While cleaning, Martha found something she’d forgotten all about. Her purple hair clip from elementary school. The big, plastic kind that snaps back and forth – open, closed, open, closed.
When Martha recognized what it was, she paused… then sat down. She fingered the object in her hands idly as her eyes turned inward. Though she’d asked her mom to buy it because of how stylishly it accented her dark hair, it ended up spending more time in her hands. Open, closed, open closed: a fidget toy for the perpetually nervous.
Her favorite.
When not assuaging waves of anxiety, the clip was carefully positioned above her left brow, holding back long, dark brown hair. It made its appearance at every major social function and received many compliments from awkward adults who didn’t know how else to talk to children.
Drama came to mind, the kind arising from middle school misunderstandings. Someone else had a purple clip, too, but not this exact kind, and Martha tried her best to assert ownership. Finally, as all things do, it got back to an authority figure and Martha’s silent companion was restored to her. Fervently, Martha remembered, she had wished to be an adult so she could have control. She could avoid the drama and stupidity so prevalent in the world of children. She’d have control over the things that mattered to her.
Martha’s throat was dry. It was surprising to find the clip where she did. A child’s object in a child’s room, but not the little girl’s property after all. Martha wondered if her daughter had found the little purple thing somewhere in Martha’s things and taken a fancy to it, stealing it for her own personal collection. How typical of the three-year-old.
When had Martha lost the clip? Sometime in middle school. Maybe it succumbed to the growing mass of bobby pins, hair ties, bands, gels, styling agents and more drowning her old child’s things. The bathroom drawers become filled with new ideas of herself, different from who she was but crying out promises of future accolades. The clip was long forgotten as time inexorably ticked on.
The nervous girl turned into an even more nervous adult.
Her cell rang, yanking her from her fog. She answered. It was Jose again, asking how she was doing. If she had gone to therapy. How did it go.
Quietly, Martha answered and when Jose was satisfied she’d make it through the day, the call ended. Martha slowly put the phone back. She leaned her head against the wall where she’d been sitting. Her eyes closed as she struggled to keep herself in check. Jose wouldn’t like her to be cleaning this room again.
Her hands moved of their own accord: open, closed, open, closed. The snap was refreshing, relieving almost. As though pieces of her tension were released through a small tear in the fabric of space – a hole through which she could drop herself, piece by piece.
Martha remembered being yelled at in class when she had been clicking her clip unconsciously, not even aware she was doing it. Why did others care if she were doing it? It distracted. It annoyed. It made other people nervous when she did what made her feel better.
Maybe that was when she lost it. When she stopped trying to feel better and started trying to feel like others.
Open, closed. Open, closed.
Suddenly, she got up and went to the bathroom. She looked at herself. Hollows under her eyes and messy hair. She hadn’t put effort into her appearance in a long time.
Martha reached up and put the purple pin in her hair, above her left brow. Too messy – the pin slid forward, unable to hold her masses of tangles.
It took Martha a few minutes to find where she had last put her brush. She spent several more minutes brushing out the dark curls. Finally, she returned to the mirror and lifted the clip once more to her hair.
Even brushed and wetted, Martha’s hair would not comply. The clip may have been enough to maintain her when she was 11, but now her thick hair was too much and the clip gave up too easily. All it was now was a fidget toy.
And doesn’t a fidget toy lose something when it’s real purpose is gone? It’s just trash.
Martha went back to her daughter’s room and sat down in the same spot. She fiddled with the purple clip. Open. Closed.
It was about 3:30 pm. Her daughter would have been coming home from elementary school around now. Or would Martha have her own car in this alternate reality? Maybe Martha would be the kind of mom to pick her daughter up from school instead of having her walk.
Martha thought of all the other mothers, lining up now along the school sidewalk, engines idling as they waited for their small children to come pouring out of the school, yelling at and cajoing their friends as they moved en masse toward their parents. Martha thought of little shoes, half off at Payless. Second graders toting big plastic superhero-themed backpacks the same size as their little bodies as they smiled at their mothers and told them about the bug they ate at recess.
Martha’s fingers were moving a mile a minute, snapping the old metal back and forth until finally, with a small metallic sigh, it broke.
Martha stopped, looking down at her hands and the small pieces of broken metal. Trash. After several long moments, Martha got back up and looked at her daughter’s room, unchanged in four years. She’d been cleaning the dust and dirt, but now didn’t seem to have the heart to continue. She turned off the light, closed the door behind her, and threw the purple clip away.