ECLECTIC WRITER: May 2002

Vanity’s Fare

Story and Drawing

Füsun Atalay ~ Copyright © 2000

My best friend Wendie and I hate rain and humidity for exactly the opposite reasons. At the slightest bit of dampness in the air her hair frizzes ; whereas mine loses its long laboured curls and hangs limp. Of course there’s the gray skies and the gloomy feelings a rainy day brings, but, in comparison to the imminent threat on my self image, they simply pale.

"Oh, you’re so lucky!" Wendie keeps whining. "You have such beautiful, straight, thick hair! Look at mine- I’m born with the electrocuted look!"

I keep telling her it’s not much fun to have straight hair. Leaving it natural makes my face appear longer and my jaw line more squared. I like the big, bouncy curls which give a softer uplift to my appearance. But to obtain such curls, I have to wet strands of hair at night and confine them in spiky plastic curlers with pink snap-on caps.

The worst part is sleeping with those curlers. I have the type of hair that takes along time to conform. It would rather hang free and loose. Some friends ask where I get it straightened so nicely although I keep explaining that’s my natural hair. They look at me strangely when I tell them of the pains I take, feeling doomed to sleep in discomfort for the rest of my life just to have curls!

I must admit that I do not envy Wendie in the least for her naturally frizzy hair. She spends close to an hour every morning in front of the mirror, hair dryer in one hand and a wide brush in the other, pulling and stretching her tight, frizzy curls. The longer and harder she pulls, the better her wiry curls turn into voluptuous waves. That’s why she often looks as if she walked out of the coiffeur salon with a fresh hair do.

Perhaps hers is a small price compared to my ordeal of sleeping over an uneven landscape of rollers every night. But at the first hint of humidity, our individual efforts go to waste, and we each end up what we had to start with.

A permanent is out of the question for me. I have tried it once- many years ago when I was in Paris. I wanted something that would be more memorable than a miniature Eiffel Tower statue.I wanted an experience on which I could look back and remember the summer of my European vacation. . .

So I walked into a coiffeur salon and explained in an affected Parisian accent that I wanted big curls that would stay, even after many shampoos.

Antoine appeared to be kind although, I sensed a certain haughtiness in his approach. He ran his long fingers through my hair a few times pulling it back, examining and evaluating from various angles. He crossed his arms, tilted his head and squinted meditatively for a few seconds, leaving me in suspense.

Finally he announced that if I wanted curls, I would have to agree to shorter hair. Otherwise, I would be supporting a rather large head and resemble a giant ball of copper wire used for scrubbing pots and pans.

I should have known I would regret my decision. After all, a permanent is what it suggests. But I was in an adventurous mood and wanted a memorable experience from Paris. And, what could be more memorable than walking out of a coiffeur salon with a French perm?

I spent close to three hours at the capable hands of Antoine who had already made it clear that he definitely preferred straight hair and questioned my sanity, albeit in a subtle way. I assured him, in my limited French that I was really not insane nor at the threshold of mid-life crisis. I just wanted to sleep peacefully for a change. No more butane curlers or plastic rollers. Just wash, brush and fluff. Carefree and easy to maintain like a polyester wash ‘n wear shirt.

If it was a memorable experience I wanted to take back with me, Antoine had certainly fulfilled my wish although it did not turn out to be the type of experience I remember with nostalgia and warm, fuzzy feelings as I had hoped it would be.

I’m certain that my permanent, by any professional standard, would have been considered very good. It just looked horrible on me and I was stuck with it until it grew out.

I realized miserably that, after all, I looked just like Wendie in the rain. I was condemned to months of drying my wet hair pulling on it with various sized styling brushes to smooth out the frizzies and get larger, bouncy curls.

I should have known I’d regret my daring decision immediately when narrow strands of my shortened hair were getting shackled in slim curlers, and my skull was doused with a sharp smelling chemical which tickled my nostrils and brought tears to my eyes.

One would think I had learned my lesson with vain endeavours and preferred to live naturally. But it’s human nature, as I know so well now, to seek adventure and dare to trek on untrodden territory. At least— insofar as one’s personal territory goes.

My disastrous Paris experience should’ve been a lesson for me to stop interfering with nature’s creation and spare any other part of my body from further mistreatment. Yet, viewed through the hazy lenses time inserts between the past and the present, the jagged edges of traumatic experiences are smoothened.

The panic, regret, despair and anguish I felt a dozen years ago standing outside Salon de Coiffure Chic, have mellowed to an abstracted smile at the most at my vanity.

I have not given up on beauty salons all together in favour of living more naturally. If there was a lesson to be learned, whatever it was, I’m sure I learned it although I haven’t been able to put it into words yet.

Since my last and only hair permanent, I have changed into a strawberry blonde, abandoning my fiery red hair somewhere in the past. The chemicals in hair colours are not as harsh as those used in perms, so I can tolerate them. And I get my legs waxed regularly, spending a good torturous hour spread out on the white linen covered table with a little towel draped over my body.

I think of all this as a pound of flesh for an ounce of beauty. The agony of hair, being ripped out by its roots on sticky strips of linen, becomes endurable when I visualize slipping into a tight black skirt and cross my smooth legs at a restaurant or a theatre. I know, when his hand probes under the table to brush my knee or thigh, he won’t be disappointed. A little pain is the price of womanhood, I keep reminding myself. It is the bane of our eternal vanity.

But there is still one thing I will never, ever give up: my big, blonde curls. I still abhor straight hair that hangs like random strands of hay. I am quite used to it. so I don’t mind the discomfort of sleeping with curlers three nights a week. It’s an insignificant trade off, because when I wake up and pull those curlers off, I know I will have a sure winner of a face adorned with large, bouncy blonde curls- that is, just as long as it doesn’t rain, and I stay in air-conditioned, de-humidified places, of course !

Read at the Newfoundland & Labrador Writers' Guild Christmas Party ~ 2000