I do the back first, and then around the sides.

She needs the curls kept long down from the ear, as Pierre-Auguste Renoir liked to do (you could look it up) to sharpen her profile and make her face narrower.

I’m good at this. So far, she’s thrilled. Well, pleased.

Yes, I’m cutting her hair.

I’ve been my bride’s dilettante hairdresser and manicurist since the pandemic ended her regular appointments, and I’m getting good at it.

If it weren’t for social distancing, I would consider getting my license, so I could do house calls. Does your manicurist do house calls? I don’t think so.

I also do her eyebrows and trim her nails, just the fingers; her podiatrist does her feet. I haven’t gotten to serious manicuring or coloring yet, but I’m looking forward to choosing the colors.

I did this in my theater days for impoverished actor friends. (The hair, not the colors.)

After a time, other actor friends paid me to cut theirs. It was an easy standard cut. Every guy wanted to look like Cary Grant.

I’ve considered charging her two bucks for this, but then she controls the money in our slender accounts, and if I can’t get the latest iPhone, how would I get $2?

Hard times demand hard choices. You know, Stella Artois has raised the price on the 12-bottle case. Being an elitist can be expensive.

Some beauticians post a notice that masks at their shops are optional. In other words: abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Optional? Are ventilators optional?

This is hard. It’s still embarrassing to remember that when COVID bloomed, I overreacted.

Out of an overabundance of panic, I dropped my barber and bought an expensive hair “styling” kit, and started performing sonatas on my silver waves. Don’t try this at home; it’s not for amateurs.

At the beginning of the panic, when numbers started surging, my daughters, who pay over $200 to have their hair done, insisted that I stay out of small shops with others in the next chair, sniffling and coughing, like that.

After two such “stylings,” I looked like I was having my hair cut by John Gotti’s prison barber.

After months of looking like I had mange, I crawled back to my 30-year relationship with my “stylist,” who had become super cautious.

These days I sneak in his backdoor at the end of the day, he styles me, and I sneak back out. Now I look more like an elderly George Clooney.

My work is finished.

She, who has let her beige curls gently slide in to the color of rainwater in a silver bowl, is back to looking like an older Shirley Temple, with a bounty of twisty curls.

She sits quietly, as the morning sunlight waltzes softly into our home. She’s kept her eyes closed throughout the work, but now she opens just one, and it’s full of light, love and gratitude.

Now I know why Renoir loved his women.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer. 

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