In the Colorado skies
There is the bluest bird with the blackest eyes
Who fascinates a stranger
Who just shared with me he lost his wife
Five days ago, he softly said
“Fifty years of loving her
And as she held my hand and said goodbye
She said ‘don’t give up, I’ll send you signs.’”
– “A Love Story,” Sara Bareilles
I sit, spine rigid, in a hair salon chair and try not to sing under my breath as the stylist pins my hair into an updo. I’ve had Sara Bareilles’s new album stuck in my head ever since it came out, but I can’t sing right now. I have a feeling it’s probably not socially acceptable to sing while you’re getting your hair done.
The salon, Hair Etc. (apparently they do nails too), is small but neat. The room is flooded with brightness—windows in the front of the salon, towards the nail bar, let sunlight stream into the room. Looking in the mirror, I can see over my shoulder to where Aunt Jennie, the bride, is getting her hair done. She’s chatting animatedly with her hair stylist, head bobbing far more than I think is generally wise while getting one’s hair done. Over the hum of the hairdryers, I hear her say, “I went upstairs just for a few minutes—” and I smile to myself, because I know what story she’s telling. She met Bart, her fiancé, at a swing dancing class at their favorite coffee shop (because of course the coffee shop is an event space too). She was there for a farmer’s group, but she joined the swing dancing session for a few minutes, and Bart told her afterwards that that was when he first saw her: while she was dancing, the biggest smile on her face, filled with an excitement that made Bart think, I have to meet her!
A bell tinkles as the door opens, just out of my peripheral vision. Cheerful voices greet each other; the employees must know the newcomer well. I resist the urge to crane my head and see who it is. I wouldn’t know anyone here anyway. I know very, very few people in Carrollton, Ohio, and the few that I do play some part in Aunt Jennie’s wedding.
The stylist doing my hair comes to my rescue. “That elderly gentleman who just walked in,” she says, quietly, so only I will hear. “You probably can’t see him.”
“No,” I agree, only just managing to avoid shaking my head.
“He’s so sweet,” she says. She sticks another bobby pin in my hair. “He’s a hundred and four, I think.”
My eyebrows shoot up. “Wow.” The number strains credulity, but then, stranger things have happened in this world.
“He’s a regular. His son brings him in here every month or so.” The stylist twists another lock of my hair into place and reaches around me for yet another bobby pin. I never knew hair could hold so many pins.
“He… comes to get his hair styled?” I ask doubtfully. A vision flashes before my eyes of a balding old man having a few wisps of hair combed out.
The stylist chuckles. “No, he gets a pedicure. He’ll be excited to hear y’all are getting your hair done for a wedding, though. He loves it when people come in for weddings. One time—” (Another bobby pin) “—he brought in a photo album from his wedding in 1945. Eighty-one years ago. Can you imagine that?”
- The end of the second World War. I surreptitiously scribble the subtraction on my palm with a finger tip. He would have been what, twenty-three? Well, I guess that settles it: unless my stylist has the dates wrong, that gentleman back there is definitely in his hundreds.
“No,” I say honestly. I can’t imagine that. Eighty-one years is far longer than I’ve been alive.
“All the photos were black and white,” she continues. “He couldn’t tell us what color the dresses were, or the decorations, or anything. But he kept coming back to the photos of his late wife and saying, ‘Wasn’t she just the most beautiful bride?’” In the mirror, I see her smile fondly at the recollection.
“There,” she says after a moment, sticking one more bobby pin in my hair. “Let’s spray this, and then you’re good to go.”
I thank her and admire my princess hair in the mirrors before sliding out of the chair and moving to the waiting area in the middle of the room. I have to say, I think my hair is gorgeous. Obviously I can’t take credit for it, but it’s nice to feel so elegant. Everyone else loves it, too.
I sit down in a waiting-room armchair next to my grandmother, who’ll be the next to get her hair done, so she’s not in the waiting area for very long. Around us, the buzz and hum of the hair salon rises and falls. Across the room, my sister grins at me in the mirror as she gets her hair curled. My grandmother takes the seat I was sitting in and starts having her hair done in an updo. In the nail bar behind me, the elderly gentleman and his son chat with an employee.
A few other customers come and go. Do they wonder at how busy the salon is on a Thursday morning? I doubt many people usually come at this time. Maybe that’s why the elderly gentleman schedules his pedicure now. I hope we’re not disrupting his quiet morning.
My sister Emmie finishes getting her hair done: a half-up hairdo with ringlet curls and a gold hair vine, on-theme with the hair accessories Aunt Jennie picked out for us bridesmaids.
“Ooh, princess hair!” I say, laughing.
Emmie laughs too, raising an eyebrow. “Um, Sofie, have you seen your hair?”
“Yeah, she showed me the back in a handheld mirror. Yours is very…” I search for a good description. “Elvish,” I finish.
“Thanks.” She perches on the chair next to me. “I have to be careful not to lean back too far, I’m worried I’ll mess it up.”
I smirk and shrug. “I’ll be fine as long as I don’t lean back in the car.”
Emmie wrinkles her nose at me. I grin.
Before too long, I am singing under my breath once again. With the noise of hairdryers and half a dozen conversations taking up the airspace, nobody’ll hear me, right?
Wrong. Of course. Emmie hears, and she takes the song up too. “I wished for cinematic love/ Or some approximation of it/ Like somebody else’s bravery/ Could ever be the thing to save me…”
Have I mentioned how much I love Sara Bareilles’s music? We’re obsessed. Emmie has a much better head for lyrics than I do (seriously, her lyric memory is magic), but by now I’ve sung the songs from this album enough to have nearly all the lyrics memorized. Especially “A Love Story,” because it’s been stuck in my head recently. I learned “Say Leave” first, but I keep coming back to “A Love Story” just because it’s so beautiful. “My bright future knows I’m starin’ at her/ And she never asks about the glory/ She just wants a love story…”
Aunt Jennie has her back to us, but in her mirror I can see her laughing at something her hair stylist says in response to her story. She lights up around her fiancé in a way I’ve never seen her light up before. Even thinking about him makes her giggly like this. Emmie and I watch her together for a few minutes before we go back to singing under our breaths. We’re probably the only people I’ve met who have this habit of singing all the time. We were surprised to find out the other day that most people don’t always have a song stuck in their heads. How do you live life without a mental soundtrack?!
When Aunt Jennie’s hair and makeup are finally finished, she’s breathtaking. Hair pulled back in a bun, with a gold and pearl headband and even a dusting of glitter—she looks like she stepped out of a fairy tale. What really makes her shine, though, is her joy. She comes to sit with us, her smile so wide it must hurt, and we fall to chatting about nothing in particular. Hairstyles. Music. Fairy tales.
I hear footsteps behind me, accompanied by a scraping sound like moving a chair across the floor. I twist in my seat and glance up to see an old man, stooped over a walker, shuffling towards the door. He’s led by a middle-aged man—presumably this is his son.
The old man smiles slowly and says goodbye at all the employees on his way out. His face is wrinkled and drooping, spotted with age, but happiness still shines in his eyes. He creaks to a stop beside Aunt Jennie’s chair.
“Dad,” his son says, “these ladies are here getting their hair done for a wedding.”
Oh, right, the hair stylist said he’d like that. We smile politely up at him, waiting for his response.
The old man takes a second to process what his son said before he turns to my aunt and says slowly, voice a cracking warble, “I got married, years ago. I was twenty-three and my wife was seventeen. We were so happy,” he adds wistfully.
Emmie and I exchange glances. Seventeen? 1945 was a different time, that’s for sure.
“Fifty-nine years of marriage,” his son says, nodding.
“And you know,” the old man says, quite as if we do, “it was funny, I met her at a club. I used to sing back then, you know.”
We don’t, of course, but why point it out? He’s telling us a family story. I bet he’s used to telling it to people who already know the whole thing.
“I was singing one Saturday night and from the stage, I saw her in the crowd. She was just lovely. She was a twin, you know,” he adds as an afterthought. “But she was much prettier than her sister. She got all the beauty. You know, I saw her, and I thought, I have to meet her!”
In my mind’s eye, I try to imagine the old man as he must have been, eighty-some odd years ago. Taller, his back unbent by the weight of the years and cares between now and then. Voice confident and clear as he stands on a raised stage singing into a microphone, the sort we’d call old-fashioned now. Stage lights shine on him, illuminating the dust motes in the air and turning them golden. He looks out into the crowd, darkened by the very brightness of the lights that shine on him, and sees a girl.
How he sees her with the lights shining on him, I don’t know, but he does. She almost shines herself, she’s so enraptured with the music. Of course she sees him, since he’s on the stage—she’s watching him!—and for a second they catch each other’s eyes.
“I couldn’t talk to her that day,” the old man says, “because I had to go once I’d finished the set. But I kept hoping she’d be there the next weekend. Then when I got there for my first set that weekend, the manager came up to me, and you know what the first thing he said was? ‘There’s a girl here asking to talk to you!’” The old man laughs, voice breaking a little. “And it was her!”
None of us quite know what to say to that. Fifty-nine years. Fifty-nine years built from one glance exchanged in a crowded room.
The old man sighs and starts to go, then stops and turns back to Aunt Jennie. He says something to her in his wavery voice, low and indistinct enough that I can’t tell what. She smiles.
“Thank you,” she murmurs.
As he walks toward the door, we hear him say to his son, “Wasn’t she just the most beautiful bride?”
We watch the door for a while and listen to the noise of the salon: the hairdryers, the chatter, the laughter. Eventually we turn back to our own conversations—as always, with singing sprinkled in.
He stared up at the heavens
And the tears rolled down his face
He told me I was living proof of her to him that very day
It took my breath away with sadness
And I held it to my chest
And I let it break me open and be blessed
Be blessed
– “A Love Story,” Sara Bareilles
