The Wisdom of Hair

by Kim Boykin

  “Oh, Ronnie, don’t be such a girl, I’m just teasing Zora a little bit.”

  Ronnie tilted his chin up and looked down on Charmaine. He ran his hands through her platinum blond hair like she wasn’t even there and looked at me.

  “Between this color and the condition of her skin, you might want to tone down the blond so she doesn’t look so old.”

  He sashayed back to his station but kept cutting his eye around at Charmaine while he finished up his lady’s hair.

  “Do you?” I asked. “Want to go a little darker, Charmaine?”

  “Do you want to be fat forever?” she hissed under her breath. “Because that’s what I’m wishing for you right now. Get my regular color going, I’ve got better things to do than sit around this dump all day.”

  I mixed Charmaine’s color and started applying it with the brush. I couldn’t help but think about the client Mrs. Cathcart had used as a cautionary tale to remind us just how tricky color can be. Legend said she was fifteen and completely gray. She’d been teased so much at school, she was already damaged by the time her mother brought her in to have her hair colored, something nice and blond. Her mother said her daughter had horrible allergies and asked if that made a difference. The student didn’t think to warn the girl that some people who are prone to allergies can have a reaction to the bleach and went on about her business.

  Not only did the poor girl’s face end up looking like the Elephant Man’s, the student overprocessed the hair, so when she started rinsing the color out, it came out by the handfuls. Needless to say, if there really was a student, her calling to fix hair was revoked that very day.

  Charmaine eyed me suspiciously as she dabbed at the foamy white bleach around her hairline. I smiled at her and went to the break room to put my feet up. I didn’t set the timer. I could have fried her hair to match her skin, but the clock inside me that always knows how long to process a perm or let color sit said it was time to rinse out Charmaine’s hair. I hauled myself up out of the chair and went back to the shampoo bowl.

  Charmaine was right, my belly was big. I smiled as it rubbed up against the side of the chair and wanted to laugh out loud when the baby kicked so hard, Charmaine moved her arm away from me. When I towel dried her hair, even wet I could tell the color was perfect. Charmaine Lyndell still had fried skin and bad teeth. She was still a pitiful woman, but when I was done with her, her hair looked fabulous.

  Dealing with emotionally charged women was draining, especially being pregnant. But Ronnie and Fontaine were a wonder. The most burned-out, stressed-out, miserable women could sit in their chairs and dump every care in the world on them and it didn’t seem to faze them one bit. At first, I watched them, the way you might watch a magician to figure out where the rabbit went, but after a while I just gave up and asked Ronnie how he did it.

  “As close as I am to my ladies, I have to envision a protective pink bubble between us, one that I can reach my arms through to fix their hair and still listen to their problems, but not take them in. If I did that, I’d be crazier than a bagful of squirrels.”

  It was hard enough to muster up enough energy to get through the day, much less conjure up a pink bubble to protect myself from the likes of Charmaine Lyndell. I didn’t know the next woman coming in for a haircut. The day I spoke with her on the phone, she said her name was Maxine Waverly and then paused for me to be impressed. She said she was new in town and was referred to Fontaine by her real estate agent. When I told her Fontaine was booked for three weeks and she couldn’t have Ronnie, either, she let out a disgusted little huff and snipped, “Well, is there anyone else who can fix my hair?”

  I could tell by the nasally tension and the way she said every word just so, she probably wasn’t going to be easy. I didn’t tell her I was fresh out of beauty school and figured we were even.

  As tired as I was, I knew the best thing for me and Maxine Waverly’s hair was to call and cancel her appointment. Before I could make it to the phone to call, she pushed through the front door of the shop almost an hour early. She was a pretty woman in her forties and was dressed like a Stein Mart mannequin in a loud, expensive-looking dress. She didn’t smile or say hey, just headed straight for the hairstyle books and magazines because she wanted a change.

  Fontaine was running way behind because his client had just seen the movie Big. She’d brought a picture from People magazine in and the woman wasn’t leaving until Fontaine made her board-straight mop look like Elizabeth Perkins’s hair. I was wrapping Fontaine’s four o’clock perm while Maxine went through a dozen books before pointing to the edgy Dorothy Hamill haircut Ronnie had sketched out for me and had framed.

  “I want this haircut,” she said to no one in particular as she eyed the pencil drawing like it was a fine piece of art.

  I’d never done anything that artsy before and had no business starting on this woman.

  Fontaine looked in the mirror at his client with his hands on his hips and shook his head. “Mrs. Tool, I have worked every miracle I know how to work and—”

  “It’s beautiful,” she cooed, running her fingers through curls that would be stringy the minute she stepped outside.

  Fontaine shrugged as the woman pledged her allegiance to him forever and then nodded at Maxine. “Let’s get you shampooed.”

  Fontaine leaned her back in the shampoo bowl and she closed her eyes. He washed her hair without so much as a word while she talked on about the haircut she’d chosen.

  “I like the angles,” she said as he showed her to my station and shook the nylon cape open. “I’m so glad you had some time for me.”

  “I’m just shampooing you for Zora,” he said as I took my place at my station. Maxine looked at me in the mirror all tired and young and pregnant and whipped around to face me.

  “How old are you?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  She turned around and jerked off her bifocals. “I said, how old are you?”

  “Twenty.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” Fontaine looked up from putting the permanent wave solution on his lady’s hair. “Excuse me, sir. Your salon came highly recommended. I cannot believe you’re trying to pass off this child as a stylist.”

  Fontaine walked over to my chair and turned the woman toward the mirror. “This child is my best stylist, ma’am. I’m lucky to have her, and so are you.”

  She waited until Fontaine returned to his station and watched him say something to Ronnie, who gave the woman a look that would intimidate an angry gator.

  “Forget the haircut. Just blow my hair dry.”

  My hands were shaking while I styled her blond hair. Her roots were showing, she would need color soon. Judging from the shape of her last cut, either her stylist was less experienced than me or the right side of her hair grew a lot faster than the left. Mrs. Cathcart taught us that was normal and speculated it had someone being right-handed if the right side was longer. A magazine I read said it was all because our hearts are off center, sending more oxygen-rich blood to one side of the body than the other. By the way Maxine watched me wipe away my tears as I blew her hair dry, I don’t think she had a heart.

  The second the hair spray filtered through the air and onto her hair, she ripped off the cape, rifled through her purse for twenty dollars, and left out in a huff. I left out, too, wondering if answering the call to fix hair was worth feeling like I did. Ronnie and Fontaine called me at home and promised Maxine Waverly would never set foot in Ronnie’s Two again. I told them I was fine, but I wasn’t.

  I was glad I didn’t have anything on the books the next day. I restocked all the stations with towels and perm papers and cleaned a bucket of hairbrushes, which is just about the most disgusting job you could do. Not the round brushes we used for styling, boar bristle hairbrushes Ronnie and Fontaine used on their regulars who had their hair set once a week.

  Just the thought of someone not washing her hair for a whole week and soldering it in place every day with Final Net m
ade me sick. I raked through a half dozen brushes with a fine-tooth comb and had to stop before I threw up.

  “Someone here for you,” Fontaine said. “I went on and shampooed her.”

  “Thanks.” I stretched and dug my fist into my back, grateful someone had rescued me from the less glamorous part of my job. When I walked into the salon, Maxine Waverly was sitting in my chair with a wet head, cradling the Dorothy Hamill sketch someone had taken out of the frame. She saw my reflection in the mirror and turned the chair around to face me, still not smiling.

  “I’ve had nine good hair days in fifteen years,” she said. “Yesterday was one of them. Fontaine said you had some time today; I’d like this haircut. Please.”

  After a miracle from God, I wasn’t about to tell Maxine I’d never cut anyone’s hair from a picture before. I was sure she’d be the only person in Davenport to wear her hair like that, maybe along the whole Grand Street. The style was artsy and beautiful, but it looked like something a runway model would wear in one of those fashion shows where they prance down the runway like Clydesdales.

  During the time I cut Maxine’s hair, I learned a lot about her. Her husband was having an affair, but she didn’t care, she’d married him for his money anyway. Her only child was grown and gone and gay. She didn’t like that, either, but she loved him and learned that whatever he was, he was hers and it didn’t matter.

  She looked at the severe angles of her hair and seemed pleased because they accentuated her violet eyes. She shook her head and, even wet, every hair fell into place. After I blew her dry, Ronnie took pictures to send to one of those hair magazines. Maxine reached for her purse to pay me, I thought, but pulled out a piece of stationery from a fancy salon in Dallas called Hawthorne’s.

  “This is my color formula from my stylist back home. If you have some time today, would you mind doing my color, too?”

  Mrs. Cathcart used to say when a new client gives you the key to her color, it’s a sign of the utmost trust, but Ronnie said it was more like the client was giving you the key to her heart, which sounds corny, but is really true. In all, it took two and a half hours for her color and that crazy haircut. Maxine tipped me twenty dollars and made an appointment in three weeks to touch up her color, another miracle considering most women wait at least four weeks between treatments.

  A client’s smile is always the best gauge to measure her satisfaction. But Maxine never smiled, which was kind of unsettling. When she surprised me with a hug, I noticed lots of feathery little scars around her hairline I hadn’t noticed earlier. Maybe she’d been in a horrible accident; Ronnie guessed she’d had a botched face-lift. Whatever the case, Maxine Weatherly never smiled because she couldn’t.

  37

  As much as I loved living at the Farquhars’, I still had a little piece of a dream in my mind of a small house nearby for the baby and me. I put the dream on layaway, setting aside a little money every week for a down payment. Being so young and not knowing how much things cost, I almost cried when the place I wanted most went up for sale. So I adjusted my dream and ended up making friends with an old woman six blocks from the Farquhars who was looking for a good family to live in her home when the time came for her to give it up.

  “I doubt I’ll have enough money to buy your house for a long time,” I told Miss Polly Jackson one day over homemade lemonade on her front porch.

  “Don’t doubt,” she snapped like I was one of her own. “I’ll just have to hold out until you do.”

  Mrs. Farquhar and I finished painting the chair rail in the nursery before I went to work that morning. We called it the nursery but it was actually one of two guest bedrooms connected by a Jack and Jill bathroom. Mr. Farquhar had a carpenter come in and install shelves Mrs. Farquhar swore the baby needed and the chair rail. I picked out a simple border with pink and blue rocking horses, but Mrs. Farquhar’s house was so fancy, it looked out of place. So we settled on a Humpty Dumpty one with horses and soldiers and queens in the repeat in case I had a girl.

  The only picture in the nursery was the Polaroid of the sonogram the technician took at the doctor’s office. I’d already heard my baby’s heartbeat, which was a wonder, but taking a picture of her in my belly? Nana Adams would have laughed in that doctor’s face and called him a liar. But the technician rubbed some icy blue gel on my belly and slid a microphone-looking thing over the gel until she saw what she was looking for. She pointed at the black-and-white TV screen to all kinds of things none of us could see. Arms, hands, heart, lungs. She said everything looked good and it was a girl. At first I didn’t see anything but a lima bean and thought the sonogram might be a scam to separate Nettie Farquhar from her money. But when the lima bean moved, Sara Jane and Mrs. Farquhar and I were full of awe and wanting for her to hurry up and get here.

  It was such a slow day that before Fontaine left to run errands, he said I should just go home and put my feet up. But I stayed and restocked all the stations while Ronnie read gossip magazines out loud and made fun of what the stars wore in public. He swore he could dress every single one of them better than they could dress themselves. I agreed with him and headed for the break room to put my feet up.

  I was drinking a Coke and folding towels when he poked his head in the door.

  “Another haircut for you.”

  Fontaine always quietly announced there was a walk-in waiting for me in the reception area. But Ronnie always made a big deal about it like they’d come in off the street begging for me.

  “Thanks. This baby has been tap-dancing on my bladder all day. I’ll be right out.”

  The weird thing about being pregnant and gaining weight is my weight didn’t change for a long time. In the back of my mind I thought I was getting a pass on the weight-gaining thing and then one day, about my sixth month, the weight fairy came in the middle of the night, and I woke up the next morning ten pounds heavier. Not long after that, fifteen more pounds just suddenly appeared.

  Ronnie always obsessed over his weight, turning sideways in the mirror a hundred times a day, sucking in his poochy belly, and asking, “Do I look fat?” I knew better than to give him an honest answer, and after the weight fairy visited me, he stopped asking.

  I walked down the long hallway toward the salon and stopped short. He was sitting in my chair. His face was still achingly beautiful. He was thinner, paler, almost sallow. He looked tired, older than I remembered. His hair was longer. It was funny how just seeing little tresses of it hanging through the hammock a few months ago had moved me to tears. Now I felt nothing. He ran his hand through his hair and looked at his watch. He wasn’t there for me; he was just there for a haircut.

  “He’s gorgeous.” Ronnie’s whisper was high-pitched, like he was giggling the words. “And just look at that hair.”

  “Why don’t you take him?”

  “No, ma’am. He’s delicious and he’s all yours.”

  If Ronnie knew who the pretty man in my chair was, he would have shaved Winston’s head or worse. The baby kicked hard. My fingers made little circles around my belly. Sometimes I worried about seeing Winston again and having just enough of Mama left in me to be weak and foolish. But it felt good to look at him, to see how beautiful he was and know that the spell was irreparably broken.

  He looked startled to see me and didn’t turn around to look at me, just stared into the mirror.

  “You need a haircut?”

  He ran his hand through his beautiful hair. “I wanted to see you again but not like this.”

  I wrapped a towel around his neck like he was anybody else and set it with one of those long, pointy metal clips that looks like it could be used as a weapon. When I snapped a new cape open, he flinched like a gun had gone off. As it floated down across his broad shoulders and onto his lap, he took one of his long, slender fingers that used to make me crazy and ran it under the neck of the cape.

  “Too tight?” I said, giving it a little yank.

  “No,” he mumbled. “No, it’s fine.”

/>   “Sit forward a little bit and then lean back for me.” I let the chair back so that his long neck rested in the cradle of the shampoo bowl. “Water okay?” He tried to nod but couldn’t and looked away when I leaned over to wash his pretty head. My huge boobs were right in his face. If I could have pinched it off right then and there, I would have and then danced around with it like it was a prize.

  But out of the seven deadly sins for a cosmetologist, a lack of professionalism is by far the worst. I had come a long way. I’d graduated at the top of my class, heeded the lifelong call to fix hair. I’d gotten a job at the best salon in town, made countless women beautiful on a daily basis, and here sat Winston Sawyer in my chair almost daring me to ruin myself again.

  “How are you feeling?” He sounded like a stranger in the grocery line, trying to make conversation with the pregnant lady behind him.

  I slipped my scissors out of the leather sheath. How should I go about hacking up his long pretty locks? I could forget the scissors and rip out a great big handful to give him a snatched baldheaded asymmetrical look. Or stick with the scissors and cut off his ear. At the very least, I should give him bangs. Paintbrush bangs.

  I picked up a handful of hair and let it fall to see how it would lay. The texture was the same, the color was the same. But I was different.

  I trimmed about three inches until his hair was the same length it was when I first met him. I brushed the hair off of his cape and bent down close to his ear because Ronnie was watching and what I had to say was private. For a moment my body remembered everything about Winston Sawyer, and then the baby kicked hard, knocking the sense back into me. I pressed my lips close to his ear so that I felt my own breath.

  “I am over you.”

  38

  I don’t know what it was about seeing my old homeplace and then seeing Winston Sawyer that set my feet on the path toward forgiveness. But if I hadn’t walked through the past, my gaping wounds would have never healed. It helped to know that I was blessed by the love everybody around me gave so freely. All that love from my new family didn’t make the walk any less painful, but it did bring the grace I’d longed for so close that I could almost touch it.