An 81-year-old woman with limp hair lies in an open coffin in one of the viewing rooms at a north-side funeral home. She’s wearing a navy blue double-knit dress and has a rosary laced through her fingers.
While waiting for the curling iron to warm up, Aletha thumbs through the pictures. Her job is to make a “head” resemble the person in the pictures as much as possible. “You should see some of the pictures I have to work from,” she complains. “I get green-card pictures from when they were 19. One woman who wasn’t quite all there had torn herself out of her own wedding pictures. Her husband brought me the fragments.”
About 14 years ago she met an ex-mortician who played piano and sang at a neighborhood bar, and they got to jabbering between sets. When he found out what she did for a living he suggested she consider doing dead people’s hair. There was good money in it, he said.
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The head was a youngish Latina who’d been a cancer patient and lost most of her hair. Still, she had an elaborate do, with lots of curls and hairpieces. Aletha had to make bangs out of one of the hairpieces, and she says that if it hadn’t been for the pillow the hair would have fallen off.
It’s 10 AM on Easter Sunday. Candy has left a note stuck to the front door: REMAINS ARE IN PREPARATION ROOM. The staff is gone. Few people get buried on the weekend these days because families don’t want to pay union grave diggers time and a half. But Aletha has keys to all four funeral homes.
When she’s finished the old woman’s hair looks fantastic. “This is the way she should have worn her hair,” Aletha says, spraying on an inordinate amount of hair spray. As she turns off the lights on her way out she says, “Another one bites the dust.”
