Little girls with dirty hair

I was reading about war and having my hair painted varying shades of copper and red when the conversation started.

A thirteen-year-old girl was having her highlights retouched, and the two stylists working her over with foils began to chat about their clients. Their stories took on a thematic bent: little girls with dirty hair.

Apparently, a little girl had come in with her grandmother earlier that day. The girl’s hair hit her waist, and it was a rat’s nest of tangles and those awful hair feathers that seem to be popular as of late.

One of the stylists, a twenty-year-old woman with bleached hair, had just finished working on a man who complained that since the age of forty five his life had just been going all to hell. For eighteen years, life kept getting worse. Coincidentally and sadly, his oldest child was eighteen.

He asked the young woman how old she was, and after she answered in a voice that still carried traces of girl in it, he gruffly inquired, “How’s that working out for you? Life?”

“Oh, you know, it has its ups and downs. I can’t complain, really.”

I could feel his sneer. I didn’t have to see it to know it was there.

She had the good sense to change the subject, to ask him if the five blade was cutting his hair short enough.

After she finished with the man and he left the salon, she walked over to the stylist doing my hair.

“He wasn’t so bad. I didn’t feel that threatened. I just steered the conversation away when it got weird. Nope. Not threatened.”

I did not believe for one moment that she felt comfortable because the man unnerved me and I wasn't even talking to him. I’m pretty sure that my stylist didn’t believe her either, but my stylist is a nice person and complimented the girl on her handling of a difficult client.

And it was after this brief exchange that the young woman began talking with the senior stylist about messy-haired little girls.

“That’s a big pet peeve of mine, when people bring their children in here and do not bother combing their hair. I mean, I was mad at the grandmother for allowing that to happen. That poor girl, we had to cut those feathers out. It took three of us to get a comb through her hair, and that took an hour!”

Her client earlier that morning was not the first to walk into that salon with dirty hair.

Apparently, the older stylist took on one messy-haired girl as a kind of project.

She recollected that first visit when dirt colored the water rinsing the girl’s hair and left grit in the sink  and when she took special care to wipe the sweat-stuck grime from the girl’s neck.  

She taught the girl to wash her hair, yet the girl kept coming in dirty. She had a collar of dirt around her neck; the grease from her hair stained the towels.

I kept reading about the three types of atrocity committed during war, about heroism and how medals tell a woefully incomplete and unrepresentative story of war.

The stylist concluded, “Now. That woman just didn’t know how to raise a daughter, and that poor girl will grow up to become a bad mother, too. That is how it happens.”

I winced.

The business manager walked over to me and asked me if I wanted some coffee and or hot chocolate while the dye set.

“Why, yes! Hot chocolate. Thanks.”

The women continued their story about the mother and how she seemed shut down and closed off like she was a boarded-up business or a dangerous road.

The thirteen-year-old girl piped up, “Maybe the mother was just overwhelmed, and her daughter’s hair just became one of those things that she forgot to do.”

The two women seemed not to hear her.

“Oh, her husband was military. And she was, too. I just got the feeling that something was horribly wrong there. Yeah, she was rough. As I said, completely shut off. “

She paused, sighed, and affixed more foil to the thirteen-year-old girl’s hair.

“Just when I thought I was getting through to the daughter, they moved to another state.”

I sipped on my hot chocolate and continued to read about war.