2019
I’m basically a lizard woman and when I first asked for a job at the salon, they thought I wasn’t qualified to steward beauty. Admittedly, I sometimes drooled my opinions onto my blouse and I hadn’t yet learned how to wear my squishy chin flap with elegance. In general, I was spreading out, uncontained. The “help wanted” sign had been referring to someone with more recognizable points of data. Back then I was off the map, unchartable.
Look, it’s not as if I couldn’t attract sex partners. I’m a strong telepathic communicator and certain people hear it when I say I know an interstellar plane where we’ll both cum for days. But the manager at the salon, she wasn’t concerned with that. She needed the hard facts of attraction. She had a business to operate.
I tried to convince her to give me a chance by showing that I could levitate, that I could knock things over with my mind. I made a huge mess doing that, then cleaned it up, sloppily but in good faith. I told her I loved fashion, that I owned a pair of heels that made clicking noises when I slumped around a room. I proved that I was good with people, maintaining steady eye contact with anyone close for minutes at a time. She stared baldly at the pool of slime that was gathering at my feet. Usually, people pretend not to notice that.
Her eyes moved from the stain of drooled thoughts on my T-Shirt towards the top of my head. She asked coldly if I had any experience.
“I can wear a wig,” I said, aware, even then, that the way my skull looked was slightly nauseating to most people.
“We’re really looking for someone who’ll fit into the community here.” she said. It was meant as a rejection but I could tell that she was curious, aroused by this viscous tornado of a thing I was. She just needed one last push.
“I’m independently wealthy, I’ll work for free,” I said. “And I can change. I want to change.”
Most chatter had stopped, but blow dryers whirred around us. Stylists and clients gazed into their mirrors, checking that their gills weren’t showing, that their skin was still smooth and human-colored.
“We can do a trial shift,” she said finally. “Wear all black. You can come in tomorrow.” I accidentally let the tiniest amount of fluid escape from my genital hole. She fake-smiled at me until I thanked her and bowed away.
After that I went shopping. The clerks pretended not to notice the iridescent smear I left on all the clothes I touched. In a store called Nui by Jelon, I considered a pair of black wedge ankle boots with a golden zipper up the back. I thought they would look good with a dress that buckled my gelatinous waistline into submission. I could see myself with a delicate bangle and winged eyeliner that wasn’t yet bleeding into the greasy, grey folds of my reptilian face. I got excited by the objects in the store. Clutch purses promised events where I could carry them. Asymmetrical cardigans were casual yet put together for an effortless chic that belied the cold-blooded genus I truly belonged to. I wanted to buy it all. I wanted to melt into the background, passable anywhere, unremarkable but for the expert way I had hidden the humps running down my spinal column. I purchased a key chain with a dyed, rabbit-fur puff ball dangling from it, clipped it to the reusable shopping bag I wore as my business tote, and went home to stare at the wall.
I composed an email to my mother that started
big news I got a job
and ended
probably be a world-renowned runway stylist soon.
In the side bar of my browser window a photo caught my eye. It was a product shot of the boots I had been admiring earlier, and they were advertised at almost $5 cheaper. Eureka, a miracle, divinity, the universe is sending me messages. I ordered the boots with a credit card that had 27% APR while I sipped a mushroom tea that claimed to make my brain super-human. I scrolled social media and saw countless iterations of the way I wanted to look. I took it as a sign. I practiced my makeup routine while my streaming service played electronic music that, by pure coincidence, complimented my new personality perfectly. I took a selfie and stared at it. With just a tiny bit of blurring and distorting, I finally had lips. I went to sleep feeling awash in the glow of self-actualization. I dreamt that I was invited into a night club and when the bartender asked what I wanted, I responded “my usual, you fucking idiot.”
I slithered over to the salon in the morning in an enormous black Dickies shirt that I belted with a scarf, tied so tight it made my breath shallow. The manager told me that my responsibilities included sweeping hair, folding towels, and washing the bowls that held the product that gave the hair depth and dimension. As I pulled the brown and straw-colored and strawberry clumps that fell to the floor into piles, I repeated to myself: depth and dimension, depth and dimension.
“What?” said Veroniza. She had caught me muttering.
“Depth and Dimension. It’s important to give the hair depth and dimension. Celeste told me that’s what we do here. We give the women depth and dimension.”
A white lady in her late 40s was having her hair colored and cut so that it was short on the neck and swept to the side. Veroniza was just starting the full foil process, with deference. She looked at her client in the mirror and smiled.
“We don’t give them depth, they already come with that! We just give them a little extra confidence.”
“Like a helmet?” I asked. Veroniza caught my eye in the mirror. This wasn’t an appropriate topic for the workplace, for strangers all pulled together under the premise that this was a fun and superfluous activity, rather than a basic practice of survival.
“What do you think Anne-Marie? Is your hair your armor or an accessory?”
Anne-Marie stuttered.
“Oh, well, maybe a little of both?” Anne-Marie and Veroniza laughed together and then were quiet. Veroniza silently folded sections of her client’s hair into foils and painted each strand with care, coating her in the lubricant that made it possible to slip into safe spaces where she was given food and water. Standing there, with strings of slime dripping from my hands down the handle of the broom, the women were embarrassed and felt bad for me. I was so far from knowing what it’s like to relax into my role. From looking at me, it was barely clear what I was supposed to be, let alone how one would go about becoming it.
For a few weeks I worked at making friends with the team at the salon. Mobbi wasn’t a stylist yet but she’d been washing hair for a while and was starting to learn about the chemistry of color. She told me about a lip liner that she said would be life-changing. So I went to the makeup store and bought it in Pickled Mauve. That night I applied it to the edges of my mouth. It tingled. From a certain angle I looked like an angel inside a snow globe. From another I looked like I was advertising something of a sensitive nature, like ribbed condoms. I sat down to watch a TV show that everyone at work had been going on about. It was about men vs. women or something, but mostly was noise. The lip liner worked. My drooling came to a slow stop from the makeup just as my upper chest started to draw into the dark recesses of my heart because of the dialogue on the show. I watched three episodes before I began to chew the product off of my lips, unleashing a small stream of pent-up emotional perspectives onto my flannel. I wore the liner to work the next day and got so many compliments I barely wanted to eat. I wondered if there was a dermatologist who could do this kind of thing permanently. The manager told me my makeup really brought out my bone structure.
In this way I began to think about my skeleton, began to imagine my flesh draped over it like Baba Yaga’s shawls. I began to understand that I have an unchanging essence that it is imperative to share with the world, though it requires contortions I’m not trained in. That essence can’t be iguana anymore, it can’t be snake who’s eaten another snake, or expired newt who’s become goo. At the very least my essence should be parakeet or cockatoo, someone who’s evolved with hollow bones and a necessity to preen.
I do have hair. It’s not much, but it does grow in narrow sections out of the top of my head. It helps me to pick up the thought vibrations of those around me, so I’ve never thought of it aesthetically. But with my new skincare and makeup routine, and my growing wardrobe of essential black classics, the stripes of telepathic antennae connecting my brain to the outer world suddenly seemed like a blank canvas on which to express my inner beauty.
I’d been observing the stylists at work for nearly a month. Though the heads they turned out looked more or less the same as one another’s, they each had a unique manner of customer care. Jan-Brie liked to loudly exclaim how gorgeous and phenomenal the women looked after she was done with them, never before. Tolly often said “you NEED to go out tonight” when she was done with a blow out, though everyone knows blowouts make you look wan and awkward for the first day or so. Sintia had trouble reading his customers, and was the only one who ever asked them if they liked their hair when he was finished. The customers always lied. They had been staring at their own reflections for upwards of two hours. The sight of their own heads had become radically, viscerally unlikeable.
Veroniza, on the other hand, seemed to wrap her clients in a cocoon while she worked. It was mutual understanding, I think. The hair is on top of the head. It often frames the golden triangle of the face. Sometimes it looks like you’ve just had sex in a hotel suite. Other times you look exactly like the 7 year old version of yourself, but with eye bags. Sometimes you look like a wanderer. Some women make it a point to look like they’re giving an important presentation to a roomful of balding men. Most white women, Veroniza found, just wanted their hair to be fine. Just wanted it to not detract from the big picture, or to add a line of rightness to the whole thing. Their bodies were equations. Veroniza understood this, and her clients understood that she understood this, and they worked quietly together, adding gesture upon gesture until they had made a reasonable enough investment to see returns.
So I asked Veroniza for a makeover. “Make me the princess I am,” I said. “I want to look like an after picture. I want to own it. I want to kill it. I want revenge hair.”
“Revenge against who?” she said. I grew cold thinking of all moments in my life that I had tried to squeeze my lizard body into holes meant for human girls. I didn’t understand back then that, yes, it’s like a jigsaw puzzle, but you can carve and shape your pieces until they’re barely recognizable to you, just flints and arrowheads found in the ruins of your former self. You won’t know them anymore, but they will help you ease into position almost painlessly.
“Everyone.” I said.
She knew what I meant. Veroniza kept her hair short and dark. Her hand tattoos were meant to serve as a reminder that she was indeed an alien life form, passing her days on earth helping other women camouflage themselves.
“OK, what are you thinking?”
We took a moment to observe the few strands emerging from my slick scalp. I’d reached the level of acceptance of myself wherein I knew I could just change anything I didn’t like. I told her that I always thought I’d look good with Jennifer Lopez’ hair in The Wedding Planner. She agreed that while long, face framing layers would be nice, Jen had naturally very thick, curly hair, and my natural hair was sparse and about four inches long. I had such pretty, three-lidded eyes though, we should try to work with that. Work with your natural features to bring out your natural good looks. “Have you ever considered a wild color, like neon green or blue,” she asked me.
“I guess I could try it, as long as it looks natural,” I said.
“I think it’s going to be so you,” she said. Her saying that helped me to accept that I could never pull off a low chignon that would drive Matthew McCoughony wild.
While she mixed the pigment and developer, I charted the symmetry of my face. There was none. The element of time was present there, so the right side never matched the left for more than a moment. I had nanoseconds of beauty. I clung to them, tried to stretch them across the place from which my eyes saw and tack them down. But the dripping was unmistakable. My body dripped and gooped in three layers; the epigoopis, the goopis, and the hypogoopis. The effect gave anyone stationary a spell of motion sickness when they looked at me.
Before I worked at the salon I thought I loved myself in four dimensions. As the month wore on I realized that I loved my idea. The raw materials of the project, however, the ones I saw in the mirrors that followed me as I swept, were a mess. I needed another run through. I needed to be shaped and molded. There was no continuity, no overarching theme in what I was presenting to the world.
“Are you sure green isn’t going to seem like a gimmick?” I asked Veroniza.
Veroniza looked around. Mid-back-length auburn/ombre and ash blonde hairs were dancing in the streams of blow dryers and bending around the barrels of heat tools. Clients were re-telling their proposal stories. A stylist crouched behind the front desk, eating a paleo bar.
“I think it’ll help everything fall into place. It’ll bring out your personality.”
I smiled widely at her. Thoughts spilled out of the corners of my mouth, maybe for the last time, splashing down the nylon cape she’d draped over me. I was ready to be seen for what I was, to come out of hiding. You see, the form god gave me is a cave. Veroniza was helping me to flip the stone interior towards the outside, making all my ripples touchable. I anticipated the amount of jealousy I would inspire once I had been transposed.
Veroniza nearly slipped in my puddle on the floor as she stepped behind me. The dye felt like cold soup as she spooned it onto my hair patches. It felt like something that might come out of one of my holes. It felt like the fluid I’d fill my gestation sack with before a transformation. It felt glamorous. It felt elegant, and ladylike. I was coming of age before my very eyes, losing any sense of myself as a young, formless, amphibious organism. I was developing a silhouette that didn’t ooze beyond its lines.
After the product processed for about 20 minutes, Veroniza brought me to the sink and had me bend my head back over it, the awkward pose of an adult baptism. The texture of the water was foamy and warm and I felt her soft hands recoil as my few, precious hairs came away in them.
“Oh,” said Veroniza.
“What’s up babe?” I said.
She turned the water off and grabbed a towel, trying to wipe the chemicals away before they had the chance to burn the rest of my follicles. It didn’t work, I could hear the shafts crunching together before they exited my head forever.
“Um. I think your hair didn’t take well to the product.”
“It all fell out didn’t it?” I asked.
She turned the spigot back on, gently bathed my head in the warm water. She pressed her thumb against the ridges in my skull, using it as a squeegee on the mess of my coiffeur. She rubbed until my scalp squeaked clean.
“Yes,” she said, but didn’t apologize. She knew this was sort of the thing I had been expecting. I could never pretend for very long, before the truth caught up with me.
We walked somberly back to her station. I took a seat in the swivel chair with grace and poise, lifted my head towards the mirror. There I was, slick as the day I had been hatched from a mysterious, gelatinous egg.