A STORY by REGINA MULLEN
A Girl Like That
It was one of those places where you could rent a station. Suze knew right away that she wasn’t the right fit for a place like that, with its high ceilings and plastic palm fronds and neon sign that read, in pink script: BE YOUR BEST SELF.
But the manager was desperate to fill the chair. They were bleeding money with the rent, he said. Right downtown and what for? It’s not like these people take walk-ins, he said, gesturing to the smattering of well-kept women at their stations, shampooing and conditioning and folding blonde highlights into careful foils. These were the kind of gals that had a client list.
I do walk-ins, Suze said, and with little fanfare the chair was hers.
The girl who worked next to her had a name like Mary or Kerry that Suze forgot on the spot. Mary or Kerry had a sheath of white-blonde hair, one blunt length and almost down to her waist. It’s not all mine, she told Suze, like it was obvious. She parted her hair at the crown to show the lattice of beaded extensions at her scalp. Russian, she said, like that was obvious too. She liked to swing her Russian hair around her as she worked, and they were in close enough proximity that a few times a day Suze would feel it lick the back of her forearm. This, Suze never got used to. And Suze could get used to a lot of things.
Mary or Kerry only saw two clients a day. Charged thousands. Actual thousands. Suze couldn’t believe it when she first saw the number. Different iterations of the same carefully-blonde, anemic-looking girl would sit for hours as Mary or Kerry wove Russian-grown hair into their pink scalps. Raw hair, virgin hair, Mary or Kerry would say. Two adjectives that made the hair cost twice as much.
In spite of herself, Suze liked to watch these girls in Mary or Kerry’s chair. They were of a class she’d never seen up close like this. They could drop two grand on a hairstyle plus tip, then another grand on the six-week followup, where Mary or Kerry would slide each beaded extension back up, one by one by one. It was like magic the way they came in plain and left beautiful. Hair could do that to you, Suze was learning—obscure plainness. And boy did these girls know it. A girl like that could add hair, plump lips, hollow cheeks and chisel a jawline. She could whittle bright, square teeth, professionally lacquered and all in a row, mouth like a white picket fence. She could be militantly thin and make it look easy, god-given. A girl like that could buy these things, Suze observed, and patchwork together an expensive patina of beauty. All the trappings. A girl like that could afford it.
Suze nicknamed them potato-heads to her friends, each of their face-parts bought and put together. The kind of glib thing you call someone who has everything you wanted. The mean shit you say about a girl like that.
Once, Mary or Kerry asked Suze to cut bangs into a girl’s new head of hair. Mary or Kerry didn’t really know how; she was in the business of adding hair, not shearing it off. So Suze touched the girl’s cheek, touched her ear, tilted her chin down, put her face right into hers. The girl stared past her, their eyes level but not meeting, like there was no one there at all. Together, they held their breath when Suze made the first cut, one hand still holding the girl’s head aloft, fingers in the crook of her jaw as the scissors snapped shut—the closest she’ll get to a girl like that.
Regina Olga Mullen is a Czech-American writer living with her husband in San Francisco, where she is regularly bullied by the hills and the local pack of feral cats. She's been a copywriter for a decade, and also taught English 99 at Mount Tamalpais College, which is a liberal arts college for students at San Quentin State Prison. Her work has appeared previously in Gulf Stream Literary Magazine.