The Pull of the Moon_ A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,30

that aging is a crime. But I did. And when I heard it in her, I saw it in me.

But this morning I sat on the bed and I thought, I’m not giving in to it. I’m just not. And I took out the yellow pages and I looked for beauty parlors. I found one listed on the same street as the motel I was in, and I checked out and drove to it. It was a big, bare-looking place, highly polished wooden floors, a hypermodern reception area, unrecognizable music playing, hairdressers visible in the back with the bored and slightly hostile faces of the fashion model. The prices were outrageous. It looked, in short, like a good place. I asked if anyone there could do a color. The receptionist, wearing mostly her bones, but also a black blouse, a very short black skirt, black tights, black shoes, and deeply red lipstick, checked around and said Robert could do me in about twenty minutes. I said fine. She gave me a dove-gray robe to change into, very soft and smelling vaguely of some exotic perfume. Then I came out and sat next to a woman about my age who looked like she was in for color, too—she had the same incriminating line of gray beginning. She looked up and smiled at me, and I smiled back, then asked, “What are you having done?” “Highlights,” she said. And I said that’s the thing where you wear the tinfoil, right? and she said Yes, that’s the one where you sit around looking like an alien reading a magazine. I said I’d thought about that, but it would mean a commitment to permanent color, instead of my temporary cover-up. She said, “I’ll tell you what, I wish I’d never started this crap. I like gray hair. I always liked gray hair on other women. But when it happened to me, I ran right in here and got it colored.”

They called me then, and a kind of pouty-mouthed young man draped me in silver plastic and said, “So what are we doing today?” I was going to offer my usual apologetic request—lately, when I go to the hairdresser, I always feel badly that I’m not a more exciting client, but all of a sudden I just got mad. (I also got a hot flash at the same time, which seemed sort of perfect to me.) I got mad for all the times I’ve had these snobby people work on me and not see me, stand over me yanking at my hair with their face turned away from me, chatting with another stylist. I said, “Well, I’m not doing anything. You, I hope, will figure out a way to get the gray back in my hair.” I almost covered my mouth in amazement after I said this. I hadn’t known I was going to say it, I really hadn’t. But I realized at that moment that I did want my gray back, because in getting it, I’d be losing something else that I never really wanted in the first place: a corrosive sense of falseness, moving from the outside in. A sense of shame. Robert lifted up a strand of my hair as though it were dog shit. “Well, what’s on here?” he asked. And I said whatever the last hairdresser had put on it. He said well that wasn’t he. I said it certainly wasn’t, that obviously coming to him once was quite enough for anyone. It had gotten very quiet in the shop. People had stopped working; the stylist at the end station had turned off his blow-dryer to listen better and his client sat still, looking out through hair that had been brushed forward over her face. And then a man came out from the back room, dressed in the standard black uniform. He had a way of walking that let me know he was the owner, or manager, or something. He kept his face turned slightly to the side; evidently no one was quite worthy of a full glance. “Is there some problem here?” he asked. And I said yes at the same time that Robert said no. The boss man raised his eyebrows, smiled a smile that looked as though it could be chipped off his face and used to open a can. “Well,” he said. “Would it be something I can help with?” I said yes indeed. I said he could train his employees to be a little more