Headwig

There’s a head in Aunt Sonya’s room.

A head I can’t tell anyone about because I’m not supposed to be here, in the room that belonged to Aunt Reenie before she bought the land and parked a pale blue trailer with a tin roof next door. The room where Aunt Sonya and Uncle Woodrow sleep when too many of the family cram into Grandma Earley’s house. Us having to be in constant rotation so no one falls out from the emission of all that body heat.

The room where the floor is so tender, the lamp shakes with every step. The sound like coins dripping from slot machines on TV.

The head in Aunt Sonya’s room is white with no eyes. Like pillow feathers or a balled-up cloud. She has lips and a nose and my Aunt Sonya’s hair, which doesn’t make sense. I wonder if the head is a doll, a toy my aunt keeps, and the hair is plastic or dental floss-thin like Barbie’s or boar bristle-thick like Addy’s.

I just need to touch a strand to make sure…

“I wouldn’t.” A voice I recognize, one that switches between medium and low tones every other sentence, enters through the doorway.

Uncle Woodrow has one of my favorite smiles and the best stomach to hug, though Mom says I shouldn’t “be up under him” since he’s not a hugger after the first required hello and polite goodbye.

He has those big kind of eyes, the ones that look like they could roll out of their sockets if he tilts his head too far. Eyes that are on me when I withdraw my hand.

“There’s a head,” I say, both hands retreating into my pants pockets.

Uncle Woodrow leans farther into the room, sucks his teeth. “There is,” he smiles and winks at me. “Wonder where your auntie dug that one up.”

▴ ▴ ▴

Some of the family have already gotten their plates and found a spot to eat, the men drifting to the TV room in the back while the women gather around Grandma in the front room including Aunt Reenie. Her voice carries, making it sound like she’s in all the rooms at once, floating in and out of every conversation.

Mom has fixed my plate and assigns me to the kitchen, the quiet area between the men and women. Uncle Leholt is there, making his eyes wide at me while I’m herded by my mother’s strong hand grasping the top of my head like a steering wheel around Uncle Woodrow to my chair.

But I can’t play our game and make eyes back. Not when Aunt Sonya’s been digging up heads and keeping them in rooms. Heads with the hair I just saw her with yesterday.

“What’s wrong with the girl?” asks Uncle Leholt.

Adults tend to talk over me until one notices I’m in the room and acts like a mistake has been made. Like someone forgot to pick me up, or that they’ve been there all along and I’m the one that walked in by accident, seated with catfish in my cheek.

“Avi.” Mom has her hand to my forehead. Uncle Leholt’s in his seat throwing back a second can of Mountain Dew. Uncle Woodrow’s at the sink, water running over his hands, covered in fish breading.

And there’s a head in Aunt Sonya’s room.

I mean for the thought to stay quiet and inside me. For my mouth to stay shut, but it doesn’t. Mom pulls away, and Uncle Leholt chokes, which I feel bad about because Mountain Dew is our shared thing and should never be wasted and, somehow, I’ve ruined that for us.

Only Uncle Woodrow is laughing—the laugh that tucks the voices of men and women in—until my mom’s voice throws the whole thing back.

“What did you say?” Mom’s eyes are cutting in Uncle Woodrow’s direction.

Which gets Uncle Leholt’s head on a spring tilt, bobbing between one older sibling and the other.

Uncle Woodrow tattling on me, saying I went into his and Aunt Sonya’s room.

Me saying it’s Aunt Reenie’s room, which isn’t a whole lie. The room used to be hers when she lived here, before moving into a trailer next door.

Uncle Woodrow saying I had no business in there, not in a mean way, but in a way that masks Aunt Reenie’s asking what on repeat from somewhere in the front room.

Then Mom and Uncle Woodrow start talking over me, and I’m happy to return to the background until Grandma Earley is leaning out of her plush leather rocking recliner, making all the women go quiet. One foot in the kitchen gets Mom and Uncle Woodrow quiet too, their sentences dying in the middle, and Uncle Leholt’s head gets still. One of the men in the back room must see her through the open door. One shush being all it takes for even the TV to be muted.

“Y’all leave my baby alone.”

“But I didn’t—”

I want to inherit the stare of my grandma. A stare that makes the running water choke, my Uncle Woodrow bite off the rest of that sentence and replace it with the tip of his tongue between his teeth, and beckons my father into the room.

“Now,” my grandma lifts the under bit of my chin with her thumbnail so I’m looking into her always-wet eyes. “What’s this about a head?”

▴ ▴ ▴

Grandma Earley and I are like bumper cars down the hall, her telling me to follow her and me trying to obey. Except I have four speeds of walking and none of them match her steady shuffle. We walk past the room with the head. The room where I sleep between my parents every night the house is overcrowded. The room where their snores are the quietest in a bellowing competition between my uncles that’s enough to make the black iron bars over the windows shake. We go to the back of the hall, into my grandma’s room.

I stop in the doorway.

She waves me in without turning around and, I guess, since she’s Mom’s mom, she has more authority over me. I tiptoe in, stay on the balls of my feet even when standing still since I’m not sure what the rules are without Mom.

Grandma Earley is quiet, so I stay quiet. Maybe that’s the rule for her room. She leans against her bed, arms crossed and settled, meaning she’s going to be there for a while.

I stand next to her, my head at the halfway point of her waist, and try to do the same. My small body is propped up straight against the giant frame of her bed. When I try to get my arms in a crossing position that’s comfortable, I see the head on her dresser. A head almost the same as Aunt Sonya’s except this one has a hole the size of a screwed pencil tip in her eye. The bangs of Grandma’s Sunday hair cover her forehead.

“Go on.” Grandma Earley hip bumps my head, and I cross over. The closer I get to her dresser, the better I can see her pitch-black Sunday hair with the bumped ends and bangs. I turn and take in her blue scarf like it’s new, like her church hair was always hiding somewhere underneath until summoned.

“Some folks need help feeling pretty,” she pats her scarf, “or don’t want to go out being gray every day.”

Grandma Earley taps the front of her house dress. I do the same until she catches me, wipes my hands into the cloth.

Once she’s done washing me in her fabric, she picks up the head and holds it so we’re eye to eye.

“Gone touch.”

Mom says I shouldn’t go about touching things I don’t know about, and I question how much power grandmas have over moms. When I resist, Grandma Earley tilts the head closer to me, the hairs tickling my lip.

“It’s soft,” I giggle. I comb my fingers through it all.

Grandma Earley says the word wig until I repeat the word too. Her best church wig made out of real human hair. Before I can ask, she says she doesn’t know who or where it came from. Definitely not from someone or somewhere in the ground.

She tells me about Aunt Sonya’s wig, that it’s not nice to ask about it though I can still talk to her. I lie and say okay because I have to know if Dad knows about wigs since he won’t tell anyone I asked, and if he does, why didn’t he tell me?

“Do I need a wig?” I try to give her best church wig pigtails but Grandma pulls her away from me. Sets her back on the dresser.

“With your hair? Probably not.”

“And when I’m gray?”

Grandma Earley traces the outline of my edges. “You treat this right, you’ll never need one.”

“What about Aunt Sonya?” I whisper into her hand.

Grandma looks to the door, then back at me. “People got they reasons. Sometimes that reason is they got no choice.”

I tell her I understand even though I don’t. Not when she leads me back to the family. She returns to her big leather rocker recliner in the front room, and I go back to the kitchen.

I look at the hair around me. Uncle Woodrow with a close shave, his hair looking like it’s drawn onto his head, complaining that’s Leholt’s third Mountain Dew. Uncle Leholt with short curls of black and gray that form a W on the top of his head, telling Woodrow to leave him alone while crushing another empty can.

Mom and her shoulder-length hair bumped at the ends that she describes as limp in the heat. She brings me a slice of sweet potato pie she’s saved.

Aunt Sonya, who never walks anywhere. Who glosses over floors the way we learn how to do in ballet class to get from one position to another. Who tells Uncle Leholt to drink water and that Uncle Woodrow should pack the fish in the plastic pouches not stuff it.

Who looks at me and says, “I heard you was asking about my head.”