(no subject)
I wrote this vignette a while ago and I'm reading it at The CW Showcase. It's a favorite of mine.
Mama used to braid my hair everyday. In and out with her nimble fingers, twisting my hair into its tight little plaits, so it wouldn’t look messy by the time I got to school. If it did, one of the nuns would send me home and mama didn’t have time to deal with that, so every morning she braided my hair. Those ten minutes were pure torture. I squirmed and fidgeted and mama threatened to swat me with the brush if I didn’t stop fidgeting so help her god. “Fran and Sara can do their own hair in the morning; you’re a big girl, why can’t you be trusted with that?” She said exasperatedly one morning. She had a job to get to and since we knew she had to wear shoes that matched her skirt and wear her hair in and tight little bun, we knew wasn’t a job she could be late for.
“Because I’m a little monkey” I replied, squirming and turning around so I could see her grin. Mama laughed to herself and didn’t say anything else and she tied the ribbon around the end of my light braid into a bow. After that day, she never complained about my inability to sit still.
I wore the same hair style from the time I was five to the time I was fifteen, from elementary and middle school taught by nuns to the first year at my public high school, where neat hair didn’t matter. That year marked more than just a change in my hair, it marked a change in my life. We moved out of our cozy brown house in the suburbs to the massive crumbling building that held our stinking apartment in the city and my dad moved 6,000 miles away. Mama wore colored hose, more make-up than usual and went out dancing on weekends, leaving me and Sara to fend for ourselves. Fran stayed away at college, even on weekends, saying that “there was no home to be coming home to." Sara eventually started to sneak off with greasy faced and gangly limbed Paul Gibbons at night, leaving me alone in our cramped apartment. Soon enough, I changed too.
I braided my thick, light brown hair once last time in the dank, molding laundry room of our new apartment building, standing next to a thumping, foaming washing machine. Lucy, a nervous girl with raccoon eyes and cigarette breath from my third hour geometry class, brandished her mother’s gleaming hairdressing scissors. While I nervously watched the stairs for anyone who could rat me out, she chopped off any remnants of my old life in two uneven snips.
Instinctively, I ran my hand through my hair, feeling a sudden loss of weight from my scalp. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” I say, turning to Lucy. An unlit mentholated Camel pilfered from her mother’s purse dangles dangerously on her lip as she nodded. “Yeah, done this plenty of times, newbie. You worried?” I smiled and shook my head. What’s done is done, I thought, and I closed my eyes when she squirted some of the cold paste into my hands so I could help her work it into my hair.
A half hour later, my choppy, uneven bob was the color of cough syrup and my hands were the color of fire engines and shame.
This comes from a series and the whole thing is fiction loosely drawn from real life.
Mama used to braid my hair everyday. In and out with her nimble fingers, twisting my hair into its tight little plaits, so it wouldn’t look messy by the time I got to school. If it did, one of the nuns would send me home and mama didn’t have time to deal with that, so every morning she braided my hair. Those ten minutes were pure torture. I squirmed and fidgeted and mama threatened to swat me with the brush if I didn’t stop fidgeting so help her god. “Fran and Sara can do their own hair in the morning; you’re a big girl, why can’t you be trusted with that?” She said exasperatedly one morning. She had a job to get to and since we knew she had to wear shoes that matched her skirt and wear her hair in and tight little bun, we knew wasn’t a job she could be late for.
“Because I’m a little monkey” I replied, squirming and turning around so I could see her grin. Mama laughed to herself and didn’t say anything else and she tied the ribbon around the end of my light braid into a bow. After that day, she never complained about my inability to sit still.
I wore the same hair style from the time I was five to the time I was fifteen, from elementary and middle school taught by nuns to the first year at my public high school, where neat hair didn’t matter. That year marked more than just a change in my hair, it marked a change in my life. We moved out of our cozy brown house in the suburbs to the massive crumbling building that held our stinking apartment in the city and my dad moved 6,000 miles away. Mama wore colored hose, more make-up than usual and went out dancing on weekends, leaving me and Sara to fend for ourselves. Fran stayed away at college, even on weekends, saying that “there was no home to be coming home to." Sara eventually started to sneak off with greasy faced and gangly limbed Paul Gibbons at night, leaving me alone in our cramped apartment. Soon enough, I changed too.
I braided my thick, light brown hair once last time in the dank, molding laundry room of our new apartment building, standing next to a thumping, foaming washing machine. Lucy, a nervous girl with raccoon eyes and cigarette breath from my third hour geometry class, brandished her mother’s gleaming hairdressing scissors. While I nervously watched the stairs for anyone who could rat me out, she chopped off any remnants of my old life in two uneven snips.
Instinctively, I ran my hand through my hair, feeling a sudden loss of weight from my scalp. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” I say, turning to Lucy. An unlit mentholated Camel pilfered from her mother’s purse dangles dangerously on her lip as she nodded. “Yeah, done this plenty of times, newbie. You worried?” I smiled and shook my head. What’s done is done, I thought, and I closed my eyes when she squirted some of the cold paste into my hands so I could help her work it into my hair.
A half hour later, my choppy, uneven bob was the color of cough syrup and my hands were the color of fire engines and shame.
This comes from a series and the whole thing is fiction loosely drawn from real life.