Months later, on that first day when I sat down in Gina’s hydraulic chair, I told her my terrible hair stories, about my Shrimpton adolescence, my chemically dependent twenties.
“Also, I’m an ex-hairdresser,” I confessed in a rare moment of candor. For years after I quit the business, I didn’t talk about my brief former career. It was a forgotten identity, like some horrendous hairstyle endured for weeks and then shorn off in desperation. I had thrown myself into college, gotten married, and had begun to raise a child, only doing haircuts privately for my family. For all the years I was married, I trimmed my husband’s fine, dark blonde hair every five weeks, a ritual he loved. I’d perm my mother’s hair twice a year, taking personal satisfaction in the fact that I could still roll a perm in fifteen minutes and do a comb-out in record time. “You’ve still got good hands,” my mother said.
I looked back at Gina in the mirror and wondered if she cut her husband’s hair. It’s one of those things you get used to doing when you’re married but don’t even consider as you are headed for divorce. Afterwards you think about it again, how you knew this person’s hair so intimately, would have known it was his if someone had blindfolded you and put six people in chairs for you to consider.
Lately, single again, I had taken to advising on the style woes of the sisterhood of bravely aging babes that comprised most of my circle of friends. I fluffed graying bangs, and sprayed the meager upsweeps of two or three of distracted mothers-of-the-bride. Trying to be hopeful, I offered up my expertise to women losing their glow in the sad light of divorce or depression, or simply old age. I was still, after all, a healer of sorts – a doctor of hair.
Now, with my own marriage in tatters all around me, I needed some therapy of my own. I yearned to wear my hair long again, to feel it brush against my collarbone. “If you could just take an eighth of an inch off the ends. Just to keep things in shape...,” I told Gina.
