Between the 7-Eleven and The Computer Surgeon, you can get a fine haircut. The door sticks, which is why there’s a grainy picture of Christopher Walken under the words “Pull Handle And Just…”
Women older than Casablanca are dressed for intergalactic travel, solar panels radiating from their heads. In thirty minutes, they will be blonder than the starlets they have outlived.
Women younger than your niece are asking if the water is too hot, which it isn’t, since the proper temperature for shampoo is “volcano.” They are dabbing dye wreaths from foreheads, dressing divorcees and dowagers in black vinyl capes like suburban superheroes.
Our ancestors are here, remarking that the shine-enhancing shampoo smells like cookies, nudging us to tip at least 20% to the stylist who seems tired.
Our better angels are here, and they spin in the chairs, snickering at 2004 issues of Cosmopolitan and InTouch!
Our neighbors are here, as real as the promise that hair grows. Our neighbors are different here than at self-checkout. I am as shy as my long bangs will allow, but at Village Cuts, we see one another.
“My beauty!” Meadow greets me like a homecoming queen. When it comes up that I am forty-two, she throws her hands to her hips. “Nuh uh. Shut up.” I suspect she does this for the women in walkers. She is Rapunzel in high-rise jeans and declares my brown hair her “absolute favorite, because it shines.”
I am bad at salon talk, splitting weather and television into frizzier ends. We dutifully acknowledge the rain. I ask about her speech at her sister’s wedding.
“It was perfect.” She expects victories between the teeth of every comb. She pulls them out and curls them around her fingers. “How often do you get to tell the world how great someone is? I didn’t hold back.”
She paints around my bangs so carefully, the shampoo girl will have no stains to remove. She tells me I have barely any grey, which I don’t think is true, or else I wouldn’t be here. I’m glad I’m here.
I once asked Meadow about the Bible verses running the length of her forearms. Her parents died before she was twenty, “and these were their favorites. So, they’re always here too.” She lives with her grandparents, who are “awesome, awesome, awesome.”
“Did your grandmother cry at the wedding?”
“She laughed!” Meadow pats purple jam into my part, then twists her ladybug timer. “Thirty minutes. She laughed because she couldn’t stop talking. The whole church service, she talked. Everyone laughed, even the priest.”
“I love your grandmother.” I am a vision in blackberry jelly, my helpless hair raising its hands as if this were a stick-up.
Women are cackling around us, little revelations curling around the commonplace. The fire-headed stylist wishes her son were more aggressive. Basketball, football, and lacrosse were disasters. “I’d even be okay if he’d play an instrument. Just something. You need something. Be alive. Please be alive.”
I have been gifted proximity to a princess. Corinne – stylists speak her name like an incantation– has tiny spikes the color of sand dollars. She has a boyfriend named Elmer, who seeks the warty gourds of October and presents them as a love offering.
“Can you believe that?” Corinne can’t decide if she is proud or aghast. “He could get me roses, but no, it’s these grotesque green things.”
“Does it make you laugh?” Corinne’s stylist asks good questions.
Corinne doesn’t answer. She exhorts. “Sweetheart, get yourself an Elmer.”
Corinne has not had her hair colored in decades, because it turned perfect on its own. But a haircut like hers requires regular maintenance. And “I pluck my eyebrows every night,” she turns to tell me. “Stay ahead of things, so you don’t get overwhelmed.”
Our village skews female, but every Friday at 1:30, a king comes for his coronation. The world sees a strawberry blonde pompadour in a Jets jersey. The world hears fragments. Village Cuts experiences Kenny. I have never heard him say a verb, but I have never heard him speak anything but truth.
“Forty-seven!” He declares today. The stylists ring him like candles. “Forty-seven!”
“Happy birthday, hot stuff!” Meadow is excited.
“The best is yet to come!” The fire-headed stylist admires Kenny.
Kenny’s mother chauffeurs him here, but no one pretends Bettina is a chaperone. She’s here to have her hair blackened, which ages her but is the right decision. Bettina has not plucked her eyebrows a night of her life, and they explore in all directions.
“Dinner! Dinner!” Kenny has caught one of his favorite words. “Dinner! Mommy!”
“I love Kenny.” Meadow sighs and means it.
“Bless his mother.” Corinne shakes her head.
Nobody feels bad for Bettina, because Kenny won’t allow it. “Party! Party!”
Bettina tells us she’s making shrimp enchiladas. “That’s bangin’,” Meadow correctly observes.
The shampoo girl speaks to Kenny in full sentences and looks him in the eyes. “You are one of the coolest people I know, Kenny.” She can’t be more than seventeen. “You make me happy every Friday.”
“Good woman!”
I experienced Kenny for a year before finding the courage to speak. I don’t know where I found the words, so I can only assume they were provided. I have less interest in sports than the fire-headed stylist’s son, but I told Kenny, “You know, I root for Gang Green, too.”
He was incredulous. I felt incredible. We both laughed until we ran out of breath.
The next week, as Kenny walked in, I was covered in blackberry jam and scrolling Pinterest. He stopped so short, Bettina crashed into him. He gasped. “Good woman!”
Meadow had a new tattoo that day, a solemn angel with the words beat your wings.
“That’s a work of art,” I correctly observed. “That’s some of the best advice I’ve ever seen.”
“That’s what I’m goin’ for!” Meadow’s belly is as squishy as mine was at twenty-two, but she lets it breathe. Meadow has suggested I wear crop tops. “It’s never too late, and I swear you’re twenty-six.”
“Dinner!” Kenny reminds us.
Meadow and I exchange mandatory observations about the humidity – I understand some state regulatory board would shut down Village Cuts if we skipped these preliminaries – before ascending to secrets. I have not disclosed this to anyone, but “I’m considering a second tattoo.”
“Shut up! You should do it! What will it be?”
Meadow knows about the kittens on my ankle, the midlife-crisis memorial to my confidantes. She knows my mother convulsed at the idea, came to love it, and now only asks every two weeks, “that’ll be the only one, right?”
But now Meadow knows that “I want a tiny one of the Eiffel Tower on the moon.”
“No way. I have goosebumps.”
I tell her I am the moon. I tell her I am not the light, but I try to reflect it. I tell her I will submit my mediocre essays to The Paris Review until they relent, and then I will get my tattoo.
“Who are these people? They should publish you today. You’re brilliant.” She also thinks I believe her when she says I look twenty-six.
“It’s a crazy dream.”
“That’s the only kind! Tilt your head down.” Meadow is “neurotic about precision” when it comes to the back of my hair.
“I don’t know why it’s so important,” I confess.
“You don’t need to know!” Meadow will not take off more than necessary. I am shooting for my shoulders by Christmas. “And you should get the tattoo ahead of time. Why wait to enjoy it?”
“Party!” Kenny agrees.
Corinne nods. “I’m no fan of marking yourself, but I agree with the young lady. Pardon the cheekiness, but…” Her eyes bubble like laughing lentil soup. “…you’ll always have Paris.”
“What is that from?” Meadow demands. “I always hear that, but—”
“—Casablanca.” Corinne sighs with satisfaction. “You should see it, sweetheart.”
I picture a secret screening of Casablanca here at Village Cuts, ancestors and angels and ash blondes and the princess and the king all sighing together.
The shampoo girl hasn’t seen Casablanca, either, but “my grandpa and I watched another oldie last week, Dr. Zhivago, and it was amazing. I cried and cried.”
Sixty seconds into my wash, I know that she plans to play Lara’s Theme on piano for her senior recital. She wants to surprise her grandpa. She wants him to live to a hundred. She wants to become a trauma nurse.
“You’re perfect.” It falls out of my mouth.
“I am?”
“We need people with tender hearts like yours in this world.” We need Village Cuts to take over cities and continents.
“That’s super sweet of you to say.” She doesn’t know how I know enough to say it. She will accept it anyway.
“It’s true.”
“Dinner!”
I observe, “A salon is a kind of ER, isn’t it?”
The shampoo girl doesn’t laugh. “That sounds crazy, but it’s totally true.”
“Party!”
I give Meadow a $50 tip and stop for warty gourds on the way home. I skip the self-checkout and tell the cashier she looks stunning.
Angela Townsend is the Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, CutBank, Lake Effect, Paris Lit Up, Pleiades, The Razor, and Terrain.org, among others. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 33 years, laughs with her poet mother every morning, and loves life affectionately.
