The First Chair I Washed Her Hair In

The Chair I Learned In

I knew how to do it because my mother taught me. That is the piece Renae left out of her story, and it is the piece that matters most.

Opal Hartley was a hairdresser in this town for forty-one years. Before June had the shop, before June was even born, my mother had a chair in that same building on Main Street, the first chair by the window, and half the brides and widows in this county got their hair done in it.

I grew up in that shop. I did my homework in the waiting chairs. I swept the clippings off that floor for a nickel a day.

The shop smelled like perm solution and coffee and the hot metal of the dryers, and to this day that smell means safe to me.

Women came in there and told my mother everything. Who was sick. Who was leaving who. Whose boy had gone off to the service. A beautician in a small town is half the time a preacher and the other half a bartender.

And when I was twelve my mother stood me behind her and put her hands over my hands and taught me how to hold a woman’s head so she trusts you with it.

“Gentle at the neck,” she used to say. “Firm at the crown. A woman can tell everything about you by how you touch her head.”

I did not make a living at it the way she did. I married young, I raised my two, I worked at the glass plant in Mitchell for twenty-two years until it closed. But my hands remembered. Hands always remember what your mother’s hands taught them.

So when the home could not keep a beautician, and my mother was sitting there with her hair flat and tangled and a lost look in her eye, it was the easiest thing in the world for me to fill a basin and do for her what she had done for strangers for forty-one years.

The first time I washed her hair in that little room, she closed her eyes and she said, “That’s good, honey.” She did not know my name that day. But she knew those hands. She had made those hands.

And I sat there on the edge of her bed after, with her hair in rollers and her face soft, and I cried where she could not see me.

I understood that the whole long circle of a life had come around to this. She taught me to care for people’s heads. Now the first head I truly cared for was hers.

That is the woman Renae said I had thrown in the garbage.