Under the bangs her dark eyes did not seem to stare so. Her whole face seemed to shorten, and the long cheekbones took on a proper proportion, looked almost interesting. She hardly knew herself. Quickly, eagerly, she wet her hair to keep it in place, found Aunt Bett’s scissors, and began to cut bangs straight across her forehead.
When she was finished, the reflection that looked back at her was completely new. For the first time in her life she liked the way she looked. She stood staring at herself, then she began to cut the back, making a curving line at mid-neck. Her hair fell away to the basin… .
… but it was not the basin. It was a dresser, her hair lay in rusty hanks across a red dresser scarf. She was in the red bedroom staring at her reflection in the gold-framed mirror, and the scissors in her hand were not Aunt Bett’s big shears but a small, delicate pair, filigreed with gold. She laid them down and stared at them with horror. To have cut her hair with something —something—the scissors lay across the lengths of her hair, and there were lengths of hair on the oriental carpet. She was not wearing her old blue robe, but white silk pajamas. She stared at her reflection; she examined her hands, felt the dresser and the texture of the scarf, and turned to study the room. Why was this time so unlike the others? She turned back to the mirror and saw the panic in her face… .
… then pounding on the bathroom door made her jump. She was back in the bathroom, opening the door to let Marylou come in. Her hair lay scattered across the bathroom rug, and in the basin.
“You could be neater,” Marylou said, brushing past her. “You could have put a paper down. Let me look.” She stared at Bethany with what was real surprise. “I like it,” she said slowly. “Why you’re—you’re almost a different person.”
Chapter 6
Colin’s hands were black from polishing silver, and there was a black streak across his chin; he stood gazing remotely out the kitchen window, then sighed. “If we had hamburgers in the yard,” he said absently, “I wouldn’t have to polish all this stuff. Why do we have to for Justin anyway?”
“Aunt Justin,” Aunt Bett said. “When you’re done, wash those forks and dry them real well. And,” she flung back, her head in the refrigerator, “get the platter down from the top shelf.”
Bethany laid the white linen cloth on the table and began to unfold it one section at a time, thinking of last night, of her first date with Reid, a date so casually asked for, as if he had asked her to hand him a bridle from the tackroom; and it had been as casually accepted, her heart thudding underneath. She turned the last section of the cloth, making it fall down over the edges of the table, and began to smooth out the creases with her hands, thinking of walking with Reid under the yellow street lights with the smell of crushed eucalyptus leaves all around them, stopping to watch a little cat leap at moths under the last street light, coming back on the other side of the street to have a soda. She had tried, during the movie, to get some thought from him but she could not, and had sat in the darkness wondering if he would kiss her good night. It would be her first kiss, and she knew she wanted him to, she had been dizzy with it really, she could think of nothing else. Did he feel it too? He must feel something, how could he not? And yet she couldn’t tell. Did he look at her differently? He was very solemn, but Reid was always solemn, when he did smile it made her weak and happy. And when at last he kissed her, in the darkness of Aunt Bett’s front porch, she felt as unattached to the world as she did when she was flung between two worlds, unattached and confused with the feelings that rose in her.
She had gone to sleep in a delicious haze. How come she had known Reid all her life and had just now discovered him? Did cutting her hair make him think of her differently? Even Jack had noticed, raising an eyebrow and whistling softly when she met him on the street. And her reflection in the store windows, and in her own mirror, made her tingle with pleasure.
She laid the silver out, and the good china, and the special glasses for water, and wished there were flowers, blue flowers to match the willow patterned china. But there were flowers, for when Justin arrived she had a handful of batchelor buttons gathered along the fields, their stems wrapped in her wet handkerchief. They were as blue as Justin’s eyes. It was good to see Justin, very good. Bethany took the flowers, and Justin’s jacket, glancing, puzzled, at the red patch pockets with their appliques of birds. She felt as if she recognized them. Well, maybe she had seen Justin wear it before. She looked back at Justin herself, Justin who looked so much like Mama. Really, it was not that they looked alike, but that they were alike somehow, light-boned, with a simple grace of movement that was the same. Where Mama’s hair had been brown and her skin tanned, Justin’s hair was blond and her skin always seemed transparent, with tiny peach-colored veins that, seen from a little distance, made a peach-colored glow, very scrubbed looking. And yet, beneath Justin’s brightness you could often sense something withdrawn, something kept apart. That was not like Mama.
Bethany tried to imagine Justin and Mama as children, two little girls running on the shore. They had been so much younger than Aunt Bett and Aunt Selma, and Justin’s sister Kathleen. “Two muddy, disgraceful little girls,” Aunt Bett said at dinner. “You and Marjory, dirty-faced tomboys. You never did like to wear dresses.
And Kathleen was nearly as bad, Mama used to say your older sister should be a better influence on you and not in pants all the time. But at least Kathleen was cleaner.”
“You and Selma tried so hard to get us into dresses,” Justin said. “And hair ribbons! I can remember you chasing Marjory and me, and even Kathleen, with hair ribbons.”
Bethany grinned. It was a story Mama had told her often, how Bett and Selma had tried to make ladies of their own younger sister and of Justin, both of whom preferred Levi’s to dresses, and mud to tea parties.
But Aunt Bett did not see the humor in it. “You know it worried Mama, Justin, to have Marjory always dressed like a boy. And she never could do anything with Marjory as long as you were in it with her. Papa only egged her on as bad as Uncle Zebulon did.” Justin’s mother had died when Justin was four, and Zebulon had raised her and her older sister Kathleen the way he thought girls ought to be raised—a far cry from the view Aunt Bett’s mother took of the matter, even if she was Zebulon’s own sister. Marjory, being so much younger than Bett and Selma, had clung more to Justin than to her own sisters.
“But the worst thing of all,” Aunt Bett said indignantly, “was when Zebulon used to slip Marjory out the window at night to look at the stars and build bonfires ! A child of six! If I’d known about it then—”
“If you’d known about it, you’d have told on us,” Justin said simply.
“Well I never did understand why he did it. What if the child had been hurt, out there in the night, what would he have said—”
Bethany wondered privately if Aunt Bett was jealous of those long ago times.
“Oh, I think your father knew, don’t you, Bett?” Justin winked at Bethany. “Father said Marjory needed something secret and all her own, without rules, just a wild free thing—to grow on. Maybe because she was so much younger. Maybe because she was different—” she said softly. “A child—just a child who needed those things.” Bethany could see Mama, the smallest, the most vulnerable, holding that one secret thing close.
She must have shown her feelings very plainly, for Uncle Jimmie was looking at her with a shy, almost secret, expression. “Justin and your mother used to ride on the beach,” he said softly. “I can remember standing among the dunes where they wouldn’t see me, a great hulk of a boy, watching those two little girls no bigger than puffs of smoke galloping along the beach, and feeling awash with jealousy.”
Justin smiled. “Mr. Grady taught us, he was a good teacher. I feel as if the village wouldn’t be the same without him.” And, at Bethany’s look of surprise, “You must have known he taught your mother to ride.”