trimming the turkey

I've been working on another entry about mushrooms, which hasn't been going well -- I've lacked inspiration, and nostalgia is one of those things that requires more than its fair share of concentration -- so I thought I'd put it aside for now and post something else while that story percolates.

We've been looking for a pair of round trip tickets back to Seattle for Thanksgiving, part of what is now a habit for me and a new tradition for the Guy. This is the first holiday opportunity for him to look across the table at his future mother-in-law, as opposed to that queer Japanese antique stick figure related to his girlfriend. Despite two years' acquaintance, she still manages to reduce him to a shivering wreck, though growing accustomed to her has done much to alleviate this bizarre ataxia of his. A few weeks ago, he even managed to bear up under the strain of wishing her a happy birthday over the phone, in Japanese no less.

While I have to admit she laughed for quite a long time after he got off the phone--he hasn't quite mastered the Japanese accent--I think it was a step in the right direction. A year ago, he would have scuttled towards the bedroom and hidden under the desk if I'd even suggested he talk to her. As it happens, tickets to Seattle will cost us somewhere around $600, so it's probable that we won't be able to get up there this time around. I've apologized to Mom, who claims she doesn't care.

"Oh, I have plenty to do. I will be fine," she said cheerily, in Japanese. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure this means, "I'll be alone and lonely on the holiday, and will clean the kitchen from top to bottom in a vain effort to assuage the deep depression inspired by an absent and uncaring family," in English.

I swear, sometimes it's impossible to talk to her.

Over the last few weeks, the Guy and I have started having some issues that probably need to be worked out before the wedding. This isn't a surprise to anybody who's married. There's something about the advent of a wedding that inspires a certain amount of nitpicky-ness in the most mellow of future spouses. Knowing there's a date--or that there will be someday be a day (we're a little behind in our wedding planning)--when one will be linked ad nauseum to another human being makes one take a good hard look at said other to see what can be improved before one signs on the dotted line.

Once the vows are spoken, all motivation to change on the part of the second party is effectively erased. He has gotten his cake, and has eaten it, too. The girl is his; the race is won. In his mind, it makes no sense to change. He had what it took to get to the finish line with his prize. Why bother changing perfection?

As it happens, in this case, Perfection has hair down past his hips. Damaged hair, with a serious wealth of split ends. Hair that hasn't been cut since the early '80s.

I used to have split ends once upon a time, part of a legacy of cheap shampoos and a budget that didn't include room for conditioner. It was inexpensive entertainment for a musician on a budget, having split ends; I could spend hours curled up in a chair, painstakingly pulling my hair apart until I had two long strands of hair where once I had one. There was a masochistic satisfaction to it, and never mind that this constant harassment of my hair resulted in a fragile and decidedly lopsided afro effect.

I still check it from time to time, hopeful of finding at least one split end I can mutilate. Nowadays, I take good care of my personal grooming; the rare sighting happens once in a blue moon. On the other hand, the Guy....

...the Guy is just asking for it, is what I say.

He looked up from the computer one night to find me silently huddled behind his chair, brooding over a handful of his tangles.

"What're you doing?" he demanded.

"Nothing." Well, of course I said that. I'm a girl. I'm not a moron. A boy would have told the truth and got in trouble.

He twisted around to investigate, and caught me red-handed in the act of peeling a hair into four distinct pieces. Yes, it's just that damaged. "Are you splitting my ends?"

"It was already split. I'm helping it along. It would've fallen out anyway, eventually."

Not the best thing to say to a man. All men have a deep-seated fear that premature balding is hovering just outside his door, like the front team for Death getting the site ready for the big visit. He instantly reclaimed his head, rolled his chair a few feet away, and regarded me with the air of a man discovering his wife was once a suspect for proactive precipitation of widowhood. "Stay away from my hair," he ordered.

The situation disintegrated rather quickly after that. There was, as I say, a hypnotic fascination to his damaged hair, and whenever I spied him engrossed in something else--vulnerable, in other words--I would drift unobtrusively behind him to peel another hair before the Guy felt my presence and scampered to safety. At one point I decided to do him a favor, and started bringing scissors with me. If anything, the metallic hiss of the scissors clipping his split ends off made him even more nervous.

He grew increasingly wild-eyed under this treatment, and began adopting a furtive, hunched posture whenever I was in the same room. From time to time in the car, my gaze would drift to settle thoughtfully on his long braid. He would sense my stare and whip it to safety while his shoulders slowly rose to engulf his ears.

One night, discovering me crouched behind him with the scissors in my swiss army knife, he lost his equilibrium altogether. "Stop it!" he shrieked. He leaped from his chair to the far end of the room in a single bound, and turned on me like a cornered rabbit. "Those are scissors, aren't they? You were using scissors, weren't you? You were cutting my hair, weren't you?"

"I was helping you," I said soothingly, tucking the scissors into hiding behind my back. "It was all splitty and flaky and dead and gross. They need help, Yan. Lots and lots of help."

"Leave my hair alone!" he hollered, and danced in place, agitated. "Why can't you leave my hair alone?!"

"If you'd just cut it--" I began, in my most reasonable tone of voice.

The Guy wailed. "You want to cut my hair!"

"It's so long, you have so much of it. I just wanted to see . . ."

"You want to castrate me!!"

"You're being completely unreasonable about this."

"STOP LOOKING AT MY HAIR!"

"It's so messy. You don't take care of it, it's all damaged. I just want to see what you'd look like with, you know, a normal head."

The Guy burst into tears.

Well, okay, no. That last bit was creative license. But the rest of the conversation is pretty much word for word. In the main, he's mostly torn between worry and hilarity when I make these aborted assaults on his hair. I think he's grown to expect it as one of those charming little quirks of our relationship, although this hasn't kept him from being in a rather nervous mood, lately.

"If you get to cut my hair, I get to cut yours."

"Fine. I don't mind. You can even do mine first. Here--"

"Not fair! Yours will grow back!"

Personally, I think he's overreacting. A haircut's not really that big a deal. I don't even mind that his hair is long, although it does sort of make my fingers itch after those scissors. Besides, I can always get to it while he's asleep. He really does have a lot of split ends.

Now that I think about it, he hasn't been sleeping very well lately.

Interesting side note. A reader has asked to use my last entry in a class she's teaching, up in the wilds of the Arctic circle. A class, let it be noted, which is teaching English. This is cool in so many ways that I can't even cover them all. There's the fact an entry of mine will be read aloud to complete strangers by someone not related to me, for one thing. For another thing, those complete strangers will be there by choice, not accidentally caught in a surreal nightmare by the chance concatenation of a sudden downpour, no umbrella, and a Twilight Zone-ish Bates Motel convention center advertising Time Shares for poetry.

It's possible that she'll be using the entry to teach her students what not to do when constructing a proper sentence, and I'm fine with that. I've been extremely generous with representational samples, and if my high school Writing 101 class did anything, it was to imbue me with a fanatical desire to see good grammar eliminated world-wide, once and for all.

On the other hand, it could be that she'll be using it as a role model, a good one, and in that case, hurrah! This is something of a triumph considering that I didn't even speak or hear English until the age of three, when my parents enrolled me in Acorn Academy Preschool. They never spoke it at home, and all their friends were Japanese as well; for all my exposure to America, I might as well have been born and raised in Kyoto.

I asked Mom later why she never even tried to speak in English in the house.

"I didn't wanting you to learn the bad Engrish," she explained. "We were thinking, if you learning from us, it will be, tsk, so bad, so bad Engrish."

And, you know, she was probably right. She usually is. On the other hand, how cool would it be to be able to launch full-throttle into a sentence like, "I was reading ther book, ther book my student, she is giving to me, and I am so boring--"

--and make perfect sense?