I don’t know why I crept about the apartment so quietly, because Winston was still drunk from the night before. I dressed and ate a little biscuit left over from Thursday’s dinner, looking in on him every so often and then one last time before I left. His face was so peaceful, vulnerable, almost innocent.
The morning was crisp and beautiful, like apple season in the mountains. Leaves rustled about as I tiptoed down the steps of the garage apartment and stepped into a world of live oaks awash with color. Not the brilliant reds and oranges of the hardwoods back home, but deep greens and rich browns. Still pretty.
I walked like a little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes, grown-up and giddy at the same time. I loved playing house with Winston. It agreed with me, having my man, loving him to the point that I was grateful to be alive just so I could feel this way. I spoke to everyone I passed by. I could tell by the way an old woman smiled and nodded back at me that she knew what I was feeling, that she had felt that way herself at one time.
If I hadn’t been tethered to the ground by graduating and getting a job, I would have floated right up to that sweet November sky and made a place there for me and Winston forever. Instead, I glided through the door of the beauty school, hung my jacket up on the rack, and turned around to find Sissy Carson right in my face with an annoying know-it-all smirk.
“Who is he?” she asked.
“What?”
“I’ve seen that look too many times on my own face. Come on and tell now. Who is he?”
I smiled and pushed past her to sign in at the appointment desk. It galled her so that she followed me around while I got a permanent out of the storage closet for my first appointment and restocked my station with perm rods and clean hairbrushes.
“You know they’re all shit. Every single one of them.”
I gave her a look and waved to Ellie Jeffords, who was checking in for her appointment with me. Ellie used to be the poster child for happiness, but in the past few weeks she seemed to be renting it rather than owning it. She came in four times last month and always wanted to do something different to her hair, not in the way that she just wanted a change of style; it was more like she was trying to change something else, something that even an ordained cosmetologist couldn’t fix.
She was married to Ned Jeffords, a good-looking young attorney who worked for his daddy’s law office in town. She came into the school with the longest, silkiest chestnut hair that you ever did see, clear down to her waist, and said she wanted it cut, short like a pixie. Now I never cut anybody’s hair from real long to short, so I talked her into cutting it right about to her shoulder blades. Two days later, she was back, wanting to go even shorter and talking about a perm. I told her I didn’t think a perm was such a good idea because her hair was great just the way it was, but that I would cut it to her shoulders if she wanted.
When I was done, I handed her the mirror and watched her look at herself. The haircut framed her gorgeous face. She was beyond beautiful, but I don’t think she saw that. She said I did a good job and that it didn’t have anything to do with me before she made an appointment for the very next week for another haircut and a perm.
“If you don’t want to do the perm, I’ll go somewhere else, Zora.” She didn’t say it mean like, just sort of matter-of-factly.
Ellie’s wanting to mess with her hair like that didn’t make any sense to me. But I promised I’d do the perm and told her I thought she looked perfect the way she was. She just smiled at me. It was then that I saw between the lines and knew for sure that this woman was miserable.
“I know you don’t want to do this, Zora,” she said as she sat down in my chair that morning.
“What does your husband say?”
“Ned? He’s so busy studying for the bar exam and chasing after his daddy’s coattails, he doesn’t say much. But his mama…”
I noticed her hands begin to shake, and she had the same look on her face that someone does when they really need a drink.
“Do you spend a lot of time with Mrs. Jeffords?”
She nodded as I began to section off her hair to wrap it for the perm.
“She’s horrified I come here. Says a woman in my position in the community should never go to a beauty school, but my mama always came here. She brought all seven of us. Sometimes we got good haircuts and sometimes Mrs. Cathcart gave us an extra cookie because the girl messed up our hair. If this place was good enough for Mama…” Her voice trailed off.
I got her hair rolled up and put the solution on. I sat down on a little stool in my station and set the timer. She hadn’t said much for a few minutes. I thought maybe she didn’t want to talk, which was fine by me and one of the ten important telltales Mrs. Cathcart taught us about meeting our patrons’ needs. But she looked too fragile to be left alone, even for twenty minutes.
“We met in high school,” she began. “I don’t know why Ned was attracted to me. It didn’t make any sense. Mama said I was his Indian chief.”
“His what?”
“You know, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief.” I nodded. “Ned was voted Most Everything that was good—popular, humorous, most likely to succeed. Somewhere in all that he chose me.”
“Ellie, you’re beautiful, inside and out. Why wouldn’t he choose you?”
“I don’t know. For a long time I thought he did it to make his folks mad, but that wasn’t it. Ned says he fell in love with me the first time he saw me at high school. I had gone to the same school with him since we were in the sixth grade, but I guess he didn’t notice me then. He doesn’t see me much now, either, but when he does, he’s so…sweet.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah, he keeps telling me that once he feels comfortable, like he’s got a handle on things and as soon as he passes the bar, he’ll spend more time with me, but how can that be? His daddy says that once he passes the bar, I’ll never see him. He said that to me like he was proud of it. I think they hope that I’ll just get fed up and leave Ned, but that would break his heart, and I could never do that.”
The timer went off. I rinsed her hair out, put the neutralizer on, and let it sit for a while. Mr. Cathcart asked me to answer the phone for a few minutes because the receptionist was out, and his hearing aid battery was out. He asked us all to take turns that day, and I wished that he had asked me later, because I sure hated to leave Ellie just then.
When I heard the timer go off, I asked somebody to take my place at the desk while I rinsed Ellie’s hair and blew it dry. No matter what she did with herself, she was still gorgeous. She ran her hands through the soft curls and asked me to pencil her in for the same time next week to go blond.
I wanted to tell that her hair was perfect just the way it was, that the color was so true I could never have gotten it out of a bottle, but I knew it was no use. I wrote her name down in the appointment book and gave her a little reminder card, even though she said there was no need.
“Do you have any plans for the rest of the day?” I thought I might ask her out to lunch. She sure looked like she needed a friend.
“Yes,” she said plainly. “I’m going to get pregnant.”
“Oh, well,” I said. “I was just going to see if you wanted to go to lunch this afternoon, but it sounds like you’re pretty busy.”
She thanked me for the invite and for doing such a good job with her hair and left. Sissy Carson had been waiting all day to get another dig in on me, and I saw her watching Ellie the whole time she was sitting in my booth, whispering to the old biddy she was working on. She strolled over to me with that same smug look she’d had since that morning.
“She doesn’t belong here,” she said matter-of-factly. “And what in the hell is she doing to herself? Her pretty hair’s gonna be all burned up with perms and color.”
I still didn’t say anything, just went about my business. But I thought about Ellie all day and how the Jeffords had done her. I’d heard all kinds of talk about what they’d said, about her being white trash, how they’d threatened to disown Ned if he married her. Even worse, after they accepted the wedding, they’d paid for the whole affair and didn’t invite a soul that Ellie knew or loved. Life was terrible for her, and I guess Ellie thought that since Ned was their only child, her life might be better if she had a baby.
At first, it puzzled me as to why Ellie Jeffords was forever trying to change the way she looked. But after a while, I realized she believed that if she looked different, her world might just be different, that somehow in all of that she would find happiness. I know that sounds crazy, but since I realized this about Ellie, I’ve seen it in other women who come to my station and look in that big mirror the same way. They want something different, a change. They want to be happy.