My father furrows his brow for a moment and then nods.
“You’re right,” he says, “you’re absolutely right. Simon Le Bon sucks out the yolk, starts choking, and then Nick Rhodes Heimlich-manuevers Le Bon, who expels the yolk which arcs through the air and settles in a corner of the sky where it begins to throb and radiate, and the video which had heretofore been sepia-toned takes on this incredibly garish, heavily impastoed Van Gogh-at-Aries coloration as they sing the refrain, Spit the sun into the sky / I’m so hard, I think I’ll die! over and over again. It’s Duran Duran. You’re absolutely right.”
He turns back toward me.
“Anyway … it’s as if someone had meticulously sawed around the circumference of this woman’s cranium at about eyebrow-and-ear level and just lifted the top right off. But the really amazing thing is that she has a full head of long brown hair growing directly out of her brain. So apparently her condition was not the result of a freak workplace accident or a sadistic experiment — which is what I’d initially assumed — but the result of a congenital defect. She was either born without enclosing cranial bones or had suffered some sort of massive fontanel drift. And, remarkably, her hair follicles are distributed in a perfectly normal pattern directly on the pia mater of her cerebral cortex. The other beauticians are too squeamish to work on her and, in fact, fled to the pedicure and waxing rooms the minute she walked through the door, so I volunteer. As soon as she’s in the chair, it’s obvious to me that she’s feeling a bit uncomfortable, so the first thing I say is, ‘Meredith, take your eyeglasses off.’
“She’s like, ‘Excuse me?’
“ ‘Take off your glasses.’
“She doffs the thick-lensed violet frames.
“ ‘Did anyone ever tell you how much you resemble Reba McEntire? It’s uncanny.’
“She giggles, blushing. The ice is broken. I intuit immediately that Meredith is a warm, friendly person with a wonderful, understated sexiness. We start talking about what kind of a cut she wants.
“ ‘First of all,’ she says, ‘I’m sick of always having to brush these bangs off my prefrontal lobes.’
“ ‘The bangs have to go,’ I say.
“Meredith explains that she’d like a hairstyle that doesn’t look ‘done.’ She wants to be able to just wash her hair and finger-style it, without needing a brush, because the bristles can apparently nick cerebral arteries and cause slight hemorrhaging and mild dementia. She also wants to be able to let it dry naturally — hair dryers can overheat and sometimes even boil her cerebrospinal fluid. And electric rollers and curling irons are absolutely contraindicated — they tend to induce convulsions.
“I start by trimming off all the extra hair that had been hanging down over Meredith’s shoulders and bring the length up to a point where the hair can curve gently against the sides of her neck. I want a fuller, more luxurious look to her hair, and since she’s got plenty of it, I control the volume with a graduated cut. Meredith’s hair had parted naturally between the cerebral hemispheres, along the superior sagittal sinus. I think a slight asymmetry will create a more sophisticated shape and line, so I sweep her hair over from a side part at the left temporal lobe. This is a very versatile style. It can be tied back for aerobics, worn full and smooth at the office — Meredith is a commercial real estate broker — and then swept up for evening. In other words, there are no limitations to what Meredith can do with this cut, which is exactly right considering her sports activities, her business, her charity benefits — she’s co-chairperson of the Rockland County chapter of the American Acrania and Craniectomy Society — and her busy social life. Meredith’s hair is a very dark, nondescript brown, so I suggest to her that we lighten it. She enthusiastically agrees. I start by coloring in a soft, cool blond to maximize the impact of the wet, pinkish gray tissue of her brain. Then I add a few extra highlights to play off the deep ridges and fissures that corrugate her cortex.
“Meredith is ecstatic about the make-over, but she has one lingering concern.
“ ‘I won’t need barrettes, will I? When I wear them, they put too much pressure here,’ she says, indicating the posterior perisylvian sector of her left hemisphere, ‘and it disrupts my ability to assemble phonemes into words. That can really be a problem when I’m showing property.’
“ ‘No barrettes, clips, combs, hairpins, headbands — that’s the beauty of this style. You wash it, let it dry, run your fingers through it — done. No fuss, no aphasia, no memory loss, no motor impairment. You’re ready to rock.’
“ ‘It’s just perfect!’ she says, turning her head this way and that, as she admires herself in the mirror.
“Before she leaves, we discuss which shampoos and conditioners won’t permeate the blood-brain barrier. She gives me a big kiss, a huge tip, and nearly skips out of the shop, at which point the other beauticians filter back to their stations.
“About two weeks later, I receive a note at the salon from Meredith. It says: ‘The office manager was very, very impressed — if you know what I mean! Some people took a while to notice how different I looked, but all of them love it! You’re THE BEST!’
“And so, son, the point is — any asshole with a Master of Social Work degree can put on a turban and start issuing fatwas about whom you can and whom you can’t mail meat to, but it takes real balls to turn a brunette without a cranium into a blonde.”
I’ve whipped out a pad and pen, and I’m trying to scribble this down as quickly as I can: Any asshole with a Master of Social Work degree … can put on a turban and start issuing fatwas … about whom you can and whom you can’t mail meat to—
And my pen runs out of ink.
“Fuck!” I squawk. “Excuse me, anybody have a pen or a pencil?”
“Here,” says the prison superintendent, reaching into his jacket pocket and handing me a syringe-shaped pen, the bottom half of which is emblazoned with the words New Jersey State Penitentiary at Princeton — Capital Punishment Administrative Segregation Unit, its upper half a transparent, calibrated barrel filled with a viscous glittery blue liquid that undulates back and forth as you tilt it.
“Cool pen!” I exclaim.
“Thanks,” he says. “I get them from the potassium chloride sales rep. It’s one of those ‘put your logo here’ freebies.”
I finish transcribing the maxim — but it takes real balls to turn a brunette without a cranium into a blonde.
And as the superintendent and warden usher me into the witness room, I experience two serendipitous visual thrills.
First, as the warden extends a guiding hand, there’s a slight billowing of fabric at the top of her dress that gives me a sudden glimpse of the etiolated curvature of a breast and then (I catch my breath!) a sliver of a crescent whose slight variance in coloration might indicate — I suspect, I hope! — just maybe (gulp!) the very top of an areola!
(Or perhaps not. My seventh-grader brain could be creating an areola where there is none, my adolescent libido “filling in the blanks,” investing ambiguous retinal input with its own meaning. I may be processing visual stimuli with the little head instead of the big one. In fact, this could be a perfect example of an idiomatic expression that Ms. Frey, my Spanish teacher, taught us: Mirando con el bastón en ves de los bastoncillos y los conos. Seeing with the rod instead of the rods and cones. In other words, this phantom areola might simply be a cathected version of the Kanizsa triangle — a famous optical illusion in which the observer perceives a triangle even though the interconnecting lines forming a triangle are missing — that we just learned about in Mr. Edelman’s biology class. Weird …)