After Her Read Free Page A

you had to wonder how he had ever spotted it.
    â€œThe back must have fallen off,” he said. “I didn’t want you to lose it.”
    She just stood there then, with the small gold cross in one hand, the other reaching for her naked lobe.
    â€œDon’t expect to find a guy like him when you start dating,” one of the waitresses told me one night when he had taken us out to Marin Joe’s—our regular tradition. “Because there aren’t many like that.”
    Our mother would have said this was good news.
    H E HAD A GIFT FOR hair, inherited from his father, and he loved brushing ours. He cut hair like a professional—using his dead father’s scissors.
    â€œSometimes I think I should have been a hairdresser,” he said—though in fact he could never have settled for that. “A man could do a lot worse than spend his days with his fingers running through women’s hair. Instead of chasing down a bunch of low-life mutts.”
    First came the shampoo in our sink. He’d test the water with his wrist before he poured it over us, and when he lathered our heads, it was more like a massage. He used a special brand, with peppermint, that made the skin on your scalp tingle. All my life I’ve looked for that shampoo.
    He put a record on. Dino, probably, but it might be Tony Bennett or Sinatra, and he might sing along, though never when he got to the cutting part, where all his concentration was required. That and a steady hand.
    He set a chair in the yard. When we were little, he carried out whichever one of us he was working on that day, with a towel around our shoulders. The way he stepped back to study us was as if he was an artist, and we were his artwork. Then he began to cut.
    He could sing like Dean Martin, to my ears at least, and he knew all the words to the songs, including the Italian ones.
    T HERE WAS A THING HE did for us, a trick he could perform, that no other human being I ever met has known how to re-create. Something so strange and amazing, just describing it is difficult.
    You’d be sitting on the couch next to him. The person sitting there would be me, or my sister. Maybe he’d done this once for our mother, but if so, that day was long past.
    Then he’d pull a hair from the top of your head, so swiftly it never hurt. My sister and I kept our hair long from when we were little. So he had plenty to work with. And black, like his.
    You never knew when he might do this. You’d be sitting there watching TV next to him, or reading, and there’d be this sharp little tug at your scalp, no more than a pinprick. Then you’d look over at him, sitting next to you, and he’d be twirling this hair between his fingers. They moved so fast I never understood how he could do this. But after a few minutes, he’d hold your arm out in front of you and on your skin—olive colored like his—he’d set this creation he’d made that looked exactly like a spider. Made out of your hair.
    It never worked to ask for a spider. Months might pass that he didn’t come up with one for you, and then he did. They were so tiny and delicate, it was impossible to hold on to one. Just breathing could make it blow away. Or when he exhaled his cigarette smoke.
    The first time he made a spider and I lost it, I cried. “Don’t worry, baby,” he said. “There’s plenty more of those in your future.” For a surprisingly long time, that’s how I thought my life would be—men would perform magic for me—and for a longer time, that’s how I thought it should be, even when it wasn’t.
    Years later—in my twenties, when I met a man I thought, briefly, that I’d marry, I asked him if he knew how to make spiders.
    â€œSpiders?” he said. He had no idea what I was talking about.
    â€œYou know, out of my hair.” I actually thought for a long time that this must be something all men did for the