A Letter from Berthe

by Martha Hipley

Now that I am old, almost eighty, and lucky enough to live unimpeachably in my final days (pension, rent-control, an easy satisfaction with whatever is on sale at the corner store), I don’t care what anyone thinks of me, least of all you, my own daughter, but I write this as a courtesy, so that there will be no questions in the end. My mania is real and good, but also life-long, congenital maybe, and you should consider these changes in my behavior as irreversible, inevitable, and a source of great happiness and peace. Before you ask, no, I have not and will not change my will, and anyway, there’s not much money to speak of.

So, while I appreciate your Wednesday visits and the Sunday coffee hour in the multipurpose room after the nine AM service at Christ Lutheran, you must realize that the death of your father freed my time for other social endeavors and thus my real and true obsession. I assume I must be a dying breed in this day and age of endless dating apps and digital pornography – a pervert with one true fixation. Your late father, a good man, was not my first love, nor my great love. What I have always and only ever loved is hair.

My own hair has always been thin and fragile (unfortunately you have inherited this), and even when I was young I barely needed a trim every few months to clip away the wispy ends. These days I find more and more of it stuck in the trap over the shower drain. And your father, well, he was similarly disappointing. We met in the Summer of Love, and there was something poetic about ending up in a totally banal and traditional marriage with someone I met at an orgy who lacked the one thing that really turned me on. He was already balding when we met and could never grow a beard, he never even had much body hair, but as you know, the marriage was pleasant and functional. He was a good father, I hope.

Of course, I’ve tried the obvious thing. When your father passed, I took a job sweeping up at a salon, “just to keep busy,” but the hair was always too clean and too disconnected. I couldn’t get off on a lock of hair as much as one could get off on a disembodied and soaped up tit plopped on the floor. It’s the filth of it but also the connection to the living thing that really makes it for me. So I turned to the one place where someone of my stature can find her nose pressed up against the nape of a stranger’s neck without breaking the laws of public decency – the transit system. All these days and hours that wrap around my few social engagements, all I do is ride the metro.

My favorite time is summer, especially June when the city is already vile and humid but still full of university students crammed into the trains and buses. The business school uptown is a wash, but the arts college and the film school downtown still attract the sort of hippie types I loved when I was young. They flop over the sticky plastic seats, hungover and exhausted, their long hair full of sweat and dirt and the grease of cheap food and sex with their classmates. They never notice a little old lady leaning a little too close, her nose just brushing against the tips of their curls. They talk amongst themselves about who they are sleeping with or what they are reading, and I can sneak right up behind them and nuzzle into their afros and ringlets and braids and dreadlocks. Even when they reek of stale beer and moldy vintage clothes, their hair is so beautifully young and rich, so thick and soft – and oh, these days, painted every color of the rainbow! I can almost come just from imagining the smell and feel of some bubblegum pink ponytail brushing up against my face.

And this was all well and good, a steady flow of my wildest dreams, enough to last me until the grave until - until! until the transit strike this summer. I support the working man, but what was I to do? I wandered the streets for a week in a delirium, overtaken by the heat but also by my lust. The city feels so empty in the summer, aside from clean-cut tourists who could never satisfy me with their buzz cuts and slicked back buns. I thought I might waste away before City Hall managed to negotiate a new pay deal, but then, Kip, oh Kip!

I should have been clever enough to realize that while many of my beloved students would be busy backpacking around the Andes until the fall semester, there was another kind of dirtbag still at my fingertips. Not three blocks from this apartment, there is a new skatepark, funded with, I suppose, whatever municipal funds they aren’t using to pay the train conductors, and it is a bounty of shag haircuts and sagging cargo pants. I began to go only in the evenings, after dusk, when the earnest children with their helmets and kneepads are called home for dinner and the older delinquents arrive after escaping their retail jobs. Even to glance at a distance, I felt I might survive. Just to see their hair cascade as they dropped into the bowl and then appeared, anew, catching the glow of the street lights on the other side for a nose grab or invert – all these new things I have learned from him!

It was thanks to my compulsion that we finally collided. I had crept too close to the fringe of the park one night, and Kip, in a failed trick, bowled me right over. For a moment it was ecstasy: our limbs entangled; his long, blonde hair wrapped around my face like a net. I could have laid there forever, and I learned later, so could he. As much as I love hair, Kip is obsessed with scraped knees and cracked ribs, jammed fingers and broken arms – all the war wounds of a high impact sport. In this way, his hobby is as two-fold as my train-riding. I could feel him grow stiff in his baggy jeans as he finally helped me stand and heard the snaps and pops of all my fragile, ageing bones. Oh, how cruel is this life, to only find each other so late in it (for me at least), but with the lateness having ripened the passion! Kip persuaded me to buy my own board and helped me bolt on the trucks with his strong and scarred hands. The moments where he walks beside me, cradling me, his mane pressed close as I stumble from the board and fall beside him, bloody, are the best of both our lives.

I hear the transit strike is finally ending, right in time for the end of the summer. Kip was worried I might abandon him, that I might return to my old ways (of course we have talked of many things from our pasts). No, I have other ideas, robbed from his. He tells me when he was younger he liked to “surf” along the tops of the trains, over the bridges, especially at sunset, to see the city from that strange, propulsive view. I have been practicing so well with my board, I hardly fall anymore. I think we need a new challenge for our love.

My dear, now you know, though I suppose you always suspected, there was no passion in our family life. I did my best to be a wife and a mother, as little as I cared for either. I only hope you can see the care in this message now – take my example! What passions you have should be grabbed and throttled, inhaled and spat on! I promise you, it is never too late to destroy yourself. I only wish I had done it sooner.

Martha Hipley is a filmmaker and writer from Baltimore, Maryland who divides her time between Mexico City, New York, and Berlin. Her stories have been published in Maudlin House, VOLUME 0, and ARTWIFE, among others.