I drove through the toylike downtown to carefully streetscaped Wall Street, with its new old-fashioned lights and neatly ordered trees. Everything was very clean, very open. Healthy-looking people smiled. It was like moving through the set of a 1960s TV show of the utopian future. There was a parking space in front of the Heads Up Salon. Someone had even left time on the meter.
A young woman was cutting a man’s hair in the brightly lit interior. “Be right with you,” she called, looking up from her work, beginning to smile. The smile went out and she stepped forward a pace. “Ma’am? Are you all right?”
“Yes. Fine, thank you.”
“You just sit right down and let me bring you some water.”
She was the first stranger I had seen without metal and glass between us in months. I experimented with a smile. “No, really. I just… It was a little warm out there.”
“Well then, if you’re sure? I’ll just finish up here. Won’t take but five minutes.”
I feigned an overwhelming interest in the rows of hair care products lining the shelves above the large plants near the cash register, and she went back to work. After a minute or two, I could breathe normally. I didn’t want to flinch every time the hairdresser or her customer laughed at something the other said. I tried to remember how small talk worked. The weather. The news. I didn’t know any news. What a lovely town this is …? Yes, and What a nice little salon… I could do this.
The customer admired his cut in two mirrors, stood, paid, left.
“Your turn,” the woman announced. I sat in the swiveling chair. We looked at ourselves in the mirror. She ran her fingers casually through my hair. I made myself sit still. “It looks as though it’s been a while.”
“Yes.”
She fingered a few inches thoughtfully. “You’d look great in one of those new, sleek cuts that you just wash and go. But they’re very short.” She cupped both hands around my face, looked at me in the mirror, got suddenly enthusiastic. “I think we should do it! With your eyes and height you could carry it off!”
“I’m game,” I said, and tried a grin, and just like that I went from stranger to conspirator. It was easier than I remembered. A chameleon, Julia had called me. Don’t you ever get lost, pretending to be so many people? I hadn’t understood, then.
“I’m Aud,” I said abruptly. “This is my first trip into Asheville.”
“Oh.” She blinked. “Well, I’m Dree. I’ve lived here since I was two.”
“Dree isn’t a name I’ve heard before,” I said as she led me over to the sinks.
“It’s from India or Pakistan or something. My mom wasn’t sure. Maybe it’s short for something. I tried looking it up once, but couldn’t find it. Lean forward.” She wrapped a thick, soft towel around my shoulders. “My mom was one of those old feminists, you know, who came out here to live on the land in a women’s community.” Slush of water from the tap. Squirt of liquid. “This is chamomile mint.” She held her hand under my nose. It smelled light and young, like Dree. “Lean back.”
The water was warm, the shampoo cold. For some reason it wasn’t as hard to have her touch me, now that she knew my name. Her fingers were very strong and brisk. I wondered who she went home to, whether she washed their hair for them in the shower or bath, if she knew how easy it would be to hit me across the larynx with a shampoo bottle and watch me choke to death. I almost sat up.
“I’m going to use an intensifying conditioner. Like all our products, it’s made from all-natural extracts and not chemicals.”
“Everything is made with chemicals,” I said at random. “Water is a chemical molecule: made of hydrogen and oxygen. The air we breathe, even the food we eat: carbon, nitrogen—”
Her hands had stilled, so I made myself stop, but then I felt her shrug and she laughed. “Okay. So it’s made with naturally occurring stuff, from plants, not things made with a giant chemistry set. Better?”
“Better.”
She finished rinsing my hair, wrapped it efficiently in the towel. “Come over to my station.”
I sat in the chair before the mirror and she combed my hair through and picked up her scissors. “Last chance to say no.”
“Go ahead.”
She pulled wet hair up between her index and middle fingers, like a ribbon, and cut. “Will you be in town for a while?”
“I’ve inherited some property a few miles from here. I’m renovating it.”
Pull, snip. Pull, snip. “To live, or just a vacation home?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“It used to be that you couldn’t get a job around here unless it was as a forest ranger in the park service, or working at Biltmore. At least not year-round. Summer jobs, waiting tables, selling crafts, during tourist season. But then people started to live here.”
“Seems like a nice town.”
She shrugged without missing a beat in her cutting rhythm. “I suppose. People are moving here all the time from Atlanta and other big cities.” Snip, pull, snip. “Tilt your head sideways for me, please. Ken—that’s my brother—works for McCann construction, and he’s never been so busy. They’re building houses as fast as they can nail together two planks. Not just itty-bitty things, either, but monsters with pools and party decks, the whole nine yards.” Snip, pull, snip. “Oh, this is going to look good. Such lovely hair. Bet you’ve never wanted to color it.”
“Can’t say I have.”
“And there’s a bunch of—Hold on while I just lower you a bit. How tall are you, anyway?—bunch of businesses that moved close to town a while ago that just keep getting bigger and bigger. There’s Sonopress, ITT, BASF, all those high-tech places. They’re even going to expand the airport.”
“I didn’t know Asheville had an airport.”
“It’s about as big as my left toe. But like I said, that’s going to change. My mom’s always moaning about how fast everything’s growing.”
Her mother’s opinions carried us until she exchanged the scissors for a hair dryer, which roared to life like an old Norton Commando and effectively put a stop to all conversation.
“There.” She turned it off, spun my chair this way and that, nodding to herself. “Take a look.” She turned me back to face the mirror.
“It looks great.”
“I think it works,” she said complacently, and hummed to herself as she pulled off my towel and brushed a few stray hairs from my collar.
She went behind the cash register. “Would you like some product—some of that conditioner? Then that’ll be just thirty-five dollars.”
She zipped my card through the magnetic reader and the receipt churned silently from its machine. I added in a good tip and signed.
“That cut should be trimmed every six to eight weeks, so I’ll expect you back before too long.”
“I’ll be here.” And then I was outside, with the sun warm on my newly exposed neck, and feeling hungry. I started walking.
The heart of downtown Asheville looks as though some mad city planner scooped up half the art deco buildings in Miami, dumped them at random points around a small town square, then stuck in a fountain for pretty, along with a few postmodern structures whose only apparent aesthetic purpose was to reflect in their green glass the older, more substantial buildings. Everything was achingly clean.
As I moved more or less east through the streets, the character of the passersby gradually changed from individual people striding purposefully on everyday errands to that amble, stop, gawk-while-we-hold-hands-and-block-the-street pattern of the tourist.