“Find it for me and press it, would you? I know it’s a mess. Everything’s a mess.”
Reba found and pressed the yellow dress. Pilate helped Hagar bathe. Finally a clean and clothed Hagar stood before the two women and said, “I have to buy some clothes. New clothes. Everything I have is a mess.”
They looked at each other. “What you need?” asked Pilate.
“I need everything,” she said, and everything is what she got. She shopped for everything a woman could wear from the skin out, with the money from Reba’s diamond. They had seventy-five cents between them when Hagar declared her needs, and six dollars owed to them from customers. So the two-thousand-dollar two-carat diamond went to a pawnshop, where Reba traded it for thirty dollars at first and then, accompanied by a storming Pilate, she went back and got one hundred and seventy more for it. Hagar stuffed two hundred dollars and seventy-five cents into her purse and headed downtown, still whispering to herself every now and then, “No wonder.”
She bought a Playtex garter belt, I. Miller No Color hose, Fruit of the Loom panties, and two nylon slips—one white, one pink—one pair of Joyce Fancy Free and one of Con Brio (“Thank heaven for little Joyce heels”). She carried an armful of skirts and an Evan-Picone two-piece number into the fitting room. Her little yellow dress that buttoned all the way down lay on the floor as she slipped a skirt over her head and shoulders, down to her waist. But the placket would not close. She sucked in her stomach and pulled the fabric as far as possible, but the teeth of the zipper would not join. A light sheen broke out on her forehead as she huffed and puffed. She was convinced that her whole life depended on whether or not those aluminum teeth would meet. The nail of her forefinger split and the balls of her thumbs ached as she struggled with the placket. Dampness became sweat and her breath came in gasps. She was about to weep when the saleswoman poked her head through the curtain and said brightly, “How are you doing?” But when she saw Hagar’s gnarled and frightened face, the smile froze.
“Oh, my,” she said, and reached for the tag hanging from the skirt’s waist. “This is a five. Don’t force it. You need, oh, a nine or eleven, I should think. Please. Don’t force it. Let me see if I have that size.”
She waited until Hagar let the plaid skirt fall down to her ankles before disappearing. Hagar easily drew on the skirt the woman brought back, and without further search, said she would take it and the little two-piece Evan- Picone.
She bought a white blouse next and a nightgown–fawn trimmed in sea foam. Now all she needed was make- up.
The cosmetics department enfolded her in perfume, and she read hungrily the labels and the promise. Myrurgia for primeval woman who creates for him a world of tender privacy where the only occupant is you, mixed with Nina Ricci’s L’Air du Temps. Yardley’s Flair with Tuvache’s Nectaroma and D’Orsay’s Intoxication. Robert Piguet’s Fracas, and Calypso and Visa and Bandit. Houbigant’s Chantilly. Caron’s Fleurs de Rocaille and Bellodgia. Hagar breathed deeply the sweet air that hung over the glass counters. Like a smiling sleepwalker she circled. Round and round the diamond-clear counters covered with bottles, wafer-thin disks, round boxes, tubes, and phials. Lipsticks in soft white hands darted out of their sheaths like the shiny red penises of puppies. Peachy powders and milky lotions were grouped in front of poster after cardboard poster of gorgeous grinning faces. Faces in ecstasy. Faces somber with achieved seduction. Hagar believed she could spend her life there among the cut glass, shimmering in peaches and cream, in satin. In opulence. In luxe. In love.
It was five-thirty when Hagar left the store with two shopping bags full of smaller bags gripped in her hands. And she didn’t put them down until she reached Lilly’s Beauty Parlor.
“No more heads, honey.” Lilly looked up from the sink as Hagar came in.
Hagar stared. “I have to get my hair done. I have to hurry,” she said.
Lilly looked over at Marcelline. It was Marcelline who kept the shop prosperous. She was younger, more recently trained, and could do a light press that lasted. Lilly was still using redhot irons and an ounce of oil on every head. Her customers were loyal but dissatisfied. Now she spoke to Marcelline. “Can you take her? I can’t, I know.”
Marcelline peered deeply into her customer’s scalp. “Hadn’t planned on any late work. I got two more coming. This is my eighth today.”
No one spoke. Hagar stared.
“Well,” said Marcelline. “Since it’s you, come on back at eight-thirty. Is it washed already?”
Hagar nodded.
“Okay,” said Marcelline. “Eight-thirty. But don’t expect nothing fancy.”
“I’m surprised at you,” Lilly chuckled when Hagar left. “You just sent two people away.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t feel like it, but I don’t want no trouble with that girl Hagar. No telling what she might do. She jump that cousin of hers, no telling what she might do to me.”
“That the one going with Macon Dead’s boy?” Lilly’s customer lifted her head away from the sink.
“That’s her. Ought to be shamed, the two of them.
“Must not be working out if she’s trying to kill him.”
“I thought he left town.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Well, I know I don’t want to truck with her. Not me.”
“She don’t bother nobody but him.”
“Well, Pilate, then. Pilate know I turned her down, she wouldn’t like it. They spoil that child something awful.”
“Didn’t you order fish from next door?”
“All that hair. I hope she don’t expect nothing fancy.”
“Call him up again. I’m getting hungry.”
“Be just like her. No appointment. No nothing. Come in here all late and wrong and want something fancy.”
