Talk to Bonnie on the Fictionville Blog
When she saw the large plate-glass window and the sleek, minimal design of the establishment she knew she had found what she was looking for. “When can I come in?” she asked the platinum dye job behind the blue-green glass desk. “Noon tomorrow? I’ll take it.”
She had done this before and had a name for it: the zipless haircut. A simple haircut in a city where she did not reside, where she would never have to bump into the stylist and never have to feel guilty about switching to another if she felt like it. She enjoyed the feel of a stranger’s scissors snipping at the ends of her hair. She liked not knowing a thing about that stranger’s life, and he or she knowing even less about hers.
Sometimes she made things up for the stylists while she was sitting in their black vinyl swivel chairs, a dark cape flung over her shoulders like a poorly staked tent. “I’m a stockbroker,” she said to a young Asian man in Vancouver several months earlier. “Well, actually, I trade options. Sometimes futures. Every once in a while, commodities. These days I’m into smoked rubber. I saw some at the pier yesterday, just off a boat from the West Indies. Beautiful stuff. Burnt orange. Need some?” No, of course he didn’t.
Once, in Paris, on an early spring morning after drinking bitter coffee with grounds floating in it, she found a haircutter open on the Rue de Bac, near her hotel. She spoke some French but had just gotten in from Orly and was too tired to carry on a conversation in a language not her own. So she pretended she was Romanian (her father’s ancestors were from there) and made up a few words that had soft “sh” sounds at the ends. The haircutter left her alone and snipped her hair silently, barely looking at her to see if the haircut fit her face. These were the moments the woman liked best: being fully attended to and completely ignored at the same time.
Her mother had gone to the same haircutter for as long as the younger woman could remember, in some decades on a weekly basis. Some weeks her mother would have her short, sculpted hair cut, other weeks just styled. Her mother spoke of her haircutter in elevated terms. No one understood aesthetics better than he, she implied when she invoked his classy French name. He knew art, he knew fashion, he knew music, he knew makeup. She wondered what else her mother had talked about with this man who had watched her age slowly over the years, her black hair turning gray in isolated spots. Did he advise dying? Or staying alive?
For several months, when she was 16, the woman had dated a haircutter, a boy only a few years older than she who had quit high school to pursue his passion for hair. She met the boy through his older sister, a woman with a long, blond perm. The sister was dating a friend of the girl’s father. The haircutting boy lived with that sister and her boyfriend in a large house not far from downtown. They shared two Great Danes, a low round bed, an entire room dedicated to their CB radio, and at least one bedside drawer full of prescription drugs, strewn in it like penny candy.
The haircutter boyfriend loved coursing his fingers through the girl’s long dark hair. He whispered, “Never cut it,” to her when they hijacked the round bed and the prescription drawer for their Marvin Gaye-accompanied lovemaking. “Trim, but never cut.” This frustrated the girl. She wanted the boy to want to cut her hair off, all of it, and to deny him the opportunity. She wanted to sit in the salon where the boy worked, in the chair next to or perhaps across from his, and have one of his colleagues snip away at her long, straight hair while the music blared through the speaker system and the smells of sprays and ungents coursed through the blow dryer breeze. She wanted him to watch and then follow her to the car, angry and excited by so blatant a betrayal.
On a visit to the city where she was born but where she hadn’t lived for many years the woman made an appointment with a haircutter whose name she found on the internet. She read that the stylist, Marco, had won two national hairstylist’s awards a year earlier and she took that as a sound recommendation. She liked Marco and his small shop in a suburban shopping mall. She liked that the salon was only steps from one of the mall’s entrances, so that it was easy to run in and out without having to walk through the main body of the shopping center. She liked emerging looking new and strange, even to herself. Especially to herself.
In another city where she had lived for a while she found a haircutter who never failed to give her a good haircut and went back to the woman and her pristine white salon several times over a year or two. Then the woman’s sister came to town and needed a haircut and went to the stylist in the pristine white salon and became a regular there, visiting the shop on her increasingly frequent visits to town. What could the woman, at that point, do, given this new state of affairs, wherein the haircutter not only knew what she did and where she lived, so often had she sat in her chair making uncomfortable small talk, but now knew her sister – her sister! -- too? She was forced to stop seeing that haircutter and has not been to the same stylist twice since.
The woman’s mother, at 70, still went to the same hairdresser, who was by now semi-retired but who agreed to continue to cut, but not style, the hair of his longstanding clients. And the woman’s sister, for all she knew, still went to the woman’s former haircutter in the crisp white shop in the city where the woman used to live but has since left. In the meantime, the woman’s haircut territory has expanded with her travels.
Over dinner one night a friend of the woman’s told her that he, too, liked having haircuts in exotic places. He found that having his hair clipped in New Delhi, Brussels, and Sri Lanka were interesting cultural experiences, and told her of a time in Korea when the haircutter stuck a long, thin vibrator into his ears so far he thought his drums would surely pierce.
The woman couldn’t relate. It was not a cultural experience she sought, but a relief from culture, not an exotic experience, but a familiar one in an unfamiliar place. It reminded her that she could find the markers of home wherever she traveled, that all components of her life were endlessly interchangeable. So long as she maintained the opportunity to keep herself strange, to remain unknown and unknowable: a middle-aged woman passing through town who fit in just fine, so long as no one asked too many questions.