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So I was hanging out in Wayan’s shop again this morning, and she was trying to figure out
how to make my hair grow faster and thicker. Having glorious thick, shiny hair herself that
hangs all the way down to her butt, she feels sorry for me with my wispy blond mop. As a
healer, of course, she does have a remedy to help thicken my hair, but it won’t be easy. First,
I have to find a banana tree and personally cut it down. I have to “throw away the top of the
tree,” then carve the trunk and roots (which are still lodged in the earth) into a big, deep bowl
“like a swimming pool.” Then I have to put a piece of wood over the top of this hollow, so rain-
water and dew don’t get in. Then I will come back in a few days and find that the swimming
pool is now filled with the nutrient-rich liquid of the banana root, which I then must collect in
bottles and bring to Wayan. She will bless the banana root juice at the temple for me, then rub
the juice into my skull every day. Within a few months I will have, like Wayan, thick, shiny hair
all the way down to my butt.
“Even if you are bald,” she said, “this will make you have hair.”
As we’re talking, little Tutti—just home from school—is sitting on the floor, drawing a pic-
ture of a house. Mostly, houses are what Tutti draws these days. She’s dying to have a house
of her own. There’s always a rainbow in the backdrop of her pictures, and a smiling fam-
ily—father and all.
This is what we do all day in Wayan’s shop. We sit and talk and Tutti draws pictures and
Wayan and I gossip and tease each other. Wayan’s got a bawdy sense of humor, always talk-
ing about sex, busting me about being single, speculating on the genital endowments of all
the men who pass by her shop. She keeps telling me she’s been going to the temple every
evening and praying for a good man to show up in my life, to be my lover.
I told her again this morning, “No, Wayan—I don’t need it. My heart’s been broken too
many times.”
She said, “I know cure for broken heart.” Authoritatively, and in a doctorly manner, Wayan
ticked off on her fingers the six elements of her Fail-Proof Broken-Heart Curing Treatment:
“Vitamin E, get much sleep, drink much water, travel to a place far away from the person you
loved, meditate and teach your heart that this is destiny.”