The Trouble with Fairy Tales

Courage My Love

PEARL’S HAIR SALON is a tiny place tucked around the side of an old four-story apartment building. It’s within walking distance of my house in downtown Toronto, and for years I’ve been sneaking into Pearl’s every month to have my roots touched up.

There are only three chairs facing the mirrors, and on busy days, Pearl darts between them like a hummingbird, multitasking to the ding of a timer. Sometimes young men come in for quick haircuts, but mostly it’s women my age, other pensioners who appreciate Pearl’s reasonable prices and the fact that her radio is always tuned to a soothing classical station. None of us minds the tired decor and the occasional blip when the air conditioner fails or the hot water inconveniently surges; we feel like a supportive community of like-minded souls, even though we’re strangers. We do what women have always done in the intimacy of a beauty salon: We let down our hair— we confide and confess; we talk about love.

As Pearl slathers brown dye on my hair, I strike up a conversation with the woman sitting in the chair beside me. Her gray-blonde hair is already plastered with streaks of gooey bleach and folded strips of tinfoil stick out of her head like electrodes. We discover that we grew up in the same hometown and she’s read my previous memoir, They Left Us Everything. Pearl knows all about that book, too, because when it won a prize, the shock caused bits of my hair to fall out.

“What are you writing about now?” the woman asks.
I never know how to answer this question when I’m struggling to write a new manuscript, so I just blurt out, “Old boyfriends!”

“Oh, I’ve got a few of those,” she says, “only now they’re old in more ways than one.”

“Which fairy tales were they?”

“Fairy tales?”

“You know . . .” I say, “like Sleeping Beauty when you were first kissed awake . . . or some Pied Piper who led you astray. You must have been Little Red Riding Hood once, weren’t you? Didn’t you ever meet a wolf?”

“Oh yes,” she says, nodding, “probably more than one.”

“See? And how about Cinderella? Didn’t you ever meet your prince?”

“Sure! Got married in my twenties, but it didn’t work out so well.”

“Same here.” I shake my head. “So, what happened to us? How come we kept falling for fairy tales?”

“Blame the Brothers Grimm!” she says, laughing.

“Exactly! I keep thinking about all the messages we got— be good little girls . . . stay on the path . . . wait to be rescued . . . one day your prince will come. Do you think we were groomed?”

“Doomed?” She fiddles with the cotton in her ears.

“Well, maybe that too.” I point to the celebrity magazine she’s flipping through. “Have you ever watched The Bachelor . . . or Say Yes to the Dress? We’re still buying this shit!”

Just then, Pearl’s timer dings. As she leads me over to the basin to lather shampoo through my hair, a lyric from South Pacific cascades through my ears. How many times have I tried to wash that man out of my hair? How many times have I sacrificed myself to romance? Postponed my dreams? Lost myself in a man? It was only once I’d left a man that I found myself again.
Pearl hands me a towel.

“You know what fairy tale I’m starring in now?” I say, clipping my hair back.

“No, what?”

“The Traveling Musicians— it’s the one where a bunch of animals are told they’re too old to be useful, so they’re abandoned in the woods and left to die.”

“That sounds like me,” she says. “I used to live in a big house, but when my husband left me, we had to sell it. I live alone in a seniors’ residence now. My children want me to wear an alarm in case I drown in the tub or fall over the balcony. It makes them feel better, but I hate it.” She smiles. “At least it’s not a nursing home . . . yet.”

“Well, there’s no nursing home in The Traveling Musicians! When the old animals meet each other, they decide to band together and create a whole new adventure. They reinvent themselves.”

I remind her of a modern film version: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. It’s no wonder that movie was such a blockbuster hit with the boomer generation.

“Good luck with your book,” she calls out as I’m leaving. “Make sure there’s lots of romance and drama.”

“Drama?”

She giggles. “Sure! Everyone likes to read about romance and drama. You should see what goes on in my apartment building!”

LEAVING PEARL’S, I HOP THE streetcar and make my way down to Kensington Market. It’s a gritty part of the city where fishmongers and fruit stands spill onto the sidewalks and painted Victorian houses sell secondhand clothing and bongs. Winding my way through the crowded streets, past stores with names like Breathless and Exile, I arrive at Courage My Love. It’s the vintage shop where I often go to rescue orphaned dresses that remind me of my youth. I keep hoping to stumble upon my old prom dress, a short piece of pale-pink fluff with spaghetti straps that I wore to a cadet ball in 1963. It would be fun to run into the cadet who took me (I think his name was Floyd), but I’m much more interested in reuniting with that dress. I wonder what happened to it?

Outside the shop I thumb through their circular racks twirling with crinolines and ancient fur coats, then trip up the steps piled with old boots. Inside, I’m enthralled with the shelves of my past. Above glass-topped counters cluttered with hippie beads, incense and Mexican silver, I spy patent leather handbags, ceramic Bambi lamps and souvenir ashtrays from Niagara Falls. There’s even an Elvis bust.

As I riffle through treasures from the fifties and sixties— tiny-waisted cocktail dresses, circular poodle skirts— I’m thinking, Why aren’t old women treated like treasures? After all, we’re pre-loved and meet the definition of vintage: We’re at least twenty years older than everyone else. Some of us are mid-century modern, some prewar, some even qualify as antique— like my good friend Pat, for example, who’s in her mid-nineties. She bewitched me when I was seven years old by teaching me art in grade 2; now she’s my oldest living friend. I call her my “Other Mother.”

Suddenly, in the lingerie section, I spy a floor-length swish of red-hot silk— somebody else’s long-lost memory— and quickly buy it for forty dollars. It’s missing its sleeves, but the neckline is adorned with crushed velvet petals, and the operatic resonance of it makes me feel like singing arias all the way home.

Tonight, I slip it over my blue jeans and T-shirt and invite my friend Les to come for a drink. It’s after nine o’clock. Most of my other friends are asleep by now, but I can always count on Les. She keeps artist’s hours, working into the night like I do, and her husband doesn’t seem to mind. For almost twenty years, we’ve been sharing our thoughts, reading aloud, facing our fears, propping each other up.

Just before she arrives, I rummage in the box under my bed where I keep my old shoes and stick my pedicured toes into lacy, pink mules— absurdly high, extravagant heels I haven’t worn in twenty years, not since a certain lover slept over. It takes so little to feel sexy again. Gripping the banister, I teeter cautiously down the staircase, careful not to trip on my new wings of silk as they flutter dangerously behind me.

“I love coming to your house,” says Les, waving her arms around my front hall. “It’s so artistic!”

I recognize the word artistic as friend-speak for clutter. Books are strewn everywhere, overflowing from shelves and stacked on the floor. Unfinished paintings lean against walls, and an antique, wool bathing suit dangles from a standing lamp. In the fridge, bottles of nail polish are nestled in the egg compartment, and whenever I go to get ice cubes, old paintbrushes wrapped in plastic bags to keep them pliable tumble out of the freezer. Forty years ago, when my three children were young, their friends said they felt so free here, mistaking the chaos for anarchy. “At least you’ll be safe from burglars,” quipped my brother Victor, “because who would break in, when every room looks ransacked already?”

Back then, as a single mother, when I had more imagination than money, I’d “renovated” my kitchen by mirroring all the walls. I told everyone it was to create the illusion of distance and space, but the real purpose was to see myself reflected into infinity to prove that I still existed. Now, when Les walks in, she sees the mirrors are covered with yellow sticky notes.

“Is this how you’re writing now,” she says, looking around, “using your mirrors as a bulletin board?”

“I’ve been rearranging those all week,” I say, “trying to find my theme.”

“I like this one!” She points to a note near the ceiling where I’ve written in big block letters: WHO AM I?

“That’s my biggest question!”

“It’s our universal question.” Les plonks her elbows on the counter to watch me make coffee. “Who am I now . . . and who was I then?”

“I can’t figure it out,” I shout over the hissing of the espresso machine. “How do we ever make sense of our lives when there are so many threads to untangle?”

“You can’t tie your life into a tidy bow,” says Les, tugging at her gray corkscrew curls. “It’s always going to be a straggly, messy, untidy thing.”

“But what did it all mean? They say if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else. But which of us ever knew where we were going? And now that we’re here— at this someplace else— how did we get here?”

“Exactly. We’re baffled. Old age has happened so fast.”

“My friend Pat says you can only know yourself through relationship . . . but in every relationship, I’ve been a different person.”

“How many relationships have you had?”

“I can’t remember! Sometimes I think I can . . . and then one night I’m lying in the bathtub, and I think, Oh! I forgot about him!”

Les laughs. “Me too . . . but I remember what his shoes looked like.”

“So how can we truly know ourselves?”

“That’s the thing. We may never know.”

“But I knew who I was when I was eight— didn’t you? I was inventing products, producing plays . . . I’d even written my first book by then. Then something happened, and I lost my way! How do we drift so far away from our childhood dreams, from what we were meant to do?”
“Hormones!” says Les.

“Really? It’s that simple?”

“Sure! Don’t you remember how mesmerizing boys were? How alluring love was? When puberty strikes, we abandon ourselves.”

I switch on the tiny, white fairy lights that snake around my kitchen window, then light a candle and carry it outside to the patio table. Low in the sky, a summer moon hovers. We can hear the radio in the kitchen faintly playing jazz.

“Remember how we felt at seventeen?” Les says, collapsing into a wrought iron chair. “We felt so wild, so full of passion. There was such a long road ahead, like anything was possible!”

She starts to sing “Try to Remember” and the wind lifts her notes into the wistful rustle of the trees. For three glorious hours, we sit outside in the glow of the candle, sharing stories of our misspent youth, laughing like conspiring rebels at the absurdity of it. By then we’re feeling totally reckless— drinking espresso, and it’s not even decaf.

The trouble happens later, after Les leaves, after the caffeine has kept me awake all night, when the pain in my lower back from the high heels means I can’t walk for two days.

Still, it was worth it.

Despite what I look like on the outside— the sagging skin and gnarled arthritic joints— on the inside I feel thirty-two. Les says she feels twenty-eight. Pat recently told me she feels forty-five, even though she’s ninety-five. We all have a young person locked inside, as if the clock had stopped, each of us channeling our best age, when we felt on top of the world. The passions we felt in our youth continue to flicker and ferment below the surface, waiting to be reignited, often erupting as fierce as ever, sometimes even more so.

The reality is that my knob-and-tube wiring is too old to replace. Barnacles have started to appear on my back. I find myself worrying about weather forecasts and the rising price of gasoline just like my mother did, and I carefully clutch railings as I descend subway stairs, my pockets full of tissues now, to dab at my eyes when the wind blows. The third finger on my right hand is often locked when I wake in the morning, so I pry it open using the edge of my mattress.

I used to use my mattress for other things.

I have no wish to compete with the young: to inject Botox, lift my face, or ingest hormones to embrace a man on Viagra. Somebody needs to show the younger generation what old age looks like. It might as well be me.

On the other hand, maybe we should all wear T-shirts emblazoned with photos of our younger selves to remind others what we used to look like. We all looked gorgeous then, we just didn’t appreciate it. These days, whenever I look in the mirror, I try to remind myself that I’ll never look younger than I do today. At seventy-seven, my wrinkles are coming along just fine, delicate crisscrossed lines that look like crushed silk, the kind I always wanted, and I’m glad I no longer care so much about the shape of my eyebrows. I’m happy to embrace my interior landscape, to spend my time thinking, assessing, looking back at the forks in the road, sometimes with regret, but mostly with curiosity, trying to make sense of the choices I made— searching for meaning.

What were the themes of my life, my failings, my plot? All good stories take shape. Some look like waves that build to crescendos, others like steps to the top of a mountain. It feels like I’ve been swept out to sea every seven years or so, but I’ve also plunged off a few cliffs. Perhaps mine wasn’t one long journey. Perhaps I’ve lived many short stories all strung together.

So, why am I still rearranging those sticky notes?

It’s because I’m avoiding a story that needs to be told.