Style

When my mother and grandmother discovered they could give themselves perms and save the exorbitant cost of a weekly trip to the beautician, they did it. And they did it to me.

But not before cutting my bangs.

Which brings me to a revelation about myself - something I've hidden from some of you:

I have an extremely high forehead.

Further honesty would have me reveal that it's not so much a large forehead as an inadequate hairline. This is the reason I wear bangs. And never part my hair in the middle. Or on the side. Or on the other side. Or pull it up in a ponytail. Or run my fingers through it. Or stand facing the wind. Or swim in public.

In my day, I have hidden this knowledge from many a suitor (both of them). And why shouldn't I? I don't want to know it myself.

So, when my mother and grandmother began practicing their dark arts on the vertically-challenged expanse of my head, I always wound up looking like a baby gorilla. The kind with kinky, frizzy corkscrews ringing its giant, glowing scalp.

I was completely unaware of their collective error in judgment until I was a young adult wanting a perm for the holidays, and had been instructed by my mother to get my bangs cut first. Though my anal sphincter tightened wincingly, I dropped by a local beauty shop, informing them I needed my hair cut before my big perm. To which the beautician replied, "Honey, you get your hair cut after a perm, not before."

I went home, vomited, and never got another perm. My mother was likely more relieved than hurt as she had a lot of other heads to perm back in those days. More grateful heads than mine.

She did her best to help me with my hair difficulties over the years, suggesting flattering styles, paying for me to see a real hair stylist once, and encouraging me without hurting my feelings. But when one night, on the phone, she asked gently about us injecting some life into my lifeless hair through the art of the home perm, my answer was a bitter, uninterrupted diatribe against home perms that began with the word "Ogilvie" and ended with the words "baby gorilla".

Afterward, I was dry-mouthed and tight-jawed awaiting an apology (I suppose), but the silence I mistook for her regret was only the pause before her cackling waves of laughter. She kept hiccuping, "You never even paused!" Then we both laughed until we cried.

And it wasn't the last time we laughed on the phone until we cried - because my mother is an amazing woman.

Larger than life itself (and relieved as I was to be done with the Ogilvie home perm phase of life).