Free Goldengrove by Francine Prose Page B

satisfied? Happy now?
    “So?” Frank said. “ Bellissima , no?”
    “ Bellissima ,” I agreed. What did it matter, really? I’d left the world in which people cared about bad hair days.
    While my mom got her standard trim, I lost myself in a magazine devoted to which starlets wore which evening gowns to which Hollywood events. I glanced up from a story about the miracle Beverly Hills fertility doctor responsible for a whole generation of celebrity babies. Mom was grinning at me—all done!—and looking the same as before.
    “ Bellissima ,” I said, fighting tears. I told myself, It’s only hair. It grows back. But I didn’t believe it. Because like everything else in those days, my hair was itself and something else. The bad haircut didn’t bother me half so much as the feeling that Margaret had withdrawn her protection. She would never have let Frank and Mom conspire to maim me this way. Obviously, I’d lost my mind along with my hair. The Nico blaming an ugly haircut on her dead sister was no more like me than the froggy hermaphrodite frowning at me from the mirror.
    My mom seemed clearer—sharper somehow—after our visit to Frank’s. On the drive home, she asked if I wanted to go shopping. It was one of the few activities that seemed relatively safe. Margaret had mostly worn vintage, so she’d never come with us.
    Mom and I used to drive to the Albany mall, always a little buzzed, as if something transformative might happen to us there. The same thing always happened. Mom zoned in on the sale racks. It thrilled her to find a dress by a designer I’d never heard of, and her joy splashed over onto me, regardless of how the dress looked.
    As we’d swung through the racks of clothes and carried them to the fitting room, conversation was even easier than it was in the car. It was like the chatter of nursery school kids playing in separate corners. I’d talk about school, Mom might describe a sonata she was learning. Or sometimes, like all grown-ups, she felt she had to give me advice, which in my mother’s case was often mystifying. I remember her saying you had to learn to exist on the line between loving the world and wanting to live in another world completely. I sensed that if I’d asked what she meant, her answer might involve more than I wanted to know.
    Every so often, entirely by chance, we found a bargain that looked nice. Transformative, even. Not that it transformed me, but that I imagined it changing the boys in school, who would see me, in my new outfit, as a different person. A girl.
    In the cramped changing cubicles, I twirled around for my mother. I knew what would please her—practical, subtle, unsexy. And I wanted to please her more than I cared about looking pretty. Especially when nothing looked pretty. I might as well listen to her. Margaret said she didn’t understand the unflattering outfits I bought with Mom on these trips. How odd that Mom’s thrifty inner Puritan should choose to emerge at the mall.
    Now, on the drive home from Frank’s, Mom said, “Do you need anything? New sandals?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think?”
    “The buying cure,” my mother said. “That’s what my mother used to call shopping. You get the joke, right, Nico? The talking cure is what they used to call psychoanalysis.”
    “I get it now,” I said. “Ha ha.”
    “After my father died,” said Mom, “my mother went out and bought an expensive mink coat. She wore it twice, then put it in mothballs and never wore it again. Your grandma just wasn’t a mink coat kind of girl.”
    I hated it when my mother talked about her parents. It depressed me that she still missed them. It was worse now, because it made me realize that missing someone could last an entire lifetime.
    My mother said, “What about some new summer stuff?” Shopping was about the future. What future would I shop for? Where would I wear what I bought, and why would it matter?
    “I don’t need anything,” I