More Than Vanity
Sharon Pafistis has spent her whole life learning that what people call vanity is really currency — the small, careful trade by which a battered woman buys back the look of being whole. She got good at the exchange in a Cornish tearoom, better at it in a Truro salon, and built a business on it in Hobart that women came to be heard in as much as styled. She married a man she barely knew, picked a lock for the first time at forty-two, and discovered an appetite for the wrong things she has never quite put down.
Sharon learned the trade twice: once from her mother, who ran a tearoom on the Cornish coast and understood that hospitality was a kind of architecture, and once from her grandmother, a retired seamstress who sat her in front of old films and showed her how a hairstyle could be a small, deliberate lie a woman told the world about herself.
Truro made her a stylist. An Australian builder made her a wife inside two years and took her to the other side of the world. Hobart gave her two daughters, a glass-walled mansion above the harbour, and a salon called Serenity where divorcees and grieving mothers paid for an hour of being looked at properly and never said so out loud.
Then her husband walked out one July morning and didn't come back, and the composed woman the detectives interviewed turned out to be someone neither they nor she had met before.
He came back to her, eventually, in a settlement she had not chosen and could not leave. She still opens the chair each morning. Some of the women who sit in it now have their families intact; others are putting themselves back together from much less. She tends them with the same hands that once picked a stranger's lock, and she has stopped pretending the woman who does the tending and the woman who did the picking are two different people.
