The Beach Hair Wrap Was A Six-Month Commitment

The stand was wedged between an airbrush t-shirt place and a man selling fossilized shark teeth. There was a hand-painted sign. The sign said HAIR WRAPS $8 in bubble letters, with the dollar sign bigger than the eight. There were two plastic deck chairs set up in the shade of a vinyl awning, and in one of them a girl about your age was already sitting, head tilted sideways, while a woman wearing six anklets wrapped a stripe of lime green around a lock of her hair.

You were ten. You had thirteen dollars. You got in line.

The Chair

The woman did not ask your name. She asked if you had money. You said yes. She said sit, and pointed at the empty chair. You sat.

She picked up a lock of hair from the right side of your head, near the temple, and said this one okay? You nodded. She was not really asking. The lock was already in her fingers. She tucked the rest of your hair behind your ear with the back of her hand, which was cool and smelled like coconut, and then she picked up a cardboard box of embroidery floss skeins and set it on your knee.

Pick three.

The box was full. There were maybe sixty skeins in it, in every color, and they were tangled slightly at the edges where kids before you had put them back wrong. You picked turquoise. You picked hot pink. You thought about picking yellow and then picked lime instead. You put them in her hand. She did not comment.

You picked three colors in thirty seconds that you were going to look at every morning in the bathroom mirror for six months. The decision felt small. It was not.

The Pull

She combed the lock with her fingers. She took the first color, folded a long length of it in half, and tied it to the base of the lock with a knot you did not see her tie. Her hands moved too fast. The knot went in tight against your scalp. You felt it. It was not comfortable. It was not supposed to be.

Then she started wrapping. She held the lock taut with her left hand, with your scalp as the anchor, and with her right hand she spun the floss around and around the hair, pressing each loop up against the last one so the color made a dense tube. Every few turns she gave the lock a little tug. The tug was downward, which meant up on your scalp, which meant do not move your head. You did not move your head. You stared at a point on the awning where a seagull had earlier.

Her hands moved too fast. The knot went in tight against your scalp. The pull was downward on the hair, which meant up on your scalp, which meant do not move your head.

After about an inch of turquoise she switched to hot pink. You did not see her switch. One minute the color going around your hair was turquoise and the next minute it was pink, and if you asked her how she did it she said shh, which was not an answer, which was what she had been saying all afternoon to kids like you.

Try It

Pick three colors. The sequence repeats down the strand. Pick a bead. Then move the time slider to six months later and see what the ocean, the shampoo, and the gym class take out of it.

The Bead

At the end there was a bead.

The bead was wooden. Cedar, usually. Sometimes cherry. Sometimes a lighter oak with the grain still showing. It had a hole drilled through it big enough for the floss to go through twice. She threaded both ends of the floss through, pulled them tight against the bottom of the wrap, and tied them off in a knot the size of a lentil. Then she picked up a Bic lighter.

The lighter is the part your mother did not know about.

She lit the lighter and brought it toward your head. You did not flinch, because you were ten and did not know flinching was an option in this situation. She touched the flame to the floss just below the knot. The ends singed. The nylon melted. The knot was now a tiny glossy black bulb that would not come apart. She blew it out. She said done. She put the lighter back in the pocket of her apron. She was already looking at the next kid in line.

The wrap was about four inches long. You could feel it against the side of your neck. It was tight. The pull on your scalp was going to stop in a few hours, you were told, and it did, mostly.

The Shower

You were told not to shower with it.

Not forbidden - just advised against. The woman at the stand had said keep it dry. You said okay. Your mother said are you sure that thing is sanitary. You said mom. You went home. You showered the next day.

Water does something to embroidery floss that cannot be undone. The fibers swell. The dyes bleed into each other at the edges. The tight bands around your hair soften and start to breathe, and when they dry they are not the same bands anymore. They are the same colors, maybe, but the saturation is off, and the pink is slightly running into the turquoise. By the end of the first week the wrap no longer looked crisp. It looked like it had been through something, which is was.

You kept showering. You did not have a choice. You were ten. Your mother made you shower every other day, and you were not going to stand in the shower with your head sideways out of the stream for the next six months, which is what the woman on the boardwalk had implicitly suggested.

The Smell

Here is the thing nobody mentions.

The wrap smelled. Not immediately. Not even by month one. But around month two, after you had shampooed around it a dozen times and the water had seeped in and the floss had held onto the water the way floss holds onto water, which is forever, the wrap developed a smell. The smell was not strong. The smell was quiet. The smell was faint damp towel, with an undertone of tangled hair, with a top note of scalp. You could not detect it on yourself. Your mother could. Your mother did.

The smell was quiet. The smell was faint damp towel, with an undertone of tangled hair, with a top note of scalp. You could not detect it on yourself. Your mother could.

She did not say anything for a while. Then one morning she said honey. Then a week later she said honey, I want to talk about the thing in your hair. Then a week after that she was standing behind you in the kitchen with the kitchen scissors and a look on her face that was not angry but also was not negotiable.

The Argument

Here is the counter-argument.

The counter-argument is that the hair wrap was a bad souvenir. You paid eight dollars for a decoration that was going to decay in your scalp for half a year. You could have bought a sweatshirt. You could have bought a snow globe. You could have bought nine Lip Smackers. Any of those would have been in a drawer in a month and remembered fondly in ten years, instead of being surgically removed by a parent in a kitchen.

I agree with most of this. The hair wrap was objectively a worse purchase than almost anything else on the boardwalk, including the shark tooth. The shark tooth lasted. The t-shirt lasted. The wrap had a built-in expiration date and it stunk on the way out.

But here is what the hair wrap did that nothing else on the boardwalk did. The hair wrap stayed on you. Not in a drawer. Not on a shelf. On you. Every morning when you brushed your hair you had to brush around it. Every time you tucked your hair behind your ear it came along. Every time somebody at school said what is that, you got to say I was in Ocean City in July, and the fact of the trip was still in your body, physically, as a thing hanging off the side of your head.

A snow globe sits in a room. The hair wrap was a room, and you lived in it. You carried a four-inch piece of vacation around with you for half a year. The vacation was over. You, on your scalp, with your fingers whenever you reached up, were still in it.

A snow globe sits in a room. The hair wrap was a room, and you lived in it. You carried a four-inch piece of a vacation that had already ended, on the side of your head, until it was no longer defensible.

That is a weird thing to buy. It is also, I think, closer to what a souvenir is supposed to do than a shelf object. A souvenir is a thing that keeps the trip going. A hair wrap kept the trip going until it couldn't. Then your mother cut it out and put it in a plastic sandwich bag, because you asked her to.

What Is In The Drawer

I have one.

In a plastic sandwich bag, in a shoebox, in a plastic bin, in the attic of a house my parents don't live in anymore. I know exactly where it is. The bag is labeled, in my mother's handwriting, with my name and the year. The wrap inside is four inches long. The turquoise is now mostly gray. The pink has gone brown at the edges. The lime is still kind of lime, which is suspicious, because lime should fade too, but it did not, so I think it was polyester and the other two were cotton. The bead is cherry. The bead is split down the drill hole. The knot at the bottom is still the exact lentil-sized bulb the woman melted shut on the boardwalk with a Bic lighter in 1998, which means that knot has survived three moves, two attics, and the slow entropy of a house.

The bag has a few of my hairs still trapped in the wrap. They are the color my hair used to be. They do not match the hair I have now.

I do not open the bag. The bag does not need to be opened. I know what is in it. It has already done the thing that it was for, which was to extend a week on a boardwalk into six months of carrying a weird thing on the side of my head, and then into a lifetime of a plastic bag in a shoebox. Eight dollars. It is still working.

The woman at the stand is not there anymore. The stand is a kettle corn place, last I checked. The embroidery floss is somewhere, in six-skein bundles, at a craft store in a strip mall, waiting for a nine-year-old whose mother is going to say sure and whose scalp does not yet know what is coming. The lighter is in somebody's apron. The bead is in a drawer. The hair, I am told by a hairdresser who did not know she was giving me a eulogy, grew back exactly as it was before.