Permanent Waves, by Kendall Walker

The first time my grandmother ever wore her hair short, it was the day JFK got popped. (I’m much too young, you see, to have my own “The Day JFK Got Popped” story, so I have to tell you my grandmother’s). Twenty-eight years old on that November 22, she went in for a perm, a “permanent,” as she always did around that same date every year, just in time to enhance what she knew to be her already good looks for the upcoming holiday parties.

“Don’t do it,” my grandfather had flirtatiously fake-pleaded with her the night before, sitting, I like to imagine, over one of my grandmother’s bread-crumb stuffed, but still somehow always succulent crab cakes, later the unrivaled culinary highlights of my youth. With his eyes fixed in the same stunned, grateful gaze he seems always to have worn in her presence, he made a fruitless appeal to her considerable, but by no means unlimited or unwarranted vanity: “Frankly, Elsa, your face is so pretty, I always think you’d look better with short hair.” Probably, what my grandfather minded were not the dense, glimmering curls that, judging by photos, I can’t imagine anyone minding, but rather the expense. (“As long as your granddad was living, we were always shit poor” my own mother confided to me once, laughing guiltily through her tears while she told me this story. “It wasn’t until he died, and your grandmom started working, that things finally began to get better.”). 

For my grandmother, though, I think the expense of the perm was precisely the point of it—her one wholly selfish annual indulgence amidst the worry and want of those first married years.

I imagine she goes into Hutzler’s, which at this time is still a large department store—the way Baltimore is still a big city—and which, she doesn’t know yet, in another ten years she is going to manage. The salon is in the basement. The friseurs, in their powder-blue smocks, are all men. My grandmother’s favorite is Mr. DeMarco, a recent Italian immigrant whose Old World skills my grandmother, somewhat snobbishly, knows how to cherish, and who is still so naively, patriotically “fresh off the boat,” he jokes, whenever someone makes fun of his grammar, his accent, that he cannot speak English, but only American.

As with all his clients, Mr. DeMarco greets my grandmother by kissing her hand—an affectation that, he confessed to her once, he has picked up only since arriving in Baltimore. With a bow-like flourish, a bit like a maître d’ or a matador, he seats my grandmother and capes her, then appreciatively, admiringly, washes and rinses her hair. And after this it is not merely magician-like, but positively priest-like, the way he rolls over the tentacled, extraterrestrial, at this point almost antique-already contraption, tugs my grandmother’s sumptuous, blond-tipped but black-rooted hair into ribbons—a long, shimmering sacrifice—then rolls the ribbons up around the cracked old Bakelite curlers and, humming his favorite little operatic melody, begins to massage in the goo.

“Now don’t leave me under here too long, Lorenzo,” my grandmother chides Mr. DeMarco, savoring the strangeness of his forename as the machine revs up and the steam starts to rise in a chemical cloud. She almost reminds him that she is already naturally curly, but then realizes that, as an expert, he must already know this, and that pointing it out would just make it absurd.

“Don’t you worry nothing, Mrs. Rawlins,” Mr. DeMarco says. “Lorenzo’s got his eye for you,” it being completely unclear, at this point, whether Mr. DeMarco’s frequent, oddball malapropisms are real mistakes, or if they are just another layer of his showmanship.

“I’m completely at your mercy,” my grandmother says, while Mr. DeMarco lowers a plastic dome over her head to capture the valuable toxins.

As usual, during the time it takes to perm, my grandmother reads through a magazine. It may be Time. It may be Life. Either way, they can’t afford a subscription at home, and this moment of reading is one of the many, many pleasures of Hutzler’s. With a growing sense of  engagement, and joy, and immersion, she flies through articles about a “Miss Teenage America” pageant concluded recently in Dallas, the dark-haired, somewhat cock-eyed winner of which, my grandmother can’t help thinking, isn’t nearly as pretty as she was at that age; about the wedding of the world’s first female cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, in Moscow, where a bald, smiling Khrushchev raises his vodka glass to toast her; about Agnes de Mille, the “grande dame” of dance, and the new show she is staging on Broadway; about a Nobel Prize awarded to a cigarette-smoking “lady” physicist and mother, Dr. Maria Mayer, for her work mapping the arrangement of neutrons and protons in the atom. With the proud sense of gaining new knowledge—a little intellectual frisson she has felt, she realizes now, much too seldom since graduating from high school—she moves on to a story about Lincoln’s composition of the Gettysburg Address. 

And after that, there is only one article left, the one, my grandmother admits to herself, she’s been trying to avoid, about a war in far-off Asia that, at least in her mind, is not yet quite her country’s war, and that maybe reminds her just a little too much of the things my grandfather has told her about what he saw and he did in Korea. Reluctantly, but with growing interest, revulsion, and sadness, she studies a full-paged, color (in a magazine in which, otherwise, only the ads are in color) photo of a self-immolating monk, burning hunched and cross-legged in the street. The orange of his robes is already at one with the orange of the flames, and only the relative white of his skin and his bones is distinguishable. Drawn in now, almost hypnotized, my grandmother turns the page to linger over a dazzling, high-contrast black-and-white of streaking rocket fire setting whole buildings in Saigon ablaze. And all of a sudden, this once-distant war seems so real she can not only see, but smell and taste it, the chemical sear and the burning of flesh, like some sort of rancid, horrifically overcooked crab cake. 

Nauseous, and with a claustrophobic sense of sudden panic, my grandmother looks up for Mr. DeMarco. The salon is so empty, though, so wiped clean of life, it’s as if the bomb has just dropped, and she’s the last woman not in the shelters.

My grandmother screams only once, just as a surge of hot pain hits her scalp. Mr. DeMarco comes running from the far side of the floor, where people—now no longer just “people,” but a crowd—have gathered around the black and white floor model televisions.

“I’m so, so sorry, Mrs. Rawlins. I shouldn’t have left you. But just now. In Texas. They say someone’s shot President Kennedy.”

And so that’s it. The deed is done. Mr. DeMarco lifts the smoking dome from my grandmother’s head, and she, crying now like Mr. DeMarco, raises her hands to grasp her hair, crisp and charred where it touches the rollers. It crumbles into waxy, stinking dust in her fingers. And Mr. DeMarco, tears damming up in his neatly-trimmed beard, does the only thing that he can. He takes his tiny steel scissors in his fat, trembling hand and, just above the point where the curlers hang scorched from what’s left of her hair, clips free the woman who to me will be Grandma.

___________

Kendall Walker’s work has appeared in J Journal: New Writing on Justice, Midwestern Gothic, Aesthetica, Ampersand Review, Bound Off, Retort Magazine, and Zygote in My Coffee.