Home Salon
A Vignette
By Maryanne Peters

I like to think that were pangs of regret even before she took the steps that she did, but that might just be me trying to think better of the man I was. It is more likely that I slept so soundly because I did not care. Why should the tears of a woman matter to a man like I was? Men like that think that “the waterworks” can be turned on by women as they like, as a means of controlling me. That was before hormones showed me the truth.

I woke up looking the way I did in the image, although that would be a few minutes after that, when my eyes had cleared and I understood that under the cover I was fully restrained. A hairdresser’s chair cannot be moved, and to be bound at the wrists and elbows and at the knees and ankles is to completely immobilize a person.

She said that I should be grateful that the painful stuff had been done whiles I was unconscious, or somehow semi-conscious because there was a vague recollection. The facial hair and male skin being peeled away, the ears being pierced, the body being waxed, and the ring fastened to my penis to make any erection agony and any urination downward.

I was only recovering after my hair had been bleached and as the curlers were put in and the net cover tied over them, leaving me to look straight ahead into the mirror and the woman whose head was lolling and whose eyes where struggling to focus, just as I was.

I recall that I said something but stopped immediately when I understood that my voice was not right. It sounded as if somebody was holding me by the throat and forcing every word to become a high-pitched scream

The woman in front of me, behind a sheet of glass, seemed to be trying to speak too. It tokk some time before I came to the stunning realization that this was a mirror and that was me. The face had my jaw, but the cheekbones and the lips were not me – some small procedure as it turned out, and some early attempt at makeup before I woke.

It was me, with the maleness stripped away to a thread as thin as what was left of my eyebrows. But it was me.

I saw she was there beside me, her red hair held up in a claw clip. The bruises were still on her face. Based on what I had done before perhaps a couple of days. It was before she could use heavy foundation to mask the worst of it, and receive customers into this place, her home salon.

I had agreed to it because jealousy was driving me crazy. I needed to know where she was. A woman as beautiful as her is bait to men other than me, and I could not bear that. I thought that marriage would cure these wild thoughts, but if anything that made it worse. She had sworn that she was mine and nobody else’s and yet I saw the way she looked at people and could not believe her denials.

I have a temper, or I had one then. When I was in a state, I was blind to the truth.

I am now left wondering if I was blind to the truth all along, in every mood I had except those secret moments that were supposed to remain forever hidden from the world. Men are easily fooled, even by themselves.

Because when those curlers came out, not long after that images was taken; when the curls were brushed out and shone in the lights above the mirror, when the makeup went on and the lips puckered suggestively – then I suppose I understood how thin my male veneer was.

Whether she saw this in me or not I have never really understood. Did she really think that I would live on tied to that chair, only to get free at some moment, and then rain down fury upon her which this time would be sure to kill her? Or did she understand that when she sliced through those restraints I would stay in the chair of my own accord, admiring the woman I had become and wondering what future might lie ahead of her.

People will tell you that the hard thing is the doubt that you could ever be anything other than the person you were born to be. If that doubt can be removed at a stroke and you have all that is needed – the hair, the skin and the voice – then the rest is just rags. You can step out and be somebody else – somebody good.

And that is what I did.

We are no longer married. I have my own man. But I still attend her home salon to get my hair done. People often say it of their hairdresser but in my case it is true - She knows me, you see, in every sense.

The End

© Maryanne Peters 2022