A few days later, my curiosity got the best of me and, with memories of Kenneth’s East 50s fantasia floating around, I hopped the train to Brooklyn to see the last place that tended to my mother’s famous auburn hair. . . or hairs as they were at the end, only as auburn as Zena’s dyes could make them.
Getting out at Avenue M, I walk block after block of one and two story stores, leaning together like so many jumbled, mismatched teeth (Superior Kosher Fish flush against a combo shoe store/copy center next to New Age Mystical Readings). As the side streets are a mix of crowded apartments and large single-family homes, I’m aware of the intense disparities of wealth, class, citizenship and rights pressed nose to nose in New York.
It reminds me of once seeing my mother on Avenue J, a sister shopping street, in her fabulous Kenneth bouffant and a mink-trimmed cape and diamond earrings, running home from the subway on the day my brother had been accepted to Amherst, early decision. Giving her some slack, as 1) she’d come from “the city,” and 2) my brother’s achievement had conferred the Jewish mother’s equivalent of a coronation day, she still looked like aristocracy among nondescript peasants, which filled me with embarrassment and pride.
Having spotted “Forever Young’s” purple and gold awning, I tentatively look in from the door, only to realize that 4 or 5 pairs of eager eyes are ready to draw me inside. In the face of idle stylists, probably working on commission, I realize I’ll have to engage.
Before anyone gets to me I take in the burnt mustard walls and posters of ‘80s models and a single client, so ancient, her ankles are a web of blue veins as is her scalp which has a few small protrusions the size of miniature golf balls. The stylist, in a sea-foam green shirt wielding brush and blow dryer, is whipping the woman’s strands, thin as filaments, into a cotton candy nimbus.
Two women, small and round, in dirty black salon coats come toward me asking if they can help me. As they do, I realize I’m a foot taller than everyone else. Clearly, this is no place to be anonymous. I tell them I’m Natalie Reif’s daughter, at which point, there’s an eruption—surprise, sorrow, much clucking “so young!” “so beautiful!”. I say I was just passing by and that my older sister had told me my mother used to go to this salon.
I ask who is Zena. Turns out, she’s the smaller woman with dyed black hair in a John Lennon cap. She tells me “Your mother, she was so smart, always reading books, so wise, so nice.” She tells me about a time when her son had moved back in with her along with his wife and 3 children and she was beside herself with the crowding and chaos. “You mother took my hands (she takes mine) and said ‘Zena, one day you’ll need them.’ I tell you she saved my life!”
My eyes start to tear. I hug Zena and thank her. She sees me out and walks alongside me until she turns into a store with “Dump Cable for Dish Network,” on its awning.
Later, I admit the adventure to Sister 1 who tells me that the first time my mother didn’t show up, Zena called in a panic. “Wow,” I say, “these women really cared about Mom.” My sister says, “She really needed the $20 tip I gave her every week.” At which I realize—or at least have a theory about—why Zena walked me several doors down.
As I start to feel “played,” a Biblical thought intrudes: You were once strangers in the land of Egypt. And knowing it to be true, at least 2 generations back, I promise myself I’ll return to Forever Young and give Zena something from my mother.