The Chair on My Mother’s Sun Porch

Kaylee Comes to the Porch

On a Thursday in the third week of October, I was finishing a cut on Ardis Johnson when I heard the porch door open and close and somebody stop just inside it.

It was Kaylee.

She had on a jacket too thin for the weather and her hair pulled back the way young girls wear it now. She was holding a plastic grocery bag in both hands like it was something that might get taken away from her.

“Hi, Shelly,” she said. “I’m sorry. I should have called.”

“You’re fine, honey. Come in out of the wind.”

Mom came through the inside door with the coffee tray. She saw Kaylee and did not even blink. “You must be the Moore girl,” she said. “Sit down. I’ve got a cup with your name on it.”

Kaylee sat down in the wicker chair by the dryer, and Mom handed her a blue-flowered cup, and Ardis Johnson looked her up and down through the mirror.

When Ardis was gone, Kaylee opened the plastic bag. Inside were perm rods, the gray and pink and white ones, and a box of end papers, and a bottle of solution with the seal still on it.

“I need to learn how to do a perm,” she said. “A real one. On old ladies. Half the people who call want one, and I keep saying I can’t fit them in, but the truth is I don’t know how. And Aunt Kendra doesn’t do perms. She never learned either. And I can’t keep telling people no.”

She said all of it in one breath. Then she looked at her hands.

“I know I don’t have any right to ask you,” she said. “I know I got your Saturdays. I’ll pay you. I’ve got some money saved.”

I looked at her for a while. She reminded me of me at twenty, standing at Marlene’s front counter in Sioux Falls with my license in a sleeve, scared to death I would burn somebody’s hair off.

“Put your money away,” I said. “Come back Tuesday at nine.”

“Tuesday?”

“Tuesday is Gertie Lund,” I said. “She’s had a perm every eight weeks since before your mother was born. She’s due next week. If you can wrap Gertie, you can wrap anybody in this county.”

Tuesdays

Kaylee came back that Tuesday at a quarter to nine. She came the Tuesday after that, and the one after that, and pretty soon she was coming on Thursdays too, on her own time, between Saturdays at the salon.

I asked Gertie first, of course. I told her the Moore girl wanted to learn, and that I would be standing right there, and that if she did not want a beginner touching her hair, I would understand.

Gertie looked at Kaylee for a long time over the top of her glasses.

“How old are you, dear?”

“Twenty, ma’am.”

“I was twenty when I married Walter,” Gertie said. “Didn’t know how to do one thing. My mother-in-law taught me to make bread with her hand on my wrist.” She held out her own wrist, thin and spotted, toward Kaylee. “You go on. Shelly’s hand will be on yours.”

And it was. I stood behind Kaylee and put my hand over hers and showed her how to section that fine white hair into little panels no wider than the rod, how to fold the end paper so it did not crimp the ends, how to roll it smooth and snug but never tight, because tight on old hair is how you break it.

I showed her the strip of cotton around the hairline so the solution did not run into Gertie’s eyes, and how to unroll one rod to test for the S.

She was slow the first time. It took her almost two hours to wrap that little head. Gertie sat through every minute of it like a queen, with my mother’s coffee in one hand and her other hand resting on Kaylee’s arm whenever she came around the front.

“You’re doing fine,” Gertie told her about every ten minutes. “You’re doing just fine.”

When it was done, and rinsed, and neutralized, and set, and dried, Kaylee stood back and looked at it in the mirror. It was a little tight on the left side. It was the best first perm I had ever seen.

Kaylee started crying.

“Oh, now,” Gertie said. “Now, now. Don’t you get my new hair wet.”