Father
No one is indifferent to hair. It even has its own day: a bad hair day. The first human to catch sight of her hair reflected in a lake probably tried to do something with the mop on her head. Even Mrs. Parker remembered her childhood through the prism of the follicles on her head, once calling herself, “(A) plain, disagreeable child with stringy hair and a yen to write poetry.”
The Rape of the Lock
Word Count 548
I watched my long hair land on the floor in fluffs of brown. By the time I understood what was happening, it was too late. Half my head had been shorn to look like Helen Reddy. I was seven years old.
I wept. Not the silent tears of a stoic. My shoulders heaved, my mouth stretched into a keening rictus of despair, salty mucus snaked down my nostril into my blubbering mouth. Can someone shut this brat up? No, they could not. I raged like a beast at what had been done to me without my consent. My mother was mortified. The stylist asked us never to return.
On one level, I knew I was overreacting. It was just a haircut. My mother had four children in five years. Everything fell on her shoulders, so it’s not surprising that she would seek to lessen her load wherever possible. Short hair meant less fuss.
When Am I Having My Hair Done?
Word Count 1818
Of all the ways one changes through the years, there was little to suggest that I would ever become like Helen, my mother-in-law. I was still in my twenties when my soon-to-be husband, Dennis, first introduced us at her eightieth birthday party. By then, she was deep into her last-act persona of a slightly eccentric elderly woman. Despite having moved to Albuquerque a half-century earlier, Helen still spoke with a Boston accent that made her sound like a mislaid member of the Kennedy clan. She lived alone, as she had for two decades since being widowed, in the small, pink stucco ranch house where she and her husband had raised their four sons. Much to the consternation of everyone who loved her, Helen also still drove. That is, until she and a fellow octogenarian motorist had a misunderstanding at an intersection that landed her in the hospital. But that’s another story.
Spike
Word Count 1533
In the 1990s, I dined out frequently on the fact that I’d once lived so close to CBGB-OMFUG, which stood for “Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers,” I crossed the street to avoid CBGB, spying on the scene from the safety of the opposite corner. The costume was black leather, chrome studs, chains, fourteen-hole Doc Martins, ripped fishnets, extreme eyeliner, thick Kabuki make-up on both girls and guys, and betel-nut red lipstick from the three-for-a-dollar bin at Manny’s Variety on Second Avenue.
Hair had taken a U-turn. In the 1960s, hair was natural. With The invention of neon dyes, super-strength Aqua-net hair spray, and cheap water-soluble adhesives like Elmer’s glue, as well as new uses for Knox gelatin, hair went to places it had never been before. The scene, which began in London, was flourishing in front of CBGB.
Touched
Word count 578
It was a cold Canadian afternoon. I was thirteen, stoned, and heading home after skating with friends. I decided not to take my skates off or put my guards on for the quick walk back. The feeling of exhilaration as I tippled down the steep hill, tiny sparks flying beneath my feet, was quickly overcome by the mind-bending pain when I, unable to slow my momentum, got my skate caught in a storm grate. I went over, snapping my tibia and fibula in two.
I was told later that the first neighbour to reach me fainted outright. I don’t know if I kept fainting or if my body was in such shock that I was removed from reality altogether. I have no memory of being taken to hospital. The next time I became aware of my surroundings, I was lying on a gurney in the hospital corridor.
Long As I Can Grow It
Word Count 433
She wanted to touch my hair. I almost always said yes to her, but I did refuse her this one thing. My curls, like me, are Semitic, sensitive to seemingly imperceptible shifts in barometric and homoerotic pressure, relationship status, locale. As desperately as my body craves touch, that’s how desperately my frizz-prone curls eschew it.
She begged me for a waiver. “They’re not waves. They’re curls,” I punned. She frowned prettily. “I hate puns, remember?” she said.
Me without puns is like Oxford without commas. But as we went on, I made fewer and fewer of them, consistent with my nonstop apology for being me. Sorry, I’m old. Sorry, our no-future romance crimps the edges of my lust, my hope, my heart. Now that we’ve excised each other, I wonder, does she miss my wordplay? My rose petals in her mailbox? My untouchable hair?
Don’t Touch My Hair
Word Count 1784
There’s this story told all the time about braids in our hair. This story is told in a few different ways. It goes that when Black people were captured for enslavement in the States, they braided seeds into their hair so they could plant food wherever they ended up. People also say maps were braided into the top of the scalp, so enslaved people could escape. Some people say it was during the underground railroad, some people say West Africans did this before enslavement, but the idea is that Black people’s hair has a history of resilience. This story, however, isn’t really the whole truth. Black hair’s “resilience” is truly just a myth to make us appear strong. Like we are made for our endurance. These stories are manipulated to avoid speaking about how generational trauma builds and clouds our connection to reality. Nobody has ever viewed my hair with neutrality. There are white women who touch my hair against my will in the store. White men who stare and lust at it when I’m out to dinner. Peers I grew up with, wondering why my hair isn’t the same. They don’t do this because once upon a time, my hair used to carry seeds or maps. It’s exotic to them. An excuse to look away from oppression. I will never need to tell a story of putting seeds in our hair or crossing the ocean with brilliant maps braided on my head. No story will ever be as important as our own stories, the real ones, and how we want to tell them.
Cat Killer
Word Count 1177
She narrows her eyes into the rearview mirror, repositioning her bouffant hairpiece, placing a bobby pin just so with pointer finger and thumb, all while reversing out the garage. Her four girls—ten, eight, six, and four—form a regiment across the back seat. We’re pinching. We’re squealing. We’re kicking each other with scuffed, patent-leather dress shoes when our mom shouts, “Quiet! Or we’re not going to dinner.” We don’t believe the part about not eating out. She’s been getting ready all afternoon. But the thunder in her voice and the trouble she’s having with her hair tell us we should shut up anyway. Watching Mom’s eyes in the mirror is a habit for me, the second oldest. Her sudden mood shifts have trained me to be on the lookout for subtle changes in facial expressions—lowered eyebrows, pursed lips—forecasting that gust of anger.
The Sweet, Soft Buzz Of It
Word Count 544
Born with a head full of spiky light brown hair, in some early photos, in a certain light, you resemble a wide-eyed orangutan baby with that russet tuft. I couldn’t believe it when the pediatrician came to check you out. He didn’t say you were the most perfect baby he’d ever seen.
Your hair grew lighter and longer. Sometimes, I’d put it into two braids like those my mother wrestled my own hair into before school most days. I taught you to braid three strands of your doll’s hair, each strand a sister wanting to be in the middle. To keep warm. Now it’s my turn each would cry, until they were intertwined, the braid complete. For your first day of kindergarten, I learned to make a French braid. The braids got more intricate, and you learned how to make them. We braided challah, your stunning six braid loaves, always a hit.
Blood on the Tracks
Word Count 1728
The hairdresser’s chair spins effortlessly as I take a seat and hang my purse on the armrest. Along the seams, the leather is starting to split, showing its age. An old-fashioned hood hair dryer stands idle in the corner. I put my cell phone down on the shelf among the brushes, combs, and scissors. I’m the only one in Stella’s Salon today, and she has just discovered that we have a connection.
“Ohhh, Nellie was your aunt? She used to cut hair out of her home, right? She was the one who sat on a chair, on the train tracks!”
Stella seems a bit too pleased to have found someone related to my aunt. I knew she had committed suicide forty years earlier, but the detail about the chair is a new one for me. I cover my mouth and pretend to cough so I can hide my reaction. Maybe it’s just a rumor. Small towns are known for gossip that strays far from the truth.
The Unkindest Cut
Word Count 679
As I thought about my wedding, just thirteen days away, I felt sure I’d taken care of everything. But as I walked out of my fiance’s apartment on East 67th Street and turned onto Madison Avenue, I looked across the street at the recently opened Vidal Sassoon hair salon and realized I hadn’t given a thought to my hair. I always loved my dark shiny hair and wore it long and straight, way below my shoulders. Rarely visiting a salon, I only bothered with an occasional trim. But, crossing the street and looking at my reflection in Sassoon’s large window, I could see that the bottom strands were looking a bit scruffy and uneven.
I’d recently read feature stories about Vidal Sassoon in the New York press. The exceptional reviews claimed he’d “changed the world with a pair of scissors,” introducing his “simple geometric Bauhaus-inspired hairstyles.”
Just the Way You Are
Word Count 966
After my mother became too preoccupied with her own ailing body to care about her appearance, she focused on mine. “When are you going to do something about your hair?” Or “Don’t your friends tell you to do something?” Her comments relieved me. She may have been losing some of her faculties, but she was still my mother. And because she was still my mother, for days after our visit, I would look in the mirror and gasp, seeing, as if for the first time, the steely gray and white hairs spiraling out like chicken wire from my own wrinkled and aging forehead. Still, I knew I wouldn’t do the ‘something’ she desired first, because I was cheap and didn’t want to pay a beauty parlor, and second, because if I had a free hour every few weeks, I’d rather ride my bike.
Of course, the real reason I didn’t do anything about my hair was because I had the great good fortune of marrying a man who loved me however I looked.
The Invisible Hair
Word Count 1162
To celebrate turning 21, my parents offered to pay for a bottle of Tia Maria. During the previous year, all my friends had had their 21st birthday parties: dress rehearsals for their future involving deckle-edged cards, RSVPs, Black Ties, hairdressers, and catering. It was August. My final exams were in two months. A white graduation dress was the extent of my ambition.
So here I was, in my college room, sipping alcoholic cream with Suzanne, my new friend, and her secret colostomy bag. She was excited. She was often excited. Suzanne was finding men thrilling and dragging me along with her into situations based on her very good looks. She was going to have sex for the first time. The man was much older, a bit famous, and involved with a very famous actress. He knew about the bag. He was going to be very sensitive, very cool, and very exciting. Her life was about to take off.
Whereas I, five months later, would be in an ambulance, travelling down a very long rough track through the bush, and all because of my hair – one or possibly two strands.
Put the Wig Back On
Word Count 725
As a child, my hair was so thick and unruly my mother ordered her hairdresser, Louis, to cut it all off. I remember feeling angry about my shorn head. My mother was delighted to no longer deal with my hair, which frankly affronted her. Her own hair was soft and straight. She was a natural ash blond. She wore her hair long and pulled back from her face in a sophisticated chignon. My hair, which I’d inherited from my father, was dark and coarse and curly enough to be called kinky.
Kink of any description upset my mother.
Losing My Hair
Word Count 223
i
there is a lack of quiet now
too much fruit in the bowl &
harsh light without trees
to soften
ii
sometimes people just stop
talking to you—or if they do
it’s lite
Twisted
Word Count 596
In the late 1960s, fake hair was all the rage. Fake everything, really. Tang was considered a health drink. Mom’s braid was not the shiny, funky braids Chér rocked. Her braid was a coarse, manmade structure made from the latest in wig-and-fall technology.
Patsy would pull her God-given hair into a high ponytail, form a bun with it atop her head, then encircle the bun with the massive five-inch-tall braid, fortified with two types of bobby pins: the closed ones and the V-shaped ones. Lots of them.
If a friend of mine dared to utter, “Why does your mom wear that braid on her head?” my response would be the evil eye and an “Ugh!” in a tone disgusted enough to halt all further inquiries. Even though the question was always in my pants pocket.
Some questions you don’t ask your parents.
wishingthinking
Word Count 501
i shaved my head the first time when i was in treatment for my eating disorder. i loved and hated my eating disorder, was one foot in and one foot out regarding recovery. i think i needed a break from real life, needed a break from everything and everyone. plus my eating disorder was out of hand, to me it was like a pet that loved you dearly but occasionally would bite your hand or try to rip out your throat. i wanted to shave my head because i wanted to feel differently about myself. i thought if i shaved my head, i would look in the mirror and finally things would snap into place. i didn’t expect that i would suddenly love myself but i thought i would understand something or have some new level of clarity.
Hair Care
Word Count 786
I’ve been avoiding cutting my husband’s hair. It’s strange work. Clumps of hair gather at my feet like small pets wanting their dinner. I learned how to cut his hair during the pandemic. Now that it’s safe, he could go to the barber, but he wants me to cut it.
Today at the memory-care center, my mom and I waited a long time for my dad to be wheeled out to the reception area to visit. We sat facing the open French doors of the conference room. A short woman with a sleek, unyielding bob expertly cut her husband’s hair. “She’s a hairdresser,” my mom explained.
There’s a beauty salon inside the care center. For an extra fee, your loved one can get haircuts, manicures, and pedicures.
Uncle Willy’s Toupee
Word Count 593
It was 1967. I was a few weeks short of my sixteenth birthday. Sixteen – an age of transformation. One morning, I overhear Mom on the phone with Aunt Sally. "Have you seen the hairpiece yet?” she asks.
I can only hear mom’s side of the conversation.
“Well, I can’t decide if I like it or not. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen.”
Sally speaks a lot.
“Willy looks fine in it, but still, for the sake of propriety….”
Sally speaks for a really long time. My teenage hunch? She’s lecturing Mom.
My mother and her siblings were the trifecta of personality disorders. Sally was studious, dark, moody, and despairing. She wore black turtlenecks, read unrhymed poetry, and smoked Nat Sherman Cigarillos. Mom was hard-working, serious, and intellectually adventurous. She smoked Pall Malls.
Better Dead than Red
Word Count 770
No one believes I was once a redhead.
“When you were born,” my mother told me, “ I said, ‘She has red hair!’ The doctor said, ‘No, it’s just blood.’ And I said, ‘That’s red hair.’”
Whether or not, at birth, I had enough hair for its color to register, I don’t know. I do know that my mother liked to feel vindicated.
No one else on either side of my family had red hair, though when he grew a beard, my father called its color red, or at least brownish red, as if in alliance with me.
In my seventh-grade yearbook. Peter Barnes wrote, “Rather be dead than red in the head.” I was sure he meant it as a joke, referring to my red hair; I still think so—I doubt he knew the saying’s origin. I didn’t, either; at age twelve, I was limited in my understanding of politics and international relations.