How My Grandmother's Beauty Parlor Shaped My Life

Alexis Calabrese shares how she found comfort (and love!) in a haze of Aqua Net and lots of hugs.

Children weren't encouraged at the Beauty Palace, but when I was a kid, still toddling around in Mary Janes, I spent quite a bit of time there. The Beauty Palace was my grandmother's salon in Lincroft, New Jersey, the kind of place where women went for weekly sets, perms, and rinses. There was no extra charge for the gossip that flowed all day long just like the strong coffee brewed in the back room. My maternal grandmother, Marion — "Mommom" to me — worked six days a week, closing the shop at 5:30 sharp before cashing out the register, folding the last stack of towels and locking the door.

The Beauty Palace had a sophisticated, kid-free vibe, but as the boss's granddaughter, I had a golden ticket. I'd follow her around the shop, periodically pocketing little tokens from the stylists: brightly colored combs from their drawers and candies from bowls at their stations. Between customers, Mommom would sit me down in her section, drape a pink cape across my shoulders and clip spongy rollers into my straight brown hair.

"Those highlights are like natural henna. You're the real deal, my beauty cutie." Then she'd give me a quick shot of Aqua Net and pin a flower behind my ear. I loved watching her work, the blur of her strong hands as they teased out curls or snipped away at a wet head. I was lulled by the orderly routine, soothed by the sequence of tasks, including the job Mommom gave me. At the end of the day, I used a magnet shaped like a lollipop to pick up rogue hairpins that had fallen to the floor. The pins stuck with a satisfying click. When I was done, Mommom shook them from the magnet into an old cigar box. As she sterilized the pins in hot, soapy water so they could be reused the next day, I sat on the counter next to the huge sink, listening to her stories. On our way out, after everything was done, I tucked the magnet into a vase at the front desk, where it would stay until my return.

When my grandfather retired, so did Mommom. They moved to South Jersey, where she became a traveling stylist, curling and setting customers' hair in their own kitchens. She set up beds in the guest room for all the grandkids, including my brother and me. It became our second home, an escape from our house in Westchester County, New York, where we were under the siege of our parents' divorce. Their split was ugly, long, and heated, the kind that swallows history and spits it back in ruins. Whispers of our family's demise wound their way around town, into the schoolyard and playgrounds, gripping me with a shame that took years to shrug off.

My grandparents hated every second of it and made regular trips to see us. Mommom made breakfast, walked us to the bus stop and put dinner on the table every night. She swept cobwebs from dark corners and put fresh flowers in vases. But she did not coddle. When I told her some kids had teased me about my "broken" home, she shooed away my self-pity with a wave. "I've seen broken plenty of times," she said, locking her arm with mine. "Trust me, there's nothing broken here."

When school ended each year, my brother and I escaped to the piney woods of my grandparents' yard in South Jersey. On sunny days, we went to local orchards to pick peaches and blueberries and then drove to Point Pleasant, on the shore, for clams and mussels. In New York, I hated helping in the kitchen, but in Jersey, I had my own apron. I learned how to cook with Mommom's cast-iron skillet, how to carefully drop corn fritters into sizzling oil, stir chowder, roll dough. There were always cousins around for dinner — aunts and uncles, too — and during those meals, I never saw my grandmother sit down. She ladled food, wiped spills, and kissed stained cheeks, moving around the table like she used to move around her shop, eyes everywhere, hands flying, never missing a beat, like a conductor making music from random notes, coaxing a song from discord.

On Saturdays, she made her styling rounds. I carried her bag, a sturdy straw vessel decorated with splashy blue flowers and neatly packed with cigar boxes, each one holding something different — scissors, combs, pins, or pastel curlers. Her customers always put out treats for me, but watching my grandmother work was still the main attraction. Her fingers moved like lightning, twisting tufts of silver hair into tiny pin curls, then into perfectly patterned rows. There was no lollipop-shaped magnet for me to pick up pins with, but there was no need. She never dropped one.

Mommom's little house fell quiet the year my grandfather died. She started spending more time in New York, in our new house, with my new stepdad. I had my own issues with all the changes. As a high school freshman, I moved to Manhattan to live with my father, which distanced me from my mother, though not from Mommom. She sent money so I could buy bus tickets to visit her. We'd stay up late, telling new stories and shaking out old ones.

My life never settled, and I ended up bouncing back and forth between the city and my mother's house in the suburbs. As I made my way through high school, college, and the years after, it was Mommom who was my port in the storm.

In my early 20s, when I was starting my career in advertising, I brought Mommom to my hair salon in the city, where I dropped most of my paycheck on a cut. She loved all the new techniques and studied the stylists as they worked. "Can you imagine? An iron for straightening?" She held it in her hands, feeling the weight, imagining the possibilities.

As my career took off, she started to slow down, traveling less and seeing the doctor more. But she was still the person I called when things got rough. Every time I stumbled out of a breakup, lost a business pitch or fought with a friend, she was there. Even when confusion invaded and she called me late at night to see if I was picking up Chinese for dinner, I still relished the sound of her voice. Just the sound of it steadied me, like a strong hand at my back.

Eventually, Mommom moved into a nursing home. She had a roommate who spoke Spanish and a staff who never cared to know her name. One Sunday, she called to ask if I could send her some books. "Just something to pass the time," she said lightly. "Anything to pass the time."

I said I would, grabbed my coat, and headed across the bridge to Jersey.

I found her in the community room, sitting by herself, picking through coupons. The sight of her poring over the slippery guts of the Sunday paper froze me in place. She looked up, saw the tears glowing in my eyes and calmly shuffled me out to the hallway, where she smoothed my hair behind my ears, instinctively checking for split ends.

"Sweetheart, it's OK. I'm fine. Now, let's go to my room, where you can tell me all about that big job of yours." She looked up and down the hallway. "One question." A smile shone behind her brown eyes. "Where the hell am I?"

When Mommom died, I was left with a knot of heartache that loosened over time, but never quite dissolved. There are moments when I hear her voice, like when I'm brushing my daughter's hair and the light bounces just right: "You can't pay for that color, honey. There's not a bottle on Earth that can capture that!"

Over the years, I've learned to live without her by keeping her memory close. I tell her stories to my kids, freshening up details and pointing out pictures in dusty photo albums.

And then, a few years ago, while I was clearing out my uncle's attic, Mommom and I met again.

My cousin Ashley found the straw bag. The turquoise flowers were still bright, but the straps were worn and the buckles pockmarked. Inside, a stack of cigar boxes, each one packed with rattail combs, curlers or pins, lay intact.

"What's this?" Ashley was holding the lollipop.

"A magnet," I said. "I used it to pick up bobby pins at Mommom's shop."

I turned it over in my hands, recalling pink walls and leather chairs. I smelled the heady scent of Aqua Net, heard the hum of hairdryers muffling Mommom's voice as she put the stick in my hand and kissed my cheek.

"Off you go, my beauty cutie," she whispered in my ear. "Off you go."

This story originally appeared in the July 2015 issue of Good Housekeeping.