on Being Hairdresser for a Day

I'm fresh off my stint as hairdresser for a day. My fingers are sore. The left pointer finger I used to catch the toasted sections of hot pressed-out hair is now tender with the beginnings of a blister.

“Do you know how to straighten hair?” my friend had asked me earlier that day.

“With a flat iron or hot comb?” I answered.

I knew that with the former I could dust off the ancient skills I developed pressing out my own hair when my hairdresser Maria, the one other individual I trusted with a smoking comb so close to my scalp, was unavailable. But I wouldn’t dare use a menacing hot comb on somebody else’s head without a professional license, or at the very least– overblown audacity.

“I can flat iron,” I said. “I may not be able to get a professional, bone-straight look. But yes, I can flat iron it.”

I was the last choice, I knew, but with the late hour approaching and a departure for an overseas trip the next day, I was also the best.

“It doesn’t feel straight,” my friend said after reaching up to finger my first attempt, a move that I learned through painful means from both my mama and Maria growing up, is a cardinal sin.

It looked straight to me. In fact, it looked bone-straight. But women, black women in particular, are sensitive about their hair. I know this. I understand this. I relate to this. So my response is to simply go over it with the flat iron again. Then go over it with the rotating, curling and flat iron brush contraption I'm handed, fresh out of its box. Then once more with the flat iron, each time the limp hair, its post-shower, boistorous curl now absent, falling tired onto my raw fingers.

I’m just going to wear it straight for a few days, my friend explains to me. She wants to arrive at her final destination with it straight. But summer heat, an exotic location, and beaches guarantee that there will be swimming. The straight hair will only last until this urge to swim takes over, and the curliness and thickness will again reclaim their rightful place crowned atop her head.

I can tell she’s not satisfied with the straightness of her hair. But I press on (yes, corny pun intended), and she sits cooperatively as I jerk her head around with a hairdresser’s prerogative. It takes over an hour, not including the other pertinent steps of the process: washing, blowing out, and of course, snacking. It’s the wee hours of the morning by the time we finish.

But we do and she’s off to the bathroom mirror admiring my handiwork. She spends a few minutes playing with her hair, shaking it, pushing it to one side with another, and positioning the curled ends that had outright, and with much frustration, refused to go straight until the very last minutes.

The commentary begins.

"It did finally curl."

"It looks nice."

"It’s got bounce."

"I like it."

Good, she likes it, but that’s not what makes me smile inside.

It’s when she says: “This is the way I’d have my hairdresser do it if she could. She always goes bone-straight. This has body!”

Have I inched her a bit towards a natural nap? Maybe if she asks me next time, I’ll leave a bit more body in it, slowly and deliberately undoing a lifetime of being socialized into the norm of straightness.