It seems not right to live near houses, houses with yards, and lawns, and one, not too far, with an in-ground pool you can see from the sidewalk. On a hot day I watch two ladies sit on lawn chairs, chatting in one pieces, not even swimming, and am tempted to ask them if I might just – quickly – jump in and then out.

It is Brooklyn, still, where we live, but with houses. Not like the Brooklyn where I lived before. Not Park Slope, after college, where I could hear the two dog walker roommates above me with all their dogs, and their freezer they reluctantly showed me, filled with dead animals, including a cat and some fish; or Bushwick in my single 20s where I lived with 3 boys, all artists, all bad ideas, in an old sweater factory where the make-shift walls were push pinned sheetrock, not all the way up to the ceiling; where I could hear all of them, all the time, fucking. Or our lovely Fort Greene garden apartment where I lived as a newlywed, with its backyard for parties, its large wood plank floors and its space too small for babies.

More room is why we moved to this Brooklyn, with houses right outside my apartment door. Houses so close that I can trick-or-treat my infant daughter to a mansion; I don’t even have to dress up. I can ring the bell for her, and stand and wait with a smile, then peek while she grabs candy she cannot yet eat, to see what life might look like from the inside.

Houses begin to line the streets only a half a block from me in Brooklyn, but I have been told – by a woman who hears my address and sighs – that I am living the Flatbush life. The Flatbush life, as in bodega, front-lace wig and hair salon, roti, Jamaican patty, and fresh fruit, pig feet, bread fruit and tripe. Extra large women’s stores, shoe stores, shoe stores, better bodega, Bo Bo kitchen Chinese for rib tips and fries, liquor store and repeat.

The best thing about my Flatbush life in Brooklyn is that it rarely changes. It goes on for miles, and I can find almost everything I need. I am in the middle of all this; this, and the houses.

I imagine growing up in one of these houses is not like what it is like to grow up in the suburbs. But this looks like the suburbs – on some streets, you don’t even have to squint your eyes to believe you are there.

If someone told me this was Brooklyn, showed me a picture, with a person and a house and a lawn, perhaps a family, with a baby, a mother and father outside a house, I would not have believed them. If someone showed me the same picture, and I was the mother and the father was my husband, and the baby was mine, I would call it a dream.

But people do live in these houses in Brooklyn. They have cars and garages, even. One day I spot someone gray-haired, looking from a portico window. My mother tells me to keep an eye on that house, it looks like someone might die.

But mostly these houses seem empty inside. Each time I walk to the subway I am struck by the lack of people outside on the freshly mowed lawns, in the lightless windows, on street after street, I only know they are there by the upkeep.

I am not friends with anyone who owns a house in Brooklyn. Once, I went to pick up a free toaster that someone posted online they were giving away. I knocked on the door of a large green Victorian, and a small girl answered, wearing fairy wings. The mother of the girl welcomed me inside, and pointed to the toaster on the floor. Her daughter danced around and asked me where I was taking it. On the coat rack I saw a collection of fairy wings, all different colors and sizes, where the coats should be.

“I am taking it over near Flatbush,” I said, and hearing myself say it – the joint of two unremarkable words, once used, when I was younger, to describe my chest and my groin, combined into the name of the street that ran by my side, made me laugh. In the land of the fairies, my home seemed far away.

One day my husband tells me there is a house for sale. A house just down the street, near Flatbush. It is too good to be true – a foreclosure – and I follow him to see.

Outside, the house is large and yellow, with pigeons nesting in the eaves of the roof. When we go inside, you can still hear the pigeons. It had been a half-way house of some sort, and all the rooms have become bedrooms. Even the kitchen.

“A real fixer-upper,” the real estate broker says as we walk around, looking at the bunk beds, the rooms divided into smaller rooms with shoddy work, the original moldings painted over so many times that they look like they are covered with shoe polish, like if you dug your nail into the layers, uncovering years of color, you still would not hit the wood.

“You need a real vision,” the real estate broker says, which of course is true.

My vision is this: A halfway house turned house of my own, halfway between Flatbush and the other houses. A wrecking ball with radar for wood, that strips the paint and walls so that the house lays bare with all the things it was born with; all in the middle of my two Brooklyns.

The houses are the reasons we never see anyone who lives in them, I realize as I walk inside the big yellow house. There is an octagonal room where I imagine I would write beneath the pointed hat ceiling. The banistered staircase leads to other rooms. The attic I dream into a nursery, complete with pigeoned eaves. I can see why no one wants to leave.

I have a real vision, I think. Is this all I really need? A picture someone who doesn’t know us won’t believe. My husband and I on the lawn in front of our home, my daughter with fairy wings.

Rachel Sherman’s novel, LIVING ROOM, was published by Open City Books in October 2009. Her first book, THE FIRST HURT, a book of short stories, was chosen as one of the 25 Books to Remember of 2006 by the New York Public Library.

**

No one who does Japanese hair straightening at Hair Village is Japanese.

You can’t have highlights if you want your hair straightened.

You can’t touch your hair – even put it behind your ears – for three days afterwards.

You can’t wash your hair for three days either.

You should probably wear a shower cap when you are near water. Just in case.

***

To get my hair the way I always wanted it, which was straight and easy and flat on my head, I had to go to Queens.

The hair had been a problem: I remember when my college boyfriend told me – after 6 months in Spain – that when I ran to him at the airport, the happiest girlfriend in the world, all he could see was my hair.

8 years later and I still see me running: a body with hair for a face.

So, Queens. I had only been there twice: once to go to an anti-semitic beer garden where I avoided being harassed like some of my friends had, even though I still had Jewish hair, and once to eat Indian food. It was not so far, but it felt it, going on the train that went out from underground.

Hair Village is small. Neon lights and a room as big as my studio, filled with girls getting their hair straightened, and the women who straighten them.

Later I would see that everyone left Hair Village beautiful. I went there because it was cheap.

I had learned about Hair Village from an Eastern Bloc bartender in a Mexican restaurant after a few Cadillac margaritas. I asked her for more free olives and told her I liked her hair.

“It’s fake,” she said.

Then she told me about Hair Village.

* * *

When you get to Hair Village, first you go to a Korean women. She is the boss, and everyone directs you to her. She tells you to wash your hair and then blow dry it. Completely dry.

There are seven processes:

1- Wash hair. Dry.

2- Chemicals for up to 2 hours, depending on hair.

3- Wash hair and dry again

4- Some other chemical where they put this thing that goes all the way around your neck that looks like one of those throw-up catchers in hospitals only super-sized.

5- Wash and dry.

6- Have woman take an hour to use a tiny iron to straighten each part of your hair in tiny sections. She blows on your head so it is not too hot.

7- Watch as she cuts your hair and makes you the new you who is a better you and does not have to worry anymore about big hair.

* * *

I am told that in the morning there is a line out the door. I am too late for the line, which is good. A mother who sits next to me tells me that she needs to get the process again. Hers is growing out, but it is her daughter’s first time.

Her daughter is in high school and has long dark hair. I ask her questions, and she tells me she is interested in psychology. She is only in 10th grade, but I ask her about colleges. She tells me Cornell. Her mother checks beneath her shower cap.

While waiting for my hair to cook I watch a little girl, about 4 or 5, lie on the dirty floor and cry for her mother. Her mother is there, getting the process, but the little girl is having a hard time. I wonder about the ventilation in the place, since there does not seem to be much, and the air smells of chemical upon chemical, burnt hair, and something I can’t define.

The little girl’s mother threatens she will leave her with her father, which suddenly seems like the worst thing this little girl has heard. She cries and whines and is tired. Her mother has been there for hours.

While my hair is wrapped up in plastic and there is a string of cotton “protecting” the skin near my hair, I start to fall asleep. I set my watch for the time I get to stop waiting. I doze/jerk myself awake/doze.

Another girl has strawberry blond hair and is with her mother. They look like they are from the suburbs. The mother gives the girl a hard time-about the cost of the process, and later about having friends over that night in their basement. There will be boys and the mother does not want them. She carries a fancy purse and her hair is dyed blond and she has those driving shoes on which always mean something other than that she has a car.

The girl just wants to get her hair done. It is big like mine. There is a lot of room for talking and bonding in this place, but I am watching the girls in the mirror watch themselves as they transform, easily, surprisingly, wonderfully, and finally, into the girl they had dreamed themselves for so long.

The big hair they have left behind is the kind that frizzes in the rain, needs blow drying each morning, makes the shadow of your head a triangle. It is the kind of hair that makes you tie it up and tie it down, twist it into ringlets while it’s wet, use any product that says “de-frizz,” and constantly touch it to check it’s height and width.

With new hair, it is a possibility you will look Japanese from behind. You will wake up and shower and leave your hair down. You will go into stores, to parties, to best friend’s houses who will stand so close in front of you and touch your hair. They will stand so close it will feel like they are going to kiss you, they are so happy, telling you that it is the best thing you ever did You will hope that, at least once, you have done something just as good, or better.

When you walk out from Hair Village, straight haired and new, you will go up in rank from 1-10: those numbers the boys give girls. Some of you will even go up 2 points.

When I leave it is five hours later, and dusk. The air feels good outside in Queens, although I don’t know if I will come back. Except for a re-touch, when my old hair grows in. For now I don’t worry. I am straightened. My hair waves behind me, and I leave for the train.

**

HAIR VILLAGE
6302 ROOSEVELT AVE, WOODSIDE, NY 11377
Phone: (718) 507-6244

Inside Miguel’s Barbershop on 942 Amsterdam Avenue, Spanish speaking men sit in barber chairs facing the mirror. It is a sunny Friday in the early afternoon and the shop is busy.

I ask a guy named Anthony, who is sitting in the back, about Miguel’s.

"This is a guy’s place," he tells me. The barber working on his hair with an electric razor is giving him a fade-to-low trim.

"It’s family oriented," Anthony says, "So you have a lot of guys who grew up with each other. They knew each other in the Dominican Republic. Men come by and tell little stories. That’s how we are in our culture."

It certainly is a guy’s place. There are no women inside the shop. There are Yankee posters on the walls and Yankee caps on some of the men who have just come to chat.

Miguel’s Barbershop has been open for three years.

The owner, Miguel, came to the United States four years ago from a place called Nagua in the Dominican Republic. Miguel was a barber in the Dominican Republic, and once here he started working in the barbershops on Amsterdam. He was able to acquire enough customers and funds so that he and his brother could open Miguel’s Barbershop, their own place.

"You can come here and not waste a lot of time," Anthony tells me, "You can get any kind of style you want.

"They have competition from the guys across the street from 107-108th, but I think this is the best one – you got more room. Over there it’s always packed."

I cross the street to the competition–Santana’s Barbershop on 965 Amsterdam. Santana Solis, the owner, came to the United States in 1966. He is also from the Dominican Republic and he does not speak much English.

Santana’s has been open for 34 years, and through a translator, Mr. Solis points across the street to two other stores he owns. He says that he moved his barbershop from the other side of the street to this location five years ago.

Mr. Solis has a large brown cat that sits in the sun on one of the chairs. I pet the cat and take pictures of the men. Santana’s is as busy as Miguel‚s. When asked, all the customers are happy with their haircuts. There are no other women here, just like Miguel’s. I pet the cat again and talk to it.

"You want it?" one man with an accent asks me, "Take it."

"It is a boy or a girl cat?" I ask.

"I don’t speak English," the man tells me, smiling.

I cross the street again and enter Barberia Barbershop at 980 Amsterdam. A boy gets his haircut by the barber, Gilberto.

Gilberto has worked here for seven years, and he looks like an actor in a Fellini film. The boy getting his haircut is at the age where he should shave his moustache but hasn’t yet.

The man in the chair tells me this is a very old establishment. It is quiet inside, and I wonder if after I leave, Gilberto will give the boy his first shave.

I have always wanted to go in Las Divinas, the hairdresser at 994 Amsterdam. The big window has a pair of colorful scissors crossing each other, and through it you can see the gold-colored mirrors inside.

There are no customers yet, so Nelly, Clarisa and Wendy, the women that work here, do each other’s hair. The women are from the Dominican Republic

as well. Wendy, who speaks some English, tells me she is getting extensions. I watch as Nelly glues piece of black hair onto the back of Wendy‚s scalp. The extensions will last for three weeks and cost $75.

The three women talk in Spanish while I take pictures. A homeless man runs in and sits in the back of the store where the blow dryers are.

"No pictures! No pictures!" he says when he sees me, putting his hands in front of his face.

I tell him that I will not take his picture but he runs out of the store anyway.

"He’s crazy," Wendy says, "He comes in here to get warm."

Melvin and Pat‚s is a unisex salon at 998 Amsterdam. It is not as big as Santana‚s or Miguel‚s, but it is packed with people and mirrors on both sides of the wall, so that it seems bigger.

Melvin and Pat‚s has been open for three years. The clientele today is almost all young men, although the barbers tell me the salon is for both sexes. It is cramped, and some of the men snicker while I ask questions, although I am not sure why.

"There’s a woman back there," one of the barbers tells me.

I go to the back where a woman sits watching television. She does not want me to take her picture.

I backtrack to 926 Amsterdam to a place with a sign outside that says Leo‚s Barbershop. It is a small store with one barber named Tulio, who is known in the area as Leo. Leo tells me he has been open for only two months. He has worked in the neighborhood in various barbershops on Amsterdam since he came here from the Dominican Republic eight years ago. He saved money while he worked so he could open his own place.

"Business goes slow at first, but it is starting to pick up," he tells me.

When the man who is getting his hair cut leaves the place is quiet except for the television, turned to the Spanish channel, like in all the shops I have been to.

Leo speaks more English than many of the other barbers. He gives me his card and his email. I wish him luck and pass two more barbershops on the way home.