Me, My Hair, and I (15 page)

Maids of the Mist

KATIE HAFNER

O
n the credenza in my office stands a framed black-and-white photograph, taken in the early 1960s during a family outing to Niagara Falls. We are aboard the
Maid of the Mist
, wearing heavy rubber raincoats with sturdy hoods. My aunt, uncle, and cousin, who had come with us, look stoic, even thrilled to be drenched by the mist thrown off by the powerful falls. My father must have been the photographer, because he isn't in the picture. My sister and I, ages six and four respectively, appear vaguely unhappy, no doubt holding out for the promise of hot chocolate at the end of the ordeal. But it's the look on my mother's face that makes an indelible impression: Head bowed, she is gripping her hood at its base, wrapping it tightly around her slender neck. She does not look happy to be there.

For the many years I have owned this photograph, I've assumed she just didn't like the cold, wet setting. It wasn't until recently, studying the picture anew, that I entertained the idea that there might be another reason for her dark mood:
the effect Niagara Falls was having on her hair
.

Bodies, and everything attached to them, have long dominated the fine minds of the women in our family, some of whom were prominent scientists and accomplished musicians. My own limitations in the physical sphere were clear to me when I was very young. At age eight, I was held up for scrutiny by my grandmother, who voiced her doubts about whether my figure would ever amount to anything.

My mother and sister were especially incandescent in their beauty. By the time she was fourteen, my sister had blossomed into a younger version of my mother—a rare combination of sinews where sinews mattered, an Audrey Hepburn neck, and perfect bone structure. My mother was gifted in both physics and mathematics, and for men of a certain type, the beauty-brilliance combination was an attraction like no other.

As for me, I came to hate my body, especially my nose, which in the course of my own pubescent bloom had tripled in size. It was a replica of my father's nose, directly proportional in size to his. I was so frightened of myself as a child that I once asked a close friend of my mother's whether I was pretty. I was sure she would give me the benefit of the doubt. Instead, she was honest: “You're pretty enough,” she said curtly, only to go on at rapturous length about my sister's physical gifts.

But I possessed one thing my mother and sister did not: naturally straight chestnut hair. And both of them envied me for it. Theirs were heads covered with thick and unruly frizz, the curse of many a Jewish woman who wished she didn't look quite so Jewish. Indeed, women mess with their hair because it's the easiest thing to change, the ultimate accessory. Many say their hair sends a message to the world about who they are. When it came to the women in my family, they wanted to send a message to the world about who they wished they weren't. More precisely, they wished their Jewish looks weren't so indelibly etched on their heads.

Of course, many women want another woman's hair. If yours is curly, you wish it were straight. If it's black, you want it blond. If it's blond, you want it to look more ethnic. If it's thick, you think it's too bushy and would prefer it “fine,” even wispy. I always had the feeling that my mother and sister could not for a minute fathom the fact that such a silken mane had been wasted on me. And wasted it was. My own genetic good fortune was lost on me. I took little comfort in the fact that my hair required no maintenance, that all I had to do was wash it with whatever shampoo I found in the shower and let it hang dry. When I was very young, of course, their envy barely registered, but even as I grew older, I took little comfort in knowing that my mother and sister admired my hair.

In fact, my hair was the object of envy among many of the females in my life. Not long after that trip to Niagara Falls, my mother left my father, and my sister and I eventually came to live with him, our stepmother, two stepbrothers, and a stepsister. My sister and stepsister, close in age and at constant war over boys, detested each other. But they hated their hair even more than they hated each other. Throughout their teenage years, the girls spent thousands of hours and no small fraction of their weekly allowance forcing straightness upon their naturally kinky hair. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, long before the advent of flatirons, Frizz Be Gone, keratin treatments, and a portable blow-dryer in every bathroom, they subjected themselves to endless attempts at getting their hair to look like mine.

My sister went so far as to lay her locks straight down on the ironing board, using a clothes iron to flatten it. After an unfortunate singeing incident, the effects of which wafted through the house for hours, she abandoned the clothes iron and stuck to setting her hair in large pink plastic hair curlers, then sitting for hours wearing a plastic bonnet hair dryer. My stepsister used empty frozen orange juice cans. After washing her hair, she would pull it up on top of her head in a ponytail (using, yes, a rubber band). She would split the ponytail into a half-dozen or so sections, then wrap each section around a can, which she would then attach using extra-long bobby pins.

Rain is the nemesis of women with frizzy hair. My stepsister's ritual for walking home from school in the rain was to part her hair down the middle in the back and wrap each side section around her head, turban-style, clipping it flat against her head with bobby pins, then donning a rain hat.

Although I was vaguely aware of how miserable all of this made the females with whom I lived, the fact that I was sidelined—a mere observer to their hair mania—made
me
miserable. I felt left out. I lived in my sister's shadow and remained in awe of her nose of appropriate proportions, her large breasts, and her tiny waist. Frizzy hair was just part of the package. I begged and beseeched: Please put curlers in my hair too. They ignored me. So I made one or two of my own ham-fisted attempts at rolling my hair. The result was a neither-here-nor-there effect—vague curls that lasted a few hours, then reverted to strands as straight as I beams.

The only consolation I took in my hair was that it provided evidence that I was not, as a neighbor had once observed, a “Xerox” of my father. I adored my father but did not want to look like him. What separated me from him was my hair. His was wavy. Mine was straight. With the flawed logic that kids often employ when trying to square themselves with the world, I decided that our different hair meant we didn't
really
look alike.

Then one day I took a close look at a photograph of him at age twelve or so. There was the signature nose, the thin lips, and the receding chin. And his hair was as straight as, well, mine. I panicked and asked him about it. Oh, yes, he said, his hair was naturally straight, but shortly after that photograph was taken, one night at summer camp a gang of bullies shaved his head while he slept. When it grew back,
it was curly
. This evidence of a one-to-one genetic transfer sealed it. I was forever doomed.

As I grew older, I still failed to appreciate my mane. And in the way that comments from childhood can trail after us for decades, the “pretty enough” judgment tossed off by our family friend had taken root in my psyche. “Pretty enough” became my self-identity, and there wasn't much I could do about it—with one exception. When I got to college, I decided that if one key to my mother's and sister's beauty was their God-given hair, then that was something about myself I could change. So I got a perm. If frizz is what I wanted, frizz is what I got. I looked like a cartoon of someone who had just inserted her finger into an electrical socket, but I couldn't have been more pleased. I sent a photograph to my mother. “Why would you want to look any more ethnic than you already do?” was her response.

In my twenties, my fixation on appearance melted away as I entered an overly smug and earnest phase of life. I was wrapped up now in being a young radical in the mold of Jane Fonda, whose own lovely locks seldom went unattended, mind you—just take a look at her acceptance speech for the
Coming Home
Oscar. I found I had no patience for my sister's continued preoccupation with hair. “Look at the sheen on that girl's hair!” she said once while we sat in a restaurant. I followed her gaze and saw a woman with a head of long, straight, very shiny dark brown hair. Sheen? Really? I chastised my sister for caring so much about something so superficial. I told her she had been captured by classic Marxian false consciousness. At that moment, I thought less of her for caring more about the sheen of someone's hair than about the Trilateral Commission, or the daily fascism found on the
Wall Street Journal
's op-ed page, or whatever capitalist conspiracy I had decided to rail against that week.

In my thirties, my political fervor mellowed into a liberal latte lover's complacency, and I grew interested once again in looks. But now I transferred my concern to my daughter, Zoë, whom I had with my second husband (had I had children with my very Semitic-looking first husband, my mother once remarked, “the child would have looked like E.T.”). Zoë was blessed with looks not from my side but from her father's, a handsome collection of Irish and French blonds and redheads with a dash of Cherokee mixed in. My own hair, still full and dark and very straight, ceased to matter much to me. For I was inordinately proud—secretly, of course—of her hair. I had feared she would be one of those newborns born bald or with a head of hair so light it was undetectable. But my daughter emerged with ample amounts of light brown hair, which soon turned very blond; then, by the time she was five, it was thick to boot. Still better, both my mother and sister pronounced Zoë generally “stunning.”

MY SISTER DIED
suddenly and far too early, at the age of fifty-five. It would be easy to say that the enormity of her death made all the fuss over looks and hair seem silly. But for me, at least, all that fussing took on an importance that, while my sister was alive, I hadn't been able to fully appreciate. Her preoccupation with her hair became important to me because it had been so important to her. Now, four years after her death, when I conjure an image of my sister at the end of her life, the first thing to appear in my mind's eye is her hair, still long—and kept meticulously straight.

At around the same time my sister died, my mother began fretting less about her hair and more about growing old. Well into her seventies she kept it long and pulled it back into a loose bun high on her head. Now she wears it short, so short that it's nearly impossible to detect any curl at all. The thousands of hours she invested in it, now moot, will never be regained.

As for me, my own thick, straight hair is now a perk of the past. When I look in the mirror, I hope those are gray roots I'm spotting but know they are patches of skin, follicles gone fallow. My thinning hair has turned into not just one problem we see shampoo advertised for, but
every
problem we see shampoo advertised for: it is dull, lifeless, damaged,
and
brittle, with random strands of frizz thrown into the sorry mix.

My daughter, now twenty-two, seems perfectly relaxed with her hair. She does nothing but wash it, condition it, and let it hang dry. In other words, she doesn't obsess. She just takes good care of it and brushes it with the same Mason Pearson “Detangler” she has used since she was small. It's gorgeous. And you should see the sheen.

Hair in Three Parts

DEBORAH JIANG-STEIN

1.

One day when I was around twelve, I tiptoed into my parents' bedroom when no one was home and snooped in their dresser. What I discovered spun my world out of control. Buried in the top drawer under silky slips and perfumed bars of round soap, I found a typed letter my mother had written to the family attorney, and in just one paragraph I learned I had been born in a prison in West Virginia, to a chronic heroin addict.

Prison? Who's born in prison? I dove into emotional lockdown, the news so traumatic, and that day a wedge divided me from my parents—because I never told them I'd learned about my roots. My mother had already told me a few years earlier that I was adopted, and the world knew too—this caramel-colored, racially ambiguous girl in an all-white family.

No one knew why I'd shut down, not my family, not my teachers, no one. I didn't even know. I'd locked myself up in my own prison inside, where time and memory blurred. I was afraid of the world, terrified of people. Most of all, I was scared of myself and hated myself: I'm the daughter of an inmate. I'm bad, I thought, bad because I was born in a prison.

But in my day-to-day life, I was the daughter of two academics, two English professors, my adoptive family, who were as confused as I about what locked me up. In fact, I kept my birthplace a secret until I was an adult in my twenties and told a friend. At the same time, curiosity drove me to learn more. I just couldn't metabolize how a baby can be born in prison. After some investigating and detective work about my background, I learned that my birth mother and I lived a year together in the prison until authorities removed me from her cell. She was just beginning her ten-year sentence.

Prison is no place for a baby, the warden eventually decided, so I began the journey to foster care and, later, adoption—which sounds now like a fairy-tale ending to a tragic beginning.

But by the time I was eighteen and estranged from my parents, law enforcement in Seattle, where I had grown up, was hunting me down for petty crimes, mostly drug-related, in three states from California to Washington.

Twenty years after I found the letter, I met my birth family through a search agency and was devastated to find out that my birth mother had died. But they gave me a treasure, the photo album she'd kept in prison and forever after. It was all she had left of me. Beneath the sheen of a three-inch ragged-edge square of cellophane affixed inside her photo album, a single thread winds around the center of a few strands of my baby hair. On other pages, filled with my baby pictures, her love bleeds from the cracked corners of the black construction paper.

These are the few treasures I've inherited from her, along with two tiny knit sweaters and a yarn toy, and a blood-carried disease she possibly passed on to me—all pieces of a fractured story that have helped fill in the blanks of what I learned in the letter.

2.

Rome, Italy. My father took my brother, my mother, and me on his sabbatical year so that he could finish one of his books on John Milton's
Paradise Lost
or some other epic poem he studied. I was in third grade, eight years old.

One day, my mother was sick, maybe with a flu, I can't remember, but she was too sick to braid my hair the way I always liked to wear it for school. My father's big, clumsy fingers, thick as the smuggled Cuban cigars he smoked, braided my hair, a mass of black hair like a troll doll, into weak twists. On my run to the bus, the bands in my braids snapped out—the only time I could remember my hair flying free. By the time I took my seat on the bus, shame washed over me.

I'm exposed, naked, I thought, frantic about this undressing.

I wanted the power and boldness of Medusa to save me from the humiliation. We'd just studied the legend in Greek mythology, at the Overseas School I attended in Rome. Medusa's hair transformed into serpents—this is how I imagined I looked without my braids. But I didn't have her boldness, not on the inside. I was terrified of people, and the fear turned me mute at times. Most of all I was still scared of myself.

One day a decade later, back in Seattle, where I lived on my own after graduating from high school, I was in the hair salon for a cut. My stylist, Johnny—one of the slick, fast-talking thugs I hung around with who also smoked weed in the alley behind the salon between his customer appointments—said, “You have a few bald spots in back. You know this, right?”

When I thrust my fingers into my thick, wavy, shoulder-length hair, Johnny took my wrist and guided my hand to the back of my head. The shock of these spots, the size of a quarter, and smooth and hairless as my cheek, horrified me. I yanked my hand away.

At first, I thought it was damage from all the hair product. I loved my hair. I took good care of it. No more braids. I let it fall to my shoulders, free and wavy, and sometimes humidity thickened it. I was a loyal hair product consumer, with mostly gel and spray, and an easy believer in all the promotions that corporations bombard us with in advertising.

But no, Johnny said, the baldness wasn't a side effect of hair products. He said it was alopecia areata, spot baldness caused by stress.

I'm damaged, I thought, and in an instant felt uglier than I already did. I'd grown up in a white family, a multiracial girl in the 1960s, at time when civil rights and race blending were just coming into public view. On top of that, I didn't know what races I was, only that my caramel-colored skin and more ethnic features than my family's made me racially ambiguous.

My hair grew back after a few months, but the stress of drug dealing and running from the police continued for a few more years, until the day the feds knocked on the door of my best friend. They were looking for me about a deal gone wrong—which she immediately called to tell me. The phone call drove me on the run, and I left Seattle with two suitcases, and still estranged from my parents. They had no idea where I was or what I was involved in, other than that I was up to no good.

I flew to the Midwest to live with one of my uncles, whom I was close to, and began life anew, in my late twenties and yet emotionally still a teen. A lawyer helped clear my case, and that's all it took for me to reconsider the extreme death-defying risks I'd taken. I left it all behind: the drugs, drinking, ex-cons, and thugs, and I stayed in the Midwest until I moved to live in Tokyo for a few years.

My new self gravitated to dance and the arts, and a new crowd of friends, mostly dancers and actors and a few hairstylists.

As I tried to figure out who I was and what to do with my life, the issue of hair kept coming up. Mine was still shoulder length and wavy. In dance classes, I pulled it back into a ponytail. For the nightlife, I gooped it up with hair product.

I could see that hair was more than just a physical style. It's identity. So when the “I'm not good enough” swept through me—because “my hair isn't curly enough” or “it's too straight” or “it's too black and I wish I were blond”—I turned to my friends in the hair business for a makeover. I'd hang around the guys in my favorite salon, and they cropped my hair short, then bleached the black out so the color du jour would take hold.

My friends in the salon also got me a few jobs modeling for print. I didn't mind all the attention this brought to my hair, but the life on parade and in the public view made my other insecurities ramp up, especially about my light brown skin color. So I lightened it with temporary skin bleaches and creams, trying to escape my multiracial looks.

The money from modeling was good and the hair products that came with the jobs were great: oils, straighteners, relaxers, shampoo, conditioner, gel and spray, mousse, tonic for hair growing, softener, thickener, tools and serum to texturize, shine, unwave, unfrizz, or volumize—especially when I bleached my black hair in blond streaks or dyed one side orange. Back then, fuchsia was my look for springtime.

My family and I had reunited by now, the adoption turmoil mostly in the past. Still, I hadn't told them I knew about my prison birth. When I summoned the courage to tell my mother that I knew about my prison roots, she said, “Oh, Deb, we were afraid to tell you, afraid what it might do to you.”

My first thought forced me to bite my lip: Well, look what happened when I eventually found out.

But I kept that private. I knew she'd done the best she could and just didn't know how to break such tough information to her daughter.

Whenever my mother and I visited each other, her eyes widened when I'd show up with a new hair color. Still, we'd grown close and the steel lock on my heart had melted into the deepest of mother-daughter love.

3.

A new season of life, a dying parent, my mother adoptive has run out of options for staying alive. Chemo, radiation, they bought her some time but not enough. She is pushing eighty and I'm in my thirties.

I run my fingers through her chemo-thinned silver hair, but in the mother – adult daughter world of love, time wasn't on our side. There's never enough time for love.

She's in her last inhalation.

I run my fingers through her chemo-thinned silver hair.

My other hand on her shoulder, then her back.

Stroke the cotton bathrobe where my fingertips bump over her ribs.

She's in her low deep gurglegasp, the final of her breaths.

And I run my hand through her hair.

One last time.

The intimacy blends my two mothers—my hands stroking my dying mother's hair, and the strands of my baby hair that my birth mother kept.

TH
E STORY OF
my two mothers and my hair does not end there. Not long after my mother died, I tested positive for hepatitis C, a viral disease that leads to inflammation of the liver. It's a virus transmitted by blood, sometimes from sharing needles, which I did when I injected drugs. On rare occasions, hepatitis C is passed from an intravenous-drug-using mother, like mine, to her baby. It's also rare, though, for a baby to be born in prison.

Hepatitis C can lie dormant for years, as in my case. When I learned that more Americans now die of hepatitis C than from HIV, I looked into treatment, and the most common treatment was injections of interferon over a span of a year or more. I shook my head. Not for me. I felt fine, had no symptoms that I knew about other than fatigue—but I was the mother of two children, one still a toddler, and what mother isn't exhausted?

Instead, I took the path of healthy diet and general all-around good care of myself. I'd already quit drinking, and lucky for that, because alcohol is lethal for a diseased liver. The side effects of interferon are similar to chemo: flu-like feeling, fever, chills, weight loss, nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, aches and pains, headache, poor appetite, fatigue, depression, dizziness, sore throat and mouth sores, insomnia, itching, confusion, excessive sleepiness, memory loss, and low blood counts, because white and red blood cells and platelets may temporarily decrease, putting one at increased risk for infection, anemia, and/or bleeding. It's like the pharmaceutical television ads where the glowing benefit of the drug shrinks in the long lineup of hideous side effects.

And interferon can also wreak havoc with hair: cause changes in texture and color, and hair loss, not falling in clumps, as in cancer chemo, but turning brittle and breaking off.

Here it was again, a threat to the tumble and mop of my thick, now all-black-again mop. But mostly, I didn't see the trade-off: a 20 percent chance of ridding myself of the virus with that litany of side effects. As for the hair loss, hair grows back. Liver is life. Better to lose hair than my liver.

I have a plan if I ever pursue the interferon treatment. If my hair falls out, I can follow the practice of ancient warriors. In medieval times, they used shorn hair for catapult ropes. Centuries later, they used hair for bomb fuses. This entranced me when I read about it. I've been a bomb fuse most of my life, maybe because I was born into all the ferocity and fierceness that comes with prison. Or maybe I was born not just with the wild hair but with the boldness of Medusa, though it took so many years to see and such a long time to embrace.