The Lavender Hour Page 3

  I accepted Lily's offer, and from there, in the perilous cause-and-effect way, one thing led to another, and before a week had passed, I'd packed up my bobbins and worktable and the other supplies I needed for jewelry making—a side business I used to augment my teaching—and reckless for change, I set off for Cape Cod.

  Synchronicity. Domino effect.

  Almost immediately, Faye Wilson, a neighbor and an old friend of my daddy's family, stopped by to see how I was doing, and within days, I found myself with a surrogate family, which was how I happened to be driving with Faye one rainy day that October on my way to hear a speech by Dr. Bernie Siegel, an oncologist who lectured on mind-body connection. Faye was the volunteer coordinator for Bayberry Hospice of Cape Cod, the event's sponsor, and she'd talked me into taking her extra ticket, saying I needed to get out more. Of course, when I heard that, my heartbeat accelerated. I wondered if Lily had broken her promise and told Faye about my tumor.

  In the hotel conference room where the event was held, I remember wondering what Siegel could tell me that I hadn't already lived through. “Diseases can be our spiritual flat tires,”he said early on in his speech. “Disruptions in our lives that seem to be disastrous at the time but end by redirecting our lives in a meaningful way.” Spoken like a person who has never had cancer, I thought, and began to drift away. But halfway through, as if some part of my mind had been on alert, listening for it, one sentence penetrated my consciousness. I waited until we were back in the car before I turned to Faye. “Do you think it's true, what he said?” I asked.

  “What's that?”

  “That we learn how to live from the dying? I mean, it sounds good—We learn how to live from the dying—but is it true? Do you think we really can?”

  Faye concentrated on driving. “What we learn from the dying,” she said after a minute or two, “is the one thing we want to forget.”

  “What's that?”

  Faye turned toward me. “That we're all going to die.”

  Again I wondered if Lily had betrayed my need for privacy. Ashley always accused me of being a drama queen, but, thrust into the center of a real soap opera story line, I discovered I had a limited tolerance for the attention. When I'd first been diagnosed, I had tried to keep it on a need-to-know basis, and one of the appealing things about moving to the Cape had been that no one there knew about my history. I could feel normal again.

  “The dying can teach us how to die, Jessie,” Faye was saying. “Maybe that serves as a model for how to live. What do you think?”

  “I don't know. I'm not so sure watching someone die can give us what we need most.”

  “Which is?”

  “Which is a sign that danger lies ahead, that it is barreling down the track and heading straight for us.”

  “And you'd like a signal?”

  Well, yeah. Who wouldn't want some indication, something to give us warning so we weren't blindsided by fate. “Something.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don't know.” I looked over at Faye. “It probably wouldn't do me a bit of good anyway.” I tried to lighten the mood. “I wouldn't heed it if it hit me full in the face.”

  “You don't think so?”

  “Just ask Ashley. She's always saying, if the road sign says Stop, I speed up.”

  “Ashley says that?”

  “She does. Anyway, if you're looking for a guide to the fucked-up life, I'm your girl.” I laughed. “No work. No man. No clue.”

  “Why don't you have a man?” Faye said.

  I considered her question. Why didn't I have a lasting relationship instead of a string of sour romances? I had asked exactly that of a therapist I'd seen for one month on the back side of yet another failed affair and an anxiety attack so relentless I'd had to use up three days of sick leave at school. He had posited that perhaps it was because, if I left a man first, it prevented him from leaving me. “I don't know,” I said again to Faye, and then, uncomfortable, I switched the topic. “And anyway, getting back to Siegel's statement about learning from the dying, is that why you work with hospice?”

  “I suppose that's part of it.”

  “Isn't it kind of—I don't know—depressing?”

  “No. Sometimes it's sad, sometimes heartbreaking. But not depressing. It's tremendously rewarding. Not unlike what you get from teaching, I'd say. Mostly, it's a privilege.”

  Privilege. The word settled in my head. Then (needing what?— an anchor, or at least a keel, something to hold me steady as I started anew, or perhaps simply because I possessed Lily's DNA after all and had a need to give back) I surprised myself by asking Faye if she thought I could become a hospice volunteer. And there it was again. Cause and effect. A budget cutback and lost job. A vacation house left vacant. A chance invitation. One sentence in a speech. A butterfly taking to wing in Asia. And now, six months later, following intensive training, there I was, standing in the home of my first client. Lily—the pre-boy-toy Lily, the public-service Lily—would have been proud. Hell, I was proud. It felt good to give back. To think about something or someone other than myself.

  I CONTINUED to stare at Luke's door, strained to hear the sounds from within. He'll be fine, I'd said to Nona. I promise. Who was I to promise something like that? What if he wasn't fine at all? I had a quick sensation, a low, beating fear. What if he was unconscious? Or worse? On the other side of the door, I heard the scritchity ticking of a dog's nails against a wood floor.

  “Mr. Ryder?” The pulse of fear grew stronger.

  The dog whined softly. The television blared.

  “Mr. Ryder? Luke?”

  “Go away.”

  “It's Jessie,” I said. “Jessie Long. The volunteer from hospice.”

  “Go away.”

  He didn't sound sick at all. His voice was deep, and not in the least weak, certainly not the voice of a dying person. Again I pictured the man in the photo. His was exactly the kind of voice I would match to that man, the kind of voice that stayed in your head for a long time after.

  “I just wanted to make sure you're all right.”

  Nothing.

  “Or see if there is anything you need.”

  Silence. I couldn't shake the feeling I was failing Nona in some way.

  After a while, I crossed to the sofa, which was just as scratchy as it looked. I picked up the newspaper. The top left square of the puzzle was filled in. Six-letter word for cavort. (Prance.) Completely refashion. (Remold.) Old World lizards. (Agamas.) Even with the answers penciled in, I didn't get it. Lily and Ashley were crossword fanatics, but I never had understood the appeal. I refolded the paper, used it as a fan. This was so not how I had imagined hospice work during the weeks of training. Bernie Siegel be damned, it was as clear as crystal I'd made a big mistake. How could I have thought I would be of help here and learn something in the doing?

  Earlier in the training, I had envisioned how this day would go.

  In my imagination, I saw myself sitting by a bed with an elderly patient. The sheets were clean, the room neat. (Although I knew about the messiness and foulness of disease and death, in my visions, the room was always tidy, always smelling of orange oil or lavender like the sprays Lily had used to scent my bed linens when I returned from the hospital after the surgery.) In this sweet-smelling space, I comforted a wise elder and then listened while she talked to me, handed me the road map I had been missing.

  Instead, here I was, fighting anxiety and drinking bad coffee in a room so steamy, it could pass for a spa, a paneled-door distance from a very sick man who wouldn't say hello much less let me know the privilege of helping him. It didn't look like I was going to learn the first thing about how to live or find reliable love in that house. Well, it was ridiculous, really. Thirty-two and expecting to find answers to the thorny questions of life from a dying man. Worse than ridiculous. Believing such a thing possible was gullible and naïve, serious character flaws that laid a person wide open to all manner of ruination. This whole thing was a mistake. If,
at that moment, Faye had walked through the front door and asked me if I wanted out, I would have said yes instantly and without a second's hesitation. I thought about calling her when I got home and confessing that I could do no good in this overheated, empty house, where I couldn't even see the man I was caring for.

  But I did not call her, and that night, I had my first dream about Luke. Not the cancer-riddled patient whom I had not yet even met but the man in the photo with the crow black hair.

  I know you.

  three

  I HAD BECOME a morning person that year on the Cape, something my friends and family back in Richmond wouldn't have believed, for they knew me as a person never fully conscious before nine. But as I was to learn that spring, people can change even the most ingrained habits, release even the most tenacious fears and deep-rooted beliefs. So every day, I was up and dressed by dawn, drawn from my bed by the promise of the soft air and the lilac-rose of early light over Nantucket Sound.

  The cottage, built in the late 1800s, was located in the old Ocean Grove Campground in Harwich Port, an area that had managed in large part to escape the notice of nouveau millionaires and their architects, men Faye described as having absolutely no sense and smaller dicks. “It's all compensation,” she maintained. “Why else would they need to build these monstrosities that could pass for passenger ships?”

  I'd chosen one of the second-floor bedrooms for my studio, primarily because of the view that gave out over the water from the bay window, and had set my worktable in the window's curve. Occasionally, while weaving a necklace or a pin, I would lift my gaze and look out over the water, which, depending on the tides and light, changed colors hourly from a shade so deep, it was nearly black to a silvery slate blue. I liked to watch the early morning walkers, bundled up against the wind and making their way along the shore. I invented stories for them—lives I liked to believe were possible: blissfully uncomplicated loves that traveled a straight path with no blind drives or messy detours; vacation trips to Australia or Greece; hearts that held steady; health that held firm—and then I'd turn my attention back to my work.

  That morning, the hair on my worktable was auburn, but it would look dark brown by the time it was twisted tightly into the pattern I'd chosen, a square ribbed chain braid that called for twenty strands, seventy hairs in a strand. I began by affixing slender wooden bobbins to the end of each strand.

  Occasionally a client would ask me how I came to make hair jewelry, but I had no ready answer. In life, as in art, there was no accounting for what you liked, what you were drawn to. Something spoke to you, and you couldn't even say why.

  The first time I thought about working with hair, I was twenty-four. Up until then, my focus had been pottery, and that summer, during a trip to Wyoming, I found myself drawn to the idea of exploring more substantial pieces. Vessels. Large pots. On a spur-of-the-moment visit to the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, I stood before a display of horsehair pottery, mesmerized by the patterns the strands of hair made when laid in clay and fired. A docent pointed out how the hairs of the mane were less coarse than the tail hairs and so created entirely different patterns. It was the first time I had considered hair in any way connected to art. Seeing my interest, the guide led me to another exhibit of belts and bolo ties and wristbands that had been crafted entirely of horsehair. She told me there was a museum in Iowa devoted entirely to hair art jewelry. On the return home, I rerouted my trip and stopped there. I was hooked instantly. I loved how indestructible hair is, how it lasts longer than flesh and bone. Within the month, I had researched patterns and tracked down and special-ordered the materials I would need. I never found the jewelry weird or creepy, as Lily once maintained that she did. Naturally she—and Ashley—made their revulsion plain. “Stick to ceramics; that's respectable, not weird” hung in the air between us, and telling them about the high-society popularity of hair jewelry in Victorian times did nothing to dissuade them. Lily said she couldn't see any earthly reason why I'd want to create something out of another's personal matter.

  She had her own hair story, one she told me shortly after I began creating the jewelry. When she was in grade school, the school nurse would appear in the classroom twice a year, armed with a box of wooden toothpicks. The teacher would direct the students to line up in front of her desk, and each, in turn, would be inspected by the nurse, who would pluck two toothpicks from the box and—with narrowed lips and vigilant eyes—separate and lift hair from scalp to check for lice. When satisfied, the nurse would toss the toothpicks into a wastebasket and, excusing the child with a little push on the shoulder, call out “Next.” In a silence broken only by the shuffling of feet, the line would inch forward. But occasionally the orderly pattern was broken, and the nurse nodded at the teacher, who would, in turn, usher a shamed child from the room and to the front office. The next day, trailing the reek of creo-sol, the child would return and for weeks hear the taunts of his classmates. Cootie-head, the others would tease. Bedbug. “Even you?” I'd asked my mama, recalling that, in our childhood home, name-calling was an offense she didn't permit. Lily nodded. “I cannot tell you how horrible it was to be in that line waiting,” she said, as if that explained everything. “I remember in Mrs. Sherman's class— that would be the third grade—I was so nervous waiting for my turn that I peed my pants.”

  “God, how embarrassing,” I said.

  “Oh, not nearly as mortifying as being found with lice,” Lily said.

  “But surely you didn't have to worry,” I said. Our grandma was Dutch, and cleanliness was her religion. Lice didn't stand a prayer on her children.

  “You just never knew,” my mama said.

  Occasionally I'd wonder if this old grade school memory was why Lily was always encouraging me to go back to working with clay. Did she associate hair with something dirty, shameful? I had explained the process to her, how I only used clean hair and actually boiled a piece when it was completed—not for sanitary reasons but to tighten the work—and then dried it in an oven. All to no avail. Lily would be happier if I returned to firing clay.

  Or maybe not. My mama was once as predictable as a box of saltines, but now I had no idea what she thought or wanted.

  AS I SAID, it was its quality of permanence that first drew me to working with hair. It consists largely of the protein keratin, which is insoluble in water, and contains small quantities of manganese, iron, and various salts of lime, properties that make it nearly indestructible. Outlasting flesh and sinew, it has been found in a perfect and unaltered state on mummies more than twenty centuries old.

  Although hair jewelry had been created for centuries, most people are unfamiliar with the craft and are amazed when I tell them that, although the technique is difficult to master, human hair can be fashioned into almost any ornament. Over the years, I have created necklaces and earrings, pins and bracelets, watchbands, rings, and lockets. One winter, I made an entire charm bracelet for a woman in Michigan. The charms (a heart, a Celtic cross, a horseshoe, and a harp) were woven using strands of her grandchildren's hair. For another client, I made a wreath of flowers using the hair of five generations in shades so varied, they defied belief, a kind of materialized genealogy. The woman sent me a photo of it, framed under glass and hanging in her living room. I had made a charm for an infant, woven from the hair of his parents, who held to the superstitious belief that this would protect their son. I hoped it would.

  But recently more and more of my commissions came from women who were undergoing chemo. While I was at the hospital for my own treatment, word got out through the nurses' grapevine that I made this jewelry, and other patients began to call. Then word spread, and orders started to come in from all over the country. Rather than wait for their hair to fall out, these women created rituals, finding some kind of empowerment in the cutting of their hair, saving it. I understood.

  One woman wrote that she'd held a party with her three closest friends. They washed her hair and cut it, each keeping a lock for herself, then
set the bulk of it aside to ship to me. I was to weave it into rings for her children. The remaining few strands she had placed out on the porch railing for birds to incorporate into nests. Something I would never do. In Greece, women burned the combing from their brushes, believing that if a bird used it for a nest, their souls would be clawed and torn.

  As I worked on these pieces, I wove in hope and something akin, I suppose, to prayer, and sometimes I wrote a note to these women when I sent off the finished piece. I'd tell them that I was a cancer survivor and to hold on to hope, it was what sustained us.

  THE AUBURN hair—that of a child who had recently been diagnosed with leukemia—slipped like water between my fingers. I was tying bobbins to the strands when the doorbell broke into my concentration. Automatically I checked my watch, amazed to discover it was already after eleven. I rose and stretched, glad for an opportunity to relieve the tension settling into my neck. By the time I descended the stairs, Faye had already let herself in.

  “Hey,” she said. “Am I interrupting, or are you ready for coffee?” “I'm always ready for a break,” I said. “Come on in.” “What are you working on?” Faye's interest was sincere. Unlike Lily, Faye was fascinated with my jewelry. At Christmas, I had given her a pin and on her birthday, a bracelet. She seldom went out without wearing one or the other, again unlike my mama, who, as far as I knew, had never worn the loop earrings I made for her. Today Faye wore the bracelet, a narrow band of brown worked in eight-square chain braid with filaments of gold woven in. She carried a box of doughnuts and was wearing sweats she'd probably picked up at the local thrift shop. Faye had more money than Croesus, but she was the most unpretentious person I knew. She was as likely to wear the same faded sweats to a cello concert at the Congregational Church as to the town meeting, where she raised hell over issues of zoning and affordable housing. I thought Faye lived her life according to an inner compass the majority of people seemed to lack.