Mom’s Friday Chair at the Beauty College

The beauty college

That weekend I called around. On Monday morning, before the elevator opened, I called the beauty college in Salina.

I knew it was there. Trina had gone there herself, all those years ago. They have a student clinic where people from town can come in and let the students practice on them for low prices, and a licensed instructor checks every bit of the work.

The woman who answered the phone was named Rochelle Imhoff. She said she was the senior instructor and had been there thirty-one years.

“I have an unusual request,” I said. “My mother is eighty-three. She has had a wash and set every Friday for thirty years. She can’t do it herself anymore. Do your students still do roller sets?”

There was a little pause on the line, and then Rochelle laughed. It was a warm laugh, the kind that sounds like it comes from somebody who has stood on her feet for a living.

“Honey,” she said, “nobody asks for a real roller set anymore. I have to beg ladies to come in so my girls can learn it for their state board. Bring her in. What time?”

“Could she come at ten on Friday?”

“Ten is fine. A wash and set is eight dollars in the clinic. Tell her to wear a button shirt.”

I told Mom that evening on the phone. She was quiet for a while.

“Salina,” she said. “Gwen, you have work.”

“I already asked for the morning off.”

“Will it look like a beauty college did it?”

“Mom, Trina came out of a beauty college.”

That got a small laugh out of her. “Well,” she said. “I suppose that’s so.”

The first Friday

It was the first Friday in March, bright and cold, with the kind of hard blue sky we get in central Kansas when the wind finally lies down. I picked Mom up at a quarter after nine. She was waiting on the porch in her good coat and her button blouse with her purse on her arm, as if she were going to church.

The scarf was still on her head. She had not taken it off in public for a week.

It is about half an hour into Salina from our town. We drove past the elevator, where Fritz lifted a hand from the scale house, and past the wheat fields, still flat and winter brown, with the green just starting to come up in the low places.

Mom talked the whole way. She talked about the price of eggs and the new pastor’s wife and whether the Jacksons were going to sell their quarter section. She did not talk about Trina. I understood that she was nervous.

The beauty college sits on a busy street with a big plate glass window across the front. Inside, there was a long row of stations, black chairs and mirrors, and young women in black smocks with their hair done every color under the sun.

Rochelle met us at the front desk. She was fifty-eight, tall, with silver hair cut short and smart and reading glasses on a chain. She took one look at my mother and put out both her hands.

“You must be Velda,” she said. “My girls have been talking about you all week.”