BEAUTY SHOP TALK

by

Vicki Charmaine Bunch

Half the town is sick. Vice-Principal Vernon Wagstaff, quoted in the Rattler, said Tuesday the high school broke the official record for absenteeism set in the head lice epidemic of 1990.

Just to be on the safe side, the county health department has asked certain key businesses to close down until further notice. According to experts, many seemingly innocuous objects are equivalent to hundred megaton germ bombs. Bowling balls, for example, harbor millions of lethal germs, as you can imagine if you think about it. The nose on the statue of city founder Cornelius Axel, rubbed for good luck by generations of Axelites, was discovered to carry enough germs to kill everyone in the state of Texas.

Health officials quarantined the kids from Little Wigwam Day Care. They closed the bingo hall. They even shut down the salad bar at Musty's Fish 'n More. It's as boring around town as a Sunday before the blue law was repealed.

I have been at death's doorstep over a week now, which you would know if you bothered to look at the raw, flaking skin around my nostrils. I've been coughing all night long, sneezing, and going through three large rolls of toilet paper per day. (Hint from Hell #35: Wind toilet paper around you neck and blow your nose as needed if you're a busy gal like me!)

Nobody's showed up at the beauty shop with an order to close. A cosmetologist never gets a day off. You can be doubled over with the dry heaves and clients still expect you to roll their hair. "A beautician has the most indispensable job in town," my mentor Jezebel Furr warned, when I answered my calling.

Plus, with these looks, nobody ever believes I'm sick. When I go to the doctor's office with a hundred and ten degree fever, all Dr. Jones wants to do is complain about how he can't make the payments on his ski condo now that there's managed care. That, and ask my advice about hair weaves.

Maybe it's the false eyelashes. And the fact I'm such a strapping woman. You can look too healthy for your own good.

My grandmother Chlorine--God rest her soul--always wore her most pathetic rags when she went to see the doctor. She drew dark circles under her eyes, drooled, used those fake blood packets. Extreme measures, yes, but that's what it took to get the doctor's attention.

When you look like my family--with rosy cheeks and pearlized eye shadow--you look so much better than 99% of the population, nobody's going to take your sickness seriously. Medical personnel are so used to seeing sad sacks who won't even put on a pair of pantyhose, they go into shock if you come in wearing a sweat shirt with a sequined poodle.

Do you want to know my fantasy? For a client or my husband or anybody in this town to just once feel sorry for me. To bring me borscht and a dot-to-dot book. To put a rag on my head and turn on my favorite show. But I know it will never happen.

People just don't care about each other like they used to.

Framed and hanging over the hair dryer is a hand-made get well card my great aunt Irina Plott sent to my grandmother when she got hit by the ice truck. Aunt Irina, who died in 1936, was the poet laureate of the family, and wrote many books which were never published but which I rescued from the garage sale my greedy, uncultured cousins were having.

How fitting her poem is, even in our modern times.

To the Invalid

I do feel sorry for you

Though my empathy's not good.

Did you hurt yourself on purpose?

The rest of the family would.

What wisdom. What good writing. Now I know who I take after.