December 2002
Issue - Essay # 7
Fried
Hair
By Tessa Dratt
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One
afternoon when I was ten, I came home from school to find Mother and her
friend Hanny eagerly awaiting me. They
were sitting in our living room smoking Lucky Strikes, drinking coffee
from china cups and gossiping in German the way they always did.
Yet something was different.
"There you are!" Mother said with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. "Hanny and I have a been waiting for you." "Why?" "We have a surprise." "What
surprise?" I asked warily. "We’re going to give you a Toni Home Permanent Wave!" My
hair had always been pin straight, chin length, parted on the left with
a barrette in the right side. It
wasn’t great hair and it certainly wasn’t the long hair I dreamed
of-- hair to braid, twist and play with in boring moments, but it was
mine. I was used to it.
"I don’t want a permanent." "Don’t
be difficult. You’re going
to love it. We bought the
kit this afternoon. Put your
books away, get a snack, then we’ll meet you in the kitchen." "But, Mother, I don’t want to do it." "Nonsense. Hanny and I have it all figured out. We’ve studied the directions. We’re all set to go." "Ja,
ja," Hanny added. "You
vill luff it. Vee vill haff
fun." "Go
now, go. Get ready,"
Mother said in a voice that brooked no discussion.
"You’d think we were going to torture her," Mother
said to Hanny and they both laughed. Mother
had never worn an apron in her life, but now donned a plastic house
dress that scraped and rattled with every movement.
Hanny unwrapped an identical one.
They each pulled on a pair of ominous-looking plastic gloves
straight from Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory.
A pile of slim pink curlers, a packet of thin paper squares, and
several bottles filled with grayish solutions lined the kitchen table. Hanny
handed me a wash cloth and told me to lean over the kitchen sink where
she proceeded to shampoo my hair and rinse it with pot-fulls of scalding
water which sent streams of soap down my neck into my blouse. Then she
placed me in a straight-backed kitchen chair and spread one of
Mother’s old sheets around me. It
seemed that Hanny, the expert who fixed her hair by herself
instead of going to the Beauty Shop like Mother, was going to
give me the actual permanent. Mother
was in charge of handing Hanny the supplies. For
an hour Hanny parted tiny segments of my hair, wrapped each segment in
the tissue paper square, then squeezed the wrapped section into a narrow
pink curler and snapped the curler shut.
A cigarette never left her lips.
The smoke from her cigarettes and the fumes from the solution
made me cough. "Still
bleiben!" Hanny commanded when I fidgeted. "Could
you please stop smoking?”"
She
ignored me and continued her work. When
my head was transformed into a small lopsided sphere totally plastered
with pink plastic sticks, Hanny handed me another washcloth. "Cover
da eyes!" she said and applied the first solution. The
smell was horrible: Worse
than my brother’s socks on the floor of his room or the time I’d
left half a sandwich in my skirt pocket for six weeks in my closet at
the height of summer. I
could feel the searing liquid ooze between the pink curlers and into my
scalp. My head burned.
My nose tickled. The
skin on my cheeks felt swollen. Mother came up behind me with a basin and told me to tilt my head backwards so the extra liquid wouldn’t drip onto the floor. Certain I was going to throw up, the vicinity of a basin was reassuring. "Tventy minuten," Hanny said. "You vill sit mit head back tventy minuten. Den ve rinse and apply de neutralyzen solution." Twenty
minutes and two cigarettes each later, Mother blotted my head with a
towel and Hanny applied the second poisonous potion.
We heard Father’s voice from the foyer followed by the rapid-fire click of his footsteps. "What’s that smell? Where is everyone? Olga? Olga? What’s going on here?" Father
came into the kitchen. His
face shifted in a swift series. Curiosity, confusion, concern and
finally white-faced anger. His
ran his palms over his bald head, then tugged at the corners of his
mustache, the two things he did when he didn’t know what to do.
"What
are you doing to her?" Father’s
expression mixed compassion with horror. "Ve
haff given her a permanent," said Hanny.
Her voice rang with pride. "Are you crazy? A child?" "A
Toni Home Permanent Wave," Mother added, as if that would make
everything all right. "If God had intended her to have curls, she would have been born with them!" While
the adults were bickering, no one kept track of the time.
The neutralizing solution remained on my head too long.
When they finally remembered me, the stinky mess perched
miserably on a hard kitchen chair, there was a rush to clean me off and
wash me down. Even Father
helped. He took me on his
lap and toweled my raw head dry. Father’s
eyes confirmed my worst fears. I
needed no mirror. Under my
fingers, my hair felt like steel wool.
Blisters had formed on my scalp.
I smelled like a chemistry set.
Tears welled up as Father pressed my damp, frizzled head towards
his chest, but even his clean starched smell couldn’t neutralize the
sulphurous fumes in my nose. I sobbed and rocked against Father. "What’ll my friends say? They’ll make fun of me. They won’t even know me!" "Don’t be dramatic," Mother said. "It’s so unbecoming." Hanny,
for once, said nothing at all. She
didn’t even light a cigarette. I
retreated to my room where I visualized myself struck down by a school
bus the very next morning or found dead on Riverside Drive that night
after I’d climbed out my fifth floor window.
And wouldn’t they all be sorry.
Desolate. Guilty.
But when I pictured the funeral and there I was laid under ground
with the hideous frizzled fried hair, my fantasy came to a halt.
This was not going to be the look with which I left this world.
Nine
months went by. My new hair
grew out straight as a pin and my natural light brown color.
The permed ends stuck out in all directions, frayed, bleached
blond and broken. One
afternoon when Mother was out - at Hanny’s no doubt - I took a scissor
to my head and gave myself a home-style trim.
The results were not pretty, but there wasn’t a curl in sight.
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Author's Biography Tessa Dratt writes from Chicago, Illinois. She is still trying to figure out what to do with her hair. |
Essay
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