Read Online The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall - Free Book Online

place for years, even before she became Golden’s second wife. She had taken a keen interest in hair at age fifteen when she permanently lost all of her own. Her father, a man who managed to support three wives and eighteen children on a bricklayer’s pay, couldn’t afford the extravagance of a wig, so Nola had saved up her egg money and bought a book called The Wigmaker’s Art. With hair donated by her sisters, she practiced making her own extensions, weaves and full-wefted caps, all of which she sold as fast as she could make them. She learned a dozen different styles, even tried her hand at toupees and hairpieces, which turned old bald cowboys into screen idols overnight. The more wigs she made, the more hair she required, and so she began making house calls, offering a cut-and-style free of charge. Plural wives who had not cut their hair in their entire lives were suddenly jumping at the chance to be shorn at the skilled hands of Nola Harrison. Because Nola was engaged in a good cause—there was a significant number of women who had lost their hair to cancer or radiation poisoning or simple old age and needed a good wig—the priesthood council could make only feeble protests. As long as the hairstyles stay modest, none of them Marilyn Monroe haircuts or dye jobs, and the women don’t get into shenanigans like getting their nails painted, then I guess we can go along with it . Within a year Nola saved enough money to lease the old Anderson Building, which at one time had been the Tender Brothers Drugstore and Café. She dreamed of teaching other women from the valley to cut hair and make wigs, but it turned out she was the only hairstylist and wigmaker this part of the valley needed. Though the academy had never produced a single graduate, it provided, on Tuesdays and Thursdays and an occasional Saturday afternoon, a place where the town women could get a perm, where the plural wives could get a trim or shampoo, where any woman at wits’ end could go to get a break from the incessant demands of children and men.
    “Oh, we’re a bunch of desperadoes, all right,” Nola said now, her eyes as bright as brass tacks above her red bandana, her scissors going snick snick snick , the hammock of fat under her arm quivering. “But we do like to smell pretty.”
    Trish sat in one of the folding chairs along the wall to wait her turn. Next to her, a pile of old magazines a foot high threatened to slide to the floor. She flipped through a finger-worn copy of Life and wondered if a poisonous cloud of hair chemicals might be preferable to a handkerchief soaked with cathouse perfume. She’d come in wanting only a shampoo and trim for her big night tonight, maybe catch up on a little gossip, but now she felt on the verge of vomiting or passing out or both.
    Doing her best to breathe through her mouth, she shuffled through several more magazines until she came upon something unexpected: a Cosmopolitan whose cover featured a heavily made-up woman in ultra-tight tennis shorts and halter top standing in the face of a stiff breeze. Next to her head of feathered, windblown hair was the headline:
     
    OBSESSED WITH YOUR BREASTS?
    HOW TO DEAL WITH THOSE FEELINGS
     
    And below that:
     
    THE CRUEL LOVER: WHY ARE YOU
    DRAWN TO HIM? HOW TO FREE YOURSELF
    FROM HIS DEVASTATING ATTRACTION
     
    She wondered how long it had been since she’d seen a magazine like this, and how could such a thing have managed to end up in Nola’s reading pile? Flushed with adolescent guilt, she turned the pages filled with underwear advertisements: women in bra and panties having lunch, wearing fur coats, conducting board meetings, gazing thoughtfully out of windows. There was an article called “Alternatives to Bikini Waxing” and a column about the misunderstood affliction known as nymphomania.
    Along with the illicit thrill of reading about the newest Cleavage Enhancement Brassiere and the woman from Ohio who claimed to have sex thirty to forty times a