Free Goldengrove by Francine Prose

to town with a long mental list of errands and got every detail right and came back with everything that we’d asked for.
    But now she often drove off and returned, sometimes twice, for her wallet or glasses. Her driving had gotten erratic: too slow, too fast, too slow. The light changed from red to green, and she’d sit there till someone honked, a rare event in the country. Lines of traffic snaked behind her.
    I felt I should mention this to Dad. I wasn’t telling on Mom. I was concerned about her safety. I was afraid that Margaret’s death might have damaged my mother’s brain. A few times she mentioned that she’d been having constant déjà vus. She hoped it wasn’t a symptom of a tumor or early-onset dementia. I wished she wouldn’t talk that way. What if Mom or Dad got sick?
    I waited till one evening when my father was peeling carrots to ask, “Dad, have you noticed anything odd about Mom’s driving?”
    My father dropped the carrot and the peeler. He sat down at the kitchen table and put his head in his hands, a gesture as clear as speech.
    I thought he said, “I’ll talk to her.” But I couldn’t really hear, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask him to repeat it.

Five
     
    O NE MORNING, A FEW DAYS BEFORE I began working at Goldengrove, Mom said she was going for a haircut and asked if I wanted to come along.
    Margaret had always cut my hair. The first time, she hacked off my baby curls with cuticle scissors. My parents had been horrified, but my sister was so gentle I don’t think I even knew that the feathers sifting down had been attached to my head. After that, she’d practiced on herself, and she always looked so beautiful that eventually I asked her to cut mine, too.
    We’d steam up the bathroom and mist the air with Mom’s sandalwood oil. My sister wore her bathing suit, and her bare stomach brushed my arm as she danced around me, a half-naked sprite I watched in the mirror she squeegeed with her hands. Margaret was always so pleased with the result that her confidence convinced me, even when I was pretty sure I’d looked better before. In photos from that time I often seem to be wearing a pale, crooked helmet beneath which my round face bulbs out like a shiny plum.
    For years, she’d been snipping my bangs short and straight across. Margaret said nerdiness was stylish, but I suspected her of overdoing it with me. She’d worn her own hair in a shaggy cap— an homage , she said, to Jean Seberg in Joan of Arc .
    Our father used to joke that Margaret could always cut hair if the singing didn’t work out. Usually Mom laughed at his jokes, funny or not. Margaret said that Mom was conditioned from birth to respond to male humor. She never seemed to get our jokes, and her own were so deadpan that you couldn’t tell if she meant to be funny. But when Dad joked about Margaret cutting hair, Mom never even smiled. Her plans for Margaret didn’t include a future in cosmetology.
    Mom wore the same hairstyle she’d worn in her soybean commune days. Margaret said it was a ’60s thing. You couldn’t get them to change their look. The only thing that consoled me for not being beautiful like Margaret was seeing how her beauty caused a crackling in the weather between her and our mother. Once I overheard them arguing about Mom’s hair. Margaret said Mom should let her cut it. She’d do a better job than the butchers Mom went to at the mall.
    “Only one butcher, dear,” our mother said, “and strictly speaking, near the mall.”
    Frank’s was where our mother went. Frankenstein’s, Margaret called it. Sometimes when Mom scheduled a haircut on our way to somewhere else, I’d have to leaf through the dimpled magazines and try not to stare at the women, who did look like Brides of Frankenstein in their tinfoil antennae.
    It was cruel of my mother to remind me of something that Margaret and I would never do again because my sister had left me to the mercy of butchers like Frank.
    “We can get