Streaks

I.

THE FIRST STREAK APPEARS WHEN TABITHA IS SITTING on her living room floor surrounded by hair accessories—scarves, hair ties, headbands, bobby pins, an upturned hairbrush she keeps moving out of the path of her four-year-old son. Ian circles her, asking her to bend down and turn so he can shove bobby pins into bunched pieces of hair, scoop the top of her head into his knotted interpretation of a braid, wrap a scarf around her like a blindfold. The streak appears above Tabitha’s right ear, the ear she is holding her phone to, the ear into which her step-father has just said, “Your mother is gone.” So, neither Tabitha nor Ian notice the sudden appearance of green because Tabitha cannot see herself and Ian is focused on getting the hair above Tabitha’s left ear to stick out from her head. Tabitha takes a sip of wine from the glass cradled in her crisscrossed legs and holds it in her mouth.

When Tabitha was young she held onto everything. Her childhood bedroom and her college apartment were filled with all the things she couldn’t let go of filed into shoeboxes and tucked into corners and onto shelves. Tabitha had tickets from every movie she’d ever seen, a playbill for every play, her first through her most recent paycheck—all cashed. She kept her fortune cookie fortunes, lotto tickets, and horoscopes all in a box labeled luck/fate. In her nightstand drawer was a journal in which she’d kept a record of every time her mother had told her she loved her.

This is what Tabitha thinks of until her thoughts are interrupted by her step-father’s broken and tired telling of what happened. How, at first, she was just putting blankets in the fridge and moving the coffee maker in the bathroom, then it was a fall, a fractured hip, three bouts of pneumonia—the slow crawl of dementia turned rapid decline. As he talks, Tabitha keeps holding the sip of wine, keeps it above her tongue until the wine is the temperature of her body, until the muscles in her mouth stiffen, until her step-father stops talking and she must swallow.

When she hangs up the phone, Ian stands in front of her, claps his hands then holds them out triumphantly and says, “All done.”

For a second, Tabitha is her mother’s daughter—eyes wetting, throat tightening—but very quickly she goes back to being Ian’s mother and takes one of his outstretched hands, kisses his palm, and says, “All done?”

“All done.”

Tabitha uncrosses her legs and stands slowly to let the blood get back to her toes. Ian stands behind her at the mirror, holding her leg and looking up. When Tabitha sees the green streak, she touches it and then looks at her fingers, expecting to see the residue of a chalk or paint she hadn’t seen her son grab. But her fingers are clean, and the streak runs from root to tip, and when Tabitha looks to Ian and he sees he says, “Not me,” and shakes his head.

II.

In bed that night, Tabitha rubs vetiver oil into her feet while her husband, Sam, looks for an Internet diagnosis. A Google search reveals the possibility of melanin deficiency, either from vitiligo or malnutrition, though neither list colored hair as a possible symptom.

“Have you been near chlorine?” Sam turns the tablet screen toward her. It’s filled with images of blonde children with tinted hair from too many summer days spent in a pool.

“I’m not blonde.” Tabitha tucks her feet into socks and then stands to go brush her teeth. “And, no. I haven’t.” In the mirror, Tabitha picks through her hair as though she’s looking for lice, dissecting the colored streaks—now three: green, blue, red—and holding them away from her head. Tabitha never had good hair. Ashy and thin, it hangs limply around her face, indifferent to volumizing products. Over the years, she’d tried growing it out, cutting it short, getting it permed, blow drying it daily, blow drying it never, getting extensions, taking biotin, eating more spinach. Still it defied her, held no curl, and lay flat against her scalp. She’d given up on her hair, stopped booking salon appointments, and let her beauty-school niece trim the ends every other month. Which is why, when the streak appears, she isn’t sure if she should call a salon or a therapist. Tabitha releases her hair slowly, letting it fall strand by strand, then grabs the toothpaste.

From the bedroom, Sam calls, “How are you doing?”

Around her toothbrush, Tabitha manages, “Fine.”

“I mean about your mother.”

“I know.”

When she finishes with her teeth, Tabitha gets in bed, turns off the light, and rolls away from her husband. Just as she starts to fall asleep, Sam’s voice comes from the darkness, “Have you been getting enough iron?”

III.

Another streak comes—burnt orange, an inch and a half wide—when Tabitha brings out the china from her parents wedding. Rinsing off settled dust and drying each gold rimmed plate one-by-one, Tabitha remembers the last time she saw her mother. Even before the dementia, Tabitha hated visiting her mother. Hated the way she spent the whole visit screaming about politics, compared Tabitha to her step-children, pointed out all the things Tabitha could be doing better. At first the dementia didn’t change much—the blankets, the coffee maker—but then there were misremembered memories, memories of transgressions Tabitha didn’t commit, memories Tabitha’s stepfather, Joe, refused to correct. Tabitha left every visit wishing, as she walked to her car, that it would be the last.

But it was these plates that did it, these thin, gold rimmed plates that Tabitha’s mother kept in the china cabinet. The set was the only thing Marge kept from her marriage to Tabitha’s father. Everything else she’d made him take or thrown away; the pictures and programs from the wedding she’d burned in their fireplace in the middle of summer. But the plates were their only good china growing up, so she’d keep them. Tabitha always thought she’d inherit them. But when she went to her mother’s house that day, the plates were gone.

“Ma, what happened to the plates?”

“What plates?”

Tabitha came to stand in front of Marge, who looked past her at the headline’s scrolling across the Saturday news. An update on a primary election, then something about a Kardashian being pregnant.

“The plates from you and dad’s wedding, Ma.”

“Oh,” Marge said as Joe came into the room, his hands held out in front of him, as though feeling the warmth of a fire or trying to calm a standing bear.

“Don’t upset her,” Joe said as Marge said, “I donated them.”

“You donated them?” Tabitha’s eyes went to Joe, the only one of the pair capable of carrying a box of china, of driving.

Marge leaned to the other side of her chair, still trying to see the TV around Tabitha. “They’re from your father. You know, that man never—”

“Don’t talk about Dad—”

“You don’t deserve the plates.” The words came out of Marge like spit, like venom, like acid. Joe stood immobile in the doorway. “You’ve never done anything for me.”

“I’m here every week,” Tabitha started. “I bring you groceries and decorate your porch for the holidays. I listen to you talk and talk even though you never ask me a single question, never ask about your grandson or your son-in-law–”

“You hate me.”

“I don’t hate you.”

“Well, I hate you.”

There is a silence like the second after you pop a balloon. Joe, from the doorway, said nothing, only hung his head and shook it.

“You’re ungrateful,” Marge said. “You don’t appreciate anything I’ve done for you.”

On her way home, Tabitha stopped at every thrift store within a five-mile radius of her mother and step-father’s house. At a Salvation Army a few streets over, she found the plates stacked together and bundled with masking tape, a price sticker on top said 16.99. At the register, the cashier, an old woman in a red embroidered vest told her, “Half off,” then pointed at the banner above their heads.

EVERY WEDNESDAY

HALF OFF STOREWIDE

While Tabitha pulled out her wallet, the woman took out large, thick sheets of paper and wrapped the plates, tucking the paper in wherever there was a space. “Wouldn’t want them to break,” she said, and Tabitha, with a twelve-person line behind her, cried.

IV.

By the time the funeral comes, Tabitha’s hair is peppered with the memories of her mother. The streaks, pulled back and swirled together into a bun, outnumber Tabitha’s natural color. After everyone has filed past the coffin, Tabitha stands in front of it and peers in. Her mother’s lipstick is smeared at the corners of her mouth from where someone leaned in to kiss her. Tabitha licks her finger and wipes the excess away the same way she does when she leaves her lips on her husband’s neck or her son’s cheek, except her mother doesn’t flinch. Tabitha pulls her own tube of lipstick from her purse and fixes her mother’s wrinkled cupid’s bow. Sam comes up behind her. He is holding Ian, who is asleep on his shoulder.

When Tabitha comes away from the casket, Sam reaches a hand out and pulls Tabitha to him. They stand in each other’s arms in the aisle of the church. Behind Sam, there is a table of candles glowing against the wall. It is long and blazing. When Tabitha closes her eyes and tucks her face into her husband’s shoulder, she can still see the flames flickering in the dark.

V.

When Tabitha’s father-in-law died, they’d played euchre in the garage and drank whiskey. When it was time to eat, everyone piled their plates with a potluck of food and then quieted as Sam stood to give a toast. They poured out some of their whiskey, polka-dotting the garage floor, before taking a sip themselves. Everyone stayed late to sit in the memories, the collective missing. Sam’s brother got too drunk and had to stay the night. When Tabitha woke up the next morning, Sam’s side of the bed was empty. She’d found him curled into the arm chair in the guest room, his brother sprawled on top of duvet. Both of them slept uncovered, their eyes swollen and cheeks tight.

After her mother’s funeral, Tabitha’s home is filled with polite silence. Relatives stand in clumps, catching up and saying What a lovely service and It really was whenever they run out of things to say. Occasionally, someone passes by the dining table, covered in that gold-rimmed china, and pops a cherry tomato in their mouth or places a few pickles on a napkin that they cradle in their palm while they hurry back to the safety of wherever they’d been standing and whispering before.

“You really should’ve dyed it.”

Tabitha looks up from rearranging the deviled eggs and sees her little sister, Sally.

“Out of respect for the dead.”

Tabitha puffs a small burst of air out her nose. “I figured there’d be enough black today.”

Sally reaches down and takes one of the deviled eggs, breaking Tabitha’s perfect circle.

Tabitha doesn’t fix it, instead she says, “You missed the show.”

“I told you I might not make it.”

“I thought you were kidding.” Tabitha starts toward the kitchen.

Sally follows and says, “I don’t know why you would.”

“She was our mother.”

“Was she?”

Tabitha reaches the kitchen island and grabs hold of the counter, her knuckles white around the marble.

“At some point, Sally, you’re going to have to let that go.”

“Oh,” Sally reaches up and flicks the side Tabitha’s bun, “like you did?”

Tabitha strides from the kitchen and down the hall toward her bedroom. Sally follows after her, calling her name, but when Tabitha reaches the bathroom she locks the door behind her.

When Tabitha was in high school, Sally in her final year of junior high, she’d spent an entire Saturday in the bathroom teaching Sally how to be a woman. She straightened Sally’s hair and showed her how to part it to make it look bigger. Opened up a pad, a panty liner, and a tampon to show her the difference and explain how each worked. When the girls didn’t come to the table for dinner, their mother found them in the bathroom. Sally’s face was dotted with toothpaste, a peak of white for every blemish, and Tabitha was kneeling in front of her teaching her how to blot her lips to keep the lipstick from getting on her teeth.

Sally bangs on the door, firmly at first but then softer and less incessant. But it isn’t until hours later, after everyone leaves, that Sam picks the lock and finds Tabitha sitting in the shower fully-dressed, water running, watching the water hit her outstretched palms. Her clothes are soaked through, and her hair—wet and dark—is almost all the same color again. The only streaks showing through are the ones that are the lightest.

VI.

Tabitha’s niece doesn’t want to touch Tabitha’s hair.

“You know, people kill their hair to get this effect.” She stands behind Tabitha and runs her fingers through Tabitha’s technicolor tresses. “Won’t you miss it?”

“It’s not worth the upkeep.” Tabitha laughs at the joke her niece—eyes still unburdened by bags and wrinkles—does not get.

After three hours, Tabitha’s hair is grey. Old lady grey. Done-giving-a-shit grey.

When she comes home, her husband is fixing a door hinge that’s been broken for months. He pauses, drill still spinning in his hand.

“What do you think?”

“Looks good.” He comes closer and circles around her. “Will it come back?”

Tabitha shrugs.

Sam holds her face with one hand when he kisses her, then goes back to work.

VII.

Ian is the only person who misses her colors. Whenever Tabitha’s head is in reach, he pushes her hair from side to side, then flips it over her face and tries to crawl inside the cave of it, looking for a strand of green or purple or teal. Once, when he is in her hair with her, Tabitha asks, “Do you know that I love you?”

Ian nods slowly, still peering at her scalp.

“How do you know?”

Ian continues to stare up for a moment, then brings his eyes down to meet Tabitha’s. He reaches one small hand out and presses it against her lips until she kisses his palm then presses the same hand against his own puckered lips.