The Braid in the Beauty Shop Window

Maren had started growing her hair for donation two years earlier, in the fourth grade, after a lady came to talk at school about children who lose their hair to sickness.

She came home that day and asked me how long it would take to grow ten inches.

I told her probably two years, if she was patient and didn’t let anybody trim more than the ends.

She marked it on the calendar on our refrigerator, and every month after that she made me measure it with the yellow tape from my sewing basket.

At first it was for no one in particular. It was for “a kid who needs it,” as she put it.

Then last spring, Josie Pratt stopped coming to school, and by the end of May the whole sixth grade knew why.

Josie is eleven, a small, quick girl with freckles who sat two desks over from Maren and used to ride my bus before she got sick.

The doctors in Minneapolis said leukemia, and she started chemotherapy the first week of June.

By July her hair was gone. Her mother told me in the grocery store that Josie had stopped wanting to go anywhere, not even to the lake, because people looked at her and then looked away too fast.

The wigs they had tried were scratchy and hot and slid around, and Josie hated them.

Then her mother heard about a woman in Wisconsin who makes wigs for children out of real donated hair, and who only charges families what they can pay.

The woman needs several long ponytails for each wig, all close to the same shade.

Josie’s aunts had sent theirs, and a cousin had sent one, but the color was going to be uneven unless she got one more long blond braid of good length.

Maren raised her hand before anybody asked her. She came to me that evening in August with the yellow tape already in her hand and said, “Mom, measure it. I think it’s long enough now. I think it’s for Josie.”

We measured at the kitchen table. Then we measured again, because neither of us believed it.

From the band at the nape of her neck to the end of her braid, it was fourteen inches and a little over.

Fourteen inches is a lot of hair on a twelve-year-old girl. Cutting that much would leave her with a short bob, just to her chin.

I asked her twice if she was sure, and she looked at me as if I had asked whether she was sure the sun came up.

So I called Vonda and booked her for the second Saturday in October, nine o’clock, thirty-five dollars for the cut and the shaping afterward.

Vonda said she had done donation cuts before and knew how to band the braid so it would travel.

Then I made the mistake of mentioning it at Sunday dinner at my mother-in-law’s house, between the roast and the pie.

I thought it was a nice thing to tell a grandmother. I thought she would be proud.

Arlette Lindgren is sixty-six years old. She was widowed seven years ago and still keeps the farmhouse north of town, though she rents the fields out now.

She sings alto in the choir at the Lutheran church and has never missed a Sunday that I know of.