See No Color (14 page)

Straightened, curled, re-curled, relaxed, weave. It was like a whole new language. I looked up at Mom, but her face only reflected my own questioning and uncertainty. I could see I would just have to pick an option and hope that it worked out; that was the best I could hope for.

“Relax the curl,” I said, almost in a whisper. I liked the way the word sounded:
relaxed
. My curls were tightly wound like small springs, and in my mind I could almost see them becoming new, unfamiliar, cascading down my back in dark waves. Mornings I would rise from bed and shake them out, shaking not just my head but my shoulders also, like those women in Pantene commercials. I would trade my pick for a brush, one with a shiny gold handle, and when I sat at my bureau, I would run the brush all the way through, scalp to back. The brush wouldn't catch on any nasty curls, any split ends, like my pick did now. As Naomi walked me to the salon chair, Mom stood there in the waiting area, watching us. I could almost hear her say, as she always did, “You never know how something will be if you don't try it.”

I sat down in the high swivel seat.

“Okay, let's get you going,” Naomi said. She threw a plastic sheet around my body, and snapped it at the neck. Mom waved at me from the waiting room, moving toward the door to go. Naomi removed my barrette, and hair sprayed out behind me like a lion's mane.

“Girl, you got a lot of hair,” Naomi said, with a laugh. She turned the pick over and began to divide my hair into sections using its sharp, pointed end.

My fingers clutched the armrests.

Naomi clipped the portion of my hair she had finished with a bright pink hair clip and started on another one.

“Does she know what to do with it?” she asked.

I closed my eyes. “Who?”

“Your mom,” said Naomi. “She's your mom, right? The woman who dropped you off?”

Does she know what to do with it?
“Yeah,” I said. “I … I guess so.” I willed my eyes open; I knew I needed to see what she was doing.

Naomi laughed. “You guess she's your mom, or you guess she knows how to do your hair?”

“She knew how to do it when I was little,” I said. “But now I do it.”

Naomi grabbed another hair clip and fastened it onto the section she had just finished dividing. Then she started on a new section, whipping my neck toward her. “And how do you do it?” she asked.

It wasn't at all like talking to Reggie; when he asked a question, it was like we were talking, not like I was an interesting and rare animal specimen.

“I dampen it with water every morning, then put on some hair gel,” I said. “Then I usually pull it back.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Gel isn't good for hair like yours. Dries it out. Use some kind of leave-in conditioner.”

Leave-in conditioner.
Where would I find it? I would look for it in the black hair care section of Walgreens. Boxes and boxes of products with photos of women with the very same cotton-candystyle hair as Naomi.

She was leaning me back, I think in an effort to get a better angle on my scalp. “You never had a relaxer before, have you?”

“Nope.”

“That's too bad,” she said, clipping the last section. “Could've saved yourself a whole lot of trouble combing out this mess.”

She need a black mother to tame that mess.

Naomi opened a violet package that had a smiling black girl with long, super straight hair across the front. I hiccupped.

“You okay?” Naomi asked. She was opening a container of something that looked an awful lot like shortening.

I hiccupped again.
I'm going to look beautiful.
“Yeah.”

She stirred the white, plastic-like substance with a small wooden spoon, unclipped one section, and then began to smear it across my roots. “You don't have any scabs or open sores or anything on your scalp, do you?” she asked.

I frowned. “No.”

“Okay, good,” she said.

In the mirror, I saw that her finely manicured hands were covered in translucent plastic gloves, and I wondered if that was because what she was putting on my head was toxic. She must have sensed my uneasiness because she said, “It's nothing to worry about—all the chemicals are safe. You just want to try to avoid getting them into anywhere they shouldn't be.” A fleeting image of Reggie's grandmom and her sparse hair came to me then, and I wondered if that was what your hair looked like after a lifetime of putting these “safe chemicals” on it.

The cream felt hot on my scalp, and it smelled like toilet bowl cleaner.

Naomi mashed the substance into a clump of hair and flattened it against my head with her gloves. “How does your head feel? Does it feel too hot?”

I shook my head. This was like a suicide sprint. I just had to get through it.

“Once you do it this one time, it's so much easier the next time, because you don't have to start all the way down at the roots,” she said, moving on to another section of my hair and smoothing it straight as she went.

My scalp began to burn, but I knew I couldn't say anything. Maybe I had some scabs or bruises or something that I didn't know about. I looked sideways; she was getting to the bottom of the container. It would soon be over.

“Okay, now just sit here for a few minutes,” said Naomi. She pulled a clear plastic cap over my head.

“Okay,” I said, and watched in the mirror as she walked over to the receptionist and began to talk about nails.

I reached over and opened my book, praising myself again for remembering to bring it. It was amazing how many people didn't see you at all if you were lost in a book, or pretended to be. After a few minutes, however, I noticed that I had read the same paragraph three times. Both of the women who had had Saran Wrap on their heads when I walked in were now getting their hair washed of the chemical cream that had apparently done its work. Their hairdressers were rinsing their scalps with the highest pressure water I had ever seen. It was so loud that they were almost shouting through the salon.

“What, so she think she better than her sister?”

“Well, you know she got that good hair and high yellow complexion. All the mens be after her.”

“Uh huh. But don't they got the same father?”

“Girl, you know she got that white daddy. She think she a child of Obama or something.”

Laughter.

“Calling herself ‘mixed' and all. Like there's some difference between the way white folks'll do a high yaller gal and a dark-skinned one.”

“Girl, you right. She 'bout to find that out.”

“Uh huh.”

“Black is black is black is black. Has always
been
black, and always
will be
. I don't care what no one says.”

“Everybody just got to think they better than someone else—'specially if they light. That's why we still can't get nowhere as a race.”

“Now that's some real talk.”

My ears were burning, and I concentrated intensely on the paragraph in front of me, wishing I could actually fall into the book. But it was futile; the language on the page could as well have been Russian for all I was understanding. Was it true? Did most mixed people think they were better than most black people simply because they were lighter and whiter? And what was the difference, the
important
difference anyway, between mixed people and black people? These women were saying that there really was none, that that was just something mixed people used to feel superior to black people, but I couldn't quite believe it.

I was sure that my hair was completely fried by the time Naomi came back for me, took me to a chair by a sink, and took off the clear plastic cap.

“Yeah, this is going to look so pretty,” she said as she squirted shampoo into her gloved palm. Then she sat me back, pushed me up against the lip of the sink, and began to wash the cream out of my hair.

Her hands on my scalp felt so strange; I couldn't believe how easily they moved their way through my hair—catching on nothing. Reggie would no longer pull my curls and then let them bounce back.

Naomi washed all the shampoo out of my hair, shampooed and rinsed it again, and then squirted on something she called a deep conditioner.

“See,” she said, sitting me up and turning me toward the mirror. “Beautiful.”

I slowly looked up at the face in the mirror. It was a narrow face, much narrower than I had ever realized, with full lips and big, sad eyes. My hair was longer than I ever imagined it could be—running past my shoulders all the way down past my upper back. The crazy curls that defied both gravity and water were gone now, and in their place were long, stringy strands that left me feeling exposed and naked.

“It might take a minute to get used to because it's so different, but wait till you see it blow-dried,” said Naomi. She squirted an oily substance in her hand, rubbed it on my hair, and then blew it dry. Then she went around me and snipped the ends off. Scissors. Creams. Oils. Blow drying. More scissors. Each new step in her process was another mystery to me, and before she'd finished them all, an hour had gone by.

“You just put this cream I'm going to give you on it every morning, and then blow it dry just like this, and then you're set, voilà!” she said, and then she made liked she was Vanna White and I was one of the letters she was turning over.

I stood up and peered at myself carefully. My hair was parted perfectly, right down the middle. The cut was layered in the front, with chic, jagged edges that framed my face. Naomi beamed at me in the mirror, obviously pleased with her work. Then I started to cry.

“What…” said Naomi, and she leaned closer to me. “Are you okay?”

All I could think was that I looked like an Indian—the kind you might see in a John Wayne movie. My hair, it suddenly occurred to me, wasn't this straight because it wasn't supposed to
be
this straight. My face was too angular, my features too defined. It was all wrong. And now I would have to wait at least a year to get my hair back.

Naomi tried to hug me. “Honey, whatever it is, we can fix it.”

I need to stop crying.
But the more I tried to stop, the more the tears fell.

“Even if you want it back curly again, we can put curlers in it to make the curl even cuter than it was before—and less frizzy, too,” Naomi was telling me. She looked at me hard. “You know, that's really what we should have done in the first place, anyway. You're right, maybe this is too drastic.”

I covered my mouth with my hand, so that I wasn't exactly sobbing. I wished I could just run out of there, but home was a good twenty-minute drive away. This was the second time recently I had cried hard in public.

“Okay, yeah,” said Naomi. “That's it, that's exactly what we'll do—we'll just give you a set of rods you can use every morning, it'll be easy. You won't even be able to tell the difference, except that the curl will be lighter, prettier.” She clapped her hands. “Yeah, that's it.” She bent down and began to rummage through the cabinets. “Just let me find that set…”

I need to stop crying. Now. Before Mom gets here.
I wiped my eyes and face clean with the backs of my hands and took a deep breath. “No, no, it's okay,” I told her. “Don't worry, I like it.”

A woman at the hair dryer in a yellow jogging suit was staring right at me, her eyebrows knitted together in concern. Other women at the salon were beginning to notice all the commotion, too. It was definitely time to go.

Naomi turned away from the cabinet and looked at me incredulously. “You what?”

My heart, my heart. Heat rising from my chest, from deep down in there, the aorta and its ventricles, trying to contain this friction that just kept on bubbling up. My heart would burst, I was sure of it; I could see its red pieces splattered on the bright white walls.
I can breathe
. “I like it,” I told her, sniffing. “I mean, it's different and everything,” I faked a laugh, “but I'm getting used to it.” I pushed out a smile.

Naomi crossed her arms and leaned back on a small table. “You're getting used to it,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. The tick of the clock on the wall was like a new, tiny nail ramming my skull every second. I wanted to grab onto it; I thought that maybe its sound could keep my heart together.

Then Mom walked in the door.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“W
ow!” Mom clasped her hands over her mouth. “I just … cannot … believe it. You've done an amazing job, Naomi. She looks like a real, grown-up young woman now, doesn't she?”

Naomi looked at me questioningly, and I forced out a fake smile.

“Well, yes. I think it came out quite nice,” she said.

“That's an understatement,” Mom said, laughing. She came around the high barbershop seat and patted my hair down. “It's so soft, isn't it? I had no idea her hair was so soft. Or even that it could do this.” She laughed again.

Women at the salon were beginning to notice the spectacle of us and give Mom the evil eye. Of course, she had no idea.

“I just can't believe it. We should have done this years ago.”

I gingerly lifted her hand from my head and stepped down from the chair. “Mom, we better go.” I pulled my cell from my pocket. “The time.”

Mom laughed, a little too happily, I thought. She was almost as good at acting as I was. “Yes, you're right.” She turned to Naomi. “How much do I owe you?”

• • •

When we got home, Dad and Jason could not stop talking about it. “It's fantastic,” said Dad.

“It does look pretty damn good,” said Jason, chomping on a handful of peanuts.

The rest of the day they came up behind me while I was getting a glass of water or watching TV and touched my hair very carefully. “It's so smooth,” they said, smiling. “It doesn't even look like your hair.”

I just smiled back at them. I couldn't tell them that it wasn't actually me they were looking at, that it was rather who I had wanted to be. I couldn't tell them that I wanted to take it all back, that I would have given anything for my crazy curls, because I was too embarrassed. I couldn't even admit this to Kit, who was, of course, less impressed by my new look than everyone else.