The Wisdom of Hair

by Kim Boykin

  The girl cried and Dolly cried; only Dolly quit when Mrs. Cathcart gave her a biscuit. Mrs. Cathcart must have felt sorry for that girl because she was always trying to help her, but the crying girl needed more help than Mrs. Cathcart could give.

  *

  We’d been in school about three weeks and had not touched a human head of hair. Mrs. Cathcart said after four weeks of studying, she would let us shampoo some of the customers when the girls in the class ahead of us got backed up. Every day was spent practicing on faceless, black-haired mannequins, doing pin curls, updos, and spit curls. I was horrible at spit curls, but not Sara Jane Farquhar. She could do anything with hair.

  Mrs. Cathcart had the best-looking mannequin head. She named it Dolly, after her beloved, who spent her days sleeping under the seat of any one of the hair dryers that happened to be on. Mrs. Cathcart loved to run her hands through Dolly’s artificial hair and demonstrate techniques we all knew we would never do in a real salon. Things like upsweeps that had gone by the wayside ten years ago but would still be a part of our exam. Most every day Mrs. Cathcart got flustered. Before she could finish her long and involved how-to explanation, Sara Jane had done the drill on her ratty old mannequin and had done it better than Mrs. Cathcart.

  One of my high-school teachers told us about little a boy, maybe eleven or twelve years old, who was enrolled at Duke University. She explained to us that the little boy was a prodigy, and that’s exactly what Sara Jane Farquhar was like when it came to hair.

  I don’t think Mrs. Cathcart knew what to make of Sara Jane. I could see a part of her was proud Sara Jane could do the mannequin drills faster and better than her own example. Still, you could tell she was jealous. Mrs. Cathcart liked helping us, especially when we got flustered. Whenever she walked by Sara Jane’s mannequin, she just nodded and smiled a phony smile that said, I’ll stump you yet, Sara Jane Farquhar.

  We’d taken our first written test from our ratty blue textbooks. I was pretty sure I had done well. When Mrs. Cathcart laid my paper facedown in front of me, she said, “You did a fine job, Zora.”

  I turned the paper over. She had circled 100 in red in a way that made it look like a happy face. I blushed and looked over at Sara Jane. She rolled her eyes at me and showed me her paper. Mrs. Cathcart had written STUDY across the top in big letters, under that a 27 was circled in the same gaudy red ink.

  “What happened, Sara Jane?” I asked during our break.

  “With what?” she answered. “That test? I can’t pass a test to save my soul. Shoot, it took me six tries just to get my GED, and I don’t think I passed. I just wore them down.”

  “I’ll help you study.”

  Nina Price, otherwise known as the crying girl, and a few others who didn’t do well on the test were huddled in a corner of the canteen. Some of them cried right along with Nina. In contrast, Sara Jane stood there with her perfectly colored blond hair drawn up in a loose bun on top of her head and little golden tresses hanging down around her gorgeous face. From the neck up, she looked like one of the heroines on the cover of a Gussie Foyette romance. And she wasn’t the least little bit concerned about grades.

  “I won’t pass.” She shrugged off the words with a thin smile.

  “You have to, Sara Jane. I’ll help you; my God, you’re so talented. You can do anything with hair, even better than Mrs. Cathcart.”

  “I know I’m good at hair, but I can’t remember much of anything after I read it, especially the names of muscle tissue or nerves in the human head.”

  “But you’re so good at this.”

  “I’m not good at the books. Shoot, the stock boys and the guys in the meat market across the street are betting on how many weeks I’ll last. The big money is on six weeks. I’m really trying to make it past then just so daddy’s new stock boy will win. He bet I’d make it all the way. He didn’t know any better.”

  Sara Jane Farquhar read every romance novel she could get her hands on. Heaving breasts and throbbing loins engrossed her so much that at first I just laughed it off. But it was sad that she could remember the tiniest details from books Nana Adams would have rightfully called smut, but she couldn’t retain one word from a textbook.

  “Sara Jane, if you don’t mind me asking, why are you here if you know you aren’t going to pass?”

  “I wanted to do something; Mama knew I had a knack for fixing hair and thought it would be a good idea. She knows I won’t pass, either. I got it from my daddy, whatever it is that makes me so I can’t learn. Grandmamma let him drop out of school when he was in the eighth grade.”

  “I’ll help you study. Every day. Please, Sara Jane.”

  She smiled at me and brushed one of the wispy curls that dangled seductively near her green cat eyes. “Sure we will. We’ll have a real good time.”

  *

  The sound of Winston’s car in the driveway surprised me. Sara Jane and I had been studying so hard for the next exam, I’d completely forgotten to cook his dinner. The two of us rushed to my bedroom window and watched him get out of the car. He didn’t even stop at the picnic table to see if there was a Styrofoam plate covered in tinfoil. He just went straight in the house to the living room and poured himself a drink.

  “Oh, Zora, he’s got something heavy on his mind.”

  I’d not missed a single day setting that hot plate on that stupid picnic table. I’d set it in the same place so often that the heat from the plate had made a permanent mark on the redwood table. I couldn’t believe Winston didn’t care his dinner wasn’t waiting for him. I felt like someone had kicked me in the stomach. At the very least, it should have occurred to him to come check on me to see if something horrible had happened to me.

  Sara Jane got up, went to my little refrigerator, and moved things around until she found a bottle of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine she had actually bought at another grocery store across town because her parents were Baptists and didn’t believe in drinking alcohol much less selling it. She poured mine in a Bama jelly glass and hers in my only teacup. “You drink and I’ll talk.” She took a big gulp of wine. “I’m going to tell you about Preston Hensley.”

  I nodded and sat down on the couch. It was impossible not to smile when Sara Jane gave me that little smirk. I was still dazed and wounded, but she had a way about her that made me lay down my cross for the moment.

  “When I was four days shy of sixteen, Preston Hensley set his sights on me. He was the preacher’s son, but he wasn’t what you’d call devout. Now, he was at church every time the doors opened and nobody ever had to prod him. He wasn’t there for the preaching, though. He was looking for virgins.

  “He’d charm their mamas into letting them go out with him, then he’d charm the panties off of each and every one of them. I knew of at least a dozen girls who knew Preston Hensley. Some were in the Girls’ Auxiliary, some in the choir, and one was a visiting missionary’s daughter.”

  “No.”

  “Oh, honey, he was Beau Paramour all over, you know, from Harvest of Passion, that first Gussie book I gave you to read. Anyway, when we started dating I was determined I wasn’t going to be an easy conquest.

  “The more he flirted and teased, the more I flirted and teased right back, but I never let him do anything. Now this really drove him crazy because I think he just smiled at those other girls, and their legs parted like the Red Sea. He wanted me so bad, and I toyed with him until he couldn’t stand it anymore. I didn’t have the first clue as to what I was doing, but it sure was fun watching him pitch the tent in his pants and then sending him home.”

  “Sara Jane.” My face blushed on and off like a stoplight.

  She took another swig of wine, and there was a long pause for effect.

  “Wait a minute.”

  “What?”

  “If I tell you my story, you have to tell me yours.”

  “I don’t have a story.”

  “Come on, Zora. Every girl has a story, especially one as pretty as you.”

  “Really,
I don’t.”

  My face was hot with shame, but not from Sara Jane’s question. The only stories I could ever let myself tell were about dodging the advances of Mama’s boyfriends who’d had too much to drink. I couldn’t even look at her, and I prayed she couldn’t look at me and know my secrets.

  “Listen up now.” She lifted my chin with those soft round hands of hers and smiled at me. “This story’s so good, I’ll tell it anyway. Like I said, Preston was determined to conquer me, and I was getting bored with him. So one night, a Tuesday night when nobody was at church, he took me to the nursery. We sat in the dark with just the moonlight coming through the windows. We whispered and giggled, played with those Fisher-Price trucks, rolling them around our bodies until he couldn’t take it anymore. The moon was just right. I could see his face. He wasn’t playing anymore.”

  She poured us both another glass of wine, sat down, and pulled her feet up under her as best she could. “He took the mattresses out of the cribs and laid them on the floor. Then, he knelt down, took my hand, and I knelt, too. He unbuttoned my blouse while he kissed me on the lips the way they do on TV when you hear that saxophone music in the background. He unhooked my bra, but I didn’t stop him like I had before. I think I was as ready as he was.

  “I reached to unbutton his shirt, but he backed away a little so that he was just out of reach. Then he read the most beautiful poem I’ve ever heard. I still have it. I even memorized it.” She sat a little straighter and began to recite:

  Who is this that appears like the dawn, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, majestic as the stars in procession? It is my lover. How beautiful you are and how pleasing, my love. I pray you will let your lover come into your garden and taste its choice fruits.

  “Well, that was all it took. We rolled around on that little bed exploring each other, and then he slipped it in, real gentle-like. Poor thing had been worked up for so long that he came in about a half second.”

  I laughed hysterically. Sara Jane laughed, too.

  “Was it really that funny?” She was trying to catch her breath.

  “No. Sara Jane, he was quoting the Bible.”

  “No.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s from Song of Solomon.” I wiped tears away.

  The first time my Nana showed me the family Bible, I was maybe twelve years old. I found that chapter right off. We weren’t much for going to church, but I read that whole book and wondered what in the world was going on at that Bible-thumping church down the mountain.

  “So, whatever happened to Preston Hensley?”

  “He was big on the rhythm method; since his daddy was a preacher, I think he was afraid to go to a store to buy rubbers. Anyway, his parents got word that the missionary girl was pregnant, so Preston did right by her. Last I heard they were living in Africa with her parents and Preston was taking a correspondence course from some seminary in Mississippi. They had a little boy and there’s another baby on the way.”

  We finished off the wine and opened another bottle. Between my tipsiness and Sara Jane’s nonchalance over the loss of her own virtue, I forgot that it didn’t matter to Winston whether I lived or died. After Sara Jane left, I’d catch myself smiling over some silly little thing she had said or done or how strong she was inside herself. I loved whatever it was inside her that always made her take over when I was hurting and make things better.

  6

  The only head of hair I’d worked on, other than that pitiful mannequin’s, was my own. Students who’d graduated with the June class but hadn’t found jobs yet worked on any customer that came into the school. We were all envious even though none of us, other than Sara Jane, actually knew enough to work on a human head. Besides, it helped those girls who hadn’t found a job yet to get a jump on their apprenticeship.

  Prudence Smart, a girl in our class who was neither prudent nor smart, didn’t know what an apprenticeship was. Irene Styles, a bony little thing with a smart mouth, piped up and told everybody it was working for nothing, which wasn’t true at all. It was closer to working for next to nothing.

  Whenever Mrs. Cathcart noticed one of us looking a little jealous of those apprentices, she would remind us that they would be gone by the time we were ready for real patrons. But you can only work on a fake head of nylon hair for so long before you start resenting the girls with living, breathing customers.

  The First Baptist Church sponsored a ministry at the local nursing home, and as chairman of the Outreach Committee, Mrs. Cathcart decided it would be charitable to provide the willing elderly with our services. Some of us went every Wednesday for about a month until we got a little clientele going. It worked out well for everybody because the school was closed on Wednesdays anyway in recognition of midweek prayer services at most of the churches in town. Everybody was thrilled at the prospect of having real live customers to work on, although they weren’t paying ones. And it was good for those lonely old ladies to have somebody to fuss over them, even if it was just for a wash and set.

  I remember that first day when those twelve elderly ladies toddled into the cafeteria just after breakfast. Two more were wheeled in by nurses’ aides and one of them had an old baby doll sitting in her lap. As luck would have it, the crying girl got her. She took one look at that baby and started crying. Mrs. Cathcart tried to calm her down, but the crying girl told Mrs. Cathcart she was pregnant. It was the last time any of us ever saw her in uniform.

  You’d think that after all of our complaining and chomping at the bit, every single one of us who stood over those wet silver heads would have known exactly where to begin, but we didn’t. Sara Jane, on the other hand, had already sectioned off her lady’s hair and was just chatting away like she had done this every day of her life.

  “Well?” the old lady assigned to me snapped. “Are you gonna fix me up or what? I can’t sit here like this; I’ll catch my death.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll just bet Harold sent you here, didn’t he? I know he would just love to see me six feet under, the little S-H-I-T.”

  “Honest, Mrs. Ethyl, I don’t know any Harold. I’m just here to fix your hair. I’m Zora Adams. Remember? I’m here with Mrs. Cathcart from the First Baptist Church.”

  “Damn Baptists.” I put a clip in a section of her hair and looked up to see if Mrs. Cathcart had heard her blasphemy. “My first husband was a Baptist, you know. What a cockeyed religion. I wish somebody would tell me just what they think they’re doing during those altar calls. Whispering their sins in that old reverend’s ear, and all the while he’s nodding his head up and down. What does that mean? At least we Catholics have the decency to confess our sins in a dark little box, the way God intended.”

  I pulled another section of thin, wet hair up straight between my fingers and grabbed a roller off of the tray. Before I could roll it up, Ethyl would turn around to fuss about one thing and then another and it would slip out of my fingers. Mrs. Cathcart tried to distract the old bat by showing her a little Christian love and compassion, which made the little pulse on my teacher’s forehead go crazy.

  “How are you today, Mrs. Ethyl? God loves you and I love you.”

  Ethyl just looked at Mrs. Cathcart and stuck out her tongue.

  “Humph. She looks just like my daughter, Lytle. Greedy little bitch. Walked around my house for years saying, ‘When you’re gone I want that, and that, and that,’” she said in a squeaky falsetto. She pointed to Mrs. Cathcart. “Get out of here.”

  Mrs. Cathcart wheeled around and stomped off. Ethyl was right pleased with herself and settled down enough so that I could try to finish rolling her hair. This was next to impossible because Ethyl talked with her head and I couldn’t hold on to the section of hair long enough to get it on a curler. The woman didn’t know how to be still, so I just did the best I could. Mrs. Cathcart stared at me from across the room with her Joan of Arc smile, rubbing her throbbing forehead.

  Two of the women, who were sisters, sat side by side at the cafeteria
tables holding hands, completely unaware Toni and Deana were working on their hair. They were old and thin with the brightest eyes, chatting about all sorts of things like school and whether they would go to the swimming hole that day. One of them confessed that she had stolen two eggs that morning and sold them for candy money when the rolling store came around. The other one said that she knew, that she had found the candy hidden under the house.

  “The rats and bugs got it, Lottie. I’m so sorry.”

  “I sure hope they finish it before Mama finds it,” Lottie said, and they both laughed so hard, it made the girls fixing their hair fuss.

  Clara was assigned the only black woman in the group. Twice she walked across the room to talk to Mrs. Cathcart before she returned to her patron. I could tell by the look on her face she didn’t want to touch the woman’s hair, so I excused myself from Ethyl and told Mrs. Cathcart I would trade with the girl. But Clara had heard Ethyl carrying on, and she didn’t want to have anything to do with her, either.

  I finished rolling Ethyl’s hair and had her under the hair dryer when I noticed Clara still hadn’t gotten started. That sweet old woman sat there with a smile on her face waiting for Clara to begin.

  “I’m Zora Adams. We’re all so new at this. Do you mind if I help Clara?”

  “Why, thank you. That would be real nice. My name is Pensacola Brown.”

  I was glad Mrs. Brown wasn’t sitting in front of a mirror as I towel dried her hair. I would have died if she had seen the look on Clara’s face when she finally put her hands in that hair. She looked at me with the most surprised look on her face and mouthed, “It’s so soft.”