I missed last week, the holiday here had me all sorts of twisted up as far as my regular posts, so I'm sorry, but here's the latest from behind my chair. 

The Perm Ultimatum

Dottie had been getting the same perm from me every twelve weeks for as long as I’d been doing hair, and from somebody else for a good decade before that. The same rods. The same solution. The same tight, cloud-shaped result that had not been fashionable since roughly 1987 and had not been asked to be.

I could have done Dottie’s perm in my sleep. Some mornings, before coffee, I arguably did.

Then one Tuesday, Dottie’s daughters showed up.

Both of them. Together. Dressed like they were attending a meeting, which, as it turned out, they were. They had booked a consultation behind their mother’s back. For her. “Something modern,” the older one said. “Something soft,” said the younger. They had brought pictures. They had brought printouts. There was a folder.

Dottie sat in my chair with her hands folded, looking at her daughters in the mirror the way you look at weather moving in.

“Mom,” the older one said. “It’s time.”

Now. I have been doing this a long time, and I want to tell you that there is no professional training on earth that prepares you for being made the deciding vote in a family referendum. They all turned and looked at me. All three of them. The daughters with hope. Dottie with an expression I couldn’t read yet.

“What do YOU think, Jayne,” the younger one said. “Honestly.”

And here’s the thing. Honestly? The daughters weren’t wrong. A softer cut would have taken years off her. I could see it the way you see a finished color while the foils are still in. Any stylist would have.

But I was looking at Dottie in the mirror, and Dottie was looking at her own reflection, and her hand had come up — just a little — to touch the curls at the side of her head. Careful. The way you touch something you’re afraid someone is about to take.

“I think,” I said, “that Dottie’s hair is Dottie’s.”

The daughters deflated. Dottie’s eyes met mine in the mirror.

They fussed a while longer and eventually retreated to the waiting area to be disappointed near the magazines, and I mixed the same solution I’d been mixing for years, and while I was rolling the rods Dottie said, very quietly, so only I could hear it:

“Walt liked it this way.”

That was all. Two sentences shorter than any explanation and about forty years deeper.

Walt had been gone six years by then. She came in every eight weeks, and every eight weeks I gave her back the woman he’d loved looking at, and neither of us had ever once said that’s what we were doing. We just did it.

“I know,” I said. Because by then, I did.

I did her perm. It came out the same as always. It was perfect.

The daughters mean well — I want that on the record. They love their mother. They just think the perm is hair.

It was never hair.