The salon itself is a large, open space with tiled floors and the smell of someone’s lunch mingling with the air-conditioner, occupying half the floor of a rundown business building along the highway. Up the stairs, through a heavy glass door, and this unique olfactory blend made up of chemicals and burning hair assaults the senses in greeting. A woman comes up and asks what we want done, and what my mother wants is for me to have straight hair.
“Her hair is fine,” the woman says, noting only the slight wave that flows through my otherwise healthy, virgin hair. They’re not the appealing waves in cherubs and beauty queens, but singular; an afterthought. A mere spread pattern on a fresh cement wall, with neither character nor charm. It’s not the envy of town, and if it’s not the envy of town then why bother?
“Straight,” my mother insists. “Straight straight.”
“We will relax,” the woman compromises. We are still business, after all. She’s not going to turn us away.
I find out there are two ways to do it: relaxing, for those who only need a little bit of help; and rebonding, for the hopelessly tight-curled. The woman sits me in an empty chair in the middle of the room, full of girls in varying degrees of transformation: peeking from under the domes of heated lamps, or covered in aluminum foils; backed over a sink for a wash, or under the onslaught of the snip-snip of scissors. There’s no order; there are no me-specific cubicles with my own mirror or hair tools. I have a chair and if I leave it I will lose it. I have to find another, like playing Trip to Jerusalem. These chairs are generally plastic and have no backs, but I’m grateful to have somewhere to sit down at all.
A towel is draped around my shoulders, the threadbare fabric imbued with the last decade, of the straight-hair dreams of all the girls that came before me. My mother makes camp by the entrance where all the magazines are, preparing for the long wait. She has done it herself before and her hair is now so straight it’s like fingers reaching to the center of the earth. The woman gingerly places plastic cups over my ears, one on each. I don’t know what they’re for, but I soon will. I watch her mix her concoction into a thick paste, her gloved hands applying a dollop as close to the roots as possible and down the length of my hair using some sort of pastry brush.
Inevitably, the chemical touches my scalp on accident. First it’s cool like menthol, but soon it burns itself into the skin that’s not necessarily pain but instead a fiery, torturous itch like I’ve never known before. I gesture at the woman and mime that it itches. She clicks her tongue a little; I have messed up her flow. She dips the pointy end of a comb handle in some water and scratch the affected area with it. I feel the absolute bliss of the chemical being rinsed away by this little drop of water.
It happens again, and again, for as long as she is applying the paste. A manic itch. I learn, or try, to endure until I couldn’t, giving in helplessly, clamoring after that almost orgasmic relief of water as it washes the itch off from my scalp instantaneously. She rinses it carefully each time so as not to neutralize the chemicals already on my hair. Finally, the application is over, and my head is wrapped. I’m to let it sit for what seems to be an eternity, in the company of back-issue Seventeens and Candys.
A different kind of magic happens after everything is washed and blow-dried and styled just so. A Mia Thermopolis moment. My hair is silky and shiny; it sways with grace like in the Sunsilk commercials. I am a different person; I am in awe. I touch my hair over and over — the unbelievable soft of down feathers, only it has a fluid heft to it, like a dancer’s heavy skirt. My mother is happy. We know that the results aren’t always this good; it’s all riding on genes and the chemicals and how the hair will react to it, they say. We have seen disastrous and irreversible results, from her friends and their daughters, and so I am lucky.
I sit through the next three days with unwashed, oily hair in the middle of the humid tropical heat, unremittingly crowned with a cloud of festering chemicals of which smell clings to my clothes, my pillowcase, my towels, even after the three-day penitence is over. My younger sisters, easy to scrunch their noses at the abominable smell, soon find themselves at their turn under the pastry brush. I myself return for a touch-up every year or so, until I couldn’t be bothered and I begin to like my hair as it is. I haven’t had a relax in over a decade, but even now, when I happen to smell it at a salon, I have a knee-jerk reaction. I grimace on reflex, a muscle memory, as if my body is already anticipating the return of that harrowing, mindless itch, singeing my scalp ever so slowly.
TINY WORRIES 