Rapunzel

Do all babies have this much hair? Ashley wondered as she stared down at her baby girl. The infant’s head was covered with a black crop of hair and there were fine black hairs on her shoulders and down her backbone.

She had born three weeks early and was a bit jaundiced so they put her by the window in the hospital nursery. Otherwise she was perfect. After nine miscarriages, Ashley had never quite believed in this pregnancy and now here she was—baby Ronnie.

At the moment Ashley felt nothing, which she knew was wrong. The baby was especially tiny and maybe just a bit simian. Buried deep in Ashley along with the “normal” need to protect this being, came an equal need to correct.

She put her breast in the baby’s mouth. Baby Ronnie turned her head aside.

Maybe all the hair came from Scott, it certainly did not come from her. On a good day Ashley’s fine blond hair was stringy and, no matter how much it was combed, continued to look that way. Ashley wondered if the baby’s hair had anything to do with her early pregnancy cravings. Perhaps it was the parsley, salads of the stuff, and sometimes she would just rip the heads off a bunch and cram it in her mouth, chewing away. Curly parsley, Italian parsley– it did not matter.

A few weeks after she left the hospital, Ronnie lost all the black hair. Fine brown fuzz grew into curls and then masses of curls so that people would bend over the carriage startled and full of praise. By then Ashley, who was not a young mother, had her own hair cut short into a style more acceptable to the world she was entering with Scott.

Only Ashley knew that Ronnie was a difficult baby perhaps on her way to being a difficult child and that was where the fights with Scott may have begun. Scott was in love from the moment in the hospital that Ronnie stared into his glasses and reached for his manicured finger.

Ronnie did not like the breast, she took to the supplemental bottle like a greedy little beast. Meanwhile in another room the breast pump was wheezing away at Ashley’s tit, pulling out the thin bluish liquid that seemed to repel her child.

After Ashley’s failure at breast feeding, she hovered over her child, clearing every path, kissing every hurt. As much as she seemed cozy and comfortable to others, just the kind of warm woman they could approach with any problem, Ashley lived in a distant sphere where things had to look right before they could be right. That was what made her a very good decorator and a bad mother according to Ronnie, later.

The locked doors had begun at age two when Ronnie wanted to go into her parents’ bedroom but the child psychiatrist had suggested a few nights of their locked door.

“Let me in, let me in,” the child had sobbed and screamed most of one night. She could hear her parents fighting with each other even as she banged on the door and she duly recorded the fact that her father wanted her in while her mother wanted her out.

By the time Ronnie went to nursery school in the East Sixties, Ashley had lightened Ronnie’s hair because she wanted a blond child, a child who looked somewhat like her and not Scott who, despite his Christian name, was Persian and dark. All of the mothers, carefully dressed for their offices as they dropped the children off, noticed that little Ronnie Daghlian had blond hair with dark roots. It was most peculiar.

Every year the Daghlian family sent out a Christmas card that showed the evolution of Ronnie in her silk dresses and the apartment she posed in. The trees grew bigger and richer with antique ornaments, the chairs grew finer, the Persian rugs were replaced by even rarer ones and the paintings by even older ones. Scott, though courted by Gagosian and Pace and Aquavella, was not a collector of any contemporary art.

Ashley’s friends, hoping to match their enthusiasms and disappointments to hers, eventually went away feeling rejected. She only had eyes for the girl and what she might do for her.

Ronnie was a quiet child then, complaisant, going places with her mother holding her hand, yet always keeping her little secrets with her father.

Already Ashley was focused on Ronnie’s nose which duplicated her father’s before his was corrected. She was too young to do anything now but whenever Ashley looked at the girl she saw “nose.” After that she saw, weight, the kind of weight young maturing girls get naturally just before a growth spurt but Ashley did not know or care about that and it bothered her.

The apartment, always in another stage of its perpetual redecoration, rang with conflict—slammed doors, overturned period chairs, thuds, sudden departures, fights and tears and punishments. Once, Ashley slapped Ronnie on her thigh, the girl had turned too quickly for her to reach her backside. Once, Ronnie, snarling with hate, had shoved her mother into a wall. Whatever and whenever the family ate, Ronnie always wanted something else before or after. They never finished a family dinner with all of them in place as the dessert was brought in.

 

Now age 14, with hair she could almost sit on and an attitude of superiority derived mostly from her father’s money, Ronnie left her girls school for a coed school in Riverdale where she hoped to start her life over.

Often Ronnie thought of escape and one afternoon when both the housekeepers were out, she opened the back door for a delivery and saw Carlos who was just about everything in the flesh that Ashley feared. Carlos was tall and shy, a student at Hunter working after school, and he gave Ronnie his cell number if she ever needed anything.

She was just about to throw it away when she changed her mind and entered it into her phone.

They were both lonely and his unacceptability made Carlos alluring. This was Ronnie’s best secret yet. The worse things grew at home the longer they texted into the night until the time of The Dining Room Fight. That’s how it stayed forever after in Ashley and Scott’s mind, as though there had been no others. To Ronnie, that night was both a welcome end and a frightening beginning.

After the melon was cleared and the tarragon chicken was carried in, Ashley looked at her daughter sitting there– plump, wild haired, self-satisfied, flushed with her secret love and habit of late night dope smoking. Scott was thinking of a business problem. Ashley had just lost an important client and decorating job when she turned to Ronnie and said “You are a mess.”

Ronnie got up, she was taller than her mother by then, hoisted Ashley out of her seat.

“Hey,” Scott said to his wife “Why would you say a thing like that?”

“Because it’s true, look at her…”

Ronnie whacked her mother to the floor and stormed from the room.

“Why did you do that?” Scott said, looking down at his wife on the carpet. “What kind of a person are you?”

Marina, who was serving the dinner, was peeking through the glass square in the swinging dining room door. Then she went through the pantry to the kitchen to put the dessert back in the refrigerator.

Carlos met Ronnie on the corner of 68^th street and Madison Avenue, both of them with their runaway backpacks on, only Ronnie’s had $400 and a few joints in it. When she saw Carlos’ jacket, a very worn pleather thing she began to have her first doubts but they made it all the way to Passaic New Jersey and Carlos’ aunt before Scott’s detectives tracked them through Ronnie’s phone. Also she had left a note of sorts, the kind of bitter screed and catalogue that parents want to destroy immediately but somehow are compelled to keep forever.

Running away with a delivery boy was a most original thing to do in the New York private school world at the very beginning of the twenty first century. Carlos was too young to charge and nothing had really happened. The big forbidden love, unthwarted and unconsummated, was already dying.

As the “scandal” became known and Ronnie’s “reputation” damaged, the Daghlians decided to send Ronnie to his brother’s family in West Palm Beach. His brother Ahmed lived on a whole floor of the 40 story Worth Towers.

The words “reputation” and “scandal” belonged to Scott’s mother Fatima who had, since her arrival in New York, become the complete American of the nineteenth century. She approved of Ronnie’s exile to the Towers.

A great loneliness entered Ashley. She took up with her old estranged friends to replace her missing child and became one of those over- jeweled and heavily dressed social figures drinking four glasses of wine at the benefit tables of New York. Whenever they gave her a plate of filet de boeuf and pommes dauphine, Ashley carefully removed any trace of the parsley bunch on her plate.

She lived for scraps of news from the Daghlians of Palm Beach because Ronnie had cut her off. Ronnie barely spoke to Scott either. She went to the Wathen-Eyre High School which was awash with the dope- smoking, parent- hating, overly allowanced truant teens of Palm Beach. Occasionally a child who had done something really wrong in the North was sent down. There were Porsches and Mercedes in the parking lot and every morning a team of teachers and counselors, stooped with despair and fear, scurried in looking behind them as they went. It was Blackboard Jungle in the sun with rich white kids.

Ronnie, who lived easily enough with her Persian family, had entered the world of natural blonds with little noses and saw that she would have to correct herself to fit in. She lightened her hair and wore it in one long swipe over one shoulder. She had her nose fixed. Her father paid and her mother was not there to hold her hand through the bandages. Then she wanted cheek implants and to reconstruct her chin and Scott paid again. She had become a brand new Ronnie when she returned to New York to pack for college.

Ashley went into her bedroom and thought of the stranger in her house who only spoke to her in clipped phrases and still never made it through an entire dinner. Now she looked like Ashley with a great deal of long blond hair, Persian hair from her Persian father and a small foreign nose.

 

After college, Ronnie’s parents went to Boston to drive her back to New York. As they crossed the bridge, Ashley offered to drop her off with Scott and her things and take the car to the garage.

“I’m not going home. I have an apartment downtown,” Ronnie said.

Scott had bought her a place and paid to have it decorated by one of Ashley’s rivals and had not told Ashley. This was their best secret yet and Ashley knew then that she had lost both of them.

The divorce had many chapters and many followers and camps on both sides. It had a winner who was Ashley and a villain who was Scott and a lost innocent who was Ronnie who was neither of those things. Ronnie had been Scott’s from the hospital, and Ashley’s psychiatrist, a Freudian, who had seen the two of them out together at the opera one night when Ashley was sick and stayed home, had seen it all.

Ronnie had nothing much to do with herself after graduation. She could not get a job and Scott could not get her a job so she drifted around taking courses and trying out occupations. She had joined the ranks of the third generation drifting creatives only she had not figured out what to create or who to love and who might look beyond her “glamour” to love the scared and lost former Ronnie within.

She was angry at how she had grown up and then sad and then depressed. She decided she was a victim of her mother and one November 19, a few years ago, cut off all contact. She would have to leave the city and go west where no one would know how she spent her time. Scott was paying her bills and always ready to take her calls, even in the midst of his business and his new life with his new family.

 

Every year on November 19th a car pulls to the curb in front of the Madrone Towers in San Francisco and a woman gets out. She stands looking up at the building all day and into the night and then she gets back into the car and is driven away.

Sometimes it rains and the driver gets out to hold his umbrella over her. After a while, he hands her the umbrella and gets back in the car.

When she first found out where her daughter lived, Ashley looked up Madrone because it sounded like “mother” to her. She found it was a tree with thin red bark peeling back to reveal a yellow layer underneath.

The well- taken –care- of doormen know to expect this woman and they know what to do should she ever approach the building.

They are to call up to apartment 16-C and tell Ms. Daghlian that the woman is there. Should she approach the door or the concierge’s desk they are not to let her pass. They are not to let her phone up. They are not to receive any letter or package from her. They know that there will be no response from 16-C.

Ronnie Daghlian has said she will never forgive and she means it. She has vowed never to let down her hair and let Ashley, her mother, come up.