Blonde
by Isabel Zhu
My hair is black. Just plain black. Sometimes, if I step into the sunlight, some of the strands pretend that they’re brown, but I’m never in the sun long enough to have it last. I’ve never been one to stay in the sun.
I was forbidden to ever colour my hair, let alone ask about it. My mother gave me a haircut every second Saturday of the month, sitting me down on the stool in the kitchen with an apron draped over my back. The radio would blare words I initially couldn’t understand, but she said it was good for me to listen, and eventually I did learn. While I listened to the news, she’d grab together strands of my hair, pulling my head along with it. Her fingers were long and delicate but capable of such a tight grasp. I never fought against it though. In Mom’s house, you didn’t.
She always gave me the same haircut. My bangs straight across my eyebrows and the rest unevenly tumbling around my shoulders. I saw my reflection in old photos of her around the house, her body fine and her skin not yet marked with lines of the years. Her face wore my hairdo, with the same bangs and the same uneven ends. Just as she cut my hair, her mother cut hers, she told me. Did this hair belong to her? Had she given it to me, bestowed like a family heirloom?
In ninth grade the world seemed to spin without me. The clothes you wore to sit in the hallway near the gym became items only people with a mother and a father could afford; at least that’s what my mother told me. Same thing went with the food in the cafeteria. My mother would slam cabinets after I came home with an uneaten packed lunch, even if I told her I hadn’t been hungry. She never said I was ungrateful, but she made me feel like I was. I wasn’t being ungrateful, I would try to say in words she would understand. She never could. She never tried to.
In eleventh grade, I felt like I was being spun. I saw Helen for the first time when I was in math class; a class I was expected to do well in, which fortunately I did. She seemed to float around whatever room she was in, and every time she moved, the world would be glad to stand still for her. She played on the soccer team and had been in every school play, but she couldn’t do math for her life. How could I say I minded? If she spoke to me, it was a luxury -- a fleeting moment where I felt rich.
The warmth of her words would follow me around for the rest of the day, and I could go home to the tundra of my room and sit there aching softly with her on my mind and in my heart. Despite the quiet of my room, all I could hear were whispers of her name bouncing off the walls. And as I drifted off to sleep, she would be the last thing I could see. Every inch of her glowing, from her feet all the way up to her champagne blonde hair, sparkling like the drink itself on New Year’s Eve.
It was a torture I was fully complicit in, and it only seemed to grow like a tumour. But, unlike cancer, the cure crept up on me unexpectedly. As I factored some quadratic equation for her, with her hands far too close to mine, our silence was broken.
“So have you ever been to a party?”
The lead in my pencil snapped like a bone. I laughed a little too hard, surprised that she thought I was the party going type, and told her no. Mother expected me in the house by 5 o’clock every day; a party would be breaking my parole orders.
“No, I haven’t.”
Her face lit up in my peripheral vision, a new twinkle in her green eyes.
“Well, you can come around mine on Friday. We’re starting at 9, but later works too.”
Later. This seemed to flow off her tongue so simply, but it felt like a geyser. Was she trying to kill me? But how was she supposed to know? What would Mom say?
“Okay, I’ll be there.”
Friday came like a runaway train. Helen hadn’t forgotten about the offer she had made. All I could do was grin like an idiot when she recited what the activities of the night were to be, and felt my heart sinking deeper and deeper into the recesses of my chest. Readiness was not a word in my vocabulary.
Mom wasn’t at home when I got there. She had written a note and left it on the counter, saying that she would be working late again. Dinner had been left on the stove, lovingly prepared by her hours earlier.
I obeyed the instructions this piece of paper had given me to take the laundry out of the dryer, and I did as prescribed, glancing at the clock on the kitchen wall as I moved from task to task. My movements were heavy; it felt like I had concrete blocks tied to my feet, pulling me back down from the antigravity of anticipation.
My feet were defiant nonetheless. I left at 10 o’clock, locking the door behind me and leaving dinner on the stove. As I walked the streets, laneways illuminated by street lamps, I breathed in the smell of the nighttime. It was cold going into my nose but made me feel warm inside. When I got to her street, I walked right in the middle of the road, the houses that surrounded me so gargantuan they had devoured any room for sidewalks.
I walked up to Helen’s house, a building fully suited to her eminence, and knocked on the door. The hum of a stereo vibrated her front porch beneath my feet. She opened the door, and her face lit up. She leapt onto me and wrapped her arms around me, a gesture so uncharacteristic of our demure interactions in math class.
“I can’t believe you came! I’m so happy you’re here!”
She grabbed my hand and led me in, not giving me time to take off my coat. I was left gawking, almost sick to my stomach over the dripping opulence of her home. The mirror in her foyer probably cost more than my entire kitchen.
Hand in hand, she led me down to the basement, which was packed to the brim with faces that I had acknowledged at school, but had given no thought to me. She handed me a red cup, and grabbed one for herself, flashing that Hollywood smile to everyone and anyone who acknowledged her. But in this sea of people, I was winning. It was my hand that was intertwined with hers.
As the hours grew longer, I settled into bliss. Whatever Helen had been dosing me with was making me feel warm inside. Perhaps it was also the fact that I hadn’t left her side, but the variety of drinks she had been handing to me one after another was definitely the main culprit. Eventually, she turned to me, her hair disheveled and her pupils dilated, but still glowing.
“Let’s go upstairs, it’s so loud down here.” She interrupted herself with her own senseless giggles, but I couldn’t help but join in.
Her bedroom. The multiverse theory had to be true. I watched from the doorway as she flopped down on her bed, babbling sweet nothings like birdsongs, and entered carefully, afraid it would all shatter at any sort of misstep or clumsy movement. Eventually, her murmurings slowed to a stop, and only the quiet hum of downstairs echoed around the room.
I turned away from whatever trinkets on her shelf I was observing, and saw her splayed across her mattress. Her hair was in her face, covering it like a veil. I tiptoed over to her figure, laying there like sleeping Venus, and gently tucked it behind her ear. She stirred as I pulled my hand away, and I basked in all her glory. It left me with a hum that followed me all the way home, and with every tap of my shoes on the middle of the road, my feet moved to the rhythm of contentment.
The door was open when I got home. It was 3 AM and it was wide open. The buzz of my walk home was vanquished by the light that was pouring out my front door into the hallway. The hallway seemed to only grow and shift like a kaleidoscope pattern as I walked towards it. The red and gold good luck symbol that hung on my door would offer me no salvation.
I stared down at the floor as I changed out of my shoes into my house slippers, a tradition that now seemed so foreign after being barefoot at Helen’s. In fact, everything seemed so foreign, every practice that I had never questioned.
I paced into the kitchen, seeing my mother leaning against the counter, her arms crossed. I could always tell by the look on her face what was on her mind, but this time she showed nothing. No indication. I wanted her to scream, but she didn’t. She wouldn’t give me that satisfaction. She only spoke after I had taken a seat on the stool.
“Do you think I’m like what they say?” she inquired flatly.
“What do you mean?” Of all the things she could have said, I had not prepared for this.
“You know, how I’m supposed to be controlling. How I’m supposed to never let you go out, and how I’m supposed to only care about your marks in school and be disappointed when you get bad grades.”
That same sinking feeling in my chest returned. A swell of heat, not warmth, burned behind my eyes. My bones ached and I wanted to pick up the stool I was sitting on and throw it across the room. Instead I just sobbed, tears streaming down my face, steaming as they flowed.
“I’m sorry, 妈妈 (Mama). I should have told you. I don’t know why I didn’t. I was scared.”
“You never bothered to ask. No one ever bothers to.” She paused and smoke seemed to rise from her head.
“That’s why we are treated the way we are. And you’ve become just like the rest of them.”
It snapped off her tongue and stung like a lash from a whip.
My sobs turned violent, and I put my head against the cold countertop, and cradled it in my arms.
I didn’t dare to raise my head, meet her gaze, but I heard her sigh. Her footsteps led out of the room, but stopped momentarily.
“Dinner is on the stove. Goodnight.”
She was gone in the morning, off to work before the sun came up. I spent the day in bed, nursing my hangover, trying to determine when I had become this way. So full of resentment and assumption about my own mother. When had this seed of disgust planted itself? How had I let it blossom?
When she got home, around five, I walked into the kitchen to find the apron and her scissors out on the kitchen counter, the stool pulled into the middle of the room. It was the second Saturday of the month. I looked at her, and she looked back at me. Wordlessly, I took my seat and she draped the apron around me. Her snips were meticulous, but I noticed more hair cascading to the ground than I was used to. After minutes of this, accompanied by the radio blaring Chinese news instead of English news, she handed me the mirror. My hair was shorter than before, and curled around my ears. I got up, still taking it in, when she finally said,
“I wanted to try something different. I hope you’re okay with that.”
I nodded, and ran my fingers through my new hairdo. I was infinitely grateful.
On Monday, Helen ran her fingers through my hair and called me pretty, unaware of how that gave me permission to die happy. As we went about our usual math class routine, she seemed to pause before nervously stuttering,
“I hope I didn’t do anything weird on Friday. I was really happy you were there.”
“You didn’t do anything,” I assured her. “I had a really good time.”
“Good,” her face lit up. “Maybe you can come over again sometime, just you and I.”
I tried not to implode on the spot. “That would be great.”
When I got home, Mom wasn’t there as usual, but it gave me the opportunity to look at those old pictures again. One stood out more than the others; Mom looked to be around twenty, and she was standing in the airport in Shanghai, with two big suitcases, and had the biggest smile across her face.
At this point, she wouldn’t have known that life was going to be hard, and she would work long hours and come home exhausted. But she had hope. She would raise a daughter who, only now, would realize all the sacrifices made for her, and that daughter would be infinitely grateful to her. That daughter is me, and this mother is mine.