Wares Beware

I saw Madeleine at the Bon Marche the other day. Her hair was a disaster. "What happened to you?!"

She shrugged. "You know those old houses . . . "

Non sequiturs have never been my bag of apples, so I probed further. "What do old houses have to do with hair? Where were you when it happened?"

"In the shower."

"And . . . ?"

"Well, I couldn't very well wear my glasses in the shower, now could I? With the steam and all." In the nature of noncommittal answers that one rated top of the list. A politician couldn't have done better.

One doesn't actually die of curiosity, of course, but I was close to it. "So what's in a shower that you need glasses to see? You pop in; you pop out. What's that got to do with your hair?"

"If I'd worn my glasses, I could have seen the skinny white tubes."

"Skinny white tubes?"

"Yeah. One was L'Oreal and the other was Clairol."

I thought about this for a moment. "Neither one of those should have bowdlerized your hair."

"You wouldn't think so." Madeleine ran short stubby fingers over the nearly bald area.

"So give. What actually happened?"

"The cosmetics had a major conflict with the hair products."

Madeleine was way out of my league. Cosmetics? Wearing lipstick is too much of a chore for me. "Why would you put cosmetics on your hair, anyways? Isn't that stuff supposed to go on your face? To make you look like a young hip-hop instead of a wrinkled old hag?"

"That's just the problem. The wrinkled old hag bit. But how was I to know? If both companies hadn't used the same packaging designer, I wouldn't have gotten confused."

"Let me guess . . . "

"There's no guessing about it. Poor eyesight might be an advantage when ignoring stuff you don't want to see, but it isn't worth a darn when you're standing in a steamy shower trying to read the small print on two containers which look remarkabley alike. Not that I thought much about it at the time. Just grabbed the first skinny white tube that came to hand and put a liberal amount on my hair. Wanted to remove the split ends."

I peered intently at Madeleine's head. "Well, it sure did that. What was in the tube?"

"Pure Retinol Line Eraser."

It was hard to contain my excitement. "But that's wonderful, Madeleine! If this Line Eraser will remove all your hair, just think what it will do for our wrinkles?"

"There could be a lot worse things than having a few age lines," she muttered as she walked away and headed towards a beauty salon.

"What could be worse than looking like a wrinkled old hag?"

"Looking like an ' 80's version of Sinéad O'Connor," she answered just before disappearing into the wig department.
Wares Beware © 2005 Chaeli Lee Sullivan