Part Five: What Grandma Said
Back in the bedroom, I sat in the little desk chair and didn’t say anything for a long time.
Finally, Grandma took her hand off her head. She folded both hands in her lap. She looked at them.
“My scalp itches,” she said quietly. “It’s itched for weeks.”
“When did you last wash it?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
“Grandma.”
“I can’t lift my arm high enough,” she said. “Not since the wrist. I tried in the shower. In September. I couldn’t get my hands up to my head.”
She looked at the brace on her left wrist.
“And I can’t bend over the sink,” she said. “I get dizzy. I almost fell.”
“Did you ask Darla to help?”
Grandma’s mouth went tight.
“I’m not asking that woman to wash my hair,” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
“She’d do it rough,” Grandma said. “She’d get soap in my eyes. She’d yank the comb. She’d stand there and sigh the whole time.”
She looked out the window.
“And she’d know,” she said quietly. “She’d know I couldn’t do it myself.”
That was it.
That was the real thing.
Not the soap. Not the comb. Not the sighing.
Lorraine Pederson, who’d washed and set the hair of every woman in Viroqua for forty years, could not stand to have her daughter-in-law see her helpless.
“Grandma,” I said. “How are you getting to church?”
She didn’t answer.
“Grandma.”
“I quit going,” she said. “In September.”
Grandma Lorraine has gone to Viroqua Lutheran Church every Sunday since 1941. She was confirmed there. Married there. Buried her husband from there. She sits in the fourth pew on the left side, the one with the brass plaque that says In Memory of Walter Pederson.
“I told Pastor Dahl’s wife I had a cold,” she said. “Every week. Seven weeks.”
She looked at me.
“I can’t go to church looking like this, Nicky,” she said. “I’d rather die.”
She’d called me Nicky again.
I don’t think she noticed.
Part Six: The Kitchen
I left Grandma in her recliner and walked down the hall to the kitchen.
Darla was standing at the stove, stirring a pot of chili. She was wearing her blue Kwik Trip polo shirt and jeans. Her own hair, gray-blonde and frizzy, was pulled back in a scrunchie.
She looked tired. More tired than I’d ever seen her.
“Oh,” she said when she saw me. “Nicole. I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I brought cinnamon bread,” I said. I set the bag on the counter.
“That was nice of you.”
She went back to stirring.
I stood there for a long moment.
“Darla,” I said carefully. “When was Grandma’s hair last washed?”
Darla’s spoon stopped moving.
She didn’t turn around.
“August, maybe,” she said. “Early August. Right after she got here.”
She went back to stirring.
“She fights me on it,” Darla said. “Every time I bring it up. She says she’ll do it herself. She won’t let me near her head.”
She tapped the spoon on the edge of the pot. Hard.
“And I’m not her maid,” she said.
I didn’t answer her.
I wanted to. I had a whole speech ready. About August being three months ago. About Grandma’s scalp being red and raw. About a woman who hadn’t missed church in eighty-four years sitting alone in a back bedroom on Sunday mornings because she was ashamed of her hair.
I didn’t say any of it.
Because I was looking at the kitchen.
At the pill organizer on the counter, the big kind with seven days and four slots per day, every slot filled. At the calendar on the refrigerator, with doctor’s appointments written in Darla’s handwriting. Orthopedic. Cardiology. Physical therapy, twice a week.
At the stack of laundry on the kitchen chair. Grandma’s nightgowns, washed and folded.
At the case of Ensure on the floor by the pantry.
At the dark circles under Darla’s eyes.
I picked up my purse.
“I’ll see you, Darla,” I said.
She didn’t turn around.
Part Seven: Joel
That night, I told Joel.
We were sitting at our kitchen table in the apartment above the shop. I’d made spaghetti. Neither of us was eating much.
When I finished, Joel set down his fork.
“August,” he said.
“That’s what she said.”
“Three months.”
“Almost.”
He pushed back from the table.
“I’m calling her,” he said. “Right now.”
He picked up his phone.
“Joel, wait,” I said.
“Nicky, she’s keeping twelve hundred dollars a month of Grandma’s money, and she can’t wash her hair once?”
“I know,” I said. “I know. But listen to me.”
He stopped.
“If you call her tonight,” I said, “she’s going to get defensive. She’s going to yell. You’re going to yell. Then she’s going to call your dad in Nebraska and cry, and he’s going to call you and yell, and nothing’s going to change except everybody’s going to be mad at everybody.”
Joel’s dad, Ron, drives a semi for a trucking company out of Tomah. He hauls paper rolls from the mill in Port Edwards to printing plants all over the Midwest. He’d been gone seventeen days on this run. Somewhere around Lincoln, Nebraska, by now.
He calls Darla every night at nine. He’s home maybe four days a month.
“And Grandma’s hair still won’t be washed,” I said.
Joel looked at me for a long moment.
“So what do you want to do?” he asked.
“Let me go first,” I said. “Saturday.”
“Go do what?”
“What I know how to do,” I said.
Part Eight: The Phone Call
The next evening, I called Grandma.
I waited until seven o’clock, when I knew Darla would be at the Kwik Trip for her evening shift.
Grandma answered on the fifth ring. Her voice was thin.
“Hello?”
“Grandma, it’s Nicky.”
“Oh,” she said. “Hello, Nicky.”
“Grandma,” I said. “I’d like to book an appointment.”
There was a pause.
“An appointment for what?”
“For you,” I said. “A wash and set. Saturday. At Darla’s house. I’ll bring my things.”
The line was quiet for a long time.
“I’m not a charity case,” Grandma said finally. Her voice was sharp. The old voice. The Beauty Nook voice.
“No, ma’am,” I said. “You’re my two o’clock.”
A long quiet on the line.
I could hear the game show playing in the background. I could hear her breathing.
I could hear her thinking.
For sixty years, Lorraine Pederson had a two o’clock appointment every Saturday. First in her own chair, setting her own hair. Then in my chair, for three years, before her eyes got too bad to drive to Main Street.
Two o’clock on Saturday was the most sacred hour of her week. More sacred, I think, than Sunday morning.
“Bring the good setting lotion,” she said finally. “Not that cheap stuff from the drugstore.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And a real towel,” she said. “Not one of those paper capes.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
There was another pause.
“Two o’clock,” she said. “Don’t be late.”
She hung up.
I sat at my kitchen table with the phone in my hand.
And I cried.
Part Nine: Saturday
On Saturday, I packed my kit.
Not my everyday kit. My good kit. The one I take to weddings and funerals.
Two bottles of gentle shampoo, the kind for sensitive scalps. A bottle of conditioner. The good setting lotion, the kind Grandma taught me to use, in the brown glass bottle with the old-fashioned label. A wide-tooth comb. A fine-tooth comb. A rattail comb for parting.
A box of steel pin curl clips. Two hundred of them. The double-prong kind she liked.
A handheld dryer with a diffuser. A round bristle brush. A can of hairspray.
My black vinyl shampoo cape.
And three white bath towels. Thick. Soft. Brand new. I’d bought them at the Farm & Fleet in La Crosse on Wednesday.
I drove out to Darla’s at one-thirty.
It was a gray November day, cold and still. The maple trees in her front yard had dropped all their leaves. Biscuit the dog was barking at the mailbox.
I carried my kit up the front steps. I knocked.
Darla met me at the door in a red sweatshirt.
She looked at me. She looked at my kit. At the towels over my arm. At the folding chair I’d brought from the shop.
“What is all this?” she said.
“Grandma’s appointment,” I said.
Darla stared at me.
“Her appointment,” she repeated.
“Two o’clock,” I said. “She booked it Tuesday.”
Darla didn’t move out of the doorway for a long moment.
Then she stepped aside.
She didn’t say anything. She just walked into the kitchen and stood by the refrigerator with her arms crossed.
Part Ten: The Lavender Cardigan
At one fifty-five, Grandma came down the hall.
She was using her walker. The one with the tennis balls on the feet. She was moving slowly, carefully, the way she does now.
She was wearing her lavender cardigan.
That cardigan is fifty years old. Walter bought it for her at a department store in La Crosse in 1975, for their twenty-second anniversary. It’s pilled at the elbows. One of the pearl buttons has been replaced with a plain white one.
She wore it every Saturday to the Beauty Nook. And every Saturday to my shop.
She’d put it on for her appointment.
She’d put on lipstick too. Pink. A little crooked, because she couldn’t hold the tube steady with her bad wrist.
And she’d tied a silk scarf over her head. Navy blue with little white flowers. Knotted under her chin. Hiding her hair.
She stopped at the edge of the kitchen. She looked at me.
“You’re early,” she said.
“Five minutes,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Early is on time.”
I dropped my black cape on the counter.
Grandma looked at it. She frowned.
“Not that,” she said. “A towel.”
“The cape keeps your cardigan dry,” I said.
“I don’t care about my cardigan,” Grandma said. “I want a towel. Around my shoulders. The way my mother did it.”
Her mother, Ingrid, used to wash Lorraine’s hair in the kitchen of their farmhouse when she was a little girl. In a big enamel basin. With water heated on the wood stove and a white flour sack towel around her shoulders.
Grandma told me that story once, on a Saturday in my shop, while she was under the dryer. She said it was the reason she became a beautician.
“My mother’s hands,” she said. “In my hair. In the kitchen. I never felt so safe in my life.”
I put the cape away.
I took out one of the new white towels. I unfolded it. I tucked it around Grandma’s shoulders, over her lavender cardigan. Snug around her neck, the way she taught me. Not too tight. Just enough so it wouldn’t slip.
She nodded.
“That’s right,” she said.
Part Eleven: The Sink
Darla’s kitchen sink is a double steel sink under a window that looks out over her vegetable garden. The garden was done for the year. Brown tomato cages. A row of dead cornstalks.
I unfolded my folding chair. I backed it up to the sink. I adjusted the height so the back of the chair would tilt just right.
I put a rolled-up hand towel on the edge of the sink, for her neck.
Darla stood in the doorway to the living room.
She had her arms crossed. She didn’t say anything. She just watched.
“Grandma,” I said. “Can you sit?”
She let go of her walker. I took her good arm. I helped her lower herself into the folding chair.
She sat very straight. Her hands folded in her lap.
Then she reached up with her right hand, the good one, and untied the silk scarf under her chin.
She held it for a moment.
Then she pulled it off.
I didn’t look at Darla. I didn’t look at anything but Grandma’s hair.
Flat and matted. Greasy at the roots. The walnut-sized knot behind her left ear. Her scalp red and flaking.
Grandma closed her eyes.
“Well,” she said quietly. “Go on. Get it over with.”
I helped her lean back. Slowly. One inch at a time. Until her neck rested on the rolled-up towel at the edge of the sink.
Her eyes were still closed. Her hands were gripping the arms of the folding chair.
I turned on the faucet.
I tested the water on my wrist. Too hot. I adjusted it. Tested again. Too cool. Adjusted it again.
Warm. Like a bath. Like the water her mother heated on the wood stove.
I cupped my left hand at her forehead. Right along her hairline. So nothing would run in her eyes.
The way she taught me.
That’s the whole job, Nicky. Making somebody feel safe with their eyes closed.
Then I let the first warm water touch her head.
Grandma’s whole body went still.
Her hands let go of the arms of the chair.
Her shoulders dropped.
She let out a breath I think she’d been holding for three months.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, honey.”
I had to look at the faucet for a minute.
Part Twelve: Two Shampoos
I washed her hair twice.
The first shampoo didn’t lather at all. Three months of oil and dead skin and the residue of old hairspray. It just slid off her hair like water off a duck.
I rinsed. I worked the shampoo into her scalp with my fingertips. Slow circles. Gentle. Around the red patches where she’d been scratching. Behind her ears. At the nape of her neck.
She kept her eyes closed.
The second shampoo lathered.
White foam, soft and thick, all through her hair. I massaged her scalp for five full minutes. I could feel her relax under my hands. Her jaw unclenching. Her breathing slowing down.
At one point, I thought she’d fallen asleep.
Then I rinsed. Slowly. Thoroughly. Every bit of soap. One hand cupped at her forehead the whole time.
Not one drop ran into her eyes.
Then the conditioner.
Then the knot.
The knot behind her left ear took forty minutes.
I worked it with my fingers first, then the wide-tooth comb, then the rattail comb. One strand at a time. Holding the hair above the knot so the comb wouldn’t pull at her scalp.
Grandma sat with her eyes closed, her neck on the towel, her hands in her lap.
“It pulls,” she said once.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll go slower.”
“No,” she said. “It pulls the way it ought to pull.”
She opened her eyes and looked up at me. Upside down, from the sink.
“The way it does when somebody’s taking care of it,” she said.