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The Color Wheel

by Ellen Swain

I sat with the black smock over my clothes, black plastic, smooth as a duck’s sheen of waterproof feathers, waiting for the toxic dark hair dyes to bead off the surface, and I look at the color wheel. The wheel is really a flat board filled with swatches of fake hair, all different colors. I view the menu, considering the choice for my next six weeks of hair color.

Sitting there, I see the middle, but I look to the left and I look the right, the purples, the greens, the pinks. Pink hair, bright pink hair, the pink on the edge of the color wheel, past the outer bounds of normalcy. I’ve coveted the bright color swatches for years, like an expensive pair of earrings in the jeweler’s window, too elaborate to wear every day and too pricey to buy oneself, a secretly coveted bauble.
I’m twenty years too late to be on the edge of the color wheel. At twenty I pierced my ears, without pain killers, with ice and a needle. I still have a lobe riddled with holes, a discreet reminder of rebellion, and thankfully no tattoos, or I’d be embarrassingly covering up Mayan Suns on my upper thighs during trips to the beach. We had no color wheels, just Dippity Doo to make my boyfriend’s Mohawk stand tall.

My old stylist told me when I moved to instruct my new colorist to stay in the neutral tones, the browns and auburns, the fives and sixes on a scale of ten — square in the middle of the wheel. I sat in her chair for the last time in late August, a final visit after I’d moved away on the Fourth of July and a final seat in her salon. She mixed the chemicals in three bowls and gathered chunks of hair and painted them with a brush and wrapped them in foil. Chunk of foil after chunk of foil wrapped my cream-laden hair until I resembled Medusa. With each painting, we wrapped up the strands of our friends’ lives. She gave me the update on my old boss at the public defender office and how his daughter now stood taller than him and had the long sleek legs of a dancer. And she told me about my ex-husband, whose hair she once tinted to the same shades of mine, revealing less about our desire to be twins than her highlight repertory.

“He’s starting a business with her. She’s moved in.” I’ve moved out and away. She moved in and because of my 3,000 mile commute to my old stylist’s chair, I’ve made our stylist part of his divorce spoils.

Forty is too old to walk to the edge of the color wheel, but not too old to walk to the edge of the country. I have to settle for migration and a feeling of awe for the 20-year-old stylist in training. She has a swath of pink hair in her dark, shiny black mane. As she washes my hair, I tell her that I love her color. We talk about entertainment. I explain that my partner and I like to cook dinner, play pool and read a book for an evening’s fun. She looks horrified, like someone being held under water. Her oxygen comes from clubs and cigarette smoke and drugs. Guess there’s a price to be paid for the far side of the color wheel.