The girl in the barber chair is perhaps fourteen. Her blond hair is presently dark because it is wet after a shampoo; parted perfectly in the middle and combed straight, it falls to her shoulders. She is reading Rolling Stone, and her jaws work fitfully at chewing gum.
      "I thought I'd better bring her back to you," her mother says. "She insists you're the only one who ever gets it right."
      "Jill's hair is special," the barber says. He is a short, boy-faced man wearing a gold smock. On the floor not far away is a yellow Coca-Cola crate, upside down; probably he uses it as a platform when his customer is too tall.
      "I don't know what it is," the mother says.
      "Partly it's pH. Partly it's oiliness. Partly it's the experience of the artiste." He tips up the girl's face so she can look at him out of the wall-mirror. "Isn't that right?"
      "That's right," Jill says. She glances sidelong at her mother. I told you, says the glance.
      "I've been taking her to my own beautician," the mother says.
      "You should stay with the person who knows her hair best, Mrs. Weaver."
      "She's very good."
      "I'm sure she is -- for you." The barber holds strands of Jill's hair out from her temples and compares the lengths.
      "She was a creep," Jill says.
      "She knew how to get your hair clean," Mrs. Weaver says. Her mother's voice is sharp. The word clean is in italics. "I don't know what she used, but it worked."
      The barber smiles and snips. "Janitor-in-a-Drum will get hair clean," he says, "but what does it do to the follicles? What does it do to the ends? How does it clash with the chemistry of the hair? We're looking at protein, Mrs. Weaver. Protein -- not Congoleum."
      Jill takes the gum out of her mouth and holds it in the air as if she doesn't know what to do with it. The barber plucks a tissue from a box under the mirror and takes the gum.
      "A disgusting habit," Mrs. Weaver says.
      "Excuse me," Jill says. "It keeps me from getting tense."
      "That's the truth," says the barber. "It concentrates a person's distractions. Chewing gum is like the ground wire on your television antenna: the tension trickles away, all harmless."
      "It's the way she looks."
      "They all do it nowadays. Even bank tellers," he says.
      "That doesn't excuse it."
      Jill flattens the tabloid on her lap. "Mother, why don't you go shopping or something?"
      For several minutes no one talks. The only sounds in the shop are of scissors and the turning of pages. Once Mrs. Weaver sighs. Then she puts aside her magazine and stands up from the chrome chair with its thin plastic arms.
      "I think I will do some errands," she says.

#

Lauren Weaver is not fond of this shopping mall, whose setting is a well-to-do suburb and whose customers seem mostly to be young girls resembling her daughter. The girls are everywhere -- bunched around drinking fountains, loitering in twos and threes in front of the plate glass windows of shoe stores and frilly boutiques, moving singly among the skirt and blouse racks of Paul Harris and Marshall Field's. They are baby-faced and baby-plump, their jeans like the skin on some exotic pale-blue fruit, their quilted jackets dyed orange and magenta and pink, like the flowers of that fruit. Their feet are in thin sneakers or shoes far too flimsy for the November weather outside. Their hair is either boy-short or impractically straight and long. It is true, what Jill's barber said, that all of them chew gum, and Mrs. Weaver marvels at so much tension collected in this confined place.
      She herself feels somewhat tense in the mall environment. She does not think of herself as 'old' -- she belongs, after all, to a generation whose trademark was its contempt for men and women beyond the age of thirty -- but the shopping mall never fails to remind her that she is too old for gum, for tight jeans, for impractical shoes that show painted toenails. Too old for things her own mother would have called 'saucy.' Perhaps it is this awareness of age that has prompted her to leave her daughter alone at the barber shop; anyway, it is a fact that she lied -- that she has no particular errands that need doing.
      At the heart of the mall is a skating rink, and she sits for a few minutes at the end of a wooden bench, looking idly down onto the ice. They are all shapes and sizes, the skaters. Fathers with small sons who fall and laugh and fall again, pretty girls of sixteen and seventeen who circle the rink with the becoming grace of birds almost ready to fly, one older couple -- early sixties, she guesses -- who glide across her gaze like endless lovers. In the very center of the ice is a woman in costume: white skirt covered with glitter, white sequined jacket, white skates and leotard. The woman looks to be in her late forties; her hair is tinted a vivid, unnatural yellow, teased into the shape of a dandelion bloom and striped with spokes of black. All the while Mrs. Weaver sits beside the rink, the woman keeps to the same place on the ice, spinning first on one skate then the other, sometimes fast, more often slow, head back, arms out, her vacant smile outlined with bright carmine lip gloss. Mrs. Weaver wonders if the woman is mad.
      Walking back to the barber shop she pauses in front of a jeweler's window, where a selection of wristwatches is arranged against a backdrop of black velour. None of the watches displays the correct time, but she stands for a few moments to read her face in the glass, take stock of her appearance, be assured that she is probably sane. Distracted, but sane. She even goes inside the store, to contemplate showcases brilliant with gems and precious metal, and to notice how a young male clerk responds to her -- how his eyes admire her, though he tries manfully to be businesslike.

#

When she gets back, the barber has put a flowered cap over Jill's head and is engaged with a crochet hook, drawing locks of the girl's hair up through holes in the cap.
      "What are you doing?" Mrs. Weaver wants to know.
      "Don't get crazy, Mother," Jill says. "It's all right."
      "We're streaking it," the barber says. He has dragged out the Coca-Cola crate and is standing on it. "It will be just dazzling."
      Mrs. Weaver sits down.
      "I don't recall asking you to make her dazzle," she says.
      "God, Mother," her daughter says. "Would you let a person do something nice for somebody?"
      "Think of it as a present," the barber says, "to a favorite client."
      "I don't know what to think," Mrs. Weaver says. Possibly she is upset that her daughter has acquired a fresh wad of gum. Or she is remembering the mad skater with the yellow hair, turning and turning on the same point of blue ice.
      "It isn't like bleaching," Jill says. "Walter explained it."
      *Walter*.
      "Bleaching takes away protein," the barber says. "This is coloring, a special formulation. It puts back the protein as it works."
      "What will it look like?"
      "You'll love it. We've decided on just the slightest bit of rye-and-ginger. The hair will have highlights -- a golden shimmer -- like nothing it ever had before."
      "Well--," says Mrs. Weaver. She watches the barber drawing her daughter's hair through the cap. Jill's head is like a limp wet-mop. "Perhaps I'll get used to it."
      "I'm positive you will."
      He finishes with the crochet hook and begins the streaking, soaking cotton balls with dye, stroking the exposed hair under his hands. Mrs. Weaver watches, silent, the magazine opened but unread in her lap. After a while her eyes wander to the window, which imposes the reflection of her daughter and her daughter's barber against the shadowy figures drifting through the mall.
      "I wonder, Mrs. Weaver, if you've ever thought of frosting your hair?" the barber says. "Quite a number of ladies your age have it done." His graceful hands are suspended in the pungent air. "When those first few strands of gray begin to show up in your looking-glass."
      "No," Mrs. Weaver says. For just a moment, turning from the window, she notices her daughter's sullen gaze. "I've never thought about it."
      She looks down at the magazine in her lap, listening to the scrape of the Coca-Cola crate when the barber nudges it with his foot across the tiled floor.
      Walter.
      "It's actually quite a natural process," he says.
      Jill smiles. In the wide mirror she catches the barber's eye and -- does Lauren Weaver invent this? -- rounds her baby lips into a soft, saucy kiss.

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