23

LEAVING THE ELEVATOR, I walk through the neighborhood where I lived for so many years but that I barely recognize. I go into a hair salon because I need someone who isn’t my mom to touch me. I wait my turn, and then a woman grabs my hair and tells me it’s long and it’s gorgeous, and I tell her please, cut it. She says she’ll cut it in layers, then she says a short style wouldn’t suit you, ma’am, your round face isn’t good for short hair. I look at her, insist, you’ll regret it if I cut it really short. I ask her to also give me a treatment and then, sitting in the reclinable chair while she touches my hair, she gets close and says do you want me to wax you? Your mustache is a bit thick, and your brows could also use it, and I feel her face so close and her breath and her hands on my hair and I say yes, please, and this space between our bodies fills with a strange heat and a placidness I want to stay inside. I sit back down in front of the mirror and, looking at the welts the wax left on my face, feel somewhat enraged, but then I give in to the hairdresser’s stories. Her son’s a bartender, gay, and she accepts him—she reiterates—he had gotten her this job in the hair salon, her younger daughter goes to night school and in the mornings is home alone, which worries her a lot, she says, but the television keeps her entertained. The father left a few years ago; one day her son asked if she was happy and she told him no, and her son said tell him to leave, so that’s what she did, and that day sleeping in her bed again became a pleasureful experience: I stretched out my feet, stretched out my body, I felt free, she says. I’ve always been close to my children, especially my son, do you have children? She asks, and I stay quiet for a long time and then answer yes, and she stops to look at me and says so young, but I’m not young, I just don’t look my age, people always tell me this. My son, she goes on, breastfed until he was five years old and until he was ten, he’d stick out his little hand and grab my breast anywhere, that’s the only thing that’d calm him down. I feel another wave of nausea and tell her I’m pregnant, and she says the second is easier, and I say this is my first. Then she says I’m not cutting your hair, it isn’t good, the baby needs all the nutrients and vitamins, I’ll only trim the ends, and she carefully cuts my hair while she talks about children, pregnancy, cravings, doctors, the birth, loneliness, the crying, the body, stretch marks, the pain, the depression, the happiness at seeing your child grow up, healthy, and with that the conversation ends. She gives me a slip of paper with everything she’s done and wishes me luck. I give the slip to the young man at the register, pay, and leave, I end up walking next to a group of girls who are laughing and as I get closer to better listen to their conversation about a party, one of them says why are men like that? and the rest crack up. I laugh with them. I laugh and move away imagining the hell I’m inevitably sinking into.