Salon de Belleza

SALON DE BELLEZA
Robyn Mundy
Time seemed liquid and endless in her twenties. Now Jordan’s thirty-nine, counting every
minute like a timer clicking down to zero.
She sits at the mirror bristling beneath her fringe of wet bangs. She made a nine
o’clock appointment with Carla so she’d be out of the salon by eleven, plenty of time to
spare. A bead of water trickles down the bone behind her ear, drips onto a towel wrapped
so tightly around her neck it threatens to choke her. Jordan draws her hand from beneath
the cape to rub at the line of damp skin. She pulls at the towel but the damn thing won’t
budge, taut inside the neck of the cape and held firm with double-studs. A straitjacket
ready to strangle her if she even tries to fight it.
Lily sweeps hair from the booth beside her. “You know Carla. She’ll never change. I
make your appointment for nine; I wash your hair and get you ready—she won’t walk
through that door until after nine-fifteen.” Jordan’s startled by her own reflection in the
mirror, her mouth and nose pursed into a scowl. Another of the hairdressers casts Jordan
a conspiratorial wink. Jordan makes a conscious effort to loosen her shoulders and smile.
Her husband says she’s beautiful when she smiles. Now, with a straggle of red hair flat
around her head she looks like a wet Irish setter. Behind her, the salon could be mistaken
for an antique store—a Spanish candelabra stands at a tilt in the reception area, its $400
price tag marked down in increments over the last year. Next to it an armoire, doors open,
shampoos, conditioners, hair brushes, and nail varnishes lining its shelves. Estevan’s
latest acquisition for his salon, an eighteenth-century Guatemalan confessional,
commands the opposite side of the room where two male cosmetologist’s, their faces
masked like surgeons, grind smooth their women’s finger nails. When Jordan first came
to Albuquerque she wondered if the perfect nails she saw were the effect of a healthier
diet, perhaps more hours of natural light. As for her own ragged hands, she tries to
imagine acrylics standing up to tending plants at Manic Botanic. She can see it now, little
red platelets pinging off into the lavenders and Russian sage.
She says to no one in particular, “Carla drives me nuts.”

Lily pauses from sweeping. “Look at the bright side. She has improved. I have known
Carla since she was eighteen years old. She was worse when she was younger. M-u-ch
worse.” Jordan loves Lily’s melodic lilt. Her capacity to perpetually view life in a
positive light reminds Jordan why she likes Estevan’s Salon de Belleza. The
conversations she has with the older Hispanic woman remind her of the calming talks she
had with her Mom when the loneliness of living on the opposite side of the country got
her down. Lily makes Jordan feel like a daughter again.
The Sandias’ catch the July morning light. The radio towers at the crest glint and
glimmer against a thick blue sky, the most beautiful she’s ever seen. Expansive, an
endless ocean that makes her yearn for something more, something she doesn’t fully
understand.
She’s named Carla’s casualness about time ‘The New Mexico Factor,’ the state where
time refuses to be hurried. It’s been three years since Jordan and Mike left their home and
her family in Philly. Even now she has to stop herself from growing tense if she’s not
rushing to arrive ahead of schedule. She’ll be sitting at P. G. Chan’s ten minutes early for
a lunch date only to wait another twenty-five minutes for a girlfriend who’s invariably
had some minor catastrophe with the kids on her way out the door.
Lily leans on the broom handle to answer the phone. “Carla! Where you been? Your
nine-o’clock’s waiting. I washed her already.”
Lily wedges the phone in her shoulder, holds up ten fingers to Jordan. “Ten minutes,”
she mouths.
Jordan sighs and leafs through the pages of a fashion magazine designed for bulimic
eighteen-year-olds. Carla’s a trip. How would Charles Crissman like it if Jordan phoned
him at his office now, hair dryers and nail grinders whirring in the background: “Hey,
Doc’, my hairdresser’s running late. I’ll be late for our eleven-thirty. You won’t mind
waiting, will you?” How would that kind of patient-doctor initiative fly with Dr.
Crissman? Beneath the cape she slides her hand over the curve of her belly. Her forearm
brushes the under curve of her aching breasts. Jordan gives a deep sigh. Until ten weeks
ago she’d never been late in her life.

“Ooh, Carla!” Lily exclaims, while Carla drapes herself over the reception counter as
though she has all the time in the world. “Oh my, just look at it!” Lily’s enthusiasm for
Carla’s new ring from her boyfriend irritates Jordan. She sees it as a kind of betrayal, the
same as when her sister complains about her husband in one breath only to make lame
excuses for him the next. When their mother died last year, he wouldn’t even let Rachel
go with Jordan to the funeral home to see the body.
“He thinks it will upset me, Jordan.” For all that Jordan grumbles about Mike, she’s
never had to live with an autocrat—no matter how solicitous Rach’ claims her husband to
be.
Jordan checks her watch, envisions how the morning will unfold. She’ll leave the
salon with none of the highlights she came for, she’ll fly down Menaul, arrive at
Crissman’s office only to sit in his waiting room another twenty minutes until he’s ready
to confirm what she already knows. What she doesn’t know is how to face her husband
with the news. She wonders which is worse: a domineering husband like her brother-inlaw,
or a woman lke herself, showing total disregard for her husband’s wishes. Mike will
think she’s lost her mind.
“The ring is all shiny and new,” Lily gushes. “It sparkles like the real thing, hey,
Estevan?” An antique mirror trimmed with gold-sprayed fruit sets her son’s booth apart
from the rest. Lily’s voice is barely audible above the drone.
“Huh, Mom?” Estevan removes the threading needle he holds between his teeth.
From where he stands with his back to Jordan, Estevan could be sewing the hair
extensions right through his customer’s scalp. His woman leans down in the chair with
her nose to her knees, her blonde mane dragged across her head. The line of twine and
woven knots across the back of her head looks like something from a Frankenstein
movie.
“Carla’s new ring from her boyfriend. It’s as shiny as a diamond. The next one he
gives to Carla will be the real thing.” The nail grinder halts to a ringing silence.
Carla holds her hand out. Estevan gasps reflexively, placing a free hand on his heart
as he might if a saintly apparition appeared in the salon’s parking lot. Beneath spiked
black hair Estevan’s face beams like a cherub’s. “Oh my Gaa-ard. Caa-rla! It’s beau-u-

u-tiful.” Jordan sits tall in her chair to peek. The platinum band with its chunky knotted
strands is the last thing she’d have picked for Carla’s tiny hand.
“It’s like a little lock.” Estevan teases, wagging a finger of mock warning.
Lily leans over the counter. “Carla’s new boyfriend has her locked in his heart.”
“You guys . . .” Carla blushes.
Estevan looks bedazzled by Carla’s beauty. Her skin has a copper-bronzed sheen, her
wide brown eyes accentuated by dark lashes and eyeliner. “Girl,” he winds a lock of her
hair around his finger, “when are you going to let me do something with your hair?”
Carla dismisses him with a wave of her comb.
Estevan adopts a stance of mock helplessness, looks to Jordan for support. “Carla’s
had the same haircut in the twelve years she’s been working here. It’s time for a change,
Carla. Big hair is so eighties.” Carla waits until he turns back to his needlework before
fretting in the mirror at her mass of brown curls.
Jordan puts a finger inside the rim of the cape and yanks at it, her face flushing red as the hand of the
wall clock jumps forward three full minutes.
“Too tight?” Carla unbuttons the cloak and eases it back. Jordan shakes her head like
a dog let loose from its collar.
Estevan calls over his shoulder. “I know a good jeweler who can size that ring down
for you, Carla. You should wear it on your ring finger—as a symbol of love.” He admires
the emerald he wears on his own hand, a large square-cut stone set in a heavy gold
surround. Over the winter holiday Estevan flew to Las Vegas to elope. He still has the
wedding photos pinned on the board in the salon: he and Jeff at the Luxor in matching
suits; the newly-weds with their arms linked as they toast Moët & Chandon vintage
champagne. Estevan sports his new emerald while Jeff opts for a simple gold band.
Jordan twists her own gold band around its finger, the precious metal dulled from a
decade of marriage.
Not soon enough, the hairdressers return their attention to hair. A lull falls over the
salon while the background music of Sunny 95.1 love songs drifts across the room.
Working alongside each another, Carla and Estevan hum off-key at slightly varying paces
to Ricky Martin’s “Amor.”

“There!” Carla finishes trimming her bangs and blasts Jordan’s face with jet of air.
“Are we doing a straight color, or some extra highlights as well?”
Jordan glares at her wrist watch long enough for Carla to understand the problem. “I
need to leave by eleven for an appointment. I told you that when I phoned. There’s no
time for highlights!”
“Suit yourself.” Carla pouts with the petulance of a teenager, walking off to the small
room where they mix the color and dry the towels. She calls from the door, “There’s no
need to panic. I’ll have your color on in ten minutes. You’ll be out of here on time.”
Carla can be a princess. Still, strange how a simple reassurance is all it takes. Simply by
feeling she has control of time again, the tension drops away.
Outside on Menaul, a truck driving by the salon sounds its horn in three long blasts.
“That man never misses a day!” Lily and Estevan sing out in unison.
Carla returns with the color. “He’s consistent.”
To the truckdriver’s ongoing lament, Carla chose not to marry him. He’s the ex-
boyfriend she split up with years ago in favor of another man, before her current beau,
Eric-the-cheesy-ring-bearer. Carla’s ex drives east along Menaul this time each day;
when he passes the salon he pumps the truck’s horn in three mournful blasts: a daily
tribute to Carla to remind them both what might have been.
Carla winds Jordan’s hair into a clasp. “Did your husband like your haircut last time?
Did he like the copper tips?”
“Her highlights still look good,” Lily croons. Jordan suspects a conspiracy among the
staff at Estevan’s Salon de Belleza.
She gives Carla a wry smile, the awkward moment between them blowing over. “He
liked them well enough. Once I pointed them out.”
“Men.” Carla dabs the color through her hair. “Their brains work differently than
ours. They don’t notice the things we do.”
When she thinks about her husband’s blinkered vision Jordan can’t help feeling a
twinge of smugness rolled inside her angst. She knows it’s cruel. But for all his intellect
and worldliness, Mike can’t see what’s in front of his nose, his own wife, a woman with
new copper highlights going crazy before him. All she wants is to feel she can talk to
him, to tell him she’s sad, to say what she wants. Instead, he sits at the breakfast table

absorbed in the paper, presenting her with a rundown of outbreaks in the Middle East,
updating her on the environment’s latest dismal statistics. What was it this morning? The
Japanese whaling fleet set to annihilate the sei whale within five years. There was a time
when they both would have pored over the paper. Since losing her mother she’s turned
into a porous vessel unable to contain her own sorrow, let alone take on the any of the
world’s.
These days she’s doing well to tear out the crossword before Mike heads off with the
paper under his arm to do God-knows-what at the lab’. He leans down to kiss her hair,
“You know I can’t talk about my projects.”
Mike’s regard for privacy, anybody’s, borders on excessive. She could stretch his
body on a rack and he still wouldn’t betray a confidence. “You missed your vocation,”
she says. “You would have made the perfect spy.”
He kisses the curve of her neck. “See you tonight when I get back from Moscow.”
A hairdryer whirs. Carla combs through the last of the color and turns the timer to
thirty minutes. Jordan inhales a waft of perming solution. The acrid smell unsettles her.
Lily picks out a tootsie roll from the bowl on the counter, pads over the Persian rug,
past the two leopard-skin chairs, and bumps the Spanish candelabra. Lily sits in the
empty chair between Carla’s booth and her son’s.
“How’s your friend in Arizona doing?” Carla asks.
“She’s still having a hard time with it.” Lily chews on the small log of candy. “The
loss of a son is a terrible burden to bear.” She turns her head in the mirror and pulls at a
wisp of hair. “My hair is growing too long.”
“We’ll fix it after lunch, Mom.” Estevan brushes his woman’s blonde extensions in
long, animated sweeps. Not a thread or a knot in sight.
“My friend and her son stay out in Quartzsite,” Lily tells Jordan as if the dead son
might still be part of the living. “A snake was curled up on a ledge. When my friend’s son
stepped onto the rock to climb up, he reached to the rock above. The rattler struck him on
the arm.” Lily pinches a fold of skin. “My friend is a long way from the hospital. She
doesn’t have a cell phone, nothing. She drove down the I-10 fast, but when she got to the
Emergency Room, he was already passed out. His arm was all puffed up like a big purple
balloon. They were too late to save him.”

“That’s so sad.” Carla rubs color remover at the stray dabs turning dark on Jordan’s
forehead.
“They killed the snake,” Lily adds. “My friend is having it made into a belt as a
tribute to her boy.”
“Bless her.” Carla’s face folds into a grimace. Jordan’s breaks to a stifled smile.
That’s why she keeps coming to the salon. It’s the people stories she loves. People and
families. It’s Mike’s prophesies of global doom that leave her cold. The latest wave of
terrorism all but tipped him over the edge. He’s constantly reminding their friends what a
screwed-up world they live in. It’s his justification for not wanting to bring a child into
the world. In ten years of marriage, he’s never once asked Jordan—not really
asked—whether she still feels as indifferent to the idea of a family as she did when they
met.
He doesn’t see her silent rebellion. Last night, for the first time in weeks, she wanted
to make love. He touched her body gingerly, as if sensing a shift he couldn’t interpret, but
wouldn’t ignore. Those poignant glimpses of his intuition remind Jordan that she loves
him still; they’re the moments she knows he still sees her. Had he asked her last night she
would have shared her secret. Instead she waited for him to discover it on his own, laid it
out before him, her naked body spread across the sheet, skin damp from showering. He
cupped her breast with his hand, traced each nipple with his tongue. He stroked the slight
curve of her belly, again and again. With each touch her body braced, she waited for him
to react, to say something, anything. When the changes in her body passed unnoticed, she
yielded to the strange tenderness of his touch, physical desire made urgent by the rise of
her own despair.
At eleven-o’clock, Jordan stands at the counter while Lily writes up her next
appointment. Five weeks, August 23rd. The day before Jordan fortieth birthday. By then
she’ll be fifteen weeks.

A wizened woman with a large insulated food bag pushes open the door of the salon.
She stands less than five-feet tall, her neck leathered from sun and age.
“Mom, it’s the burrito-lady. Take out some money from the register.”
Lily greets the woman in Spanish and the burrito-lady shuffles to the counter, unzips
her blue bag and opens its lid. The woman speaks in Spanish, then turns to Jordan. She
switches to English. “I make them fresh myself. Sausage and bean, breakfast burritos,
carne adovarda. The carne adovarda are real spicy.”
Jordan peers at the neat stack of burritos, each hand-wrapped in aluminum foil. She
draws in the aroma of green chili, shredded beef, pork, spice. The woman pulls out a
burrito and holds it in the palm of her hand. She pats the silver wrapping. “They’re like
cute little prairie dogs, without arms and legs.”
Jordan steps back from the smell of food, perming solution, nail varnish remover.
Bile rises in her throat. She rushes to the rest room, kneels over the toilet and retches. At
the basin she rinses her mouth and wipes her face with one of the wash cloths rolled in a
wicker basket. She runs her hands and arms beneath cold water until the nausea subsides.
A soft rap on the door. “You okay in there?” Jordan opens the door and Lily steps in.
“You doing okay?”
“I’m pregnant.” It’s the first time she’s spoken the words aloud. Now it’s a reality
outside her thoughts. Now she has to face it.
“Ah. I remember when I was pregnant with Estevan. I was sick for months.”
“Great.”
“It’s all worth it. You wait and see. A child is a wonderful blessing.”
“My husband doesn’t want children. I haven’t told him.”
Lily stands quietly. “What do you want, Jordan?”
She can’t remember anyone asking her that in a long while. Her eyes flood with tears.
“Right now I’m not so sure.”
“Listen. Last Christmas when Estevan told me he was getting married. I tell him he’s
crazy; he better call 911 before he tells his Dad.”
“Your husband didn’t know Estevan was—”
“All I know is my husband was mad. He said bad things to my son. Bad things to
me.” Lily fingers the crucifix around her neck, caught in memory. “Anyway, after a while

he gets used to the idea. I tell him to look on the bright side: ‘It’s not that we are losing a
son; we are gaining another!’”
Jordan giggles through her tears.
“God has given you both a special gift, Jordan. That’s all that counts.”
Jordan wishes it were that easy.
Sun beats in through the car window. Jordan waits in the salon parking lot for a break in
the traffic. She turns up the air, checks the clock on the dash. She’ll be ten minutes late
for Dr. Crissman. She looks at the Sandia crest shimmering in the heat. She tries to
imagine the cool climate at 10,000-feet. It’s where she’d rather be, barefoot and carefree
among piñon and juniper.
Carla’s ex-boyfriend returns west along Menaul. As he drives by the salon he blurts
the truck’s horn in a long, sad drone. In the rear vision mirror Jordan catches Carla
sweeping around her booth. Carla pauses to throw the spurned lover a wave.
Jordan picks up speed on Menaul, reflecting on Lily’s words: A gift from God. Life
would be so straightforward with Lily’s unquestioning faith—to attribute life’s outcomes
to an all-encompassing Provider. Jordan knows it’s she, no greater entity, accountable for
the burst of life within. Twelve months ago she stopped taking birth control, an oversight
at first. In the rush of flying to Philly to get to her mother, she neglected to pack them.
She planned to begin again the next month but the packet stayed unopened in her bedside
drawer.
She knows why she couldn’t tell Mike. He’s always been the logical thinker out of
the two of them. He’d have swayed her decision, catalogued 101 good reasons not to
have a child. She already knows why she didn’t make the appointment with Dr. Crissman
after she missed the first month. Time has become her ally. At four weeks she didn’t trust
herself well enough. She might have given into it as a problem to be dealt with quietly,
the way she deals with everything too difficult to face aloud. A day off work, a trip to a
clinic, Mike never suspecting a thing. At ten weeks she visualizes shape and form. Her

easts ache. She runs the flat of her hand over a palpable curve and feels the tiny life as
real and as vital as her own.
Jordan makes a turn at the arrow. She’s scared to imagine how Mike will react.
She remembers their night’s lovemaking, the touch of his hand, his strange, aching
tenderness. To the south a cumulus cloud billows over the Manzanos, a great white sail
rising through the blue. Jordan pulls up sharp at the lights. There, right there, gazing at
that pregnant lush of white, she sees the conviction behind his silence. In ten years of
marriage he’s never broken a confidence. His excessive regard for other people’s privacy
extends to a wife whose secrets are hers to share. Jordan stares at the moving cloud,
wondering how long he’s known.