A man with the right scruffed-up beard and breadth of chest swaggered into the S and M dungeon that was my place of business, and twenty minutes and one grand later had my chin — still soft with the downy fluff of teen-girl skin — held steady in one paw while the other one flew at my face so hard and fast that I ceased to exist as the same collection of matter I had been the previous instant.
When Sarah’s mother, Penny, got sick four years into our marriage, we decided to move back to Mississippi, considering it penance for the sins of our youth. We signed a lease on a house, a white one-story on the historical register with a wraparound porch and angels, stars, and the moon painted on the transom above the front door.
Subscribe and Save up to 55%
sees the old woman — wheelchair bound, pushed by her daughter — glance out the window, and goes in back to fetch a shower cap. The woman tugs her daughter’s shirt and says, almost inaudibly, It’s raining. And it is raining. Barely. But clearly it wouldn’t take much rain to collapse the woman’s hair back to what it must have looked like when she came in here — that is, not so much hair as the gray wisps hair turns into if you live long enough. Without a word, the hairdresser begins fitting the shower cap atop the woman’s head, going around the edge with her pointer finger, one by one tucking in curls like a pastry chef piping rose after rose around the bottom of a cake, the frosting flowers almost magical, blooming in pink blush. When the hairdresser steps away, the woman’s hand lifts to feel the cap there, and her daughter asks too loudly, You’re all right now, Ma? And I wonder, should I feel hope that there exists, anywhere in the world, compassion for an old woman’s curls, that she’ll arrive back at the facility, perm intact, that some aide may carefully remove the cap, letting her have a day or two of however hair returns her to herself? Or is it something else I should feel — despair that life unravels into such bathetic necessity, sprayed, teased, and blow-dried to prop up an animal surely near its final days? And then I recall, from the seat where I await my haircut, that my own mother had her grayed, chemo-thinned hair cut two weeks before the cancer took her, and that, when we said how good she looked, she smiled sardonically but seemed to sit a little higher against the pillows she was propped on. Though she couldn’t lift herself, not even to eat, she seemed to rise.
Benjamin S. Grossberg
Benjamin S. Grossberg’s poem “The Hairdresser” [July 2020] made me think of my mom, who passed away last year at the age of eighty-nine. Two months before she died, I took her on her last trip to her hairdresser, Darlene.
Since my mom had lost her independence and was at an assisted-living facility, the weekly trip to the hairdresser had become a focal point on her calendar. And even though my mom was not one to talk much about personal issues, Darlene had become an important confidante.
Although my mom’s hair was wispy, Darlene was able to puff it up, and she left with some sense of normality in her life.