Temporary Inconvenience

Coming home from school one day (2^nd or 3^rd grade?), upon opening our front door I was confronted with a very pungent odor. Man! Was it bad! I proceeded to the kitchen where I was happy to see my Aunt Jean, but she was doing something nasty to mom’s hair. It was all wet and combed and clearly the source of the foul scent. Mom was getting a “perm.”

Mom explained that a “perm” is a hair treatment and is short for “permanent.” To me this connoted everlasting, which was good because I didn’t want to smell that again! Thus began my bad relationship with perms. First off, several months later Aunt Jean returned to do it again and I learned that perms really should be called temps. Also, I don’t remember Mom ever being happy with how it turned out, regardless of who did it. (I wasn’t thrilled about them either, as my appetite was forfeit for several hours.) I will say that worse than the perms, was when I caught a strikingly similar whiff, only to find that Mom was cooking white bean soup. Double whammy. No Aunt Jean AND this was dinner.

Then my sisters began getting perms and I began to see a pattern: get a perm, complain about it. They were always unhappy with the results. I was always unsure what the goal was but it seemed to never meet their expectations.

It gets worse. One evening just months into my marriage, Kara picked me up at work and I could tell something had changed. And I detected a smell. She told me that she had her hair permed. Wait a minute. Is that a verb too? Also, Aunt Jean was 700 miles away; this probably wasn’t a L’Oreal do-it-yourself job. I skittishly asked Kara what it had cost. She said $35; she had written a check. This was bad news since we only had $20 in our account. As if to mitigate the splurge, she told me that she hated it. And it smelled like burnt rubber (like the check that paid for it.). The crazy thing is, however, that the bank would still try to honor that check. They wouldn’t ask “Misty” if the customer was happy with the perm. Not only do they not care, but they are smart enough not to ask.

Fortunately my daughters have yet to experiment with perms. They have, to my chagrin, toyed with hair-coloring. Again, they are never happy with the outcome as it is always too red or too light, or too something. (The box said “Auburn” but it was a euphemism for “Baboon.”) Then they try four different applications to try to get back to their natural color, but it never works.

I am so happy I’m a boy.