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My mother put curls in her hair while she slept. Each night, the ritual before bed was to roll the hair up, thirty-two curlers--or so that is my estimation now. The curlers were springs inside gauze surrounding some kind of mush. Each curler was held on by one or two bobby pins. Were it not for the ribbing that caused them to snag, the bobby pins would have been good for shooting with rubber bands. Instead, the most I could do was string them up onto one pin and pretend they were a set of keys (something else I desired much to have, so adult such a set seemed, and yet such a burden--each key another responsibility--once I had my own ring). It seems to me that my mom's hair was wet when she rolled it up, that she had just washed her hair, but it also seems impossible that she washed it every night (based on her own antipathy to my desire to do so later as a teen).
We headed to Portland, Oregon, by train--Mom, me, my sister. Dad was off in Brazil. We were to see Uncle Cliff and Aunt Barbie, three cousins. We were to drive from Portland to Seattle, once again for the Feast of Tabernacles. I was to receive a pocket knife and a remote control car--a Camaro, red--while there. The pocket knife featured three knives that you could pull out, a pair of scissors, a Phillips screwdriver, and two bottle openers. It seemed something I should not be allowed to have, something I was too young for; it was a gift of my uncle's--handed to me over breakfast while I spooned away at my grapefruit, my favorite morning meal at the time. And yet my mother did not take the knife from me, and I did not manage, at that time, to cut myself in some life-threatening way. Later, that same week, the plug to the bathtub at the hotel we would stay at would become stuck, and my mom would use the knife to disengage the plug, empty out the water. Several portions of the knife (one of the knives, the two bottle openers) would rust within the week. But I still have it, still use it.
My cousin Laurel was three or four years older than I, at the beginning of her teen years. Breasts were coming in. She was wearing nylons. Hair was being pushed into place to impress the boys, but not in the way with which I was familiar. Boys. Love. It all seemed so adult.
We stayed in Oregon for a week after the trip in Seattle. Students at my school had already gone back to class; there was an earthquake at our home in California. I was jealous, never having experienced one before. Now all my classmates had gotten to be in one (one that they remembered, for I had apparently been in a bad one as a two-year-old, my mother struggling between rooms to grab me).
Each morning, my cousins Laurel and Shanna arose to curl their hair more than an hour before the bus came. The bus came at 7:30 a.m. This meant they were in the bathroom by 6, plying curling irons to their heads, emerging boffed and beautiful. Curlers were tacky. Who could sleep in those things? It was worth the extra hour to curl one's hair each morning. My cousins seemed sophisticated to me with their application of modern appliances. My family, by contrast, was not sophisticated. Our house seemed plain compared to theirs--just one story compared to their two, no sugary cereals in our kitchen each morning, a table squeezed in across from the stove (our breakfast nook having been converted into my bedroom) instead of set out beside the sunlit windows of the patio.
Laurel's gift that year, as I remember it: a curling iron. Sophisticated, yes, but I was happy to have a knife and a remote-control car.
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