Mom’s Friday Chair at the Beauty College

The window chair

Rochelle sat Mom in the chair closest to the front window. “Best light in the building,” she said. “And I want the girls to see what a good set looks like when it’s done.”

Mom took off her scarf. I watched her do it. Her hair was flat and limp from a week without a set, and she touched it with her stiff fingers like she was apologizing for it.

“Oh, now,” said Rochelle. “That is good hair. Fine, but there’s plenty of it. Girls, come look.”

Six students gathered around. They were all young, the oldest maybe twenty-three, and they all wore those black smocks and carried combs in their pockets. One of them, a tall girl with a long braid down her back, put a pink cape around Mom’s shoulders and snapped it at the neck.

“Is that too tight, ma’am?”

“No, honey,” Mom said. “That’s just right.”

Rochelle explained it to them while she worked. She said a roller set was the foundation of everything, and that a girl who could do a set that lasted a whole week could do anything in this business. She said the ladies who came in every week were the backbone of every small-town shop in Kansas, and that they would be lucky to have a book full of them someday.

Then she let them take turns, the way she did with every client in the clinic, with her standing right behind them.

Six pairs of hands

One washed. The tall girl with the braid took Mom to the shampoo bowl and tipped her back so gently that Mom closed her eyes. “Your water is just right,” Mom said. “You’d be surprised how many people scald you.”

Two rolled. A short girl with freckles and a quiet one with dark glasses took sections, combed them smooth, and wound them on the rollers. Rochelle stood behind them and moved their hands a little here and there. “Tighter at the scalp,” she said. “Smooth the ends. Feel that? That’s the tension.”

Mom watched them in the mirror. She had sat in a chair once a week for thirty years and she knew exactly how a set ought to go. Once, when the freckled girl rolled a section the wrong way, Mom said softly, “I think that one goes under, sweetheart,” and the girl blushed and fixed it and Rochelle laughed out loud.

“She’s right,” Rochelle said. “Listen to the client. The client always knows her own head.”

One ran the dryer. She settled Mom under the hood and set the timer and brought her a cup of coffee and a magazine. Mom did not read the magazine. She talked to the students instead.

She told them about cooking at the grade school for thirty-one years. She told them about the cinnamon rolls she made every Thursday, from scratch, for four hundred children, and how kids who were grown men now still stopped her at the grocery store to talk about those rolls.

She told them about Dad, who farmed and who came in every noon for dinner and never once in fifty-one years forgot to say thank you for it. She told them she had been going to the beauty shop on Fridays for longer than any of them had been alive.

“Why’d you change shops?” asked the girl at the dryer. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

Mom smiled at her. “Oh, it was just time for something new,” she said.

That was all. She never said one word against Trina, not to those girls, not to anybody.