"The Last Normal Day" by Kimaya Diggs
The last normal day was in the middle of August, and it was announced by a strangely casual text asking me and my sister to come to our parents’ house. We agreed to stop by for the following morning, and that was when the wheels were set in motion. With less than twenty four hours to go before we arrived at their house, the last normal day was not even an entire day.
I was training a new bartender at work. She was an older, butch woman, smaller than me, gray around the edges with deep lines around her eyes. She had grown up in New York City during its grittiest days, and lived it, too. She nursed her gay father as he died from AIDS, got hooked on drugs—“heroin,” she said, frankly, looking at me solemnly with her gray eyes. “I like to tell people so that they can see me and go, it really does affect everyone, but you can get out of it.”
She made me feel very trusted, and very known. I had the sense that she could see the worst in me, but did not care. I was very tired and sad that day, and trying to cling to every last normal moment. But in the clinging, each moment was very strange and hazy. She sent me to sit down in the back because I looked like I needed a break.
I did not really want to take a break, I just wanted to talk, and because I am somewhat of a parasite in many ways, I wanted to hear more of her secrets. When someone trusts me easily, I feel very important, and I feel my very best, because I am truly trustworthy and that is one of the things I like most about myself.
But I did go to the back to take a break. I sat in the green office chair staring into space until a few minutes had passed, and then I went back to the front, and I told her “I think this is the last normal day of my life.” It seemed that she understood what I meant, because she nodded quite gravely and tightened her mouth, but didn’t say anything, for there wasn’t a thing to say.
Later, when my mother turned sixty, we threw a birthday party for her. My grandfather was there without my grandmother, very small and old with a firm pregnant-looking mound of a belly like half a globe smuggled under his shirt. He beckoned me over just before he left, and pressed $80 and a grocery bag filled with my grandmother’s hair into my hand. “You’re a good girl,” he said.
I was not surprised. My grandmother’s memory was failing, and she had become preoccupied with her hair. Her elder sister, who had died at the age of six, had had fiery red hair. This I know because my grandmother talked about it quite frequently, but also because she had once taken me into her bedroom to show me a Victorian-style mourning wreath made entirely of Blanche Anne’s hair. My grandmother’s hair was mousy brown, and, even as she approached 90, was shot through with only a bit of silver. And it was very, very long.
My grandmother’s hair, when let all the way down, brushed along the floor. She had lost much of her hair with age, and was very unhappy about it. So she started hoarding the hair she pulled from her brush in this grocery bag.
My first inkling that she was collecting her hair was when she called me and asked if I could do something crafty with human hair. I like to embroider, and I love a good memento mori, so I said yes, with no ideas in mind. That summer, she gave me the tiniest knot of hair: ten or twelve long hairs tangled into a bunch inside a miniature plastic zip-top bag that she had somehow tied in a knot as well. Those hairs are still in my jewelry box, because I did nothing with them.
In the months and years that followed, she would call me monthly and ask if I had done something with her hair yet, and I would always say no, because something about pulling those few hairs out of their crumpled bag felt pointedly incorrect, maybe because she was still alive. So truly, it was no surprise when my grandfather presented me with a grocery bag filled with a mass the size of a football, and, within minutes, my phone rang.
“Hello?” It was my grandmother. I said hi back and she carried on: “Did you get my hair?” Yes. “Do you like it?” At this I had to pause. My mother’s birthday party was bustling around me, my grandfather was being helped into his coat, his long-fingered hand still on the plastic handles around my wrist, and he leaned into me as my aunt pulled his arm into his sleeve.
“Yes, I do, thank you.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“I’m not sure yet, I need to brush it out.”
She said okay, and hung up.
The next summer, she called me, very upset, and told me that in the event of her death, I was to shave her head and do something productive with her hair so that it wouldn’t go to waste. She is often worried about waste. I told her that I would as long as she told my mother and my uncles and aunts what the plan was. I didn’t want to break through a circle of her grieving children, armed with scissors and an empty plastic grocery bag. At that point, maybe I could finally pull all the hair out of storage and make something with it.
My mother never let me and my sisters cut our hair. In fact, our only haircuts were miniscule trims on New Year’s Eve, and all the hair was taped into our baby books, even when we were no longer babies, and every haircut was photographed or videotaped from every angle. When I was six and asked for bangs, my four-year-old sister, who was the videographer, famously missed the moment of the chop. The camera is zoomed in on me, smiling with no front teeth as my mother combs my hair forward, and then as she approaches with the scissors, the camera drops slowly. My sister was probably watching the scene with her own lovely eyes, the camera viewfinder forgotten.
At the end of this summer, I sat on my mother-in-law’s back porch while my sister-in-law cut my niece’s hair. She wanted short hair, like her brother’s, but it wasn’t in the cards for her. She fidgeted so much that I had to stand in front of her for twenty minutes, holding her perfect face still the whole time. Her cheeks were so soft and warm, and she was laughing and looking up at me as we talked.
“Mama, is the back soft yet? Mama, when are you gonna use the buzzer?” she asked. Her mama laughed and told her that she wasn’t going to do that for this haircut, and cut her hair to her shoulders, no shorter. My niece hated having her arms confined under the haircutting cape, and I stroked the tip of her nose to make her laugh instead of pout.
It was a lovely day, a beautiful day, long after the last normal day.
Kimaya Diggs is a musician, writer, and teaching artist. She holds a degree in creative writing from Swarthmore College, and is a Callaloo Fellow. Kimaya lives in Western Massachusetts with her husband, her greyhound, and a plethora of house plants. kimayadiggs.com