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  After exactly twenty-nine minutes, the pierced girl called me back for my shampoo. Only that’s not what she did. She started rubbing on my shoulders and my scalp. She told me it was a massage. I told her I wasn’t paying extra for it, and she stopped.

  I had a bit of a fright when I noticed this woman sitting in the hairdresser man’s chair. He was painting strands of her hair purple and wrapping them in tin foil. The pieces stood up, and she looked like a silver foil dandelion.

  My eyes must have widened because Carolyn whispered, “It’s okay, doll. We won’t let them do that to you.”

  I warned the shampoo girl that I had a tender scalp and was allergic to most everything. She didn’t seem to be paying me much attention. She was singing to the dance music blaring over the loudspeaker.

  Other than that oddly placed earring, she looked familiar. “What’s your name?” I asked.

  She glanced down at her nametag that said ‘Chloe.’ “Huh?”

  “Your last name, what is it?”

  “Johnson.”

  “Johnson,” I repeated as she helped me to an empty chair near the sink to wait my turn for a hairdresser. “I believe my son Eddie went to school with a Johnson. Did your daddy live over yonder near the hub?”

  A white limousine drove up and captured everyone’s attention before the girl could answer.

  “Would you look at that,” Carolyn said, more to herself than me.

  A group of giggling young women came in.

  “Here’s the bride,” Mary Clare said with a trembly smile, then she dropped the hand mirror she was using to check the back of her hair.

  “Seven years bad luck,” I said and shook my head. “She don’t need that considering she lost her mama.”

  “Miss Lucille,” the pierced girl named Chloe said, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait. We’ve got to get the wedding party ready. I was hoping to have you under the dryer before they got here, but they’re early, and they have appointments.”

  She went off to sweep up the mess Mary Clare made.

  Carolyn patted my hand. “It’ll be all right. You have plenty of time, doll.”

  After many hugs, the bride was escorted to the sink next to me. She was right pretty, and I hoped she’d have her hair styled properly. I smiled at her, and she smiled back. Seemed like I’d seen a smile like hers before. Couldn’t think of where, though.

  “Congratulations,” I said. “So this is your big day.”

  “Yes, ma’am. We’re having our reception at Magnolia Manor.”

  Sounded to me like her family was putting on the dog, but if that’s how people wanted to waste their money . . . “Do you know I got married in nineteen and thirty for twenty-five dollars? Marry a sweet man, I always say. I hope your husband’s sweet.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” She smiled again, and a dimple showed in her left cheek, reminding me of someone I’d known in the past.

  That crooked smile and dimple took my mind right back to the schoolhouse. Buford Hamby. “You aren’t by chance related to a Buford Hamby, are you?”

  “He’s my great-grandfather.”

  “I knew it. I knew it. You got a smile just like him. We went to school together. We weren’t sweethearts or nothin’. Truth is, he was sweet on the teacher. Do you know he locked the rest of us out of the schoolhouse one day? He was a bit older than me, but we was all in the same room back in then. He wanted to be alone with our teacher, so’s he could court her.”

  The young bride smiled politely, then craned her neck to see one of her bridesmaids. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I bet you didn’t know that,” I said. “I tell you what, I’m going to give you some of the best advice I know for a good marriage. Are you listening to me, now?”

  The bride nodded. I had her undivided attention.

  “Most men like a good dessert. You bake enough cakes and pies and your husband won’t go to no kitchen but your own.”

  “I’ll remember that,” she said as they eased her back to wash her hair.

  I was a mite worried they’d never get to me before the viewing, plus I was hungry. But I wasn’t about to leave and lose my spot or let Mary Clare get a hold of my hair. One of the bridesmaids had a weepy Mary Clare working on her, and the results were . . . Let’s just say I hadn’t seen hair ratted that high since nineteen hundred and sixty-nine. The bridesmaid, who’d come in giggling, didn’t look none too happy when Mary Clare then sprayed her hair with enough shellac that I coughed sitting twenty feet away.

  I’m sure that’s not what the young bridesmaid wanted but, bless her heart, I guess Mary Clare did it as some sort of tribute to her mama. Pearl would have been proud.

  The hairdresser man noticed my discomfort and offered to do my hair. I took a good look at him. His hair was as long as a woman’s and had bleached streaks in it. He’d either been to the beach recently or he’d gotten one of those fake tans from a can I read about. From what I’d seen, he’d been giving the women in his chair messed up hair all morning, and I wasn’t going to let him update my look.

  “I’ll wait for one of the women to be through,” I said, then leaned over to whisper to Carolyn who was sitting on the other side of me. “If I’d wanted a man to fix my hair, I’d have gone to a barber shop.”

  Carolyn said she’d let him do hers. I think my whispering was too loud, and I embarrassed her.

  A woman in pale yellow sweatpants motioned for me to come over to her chair. Carolyn helped me walk over—in case I got swimmy-headed.

  In the middle of trimming my hair, this lady got a call on her cell phone. She just up and left me sitting in her chair, me with my hair halfway trimmed. I looked at the clock on the wall, and then my wristwatch. I’d already been here two hours.

  “Now, sis,” Carolyn said, “we’ve got plenty of time. I’m sure it was an emergency.”

  The emergency turned out to be some grandchild wanting a happy meal. While I waited, I watched in horror as Mary Clare fouled up another bridesmaid’s hair. Not knowing any better, the girl asked Mary Clare to trim her bangs. Before I could whistle Dixie, the girl was nearly bald. I’d never seen a woman’s hair as short except possibly some of the women patients at the radiation clinic where I went for treatments after my lumpectomy.

  All I wanted to do at this point was leave, but my hair looked worse than when I came in. I couldn’t go to the viewing looking like I did with one side of my head cut. I wasn’t fit to be seen.

  Mary Clare finished with her half of the bridal party and told me she’d take me since the happy meal lady hadn’t returned yet. As a former customer of her mama’s, I was right grateful, because I knew she knew how to roll an old woman’s hair. Yet I was a wee bit scared after seeing the lady before me scalped.

  “I believe in holding up my commitments,” Mary Clare said. “Mama taught me that.”

  She sniffed and lifted her scissors. Before she started snipping off big hanks of my hair, I told her, “That’s okay, Mary Clare. You just take yourself a break. I’m waitin’ on the man.”

  The man hairdresser, who wanted to be called a stylist and who smelled right nice, helped me over to what he called his station. “So I’m the lesser of two evils, Miss Lucille?”

  I ignored his comment and told him how I liked my hair done.

  He trimmed it too short and picked out the wrong-sized rollers.

  I told him as much. “Listen,” I said, “Those aren’t the right rollers. Pearl always used the pink ones.”

  Mary Clare, who’d come back from her break, started crying again.

  The man hairdresser finished rolling my hair with the wrong-sized rollers. But I’ll give him one thing, he was fast.

  Unfortunately, because he didn’t mind me, when I got out from under the dryer, my hair looked like Pearl’s poodle’s coat, and that made M
ary Clare cry all the more. Apparently, Jezebel ran away that morning when they let her out of the house to go tee-tee.

  I’d never been so worn out by something in all my born days—not even walking on a broken hip. And I’d thought going to the mall was bad. My hairdresser man asked me if I wanted to schedule another appointment in six weeks.

  “And just what in the H—E—double—L do you think you can do to it then? I won’t have any hair left.”

  He laughed and handed me his business card anyway.

  I decided maybe he wasn’t so bad, but the whole day had me in such a state that I forgot to give him his dollar tip.

  MARY CLARE’S latest man friend was holding her up at the viewing. Geneva told me his name was Emory, like the university, and that he worked for the post office over in Monroe. He made a good living; maybe he was just what Mary Clare needed to finally settle down.

  I hoped she’d been paying attention to my advice to that young bride about making dessert. Cakes and pies definitely were the shortest path to a man’s heart. Maybe even a hairdresser’s if that man was a stylist.

  I pondered for a minute and looked at all the old women around me. Most were wearing black hats. Mrs. Duval, whose hair had always been a lovely shade of blue when Pearl gave it a rinse, was now an unnatural lavender purple color. The hair on the back of Geneva’s head was as flat as a pancake.

  All in all, I decided that my stylist at the strip mall wasn’t so bad. He was fast, too. You had to respect a man who could roll hair faster than a woman.

  I went up to the casket and looked at how nicely Mr. Bowden had Pearl laid out. Her hair was absolutely beautiful, that shade of honey blonde she liked—she’d been pretending she was a true blonde since nineteen hundred and seventy-two when she graduated from beauty school. You couldn’t even tell there was a chunk missing from her bangs. I wondered if whoever they’d found to do her hair had used one of those weaves I’d read about.

  I made my way over to Mary Clare and patted her hand. “Your mama looks just beautiful.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “Ronnie did a great job.”

  “Ronnie who?” I said.

  “Ronnie McKibbens.”

  I moved along and made my condolences to Mary Clare’s brother Ernest, then pulled the business card out of my handbag and read the name. Ronnie McKibbens.

  Sure enough, the hairdresser man who did my hair did Pearl’s hair, too.

  I wondered if he was related to the McKibbens who lived over in the next county. I bet not one of Ronnie’s customers made him homemade pies or cakes or even banana pudding. The only customers I’d seen were under thirty, and young women today don’t know much about cooking. I could probably train him to do my hair the way I liked. I could definitely win his heart with my award-winning fried pies. And with him being so young, I surely wouldn’t outlive him and have to go through this whole mess again.

  Like I said earlier, change is difficult. But you have to be open to change—even if you don’t like it and especially when it involves hairdressers. Anyone who tells you different, doesn’t know what in the H—E—double—L he’s talking about.

  The Fan Dancer

  by

  Bert Goolsby

  “My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.”

  —Mark Twain

  WHEN GOD calls me home, I imagine it will be somewhat akin to the time the principal summoned me to his office. The call will come without warning and it will scare the pure and tee devil out of me—which is not a bad thing when you think about it.

  Anyway, one Friday afternoon, while I sat in Miss Lillian Snipe’s twelfth-grade government class bored slap out of my mind, an announcement came over the classroom loudspeaker. A feminine voice stated that Mr. Goodhart wanted to see me in his office immediately. Mr. Goodhart served as the high school principal—a nice man, but a person to avoid, especially in his office.

  Everyone in class turned and looked toward me, a question registered on each one’s face. Like them, I didn’t know what I had done or, more accurately, been caught doing.

  Miss Snipe scowled at me as I got up from my back-row desk and slipped up the aisle toward the door, past whispering, snickering classmates. When I passed the desk of Rheay Walling, a school-bus riding, country boy whose pimples themselves had pimples, he smirked and whispered loud enough for me to hear, “Now, ye goan git it.”

  On my way to Mr. Goodhart’s office, I inventoried all the things I had done recently that might be considered a violation of school rules. Yes, I had smoked; but only outside behind the auditorium, a designated smoking area. I had not been late to any classes, and I had no unexcused absences. Yes, I had kissed a girlfriend in the stairwell before classes started that morning; but we both made sure no one could see us before we did it. Just as I reached the office door, a certain event came immediately to mind—an event that had taken place during the lunch break merely an hour before. Surely, that could not be it, I thought, trying to persuade myself.

  Mr. Goodhart’s secretary, a serious, no-nonsense woman not much older than I, glanced up as soon as I opened the door to the principal’s outer office. Without uttering a single word, she directed me toward a vacant chair next to the wall. She didn’t even ask my name. I viewed this as a bad sign, a very, very bad sign indeed.

  Ten minutes or more passed before I heard Mr. Goodhart call his secretary on the intercom and ask if I had gotten there yet. When she told him I had, he instructed her to tell me to come on in. She did it without smiling or speaking. She simply looked at me and nodded at the intercom on her desk. I got the impression she did not converse with the doomed.

  I slowly opened the door to his office and peeped in, all the while wondering how I was going to tell my mother about whatever it was I was going to have to tell her about. “Mr. . . . Mr. Goodhart,” I stammered. “You wanted to see me, sir?”

  Mr. Goodhart, a handsome man with a face and demeanor to match his name, did not answer me right away. I stood in front of his desk, waiting and listening to my heart pound. Finally, Mr. Goodhart looked up. “Young man, I just got a phone call.”

  I swallowed. “You did?” I managed to say, my voice trembling, my knees starting to knock.

  “Man from City Stadium.”

  “City Stadium?” I asked, thinking about the men’s restroom and the new graffiti on its recently painted walls. While I had not written anything on them, I knew who did. Oh, Lord, I thought.

  “Well, he’s out at the stadium. He’s with the carnival that’s setting up out there. The one’s that bringing Sally Rand to town. Their drummer’s taken ill, and they’ve got him over at the hospital. They need somebody to fill in for him tonight. Someone told them about you—that you played the drums. Think you might wanna do it?” For the first time, Mr. Goodhart smiled at me.

  I smiled too, only more broadly. “Would I!?” I replied, almost shouting, so relieved was I to hear that I was not there to undergo punishment.

  “He said to tell you they’d pay you . . . I think he said thirty dollars and that’d include a rehearsal at four o’clock this afternoon and the shows you’d be playing for this evening.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears! I was going to be playing for Sally Rand, the great fan dancer! And I was going to have better than a front-row seat. I imagined myself on the stage, beating my drums and cymbals while she danced and teased, all right there in front of me, just a few feet away. And she would be naked! Naked as a jay bird! Man, oh man! I thought.

  I was quite certain I would achieve a status among my peers accorded only to high-school quarterbacks. I would be the envy of every wicked-minded, lust-filled male in high school—which meant every boy there. Well, maybe not the preacher boys.

  Mr. Goodhart wrote a note excusing me from class the rest of the day so I could be on time for rehearsal.
I rushed back to Miss Snipe’s room. While she read Mr. Goodhart’s note, I hurried to gather up my books and, whispering, informed the inquisitive around my desk of the startling good news. They appeared dazed and amazed. Before rushing home, I retrieved the note from Miss Snipe, who sat slack-jawed in her chair, patting her flat chest.

  THE INSTANT the front door slammed shut Mama yelled from the back of the house, demanding to know who was there. “It’s just me, Mama,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Are you sick or something?” She sounded worried.

  I went to the back bedroom, a room my brother and I shared. I found Mama, ironing clothes and listening to gospel music on the radio. The room smelled of starch and hot cotton. “No, ma’am,” I said, throwing my books onto my bed, “I’m okay.”

  Mama, her face drawn and tired, set the iron down and wiped away with the back of her hand the sweat that glistened on her forehead. She angled her head sideways, not smiling. “Then, how come you home? You in some kinda trouble?”

  “Nome. Not anything like that. They let me out early so I can go practice,” I mumbled.

  All of a sudden, I began to see a problem developing on the horizon, a problem neither Mr. Goodhart nor I had anticipated. A problem I think Miss Snipe, a friend of my mama, must have seen right off. I picked my drumsticks up from a shelf, dropped them into my pants pocket, and turned to go.

  Mama reached and turned off the radio right in the middle of “Turn Your Radio On.” “Practice?” she said. “What kinda practice?”

  “Band practice.”

  “Band practice? This isn’t football season. And the band’s had its spring concert already.” I felt Mama’s eyes peeling away, layer by layer, my defenses.

  “It’s the Sally Rand Band,” I muttered. “Out at the stadium.”

  Mama flinched like she had seen a haint. “Sally Rand Band? You mean the one that plays for that stripper?”

  I attempted to put a better face on things. “I don’t think she’s a stripper, Mama. I think she’s justa fa . . . a . . . a dancer.” I left out the word “fan” on purpose.