It was summer in Maryborough, Queensland on a Monday afternoon and my legs were sticking to the black vinyl upholstery of my chair. Like a magician, the hairdresser swept a silky cape into the air and as it floated down onto my legs, she secured it around my throat with some new enchantment called Velcro. I hoped she was a magician because I needed desperately for her to perform a spell that would undo what I had done to my hair.
The woman spun a long-legged stool into position, settled down on it and drew a trolley laden with combs and brushes towards her left elbow. Then she met my eyes in the mirror and smiled. ‘Now . . .’
I untied the wide ribbon attempting to restrain what looked like bed springs attached to my skull and prepared to explain.
That’s when Sharon from 10C3 English walked through the door.
Tethered by that wretched Velcro and penned in by the generous thighs of the woman perched on the stool behind me, I gripped the arms of the chair.
Sharon headed straight for me.
‘Hello Miss!’
I was squirming on sticky upholstery. Tugging at the neck of the cape.
‘Hello Sharon.’
Her face glowed with the pleasure this unexpected opportunity presented.
‘Haven’ seen you here before Miss.’
‘Take that chair if you like,’ said the hairdresser, indicating the one beside mine.
‘Cheryl’s just havin’ a fag. Be back in a minute.’
Sharon from 10C3 English sat down.
‘Cheryl’s my sister,’ she explained.
Maryborough was my first teaching post. Making 30 students believe they had to obey me was a challenge, especially since I was barely four years older than some of them. Be over-prepared ‒ that was my key strategy ‒ learn their names and act as if I had not a care in the world. I tried to act a bit like God and I mostly pulled it off: things were good in my classroom.
Letting a student know where you lived, or running into one in the street, was to be avoided. Miss didn’t buy food, try on dresses, go to the doctor or the hairdresser. She was another species. It was an illusion maintained more easily because I boarded with a widow and drove the five hours home most weekends.
Now, here was Sharon, leering at my profile.
My hair has never been on my side. I don’t remember Mum using sticky tape to get a level as she skwunched the scissors along a chunky brown fringe like other mothers did. My fringe was always slightly askew. Then there was the school dance in Grade Ten, when another hairdresser performed that sixties classic ‒my hair was scraped back, pinned down and erupting in a beehive of loops on top of my head. When I opened the front door that evening, my gangly partner gazed up at the magnificent structure, which had been ossified with half a can of Aquanet. As the light behind me illuminated his pimply cheeks, he poked at a side loop.
‘That got sand in it?’
Being caught at the hairdressers in Maryborough that Monday afternoon was unfortunate but admitting to a failed perm would be career suicide. Could being strapped in an electric chair be any more terrifying?
The hairdresser settled her hands on her knees and studied the too-tight curls on my skull. Then she looked into my tortured eyes in the mirror.
‘So, what are we doing?’
There was nothing for it but to explain the perm I’d had at home on Saturday ‒ a Mini-Vague that was supposed to produce big soft curls ‒ and beg her to do something, anything, to relax the curls and make me look less like a clown.
Without meaning to, I glanced sideways in the mirror and met Sharon’s eyes. We didn’t have mobile phones or social media in the seventies but I could foresee this going viral overnight. Sharon, who struggled to keep her mouth shut at the best of times, was sure to pursue the topic the next morning during 10C3 English.
My career was hanging by a hair.
Women describe salon encounters as luxury experiences from which they emerge renewed and resplendent, like butterflies. For me, salons are dystopian chambers of terror and embarrassment. You ask for a quarter of an inch off and watch as showers of hair fall to the floor. Or those special scissors come out, the ones that chomp through your tresses until the hairdresser drags handfuls of hair from the scissors’ teeth. Afterward, the hairdresser slides that little mirror around the back of your head and asks: ‘How’s that?’
And you smile. ‘Yeah, good.’ Because you just want it to be over. Outside, you pull down, ruffle up, or tuck behind ears, then race home to fix it. Worst of all, throughout the ordeal, you’re face-to-face with a woman who has a hank of hair flopping over one eye and the rest twisted and pegged up in stalks. She looks ridiculous.
That woman is you.
The hairdresser finished at last, having achieved nothing, but I managed to unseat the bundle of confidence mugging in the chair beside mine by enquiring as to the progress of her overdue assignment.
The hairdresser waved that little mirror around the back of my head. ‘How’s that?’
‘Fantastic. Thanks.’ I sashayed out through the front door.
Next morning, the sun came up as usual.
As I studied myself in the bathroom mirror, I remembered Grade Eights plastering strips of papier mâché to inflated balloons for creating puppet heads. It was February and I was as green as the chalkboard behind me. To get the attention of the comedian in the third row, I tested a technique male teachers employed with great success ‒ throwing chalk. Hardly knowing one end of a cricket bat from the other, I attempted to lob a piece of chalk off the student’s forehead. The chalk sailed over the fourth row, bounced off a soggy puppet head and landed in the glue. The room exploded with laughter.
My underbelly was exposed, but I managed to conjure the illusion that being an art teacher was the funniest, coolest thing on the planet. Who’d want to be good at sport when you could captivate an art class the way Miss did? This conjuring happened spontaneously, partly because I liked my job and partly because I liked the kids.
Now, like the Queen in Sleeping Beauty, I saw in the mirror what the problem was. The hairstyle was neither one thing nor the other. It simply wasn’t big enough. I set about teasing, fluffing and moussing the bedsprings and rummaged through drawers for long necklaces and the biggest gold hoop earrings I could find.
‘Like your hair Miss,’ said Sharon in class that morning.
I tossed those curls to make every girl in the room want nothing more than to sport an Afro like Miss had. Then, with the speed and accuracy of a maths teacher chucking a pellet of chalk, I deflected the conversation to Sharon’s overdue assignment.
‘Once it’s three days late, you lose five marks and we don’t want that, not if you’re planning to pass Junior English.’
‘I’m leaving in September anyway. Got an apprenticeship.’
‘An apprenticeship?’
‘Going to be a hairdresser.’ She grinned. ‘You can be my first customer Miss.’
IMAGE CREDIT: Silhoette image at top of story by www.freepik.com
