Ruth Galm - Into the Valley

B. sat on a folding chair near the door. An air-conditioning box sputtered in the corner. This was a better idea, she told herself, better than stopping at the chapel. She watched the hairdresser, a thin woman with sunken cheeks. The hairdresser’s own hair did not look well-styled, an attempt for some kind of lift at the crown that only looked like she’d just woken up. Oscillating fans on the counters blew the fine ends off her shoulders, but she seemed no more cooled off.

B. ignored all this. She felt certain the beauty parlors in the valley would be better than in the city, would hold some deeper significance, for their realness, their location among “truer” women. When the hairdresser finished the second woman and put them under the dryers, she approached B.

“I’d like a set, please.”

“We do wash-and-set, ma’am.”

“But it’s already clean.”

“We’ll have to wet it anyhow.”

B. tried not to sound defeated. “Alright, however you’d like.”

The valley hairdresser shampooed her quickly, scraping B.’s scalp with her long fingernails, then sat her in front of the mirror and sectioned her hair with the tail of a comb. She rolled each section up into a wire curler and pinned it tightly, until B.’s temples hurt. The hairdresser’s extreme thinness, chipped scarlet nails and limp hair made her look older at first, but as B. watched the woman curl and pin she realized they were probably the same age.

When B. had gone with her mother to the beauty parlor as a girl, her mother’s stiff handbag had sat on the floor with gloves laid carefully on top. She chatted with the other ladies in the same crests and falls, attuned to some shared rhythm.

And yet B. could not recall what the women spoke of, or how vital these subjects were, or whether these seemed to be the conversations they really wanted.

B. watched the two older women under the dryers. One was thin like the hairdresser, her skin mottled, the bones in her elbows protruding; the other was weighed down by fat that bulged off her torso and arms. Their voices rattled in the vibration of the dryers. B. listened to their conversation, trying to discern a thread that might be illuminating in some way, that might be what she had come for.

“Well that was just it, and so I took it back to the supermarket and showed them the opened carton. Full of lumps! I said, ‘I bought this milk yesterday and I’m not leaving without my money back.’”

“And did they give it?”

“Of course they did.”

“Well, I like it there. I’m not going to stop going there.”

The thin lady harrumphed.

There was a silence. B. waited for something else.

“I saw that greedy yellow bird again,” the thin one began. “Damn bird has no business around here, and it keeps showing up in my apple tree, picking at my apples and leaving holes.”

“Did you hear me?” she snapped at the other.

“Uh-huh.” But the fat woman was drifting off to sleep.

“You think I could get Fred to poison it? You think that’s legal?”

B. turned to them, encouraged. “Was it a warbler?” she asked. The hairdresser cupped B.’s skull and forced her face back to the mirror to set another curler. B. settled for the old women’s reflection.

“Well, no, it was a thrush, I think,” the thin woman said. She eyed B. “Do you know birds?”

“Well, not much really,” B. said. “I thought warblers were yellow, though.”

“I’m from the city,” she added, as if this explained her error. “But I was thinking of staying here.”

“Most coastal folks can’t take the heat,” the fat woman said flatly.

“People usually driving through here to get somewhere else,” the thin woman said. “They don’t stay.”

“I like the heat,” B. said. “I think the valley is interesting.”

“You one of them hippies? You trying to set up one of them camps or something?”

“Oh no, of course not. I just liked. . I’m just interested in how you live.”

B. waited hopefully for more, but they only stared at her. They resumed a discussion, privately now, murmuring under the whir of the dryers. She watched their lips in the mirror, the deeply cut wrinkles. B.’s own skin pinched from the curlers and pins. A disappointment sank through her. She brushed it off.

“Do you get many young people coming in?” she tried with the hairdresser.

“Same as everywhere,” the woman replied. She did not glance toward B. in the mirror, just pulled at her hair, shoving the final pins in. B. stayed quiet. She watched the hairdresser’s half-red nails flutter like bright frightening insects over her head.

Her mother had become increasingly disturbed lately by shades of nail polish. “I’d rather see the white than nothing at all, I suppose,” she’d explain to B. “But the yellow is horrible. Clown colors, Easter egg colors. Better nude than colors like that.” Her mother had begun calling her often that rainless winter, a creamy haze swallowing the city and her mother phoning almost daily. That January the “human be-in” had happened in the park and her mother seemed obsessed by it.

“The woman with the floppy hat. . she was in The Globe . . She looked so strange, you know. Dirty. I thought I should call you.”

B. had seen the posters around the city — a man with a pyramid and third eye at his forehead, long tangled hair, his face vaguely, eerily African — and she’d seen the pictures in the newspaper, the thousands of bodies standing and dancing and the rock-and-roll bands and flowers and long hair everywhere. B. was disturbed by the be-in too, but all the chatter about it made her more uneasy; as if the more they talked about it, the more portentous it grew. But her mother did not let up.

“Well, she looked ridiculous in that hat. And her hair was the same color as yours, did you realize that?”

“But the photo was black-and-white.”

“No, it was the exact same color, I could tell. So I just wanted to call.”

“I didn’t go. I wasn’t there.”

Her mother pretended not to hear. She moved on to whom B. had seen that week, what she’d done. After that B. began to let the phone ring without answering.

The hairdresser finished the last of the pins and put B. under a dryer next to the now-sleeping women. Close up the thin old woman’s hands were coiled with veins and brown spots like a series of stains. B. reached for a nearby magazine and flipped through it, but her mind drifted to her mother, the white nail polish, the woman in the floppy hat. She turned a page and there was the first lady again, standing in front of a bed of blue flowers in Washington, D.C. B. studied the photograph: red suit and implacable hair, the sea of blue flowers. She felt calmer.

The dryer heat baked into her cells. She must have dozed off because when she woke her scalp was raw and her hair hard and the white-haired women gone.

“How do you want it styled?” the hairdresser asked.

“I’m not really going anywhere.”

The hairdresser looked piqued. “However you think best,” B. tried to add. But the woman started yanking out the curlers in silence. B. tried not to flinch. She felt silly to have come to the valley parlor at all.

Just then a girl came in. She was perhaps twenty, naturally blonde hair falling to her shoulders. B. felt as though she had not seen a person this girl’s age in a beauty parlor in years. She was wearing shorts and a baby-doll halter that showed her midriff. B.’s mood brightened.

“Hiya, Trudy. You have time for me?”

“Sure, Kat. Just let me finish this lady. Up or down today?”

“Down. Most definitely down .”

The girl plopped into the barber chair next to B. She was not exactly pretty, but had the firmness of youth to her skin, a tight and tan body. She wore heavy makeup, thick pancake shining slightly in the heat, pale blue eye shadow with black eyeliner and thick, black mascara, which made her eyes look small and bruised.