the haircut was finished, Ms. Moray turned from side to side in front of the mirror. She said, “This is great, Lee. I see what all the fuss is about.” Before she left, we stood facing each other in the hall outside the bathroom, and she said, “Really, I can’t thank you enough.” I could tell that she was considering hugging me, and I willed her not to.
I would not want to see her now, I would not want to apologize to or thank her, I do not believe she influenced my life in any lasting way, as the best teachers are supposed to do. But something about her is haunting to me: perhaps her blend of bravado and sincerity, perhaps the mystery of what happened to her next (as far as I know, no one from Ault was ever in touch with her after she left), perhaps only her mistakes because she made so many.
For the haircut, as I had known she would, she gave me an A.
5. Parents’ Weekend
JUNIOR FALL
W hen I entered the dining hall, I saw that it was as quiet and empty as on a Sunday morning, though actually it was just after six on Friday night. In the section where juniors sat, only one table was occupied, and even that was only half full. I set down my tray between Sin-Jun and Nick Chafee, the blond, not especially handsome guy whose grandparents had started the Chafee Museums in Philadelphia and San Francisco. Across the table sat Rufina Sanchez and Maria Oldega, who were the only Latina girls in our class besides Conchita and were roommates and best friends. Rufina had long wild black hair and swollen lips and dark, thin, arched eyebrows over big eyes, and she wore tight jeans and tight shirts. Maria wasn’t nearly as pretty, and she was heavier, though she, too, wore tight clothes. Also, she wasn’t deferential toward Rufina, she didn’t talk less in groups, and that was something about her that had always impressed me.