Me, My Hair, and I (11 page)

Love at Last

JANE GREEN

T
he first time I fell head over heels in love with a hairstyle, I was at university, sitting in a darkened movie theater, mesmerized. I wanted to be Kelly McGillis in
Top Gun
. I wanted her flight jacket, I wanted her man, but most of all I wanted her blond, curly bob.

My hair was not altogether dissimilar to hers. More frizz than curl, and a natural auburn, it hung down to my waist. Surely if I cut it, dyed it, scrunched it dry with lots of mousse, I could miraculously turn myself into Kelly McGillis.

Patience has never been a virtue of mine, nor comfort in my skin, particularly when young. At eighteen, at university in Wales, away from my London home for the first time, I would have done anything to turn myself into someone else. I had no idea, back then, that who I was was enough. All I knew was that I didn't belong, I didn't feel good enough. I was too tall, too big, and too ungainly and had a halo of thick curls that I wished were straight. Perhaps if I emulated a Hollywood star, perhaps if I changed the one thing it was so very easy to change, I might, finally, fit in.

A friend and I found the one late-night drugstore in town and giggled our way round the aisles until we found a home highlighting kit and a pair of scissors. Back in our hall of residence, I gathered my hair in my fist and hacked it off into an uneven bob. The lack of symmetry didn't matter, I told myself: my hair was thick enough to hide a multitude of sins. My friend spent the next three hours pulling thin strands of hair through a myriad of tiny holes dotted all over a plastic cap sealed tightly around my head. We smeared bleach everywhere, and all the while I dreamed of my glamorous new life with a blond bob. But the reveal proved the bleach was no match for my natural auburn. My hair was now an orangey shade of yellow, or perhaps a yellowy shade of orange. More Big Bird than Kelly McGillis. Disaster though it was, this was just the beginning of my hair-transforming experiments.

I WAS BORN
with a mop of thick, curly hair. It was the kind of hair that elicited compliments from strangers in the winding streets around our home in Hampstead Village. It formed a halo around my head and flowed halfway down my back. Hairdressers went into raptures of amazement. And I would have done anything to change it to a sheath of shiny silk.

I was raised in a family where looks counted. My mother is tiny and beautiful. My father has an eye, an appreciation, for good looks. While clearly loved, I often felt like the invisible child, hidden away, buried in books, longing for a happiness I could only read about.

Back in the seventies, formal photo shoots were the order of the day. As children, my brother and I would be sent off to photography studios in the quiet suburbs, my hair pulled and blown out by my fastidious mother into a sleek hairstyle that even now I remember adoring. This elegant girl was who I wanted to be all the time; this was who I was in my mind.

Straight, glossy hair was beautiful. Rampant, frizzy curls were not. At school, the popular girls had the hair I coveted. Silky and blond meant popularity, likability, success. My curls were creative and shy; they never quite fitted in. But I could lose myself in books, in other, easier worlds, and convince myself that if I cut my hair and dyed it blond, the romantic hero could fall in love with me too.

Everything in high school was about my looks, the crowning glory being my hair, the tumble of curls moussed into submission, the front blown out to a sleekish wave. I would happily forgo makeup but never went anywhere without my professional-grade hair dryer with the all-important nozzle. After graduating from high school, I went InterRailing, traveling around Europe with one backpack and a sweaty train ticket in hand. My travel companion brought a professional backpack with combined sleeping bag that weighed more than she did and was almost as tall. Like Cheryl Strayed in
Wild
, she had to crouch down on the floor every day to hoist it onto her shoulders. Free spirit that I was, I chose instead to bring a tiny backpack, the type of backpack my kids now sport every day to school. It contained T-shirts, shorts, underwear, and a huge professional hair dryer with accompanying brushes. As long as my hair was perfect, I had a chance at feeling good enough.

That fateful night at university, the first night of my experimentation with hair, I was genuinely stunned to discover I didn't look like Kelly McGillis when I was done. I looked like me, with bright yellow, shorter hair. A couple of years later, obsessed with Holly Golightly, I took a pair of scissors to my bangs and was again shocked I didn't look like Audrey Hepburn either.

I wanted so badly to be someone I wasn't, wanted so badly to find a way to be comfortable in my skin. Hair was simply the easiest thing to change, the most obvious aspect of my appearance to alter.

At twenty-one, I learned how to straighten my hair with a round hairbrush and the all-important professional hair dryer with the narrow nozzle, tame those wild curls into something resembling sophistication, resembling
good enough
. Products came and products went, and my hair stayed straight for years.

At twenty-eight, I left my job as a journalist to write a novel. Within three months there was a bidding war for my first book, which went straight onto the best-seller lists. I was overwhelmed by an immediate best seller, fearful of the attention, fearful perhaps of being
seen
. I had more attention than I had ever had before and was desperately trying to navigate a life that suddenly seemed to be in the public eye. I had fame of a kind, success, and, for the first time in years, financial stability; the only thing missing in my life was a boyfriend. I somehow convinced myself that making a drastic change to my hair would bring about drastic change to my life, and so I did. My new haircut was too short, much too short, a boyish, butch haircut that didn't suit me. I had left the hairdresser in tears. But change did indeed occur. I soon met the man who would become my first husband, and finally, after all those years of hoping to be loved, I stopped trying to change myself. I had finally found someone who loved me, who didn't care if my dress size went up or down, and who certainly didn't care what my hair was like.

Our wedding day saw me going back to Audrey Hepburn for inspiration, this time without the short bangs. I had an elaborate “updo,” my curls first straightened, then elaborately twisted into a tight bun on the top of my head. Looking back at the photographs, I see the melancholy in my eyes. I looked like I was trying to be someone I was not, marrying a man I knew, deep down, was not the right one for me. I didn't consider my own feelings, whether I loved him, whether I thought we were a good match. The fact of his loving me was—and how sad I am to admit this—enough.

I was a very good wife, despite the constant feeling that I was in the wrong place, had made the wrong choice. As if in an arranged marriage that I had arranged myself, I would make this work, would accept that I had chosen with my head rather than my heart. I suppressed the nagging suspicion that we would not grow old together and stepped into the role of the perfect wife, throwing all my energies into keeping a good house, cooking, entertaining, and always looking perfect.

I grew my hair long but changed the color. Initially dark, once my twins, my third and fourth children, were born, I went straight to the hairdresser's and became blond. Long became short, became the classic bob length. I blew my hair out every day, was coiffed and immaculate, the very picture of a trophy wife, all of it hiding the turmoil I felt inside, knowing I was living the wrong life, with the wrong man. For most of our marriage, I was the sole breadwinner, supporting our entire family writing my novels, but I didn't want to be. In my affluent Connecticut town, trying to fit in, I wanted to be the Stepford wife, wanted to pretend to be the housewife, married to the successful husband, lunching with the girls.

We separated after seven years. The seven-year itch. Those words would play in my head over and over leading up to our seven-year anniversary. I knew it would be a turning point, that we couldn't continue pretending to be right for each other, pretending to be happy. When we split up, it felt liberating to dye my hair straight back to its natural auburn brown and grow it long. I moved into a tiny beach cottage, lived in shorts and T-shirts, for the first time in my life not using the outside to try to present an image to people of who I wanted them to think I was.

I scraped my hair back in a ponytail, eschewed makeup, and took the kids to the beach every day, where we made picnics and built sand castles.

My landlord was around a lot that summer, in a nearby house. Slowly, over shared coffees and glasses of wine and against everyone's better judgment, for I was so newly out of my marriage, we fell in love. I remember walking out the front door to get the mail as he happened to be passing. I was still in my pajamas, makeup-free, my hair tousled and messy. He says now that he fell in love with me at that moment, when he saw who I really was.

Later he confessed he didn't like my makeup and high heels, or my blown-out, perfect hair: “helmet head,” he called it. He liked me entirely natural, my hair curly, caught back in a beach-messy ponytail, in flip-flops and T-shirts, with nothing to hide behind.

During that summer, falling in love with the man I would later marry, I learned to stop trying to be someone else. I learned that I didn't need to hide behind an image, that even if I was just me, someone wonderful would still love me, think I was perfect, no matter what I looked like.

My hair is now streaked with gray, and, recently, blond. It is long; sometimes straight, sometimes naturally curly, depending on my mood. I'm still unnaturally attached to my hair dryer, but on the days I don't have time, I am finally safe in the knowledge that after all these years, whatever my hair is like, I am lovable, and loved.

The Cutoff

DEBORAH FELDMAN

U
ntil I was eight years old, I wore my hair in two braids, a hairstyle my grandmother retained from her Old World past. My peers sported pageboy bobs, and I desperately wanted short hair as well, as my braids were often made fun of, but I could not conceive of how to go about persuading my grandmother to let me get my hair cut the way I wanted. She was a Holocaust survivor who had experienced agony and grief that I found frightening and unimaginable; because of that, I could not figure out how to justify this one demand. However miserable my unconventional hair made me, it could not even begin to register on the scale with which she measured suffering.

In second grade, I hit upon a clever scheme. I came home from school one day with an urgent message from the lice inspector. She was fed up with my long hair, I reported. It had become too difficult to examine. I could not return to school until my hair was trimmed to a manageable level. The inspector had said no such thing; she had simply flipped through my head of hair, layer by layer, before finally pronouncing me clean, which hadn't always been the case. But the little harrumph she emitted when she undid my braids and saw how much hair I had was just enough to get me thinking: Could I pass off her minor frustration as something more?

In the 1990s, lice were rampant in all the schools in Williamsburg, especially the religious private school I attended, which was run by the Satmar rabbinate and housed thousands of students in close quarters. I had had my share of lice. Those dangerous chemical treatments had not yet been outlawed; I often went to bed with my head lathered in a purple shampoo, the smell of which was so all-powerful it took away my olfactory abilities for weeks, but the morning after, my white pillowcase would be covered in heaps of brown specks, some still quivering. There was the special comb too, with very fine, long teeth that my grandmother used afterward, trying to get at any eggs left behind, from which a whole new crop of lice could hatch. I had such thick hair, and it made my eyes sting and water to have that comb scraped through every strand for what felt like hours.

My grandmother had lived with body lice in the concentration camps; to her these banal head lice were “bubkes”—they hardly presented a threat. She combed away matter-of-factly, humming a tune, and indeed, her work was so thorough I never suffered from a repeat infestation.

My grandmother's head had been shaved twice, once in Auschwitz, and once again after she married my grandfather, a member of the Satmar Hasidic sect. When I told her my hair would have to go, off it went. It seemed she wasn't as attached to those braids as I thought she might be. We went to the little salon located on the slanting side street that overlooked the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which was run by two bodacious Hispanic women. One of them pulled my virgin hair too tight on a round brush, and when I cringed, she consoled me with this lingering maxim: “Mama, you gotta suffer for beauty!” I would ponder that phrase for years to come.

I was besotted with my new hair when I gazed into the mirror two hours later, admiring its clean lines. My shiny, straight hair seemed perfect for a pageboy style. I was so happy to go to school the next day, to finally experience the blessed relief that came with looking like everyone else.

It's true that the haircut did not fool my peers into thinking I was
just like them
. After all, nothing could erase the shame of my parents' divorce, not in the Satmar community, where the integrity of the family unit was paramount. But I remember that my new hair lessened some of the acute pain and self-consciousness I had been saddled with until then, and surely I was teased less often, once I no longer had lumpy braids for others to point at and mock.

The Satmar Hasidic community is one that places tremendous emphasis on uniform appearances; it is understood that there is only one way for agents of God to dress, and even if you look perfectly modest, it is felt that difference, in itself, is a form of immodesty. Failure to blend in is probably the most egregious social crime one can commit. That's why I kept my hair in that same style for more than a decade, in the hope that by dint of my conformist appearance, I would gain the acceptance I craved. Now I attribute much of that longing to the common adolescent urge to fit in; teenagers can be so harsh, even Hasidic ones, and my survival instincts kicked in to protect me from the worst of their venom. I experimented in occasional minute variations in the thickness or the length of my bangs, the barest hint of layers, but always there was that square china-doll shape that framed my face the way it did every other Hasidic girl's in my neighborhood. Eventually, I would join the married women in my family by shaving my hair and donning a wig instead, as required by strictly enforced tradition.

The day I got married, a stylist came to the house a few hours before the wedding and teased my hair over my tiara, inserting the teeth of a white tulle veil in the stiffly sprayed mound. The next morning, since I was now a new bride, my aunt took out the electric razor I had been gifted as a part of my bridal trousseau, plugged it into the bathroom wall, and ran it over my scalp in swift, assured movements. Clumps of stiff, dark hair fell into the sink, and I remembered that moment so long ago at the hairdresser's, when my soft, golden strands had floated to the floor of the salon. I had been so happy that day to let go of that weight.

Yes, I was relieved now also. There was a complex mixture of emotions brewing within me then, and I didn't allow them to surface, but I now remember quite clearly that relief was a disproportionately large ingredient. There was that familiar joy of finally being the same, of being initiated into the community as a full and legitimate member, which my new headgear would proclaim to all those in doubt. Until my marriage, I had never been fully accepted. Despite my china-doll haircut, the lingering effects of the scandal of my parents' divorce had always rendered me something of an outcast, but now that I was in a marriage of my own, with another member of the community, I might hope to cancel out the shame of where I came from.

And yet, my shaved head did not buy me full acceptance either, although it purchased a kind of tolerance that, for a while, seemed like it would be enough. People seemed more inclined to forgive my ignominious origins, my inferior family connections. I felt not so much an outcast as low caste: it was the bare minimum of membership.

A year later, I stopped shaving my head during pregnancy, although I still had to keep my head covered. There was no one to inspect me. I was free from the monthly ritual of showing up at the local
mikvah
to be pronounced kosher and ready for procreation. My hair grew in black now, because no light reached my head, always tucked underneath a turban or a wig.

In my seventh month of pregnancy, I went to a salon in New York City with two inches' growth and asked them to shape it. The hairdresser spoke to me in a pained whisper. She thought I was a cancer survivor. She could barely contain her tears at the idea of a pregnant cancer survivor. It was too complicated to explain the truth to her, and besides, she gave me a big discount.

My hair grew in slowly. For a while it was lackluster and thin. Then I started taking off my wig on hot summer days, when I was secretly attending classes at Sarah Lawrence, and slowly it came to life. My head could breathe again. My hair lengthened and lightened, but most importantly, it lifted itself off my head. No longer matted and compressed under a burdensome weight, it blew about in the breeze, relishing its newfound freedom. I hadn't realized how much I missed that feeling. Putting the wig back on became something I dreaded. As I covered my head each time I prepared to return to my community, I felt as if I was stifling much more than my scalp. It was as if my very thoughts were shrinking.

Eventually I threw away my wigs. I abandoned the community that had forced me to wear them. Ever since my son had been born, I had felt my desperation to leave increase exponentially as he grew older, learning to speak Yiddish instead of English, having his hair cut into side curls; and before he was enrolled in yeshiva at age three and officially outside the realm of my influence, I fled. We started our life over in New York, where he learned to speak English in three weeks.

Each time I went out in public with my hair uncovered, I felt more real, more solid. As it grew, inch by inch, I felt my realness increase, and could feel my footing in this new, unregulated world stabilize.

Five years after I left, a friend of mine reached over and tucked a long lock of hair behind my ear, telling me, “You know, I just realized, you're one of those women who hides behind her hair.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I've never seen you wear your hair up. It's as if you use all that hair to hide your face, or your self.”

I was surprised at her comment. I had never thought of myself as someone who hid from anything.

I have a lot of hair now. I have cut it only a handful of times since first growing it out. It has seen many summers; its strands are various shades of golden. I brush it carefully each morning and put conditioner on the ends; when I go out into the world, it feels like a lion's mane. The last stylist who blow-dried my hair ran her fingers through it when she finished and said, “Honey, you have power hair.”

It's true. Like the shoulder pads of the eighties, or the pantsuit of the nineties, my hair gives me character and individuality. I do not so much hide behind it as arm myself with it.

Still, my friend insisted. “You shouldn't hide your face. It's beautiful. You would look very good in a twist or a bun.” She gathered my hair in her hands and lifted it off my neck, as if to see. “There! Now I can see those cheekbones.”

I glanced at my reflection in the mirror behind us, but I did not see what she saw. I saw instead the broad, eastern European cheekbones of my grandmother, whom I had never seen with her hair. In the Satmar community, married women's hair was viewed as a sinful and dangerous tool of temptation. Now, cutting it, or putting it up, felt like a concession. I was like Samson. My hair was my strength. I would never again allow that strength to be undermined.

Recently I tried to drag my eight-year-old son to the barbershop to get his hair cut. Like my own hair, his grows so quickly; it's shiny and thick, the same burnished golden color of those clumps on the salon floor so many years ago. He cried and refused to get in the chair.

“What's the matter? Don't you want to get all that hair out of your eyes?” I asked, looking at his thick mop with concern. It seemed in danger of turning into a mullet.

“No. I like it long,” he insisted, brushing the hair aside.

I looked at him in surprise, realizing suddenly that this was his way of asserting his individuality, and that unlike me, he didn't have to resort to subterfuge to wear his hair the way he wanted to. I smiled.

“OK,” I said. “You grow it as long as you want.”