When anyone in town needed help, they contacted Rocky Germain. Contained within a face and body almost supernaturally ordinary lived a soul that could only exist above the fray of everyday human existence. No thorny situation, no tangle of emotion, no crosshairs of human dilemma brought forth any doubt or hesitation. It’s all about self, Rocky counseled again and again. Deep-dive knowing and loving self. Until you figure out that part, you’re stuck in someone else’s story.

Rocky had been through everything firsthand. Orphaned, ever-unlucky in love, escaping violence, jousting with poverty, addiction, phobias. It had all coalesced into a soul at peace with the human condition and a breadth of celestial wisdom that seemed, like the universe, to be ever-expanding. Rocky shared this freely and unassumingly, so it wasn’t hard to get the help you needed, though you might have to wait a bit for her next opening. The beauty shop was always busy, and her chair the busiest.

Rocky was indispensable to her considerable following. Cheaper and better than any therapist, and the outstanding haircut or highlights you got out of it, too, was almost beside the point. Rocky also ministered to a handful of soft-cheeked, white-haired men who shambled across the street from the nursing home. One told her he simply wanted to be touched by a woman who isn’t a caregiver or doctor. After that, she let him—but only him—call her Racquel, her birth name and his long-departed wife’s. When he closed his eyes while she trimmed his sparse halo of hair, she said nothing and took as long as she could stretch the time.

The roar of the hair dryers, whoosh of the wash basins, and constant chatter among the stations usually provided the cover that made conversations with Rocky private enough for the gut-spilling troubles our wobbly souls brought to her. But then there came that one day.

This day.

In a fluke moment, the dryers all stopped and the wash taps cranked off within seconds of each other. The moment when falls that startling quiet in which you don’t mean to eavesdrop; you never mean to. The fluke moment when Rocky’s voice, soft but firm, carries beyond the customer in her chair. The one we know has a two-timing husband.

We all strain to look like we aren’t straining to hear.

“It’s her story,” Rocky avers. She doesn’t have to name the otherness of her. “Get out of her story. Even if you have to pity her to do it.”

Rocky and her silent client lock eyes in the mirror. “You value truth. She doesn’t. She lives in lies.” Rocky sections off the hair, the comb carving impossibly straight lines. True North. Equator. “She lies to you. She lies to him. She lies to herself. Perhaps she doesn’t even know what truth is.”

Taking a razor to her client’s hair, Rocky’s hands move with a graceful sweeping motion that angles the ends of the hair as it falls in a flowing sheet to the shoulders. “I went through this, too, you know. Easy to blame her, or him, but it was really about me discovering self.” She pauses for a few moments, considering, then twists small sections of hair near the face and runs the razor outside to inside, eyeballing the graduated effect. “Very interesting process. Lots of work needed, buried stuff from childhood. Always feeling second best. Finding endless faults in myself. Downplaying my accomplishments. Then one day I looked at my children, and something in me whispered, ‘Hypocrite.’ It was true. I would never allow them to think such things of themselves! How could I love them unconditionally when I didn’t love myself much, let alone unconditionally? Well! I asked that whisper, what do I do now? It said: ‘Grow.’ It wasn’t about her or him, who they loved or didn’t love. It was about me learning to love me. That had to be the root of any decision I made. About anything. Then, and since.”

Rocky’s client tips her eyes upward, examining the ceiling. “I haven’t been truthful with myself either,” she says.

“Who is? How can we be?” Rocky soothes. “It’s always going to be a work in progress.” She puts down the razor and picks up the thinning shears, clicking them several times, like punctuation. “Now, about that Other Woman…”

Rocky doesn’t notice that this has become a group session, all ears in the shop tuned in on her even as eyes stay averted. Her foot pumps the chair, lowering us all down slowly.

“Get out of her story.”

I sneak a look in the mirrors, around the shop, faces reflected at each station. Beauticians and customers alike. How eerie it is that they all wear the same expression. There but for the grace of God go I.

And the thing is, I can’t tell the wives from the Other Women. This is where we come when we need help. We are all one in the grace of Rocky’s station.

*

Originally published in The First Line, Winter 2025
Author retains all rights.

The First Line mission statement:
The purpose of The First Line is to jump start the imagination–to help writers break through the block that is the blank page. Each issue contains short stories that stem from a common first line; it also provides a forum for discussing favorite first lines in literature. The First Line is an exercise in creativity for writers and a chance for readers to see how many different directions we can take when we start from the same place.

 

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