Hair Curlers

I work as an activities aide at the nursing home. Mornings, in our line of work, we deal in curlers. We have bags of them: fat pink rollers, medium-sized purple rollers, thin blue rollers, short yellow rollers. Most of the elderly female residents come into the nursing home beauty shop once or twice a week to have their hair twisted around these pink and blue and purple cylinders, each cylinder poking out bristles like so many miniature multicolored hedgehogs.

After we’ve wrapped their hair around rollers, we put the old ladies under driers, fluff up their curls with a pick, show them a mirror, and send them off to brunch. It’s an odd hairstyle, if you ask me, but it’s the prevailing one among the older generation. I suppose if I work in the nursing home long enough, I’ll have to learn to spike hair, or to dye it with Kool-Aid.

Since I am a conservative Mennonite girl myself, I wear my hair long, and I wear it up. To find myself in a beauty shop, standing among dryers and curlers and styling gel, setting hair, seems ironic.

When I started on as activities aide half a year ago, this unfamiliar manipulation of hair was the scariest and most difficult aspect of the job–to take these slippery thin bits of old-people hair, to wrap them around a curler without letting pieces straggle off to the side or puff up oddly, and to refrain from poking a tender old scalp with a plastic pin. It wasn’t so bad if there were only one or two ladies with hair to set, but Fridays, when I began this job, were a thing to be feared. On Fridays there were six or more ladies to finish by brunch time, and no hair care volunteer to help with the load. The first time I was scheduled for a Friday morning solo, I was petrified.

Linda, one of the other activities aides, was sympathetic. She had started on as activities’ aid several months prior, and at that time bought herself a brand-new package of curlers to practice curling hair. She brought them to work and showed them to me. “You could practice on a doll or something,” she said. “Just put them in my locker when you’re done.”

I took them home and tried them on my brother Chad. His hair was the longest of my brothers–but not quite long enough for curlers. To make matters worse, his hair is fine and straight. When I tried to separate a lock of hair in my fingers and wrap it around a curler, only half the hairs would conform, while the others poked up randomly in whatever way their self-expression dictated. I must say, the hair looked odd, a cross between a porcupine and Shirley Temple’s worst nightmare. I gave up about half way through, and took the curlers out immediately, as I’d promised I would. Chad didn’t want the curls to dry in place.

I tried my sister Elizabeth’s hair next, and found it much easier to work with. Elizabeth has beautiful hair–never cut, shiny dark, thick and rich with a natural wave. She is proud of it, and takes great care of it.

I wet the hair down well, sprayed on a mist of conditioner, and, slick and smart, ran the end of my rat-tail comb across the top of her forehead to separate that first swathe of hair for the curler. It was very satisfying. I felt like a professional.

“And why is that more important than helping fold the laundry?” Dad asked. He was sitting on the living room floor with a big pile of it.

Elizabeth explained that I was practicing for work. “Oh,” he said.

While I curled her hair, Elizabeth called out the times tables to another of my brothers, who was working on his speed.

The hair was coming along nicely, and I was almost done when I accidentally tangled one of  the curlers. I tried to take it out. It wouldn’t come. I discovered, uneasily, that it is no easy matter to untangle a two or three foot strand of hair from around a curler. I sat behind Elizabeth probably fifteen minutes, trying to get that curler out, while, she, oblivious, called out times tables.

All the curlers won’t be this hard to get out, I thought. Surely. It’s only because I managed to tangle this one. Stupid of me.

“Mom!” I finally called, desperately. Mom was out in the kitchen, canning apple pie filling.

Elizabeth caught on to my predicament and panicked. Dad came over to help, and Mom, when she realized this truly was an emergency, brought her supermom powers in from the kitchen and put them to work. But that hair was wrapped around the curler tighter than Scrooge to his money. No earthly force could unwrap it.

We started talking scissors, and Elizabeth began to cry frantically. “NO! You can’t cut my hair!”

Dad worked on the still-tangled curler, while Mom and I started with a couple of the others. They did come out more easily. At least, they gave that impression until you reached the thin, tight ends. It seems that instead of wrapping those straggling ends of hair around the brand-new bristles, I’d woven them. And you didn’t dare pull on the curlers, because the harder you pulled, the tighter the hair wove.

Dad finally yanked his curler out, taking a tight, wrapped strand of hair with it. It was impossible to tell just how long that strand really was. It was wrapped so tightly the curler’s pink plastic sides were squeezed into the shape of a figure eight. Elizabeth, who’d calmed down, cried again–grieving tears this time. She turned her head to see the place where she thought the hair should have been. “It’s short!”

Mom worked out a curler, and I worked out one. They worked out hard, pieces of bristle coming out with the hair. I imagined damaged hair, split ends, an ax-hacked impression when we were finished.

The third curler I started to unwind became as badly tangled as the first. “Try cutting it,” one of my brothers advised–all three brothers were watching now, vitally interested in the proceedings. “You can always buy new curlers.”

I took the scissors and hacked the curler in half right beside the wrapped strand of hair, but I couldn’t cut the wire that wound through the center of the curler like a bedspring. I pulled the wire out, in a long, unwinding line, and scrunched the hair over the cut-off edge of the curler. “This works,” I said.

“Cut your curler; cut your curler,” everyone advised Mom.

Mom did better than I. She discovered that by carefully slitting one end of the curler’s net-like material, she could remove the entire brushy, bristly center. With no bristles to hold it in place, the hair unrolled from the netted cylinder like a centipede from sunshine.

What a relief.

By the time we were done, the floor around Elizabeth’s chair was littered with wires and bristles and pink and green and yellow netting. But her hair was mostly undamaged and as beautiful as ever. Thank God.

I stopped at Wal-Mart on the way to work the next morning and bought a brand new pack of rollers and put them in Linda’s locker. She never knew the difference.

And just yesterday morning, one of the housekeepers complimented me on the freshly-styled hair of my elderly companion. “You always do such a good job with their hair,” she said.

I smiled. Best compliment she could have given me.

You know what they say: “Practice makes people cry and scream, but in the end, it is only practice. One day something may actually turn out the way you wanted it to, and you’ll be glad you practiced.”

Maybe. At least, that’s what they say.