We always went to Gloria, proprietor and sole stylist, at
Crown and Gloria’s, the hair salon my mom always used. It might’ve been because we ran in the
same circles and finding a Filipino anything in Georgia was always a treat. It’s up there with finding a fellow fan
of the Anne of Green Gables PBS
miniseries: it’s rare and beautiful and exciting and you feel like you need to
grab a hold of one another and never let go.
I suppose that’s why we had Gloria, because she was always
sort of coarse with people. I
mean, she was nice in her own way.
She gave me two lollipops from the complimentary lollipop jar and she
always said I looked like a movie star.
But she always talked me out of haircuts I wanted and scolded me for some
choices, like bangs. She told me
I’d look terrible with bangs, and that my forehead was way too small for them.
“See?” she asked with the voice I’d imagine was reserved for
her children when she gave them a good Catholic mother scolding. She held a flank of my hair from the
bank and over my forehead to recreate the mistake I could be making. I stupidly made the request again as I
sat in the salon chair, the black cape already clipped to me and a roll of
toilet paper wound round my neck.
Later on, I was confused when other salons didn’t do this.
“See?” Gloria asked, holding my hair in front of my eyes and
wiggling it to brush my face.
“You’ll be covered. Your
forehead’s too small.”
I was about fifteen at the time, uncertain, and easily
persuaded by my peers, so despite my early resolve, I resigned myself to her
hands.
The problem with Gloria was that she stuck with a good
thing. While she was the first
proper hair cut I ever had—prior to this, my haircuts were done on the back
deck by my mom—which was a huge success in middle school, it was the same way
my hair looked every year after that.
Despite pointing at different photos or suggesting different lengths
around my face, I left Crown and Gloria’s looking the same as I went in.
That was until I went to New York when I was fifteen. Months before, Gloria lectured me on my
attempts at wanting bangs, even measuring my forehead to show me how grievous a
mistake it would be, but when I went to New York, I realized something.
Well, first, it was my first trip with just my mom and
me. My sisters weren’t there to
put their two cents in and my uncles and aunt were extremely open to hear what
I wanted to do for the day, so it was the first time I really had power. Want to go to the Virgin Record’s
store? What about shopping in
SoHo? You’ve never been to a gun
range? I started to understand and
feel empowered by it, so while riding the subway back to Queens, I looked at my
aunt’s long hair. She had side
swept bangs and long layers that floated around her neck, and I remember
looking at my own grown out bob.
New York was already nice for my hair. It was the polluted wind tunnels
created by the sky scrapers and the cold.
I already started to have That
Girl montages of me walking along the sidewalks forming as I tossed my
shiny mane. So when my aunt asked
me what I wanted to do the next day, a day before I left, I told her I wanted
to get a hair cut.
I’ve always been a little weird about my hair. I reserved haircuts for after major
holidays or weekends because I liked the idea of reinventing myself, sort of
like I’d been through a terrible break up with a boyfriend, and what better way
to cap off a trip to New York than with a different look when I came back?
And okay, so I just read Betsy in Spite of Herself, where the heroine decides to come back from a trip to the city to her poky old high school spelling her name with an extra "e" to be Betsye and with a new cologne and with a tendency to drop in French words in everyday conversation. Granted the lesson learned from that was to be true to yourself, I liked the idea of trying to be cosmopolitan when I came back to Georgia. I couldn't add an extra "e" to my name, unless I wanted to be Georgettee; my skin's too sensitive for any smelly stuff; and I only had three years of Spanish under my belt, so I had to work with this haircut.
The woman spoke mainly Spanish, so there wasn’t any of that
awkward hair cut talk that I can’t seem to grasp, and she had this really
obvious dye job and had long hair, all of which I took to be a good sign,
because of that age old joke with the two barbers. She cut with precision and took steps back every once and a
while, tucking her hand under her chin to look at me. She gave me a warning before she cut those fateful bangs,
and in a few snaps she did it.
Leaving the salon, juggling satisfaction and worry, New York
looked different, mainly because I had hair in my face and I felt dizzy from
trying to swoop it out with an artful careless toss of my head. Regret began to win over as I spied
myself in windows and store fronts.
I scratched my eyebrow line from the hair scraping across my skin.
My mom, walking beside me, asked me how I liked my hair, and
seeing as she paid for it, I told her I loved it with quiet enthusiasm.
She stopped me in the sidewalk, which was dead of people so
no one was really mad at us, and she looked at me. “You look different,” she decided.
“Good different or bad different?”
She studied me again.
“Different different. It
doesn’t look like your face,” which made her laugh as we walked over to the
subway.
Later that night, I picked up my cell phone to call Judy
back in Georgia to tell her the news.
“You got bangs?” she asked, a little surprised.
“Yes.”
“What does it look like?”
I studied myself in my aunt’s mirror and frowned. “I look like Hilary Duff.”