The Back Bedroom
On the first Monday in November, I found Grandma Lorraine in Darla’s back bedroom with the door shut.
It was a little after four in the afternoon. I’d driven out to drop off a bag of the cinnamon bread Grandma likes from the bakery next to my shop. Darla’s car was in the driveway, but nobody answered when I knocked, so I let myself in through the kitchen like I’ve done a hundred times.
The house was quiet except for the television in the living room. A game show. Nobody watching it.
I walked down the hall and tapped on the back bedroom door.
“Grandma? It’s me.”
There was a long pause.
“Don’t come in,” she said.
I opened the door anyway. Just a crack.
She was sitting in the old green recliner by the window, the one Darla had hauled up from the basement when Grandma moved in. Her legs were covered with an afghan. Her left wrist was still in a soft brace from July.
And she was holding one hand flat on top of her head.
Pressing down. Like she was trying to hold her hair in place in a strong wind.
“Don’t look at me, Nicole,” she said.
She hadn’t called me Nicole since my wedding.
Seven years ago, at the reception in the Legion hall, she’d hugged me in the receiving line and said, Welcome to the family, Nicky. She’d called me Nicky ever since. Nicky this. Nicky, come here. Nicky, you’re putting too much product in that child’s hair.
Not Nicole. Never Nicole.
Nicole is what you call somebody you want to keep at arm’s length.
“Grandma,” I said. “What’s wrong?”
She turned her face toward the window.
“Nothing’s wrong,” she said. “I’m tired. Go on home.”
I came all the way into the room. I pulled the little wooden desk chair over and sat down in front of her.
That’s when I saw it.
Her hair.
Grandma Lorraine’s hair is white. Pure white, soft as dandelion fluff. For sixty years, she set it in pin curls every Saturday night and brushed them out on Sunday morning before church. Short and soft and perfectly round, like a cloud sitting on top of her head.
It wasn’t a cloud anymore.
It was flat. Matted. Greasy at the roots and tangled at the ends. There was a knot behind her left ear the size of a walnut. Her scalp was red and flaking around her part line, where she’d been scratching.
I didn’t say anything.
Thirteen years doing hair teaches you one thing above all others. You don’t say anything about a person’s hair until they ask you to.
But my throat closed up.
Because I knew what I was looking at. I’d seen it before, on women at the nursing home in town where I do volunteer hair every other Tuesday.
It’s what hair looks like when nobody’s washed it in a very long time.
Part Two: Lorraine
I need to tell you about Grandma Lorraine.
She’s ninety-one. She’s my husband Joel’s grandmother on his father’s side. She was born in a farmhouse outside Viroqua, Wisconsin, in 1934, and she’s lived within ten miles of that farmhouse her whole life.
She married Joel’s grandfather, Walter, in 1953. They had two sons. One of them is Joel’s dad, Ron.
But that’s not the most important thing about her.
The most important thing about Grandma Lorraine is that for forty years, she ran Lorraine’s Beauty Nook on Main Street in Viroqua.
It was a two-chair shop in a narrow brick building between the hardware store and the bank. Pink walls. Black-and-white checkered floor. Two big hooded hair dryers that looked like spaceships. A wall of mirrors with her license framed in the corner. Lorraine Pederson, Licensed Cosmetologist, State of Wisconsin, 1956.
Every woman in Viroqua went to Lorraine. Brides and widows and girls getting ready for prom. Farm wives who came in once a month for a wash and set and stayed two hours to gossip.
She closed it in 1998, when Walter got sick.
I bought that building in 2016.
I was twenty-two. Fresh out of cosmetology school in La Crosse. I’d grown up in Viroqua and always wanted my own shop. The building had been empty for eighteen years. The pink walls had faded to the color of an old eraser.
I didn’t know it had been Lorraine’s.
On my first day, before I even had my sign up, an old woman walked in.
White hair set in perfect pin curls. A lavender cardigan. A purse hanging from her elbow.
She stood in the doorway and looked around for a long time. At the empty space where the hooded dryers used to be. At the checkered floor I’d decided to keep.
“I set hair in this room for forty years,” she said.
That was Lorraine.
She sat in my chair that afternoon and let me wash and set her hair. She watched every move I made in the mirror. She corrected me six times.
“Too much tension on that roll,” she said. “You’ll give me a headache.”
“Pin it flat. Not crossways. It’ll leave a dent.”
“Honey, you’re using too much setting lotion. You’re not glazing a ham.”
When I was done, she looked at herself in the mirror for a long time.
Then she nodded once.
“You’ll do,” she said.
She paid me twelve dollars and tipped me five. Then she said, “I’ll be back next Saturday. Two o’clock. Don’t be late.”
She came every Saturday for three years.
She taught me everything they don’t teach you in beauty school. How to set a pin curl that lasts a week. How to tell a woman her husband’s having an affair without saying a word. How to keep your hand cupped against a client’s forehead at the sink so not one drop runs into her eyes.
“That’s the whole job, Nicky,” she told me once. “Making somebody feel safe with their eyes closed.”
In the third year, she brought her grandson to the shop.
He needed a haircut. He was home from his job in Madison for Thanksgiving. Tall, quiet, with a farmer’s tan and nervous hands.
Lorraine sat in the waiting chair and watched me cut his hair. When I was done, she said, “Joel, ask her to dinner.”
He did.
We were married two years later.
Part Three: July
In July, Grandma fell.
She was living alone in her little house on Jefferson Street, the same house she and Walter bought in 1961. She’d been fine. Fiercely independent. Driving herself to church and the grocery store in her 1997 Buick, which she called the Duchess.
She was hanging wash on the clothesline in her backyard. She stepped wrong off the back stoop. She put her hand out to catch herself.
She broke her left wrist in two places.
She was in the hospital in La Crosse for four days. Then a rehab facility for three weeks.
When she came out, the doctors said she couldn’t live alone anymore. Not for a while. Maybe not ever. Her wrist wasn’t healing right. Her balance was worse. She needed someone in the house.
Joel and I offered to take her. We have a spare room.
But we live in an upstairs apartment above my shop on Main Street. Steep stairs. No railing on one side. The doctor said absolutely not.
So Darla took her in.
Darla is Joel’s mother. Ron’s wife. She’s sixty-two. She works part-time as a cashier at the Kwik Trip on Highway 14, and she keeps a neat, small ranch house on the edge of town with a big garden and a dog named Biscuit.
She and Lorraine have never gotten along.
I don’t know all of it. Joel doesn’t know all of it either. Some things happened before he was born, and nobody talks about them.
But I know that for forty years, Lorraine made it clear she thought Ron could have done better. She criticized Darla’s cooking. Darla’s housekeeping. Darla’s hair, which Lorraine said looked like a haystack in a windstorm.
She did it at Thanksgiving dinner. At Christmas. At Joel’s high school graduation.
Darla took it. For forty years. Smiling with her teeth clenched.
And now Lorraine lived in her back bedroom.
Part Four: The Payee
In August, Darla became Grandma’s representative payee at the Social Security office in La Crosse.
That means she manages Grandma’s Social Security check. It goes into an account in Darla’s name, for Grandma’s benefit. Darla pays Grandma’s bills. Buys her groceries. Covers her expenses.
It’s legal. It’s common. Families do it all the time when an older person can’t manage their own money anymore.
Grandma’s Social Security is sixteen hundred and forty dollars a month.
Of that, Darla keeps twelve hundred.
For room and board. For her keep, Darla calls it.
Grandma gets the other four hundred and forty for her medications and her phone and her church offering envelope.
I didn’t know that until October.
Grandma told me. On the phone. Almost by accident.
“Darla keeps twelve hundred,” she said. “For my keep. I don’t mind. It’s her house.”
I checked.
I spent an evening on the Social Security website, reading the rules for representative payees. A payee is allowed to charge room and board. They’re allowed to use the money for the person’s food and shelter and care. It has to be reasonable. It has to be for the person’s benefit.
Twelve hundred dollars a month for a room, three meals, utilities, and someone to keep an eye on you?
In Viroqua, Wisconsin, that’s not unreasonable. It might even be fair.
Grandma was fed. She was safe. She had a warm bed and her medications and a roof over her head.
A skipped shampoo is not a call to the sheriff. It’s not something you report to Adult Protective Services.
It was our family’s shame to fix.