Heads

You know that’s you he’s making down there! No reaction. He was engrossed in an episode of “30 Rock” on the computer in his lap. Sitting on the bed in the old ‘boy’s’ room that was recently converted in to the ‘guest’ bedroom. He looked comfy in his hoodie and his jeans and white gym socks. In just about the position that he would have been in if his old bed was back in the place it’d sat in for about fifteen years. A creature of habit, he naturally, magnetically was drawn there when ever he sought comfort in his old home. The home of his boyhood and young manhood where he was compelled on some holidays to revisit even though he would have been much more comfortable in his apartment up at school. But his girl had wanted to go home to Brooklyn for Christmas and he didn’t want to stay all by himself in an empty college town, in an empty apartment, cooking for himself andsleeping alone. At least here (though he was still sleeping alone) his dad cooked him his old time favorite foods. He did have to put up with his sister and that was a stiff price to pay. He looked up now that there was a commercial on and there she was standing in the doorway, leaning on the jamb-Did you hear me? I said, that’s you he’s making down there right now. Doesn’t that skizz you out even just a little? Have you looked at those things? She had the look of a complete disgust on her face-eye sockets pinched tight into the bridge of her nose and mouth tightly drawn across at the bottom of her pale white face. Total disgust was an easy expression with a face like that, he thought, especially when you add in the fake diamond pin in her nostril, the rows of studs in the grizzle of each ear, the powder pale face and the jet-black dye in her spiked hair.

So what, he said and started to go back to his program. She came into the room and said So what?! I mean they’re a joke. They’re like cartoons! No, they’re like monster heads that have just enough of the looks of the person he’s trying to make them look like that you can recognize them but it’s not them and it’s creepy! I came in one night and turned on the lights and he’d moved the shelf to right near the door. I nearly crapped my pants! The thought of his sister defecating in her drawers made him smile slightly and that made her even madder. It was the smile that got her. His thin, delicate smile that made everyone trust him and want to be his friend…she hated it. And his hair. The twirl of a cowlick and silky tan-ness and softness that made everyone wish they could have his hair. She could see her own hair in the mirror across the room, stiff with mousse and black as the darkest night, and it never crossed he mind that it could just as easily been soft and warm like his. She was a reaction to her father and her brother and at this particular moment she feared one thing more than death itself-that her father would make a clay sculpture of her one day.

She got no pleasure in standing at the foot of her brother’s bed trying to win him over to her side as if there were a war going on and she was courting an ally. There was no war and she had no reason to fight over anything. Sculpting in clay was her father’s hobby. He used to make furniture, and before that he played what her mom had called ‘ear-flickin’ music which was really just bad bluegrass and one day he’d move on from clay to something else. Right now he was making bad clay busts of people he knew and he was having a hell of a good time of it. In fact he wasn’t really all that bad. If he stuck with it, he thought, he might even get to be really good at it but there was little chance of that. He rarely became great at anything though he was pretty good at a lot of things. He’d worked all his life and put a couple of kids through college. He could fix almost anything, got along with most people and he had the good sense to stay out of the way of trouble most of his life. The problem was his daughter. She was the one person he could always count on for an argument. If he said it looked like a nice day, she’d say it was supposed to rain very soon. If he said blue, she’d say green…the TV shows he watched sucked…his car sucked…everything he did sucked…which would have been okay with him if he could just understand why??? On the other hand, to him, all her friends looked like the cast of the Night of the Living Dead and she sulked a lot and her grades were not good. He knew she smoked and he found empty beer and whiskey bottles under her bed. She didn’t even try to conceal them any more. Some days it was all he could do to keep from kicking her in her tight-black-blue jeaned-sixteen year old ass.

Later in the week she was coming through the garage and on the bench of his little shop she saw it. She had tried not to look at the heads and she didn’t even turn on the light to the garage but there was a spot light with an electric eye that came on automatically when you came into the door. It went off automatically after five minutes so that you never had to turn the light on or off. One of her dad’s innovations, which she actually thought was pretty cool but she’d never admit it to him. She’d hoped to get through the shop without looking at the heads but her eye was drawn to the one closest to the door. It was on the lazy Susan he used to turn the work as he shaped the clay into a head. It sucked her eye to it like a magnet. It was her. The wind left her lungs and she stood transfixed and breathless at a life-sized head and neck that was the spitting image of her except…it wasn’t.

She recognized the eyes and the mouth immediately. They were perfect. The nose was close but not exactly right. The ears were a total miss but looked familiar as did the hair. The hair was soft looking, which must be very hard to do in clay, she thought. It was upswept on one side and there was that family cowlick that had skipped her genetically. She stood there until the light went out. Five minutes. And then she realized that she must have been staring at the thing for a full five minutes and now that the light had gone out she was blind in the dark. She waved her arms wildly until the motion detector re-lit the light and she bounded up the basement stairs yelling at the top of her lungs.

How dare you! Are you crazy? You can’t do that…you can’t use me like that. She looked in the living room and then the den and he was not there. She ran up the steps to the second floor, taking the steps two at a time and banged with her fist on the door of his bedroom. Just a minute. Just a minute. She could hear him inside. He opened the door and he was wearing a towel around his waist and rubbing his wet hair with a different bright, white towel. What’s up…what’s the emergency? He was smiling but she was mad. Spitting mad. Just who do you think you are-God? You can’t just use me for one of your crazy heads. I won’t put up with it. You might be able to use your son or your buddy or your dead uncle but you can’t use me like that…The spit was actually starting to form a light foamy froth on the corners of her mouth. Spitting mad.

Whoa! he said. Take it easy. Let me get dressed and I’ll come out and we can talk about it. He was almost laughing as he slowly closed the door. She saw him smirk and it made her even madder-if that was possible-and she thought briefly about going right down there and smashing that God-damned thing. She waited right outside the bedroom door and when he came out he’d successfully wiped the smirk off his face and he tried to take her elbow and lead her gently down to the first floor and then to the basement. She was having none of it, pulled her arm away and jumped ahead of her father and down the flight of stairs. In the basement the automatic light came on. He reached out and flicked the switch on the bright overhead lights and the two of them stood in the bright 200 watt work light hanging over the work bench and the lazy Susan with the head on it. Father and daughter stood silently looking at ‘the head’.

That’s not what I look like…were the first words she could manage. She was almost shaking with rage. He stood quietly and admired his own work giving her time to develop a deeper line of criticism. She fumed and stared but was, somehow, unable to describe in words the abysmal, inexpressible sense of rage that she was experiencing. He waited for the anger to either burst out of his daughter or to subside so that they could talk but he was unsure when and if either of these things would happen. He took a chance. Why are you so upset with me, he asked? She did not answer him. Please talk to me. Say what is on your mind and I’ll listen…really listen…to what you’re telling me. She took a deep breath and let it out. Her body calmed a little bit and struggling she said, You can’t have me like this. You can’t be allowed to take me-from me-like this. You never asked me if it would be alright to represent me like this and I don’t think it’s fair. He was listening. He didn’t speak for a few minutes. Neither did she.

Don’t you think she is pretty, he said. No answer. Really? Honestly. Tell me she is not pretty. She thought about it and after a moment said, well, yes. I suppose so. And don’t you think you’re pretty, he said. No. I don’t. I am not pretty. Then he said, you don’t think she looks like you? Well, sort of…the eyes, the mouth, but not the hair. Not the nose. While she spoke her father reached into his back pocket and took his wallet out and put it on the countertop alongside the head. He opened it and pulled a photograph out of one of the plastic display sleeves that folded into the wallet. It was turned face down and on the back of the photo was Scotch taped a lock of hair. It was the color of her hair before she’d dyed it black. It was straight and fine and shiny like hers had been. Slowly her father turned the photo over and she leaned towards it to see that it was a picture of her mother that had been taken many years ago.

Your mother was about your age-maybe a few years older-when I took this picture. And this lock of hair was one I picked up off the floor of the cabin where she lived when I first met her. She cut her own hair that day and she got mad at me for taking the lock. Well, not really mad. She liked to make believe she was mad at me but it was only a game she played…we were very much in love and I have kept that lock taped to the photo all these years. Since she died I take it out and look at it almost every day. Then he held the photo up next to the head and it was evident to her then that the head was not her at all. It was her mother. When I look at you I can see her. Sometimes when I look at you it hurts me so badly because I miss her so much… Is that what you see when you look in the mirror? Do you see her too? They were both quiet for a long minute. Finally she looked up from the photo and looked at the head, and then she looked at the other heads-a half dozen of her father’s friends and her brother and one of someone she didn’t know. Finally she looked again at the head of her mother and the tears began to run down her cheeks and drop onto the work bench. Her father reached out and took her into his arms. He felt the tears on his shirt.

You have your ways. I have mine. I make heads to remind me. You decorate yourself to forget. I will never make a head of you unless you want me to. I promise. He flicked off the overhead lights and the bright, floating images of the heads swam before their blind eyes while they adjusted to the dark and made their way up the dark stair.