Eve Marx

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.

As early as middle school, I was straightening my hair. At first, I used a drugstore product called Uncurl, specially formulated for white girls. It smelled vile. The application directions called for mixing it into a thick paste which was painstakingly plastered to your head and then combed through with a ginormous plastic comb. The first time I used it, I left it on too long, and my hair came out straight as a board but stuck out sideways. Nothing I could do would make it lie down. My second attempt was more successful, and I used the product a few times until my hair fell out in clumps giving my mother no choice but to whisk me off to a salon where they didn’t know her. A sympathetic stylist gave me a chic short haircut, but even severely damaged, my hair was still too rambunctious. I went to bed every night with it wet, pressed under an old nylon stocking, to ensure it would be flat and straight in the morning when I woke up.

By my early 20’s, I was flying my freak flag. I fled New Jersey for the Big Apple. The first big hair change I made was to quit shaving my armpits. This cost me a possible job at Conde Nast, but that’s another story. The hair on my head grew long and curly. Big flashy fried curls were in style, and for the first time ever, my hair looked inconsequential. Unhappy with this, I walked into a salon in my neighborhood and requested a perm, showing the stylist a picture of Stevie Nicks, leaving four hours later feeling like a rock star.

It wasn’t long after this I met the fruit and veg chap. That’s what my cousin Jill from South Africa called him. It’s still an endearing quality of hers, calling every male a ‘chap.’ The produce guy had his own head of thick, glorious curly hair. He was very taken with mine. As the weeks and months passed and I failed to mention my curls weren’t real, my anxiety mounted. I didn’t know how he would react when he discovered my hair was a fraud. The day finally arrived when five inches of my natural hair had grown out, and there was a distinct line between my loose,beachy waves and the tight tumble of coils that hung beneath them.

That’s not your real hair, he said. Clearly, he was disappointed. The relationship staggered on for a while, but it was a real blow to any effort either of us put into achieving transparency.

Last week I watched the documentary film, Bama Rush. Ostensibly it’s the story of four University of Alabama female students aspiring to Greek sorority life. The young women are followed during the summer of 2022 as they prepare for rush. Midway through the film, the story is hijacked or sabotaged, take your pick, by the director, Rachel Fleit, who has suffered all her life from alopecia. She cast herself in a central role of the documentary, which stopped being about the insular and aspirational sorority milieu to shift into an opportunity to articulate her own issues. She talked about the shame of having no hair and the agony of feeling she had to wear a wig every day, even sleeping in it when she left home to attend college. She describes her huge relief when she tossed the wig forever. I wanted to empathize with her in the worst way, but sadly all I could think about as the credits rolled up was what my mother would have said, having attended the University of Alabama herself, however briefly. She would have said, “Put that wig back on.”

Eve is a journalist and author currently scraping out a tiny living crafting police reports for newspapers in New York and Oregon. She is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex and other titles bearing some relation to her stint editing Penthouse Forum and other ribald publications. She makes her home in a rural seaside community near Portland, OR with her husband, R.J. Marx, a jazz saxophonist, and Lucy, their dog child.