The Hair Raiser

I am re-teaching myself how to drive. I swear, it has been so long since I learned anything at all. I am keeping all of my steering motions fluid. I have always jerked the wheel. When you jerk the wheel, the car jerks. I never put this together. My hands and arms slowly trace the curve of the road, we are a liquid rounding the bend. It doesn’t seem like I am doing enough to keep the car on the road. We stop for gas. I come back to the car with a new betty Boop stick-on decal. My husband laughs at me when I pull it out of the bag, a laugh that should be endearing but is very hostile.
             “ I just don’t get the Betty Boop thing.” He says.
“You don’t think she’s sexy?” I accuse him.
             “She’s sexy, I guess, but she’s basically an old lady. Doesn’t she remind you of your mother?”
“Betty Boop is timeless,” I gasp with my mouth open in disbelief.
             “She’s a blue hair waiting to happen.”
Maybe sexiness dies with the women who wear it. I am furious about the comparison to my mother. I have betty Boop paraphernalia everywhere. I silently apply the new betty Boop to my driver’s side window, smoothing out the trapped bubbles with my the palm of my hand. For the rest of the drive, he tries to compliment me, to distract me. He is always so cruel for a day after we have sex, like I just slept with another man or took his virginity. But he can’t stand it for ten minutes if I seem pissed with him, and he can always tell. He pays too much attention. I am more of a man than he is. As we cross into Iowa, there is a blue sign with a picture of the state and a large question mark in the center of it, for the welcome center. I guess people go there to get questions. There is no punctuation for an answer, no answer mark. I guess every statement is an answer by default.

             I am adjusting a silver umbrella, studying it. It is on an old wooden stage in a Sioux Falls elementary. Hundreds of children will come to sit in its way, a flash bulb eclipse, tiny celestial bodies with combed hair. I don’t see the children like their mothers see them. Their faces are in constant flux, they do not remain the same for one fraction of a second, for one single angle. They are all becoming each other, freckles appear like raindrops. The school photographs are bald-faced lies, a image in the sky of galaxies gone for a million years, of moments when the parents were not actually there. I press the flash release and receive a small shock off my wool dress. My husband lost his job at Oreck vacuum, as the factory downsized. Now he stays at home trying to get the dog hair out of our sofa. I’m not kidding. He is designing a machine that removes pet hair with static electricity. It is called the Hair Raiser. He is currently negotiating a contract with an in-flight catalog, the last outpost of commerce before complete absurdity, 33,000 feet above the Earth. The machine seems to work. When I get home, the record player in our living room is reluctantly tracing an Eagles album, keeping its memory despite the months and years it has spent sandwiched together with my records, layers of disagreeing plastic like igneous rock, devoid of their former heat, a fossil record of our buried differences. Every time I walk into our house, it feels like a storm is coming. Every piece of furniture has become a potential source of electric shock. He is charging the Hair Raiser in the other room. As he drags the aluminum ball along the couch, blue sparks arc like hair-grabbing fingers. Almost all of his severance pay from Oreck went into developing it. I don’t say hi. I turn around and head back out to my car, I guess to go grocery shopping. Now I am on the freeway. I am practicing my new driving technique. My fluid curve is not quick enough for this arc of the road. I feel glued to the wheel, as if the car will tip over if I turn any sharper. I am not slowing down as my car sails off of a brushy hill. Later, I will remember waking up hanging upside down. The music from the radio has missed the cue, stupidly refusing to acknowledge my misfortune with silence. I will remember this from a wheelchair overlooking the beach, with a blanket on my lap. The Hair Raiser will have raked in millions. We will be back in California, near our families. Today, my sister is coming with her kids, and I am so happy. All they want is to play on our beach and catch a glimpse of the Sutherlands, who live just down the beach. They don’t judge our wealth, they don’t pity my infirmity. I photograph anonymous inventors, a small bald man in a room full of fruit loops. I don’t set up the lights, I don’t set up the camera, I don’t even push the button, honestly. All I do is talk, and choose the picture that does not make fun of him. My photographs are shown in art galleries all over the place. They reveal something about the way our society is put together, I am told. My father does not approve of our life. He says; “I am worried about a culture that removes dog hair with a hundred million volts.”