In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Hairdo
  • Tom Feeney (bio)

Mrs. Eleanor Venesky was of the opinion in January 1995 that she was about to die, although she had no hard medical evidence to suggest it. She had been of that opinion for some years and was still of that opinion when I met her seven months later. Some days the weight of the notion pinned her to the davenport; she would spend long afternoons there, stretched out beneath a thin cotton blanket, listening to her music box and nursing her discontent. Other days, the notion had no weight at all. In fact, it was lighter than air. It lifted her up and carried her into battle.

So it was on January 17, a wintry Senior Discount Day. Her husband, Bernard, sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading the morning paper. Mrs. Venesky stood on the other side of the swinging white louvered doors, in front of a mirror in the living room, making a careful study of her hairdo. She twirled a few slack curls between her fingers. She picked at the strands of bang that had fallen down across her forehead. She ran her palms along the side of her head and down the back to the base of her skull. She clucked her tongue. “Let me get a perm,” she called through the door to Bernard, “so at least I look decent in the box.” The fellow who normally did her hair could not fit her in on such short notice. She found a number in the phone book for Summa’s Beauty Salon and called for an appointment. Sure, they told her, come on in. She hung up the phone and went to get dressed.

Mrs. Venesky lived with Bernard in a drowsy subdivision twenty miles west of Philadelphia, in a split-level home at the foot of a slope of well-barbered lawn. They raised a daughter in the house and kept company with a succession of fat, flatulent dogs. Their daughter married and moved out, and the last of their dogs had been dead five years. “God has not been with us,” Mrs. Venesky said of the years she and Bernard had been alone, [End Page 102] years that had been marked by declining vitality and a gathering sense of doom. A church-going neighbor brought Mrs. Venesky a few lengths of blessed palm during the Easter season. She wasn’t much for church herself, but she folded the fronds in half and tucked them behind the mirror on her living room wall. There they hung—brittle and brown and curled at the tips—like a light left burning in case He returned.

The ride to Summa’s took ten minutes. Bernard dropped Mrs. Venesky off at the front door. She hung up her coat and hat and took a seat. She was flipping through a magazine when a young woman invited her to step back to the shampoo station. She had her hair washed and then, with a wet towel draped around her stooped shoulders, she was introduced to her beautician.

This was not Mrs. Venesky’s first trip to Summa’s. She had been there two haircuts before. “That’s a darn good perm,” Bernard told her when she climbed back into the car that first visit. The nurse in her doctor’s office, a woman who worked behind the counter at the post office, the neighbor lady who used to stop to chat late in the afternoon while her dog peed on a tree at the top of Mrs. Venesky’s driveway—they all commented on how nice that perm looked. It made her feel pretty indeed.

The woman who had cut her hair the first time was not in the shop this day, so the job of satisfying her demands fell to Dina Summa, the daughter of the proprietor. Make it short, but not too short, Mrs. Venesky told her, curled but not too tightly. Use the little pin curlers around the base of the skull but something bigger on the top. Make the bangs fluffy and keep them off the forehead.

For her entire stay in Dina Summa’s chair, Mrs. Venesky was...

pdf

Share