Kabul Beauty School

by Deborah Rodriguez

  “How long has she been open again?”

  “She says just for two months. At first, her husband forbids her because he wants her to stay all the time inside and help his mother. But he has no job now, so he agrees.”

  “Is it hard to get supplies?”

  Raksar waved her hand proudly at the few combs, brushes, and scissors on the wooden plank. They were far from salon quality. The scissors looked like something you’d use to shear sheep. The combs looked like the sheep had been chewing on them.

  As I talked to the two women, I realized it wasn’t just that their supplies were meager; they also didn’t seem to have more than the most rudimentary hairdressing skills. I asked where they had been trained, and they both shrugged. Raksar had been trained by a friend during the 1980s, and then she’d taught Nadia what she knew. Neither of them knew how to do highlights. Even without training, though, they were making pretty good money. Raksar brought in about eighty dollars a month, at least twice as much as the average salary in Afghanistan. Nadia was making less but expected her income to grow—just doing the makeup for a big wedding would greatly expand her family’s finances. Besides, she told me through Roshanna, it was hard to find jobs anywhere else. She had worked briefly as a cook in a guesthouse, but her male coworkers had made crass comments about her and she’d quit.

  Then Nadia said something to Raksar, and they both smiled impishly. Roshanna clapped her hands and started to laugh. “They want to know if you would like to try some of the traditional Afghan salon services,” she said. “They want to share these with you, because they say you are their sister from America.”

  “Sure,” I said, slipping off my head scarf. The two women froze in place and stared at my short, spiked hair. Both reached out gingerly to touch it. They said something to Roshanna—their voices full of wonder—and I looked up at her and raised my eyebrows.

  “They say you look like a cat,” she said. “Pashak.”

  “Meow!” Raksar said.

  I felt a little bad about leaving Daud outside for this long, but I leaned back in the chair and prepared to relax. I sat up again when I saw Nadia approach with a long thread wrapped around her fingers. She gently pushed my head back again, then proceeded to thread my face. She ripped out most of my eyebrows and removed a mustache that I didn’t even realize I had. I opened my eyes once when the pain almost made me scream to see Nadia frowning just over my forehead, the thread taut between her mouth and hands. Roshanna was leaning against the wall, laughing. When Nadia was finished, I sat up and ran my hand over my face. I was sure that I would feel blood trickling down.

  Then Raksar offered to show me how she did Afghan-style makeup, the kind that she’d do for someone who would be a guest at a wedding. Again, I agreed: I figured I wouldn’t really know enough about Afghan salons if I didn’t try all their services myself. So she lacquered me with pale base makeup, put about four brilliant curves of shadow over my eyes, darkened my eyebrows and drew the ends so that they flicked upward near my hairline, and gave me big, red lips. The kohl was the worst part. She licked the stick, dipped it in powder, blew on it lightly, stuck it in the corners of each of my eyes, and coated my inner lids with kohl. I couldn’t help but wonder how many other eyes that stick had blackened. Eyes streaming, I finally stood and felt around for my head scarf. They led me over to the mirror, and I peered at myself. It was as if someone else—maybe someone in a Mardi Gras mask—was looking back at me.

  But I thanked the sisters over and over, using my little bit of Dari. “Tashakur, tashakur,” I said, bowing and holding their hands. We did three quick little air kisses on the cheeks, then I stumbled blindly back outside, where Daud gasped with admiration. My eyes leaked black kohl for the next three days, prompting all the Westerners who had been living in Kabul for a long time to ask me how I’d managed to get myself invited to an Afghan wedding so quickly.

  But aside from my weepy eyes, I was excited. It seemed that I had discovered the one thing I could do to help the Afghans—and only I, out of all the talented and dedicated Westerners I’d met here, could do it. I knew that I could help the Afghan women run better salons and make more money. I knew from my own experience as a hairdresser back home that a salon is a good business for a woman—especially if she has a bad husband.

  Unfortunately, I knew this all too well. I was still married to such a mean man that Afghanistan, then considered by many people to be the most dangerous place on earth, felt like paradise. All the time I had been married to him, my only salvation was that he had no idea how much money I made. I stashed it away, saving up for my freedom. I figured that the salon business would be even better for women in Afghanistan, where the men aren’t allowed to step inside the salons. They’d never see the cash changing hands or be able to tell the women how to run things. I asked Roshanna to tell me about other businesses that employed women. She told me about women she knew who wove carpets, sold eggs, worked in guesthouses and tailor shops and other places. Every one of these businesses was run by the woman’s father or husband or brother or distant uncle. I figured I could come back to Afghanistan with several suitcases of good hair care products and supplies, then hang around in the salons for a couple of weeks. I could teach the women whatever I knew and show them how to expand their services and make more money. I could also teach them the sanitation principles I’d learned in beauty school. I figured if someone was going to cry at a wedding, she could do it out of sentiment and not because of bacteria-laden kohl.

  When I mentioned my idea to an American friend who had been working for a nonprofit in Kabul for several years, he didn’t smirk. He thought I wasn’t thinking big enough! He told me that he thought I should open a beauty school in Kabul, and he said he’d try to help.

  When I mentioned my idea—now expanded to a school—to Roshanna, she threw her arms around me. “I want to be in your first class,” she said. “My father wants me to quit working for NGOs because some of the Afghan men make trouble for me. But if I have my own salon, I’ll be okay.”

  WITH THE IDEA for the beauty school, it seemed that all my dreams came together. I’d never been satisfied to be only a beautician, even though that’s a fine life. I’d always wanted to be part of something bigger and more meaningful—something that gave me the feeling I was helping to save the world.

  Of course, I love beauty salons. When I was seven years old, my mother opened her first salon right next to our house. I thought it was the most wonderful place on earth, with its sleek blond furniture and gold mirrors and that long row of hair dryers, like fat little spaceships getting ready to blast toward the moon. I thought the beauticians were the most gorgeous women on earth, all dressed up in their green hot pants and white go-go boots. I couldn’t wait until the day I could wear that uniform, too.

  It was the 1960s in Holland, Michigan, and all the ladies who came in had big, frosted hair, with a little additional elevation from their hairpieces. Usually, my mother let me help by handing out magazines and folding towels and pouring coffee. Lots of times she just wanted me to wander the salon because I kept the customers entertained with my nonstop chatter. But I loved to help, so she gradually eased me into the business. I started by helping her fix up the hairpieces—I’d hold them on the mannequin heads while she put curlers in them, then walk the heads across the salon and set them on a couple of boxes under the hair dryers. Later, I’d hold the hairpieces down while my mother ratted them into nice, big puffs. Then she started letting me help with hair that was actually attached to someone’s head. When the ladies came in for a wash, set, and style, I’d stand behind them and work the bobby pins out of their hair. It’s not like anything actually happened when I took the pins out—their hair would pretty much stay put because they used so much spray.

  The whole point back then was for them to leave the salon with their hair lacquered up into big beehives and come back two weeks later looking exactly the way they did when they left. We sold them silk pillowcases so their hair didn’t
get too messed up while they slept, but a lot of them took extra precautions to preserve their beehives—they’d wrap wads and wads of toilet paper around their hair before they’d go to sleep to hold it in place. When my mother started letting me wash their hair, they’d keep telling me to scrub harder and longer. “Draw blood,” they’d say. I think it was because they hadn’t been able to scratch their heads in two weeks. After my mother set their hair in big plastic rollers and let them fry under the dryers, I’d get to unwrap them. I loved that feeling of the hot, smooth hair against my fingers, so stiff from the setting lotion that the curls stood in place until my mother came to comb them out.

  When I was fifteen, I went to beauty school because I figured that I could put myself through college by doing hair. But by that time, I didn’t want to be a hairdresser when I grew up. I saw how hard my mother worked and how tired she was at night, and besides, I had caught a glimpse of a life that seemed like a lot more fun. I wanted to do something in the world of music. My mother had made me take piano lessons ever since I was five years old. She wanted me to take ballet lessons, too, but that lasted only a day; I was too big, couldn’t balance myself on one leg or two, and couldn’t fit into a tutu. But I loved music and stuck with it. In high school, I played piano, organ, guitar, and trumpet. I had so much wind that I could blast louder than any of the boys on my trumpet. I liked to sing, too, so I enrolled at John Brown College in Arkansas as a vocal performance major. But when I got there and stood among all those other, really good singers, I knew I wasn’t cut out for that. I also developed nodules on my vocal cords. When I sang Italian opera, I sounded like James Brown singing Italian opera.

  So I returned to Michigan and worked in my mother’s salon. I married my college sweetheart, and we had two beautiful boys, Noah and Zachary. But my husband and I were both young and stupid, and we soon got restless. I remember sitting in my mother’s living room when I was twenty-six and crying, asking her what was wrong with me. I had everything a woman was supposed to want—a sweet husband, children, a good job, a nice house and car, but I was miserable. I guess it’s no surprise that I was soon a single mom.

  Then one day I heard one of the salon customers say that a medium-security prison was opening up in the area. I had been wondering what it would be like to work someplace that actually offered health insurance and other benefits, and this customer told me that both the pay and the benefits were great. So I applied for a job at the prison and planned to do hair on the side. Since I hadn’t finished my bachelor’s degree, the only job I was qualified for was prison guard. How bad could it be? I thought.

  It was pretty bad.

  Actually, I didn’t mind it at first. I had two months of on-the-job training, and I got along well with both the other guards and the inmates. I told the inmates right away that I wasn’t there to punish them or make their lives harder—they’d already made their own lives hard enough. I told them that my job was to make them follow the rules. I treated them with respect, and I got respect back from them. I think they also appreciated the fact that I refused to butch up just because I was working in a prison. I wore my makeup and perfume, styled my hair with some nice long extensions, and had scarlet dragon-lady nails. One time, a fight broke out in one of the stairwells, and I called for assistance. All of us guards carried radios, not guns—since there were more inmates than guards, rioting inmates could easily use your own gun on you. As I waited for backup, I yelled at the brawling prisoners, “I’m not going to break a nail to stop this fight!” It turned into a major melee. Three guards got gashes in their heads, and a bunch of prisoners were sent to solitary. Later, one of the prisoners who had been involved winced when he heard I’d been there.

  “I didn’t know you were there, Miss Debbie,” he said. “You didn’t get hurt, did you?” I told him that I was fine but that I would have killed him if one of my nails had gotten broken.

  But after a few months, I was on compassion overload. I was just too much of a bleeding heart to work in the prison. I thought that lots of the inmates were really nice people—some of the nicest people I’ve ever met in my life—and that some of the guards were just bullies who used their power to abuse. I didn’t want to become like them, but I could feel myself changing. I didn’t like the way my mouth was starting to sound. And I think other people could sense that I was changing, too. One day I walked past the cell of a lifer who had never spoken a word to anyone in the whole time I had been there. He usually just whistled all day, as beautifully as a song-bird. He put his face against the bars.

  “This is not a place for you, Miss Debbie,” he whispered. “You don’t want to turn out like the rest of them.”

  About a year after I started working at the prison, I was driving to work in the rain and dreading it. I was working second shift and weekends, never seeing my children, and I felt like I was selling my soul to the devil for health insurance and paid vacations. I walked into the warden’s office after roll call and quit. On my last day, the prisoners lined up to say good-bye. Some of them were crying. “Good luck, Miss Debbie,” they said. “You’re going to have a good life now.”

  But I didn’t know how to find that good life. I was working in my mother’s salon again but was often depressed and wondering why I wasn’t happy. I decided that I needed more fun. I’d gotten married and had children so early that I’d never done the high-energy dating and partying most of my friends had been through, so I decided to became the best party girl in Holland, Michigan. Whenever I do something, I do it to the extreme, so in a couple of months I knew every club in the area and every person on every barstool. Soon that wasn’t enough, and I bought a sailboat—even though I didn’t know how to sail and had no intention of learning—just so I could keep it docked at the bars on Lake Michigan, in Saugatuck. People from all over partied on my boat every weekend, and the good times were always wherever I was. When I was by myself, though, reality would sink in. I was out partying so much that I wasn’t being a good mom. Most of these people weren’t real friends anyway—they just liked my boat.

  So I thought about getting religion. I had never been an atheist to begin with, but I didn’t have much of a faith structure or community to deepen my spiritual life. So I went and found a Christian church to join. Not just any church, either—this one was a full-gospel, be healed, and hallelujah kind of church. Soon it consumed all the time that I used to spend being lonely and depressed. It gave me an opportunity to use my creativity and a little bit of my musical talent, too. I forgot my disappointment that I was never going to sing Aïda on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera and became the star of the church’s drama department. I wrote plays, directed them, and acted in them. They weren’t stodgy productions, either—I loved Saturday Night Live and Mad TV and put as much of that kind of humor into the church plays as I could.

  Even though some things about the church made me uneasy, I met people there who opened my eyes to a whole new way of looking at the world. I had always liked to travel, but I’d quickly lose interest in whatever tourist destination my friends talked me into and wind up spending time in an area that most tourists shunned. When I went to Jamaica, I was bored with riding Jet Skis and drinking margaritas on the beach of a walled-off hotel, so I grabbed a bus into town. I wound up meeting a twenty-year-old mother with five kids who invited me to her home, where we ate soup made out of not much more than fish bones. I spent the week visiting her, bringing diapers and groceries. That was where I felt content. At the church, I met a retired man named Herb Stewart, who was traveling the world working on humanitarian projects of one kind or another. He invited me to go with him to India for a month.

  I had been known around town as Crazy Deb for a while. As in Crazy Deb with all the weird hairstyles and the long nails and the showgirl makeup. Crazy Deb with the boat and the all-night parties. Crazy Deb who worked in the prison. As in “I’m getting my hair cut next week—you know, by Crazy Deb.” Now I became Crazy Deb because I started to travel around the worl
d to work on humanitarian projects. That first time in India, Herb and I traveled from village to village helping people put in new wells. In one of the towns, I heard that the people had been suffering from a terrible famine. I got to know one of the families, and they told me that the worst time was during the three-month dry season. I asked them what would help, and they said rice. So I found someone with a truck and got him to drive me to a market in an area where the drought wasn’t so bad, and we filled the truck with rice. How could I buy for just one family? Back at the village, we dumped the rice on a concrete slab and called people over using a bullhorn. For about a hundred dollars, I was able to feed the people in this village for three months.

  In the middle of all this, I wound up getting married to a traveling preacher associated with the church. I knew his personality and mine were very different, but I wanted to be married again. I liked being married. I thought that, since he was such a religious man and since I was headed in that direction, it would work out. But shortly after the wedding, he went from being intense and brooding to being just plain mean—and insanely jealous. If I went out to the grocery store and came home fifteen minutes later than he expected, he’d be waiting at the front door fuming and follow me through the house to question me. He seemed to think I’d been off having an affair in those fifteen minutes. At first, I would try to tell him that this wasn’t true, but I realized it didn’t do any good to protest. So one day I tried to leave the house when he started shouting. He grabbed me by my hair and pulled me back inside, slamming me against the wall. I pushed him away and lunged toward the door, but that just made him angrier. He slapped me across the face, hard.

  After that, I tried not to do any of the things that set him off, even as I hated myself for having gotten into this situation. My mother had raised me to be a strong woman; how could this have happened? It was a tense household. My boys tried to spend as much time as possible with their grandparents. I managed to keep my husband from erupting into violence by acting like a docile, obedient wife. Then one day after church, he and I and a friend of his went to McDonald’s for breakfast. His friend and I laughed over some story, and I remember thinking that this was the most fun I’d had in months. But when we got home, my husband went crazy.