Eighteen Months Read online

  As though I didn’t know.

  As it turned out, she did provide some very helpful insights – bad word for a blind person, I prefer realizations – that would help me in social situations or in public – like last night when I was the unexpected hit of the club.

  I stopped in Rina’s office before I left.

  “Good news,” she announced when I went in.”

  “Since I’m sure you aren’t going to tell me my sight is coming back early, just dump it on me.”

  “Have a cigarette first.”

  “Rina …”

  “How many so far today?”

  “I don’t know …”

  “You’d better know. You promised me a solid trial.”

  “Based on your criteria …”

  “Yep. So, how many?”

  “Eight so far.”

  “Not bad. Light number nine, and I’ll tell you the good news.”

  I lit up. I was already able to do this without burning anything but the end of the cigarette. “Okay, what?”

  “I was able to get you in with Kirsten, the hairdresser for tomorrow at 4:00. You’re her last appointment of the day, so she can spend plenty of time with you.”

  “RINA! That’s not good news! I’m not ready to change my hair yet – especially since it’s gonna mean losing most of it!”

  “Consider it part of your instructor-ordered resocialization.”

  “No! I don’t wanna …”

  “I don’t wanna …,” she mocked me – again. I hated when she did that. “My job is to get you functional as the blind woman you are, and this is part of that. Deal with it.”

  “Rina …” I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to lose the hair I had left – after all, I had it cut into this bob only a few weeks ago!

  “Assume you don’t have a choice. I’ll help you get there.”

  “Meaning you’ll try to keep me from getting run over by a bus, but I’ll have to do all the work.”

  “If you’re getting lost and will be late, I’ll steer you back on course.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “You’re not so appealing as a blind girl when you get sarcastic.”

  “And I’m supposed to care because?”

  “You shouldn’t lose your charm because you can’t see.”

  “You’re sarcastic all the time!”

  “But I can see and I have no charm to begin with.”

  “Wha … what?”

  “Yeah. Exactly! Tomorrow at 4:00. We’ll leave here at 3:45, and we can walk there.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re impossible.”

  “You’re blind, and I know what’s best for you.”

  “I could say something rude.”

  “But you won’t because you’re too sweet, Alie.”

  She was right, the bitch. But I couldn’t say it out loud. I finished my cigarette and stubbed it out.

  “See you in the morning,” she said. “We’ll pay for the cut as part of your orientation, but you should bring something for the tip.”

  I got up to leave. “Yeah, yeah. I will,” was all I said.

  “Don’t forget, you need to smoke 11 more before midnight,” she called after me.

  I considered going back and throwing something at her. But I didn’t.

  **********

  I smoked the final 11 of the day over the course of the evening, as I sat or blindly puttered around my house. I’ll admit that I enjoyed most of them, though I didn’t enjoy being forced to smoke them. When the carton was gone, that would be it. I would have proven to Rina that I understood what it was all about, and that I wasn’t interested. At least, until then, I was willing to let myself enjoy smoking, rather than beating myself up every time I lit a cigarette. The whole process was becoming automatic, including the full inhales I was taking, but I still thought about smoking the things when I was doing it.

  The next day I had more training and both Rina and John praised me for my quick progress. John’s pills probably helped, but I had always been a fast learner.

  The pills tended to not only heavily reinforce what I was learning, but they also solidified whatever was going on in my life when I took them. I didn’t realize it then, but two of the things they affected were my smoking and my acclimation to being blind. As a result, the smoking I did was, prematurely, cemented more tightly into my mind as a normal thing to do. Blind became my expected way to be, to the point that I would eventually have more and more difficulty recalling pictures in my mind of things I’d seen a thousand times, back when I was sighted.

  I was already beginning to think differently about myself. Most people, being sighted, were not like me. In my distressed mind, I felt they were also probably superior to me. I was in the small minority of people who had only four senses, of which vision wasn’t one. That especially affected my confidence in my chances for landing a decent job.

  Rina told me she’d put out feelers for a job for me yesterday, and would let me know when she heard something. She’d work on it some more while I had my braille reading lessons with John. She sounded cautiously hopeful, but I was pretty down about my prospects.

  I had lunch with Rina. Over a couple cigarettes after we ate, I told her where my head was on the planned haircut. I guess I was feeling especially open to new things this day, or suckered into the whole mess. What’s a blind girl to do when a sighted person is convinced that she should follow their advice? I felt inferior again … or still.

  “Okay, Rina, I’ll try your hairdresser, but I don’t know what I’m willing to do to my hair to make it easier for me to style.”

  “That’s okay, talk to Kirsten, the hairdresser. She’ll have ideas to pick from.”

  “How can I tell without seeing them?”

  “That’s a dumb question.”

  “Why is that dumb?”

  “Because you’re blind and can’t see anything! You have to rely on other senses and your own ability to imagine things that you can’t see – in this case, make sure she describes the possible style to you so that you can create a mental picture. Stop using ‘I’ or ‘me’ and ‘see’ or words like it in the same sentence. People who know you’re blind now will be confused and may ask you embarrassing questions about what’s going on.”

  She had a point, sort of. I’d try to watch it.

  I told her I didn’t know if I were ready to do this yet. In typical Rina fashion, she said, “No time like the present,” and that was that.

  In some ways, I envied her focus. In other ways, it drove me crazy.

  “Did you smoke your 20 yesterday?” She asked on the way to Kirsten’s place. She’d told me how to get there walking and left it up to me to navigate the sidewalks tapping my cane and listening with my ears.

  “Yes mother, I did my 20 – before midnight.”

  “Did it help you relax, mellow out, become more even?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I have to admit that it did. I don’t mind smoking – actually, I mostly enjoy it. But I’ll be glad when this carton is done and I’ve proven to you that I do get it and I still don’t want to do it.”

  “Oh well,” she said, not sounding as resigned as I would have expected, “it’ll help you get through the first two weeks or so anyway.”

  “Yeah, that may be a good thing.”

  **********

  We arrived at the hairdresser. Rina made me lead her inside. I fumbled some but I don’t think I made a big fool of myself. She made me find the front desk – it was a large, full-service salon and I didn’t know where to go.

  “May I help you?” A girl called from my left.

  I made my way to a counter where the voice had come from. “Sorry, I’m blind,” I said. I was embarrassed, though there wasn’t any reason to be.

  “Oh, I can help you; I’m right here,” the perky voice said. She was directly in front of me. I had no idea where my eyes were pointing. My left was probably pointing down, while my right turned in. What a
peculiar sight I must have been.

  “I have an appointment with Kirsten at 4:00.”

  “Okay, you must be Alie?”

  I was wondering if I’d ever be Natalie again. “Yes.”

  “Let me take you to a seat. Kirsten will be out here to meet you in a couple of minutes.”

  She must have come around and touched my arm. I found the position to hold onto her arm, right above the elbow, and she took me to a seat. I heard her ask Rina if she needed help, and Rina saying she was with me.

  “Alie?” I heard a pleasant, friendly voice call.

  I stood up. “I’m Alie,” I said. I heard the click of heels on the hard floor as someone approached me from the right. “Kirsten?”

  “Yes. Glad to meet you.” I put out my hand and she took it right away.

  “In case you didn’t know, I’m blind,” I said. It wasn’t so embarrassing this time.

  “Yes, Rina told me. I understand that you lost your sight recently?”

  “Yeah, I’m still new at this blind thing.”

  “Let me lead you back to my room. Do you want to take my arm?”

  “That’d be perfect.” My hand closed around her arm, above the elbow as I’d been taught.

  As we walked back, she asked, “What’s your prognosis? Can the doctors help?”

  “Sadly, no. There’s nothing I can do. I’m sightless for the duration.” I left it at that.

  “Well, let’s at least make you look great.”

  “I hope so. I’m nervous. Rina thinks I need something much easier to style. If I’m honest with myself, I know she’s right. Unfortunately, I love this style I have – the slightly more than chin-length bob – which I only got recently – but I can’t fix it right. Worse yet, I can’t tell if it’s right or not.”

  “It’s a little … irregular at the moment. I can see where it would be a dynamite style on you under other circumstances. But I think we can come up with something equally hot.”

  “I don’t feel very hot.”

  “She says that,” said Rina, “but you should have seen her dancing at the club two nights ago. She was unbelievably good: smokin’ hot, hot, hot … and sexy!”

  Up until she spoke, I didn’t know Rina was tagging along.

  Kirsten laughed. “Then I’ll really have to come up with a killer cut.”

  “Maybe I could just shave my head …” I joked, weakly.

  “You could, but I’d save that for when nothing else works.” Kirsten had taken me seriously; I’d been joking. There was no way I was losing all my hair along with my sight.

  She sat me in what felt like a typical salon chair and proceeded to run her fingers through my hair, pulling it this way and that. “Your hair is pretty straight, does it hold any curl?”

  “When it was really long, I’d curl the ends with a curling iron after adding a little gel or mousse. Now, I’m pretty inept with a curling iron, or even with a blow dryer. For example, when I tried the dryer the other night, my left side poofed out and my right side was flat and flipped up instead of under.”

  “Yeah, I understand. You probably need something that you can simply run your fingers through and enhance a bit, but which mostly goes right into place after you wash it.”

  “How would that work unless it was short?”

  “Honestly, Alie … it wouldn’t.”

  “In other words, you want to cut all my hair off.” I had a sinking feeling in my stomach.

  “That’s what would work. You can’t have it long and make it look great, like it should. In a different style, though, it can be even better for you, even more exciting. If you still want to keep it fashionable and edgy, what you need to do is cut it short. Consider it an opportunity, not a problem. In the end it’ll be better. You’ve already determined that hair this long isn’t going to meet your needs.”

  My needs, I thought. My needs as a blind person who can’t even style her own hair. This was going to add to my cruel, unfair punishment. I sat there, not knowing what to say.

  “Here, take this cigarette,” Rina said, “It’ll help. You can smoke here, right?”

  “Sure,” Kirsten said. I held it to my lips and puffed as, I assumed, Rina lit it. I held an ashtray in my other hand as Kirsten went on.

  “To keep your hair youthful and exciting, I’d suggest you pick from one of three styles. Style one is a modified buzz. I’d cut your hair to about five-eighths of an inch on top and the upper sides, shorter below and in the back.”

  “Whoa!” I said instantly.

  “Wait. Before you reject it out-of-hand, let me tell you the advantages. One, it’s very chic, very fashionable. Only a few women are beautiful enough to pull it off, but you easily are. It requires no work at all. Wash, dry, wear. You could add a little gel if you wanted to make the front stand up more. You would need a trim every two to three weeks.”

  “Uh …”

  “The next style would be longer on top, one-to-three inches long, and short on the sides – up over your ears and tapered down in the back - but the sides could be a tad longer than with the buzz. You’d gel it and use your fingers to muss and spike the top. You could easily do that without seeing it.”

  “One to three inches sounds pretty short.”

  “Any longer and it wouldn’t spike, it would fall over. Even if you used enough gel on a longer cut to make it stand up, I think it would look kind of odd. It should probably be closer to one than three inches. You’d need a trim every three or four weeks.”

  “What else could you do?” I wasn’t happy with what I was hearing, even if she did think I was beautiful enough to pull these off. I’d never had hair shorter than mine was right now. This was awful.

  “The last idea is to cut you to about three inches all over, then give you a very tight, very curly perm. After you wash it, you add a little mousse to avoid frizz, and fluff the curls a little with your fingers. Voila, you’re all set and it dries naturally. If you did that, I’d suggest you go darker – at least medium to dark brown. I personally don’t think blonde hair and tight curls go together. You’d need a trim after about five weeks, and a re-perm every other time, which is often, but keeping it short will avoid any re-perm damage.”

  “None of your options leave me with much hair.”

  “Sorry, Alie, but any of those would look great on you. You’re a very lovely woman. Oh … yeah … there is one more thing. Those eyebrows have to go.”

  “Go? You mean …”

  “They won’t look right with short hair. They’ll have to be thinner - a lot thinner. Otherwise, they’ll overwhelm your face and draw attention from your hair.”

  Rina chipped in, “They’ll also call more attention to your eyes, and I know the misalignment bothers you anyway.”

  “Oh … maybe you should just shoot me now! Consciously or subconsciously, I’ve tried to develop and nurture a certain look for myself since I was in junior high. Now you’re telling me that it all has to change …”

  “If you mean that innocent look,” Rina said, “you’re right. It’s going to go. That doesn’t mean you won’t look fantastic - beautiful AND sexy - if you go with one of Kirsten’s ideas, though.”

  “Except for my googly eyes.”

  “I’ve told you, they’re charming. They do need some liner, though. Kirsten, don’t you guys do permanent makeup here?”

  “Yes. Eyeliner, brows, and lips mostly. I think they’re here until 9:00 tonight.”

  “Just what the rehab ordered, Alie,” Rina tossed out.

  “Gee, that’s great,” I replied, deadpan.

  “Okay, Alie,” Kirsten said, “what would you like to do?”

  “Honestly? Run away and hide. But I won’t. I don’t want to be buzzed, but I get the easiness appeal. Spiked would make me kinda punk, but maybe that’s okay. The perm leaves my hair longer, especially at the sides, even if it is all curled up. I get what you said about the color though, but I’ve never had darker hair than my natural dark blonde, let alone real bru
nette.

  “I guess I’m resigned to doing this. What the heck – I’ll never see it anyway. If enough people tell me they like it, maybe I’ll come to believe them. I wish we could flip a coin – but I don’t know any three-sided ones.” I tried to smile and giggle but it fell flat.

  “I have an idea, if you really want to pick randomly,” Kirsten offered. “I’ll call up a random number generator on my iPad and let it pick. We’ll number them one to three. One is the buzz, two is the spike, and three is the perm. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s see. Here it is. Generate one random number, between one and three. Okay, ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll abide by the random call?”

  “Yes, just do it.”

  “It’s a three, right Rina?”

  “Yep, it’s a three, you’re gonna be a curly brunette.”

  In moments, she began to cut away my beautiful, light blonde hair.

  After ten or fifteen minutes, she began to roll it up on tiny perm rods. I knew they were tiny because she let me hold one. I’d never had a perm, but I’d seen the rollers before … when I could see. These felt a lot smaller than what I’d seen.

  Rina lit another cigarette for me. I smoked it and two others while Kirsten worked.

  Rolling took a long time. While it was going on, Rina took the initiative to schedule me for a manicure, pedicure, eyebrow waxing, and permanent liner and lip color, after my hair was done.

  “I don’t know if I want permanent makeup.” I told her, though at that point, I really didn’t care. My hair, which had been my pride, was gone so what did it matter? I was trying to be difficult out of frustration with what my loss of sight had done to me. Yeah, self-pity again.

  “Sure you do, you’re just struggling with the changes,” Rina responded.

  “Well I’ve had a lot of them!” I said, exasperated. Rina was pulling me down the tracks like a runaway freight train. She was almost irresistible in her logical, practical, prodding way of getting on with things.

  “So you have. But you’ll come out of this a better person.”

  “If uglier is better …”

  “Alie, you couldn’t be ugly if you worked at it with a crew of twenty-five others. You are inherently pretty, stunningly beautiful actually. Sometimes I think you have this need to have that reinforced by the people around you. So I’m reinforcing it.”