The was a tapping coming from the back of the house, and not a gently rapping, but an insistent, angry tapping.
Nobody ever knocked on that back door, as it was the door to Arlene’s Beauty Shop, and my mother had taken a well deserved day off.
Her shop was usually open from Tuesday through Saturday with Sunday and Monday being her days off. I don’t recall that she posted any regular hours per se, as she mostly worked by appointments, though she wasn’t averse to squeezing someone it at the last minute if need be.
I think she’d schedule her first customer (Client? Patron? Head? I’m not sure of the terminology) for after my sister and I went off to school, and her last would be sometime in the evening, with Friday night typically being her latest evening; I recall her still being in her shop well after 9:00 PM and sometimes as late as 10:00 PM on Fridays. Saturdays, though, she wouldn’t schedule anyone past early to mid-afternoon. She would try to leave blocks of time free for lunch and supper and other things as needed, though she wasn’t always successful.
Sundays was pretty much her day off, but Mondays she might have to deal with the business of running her shop like seeing salesmen, and that was the day she could go to Lebanon for shopping, etc. Grocery shopping for the week was usually handled by my father on Saturdays; I remember going with him most of the time, one week to Krugers, the next to Werners, so we patronized both grocery stores equally.
It could be a grueling schedule, and this Tuesday she had purposely not scheduled anyone so she could sleep late and have a real day off.
So why was somebody rapping on the back door?
When I went to answer it, there was an irate older woman who came bustling into the shop claiming she had an appointment. I tried to explain to her that she had to be mistaken, but she was insistent. I showed her my mother’s appointment book; it was blank for this day, but still she claimed that she had an appointment and she wouldn’t take no for an answer.
So very reluctantly I went to wake up my mother.
Who was not amused.
But bleary eyed, she threw on some clothes, I can’t recall if it was her white beautician’s outfit or just some civvies, and came down to confront the irate woman.
I couldn’t hear what was said, but after a few minutes, the woman left and my mother came out of the shop and said, “She has an appointment with Arlene Seldomridge.” She was not happy.
I had no idea how successful my mother’s shop was as a business, but I assume that she did pretty well. She was frequently upgrading the equipment in her shop. For example, she replaced one of the clunky second hand hair dryers with a brand new modern one. This was especially important as the old ones tended to throw off a lot of heat and my mother’s shop wasn’t air conditioned. The new hair dryer could do its job much more efficiently without throwing off a lot of excess heat.
Also, we modernized the kitchen with brand new everything. By this time I was helping out a little bit with some of the cooking, and I remember being thrilled with the new oven that wasn’t underneath the electric range but was next to it at eye level.
One of the, uh, “benefits” of living in a house with a beauty shop is that you get to hear everything that’s going on in town. Without even trying.
Whenever I was in the kitchen I couldn’t help but overhear the conversation going on the the shop, and if I missed anything, I could always rely on the précis of that day’s activities that my mother provided my father in the evening.
And, of course, the women had opinions on everything.
When a local teenager suffered some burns and claimed that on answering a knock on the door she was greeted by a stranger who threw a lighted match at her, well, perhaps her parents bought her story, but not the women at Arlene’s Beauty Shop. No, they said, she and her boyfriend were playing with matches, they were smoking cigarettes, you can mark my words, girls didn’t smoke in my day, who was this stranger anyway, did anyone else see any stranger, what’s wrong with young people these days anyway?
Of course, information flow went the other way as well. While I suspect that my sister and I were possibly better behaved than the average bear child, we were still children and we still did need to be put in our places from time to time. And the women in the shop would have heard everything, from our misbehaving to our mother yelling at us.
And no, there are some things I’m not going to talk about on this blog.
This is Carol Fox and her daughter, frequent visitors to my mother’s shop. You can see the clunky old second hand hair dryer in the background, and the more modern, cooler, dryer being used by Carol.
