Trulla's Beauty Shop

FICTION Trulla's Beauty Shop Mary Hodges Yesterday Mrs. Grimm come in to get her hair done at her usual appointment time—Friday mornings, 10:00. I've been fixing her hair that same time ever since the first year I opened up. Be thirty-five years come next April. She must have been sixty, sixty-five years old then. Nobody really knows for sure. Her age is a well-guarded secret. Ain't nobody left that can remember. But, let's face it, she's old. And, in all that time, I've never seen nobody bring her in or pick her up. Always walks the three or four blocks from her little house up on Elm Street. She comes and sits down and waits her turn, rarely says so much as a howdy do; just jerks a quick nod. Always has that scowl look on her face. Looks like somebody that's figuring their income taxes, you know. Anyway, she just sits there, little oP soul, can't weigh more'n ninety-five pounds, all humped over almost to a ball, till I call her up to my station. I try to talk to her, but it ain't easy, and I don't never have no trouble talking. Most ladies always want to talk. I think it's one reason they come here. They know they can say anything they want to—that is, if they don't care to get it repeated—womenfolks' stuff, you know, like who's sleeping with whose husband, or whose kid's smoking pot, or how the country's going to hell and it's all the men's fault—stuff like that. They can gripe about their husbands all tltey want. Talk about how tight they are, how grumpy they are, how lazy they are, how they just come home from work and plop down on the couch, how they read them old nasty magazines, how they put out their cigarettes in the dirty dinner plates. We don't have no men come in here. Don't want none. We're not one of them fancy beauty shops that's got something against calling a beauty shop, a beauty shop. You know, them that say they don't cut hair, they style it. Ha! A rose by any other name, I say. Anyway, let Mary Hodges, a native of East Tennessee, is an instructor of English at CarsonNewman College in Jefferson City, Tennessee. She and her husband have returned to the area after living in many other states, including Hawaii. 14 the men go to them stylish shops. My women don't want no men at their beauty shop. They come here to talk girl talk, not to visit with a bunch of men and watch the silly things get perms and color jobs. You can tell even the Coca-Cola man is uneasy when he has to come in and put cokes in the machine. He comes in looking down like he's studying the inner sanctum or something—like he's going behind the altar. The women shut up like clams as soon as he opens the door. It's just like somebody turned the off button, and it don't go on again till he goes back out. And Jake, the mailman, he sprints in and out, fast as he can go, like the Pony Express. Now Kelly that sells beauty products to me is a different story. He always wears them sissy clothes, you know: slipper-type shoes, earrings, fringy vests and all that. Some days he'll have his hair dyed blond; some days it'll be half purple. One day it'll be long, and the next day he'll have half of it shaved off and the other half all frizzed up. But the women, they just chatter right on when he comes in. Don't miss a beat. They even look at his supply books with me and ask him questions about what would work best for them and such. Why, I've had to start stocking them expensive Paul Mitchell products that I could never convince the women to buy if...