Permanents and Transients

Permanents and Transients by Marian Motley-Carcache As an only child growing up in rural Alabama, I especially looked forward to accompanying my mother on her trips to town to the beauty shop. Beauty parlors were not only my source for movie magazines , which Mama would not buy for me, but they also provided me with my only first-hand contact with cosmetics. I could paint my fingernails ten times in the hours it took to give Mama a permanent, and since the only nail polish at our house was the clear that we used on bedbug bites and to stop runs in stockings, I delighted in painting my nails every colorfromcopper tocotton candy. Unfortunately, trips to the beauty shop, like most other innocent pleasures ofchildhood, soon proved to be neither innocent nor pleasurable. One particular visit looms in my mind to this day in nightmare proportions-and after that visit, fifteen years passed before I again could be coaxed to set foot inside a beauty parlor. Mamapickedme up from school, delivered me from an afternoon of "circling what's wrong with this picture" in those thick-pink "Think and Do" books, to take meto Voncille'sKutandKurl. My mind was filled with visions of Screen Secrets magazines andrainbows ofnail polish, of intriguing bottles of dye and tubes of conditioner. Little did I realize what was actually in store for me. It never crossed my mind that a permanent was just what it said it was-permanent. Neither did it fully register that this time I was to be the victim of the pins and the rods and the solutions and the machines. This time I would notbe free to collectmagazines and play with cosmetics. I would be confined and curled. Voncille's beauty shop was inherhome, an old house that must have been a Victorian showplace in its day, but beingrental property now, was far from grand. A wooden shingle hung out front, a pink silhouette of a woman's head with "Voncille 's Kut and Kurl" painted on it in powder blue. Several cars were parked in the front yard, probably because of a sign that read, "Please Do Not Block Drive" that stood by the driveway. A string of bells and seashells that hung around the door knob jangled as Mama opened the 27 door and we stepped into the parlor. Voncille fascinated me from the start. I had heard Mama and some of her friends say that Voncille had just moved to Alabama from Florida, and that she had tried to commit suicide for the third time just a few weeks before settling here. The idea of her slit wrists intrigued me even more than the bottles of nail polish that I had already spotted lined up on a two-tier plastic cart in the corner of the room. Another interesting thing about Voncille was that she had either plucked or shaven away all of her eyebrows and had drawn on anewpairaboutahalf-inch higherthan where the real ones had been. Soon I found myself placed on top of a stack of magazines topped with a cushion to make me sit higher in a big vinyl chair. Then the backofthe chairwasdropped from behind me and my neck was fitted into a guillotine of a crevice on the front of ablack sink. As a deluge ofwater soakedmy head, I foughtimages ofa Baptist baptism by wondering if Voncille s real eyebrows would have grown back if her suicide attempt had been successful, and if eventually she would have lain in her coffin with two sets of eyebrows. After the shampoo, the real torture began. With the aid ofa metal rattail comb and some pink liquid in a pump, Voncille began to tear tangles from my hair, tangles that she had caused in the first place when she scrubbed my hair like she was washing away the sins ofthe world. From my perch, I began to observe all the horrors of a beauty shop that I had never noticed before: the unpleasant sight of tortured women with wire curlers in their hair and Coca-Colas in their hands; the dissonant sounds of dryers roaring, the phone ringing, a TV blaring the...