Bouffant Shave
The air in Betty’s Beauty Parlor was thick with the scent of hairspray and the hum of gossip. It was 1961, and Pam sat stiffly in the cushioned chair, her reflection staring back at her from the oversized mirror. Twice a week, like clockwork, she was marched in here by her husband, Carl, who had a very specific vision: Pam’s hair teased high into a pastel pink bouffant, a towering monument to his taste. She hated it—the sticky lacquer, the pins that jabbed her scalp, the way it made her feel like a doll on display—but Carl didn’t care. He’d grin at her in the evenings, patting her head like she was a prize poodle, saying, “That’s my girl. Perfect.”
Betty, the beautician, was Carl’s conspirator. A wiry woman with sharp eyes and a sharper tongue, she’d been doing hair in this small town since the war ended. She knew every wife’s secrets and every husband’s demands. With Pam, she took special care, her nimble fingers twisting and spraying until the bouffant was just right. But Betty didn’t stop at the hair. She’d taken to whispering in Carl’s ear after each appointment, her voice low and conspiratorial. “She’s borderline insolent, Carl,” Betty said one Tuesday, wiping her hands on her apron. “Doesn’t chat with the other gals. Doesn’t fit in. You’ve got a wild one there.”
Carl, a man of few words and fewer ideas, nodded gravely. Betty leaned closer, her voice dropping to a hiss. “You want her docile? Submissive? There’s ways, you know. Old ways. Regular discipline—backdoor discipline, if you catch my drift. It’ll break that spirit right down.” Carl’s eyes widened, then narrowed. He liked the sound of that. Control was his currency, and Pam, with her quiet sighs and fleeting glares, was slipping through his fingers.
It didn’t end with whispers. Betty had a back room, a cramped space behind a floral curtain where the real work happened. Pam was led there after her hair was done, her protests ignored. “Carl’s orders,” Betty would snap, shoving her forward. The first time, Pam’s cheeks burned with shame as Betty shaved her bare—every inch, front to back, with a dull razor and a smirk. “Gotta keep you proper,” Betty muttered, as if it were a moral duty. Then came the enema—a hot, soapy gallon pumped into her while she gripped the edge of a metal table, eyes squeezed shut. When it was over, after the humiliating expulsion, Betty produced a rubber plug. “In it goes,” she said, matter-of-fact, and Pam bit her lip to keep from crying out.
Carl had approved the plan, of course. Each month, Betty swapped the plug for a larger one, stretching Pam further, promising Carl it’d “tame her proper.” The sizes crept up—two inches, three, four—until Pam felt like she was being remade from the inside out. Betty predicted five inches soon, maybe more. “She’ll loosen up permanent-like,” Betty told Carl over the phone one night. “Muscles’ll give out. She’ll be in diapers by Christmas. That’s when they really break.”
Pam endured it all, her days a blur of shame and routine. The beauty parlor visits, the back room, the plugs—they became a grotesque rhythm. And yet, as the months wore on, the pastel pink bouffant stopped bothering her. It was just hair, after all. A silly, frivolous thing compared to the rest. When she caught her reflection now, she barely flinched at the towering confection atop her head. It was the least of her worries.
One evening, as Carl admired her hair and muttered about how “perfect” she looked, Pam sat silently, her mind elsewhere. The bouffant gleamed under the kitchen light, a pastel crown she no longer cared to fight. She’d lost something—dignity, maybe, or defiance—but in its place was a strange, hollow calm. The beauty parlor had won. Carl had won. And Pam? She was still there, plugged and primped, a shadow of herself in a world that didn’t care.
