Me, My Hair, and I (12 page)

Glory

RU FREEMAN

A
few days ago, all these many years into my adulthood, I posted this on Facebook

Haircut. I.e., morning during which I writhe in agony wondering if I even need a haircut, wanting a change, resisting a change, picking out a different hairstyle, printing out those different hairstyles, and then working myself up into such a state that I plonk on the chair and state emphatically that
I LOVE MY LONG HAIR
, and coming away after paying a ton of money for a nice chat, shampoo, and ½ an inch off the ends. What is wrong with me, people? What is
WRONG
with me?

to a chorus of commiserating murmurs. I went for the said haircut and returned to upload a photograph that shows me largely unchanged, albeit slightly buffed.

My obsession with hair is partly cultural (Sri Lankan culture values thick, long hair) and partly personal (the emphasis people placed on my hair as I grew into my teenage years). We inherited great hair genes, my brothers and I, with dark, sweeping locks that seem not to age. My oldest brother grows his down to his waist and when pressured to cut it by our mother, when she was still alive, would invoke Samson. My other older brother, a die-hard Socialist, who sets aside large parts of his salary to help strangers and friends, sees no contrary tendency in purchasing expensive product for his hair.

When I was a very young child, there was never a fuss made about my hair. As a kid, I was marched off to the barber along with the boys, and once, I famously received sideburns because the barber could not distinguish my skinny-boy body from that of my brothers and assumed I was a third son. But once I turned thirteen and my mother decided it was time for me to
begin
to look like a girl,
people outside the house started to express admiration for my hair.

Whether it was because the quality of it was somehow, miraculously, exceptional in a country whose women almost invariably had long hair, or because I did not have much else in the way of notable female assets, it was my hair that people spoke about. Within the extended family, my paternal grandmother, who was never very fond of me (an antipathy carried over from her feelings about my mother), would sometimes stroke my head and bemoan the fact that my hair was not good enough. No curls, she'd say, dejectedly, pronouncing it “kay-rels,” the part I latched onto so I could make a joke of a comment that stung. But she was the exception. At school, in the days before things turned sour between us (and by then I would have learned, in my wicked, adaptive way, to take pride in the fact that their envy was still intact), my classmates would cajole me to audition for the new advertisements that were being broadcast on TV, for a shampoo we'd never heard of, Sunsilk. (TV itself had just arrived in Sri Lanka, gifted by the Japanese along with Japanese television sets.) Other friends begged to spend recess, which we called intervals, undoing my ponytails and braids and running their fingers repeatedly through the hair that seemed to weigh more than my head. The nuns at the convent I attended—those reliable killjoys—insisted on tight braids that hid the beauty of our hair, but I took pleasure in ripping out the rubber bands and practicing a bouncy swagger that swung my waist-length ponytail from side to side as I walked. It stood to reason then that I was soon expelled from that school and left without a backward glance.

From the convent I was moved to a fancy private girls' school, where I was admitted not on my own merit but on account of my mother's fame as a renowned teacher of English literature. It was a school established by the more insidious Christian missionaries who were smart enough to cloak their God-given right to spread goodwill among us Buddhists in laissez-faire derring-do. These girls laughed at the slogan by which I had been ruled at the Holy Family Convent: “Simplicity is the keynote of a Familian.” Here, there was no prescribed length for our uniforms, and hair could be managed any way we pleased. It was not an easy transition. These were young girls with notions of fashion and a lot of money. Hair dryers were the norm. I didn't possess one (my family did not possess many electrical gadgets, not even a radio). I improvised with a single table fan that had been placed in my bedroom, as the only girl in the family, a title I bore with great pride. To dry my hair, I pulled out long sections and held them in front of the fan until the mass of it fell straight down my back. I hadn't know it then, because I didn't grow into it until I was an adult, but I had what was an amalgamation of my mother's and father's hair. When wet and left to dry, it displayed the “kay-rels” of my now deceased grandmother's heart, and when combed out it fell in waves that, within a day, would turn straight. I didn't need hairstyles because my hair styled itself.

Fast-forward to the year of our Lord 2005. I was rooming with another writer, Nina McConigley, at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and I saw her holding a smallish object I had never seen being used before. Like most Sri Lankans, I don't wash my hair every day, almost never blow-dry it, and use only oils for styling and those, rarely and sparingly.

“What is that?”

“A flatiron.”

“What does it do?”

“It straightens your hair,” she said, and then she proceeded to demonstrate on a few strands of my hair.

What smooth sleekness! What miracles! Here was a chance to augment the versatility of my hair. I could, I figured, wash it and let it be curly on one day, wavy the next, straight the third, and a sheet of glass the fourth! Nina gave me tips on purchasing one of these contraptions, and indeed, when I returned home, I bought one. I hardly used it over the next years, while I eked out my existence, I thought,
on the sidelines of history
, writing articles and stories and eventually a book. The flatiron came into its own only this past year during a second book tour, and only because I had been shown—while being primped for my author photograph—the use of an electric curler. A curler, it seemed, could work on my untamable hair only if I first flatironed parts of it. And though my preference is still to let my hair just be, I confess that I've played with this a few times, enough to feel I had some skills I could hand off.

Not long ago, I was visiting Anjali Singh, a senior fiction editor on the New York literary circuit. Anjali was the one who had, years ago, encouraged me to drop the 487-page novel I was shopping around and complete the one I had just begun. That encouragement had lead to the publication of my first novel,
A Disobedient Girl.
Surely I should have remembered what I owed her when I sat down to read a book to her older daughter. The woman in the book we read was using plastic curlers. Anjali's daughter didn't know what they were, and I explained, conjuring up an image of high fashion as she listened with rapt attention. Oh, I could just feel the yearning in her little-girl body, a yearning that took me back to my own girlhood. Anjali, forgive me, I couldn't resist.

“But,” I told her, “nowadays there are electric curlers, you just roll up your hair”—and I rolled up mine to show her—“and when you take it out, you have pretty curls.”

She nestled up to me with adoration in her eyes. “Do you own one?” she asked.

“Uh-huh,” I said, “and your mom, if you ask her, she'll probably be able to get one for you.”

YES, AS A
kid I had not only drunk but wholeheartedly believed in the Kool-Aid my mother fed me, referring repeatedly to hair as “a woman's crowning glory.” The biggest lie I ever told my mother revolved around my hair: I claimed that there was a free styling offered by the hairdresser when I needed to go to a very important party at the age of fifteen. My mother's biggest outrage at my oldest brother came when he accompanied me to that same hairstylist (for his own hair) and encouraged me to ask for a Farrah Fawcett number that decimated both the highly prized length and quantity of my hair. And the one time I ran away from home was because, after I had been suspended from the convent (the nuns could get creative with their punishments, the more guilt-inducing the better), my mother swore that all my misbehavior stemmed from my obsession with my
bloody hai
r
! Then she marched off to fetch a pair of scissors so she could hack it off. I remember sitting on the floor under my table as she had instructed me, wondering how long it might take her to find a pair of scissors in our chaotic house, where nothing was where it was supposed to be and where most rudimentary tools simply did not exist, and realizing that there was nothing for it but to flee. And so I did, running barefoot through the streets of Colombo, taking my precious hair with me.

It wasn't hard to believe in the drama of hair, given that my grandmother, my mother, and her sisters all had beautiful manes that grazed the backs of their knees. Indeed, family lore has it that my grandmother was once forced by the nuns at her school to cut off some of her hair. Apparently, her hair pooled on the floor as she sat up in a tree, cast in the role of Asokamala, the female lead in the most famous love story of Sri Lankan history, interfering with the progress of the prince tasked with wooing her from her perch. My mother's combing and braiding of her own hair was mesmerizing to behold, as was the way her plait moved against her hips as she walked. I was not yet a woman, but I swore I'd acquire whatever glory was being handed out through this mane with which I had been blessed. As I grew up, I learned to organize my clothing around my hair: whatever looked best with whatever my hair happened to be doing was what I wore. It never failed to work its magic. At least on the surface, I could manage to look like I was sailing through times that tested my spirit: finding and losing boyfriends, surviving two schools where I was ostracized by my entire class for long periods, leaving my island home to come to northern Maine for college, defending my undergraduate honors thesis, jobs that spanned thirteen states, marriage, motherhood, graduate classes to which I went with an infant in a Snugli, unemployment, and all the way to walking alone into black-tie galas in New York City. So long as I had my looping, falling tresses, I could convince myself that I was not simply passable but utterly magnificent, that I could turn any moment around in my favor.

It was those words spoken by my mother about the importance of my hair that made it feel like the most natural thing in the world for me to spend most of my student-job wages on Pantene shampoo and conditioner, while my fellow internationals on our snow-filled campus in Maine purchased bottles of Suave for ninety-nine cents.

“How could you spend so much on shampoo?!” a student from Nepal asked me the first time we were driven to Kmart to acquire supplies.

“Because it's my hair!” I said, fully expecting this to suffice as explanation and dismissal.

This hair was not just my hair; it was my badge of courage, my shield, my vice, my tiara, and my salvation all rolled into one. In the summer of 2002, I made a series of decisions that left me living once more in Maine with no job and no money to call my own. I had given up work that I loved and had moved with the intention to write, but this was practically impossible while going through the ups and downs of pregnancies and childbirth and the unforeseeable difficulties of raising three very young children among, as I liked to point out regularly to my Caucasian husband, “
all these white peopl
e
!” I was a good and devoted, if somewhat eccentric, mother, but motherhood had never been a holy grail for me. And so, despite the incomparable gift of my children, I felt only the weight of being useless in the world, given all I had expected to do during this phase of my life.

“I have nothing to give,” I mused one day, sitting at the dining table while three small people sat before their afternoon snacks and regarded my sad face. I was wrapping my hair around my fingers as I said this, and in the silence that follows such utterances made in the presence of children who can neither understand nor help, it came to me that I did have one thing I could give: my hair. I had not cut my hair short since I was thirteen years old. All my haircuts were mere trims. All my haircuts since would remain trims. But for a glorious afternoon in the midst of such despair, I felt wealthy. This hair that had always been my gilding, I could and I would cut it off and do something useful with it, something that had nothing to do with personal vanity, although it surely had something to do with a certain vanity of the spirit that seeks to impress itself in some way upon the world. My husband approached the task with the enthusiasm he brings to kitchen renovation projects. I doubt he understood the enormity of the moment, but he participated fully in getting it done precisely and according to the instructions provided by Locks of Love. Bands at the top and the bottom, and a clip that took off much more than a foot of hair. Once mailed, the hair would be made into a wig for a young girl or woman who had lost her hair during chemotherapy.

Of course the aftermath was predictable. I went to the hairdresser to get it styled into something other than the jagged mess I now had, and came back with a beehive. (The only woman of color in the entire magazine of haircuts I was shown at the salon wore a beehive, so I guess the stylist assumed it would suit me too.) I said nothing but came home sobbing. I tried to rinse it out and then to pull it down from its high perch, to no avail. I tied a scarf around it and went about looking like a Russian peasant for a few days. And then I decided that this was no way to behave in front of three impressionable girls. It's just hair, I told myself, it'll grow. And though it hurt like hell to have my oldest daughter say, as I climbed into her bunk bed to kiss her good night, “You don't look like my mother,” indeed it did grow.