Earlene wound a large pea-green plastic sheet around my neck to protect my Ben Casey blouse from the hazards of
hair-cutting. My head stuck through a hole edged in rick-rack, making me look like a fuzzy, miserable turtle. She surveyed me with the practiced eye of a used car salesman. I almost expected her to kick the tires.
"Awwwww, honey," she breathed in sympathy, as she poked around the frizzy ball perched on my head. My mother permed my hair with a ruthlessness peculiar to women of that era.
"This permanent don't do a
thing for you," Earlene pronounced, then snapped her gum as if to punctuate the remark.
She didn't have to tell me. I already knew it. Mom, who dropped me off to face Earlene alone, must have owned stock in Toni
Home Permanents. She'd been ruining my hair since I was old enough to sit still. The sides were curled into a crinkled mass of auburn. My bangs framed my forehead with pinking shears precision. Every school picture from
the time I was in kindergarten until Earlene got hold of me reveals that same ball of kinky hair topped with bangs echoing the pattern of the rick-rack. I hated it.
I'd offered to sell my soul to lose the curls and,
to my surprise, my mother finally agreed. But only if I served time in one of Earlene's tangerine vinyl chairs. Getting rid of that hairdo should have been a time of joy. But it wasn't.
Earlene leaned over and dug her
comb in my scalp looking for a part. Her dangly earrings smacked me in the face, as I came perilously close to her cleavage. I shut my eyes. Maybe, I thought, just maybe this time things will work out. Maybe she'll make
me beautiful, or at the very least not the laughing stock of the eighth grade.
My mojo - which had already landed me in a shapeless white gym suit resembling a medieval undergarment and box-pleated skirts reaching
nearly to my ankles when miniskirts were making the scene - went over to the dark side. True - Earlene cut off all of the offensive fluff. But no swan emerged from beneath the ugly duckling frizz. In its place,
she left hair that climbed into a pompadour at the top of my head.
In the movies, where life doesn't have to resemble truth, plain girls fix their hair, pull off their glasses and become sleek and beautiful.
Perhaps their fairy godmothers didn't crack Beechnut Peppermint Gum while working magic. Perhaps Earlene didn't realize that 14-year-olds in the mid-sixties wanted to look like Jane Asher or Patty Boyd - not Jerry Lee
Lewis. Perhaps I was being kept humble to groom me for martyrdom.
I didn't know – but I was about to find out. And along the way I also discovered the cure for hairdos from Hell. Did I run away from home and join the
Foreign Legion? Shave my head and enter a convent? Or tough it out at school, looking like the female equivalent of John Travolta in Grease?
