The Saturday Grandma Got Her Curls Back

I reached for the cape out of habit. She shook her head.

“I said a towel.”

So the black cape stayed in its heap on the counter. I tucked a white towel around her shoulders, over the lavender cardigan, and rolled a second one to pad the edge of the sink where her neck would rest.

I put one hand behind her shoulders, and she leaned back slow until her neck rested on the rolled towel at the edge of the sink and her thin white hair fell toward the steel.

Darla had come to the kitchen doorway. She stood there with her arms crossed over the red sweatshirt and watched.

The window by the sink let in that flat gray November light. You could hear the furnace kick on.

I ran the water and tested it on the inside of my wrist, the way I do at the shop. Warm, not hot. Old scalps are thin, and thin skin burns before you know it.

“Tell me if it’s too warm,” I said.

“I’ll tell you,” Grandma said. “Don’t you worry about that.”

I pulled out the sink sprayer and cupped my left hand at her forehead, a little wall so nothing would run into her eyes, and I started at her hairline and worked back.

The first water that touched her head, she closed her eyes.

“Oh,” she said. Very quietly. “Oh, honey.”

I did not say anything. I could not have said anything just then. I kept the water moving and my hand cupped and I looked at the faucet so I would not cry into my own customer’s hair.

It took two shampoos. The first one hardly lathered at all, which is what happens when hair has gone that long. The second one came up white and soft, and I worked it in with my fingertips, never my nails, in little circles over her whole scalp.

“Scrub harder,” she said. “You won’t break me. I’m itchy clear down to my soul.”

So I scrubbed harder, and she sighed like a woman setting down a heavy bucket.

The tangles were the hard part. Weeks of lying on a pillow had knotted her hair at the back of her head into a mat as big as my palm.

I put conditioner on it and let it sit while I warmed the towels on the furnace register. Then I started at the very ends with the wide-tooth comb, an inch at a time, holding the hair above the knot so the pulling went into my hand and not into her scalp.

“If it pulls, you say so,” I said.

“It pulls.”

“I’ll go slower.”

“No, it’s fine. It pulls the way it ought to pull. I just wanted you to know I noticed.”

I have heard a hundred women complain in my chair. I have never heard one say that.

It took forty minutes. Grandma talked some of the time, about the polka hour, about the price of coffee at the Kwik Trip, about the Hendersons’ boy who got his first buck the year before. Some of the time she just lay back with her eyes shut and that small smile.

Darla did not move from the doorway.

About halfway through the knot, Darla spoke.

“You think I don’t know how to wash hair,” she said.

I kept combing. “I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to say it. You walked in here with your bag and your dryer like I’m some kind of…” She stopped. “I tried. In August I tried. She wouldn’t sit for it.”