Me, My Hair, and I (13 page)

Most of the time the things we do shape our children more than our words ever could. Following the advice of my mother, who was channeling her own ancestors, I made sure to shave the heads of each of my three daughters before they turned one, the ritual most likely to guarantee the development of gorgeous hair. “You have to do it before they speak their first word,” my mother told me. “Otherwise the shock of it will delay their speech.” There they sat, each in her turn, one minute like every other floppy five-month-old, the next their features sharply in focus beneath their shining, tender, naked heads. I am not convinced that the inability to articulate their feelings about the change meant they weren't horrified. To this day, they behave as I do in the lead-up to and the aftermath of a haircut, displaying in exact sequence intense self-evaluation, courage, excitement, pleasure, and dismay over the most trivial of changes.

I listen sympathetically. I murmur soothing words. I know I'm raising girls who will grow into women who will carry around a talisman with the power to morph, when needed, into weapon or cloak, wrap or jeweled ornament, comfort or strength. I can see them walking through life nursing private anxieties but exuding a certain joie de vivre, their heartstrings linked invisibly to each strand of their beautiful hair. The older ones buy their clothes, as I usually do, on consignment, on eBay, or at end-of-season sales, and the youngest simply inherits. But from the age of nine, each of them has visited real hairdressers. I can't afford Mason Pearson boar-bristle hairbrushes, but the ones I buy them are the best I can find for what I
can
afford. The two swimmers and runners have argan oil and shampoo that protects against chlorine and sun damage. The one with the fine blond locks gets hair treatments.

When I take them home to Sri Lanka, my father, in the sadness of my mother's absence, sometimes sits them down and rubs large quantities of coconut oil into their heads as they wrinkle their noses. I disregard their baleful glares. I smile, remembering such moments in my own childhood. Yes, I cursed and swore (silently, of course), but I knew that those hands held powerful intention. Sometimes here, in my American life, I massage wishes into my daughter's lives, holding each lush and unique mass, each fistful of dark and light hair in my palms, rubbing potions into one, rinsing foam off another, braiding and twisting, ceaselessly caressing not their heads but their innermost selves. I do these things, and I see them growing up, leaving me, having babies. I see them shaving heads, brushing hair, rubbing oils. I see them as goddesses passing on this same, easeful message of self-love.

Act Tresses: Hair as Performance Art

ELIZABETH SEARLE

Jackie Kennedy and Audrey Hepburn

My family moved a lot. I was the perpetual new girl: a skinny late bloomer with buckteeth decked with metal braces. I found refuge in elaborate pretend games I played with my sister till I was well into my teens, and in old movies we watched with Mom. I was fascinated by Audrey Hepburn in
Two for the Road
—the way she transformed from the “ugly duckling” of her schoolgirl group into a radiant young wife and later a jaded, glamorous jet-setter.

You can change yourself through your looks and styles, I was starting to see. We grew up with a framed photo of JFK above our dining room table. Years before I was born, Mom saw JFK speak as a presidential candidate, his famously fab hair tousled in the wind. He looked, Mom reported reverently, “like a Greek god.”

Would JFK have risen to power and immortality if he'd had more ordinary hair? In the biblical Samson story, hair
is
power. Who can calculate how much those heads of lavish Irish hair helped the Kennedy brothers? Not to mention Jackie. Her hair.

Another fascination I shared with my mom. Jackie Kennedy with her preternaturally wide-set eyes, dramatic dark brows, deeply dazed regal manner, and darkly intelligent stare and the shiny helmet of hair she wore into battle beside her dashing husband.

As Ted Kennedy memorably said of Jackie in his eulogy: No one looked like her or acted like her or sounded like her. Or, Teddy didn't need to add, had hair like hers.

I knew I'd never have hair like Jackie's. But I dared to hope for Audrey Hepburn hair when I first saw
Roman Holiday
, one of my mother's favorite films. How dramatic is the haircut scene and Audrey's transformation from princess to gamine whose bouncy short-cut hair reminded me of Mom's. And what I hoped my own straighter, oilier hair might somehow someday become. If I “took care of it.” As a kid, that meant Mom giving my sister and me what we dubbed “sha-baths,” a combo of shower and bath. We'd sit in the tub under the full shower stream and Mom on her knees would scrub our hair, hard. Green Herbal Essences shampoo bubbled over my long hair and bare back. A lush green-foamed, sweet-scented princess cape. Not that the preteen me was any princess. Not on the outside.

I Dream of Jeannie

My first hairdo of choice, when I was five, was a princessy ponytail. I had to flip over so Mom could grasp all my long brown hair and twist it, hard. Mom was a science teacher who kept a dissected cat in a plastic bag in our garage; she was no wimp. Her hands were strong. With no-nonsense force, Mom would pull my hair up. It had to be high like a crown, like the harem hairdo on
I Dream of Jeannie
.

Deftly, Mom would snap my ponytail into place with a double-twist motion and a single “ponytail maker”—a number 8 – shaped rubbery band decked with twin plastic marble-size balls in different groovy colors. The then “shocking” pink was my fave.

When Barbara Eden in
I Dream of Jeannie
nodded her head hard to cast her spells, her blond ponytail bobbed and gleamed as if magic itself. Even my plainer ponytail bounced like a real pony's tail. It was worth all the hard brushing and twisting needed to create ponytailed perfection. I was learning this lesson young: beauty hurts.

My mom had been pictured on the cover of a science magazine when she was in her twenties: a dazzlingly glamorous lab technician intently concentrating on her test tube, her pursed lips so darkly lipsticked that they look, in the luminous black-and-white shot, black. Her brown hair too looks lushly black—like Elizabeth Taylor's hair. I loved the fact that my mother had been on the cover of a real magazine, like a movie star. Though Mom denies it, I always believed she named me partly after Elizabeth Taylor, considered for decades to be the most beautiful woman in the world.

Mom, a dark-haired beauty and pioneering career girl in the 1950s, had been dubbed by her Philadelphia roommate First Most Beautiful Woman in the World. Mom worked then in a lab, testing soaps and beauty products. She knew the dark arts of conjuring beauty. As I grew up, Mom regularly used Loving Care to touch up her dark hair. The chemical smell and pasty brown substance seemed anything but loving and left blood-dark stains on her head scarves. But I loved the results: Mom “magically” maintaining the richly brown hair color I'd inherited. I was happy to be my mother's hair heir. But I couldn't picture being happy in my mother's quiet life now that she was no longer a big-city scientist but a high school biology teacher and housewife.

Gloria Steinem and Ali MacGraw

Gloria Steinem was my own teen-hood icon, one I'd fixated on myself, not via my mom. I loved Steinem's aviator-style wire-rimmed glasses and her long, straight, center-parted hair, streaked with ashy blond, simple yet striking.

I wore glasses too. I entered seventh grade wearing ill-chosen dark plastic stop-sign-shaped frames that prompted my South Carolina school's mean girls to crow: “She look like a dog in them glasses.” I vowed to myself that someday I'd escape to snowy collegeland, like Ali MacGraw did in
Love Story
—another of my mother's favorite films, one she didn't let me watch when I was little “because it's too sad.”

But to gawky me, the film offered a glimpse of a better tomorrow. The tale of a smart girl who escapes to Radcliffe felt hopeful even though she dies before her senior year. I loved to imagine a world ruled by brainy chicks like Ali, smartly attired in her black tights and black-framed glasses, crowned by her simple yet sexy “do.” Center-parted, shoulder-length, dark brown hair. Like . . . mine! Only it looked way better on her.

My senior year, my family's cross-country moves landed us in Arizona. In my fourth high school, I nabbed the lead in the school play and published stories in the Chaparral High literary magazine, my long brown hair streaked now with blond highlights by the fierce Phoenix sun, my pallor and acne tanned away. Plus, I was old enough for contact lenses. So I wasn't Ali MacGraw, but things were looking up.

“Can I Touch Your Hair?”

How important
is
hair in life? How big a role did my own auburn-brown college-girl hair play in initially captivating my future (and present) husband? A turning point came as I sat at age nineteen beside my future mate, then a worldly twenty-eight, in his bachelor apartment on what I later learned he called the make-out couch.

“Can I touch your hair?” John, who had a major head of hair himself, asked me.

John came from a family of major hair. His mother had what she dubbed “many-colored hair,” which no doubt caught his dad's eye on the same Oberlin College campus where I met John. By then I knew that, like plumage on birds, bright hair attracts mates.

My mother and father had fallen in love at first sight, dancing to “Love Me Tender.” They married a mere four months later. But my mom had been twenty-nine at the time, after almost a decade on her own, having her “career girl” adventures in Philadelphia. I married at the tender age of twenty-two, some of my own adventure seeking still untapped.

Together, John and I left the cradle of our midwestern college town to head east—where I found myself wanting bigger hair to match my bigger ambitions.

The Kate Bush Perm and The Accidental Aniston Cut

It seemed like a good idea at the time. The first perm: in my midtwenties when I was still in graduate school and we could barely afford groceries, much less pricey salons. But I loved the rocker Kate Bush's wild mane of lioness hair.

This was back in my own wildish days. I was trying out experimental fiction at Brown University's MFA Program, while experimenting with my hair too. Years of perming wound up frying my once-shiny hair into a too-bushy frizz, a do that matched the stressed-out frenzy of my postgraduate aspiring-writer years, scrambling for literary success in Boston. Not that there weren't some swell parties along the way in the nineties when my first books were published.

My husband describes women like guitars: “acoustic” and “electric.” I may have started as an acoustic girl, with loosely curled hairdos and natural-looking makeup. But by the midnineties, I was trending toward electric, with darker lipsticks and shorter skirts and higher heels. My teaching job at Emerson College planted me in posh downtown Boston, where I had my hair more expertly permed.

Then motherhood hit. Nothing was the same after our son was born, including my hair. Like most new moms, I barely had time to brush, much less style. I also hadn't had time to follow the swinging-singles show
Friends
. But when I emerged from my baby-besotted daze long enough to get a haircut, I wound up accidentally Aniston'd, my wavy hair woken up and amped up by angled layers. My hair was nowhere near a Jennifer Aniston level of lushness and sheen, yet her signature layers gave middle-aged me—sidelined from the writing life—a lift. Inside, as well as out.

Best Performance by a Ponytail

The segue from writing fiction to writing librettos for an opera and a rock opera in my forties marked another era change for my hair. This time, the hairstyle I eventually chose was not like anybody else's. It was my own and my hairdresser's concoction, designed to fit the new me. As a writer of literary fiction and a college teacher, not to mention a frazzled mom, I'd kept my hair and clothes simple.

But around the time my lively son was old enough to stop running me ragged, my writing career took a dramatic turn. At an age when many writerly careers are on the wane, I reinvented myself, stumbling into a project that brought my work national attention for the first time, and even a touch of notoriety.

For years I'd been obsessed with the infamous 1994 Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan Olympic skating scandal, in which the skater Kerrigan was whacked in the knee by an assailant and suspicions focused on her rival skater Harding. I'd first written about Tonya and Nancy in a novella,
Celebrities in Disgrace
. But when I hit on the idea of turning their larger-than-life tale into an opera in 2005, I found my work drawing a new level of attention. I wound up writing the librettos for both an opera and a rock opera and talking for years, several times on national TV, about the shows and the lurid knee-attack scandal itself. I also found myself drawn into a world I'd always loved from afar: theater.

So it was that on a spring night in 2006 in my midforties I found myself driving from a Harvard Square theater rehearsal of
Tonya & Nancy:
Th
e Opera
to a nearby mall on an urgent mission to purchase a clip-on ponytail.

The lovely singer playing Nancy Kerrigan in our opera had all she needed to embody Nancy and belt out her “Why Me?” aria—except the long ponytail. Incredibly, photographers from the AP were coming to capture our girls in costume, amid our strange and heady surge of media attention.

Normally a cautious driver, I sped down Route 3 to the Burlington Mall, ran in just before closing time, beelined to a garish booth. Breathlessly, I tried on several high-end ponytails. I splurged on a glossy seventy-dollar model. Triumphant, I raced to my car with my ponytail still clipped on, more gleeful than the sullen teens I galloped past.

What have I been doing with my life? I found myself thinking giddily in my car, glimpsing myself in my rearview mirror. My Aniston cut had grown too long, but the clip-on ponytail revitalized it. I roared back to the theater, greeted like a hero for having found the perfect ponytail.

What a thrill—like playing dress-up dolls, only better—to watch as our perfectly attired and ponytailed Nancy and Tonya emerged that night to a barrage of AP flashbulbs. Somehow buying that ponytail marked a turning point for me: it made me realize that theater writing was more than a passing fling. And that I needed a new look for my theatrical writing life.

Big Hair

My mommy-hair days came to an abrupt end the day ESPN Hollywood called. When ESPN said they were sending a cameraman to my home in two hours for an interview about the opera, I hung up in a giddy panic, wondering if I should tidy my living room or do my hair. It was a no-brainer. I seized a ratty brush from my nightstand and bent over to give my hair a vigorous brushing. The aging brush snapped in half.

I phoned my usual salon, could not get in, and then dialed a trendy new place I'd noticed. The stylist told me my plentiful yet baby-fine hair would “respond to product.” Loading my hair with foam, powder, and spray, she teased it so hard my scalp ached. But when she was done, my hair had magically expanded. I looked less like a middle-aged mom and more like a wild and crazy librettist who'd cooked up an Olympic-scandal opera.

Over the subsequent busy years of interviews and rehearsals and further, crazier adventures writing a rock opera, my big-hair style helped me muster some extra moxie. I was getting my professional mojo back. I began giving livelier fiction readings too. With my hair high, at age forty-eight, I won a Literary Death Match medal.