To experience the bittersweet
To taste defeat
Then brush your teeth -- "Forward Motion," Relient K
The first thing Pam does when she gets home is turn on the shower, as hot as she can stand it. Pam likes baths, like bubble bath and bath bombs and bath pillows and massage oil beads and all those silly things, but now is not the time for a bath. Baths are for feeling good. Showers are for when you need to cry.
Pam's shower is not very big, not as big as her shower at the apartment she'd shared with Roy. Her first day here, she'd scrubbed it out, rubbed her knuckles raw scouring the grime out of each little strip of grout. The tile's an ugly, pea soup green, but it's at least clean now. Hanging from the shower head is her caddy, filled with her favorite bath products. Pam's not too girly, she doesn't think, but she likes cosmetics and bath products, likes buying them even if she never uses them. Roy used to say that was stupid, used to complain about the extra five dollars at the grocery store, spent on nail polish or hair gel or lip gloss, used to complain about how much stuff she had in the shower, when all he had was a razor, a bottle of White Rain, and a bar of Irish Spring.
No one's seen the inside of this shower, no one has complained about its contents. After she moved in here, after she spent what was supposed to be the first weeks of her honeymoon moving in, unpacking, cleaning, Pam spent that first weekend wrapped in her afghan on the couch, watching a Law & Order marathon on TV, holding the phone, hand poised to dial (his cellphone wouldn't work in Australia, she told herself, but she wanted to call anyway), and feeling very, very sorry for herself.
The weekend after that, the weekend she was supposed to come home from her honeymoon and begin her life as a married woman, she went shopping.
She drove to Philly to visit her mom, and they hit the town. Pam's mom wanted shorts for herself: practical old-lady shorts, pleated khaki and almost knee-length, the sort of thing Pam would have bought for herself last summer, only now she doesn't really feel like it. Pam bought Chanel nail polish and heels too tall and strappy to wear to work -- heels that didn't really suit anything she owned -- and then raided Lush, just because she could. She couldn't really afford it, but Pam's mom was feeling generous, worrying about her baby, and picked up the tab.
Sunday night, back in Scranton, she opened one of the bottles of wine she'd been saving for a special occasion and took a long, hot bath with her new Honey Bee bath bomb and her favorite bath pillow and read Cosmo -- which Roy thought was dumb, but actually he liked the sex tips, and thought the girls in it were hot. Pam purposely skipped the sex tips, which were always the same in every issue, but read all about how to deal with unwanted advances at work and giggled.
After she'd nearly finished the bottle (drinking straight from it; she'd already returned the wine glasses her uncle had given them), she'd felt less like giggling and more like crying, so she'd stood up and flipped the drain back on, turned on the shower. She didn't want to associate her new bathtub with the memory of drunkenly sobbing about Roy and her life and the mess she'd made of everything. She's in for more of the same thing tonight.
The water weighs her hair down, and she runs her fingers through it slowly, sifting it so it all gets wet, holding it up with one hand while the water beats down on her neck. She fills her palm with shampoo -- it's just Suave, the kind that's meant as a knockoff of fancier, more expensive brands, meant for curly hair. She's already washed her hair today, and she knows it's bad for her hair to wash it more than once a day -- it gets dry, frizzy, crunchy -- but she does it again anyway. She likes the feel of clean wet hair.
After the shampoo is all the way out of her hair, after the water running into the drain is totally clear, she pours a huge dollop of conditioner into her hand, begins to work it methodically through her hair, trying to get most of it on the ends. Her mom insisted she buy nice conditioner at Lush -- the clerk, a girl with huge kinky curls and the kind of eyeliner Pam will never be able to pull off, recommended American Cream, swore it was the best thing for Pam's wavy hair. Pam's had it nearly a year now, and she's only used it three times: that first weekend she bought it, the day of the merger, and now. Her mom would be disappointed that she's wasting it.
Pam started using conditioner the summer she was thirteen. Her hair had always been curly, always crazy, but that was the summer she started to care.
+ + +
Pam met Roy the summer they were eight. His sister was her babysitter, and sometimes she Pam went to her house, and Pam, Roy, and Kenny would swim, or play soccer. They came over to play foosball at Pam's house sometimes, and by the end of the summer, they were all friends. Pam didn't have any other guy friends, and her friends teased her about it, when school started -- Pam was the only girl in the third grade with a guy friend, and whenever Roy and Pam talked, everyone went ooh and sang about Pam and Roy sitting in a tree.
Roy quit talking to her at school, because his friends teased him too, and Pam was both sad and relieved. They were still friends, though, and by junior high it got so it wasn't weird, guys and girls being friends, and they could talk in the hall, and Roy usually came by at the end of lunch. They didn't actually sit together; Roy sat with the other guys on the basketball team and Pam with her friends from art club.
The summer she turned thirteen, Pam fell in love with Roy. She knew she wanted to be with him, but she didn't know how to go about making that happen. The one time she tried to wear makeup, dress up, when she went over to his house, Kenny complained that she couldn't play soccer in a skirt, and asked her what was wrong with her eyes. And Roy didn't say anything at all.
One day a few weeks after that, Pam was over at Roy's house, swimming. After, Pam stood on the deck and wrung
out her hair, towel wrapped around her waist, last year's swimsuit pilling across the butt, too tight across her chest; her new, beginning curves.
"You need to wash your hair tonight," Roy's sister advised, snapping her gum between words. "And condition. You're real blonde this summer, and it'll go green if you don't."
"I don't... use conditioner," Pam said, shifting her weight, touching the faded towel around her waist, making sure it was still tied. She only had a vague idea what "conditioner" even was. "Should I?"
"Oh, Pam," Kathleen said. "C'mere."
Kathleen pushed Pam, still wearing her swimsuit, into the shower. "Pam," she said, digging through a crate under the sink -- Kathleen shared the bathroom with Kenny, and had a ton of makeup and bath stuff, overflowing baskets that lived under the sink -- "you have curly hair. Well, wavy. And it's very difficult to maintain. You have to take extra care of your hair. And" -- she stood up, triumphant, clutching a can of something -- "conditioner is essential." She popped her gum.
Pam washed her hair, feeling silly, and then Kathleen showed her how much conditioner to use, how to work it through her hair, told her to leave it in while she soaped herself, "gotta let it sit, works better that way."
She sent Pam home with a barely used bottle of conditioner, a can of Aquanet, and instructions to procure for herself a wide-tooth comb, a fine-tooth comb, a bottle of mousse, and a round brush.
The next day, Kathleen gave Pam a makeover. While Roy and Kenny swam, Pam sat inside, trying not to fidget as Kathleen poked her with all sorts of bizarre instruments: a mascara wand, three brushes and two combs, an eyelash curler, hairspray, lipliner. Afterwards, she wouldn't let Pam go swimming: "Don't you know that'll ruin your makeup? You want to sit by the pool, watch the boys. Laugh when they try to impress you."
That was the day Roy kissed her, her first kiss, behind his house, up against the siding, weeds tickling her calves. That was how Pam knew Kathleen was right.
She never could get the knack of hair and makeup quite like Kathleen, so most days she didn't even try. In high school she got really into art club, and quit wearing blush and eyeshadow: only pale powder and mascara and eyeliner, sometimes red lipstick. She tried to straighten her hair, which didn't really work. She wore turtlenecks covered in paint stains, and lots of black. She campaigned for another set of piercings, a tattoo, requests her parents denied. She tried to take up smoking, like the other girls in art club, but she just coughed and she didn't seem to look as cool as they did. Roy laughed, and Kathleen despaired.
Pam and Roy started "going out" their junior year, and after that things seemed to even out. Pam let Kathleen do her hair and makeup for prom, and hardly even recognized herself in the mirror that night.
+ + +
These last few months, she's spent a lot of time thinking about that summer she was thirteen, the summer she grew five inches and bought her first bra and her first easel, the summer Kathleen taught her about makeup and hairspray and conditioner, the summer she fell in love with Roy. The future that Pam wanted is the future this Pam gave up.
She thinks about what that girl would think of who she has become. She has never studied art in Paris, she has never been at all. She has never tattooed any great works of art -- her own or someone else's -- on her body. She has only one set of piercings, in her earlobes. She doesn't wear all black anymore, she doesn't smoke, and she's never done any drugs. She is much less exciting than she had intended to be. Some days it chafes, and the restless itchy feeling of her skin not fitting overwhelms her, and on those days she sketches ideas for tattoos, scours Travelocity for trips to places she's never been, the kinds of places you have to get shots to visit.
But most days she knows it's OK. Most days she knows this is how it was always going to be.
Pam pins her hair up before she reaches for the soap, letting the conditioner set. Not because that's what Kathleen taught her but because she likes the feeling of thick, slightly slimy curls of hair piled around her head, likes imagining little molecules of moisture and goodness clinging to each strand as she loofahs her feet.
She washes her face, using her strongest exfoliator, the one that tingles so much it almost hurts, wiping away her makeup and tears and at least another layer of skin, leaving her feeling raw and shiny and new.
Pam rinses the conditioner out, reaching automatically for the tap to save some of the hot water before stopping herself. She smiles faintly before cranking it all the way over to H. She inspects the bottle and decides to repeat.
Story Notes:
With thanks to Kate for the beta, and, as usual, the ending. Title is a song from South Pacific. Written for the We Take Five ficathon. My prompt was "condition."
Also, a disclaimer: Not mine.
