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.
“Is that what you wanted, honey?” Doreen asked, firing up another cigarette.
“Yeah, it’s perfect.”
“Now I don’t know if Sheila and Tracee told you or not, but I am a licensed Mary Kay consultant, so if you wanted some more makeup to complete your new look —”
“Sure. Why not?” Lily looked at Doreen’s horrifying Kabuki mask of cosmetics. “But let’s keep it light and natural, okay?”
“Sure, hon.”
Lily’s “light and natural” makeover took thirty-five minutes. Sheila and Tracee returned from their lunch break and watched Lily’s transformation, oohing and ahhing as if they were watching the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel being painted.
When Lily saw herself in the mirror, her newly painted mouth formed an “O” of surprise, making her look not unlike one of those blond, blow-up sex-toy dolls. She would almost have preferred to be wearing Doreen’s Kabuki mask — at least it had a spooky, avant-garde quality. As it was, her cheeks were dusted with peachy blush, her lips painted with equally peachy lipstick, her lashes brushed with mascara to give her a wide-eyed, Mary Pickford appearance. She looked—she shuddered at the word —
wholesome.
“Doreen, you are a miracle worker!” Sheila squealed. “Come on, Lily, let’s go buy you some new dresses!”
A better name for the La-Di-Da Dress Shop might be Designed-to-Be-Dowdy, Lily thought, as she scanned through the racks. All the dresses were in the prim shirtwaist style preferred by Sunday school teachers and small-town librarians. Finally, deciding all the garments were equally vile, Lily closed her eyes and pulled two dresses off the “size eight” rack at random.