Kate emerges from the bathroom about ten minutes later in yoga pants and the new hospital gown, a dark purple cotton bathrobe around her shoulders. She waves a pair of grippy-bottom socks at Alexis and grimaces. "I'd really rather not bend over as far as it's going to take to do this. I'll get your Dad to buy you an apartment on Central Park West if you help me put them on."
Alexis laughs and drops her iPad into her bag. Crossing the room in three eager steps, she takes Kate by the arm. "No bribery necessary, hop up."
"No hopping just yet." Kate sidles up to the hospital bed and takes the remote control in hand, lowering the mattress about six inches. "Feel the power..." she whispers as it hums into place. "When I'm old, I'm totally going to have one of these. Just with a way better mattress."
"You watch those adjustable memory foam bed infomercials late at night, don't you?" Alexis asks, a smirk on her face.
"A natural by-product of years of insomnia," Kate admits. Scooting carefully back onto the bed, Kate continues, with a note of put-on shame in her voice, "I almost bought a Flowbee once, too."
"A what?"
"A Flowww-beeeee?" Kate repeats, like saying it slower will solve everything. Alexis only looks confused. The brand of confused Kate has learned she inherited from her father – equal parts astounded that there's something she doesn't know, and excited that she's about to learn it.
"I...no. Just no. I'm not that old, you're just that young." Kate is muttering and scrubbing a hand across her forehead.
"I remind you that you still need socks. And a comb out. What is a Flowbee?" Alexis persists.
Kate sighs, and examines the light sprinkling of age spots on the back of her hand. Like hyper-emotionality, another by-product of pregnancy that she hopes will fade with time. And another addition to the list of things making her feel older. "It was an invention that let you cut your hair..." Kate grimaces, imagining what's coming next. This is going to sound stupid, but she's too tired to cast it in a less ridiculous light. "...that let you cut your hair using a vacuum cleaner."
"Kate, did they give you anything for pain, or is this profound silliness just a product of extreme exertion and no sleep?"
"I kind of remember them shooting something into my I.V. at one point, but by now I think this might just be exhaustion. Except the Flowbee part, that's true."
Alexis drags the rocker recliner formerly inhabited by her father a few feet, until it's next to be bed, and sits. "Keep talking," she orders Kate, as she takes a sock and scrunches it down until she can reach the toe.
Kate rolls her head around, popping a couple of joints, stretching the muscles of her neck. "You hooked this hose onto the vacuum and plugged it in and these little razor sharp rotating blades cut your hair, while the vacuum sucked all the hair clippings into the vacuum bag. You could choose how short your hair was cut with a sizer, just like a pair of electric clippers. Only a lot bigger. And with a Hoover attached to it."
Alexis gapes. "You're totally making that up. It sounds like something Dad would concoct just to mess with me."
Kate looks down, and realizes both feet are now shod in warm, heather gray grippy socks. "I kid you not," Kate continues, wiggling her toes. "And there were Ginsu knives, and juice-o-matics, and Popeil rotisserie ovens and magic face cream made of crushed pearls and a whole real estate program that guaranteed to make you thousands upon thousands of dollars of monthly income with almost no effort whatsoever." Kate has a brief Johnny Vong flashback, and wrinkles her nose.
"Po-what ovens?" Alexis is sure she's still drugged.
Kate shakes her head, a little like a dog drying off after a bath. She swipes at the wet ends of her hair as they swinging around and stick to her chin. "The Flowbee came out in, like, '88 or '89...and you were born in ...1994," Kate finishes on a sigh. "You are so much older than Ethan. Why did you let us have a baby?" Kate moans.
"Kate?"
"Yeah?"
"You probably need to shut up and let me fix your hair." It sounds harsh, but Alexis is smirking again.
"Right. You're right," Kate admits, burying her face in her hands. "Too little sleep," she mumbles.
"Too many hormones," Alexis calls back, having disappeared into the bathroom for a moment. She returns with a purple wet comb in hand, and a hair elastic. She sits on the bed behind Kate, and starts running the comb through her step mom's long, chestnut hair. The back and shoulders of Kate's robe are soaked through.
"Did you dry this at all?" Alexis asks.
"Nope," Kate admits.
"We're just gonna ignore that, right?"
"Yep."
"Fair enough." Alexis divides Kate's hair and starts a braid.
Sitting up straight is a chore, her lower back and abs protesting with the effort. Kate tries to ignore it, focusing instead on the gentle, methodical drag of Alexis' fingers through her hair. Visits to the stylist excepted, this hasn't happened in a long time. A slumber party at Maddie's in high school was probably the last time somebody else took the time to braid it for her. By the time she was in uniform, Kate was thoroughly adept at braiding her own hair to keep it all up under her cap.
"My hair was always long when I was little," Kate says. "Really long, there for a while. Mom braided it all the time, just to get it out of the way, and keep it from tangling up. I bet it was in the thousands, the number of times she sat with me and did exactly what you're doing right now. It was half way down my back, and she'd take her time, and we'd just talk...about school, what my friends were doing. Nothing big usually, just the little things that made up my day. And she's talk about her work, too. If she had a new client or got to make a trip to the courthouse or the library.
"And then I got my hair bobbed in junior high. I just got tired of fussing with it, and I thought it would make me look older, and it did. Part of it was my hair, and part of it, the fact that I was going through the beginning of my Goth period, which lasted all of three months, until Dad got home one evening and saw that I'd painted my fingernails black and was wearing a pair of ripped black fishnet hose under my jean skirt."
Alexis, quiet so far, chokes on a laugh, imagining a gangly, 13-year old Kate in a ghostly makeup and heavy black eyeliner. "Are there any pictures?"
Kate glances back over her shoulder. "I don't think so, Dad was pretty ticked. A girl named Trisha, who was in my grade, lived in the building next door. Trisha's older sister, Pam, was way into the Goth look, and I was completely fascinated with it. I was saving my allowance for a corset I found in a costume catalog, but that plan ended abruptly when Dad got a hold of me. He'd seen Pam's wardrobe too, and there was no way on earth he was going to let me run around in black lip-liner and platform boots and smoke clove cigarettes and who knows what else with guys who looked like Pam's boyfriend. Needless to say, I wasn't allowed to play at Trisha's house for the rest of that summer."
Alexis winds the elastic around the end of the finished braid and sits down on the bed, shoulder to shoulder with Kate, facing the other way, eager to hear more.
Kate pauses, trying to get a clear picture of it in her mind, and shakes her head."You'd think the my most prominent memory of it would be Dad squashing my first little fashion rebellion. But the thing that really stuck with me was the shift in my relationship with Mom. For years, I sat with her and we'd just talk while she braided my hair. After I cut it, we didn't have that time. Not that we didn't talk, but we had to make time for it, whereas before it was just an organic part of the day. It never occurred to me I'd feel the absence of it so strongly, all because I was in the seventh grade and wanted to cut my hair."
Kate finally turns to look at Alexis, who returns a brief, pained, sidelong glance. They are both quiet for a few minutes, as Kate silently kicks herself for throwing a wet blanket on the moment. Just as Kate draws a breath to apologize, Alexis begins to speak.
"Dad was really good at braiding my hair. He told me once he picked it up from the actresses backstage at Gram's plays. I know exactly what you mean about the conversations. They're some of my favorite memories growing up."
Alexis is drawing strands of her own titian hair out between her fingertips, over and over, fixed on it, not making eye contact. At length, she speaks, quieter than before. "I don't have memories of my mother helping me do my hair, or helping me do much of anything that's day to day. She's an occasional shopping buddy, who likes to charge her mani-pedi to my father's Amex, and eat expensive lunches. She may be my mother, and I'll even go so far as to say we have fun together sometimes, but she's never really been my mom. I know I'm not little any more, and it shouldn't bother me, but sometimes it still does."
The ache Kate has been feeling, the one that has nothing to do with the physical side effects of childbirth, and everything to do with missing her mother, distills into a fierce urge to make this somehow better for her step-daughter. Kate clears her throat and shifts to face the younger woman, ducking down to look Alexis in the eye.
"I think when you're somebody's child, their absence hurts you, when and however it occurs. Your dad is 45 years old and he's scrambling to make sense of this overture Charles has finally made. I've missed Mom every day since I was 19. And then I lost four years with my dad, when I needed him most, to his alcoholism. I had to forgive my dad for quitting on me after mom died, and your dad is going to have to do the same for Charlie if they're going to work things out. Loss is loss at any age, Alexis. You have every right to feel ripped off. I think you're pretty amazing, wise beyond your years, for being able to feel that loss without letting it rule you, without letting it become resentment. For a long time I wasn't so adept at handling mine."
Alexis' eyes, brimming with tears, close as she leans in and drops her forehead onto Kate's shoulder. There's something painfully childlike about the gesture, and Kate hurts along with her. They sit for a while, huddled together, teardrops making little dark spots on Kate's cotton pants. It's been a slow, sometimes uphill climb to arrive at the easy intimacy of a family that they share now, but in this moment, Kate realizes it's not yet enough.
"Alexis, if you want to write this off as whatever drugs they gave me, I won't hold it against you. I know I'm barely mathematically eligible for the job, but the longer I love your dad and the longer I love Martha and you, the more I feel like you're mine. And I'll braid your hair anytime."
