The Girl with Big Hair

Cathy Day

All you know about Interview is that Andy Warhol started the magazine in a factory, but it looks pretty upscale to you—whirring computers with funky screensavers, gray cubicle pods, ergonomic chairs with lumbar support, and Levelor–ed windows overlooking Manhattan. This is the first day of your internship at Interview, and you’re wearing a purple silk jacket, a lime green shirt, and the bored, glazed expression of a New Yorker—all newly acquired. More than anything, you don’t want to look like who you are: a twenty–one–year–old girl who’s never been to a city bigger than Indianapolis.
    Your first job, of course, is answering phones. Alfonso, the editor’s assistant, is home with a cold, so you must field the one hundred calls that the editor, Veda Wise, will receive that day. For the first hour, you make only one mistake, when you forget to ask who is calling and put the caller through to Veda’s office, and it isn’t somebody she wants to talk to. Veda yells; you almost cry, but by the end of the day, you will understand your blunder. In New York, only so much can be allowed to get through.
    In the afternoon, Veda clomps out of her office carrying three leather shoulder bags and a lit cigarette. She’s wearing black leggings and a black sweater, and her glasses are enormous and bright red. She calls you “darling,” asks you to phone The New Yorker and tell them she’s on her way there to do goat, and then to call someone named Moma and ask what time the benefit starts. “Got it? Great,” she says, taps her ash in your Coke can, and is gone.
    Goat. Goat? There’s a New Yorker on Alfonso’s desk, so you flip it open. Oh. Okay. “Goings on about Town.” You place a call to the New Yorker and use the insider lingo to let them know that you know what the hell is going on. Then you call New York City Information. “Yes, I’d like the number for a Moma please.” The operator asks if that is a first or a last name. “Both,” you say. “I think it’s a one–word name. Like Cher.”
    Daniel, the music editor, chuckles and appears over the top of your cubicle. He reaches down and cuts off your call. “MoMA isn’t a who, it’s an it. The Museum of Modern Art, man.”
    “I know,” you say, grabbing the phone book. “It was a joke. To see if you were paying attention.” Daniel laughs, and you think he believes you, but guile is not your forte. He can see through your Hoosier twang, your ridiculous outfit, your Texas beauty–queen hair, and this flippant untruth. You dial the number for MoMA. “Hello, this is Interview. No, I’m not calling for an interview, this is interview magazine. You know, Andy Warhol’s Interview.” You roll your eyes at Daniel and shake your head.
    Daniel points his finger at you. “Girlfriend, you are fucking priceless.”

    Everybody loves a good ingenue.


YOU ARE JENNY PERDIDO from Peru, Indiana. Over and over growing up, you were told how lucky you were to live in a place where nothing bad happens, but you didn’t feel lucky. Neither did your mother. Right out of high school, she married your father, Ethan Perdido, proprietor of the Perdido Funeral Home. Funeral homes are lovely, lonely houses, since nobody cares much to visit them unless they have to. Your mother had affairs, and these mistakes eventually would have been forgiven had she shown a little discredon. You knew why she took the hearse out for long drives. You knew why it came back with river mud on the tires. Everybody knew. One night when you were fourteen, she took the hearse and didn’t come back. The police found it a week later, abandoned in a Chicago parking garage. The guidance counselor at school asked how you felt, and you said, “I hate her,” but what you meant was: I hate her because she didn’t take me with her.
    Every Friday night, you walked to the B&B Grocery to check out the latest copies of Vogue, Spin, and Rolling Stone. You stared at the slick photos of rock and movie stars, artists, and fashion designers and imagined yourself interviewing them: sipping espressos under umbrellas at sidewalk cafes, drinking martinis in secluded cocktail lounges. The owner of the B&B, Mr. Barnett, always interrupted your fantasies, saying, “What are you reading that hippie trash for, Jenny?” Then, as a kind of apology, he’d say, “You’re looking more like that mother of yours every day,” touching your palm as he handed you the change.
    Every wayward son and willful daughter finds means of escape. It took you awhile, but you did it. The day you left for New York City, your father gave you mace, “for the perverts,” and a return ticket, “to come home for Christmas.” At the airport gate, he cried and said, “I don’t want you to leave,” which you knew meant: Don’t leave me like your mother did. His sorrow embarrassed, then angered you. Nothing, not his fear, nor this guilt trip, was going to keep you from this internship in New York. You kissed him swiftly on the cheek, grabbed your suitcase, and got on the plane before he could tell you to come back. A line of people stood at the windows of the terminal, waving at the plane, and you waved back, thinking, Good–bye, suckers! Thinking, Good–bye, Dad.
    You’d never been on a plane before. From your window seat, you watched the plane’s shadow pass over Indiana, the green squares of corn and soybeans bordered by gray county highways laid out in a perfect grid. Leaning back in your seat, you felt suddenly lighter, as if a cat had been sitting on your chest for days, for years, and had finally moved away. You ordered a gin and tonic. You’d never had a gin and tonic before, but it seemed like the proper drink to order on a plane flying to New York.
    When you landed at LaGuardia, you took a cab to your friend Siobahn’s apartment in Chelsea. In your excitement, you talked your fool head off to the driver, telling him all about yourself. How you met Siobahn in college. About her new job with a Manhattan–based TV director. How you found an ad for the Interview internship in the back of Rolling Stone. That you’d never heard of Interview and had to drive all the way to Fort Wayne to buy a copy. The driver didn’t say much back, but you gave him an enormous tip anyway because he was your first New York taxi driver, and it felt like the right thing to do.

TO CELEBRATE THE FIRST DAY of your Interview internship, Siobahn takes you to a bar in Greenwich Village. She wants you to meet her friend from high school, Nate, who’s studying acting at NYU. He looks familiar to you for some reason. He says, “So you’re from Indiana, huh? Basketball. Indy 500. Corn. God, why do people live there?”
    “I don’t. Anymore,” you say.
    Nate laughs. He tells you and Siobahn he just got back from Maine. For extra money, he models for the Tweeds catalog. Then you remember him, wearing a forest green sweater, standing in surf. You ordered the sweater he wore in the spring catalog. “No kidding? That’s wild,” Nate says without enthusiasm.
    Siobahn says, “That’s so serendipitous.”
    Nate shakes his head. “Not really. Loden was really big last year.”
    He smokes Camels unfiltered and in between sips of beer, picks tobacco off of his tongue and stares at you. You’ve never been stared at by a Tweeds model in a Greenwich Village bar, so you drink too much. When Nate gets up to use the bathroom, you ask Siobahn if she’s dating him. “A long time ago I did, but he only went out with me because my family had a pool,” Siobahn says. “One time he broke up with someone because he’d found a girl with a better apartment. Then he found out some TV exec’s daughter lived in the same building, and he worked his way down the hail to her.” As Nate saunters back to your table, she whispers, “It’s goddamned Darwinian.”
    During the third pitcher, Nate looks at you and asks, “Do all the girls in Indiana wear their hair like that?” You show them a picture of a high school friend you still carry in your wallet. Her hair takes up most of the picture. Nate and Siobahn laugh, but you feel guilty, as if you have betrayed the girl in the photograph, even though you haven’t spoken to her in years. Looking around the bar, you see that nobody, not a single woman, has hair as big as yours.
    In the morning before work, Siobahn takes you to a salon where you pay $8o for a haircut. Siobahn squeezes your hand. “You’re doing the right thing,” she says. “You’ll look like Demi Moore in Ghost.” For days after, you’ll catch glimpses of your reflection in store windows and have to look twice to make sure that it is really you.

DAY TWO AT Interview: Alfonso is back, so you need a new task from Daniel, Assistant Editor slash Hip Music Guru slash Keep–the–Interns–Busy Coordinator. He’s on the phone, nodding his head and repeating the words “cool” and “righteous” at fifteen–second intervals. Finally, he points at the receiver, whispers, “Michael Stipe,” and holds up his coffee cup. You walk to the office coffeemaker, thinking, I’m getting coffee for somebody who’s talking to Michael Stipe!
    Later, Daniel introduces you to the other editors. Mike, the book review guy—he points at his receiver and whispers, “Allen Gurganus.” Priscilla, the Photo Editor—she points to her receiver and whispers, “Herb Ritts.” Paul, Managing Editor, who isn’t talking to anybody famous because his job is to keep everybody else talking to famous people. And last of all, you are formally introduced to Veda Wise, who, Daniel whispers, is the only one in the office who actually knew Warhol personally. She also knew Robert Mapplethorpe, and you nod because you saw some of those pictures in Time. Daniel says that Veda is rumored to be having an affair with the publisher’s wife. The publisher, Daniel adds, is having an affair with a Victoria’s Secret model who has just broken up with Axl Rose, and you are breathless to be so close to such greatness.
    Daniel sets you up in a catchall office where everybody puts stuff they don’t know what to do with—like you. He gives you a copy of the latest issue and says, “Everybody in this issue needs a complimentary copy. Make a list and then go around to everybody’s rolodex and find the addresses and take these mailing stickers and fill them out and put a copy of the magazine in these envelopes and send them all off. Got it? Cool.” It takes three days of rolodex flipping and label sticking and envelope licking to get the job done. You can’t believe that a magazine this famous doesn’t have a better system, something computerized and completely automatic, but already you sense that the magazine operates on a certain devil–may–care philosophy and they don’t want to be organized, because that would make them “established” and that wouldn’t be as cool. Besides, now you have the addresses and phone numbers of Clint Eastwood, David Lynch, Mike Tyson, William S. Burroughs, and Laura Dern. You and Siobahn stick them on your refrigerator.
    A few weeks later, Daniel tells you that the editors are quite pleased with your performance, your initiative, your work ethic, your responsible, Midwestern values. Paul says, “If I could clone you, I’d be a happy managing editor. Give me a small town kid any day over one of these trendy, way–too–cool–for– my–own–good, angel–headed hipsters that come in here.”
    One day, a girl about your age drops off her résumé. Mike, the book review guy, looks at it on your desk and whistles.
    “What’s the deal?” you ask.
    He says, “C’mon! You’ve never heard this name before? Talese. Nan. Gay.”
    You say, “No. What? She’s gay?”
    Mike laughs and pats your arm. “Jenny, I love you. You’re so refreshingly naive.”
    You take this as a compliment and smile.

AT SIX IN THE MORNING on your twentysecond birthday, the phone rings. You wait for Siobahn to answer, but she hasn’t been coming home lately— “working late with the director,” she says. On the tenth ring, you answer with a who–the–hell–is–calling–this–early voice. Already, you have acquired a New Yorker’s gruffness, but your father, the mortician, is not impressed with your new demeanor. He says, “I wanted to be the first person to wish you a happy birthday,” and his voice is quiet, distant, and lonely. You see him standing in the kitchen in his blue bathrobe and matching slippers, fresh from his morning run and shower. In the background, you can hear the radio that sits on top of the refrigerator and the familiar voice of the morning news announcer, reciting crop prices and the morning weather report. Outside your window is Eighth Avenue, noisy with the honk of taxis and the squeal of bus brakes. In a few hours, you’ll fight your way through the clamor, the crowds, the steam rising from grates. Walking in New York, you’ve decided, is like fighting a war twice a day. Lately, waking up alone in Siobahn’s apartment, you’ve begun to feel that old cat again, sleeping heavily on your chest. You imagine your mother waking up to the same sounds, the same slant of light filtering into her apartment. She’s in a city, too, maybe even this one. Until now, you have always pictured your mother living a happy, secret life, but now you feel her horrible anonymity. For just that moment, you miss what you’ve left: the silence of Peru, of your father, of the funeral home, and it occurs to you that both sound and silence have shape and form, and both are equally as difficult to travel through. Your father says that a card and check are in the mail and updates you on what has changed in Peru since you left, which to him is a litany of those who have died.

WHEN YOU GET TO WORK, Priscilla runs up to you and says, “We’re working on our Thanksgiving spread, and we’ve got this great Robert Lee Morris necklace, and we need someone to wear it for the shoot over this black shirt, but the shot won’t include the head, so I figured, you know, you could probably do it just as well as any model,” and you are so overwhelmed at the thought of actually getting your picture in a magazine that you don’t realize that you’ve just been insulted.
    After work, you go to the photographer’s studio. He places a piece of pumpkin pie on the necklace, which dips out like a serving platter over your breasts. When you tell him it’s your birthday, he gives you the pie, and you go home to Chelsea and celebrate with Siobahn and Nate. You drink beer and eat pie, sitting on the picnic table in the dark courtyard behind your building. The smell of rotting fish drifts down the alley from a nearby Chinese restaurant. You snap a whole roll of film because you are so happy.

FOR THE MOST PART, your job requires you to do no more than fetch, but what you fetch and to whom you bring it keep you from feeling like the lackey that you are. You fetch so well that you are promoted from all–around lackey to Priscilla the photo editor’s lackey.
    Not long after your promotion, Priscilla sends you out in a rented limo to deliver clothes for a cover shoot, but doesn’t tell you who they are for. When you arrive at the studio in the Puck Building, at least twenty people dressed in black are milling around, smoking cigarettes, drinking cappuccino, adjusting lights, ignoring you. You hand the garment bags to the stylist, who inspects the clothes for damage and says crossly, “Michel say girl from Interview bring sandwiches. Meeez Ryder is hungry.” Then you see her, Winona Ryder sitting in front of a giant mirror, her hair a jet–black marvel of backcombing and hairspray that defies the laws of gravity. You love Winona Ryder. You’ve seen Heathers at least five times.
    You want to be nonchalant. “Great hair,” you finally say.
    Winona Ryder smiles into the mirror and says, “Thanks.”
    You can’t think of anything else to say, so you run down to the corner deli and pick up the sandwiches Priscilla forgot to tell you to pick up. The picture Veda chooses for the cover is one of Winona holding a decorated toothpick up to her face, a toothpick from the sandwiches that you, Jenny Perdido, brought her.
    You bring home these stories to Siobahn and Nate, fanning them out like a hand of cards. Siobahn plays her “I talked to Aaron Spelling on the phone” card, and Nate plays his “I got a part in an off–off Broadway play” card, but you always trump them because your brushes with greatness come almost every day. They tell you that you are so lucky. At Interview, you are miles away from being as cool as Daniel or Veda, but at the brownstone in Chelsea, you are Jenny Perdido, the girl with connections, CDs, movie premiere passes, and special invitations to the hippest clubs.
    On a chilly autumn evening, you have three passes to the Palladium for David Cassidy’s album party. The invitation–less shiver in the near–cold, calling out to the doorman from behind the ropes, hoping that their costumes will gain them entry—the burgundy velvet suits and high, white collars of the Partridge Family. Inside, you slip through the tightly packed crowd and climb the neon–lit stairs. You say, with great seriousness and a sense of awe, “Wow, I feel like I’m in Bright Lights, Big City.” You pay $6 for a beer and are not outraged.
    The three of you dance for an hour to K.C. and the Sunshine Band, ABBA, and Wild Cherry. When you were a kid, you made up a dance to “Play That Funky Music” and you perform it for Siobahn and Nate and the strangers who surround you in a circle. They clap and copy your moves, but there is something different in their eyes that bothers you, the way that they look at each other in a knowing way, a self–conscious mocking of themselves and the music itself. Unlike them, you haven’t yet mastered the art of dancing ironically.
    Around one, a crowd forms at the entrance. Nate says, “Man, this is a joke. Keith Partridge my ass.” But then, David Cassidy walks in the door. As the DJ plays “C’mon Get Happy,” Nate pushes you forward, trying to get a better look. Suddenly, everyone rushes forward, overcome by a wave of homesick longing for the Partridge Family—Keith and Laurie and Reuben and Danny and the garage where they jammed. Everyone screams “Keith!” When that wave of nostalgia hits him, David Cassidy’s eyes grow wide with fear, and he darts back outside. His bodyguards stand with their arms crossed in front of the door as the DJ plays “I Think I Love You.” He wasn’t wearing anything retro at all, and he was a lot shorter than you thought he’d be, just a singer with a new album out who probably just wanted to get a drink until the Ghost of Seventies Television came along.
    Nate grabs your hand. “Show them your Interview pass. Maybe we can meet him.”
    Digging in your purse, you say, “I thought you didn’t like The Partridge Family?”
    Nate shrugs. “A star is a star is a star.” He takes your employee ID card and is gone. Ten minutes later, he returns with a grin. “I told him Interview wanted to do a story on him and he believed me and gave me his number. Look,” Nate says, holding out the napkin with bleeding, scribbled numbers. “I’m going to call him tomorrow and ask if he can set me up with his agent.”
    You stare at him, picturing him brandishing the napkin, telling his friends in a superior, bemused tone, David Cassidy, man. Keith Fucking Partridge. Suddenly, you are sick to your stomach. “Let’s get out of here. Can we get a cab?” It’s three in the morning, and between the three of you, you have two dollars and seventy–five cents. Damn those $6 beers.
    On the walk home, you ask Nate for your ID card. He flicks his cigarette butt in a fiery arc and reaches into his back pocket. “And Nate, I don’t want you to call David Cassidy either.”
    Nate laughs through his nose. “Why not?”
    “I could get in trouble, dumbass.” You didn’t intend to use that word, but still, there it is.
    Nate hands you the card and turns a corner without saying good–bye. Siobahn falls in step with you. “That was rude. What’s your problem?”
    The answer is forming inside you, but right now, you aren’t ready to speak it.

BEING FROM INDIANA, your body wants lunch at noon and dinner at five; but at Interview, you work from eleven to eight. By the time you make it home, you’re starving. Usually, you stop at the Chinese place for moo shu pork, and at the corner market, you buy a quart of beer and a pint of ice cream. If the line at the Chinese place is too long, you skip the moo shu altogether and just eat ice cream and drink beer for dinner. In Peru, at the B&B, if you bought these things every night, Mr. Barnett would have it spread all over town that you were pregnant or crazy. Sometimes, you wish the Korean man behind the counter would show a flicker of interest, a sign that he recognizes you and your purchases, but he never does.
    Now when you come home to Chelsea and fan out your hand, nobody is there to play. You haven’t seen Nate since the David Cassidy, Dumbass incident. Siobahn comes home only to fill her garment bag with another week’s worth of clothes and leave you notes about how much rent you owe. She never comes in the evenings, only during the day while you are at work. You decide to leave her a note, inviting her to a party Interview is throwing for the new Emporio Armani line. She leaves you a note: “God, I never see you anymore! I’ll be there.”
    She doesn’t show, of course, so you end up drinking free Amstel Lights with Priscilla and Lisa Bonet. She’s married to Lenny Kravitz at the time, but he doesn’t show either.

FOR THE SPREAD ON Jean–Paul Gaultier’s spring line, Veda decides to go with an Adam and Eve theme, and she wants an apple. Not a real apple, or even a photograph of a real apple, but a painting of an apple. You are sent to the stock photo place down the street to bring her one. Four hours worth of still lifes later, you realize that most people paint baskets of apples, bowls of apples, apples on trees. Cezanne painted a lot of apples, but never just one by itself. You come up with a handful of slides with apples that have somehow rolled loose from the bunch. Veda isn’t going to like these at all, you think. While the clerk checks out the slides, you thumb through a René Magritte book sitting on the desk. The page opens. A great big lovely apple sits right there in front of you on the page. Five minutes later, you walk out with a slide of Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pomme in your hand.
    You walk into Veda Wise’s office, confident, happy, fulfilled. Veda holds the slide up to the light and covers her mouth in awe. You, Jenny Perdido, have made the Gaultier spread, even if it was by accident. Veda says she’s going to run it. Full–page.
    That night, you call your father to tell him about your coup. He says, “Uh–huh. You found a picture of an apple and they liked it. And then what happened?”
    “Everybody was excited and thanked me.”
    “Will they give you some kind of credit? A finder’s fee?”
    “Of course not,” you snicker. “That’s not how it works, Dad.”
    “Uh–huuuuh,” he says. “Well, I’m proud of you, Jenny. Sounds like you’re really making a difference there. See you in a few weeks at Christmas.”
    In bed that night, you make a mental list of what you have accomplished in the last four months. Every day, you touched things once touched or soon to be touched by famous people. You licked envelopes opened by famous people and opened envelopes licked by famous people. You faxed something to Robert Downey, Jr. You bought a turkey on rye for Al Pacino. You drank beers and played pinball with Vinnie Stigmata from Agnostic Front. One day Dennis Hopper was running around the office asking everyone, “What was the name of the Jewish gangster in The Godfather: Part II?” and you knew it was Hyman Roth. You got Roddy McDowell a bagel and booked a flight for Johnny Rotten. You held an Isaac Mizrahi in your own two hands. You appeared, full–page from the neck down, wearing a necklace with a piece of pie on it.
    In the darkened apartment, you laugh out loud. You are an international faxer. A Federal Expresser. A rolodex–flipping, limo–riding sandwich girl. You have left your father alone for a picture of an apple that isn’t even an apple.
    The next day at work, Paul calls you into his office. “Your internship is up in a few weeks,” he says. “I’ll hire you right now if you want.”
    “I haven’t decided if I want to stay or not.” The words fly from your mouth like a rush of birds, surprising and sudden.
    Paul squints. “You don’t want to go back there, do you?” Behind his head, the World Trade Center towers hang hazy and misted in the gray sky. In the cubicles outside Paul’s door, you hear Mike and Daniel fawning into their phones, setting up lunch–time interviews with Robert Olen Butler and Chuck D.
    Paul is offering you your dream, and you walk down the street of your future and come to a small sidewalk cafe. Two people sit at a small table: a star working himself up to superstar and a woman holding a tape recorder. She looks French—jet–black, close–cropped hair, blue horn–rimmed glasses, red lipstick, an enormous black leather bag at her sandaled feet. She drinks a martini and laughs like tin, like she is no longer capable of being surprised by anything. You have to look twice to make sure it is really yourself you are seeing, the same way that, after you cut your hair, you didn’t recognize your own reflection in store windows.
    Looking up at Paul, you lie. “My father is sick, and I have to take care of him. I’ll keep in touch. He might get better. I might come back.” You like him very much—Daniel, Mike, and Priscilla, too—so much so that you can’t tell them that you refuse to become them. On your last day at Interview, they make you a cake and ask if you want to go out for margaritas after work. You say you have last–minute packing to do and hug them good–bye.
    You lied again. There’s nothing left to pack. Every day for two weeks, you’ve been going to work with a tote bag full of clothes, boxing them up, and mailing them home to yourself in Peru because you’ve run out of money and can’t afford UPS. On the way home from work, you buy a tiny plastic Christmas tree for Siobahn’s apartment. The tree emits a weak, pink light, and you leave a note under it for Siobahn, telling her the same lie you told Interview. You stay up the rest of the night watching It’s a Wonderful Life, drinking a quart of beer, listening to the mice scurrying in the walls, th noise of traffic, the clatter of trash can lids.
    At dawn, you grab a taxi. You’ve never seen Manhattan in the morning, golden and sparkling in the rising sun. As the plane circles over Central Park, you foolishly think you can see the building on Broadway where you worked, the brownstone in Chelsea where you lived. Black dots move up and down the sidewalks, and you wonder if your mother is one of those black dots, as you were. You haven’t heard her voice in eight years, but as the plane descends towards Indiana out of the clouds, you can hear your mother loud as day. She’s inside you saying, Don’t be fooled by the snow on the ground, if the land is beautiful and white. You can’t stay here. And you ask her, How can I leave? At the gate, you run to your father in tears. He hugs you so hard you can barely breathe and says over and over, “You’re back. You’re home.”

Cathy Day once bore a striking resemblance to the protagonist of her story “The Girl with Big Hair.” She now teaches in the MFA program at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and has flat hair. Her stories have appeared in the Cream City Review, the Florida Review, Quarterly West, Story, and elsewhere. Recently her work was anthologized in American Fiction, Volume Ten: The Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers, published by New Rivers Press.

“The Girl with Big Hair” appears in our Summer 1999 issue.