Dressed in silver crinoline over a fine green Lincoln velvet, Lucille Creamcheese stepped out her front door on the morning of December 2, 1960, determined to make a good impression out on her own. She carried in her velvet breast pocket, which bore a striking resemblance to the soft under-ear of a rhinoceros, an advertisement which would appear shortly in the personal column of the South Steyne E . . . News under the inauspicious caption “ROOMS AVAILABLE” and hoved down onto Raglan in the direction of The Corso where, behind the geometric shapes of the salon Five-O, Mrs. Magdalen Forsythe did good business. A salon for the ladies, looking out on the golden quarter mile of Queenscliff Beach, the sea-breeze blowing sets and rinses regularly at thirty knots and the sand of The Steyne thick as molecules in the salt air. These sure had bejewelled our Magdalen Forsythe and she carried herself of late with a scrumptious endocrine posture—rumors that ‘the old insect only does permanents and peroxiding to pay Internal Revenue’ and a better job being done on account of her being completely disengaged . . . Approximately then at her mother’s flipping open of last December’s Woman’s Day from the pile marked “Strictly Customers,” Daffodil Rosa stepped into the bathroom. Deserted, her own hair had grown long and, because she had been taken out of high school (as result of her father’s you-know) and spent the last week wafting between the red soil of Columbia and the sand banks and channels of the South Steyne wash, its color had naturally bleached to a diaphanous white. She mushed this new, diaphanous hair into a tail behind (a jaunty pony); she twisted it into a twirl uptop (a Turramurra turtle); she flip-flopped a handful of it in a pink silk bandanna until, convinced after what had happened that she could no longer make anything right, she fetched the nail scissors her mother kept on the sideboard and, not pausing to position them at one angle or another, she snipped off the final six inches.
No! No! No, she didn’t care. I hear talk these days from my partners who themselves once sailed into South Steyne proclaiming like sirens that they were pilgrims following the direction of who-knows-what dharma and now telling my babaloos that the Trymelow girl’s hair was where it was at.
“Being diaphanous your grandmama’s hair dug full moonlight.”
“White white, shining bright!”
“Short hair, long hair, love hair, song hair!”
“Hair! Hair! Hair!’”
My partners take their lead from thirty days at the Lyceum when Daffodil Trymelow played a minor role in an amateur production of Lysistrata . . . But no! Man, I’ve spent too long on hair already! It wasn’t what sprung from my mother’s head that guided her life; though its attributes were undeniable, its vigor and luster; each time she cut it, it simply grew back: golden to white, trailing and streaming its way through this house until, years later, when it succumbed to a thinness up front and an unfortunate grayness. And yet to me, who gestated in the wisps and diaphanous glow of its oiliness and lankiness, it seemed that finally it had assumed its rightful position . . . pulled back, blued and eclipsed by the sight of her most felicitous gift.
O to the glory of inheritance! What a grand fate to be entrusted with an emblem such as this! My jaw is a crescent. A jaw modelled on the rim of a wheel. Feel the bone, how it curves toward the upper hemisphere so that in spite of what you might like to do with the hair, left parting or right, you cannot change the geometry. This face of mine is round! Round as a frisbee, a hoola hoop, a yo-yo, round as peace itself. I’m no more self-congratulatory than the next bod, but this inheritance is certainly distinctive. No Matterhorn or mouth popping out. Nothing for poets writing in the heroic couplet!
Alone, her hair floated feathery to the wash-basin, the tin tub on the green linoleum. A girl of fifteen (born, to be accurate, on June 6, 1945), squirming herself into a skirt as narrow as a lead pencil, a blouse said to resemble a Dior; fitting into a pair of Clarke stylefits, applying powder from a mother’s Bake-O tin until, catching the chimes in the ante-room, she left the house in the direction of a supermarket we came to call The Pink Cow.
Don’t she look just like . . . like Grace Kelly heading down our Corso? Missed out marrying the prince, but possessing all the charm of High Society and as sleek as a porpoise besides. Already a big girl, naturally, but only in the way of her mother. Extraterrestrial: made of soil and more soil but carrying it in places it was most needed, filling it with a darkness in daylight and a full cream cheese glow at night. Her now grieving face a geography in which all things were reflected. The three lodgers being once heard to say: “O the stories that face tells.” Tito Livio adding: “She is as evasive as the tide.” And Siemens Roszak, whose claims on her were similar but often kept to himself: “It’s imperial looks your mother has, not principles.” And Bobby Zimmerman, strumming across nine loose strings on a guitar he told me was a Gretsch Ranger (Names had such incantatory properties in my childhood!): “Don’t she weave a beautiful web,” he sang, “to snare Iphianassa upon.”
Just like that most subtle of actresses, Grace Kelly, except that her skin was much darker, ebonious at that time of year, and she was heading, after all, for an appointment with Comptroller Wilmers at the supermarket which, in those days before Maxim was conceived, had lost it’s real name to the weather-worn sign that hung over its delicatessen:
Save money and think
of the cow in the pink.
The things on the blink
We bought it at Pink.
The meat, does it stink . . . ?
So it goes. . . . Only, freeze things there a moment—because as she reached The Esplanade, which backs the beach at South Steyne and then curls around the Fairy Bower like the rings of an Olympiad, she experienced a moment of past hog-tying the present: . . . That is: she witnessed her father’s resurrection. No! not of his true and, by now, wantonly furfuraceous self but of the shape, the shadow of him past—printed, as if she’s in Hiroshima, on the wall outside Leacon’s Beachside News Agency. A cigar Indian who was far too similar to her father to be anyone other. No mistaking, after all, that granity brow, that full and, let’s admit it, aristocratic lip. Struck in a pose as if he was about to stretch out his patriarchal arms around her, palms flat as if she must give him something, his fingers seven inches extensile and so strong that they looked ready to roll her up, and all of him proned forward into a crescendo so terrible that the sight made a hussh like the sea and the shadow turned to flesh and blood and stopped her dead-still.
. . . When, finally, she gathered courage enough to slip by (amber eyes forced to the side of auburn sockets) he showed no fatherly pride in her bravery but contrived only to appear again, this time high over Dutch Hoyle’s Tattoory, selling cigarettes on an awning crinkle-cut and flaked by salt air: Woodbine’s! They’re Great!? And again: in the window of the Wee Bill and Bully Hotel, somehow set in glass like a white cabbage moth.
“What’s this, pop! Why do you . . . ?”
Daffodil Rosa, big though she was, flung herself holus-bolus down onto Queenscliff Beach. The sand below the South Steyne retainer wall, being soft, allowed girlish fingers to dig deep to find the sea-soak; her perfectly round face pushed into the topside dry. Wanting, yes, to see her father. Wanting, no, not to see. Her head stuck in ostrich-bob—and there in the dark of the sand subject to a clattering film of his final days. . . . How, in the Gun Club in Cooktown, on a monsoonal day in late November, her father sang “Kisses Sweeter than Wine” until he reached for his mike stand and it launched him twelve feet, forward,