Another Haircut, Hopefully No Lice

It has taken another trip to the hairdresser’s to prod me back to blogging.

Last night when my mother-in-law was here she asked if I’d like to go with her to her hairdresser’s today. She seemed quite earnest in her wish to have me accompany her and told me (again) that it was a “cheap” place, apparently convinced that frugality prevents me from darkening the doors of hair salons more frequently.

Frankly, I think she has noticed my hair growing longer and is afraid I might cut it myself again.

If any other person, in any other place, had tried to entice me to a hair salon by telling me it was cheap I would have ended the matter on the spot with a few juicy words describing my experiences with cheap haircuts. If there was ever case of getting what you pay for, haircuts must be it. But some unnamed force inside me compelled me to say, “Sure, what the heck. Count me in.”

I guess it was partly the attractive anticipation of having my hair attended to by a normal human being in a normal shop instead of in the biosphere glass world inhabited by stick-insect automatons. Plus, I kind of just wanted to experience the cheap salon. Like when you open a container of moulding food from the back of the fridge and have a sniff. You know it’s going to stink, and that there’s nothing to be gained from smelling it, but you smell it anyway. It was sort of that same compulsion.

My mother-in-law told me to be ready at nine, that we would depart then. So this morning found me ringing her doorbell precisely at nine. She didn’t answer. I rang it, at intervals, about ten times. I could hear loud, vigorous noises coming from the other side of the door. It sounded like someone was stacking sacks of potatoes up against it. Finally I pulled out my cell phone and rang.

She answered in a breathless voice and I said, a bit pinched, “I’m at the door.”

“What, my door?” she asked in apparent surprise.

“Um, yes, your door,” I said.

She opened it immediately and apologized, saying that she had called me on our home phone a few minutes earlier and, finding no answer, had concluded I must be sleeping or in the shower. So she had got out the vacuum cleaner and was doing some housework. The thudding sounds were her piling the carpets against the door.

“But we agreed to leave at nine,” I said. “I would have let you know if I wasn’t going to be ready.”

“Never mind,” she laughed. “Just give me ten minutes. Have a seat. Do you want to watch tv?”

“No thanks,” I said ungraciously and plopped down on the couch to wait.

She dressed quickly and in a few minutes we were on our way. Kassem, our driver, was wearing a winter jacket that looked strangely familiar. I kept stealing glances at it but it wasn’t until later when I had a good look at the front of the jacket that I recognized it as one of our own discards. It was one M had been presented with once in Canada for his work on a company project and the jacket bore the project’s name on its breast pocket. Well-made and warm, the jacket saw some good use for two winters but when we found ourselves in the Middle East it wasn’t needed anymore. It stayed in a box for years until last fall when I reluctantly included it in some bags of clothes we were getting rid of. Here in Beirut there are no thrift stores as such but I give our unneeded things to either Kassem or my mother-in-law and they find their way to people who can use them. I didn’t remember specifically giving Kassem the jacket, nor did I suppose he would wear it to work, but I did and he has.

It made me remember once in Saudi my neighbour telling me, in outrage, that she had seen one of the compound gardeners wearing the very t-shirt she had thrown out in the garbage the week before. She was furious. She was a very nice woman who hardly seemed to mind anything but she was wildly indignant about that t-shirt. I understood how she felt because I’d have felt the same way. The idea of someone digging through my garbage! But the difference between me and her is that I probably wouldn’t have admitted my outrage. I guess she is more honest than I am. The shame of being so rich compared to so many in the Middle East is always a millstone around my neck.

Kassem drove us through tiny, crowded streets, my mother-in-law frequently shouting from the back seat things like, “Turn left here!” when Kassem had already started to turn left. We piled out in a one-way street with parked cars lining both sides of the narrow street. My mother-in-law seized my arm and pulled me with her into the path of a taxi and a moped that was overtaking the taxi. They swerved to avoid us and we gained the relative safety of the sidewalk (it really is relative safety – people drive their mopeds on the sidewalk sometimes).

Small shops selling jewellery, fabric, plastic bowls, step-ladders and authentic Giorgio Armini gowns squashed themselves into every square foot of space and pressed over us from the overhung first floor. My mother-in-law strode boldly to the nearest glass door and pushed but the door didn’t yield so without pausing she walked a few meters to the next door and tried it. It opened, but apparently she didn’t like what she saw for she backed out again immediately.

“Come on, Jenn, I know where it is,” she said, stepping briskly to the next door down the line.

This didn’t yield the desired results, either, and she paused to look around.

“Ah, there it is!” she cried, pointed down the block. “I know where it is, I just didn’t recognize it at first.”

This time she ushered me confidently through the glass door before her. It was indeed the right place. I was prepared for it to be no-frills but this was something on an a new scale altogether. It looked like a dodgy motel. The ceiling was low and the lighting weak. The walls, originally a headache white, were smudged and smeared, as if ten generations of mud-pat making little kids had attended nursery school there. The tiles were of chipped and worn marble with veins of red and green swirling garishly around each other and threatening sea-sickness if you let your gaze linger too long. Cigarette smoke hung heavy in the air, and a tired-looking bleached blonde woman greeted us indifferently.

My mother-in-law led the way around a corner, through a scattering of bare-bones hair stations and into a portioned-off back room, where ladies who wear headscarves could bare their heads in a man-free environment. Two or three older women were sitting around in various stages of root touch-ups. None of them were getting natural-looking colours. Even the oldest of them, a women who was well over seventy, maintained her hair in deepest shades of black.

The room was just incredibly dingy looking and I tried to keep the shocked look off my face. There seemed to be one hairdresser and a younger girl working as her assistant. My mother-in-law announced that we were there for hair-cuts and that “she”, pointing to me, “doesn’t speak Arabic.” I should mention here for those of you who do not know that my mother-in-law doesn't speak English, and that the only language in which she and I converse is Arabic. My grasp of the language is stumbling and limited but it's quite serviceable, yet in the car on the way to the hair salon my mother-in-law kept asking me questions about how I wanted my hair cut, as though she would have to explain everything to them (and which is exactly what she did).

The hairdresser said kindly that she would be with us in a minute so we seated ourselves on a bench against the wall. The assistant beckoned me over to wash my hair at the little sink in a dark corner of the room. I wasn’t expecting Aveda shampoo or anything but the smell of what she was using reminded me of hand soap in airport bathrooms. Sure enough when I straightened up with the towel on my head I saw that she had been using a giant bottle of the absolute cheapest-looking stuff I ever saw. It just said “Shampoo” on it and some Arabic print.

When I sat down at the hair-cutting station I noticed that the chair was an ordinary one and didn’t have any mechanism to raise or lower it. Hard luck for her today, I thought, since at 5’7” I am taller than most Lebanese women. She came and gave my hair a cursory brushing and that’s when I noticed, with horror, the absence of any kind of disinfecting receptacle for the brushes and combs. Looking beside me at the battered implements trolley I saw a selection of hair tools and not one of them was immersed in a bottle of alcohol (or whatever that blue stuff is that sizzles up lice and ringworm). When she set down the brush that had just swiped my own head a few times I saw that it was full of hair, not my own.

My mother-in-law, friendly and chatty with everyone, discussed various subjects with the hairdresser while the other set to work cutting. My mother-in-law explained to the hair dresser that I’d had long hair last year and it was really lovely, but that I’d decided to cut it and although it looked nice now it was really very lovely before. The hairdresser was a pretty fair cutter of hair, I’ll give her that. I was pleased with the cut. But after seeing the hairbrush I’m afraid the rest of the visit was a bit of a blur for me.

My mother-in-law wouldn’t let me pay when it came time to leave. Of course. She never lets me pay for things without a big fight. These days I find I am weary of the struggle and don’t argue. The haircuts were 5,000 LL each. That’s three dollars and thirty-three cents, in American money. I don’t believe I have ever had a haircut for that price. Even as a kid at the local hairdressers in our small town I’m pretty sure I paid five dollars, or even ten.

So there, I’ve done it. I have committed the hairdressing equivalent of smelling rotten food. I’m terrified that I’ve picked up lice and I won’t be able to truly relax for at least a week. Every tingle of my scalp is going to make me tremble in fear that it’s the first nibbling of hungry parasites. All this because I didn’t feel like watching snooty Tony fuss around me in his expensive jeans and silly voice. I’m telling you today, and you can quote me on this any time you want, that for my next haircut I’m going straight to Tony and I’ll kiss the sanitized tiles he walks on.