Lessons Learned At The Corner Beauty Shop

 

 

 

Someone once claimed they learned everything they needed to know for life in kindergarten. I won’t dispute the idea although in my kindergarten class we finger painted, sang songs, had recess, and enjoyed a graham cracker snack with milk. I’m not sure any of those activities, while fun, prepared me for life.

 

The beauty shop, however, is a different story. Both of my grandmothers were frequent visitors to small beauty shops within the neighborhood. Granny made the trek every few months to keep her hair trimmed short and to have a rinse to preserve her original hair color as long as possible. Grandma, however, had a standing weekly appointment at the salon two blocks from my childhood home.

 

Some weeks I would stand in the front yard and peer down 11^th Street to catch a glimpse of her red Comet station wagon. At other times, she picked me up and took me along. I didn’t always have my hair cut but the ladies often styled my long locks and allowed me to choose a barrette to keep. 

 

I was always the youngest patron present and after a bit, the ladies, both customers and beauticians, forgot about my presence as they shared secrets and gossip. I was the child with big ears, the one who listened to my elders tell stories from the past or drop tidbits of family business. At the beauty shop, I was no different.

 

Whether I sat in the chair while someone combed out my hair or waited with a magazine in my lap, I eavesdropped. I also learned.

 

My Friday evenings or Saturday afternoons at the beauty shop with Grandma taught me many things. I learned about styling hair and how often to wash mine. I also learned about romance, marital difficulties, financial struggles, divorce, birth, death, and sex.

 

Few topics weren’t discussed and I soaked up information the way a sponge draws water.

When  most girls my age played with Barbie dolls and watched cartoons, I heard about marital infidelity. Can you believe my old man was doing that tramp? I’d like to tear her hair out! I learned that all women didn’t crave unending sex. I told him I had a headache because I won’t do it every single night of the week. 

 

During this period, Grandma divorced and remarried so I committed details of breaking up and courtship to memory. Her first husband, my grandfather I never knew, died young in the 1940’s so widowhood was sometimes discussed. Her experience as a single mom to four kids came up and I took mental notes.

 

She painted such a wonderful portrait of her last husband while they were dating, I thought I would like him.

 

I didn’t. When I  met him, he took Grandma and I for ice cream but insisted I sit at a separate table so they could be alone. My first inkling she’d married came when my parents told me she’d gone on vacation. I asked what she would bring me – since my other grandparents always returned from a trip with a souvenir or toy or both.

 

“I think she’s bringing you a grandpa,” my mother stated.

 

I had loved her second husband, a World War II veteran, who often took me for walks in the neighborhood while Grandma cleaned house.  No one had exactly explained their divorce to me so I hoped she’d found him and he’d come home.

 

That possibility shattered and broke when she turned up with the man who relegated me to my own table. I’d learned enough by then I refused to call him “grandpa” and in fact, I never called him by any title until I was sixteen. At that point, I was granted permission to use his first name, the way the other adults in the family did.

 

 

Long before sweet sixteen, I’d heard about bar fights including a fatal shooting.

 

 

“My hands were shaking,” the beautician had recounted as she backcombed Grandma’s hair into an elaborate bouffant style. “I about threw up at all the blood on the floor.”

 

The murder hadn’t quenched her thirst for alcohol, however.

 

If Grandma  had to work, I often walked down the street myself to get my hair fixed. The act made me feel very adult even though I wasn’t. 

 

Some of the best gossip stories were shared on those solo visits.

 

I also learned the hard but true reality. If people talk about everyone else, they talk about you when you’re absent too. I never shared the commentary on Grandma’s new spouse but I committed it to memory, far from surprised some of the gals didn’t care for the  man either.

 

By the time I began to date and enjoy my own intimate encounters, there wasn’t much  my mother needed to share when we had “the talk”.

 

I’d learned a colorful version at the beauty shop.

 

These days, there are fewer of the small beauty shops and more of the chain salons found in many malls. They lack the ambiance and the life lessons of the old school beauty parlors.

It’s a shame most girls today won’t grow up learning how to live from seasoned women focused on hair, with the pungent aroma of a permanent wave filling their nose.