Vanity Insanity Read Online Free PDF Page A

brown. She gloats as she recalls her elephant bell jeans with a purple smiley-face shirt. Big wow. Me, I remember the music.
    My entire life, I’ve looked to the music of the day as an anchor, tying me to my memories. Songs, good and bad, have entangled my calendar, and the strong association of a song can carry me back to that moment, either good or bad, in a second. The opening measure to the song “Dream Weaver” by Gary Wright connects me immediately to the first kiss of my adolescent career with Julie George, who turned out to be disappointingly ditzy. I guess that would be both good and bad.
    Somewhere between a possessed, prepubescent girl—I’m not talking about Linda Blair from
The Exorcist
—and a phenomenal season for the Huskers, Ava and Mom came back, well coffeed and slightly calmed. Ava still felt that something must be done to the mop on Lucy’s head. Lucy still felt differently. Ava won.
    Ava and Lucy were two peas in a pod, even though they did not approve of sharing the same pod. Ava was a tiny woman who usually got her way. Lucy was a carbon copy, though she would vehemently deny it. Lucy came from a true Italian family. Her father was Italian. Her mother was Italian. Enough already. She was the baby girl following four brothers, all of whom were admired by my sisters and others for their dark lashes, big, brown eyes, and great stature. Louis Mangiamelli was a tall, handsome man, and his boys followed suit. Lucy—short, feisty, and blunt —resembled her mother though she was the only namesake of her father. Louis, Lucy. It works.
    “OK, we’ll keep the back messy but do something with the sloppy bangs.” If Ava felt that she was meeting Lucy halfway with the issue of her hair, she hadn’t considered the serious outcome of such a request. Lucy, also oblivious to what might come of such a combination, actually smiled as though she had won. She had always wanted long, flowing hair like her friends and Marcia Brady.
    My mom and I were both aware that cutting the bangs of a person with frizzy and wiry hair is not good. And furthermore, leaving the rest of her hair wild was not a great combination with pinhead bangs. But Mom stuck to her philosophy: let the client make the call. Fifteen minutes later, Lucy’s bangs were trimmed.
    As Lucy and her mother got ready to leave, her bangs began to dry and slowly creep up her forehead like little worms on the sidewalk after a big rain. By the time the duo was at the door, Lucy’s bangs were one-quarter of an inch at best. Lucy’s hair looked really bad. Even though I had only spent thirteen minutes talking with her, something told me that Lucy would not like her hair. And as has most often been the case with my instincts about Lucy, I was right. She hated it.
    As Lucy and Ava walked out of Marcia’s Beauty Box, another strong woman entered the room. My life has been filled with a great number of strong women. Octavia was an old friend of my grandma Grace, who had lived in Fremont, Nebraska. My mother, who grew up in Fremont, had started doing hair in Fremont before she moved to Omaha in her early twenties. Once my mom moved to Omaha, Grandma Grace and Octavia were loyal to Marcia, making the half-hour drive once a week to Omaha to have their hair done. They would then do lunch and head home to Fremont, looking good, feeling good.
    When Grandma Grace died, Octavia continued the routine, claiming that no one else could do her hair right. For the sake of vanity, the drive was worth it. She stayed with what she knew was good.
    On that spring day in 1971, I stood as a witness to the brief exchange, while sweeping the shrapnel left under the chair. Octavia looked down at Lucy. Lucy looked up at Octavia. Two strong winds. Two radical jet streamsin a Nebraska spring. As James Taylor’s voice crooned from the little black radio about some tough times in his life in the song “Fire and Rain,” maybe I imagined it, but I would swear the two cocked their heads to