Me, My Hair, and I (18 page)

By now, Anna's hair hung in curls around her shoulders, dark at the roots, auburn elsewhere. The hairdo was something she'd invented, neither entirely natural nor tormented. I had nothing to do with this hairdo. She had tried braids at the African braiders on 125th Street, then had her hair straightened until she looked like Diana Ross. She had been blond and black haired, austere and stylish. Now, she looked beautiful, self-assured, and expensive. If hair was a language, she was fluent in it.

A sacrament, say the Anglicans, is an outward visible sign of an inward, invisible state.

“I don't know what you should do about Natasha,” I said. “You know her better than I do.” I was stumped, I meant, because I knew next to nothing about the world she was in these days. I hadn't even known, as Anna once pointed out, that she was treated one way when I was with her and another when I wasn't. “I'm sure you'll figure it out,” I added, and I meant that too. Look what she had figured out about her hair, I thought.

The boyfriend didn't bring his gang around. I didn't ask what threat she'd used, if any. And that was the beginning of my recognition that Anna would be able to find her own way through the world. All parents face this moment. Very few, I'm guessing, find the answer in their daughter's hair.

Capelli Lunghi

JULIA FIERRO

A
fter I had my three-year-old daughter's hair cut short last summer, neighbors stopped us on the street.

“What happened?” they asked in hushed incredulity, as if my little girl had broken a limb. My husband's first response to the haircut was nervous laughter, and asking me why I'd “scalped” our daughter.

Everywhere we went that summer, people commented on her lack of hair—the cashier at the pizza parlor, the crossing guard near her preschool, the owner of our neighborhood convenience store. I avoided posting photos of her on Facebook, anticipating the reaction, and when I finally did, the comments of surprise, and even accusation—
What did you do to her?
—piled one on top of the other.

Where are her curls?

Did she do this to herself?!

She looks like a little boy
(modified with an apologetic winking smiley face emoticon).

My daughter's playmates' parents didn't recognize her at first and then acted as if they loved the change.
She's so cute, like a little hipster!
Or they seemed confused, unable to lie.
She just looks so different.
Sometimes they comforted me with a pat on the shoulder—
Don't worry, the curls could grow back.

I smiled and laughed and shrugged my shoulders in mock bewilderment, but here's what I was really thinking: Why would I let my adorable little girl, so often compared to the dimple-cheeked, ringlet-adorned Shirley Temple, be turned into what most strangers thought was an adorable little boy?

I made excuses for what began to feel like something I'd done, a crime committed.
It was a terribly hot summer
, I said. True.
She wanted to have her hair cut short
, I explained to people who were practically strangers, feeling pressured to make my case. True.
She loves her new haircut!
Also true. She had happily squealed,
I look like a boy!
when she first studied the new do in the mirror. She loathed hair clips, headbands, and ponytails, pulling the rainbow-colored hair bands out and using them instead as slingshots for her Lego figurines. All true. So why did I feel as if I was lying to my husband when I told him, several weeks after what we were calling, half-jokingly, “the cut,” that it wasn't my fault and that I blamed the stylist instead? I was distracted, I explained, I'd been watching my newly shorn six-year-old son run around the shop—
Don't touch that! Slow down! Be careful!—
and simultaneously paying for both their haircuts, while his sister sat in the raised salon chair shaped like a yellow NYC taxicab. When the hairstylist asked me how I'd like my daughter's hair cut, I'd answered,
Short is fine!
over my shoulder, not bothering to give any specific instructions.

It
was
all my fault, I thought, she
did
look like a boy. But I refused to admit this aloud. There was a bigger truth that would have been even worse to admit: I wanted her to go back to looking like a girl. The coils of blond-streaked curls had softened her features, had made her mouth a rosy little bow, her eyelashes fuller. Those ringlets had been her most feminine trait, especially for an active little girl who refused to wear dresses or any clothing that was frilly or pink. I reminded myself that I was proud of my daughter's athleticism and strength and of the fact that she loved to play in the dirt with her older brother. She was completely and confidently herself. She was everything I had
not
been allowed to be as a child, with my pink-carpeted bedroom and canopy bed, my ballet classes and taffeta holiday dresses. But after her curls were gone, I found myself missing them, even yearning for them.

Wanting my daughter to look like a girl made me feel not only like a bad mother, but also like a bad feminist. I was an open-minded, educated, modern mother, I told myself. When my son asked for a pink doll stroller, I bought it for him happily. When my daughter shook her head at the lovely dresses hanging in her closet and chose jeans and T-shirts, I gritted my teeth and acquiesced. So why would a silly haircut matter so much? Hadn't I been a little girl like my daughter once, a little girl expected to be polite and demure and graceful—feminine? Didn't I remember the weight of all that thick, glossy hair that had hung to my waist throughout my girlhood? I began to suspect that I wasn't any more enlightened a parent than my mother and father had been. This belief in my progressive and emotionally intelligent parenting philosophy had carried me through the most challenging and self-doubting moments of early motherhood, but here I was, criticizing my daughter's hair because it wasn't feminine enough.

As we drove toward my parents' suburban home for the first visit since “the cut,” my daughter looking in the rearview mirror and happily admiring her hair, it was my father's reaction I worried about most. I'd already received, loud and clear, my mother's retort to the photos on my Facebook page, which she kept open on her computer monitor all day, hoping to catch a glimpse of her grandkids.
Her curls made her pretty, but without them she's still cute
, my mother had said, both a reprimand and a consolation. But my father wasn't interested in Facebook, and this would be the first time he'd seen the evidence of my screwup.

What if he yelled at me in front of the children? They knew him only as sweet Nonno, the grandfather who made them
pasta fagiole
and sneaked them M&M's when he thought Mommy and Daddy weren't looking; as the gentle old man they adored, who cuddled them on his lap and sang them traditional Neapolitan lullabies. They didn't know the man who had fallen into mercurial and agitated moods in my own childhood, when life in a foreign country felt wretched—the impossible language, convoluted customs, and harried pace. His dark moods had led to enraged fights with my mother, and to his promising he'd leave us and return to Italy if she continued to
throw away
money. Sometimes they led to his hitting me with his hands, his belt, and the wooden kitchen spoon and threatening a bigger punishment, which I felt even then was both ludicrous and terrifying: he threatened to hang me by my hair from a nail in the wall.

WHEN I WAS
a girl, my father insisted I keep my hair long, just as generations of southern Italian women had before me, he reminded me often.
Capelli lunghi
. In the few photos I've seen of my grandmother and my aunts in their lives before America, with their solid farmers' bodies framed by the cliffs of the Amalfi Coast, their hair hangs heavy around their unsmiling faces, as though they are draped in mourning shawls.

As the first girl born into my father's family, I was treated like a treasured doll. My mother dressed me for the part—ruffled dresses and hand-knit sweaters and capes. The signoras in Turin, where we lived until I was two years old, before moving to New York, would stop my mother in the street to coo over me, fingering my lace-trimmed bloomers and shiny patent-leather shoes, and whisper,
Che bambola!
What a doll! I was doted on, especially by my uncles, both of whom had boys. If I wanted something—fresh gnocchi, a lollipop, a ride on my godfather's Vespa—my wish was their command. They called me
la principessa
. The little princess.

My hair—long, thick, a rich brown, with a subtle wave—was my most remarkable feature. My mother would smile proudly at the compliments, not mentioning the monthly trips to the beauty parlor, where two women worked in tandem to comb through the snarls as my eyes watered with pain. In my last year of elementary school, when my mother took me to the neurologist for my frequent migraines, he suggested cutting my hair. My mother refused this advice: I needed my hair, she explained. I was to play the coveted role of Clara in
Th
e Nutcracker
that winter, and the mothers in charge of hair and makeup would use a hot iron to twist my hair into long, bouncing banana curls, which they'd spray with Aqua Net and adorn with silk bows. In my childhood, women—my mother, her friends, aunts, school friends, their mothers—loved my hair as much as men would a decade later. My hair was what made me special. My hair was my source of beauty. My power. My hair was what my daughter, who still sees the world in black-and-white terms, as
good guys
and
bad guys
, would call my “invincible shield.”

When I was a sophomore in high school, my mother and the mothers of my two best friends threw us a sweet sixteen party on a boat that cruised around the Statue of Liberty. My father had fought her on the party, claiming, rightly so, that the cost was outrageous. I imagined he was thinking of his own teenage years, a glimpse of which I've seen in a single creased sepia-toned photo, where he stood alongside several stick-thin boys in front of the rocky southern Italian landscape. A rope holds his pants up. His shirt is stained. But he poses with his hands on his hips, his chin jutting forth arrogantly.

In anticipation of the party, all three of us birthday girls had picked out floral Laura Ashley dresses. My mother had used a credit card she kept from my father and insisted I keep my dress in the trunk of her car until my father went to bed. The fantasy I had of myself in my sweet sixteen dress included my first pair of high heels, a strapless bra my mother had bought me just for the occasion (although I barely needed it), and a haircut. I imagined the ends of my new short hair fluttering in the sea breeze and tickling the tops of my bare shoulders, as our birthday-boat cruise wound its way to the Statue of Liberty and back. I wanted a cute bob that would make me look, or at least feel, like Daisy in
Th
e Great Gatsby
, which we had just read in school, and which felt dreamily fateful, since I lived on the North Shore of Long Island surrounded by attractive blue-blooded families—mothers who wore tennis skirts to school pickup, fathers who commuted to the city in three-piece suits. These were people who boated and skied and knew when plaid and floral went together, a sixth sense I imagined they were born with. My parents had moved to this affluent area so I could be raised among the rich, hoping some of the privilege would rub off on me. I worked hard to fit in, and with the help of the pricey clothes my mother bought me, I claimed a spot on the margins of the in crowd.

In retrospect, it seems ridiculous that I asked my father for permission to cut my hair when he had already said no so many times, when he was surely anxious about the money being spent on the party, a panic unique to those who know what it feels like to cry in pain from hunger. But as I've come to learn, so much of survival—for me, for my father—is about delusion.
You should have known he'd say no
, I chastise my sixteen-year-old self, blinded by an entitled sense of want and hope, like a naïve Juliet. I should have foreseen his response—his eyes growing impossibly large, his running after me with an open hand, reaching for and yanking my long hair, which flew behind me like reins meant for his grip. Then he was hitting me and I moved to that space (inside myself? above myself?) where I was both present and not, where time moved both slowly and quickly, where sound became dull, like the ticking of a watch wrapped in cotton, and when I returned to the present, my father was gone, the tracks of his feet in the shag carpet, the sunlit room filled with the frenzied dance of dust motes, welts on my arms and legs—
nothing major
, I thought—and I went to the kitchen where he was sitting at the table and crying, and I forgave him, made him promise he wouldn't kill himself or something stupid like that. And I promised him I would keep my hair long.

WHEN WE ARRIVED
at my parents' house, my shorn daughter skipped up the front steps and into my father's arms. Once we were inside the house, it was my mother who had the strongest reaction to “the cut.”
You cut away her personality
!
I could feel my father nearby. What would he say? What would he do?

As I launched into the string of excuses and tried to explain to my mother that her granddaughter was delighted to look just like her hero, her big brother, I prepared myself for my father's anger—the literal darkening of his face, the deepening of his voice, the Neapolitan curses he used in only the most incensed moments.

“Looks good,” my father said. “
Insieme.
”

The same.

He pointed to my daughter's head and then to my own head. My daughter and I had the same boy's haircut. I'd had my own hair cut short when I turned twenty, after I'd been living on my own for three years. And when my father had first seen my new stylish pixie cut, during one of my rare visits back home, he had admired it and said I looked
sophisticated
. All those times we'd fought over my hair, whether with words or with his open hands, the battle had been about so much more than hair: for me, independence; for him, a kind of warped protection of me and a grasping for the control he couldn't find in the foreign world outside our home's walls. And here he was now, an old man, at the end of his life, filled with his own private fears and regrets, but also love—for my daughter and, through her, for me. I forgave him, again.