Julia Watts - Wedding Bell Blues

The hearing was two weeks from today, and yesterday she, Ben, and Buzz Dobson had sat down to plan their strategy. Buzz, once again, had turned his meager thoughts to the subject of Lily’s

“I was thinking, Lily,” he’d said, biting into a sloppy hamburger that squirted ketchup all over his shirt. “It’d probably be a good idea to go ahead and pay some attention to your appearance. Get a nice hairdo, buy yourself two or three pretty dresses, go around for a couple weeks before the trial looking...looking—”

“Normal?” Lily had offered helpfully.

“Well, I wasn’t gonna put it that way, but yeah. You know, just let people see you out with Mimi at the playground, at church maybe, looking the way people around here expect a young mother to look.”

So yesterday afternoon Lily had grudgingly called Sheila and asked what beauty shop she and Tracee would recommend. If any women embodied “the way people around here expect a young mother to look,” they were Sheila and Tracee.

Sheila had been hysterical with joy at Lily’s call, sure, Lily thought, that the Faulkner County chapter of the Stepford Wives had just recruited a new member. “Ooh, me and Tracee already have an appointment over at the Chatterbox for tomorrow at eleven-thirty,” she’d squealed. “I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if you tagged along. Oh, it’ll be so much fun! We can get our hair done and get facials, and you can even get a Mary Kay makeover if you want. Me and Tracee won’t, though, ’cause we don’t need a makeover. And I heard they got some new dresses over at the La-Di-Da. Maybe we could walk over there after we get our hair fixed, and spend some of the McGilly boys’ money.”

And so here Lily sat, swilling beer in the morning, waiting for Sheila and Tracee to come get her.

If Ben hadn’t already taken Mimi to Jeanie’s, she’d be tempted to grab her daughter and flee, before the peroxided pod people could turn her into one of them. She disposed of the empty beer bottle and went to the bathroom to brush her teeth. Just as she was spitting, she heard the horn of Sheila’s Lexus.

Lily had hoped that the stylist at the Chatterbox would be a gay man—a Faulkner County queen who, out of allegiance to his family, had chosen to live and work in Versailles. Lily had no such luck.

Instead, the Chatterbox was run by a creature who called itself Doreen and who worked with the theory that one could make more money in the beauty industry by undermining the self-esteem of one’s customers.

When Sheila and Tracee presented Lily to Doreen, she shook her head and mumbled, “My, my, my. Look what the cat drug in.”

Not that Doreen looked that hot herself. Her straw-textured hair was dyed neon orange, and her eyelids were shadowed with bright turquoise. But the most fascinating thing about Doreen was her eyebrows— or her simulated eyebrows.

The old lady (how old was impossible to tell beneath the layers of pancake makeup) had plucked or shaved her naturally occurring brows and painted on violent black slashes that began at the bridge of her nose and ended up at her hairline above her temples. If this was the woman who was in charge of her makeover, Lily thought she was more likely to end up looking like an extra from Star Trek than an ordinary wife and mother.

Doreen turned Sheila and Tracee over to her assistant for their trims and root touch-ups. She looked at Lily, stubbed out her cigarette, and said to no one in particular, “Well, I reckon I’ll have to roll up my sleeves to deal with this one.” When she finally addressed Lily directly, she ordered, “Sit down, honey. And get comfortable. This is gonna take a while.”

Lily tried to sit still while Doreen yanked on her hair. “Never seen so many rat nests in my life,” Doreen muttered, her cigarette clenched between her teeth. Lily was fairly sure she felt a few ashes drop on her head.

She knew her hair was a mess. She hadn’t done anything to it except wash it since Charlotte died, and her once-funky white-girl braids had turned into mats and tangles. Doreen pulled and combed so hard that Lily was sure her hair was being torn out by its roots. Tattoos and body piercings were painless compared to this torture.

“Well, I reckon I got it combed out enough to wash it anyway,” Doreen said finally. When Lily turned her head to look in the mirror, she was greeted by the image of Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein.

“Lord, girl, don’t look at it yet. We ain’t even halfway there. It’s a good thing I eat my Wheaties this mornin’.” She tucked a towel into the collar of Lily’s plastic smock. “Lean back in the chair now.”

After Doreen scrubbed Lily’s scalp as though it needed de-lousing, Lily sat up again. Doreen fluffed her hair with her red talons. “We’re gonna hafta take a lotta this length off,” she muttered. “You got split ends on top of your split ends.” Doreen’s scissors began snip-snip-snipping in a seemingly random pattern, and Lily sucked in her breath as large hunks of hair fell onto her smock and the floor.

“How’s it going?” Sheila asked brightly. She and Tracee stood together, their coiffures trimmed and touched up.

Doreen looked Lily over and frowned. “It’ll be another hour at least.”

“Hmm,” Tracee said, “Well, I guess we’ll go grab some lunch at the Bucket. We’ll be back directly.”

Doreen snipped until Lily figured she’d run out of hair, then mixed up a plastic bottle of some vile-smelling chemical solution and squeezed it on Lily’s hair. Lily’s eyes teared, and her nose ran. She had always drawn the body-piercing line at below-the-belt piercings, but right now a labia piercing seemed a comparative piece of cake.

“All right, back in the sink,” Doreen barked like a cosmetology drill sergeant. Lily pondered the analogy as Doreen rinsed the chemicals from her hair. Just like a drill sergeant, Doreen was stamping out Lily’s rebelliousness and taking away her individuality to make her an acceptable member of a team.

Hair—its color, length, and style — was always tied to individuality. After all, what was the first thing the army did to new male recruits? They gave them identical haircuts.

Lily reflected on the symbolic significance of hair as her own shortened tresses were blown dry, hot rolled, brushed, sprayed, and spritzed. When Doreen finally turned the chair to face the mirror, Lily gasped. Doreen bared her yellowed teeth in a grin, mistaking her client’s shock for delight.

Lily’s new short hair was not the carefree crop of a dyke. Her ashy tresses had been highlighted a sunny blonde and were now pouffed on top of her head, coming down in perfectly arranged petals around her face. It was a soccer mom’s haircut—short, sassy, and sprayed so stiff that neither rain nor sleet nor storm nor hail could budge it.

Lily patted her stiff bubble of hair. With a do like this, she could be perkily reporting the six o’clock news. It was the perfect style for the image she needed to project, but looking at it still made her want to cry.