Just One Thing with Ciara Alfaro

Ciara Alfaro’s essay “Beauty Mark” catalogues the way the female body is expected to move, to perform, to please, to disappear. Here she shares just one thing about the piece:

“‘If you’ve read my work, you might notice that my grandma is a central tether for me. She appears almost everywhere. I write about her because I adore her, and because I am invested in gentrification, Chicanahood, and preserving memory. She is home.

“What you don’t see in this essay are all the tiny directions I could keep writing about Grandma’s shop if time allowed. The barber shop I mentioned in the story was where I grew up. At the back of the shop were hard, plastic sinks that ached my little kid neck. There was a tower of magazines I used to flip open, tracing my fingers across the bright pages. Inside her shop room, her black combs soaked in glass jars of blue gel; wintermint Lifesavers watched from a crystal bowl in the corner; the puffy black rug beneath the styling chair held her up, collecting brunette and silver hair. Across the hall was Darren, who was old with a gray mustache. He had a mature man voice that I could feel hit my skin when he spoke. After decades of working together, it was the election that got between them. He would raise his mature voice when speaking about that awful man, Grandma swore. Down the street from the shop, though, was our favorite movie theater in the city. It looked like a casino on the outside. On the inside, Grandma would open plastic grocery bags to maximize our free large popcorn refill all at once. There was the lunchtime Wienerschnitzel and Burger King. Down the street the other way was Grandma’s home—a place adorned with Catholic reds and golds, candles and a fully set dining table.

Grandma is at a different shop now. It’s a place of all women. There is a chiropractor chair, a lash studio, and a glossy snack bar. When I visited her there last month, she introduced me to a man whose hair she has been cutting for fifty-some years. Of course he followed her to the new shop. She paid one of the girls next door to cut and color my hair. She hugged me five times before she would let me leave. The place feels so different, but she forever feels the same.”