Me, My Hair, and I (19 page)

I'M STILL NOT
sure what happened that day at the kids' hair salon. Had I meant to have my daughter's lovely curlicues cut away? They were the feature that had led so many people—sometimes strangers on the street—to peer into her dimple-cheeked face and compare her to Shirley Temple, my mother's childhood idol and a figure I had felt, consciously or not, was a model for me as a girl. She was—I was—a little princess who kept her chin up no matter how bleak her life, no matter how many times my father, whom I love, threatened to hang me by my hair from a nail in the wall. It had been a threat I did not wholly believe, but I also could not dismiss it as silly or idle. Was I still haunted by it? Even a little? Maybe that fine balance—the small but terrifying possibility I'd grown up with—had been with me the day my daughter's curls fell to the floor. Or was it only the buried memory of my fear that had made her haircut so difficult for me to ignore?

Heavy Mettle

DEBORAH HOFMANN

W
hen I was growing up, my mother often told me that in my high chair I smeared oatmeal and mashed potatoes into my hair and that she could see that this was an expression of pure bliss. When the messy meal was over, she would hoist me to the sink for cleanup, a ritual of splashes and giggles. Part of the story she told is that I was a butterball of an infant and that she, suffering from a starving marriage, was emaciated, weighing at times barely ninety pounds. In the wake of her marital misery, these sessions provided a mutually nourishing understanding that my hair was also hers and that it was a source of pleasure and connection.

From about four to seven, I was skinny and I had scabs capping my knees, but my real trademark was my elegant waist-long brown braid. Mommy genuinely believed that cutting hair like mine was akin to desecration, like defiling nature or art. Trimming my split ends pained her, so she usually talked herself out of it. No pigtails or ponytails; those hurt, from all the yanking and tight rubber bands, and they were far too closely suggestive of the trophy squirrel tails many of our neighbors in rural Illinois with BB guns customized as bicycle handle ornaments. After my parents divorced, we were poor, and on top of that burden, we paid for water. To save money, some nights my little brother and I had baths one after the other, in the same water.

On such evenings before a bath, or on Saturday mornings, I could be found pumping myself on a creaking swing. My mother would unfurl my rope of a braid and let it cascade in long, rippling strands. I would again indulge in the deliberate messing of my hair in the pursuit of ecstasy. As I gained liftoff from the earth below and pumped the blue sky to go higher, higher, higher, I would lean back and let my hair leave sweeping contrails in the dirt as my feet touched the clouds. And my mother's shampooing it in the bathtub later and asking about my playtime—that was an indoor encounter with heavenly innocent security, and a prelude to bedtime prayers.

I swanned into Sunday school with soft banana curls after Mommy poised me on a stool to unwind strips of roller rags. Her scolding, “Debbieleine, sit still, please,” worked momentarily. But I never could resist a wriggle to look off to the side at Captain Kangaroo on television. Like mine, his bangs were so crooked. Clearly, I thought, he never could sit still either. Mine were always recombed and snipped incrementally toward an impossible ideal. And Mommy's tireless precision nitpicking paid off during the kindergarten invasion of head lice.

“Your glorious hair,” she would say, “like Rapunzel's, it makes you unique. Let ordinary girls wear it short. Ach! We don't give in to lice!”

As a young woman in Berlin during World War II, where she had met and enchanted my American soldier father, she had gained experience with lice in her periodic migrations to bomb shelters. Now she poured vinegar on my shafts with sneering expertise, while distracting me with exotic tales of the
Arabian Nights
and of Scheherazade. My hair, like a Persian rug, she said, was my own magic flying carpet. Adventures and romance would be mine. Taking care of my hair seemed part of the fare.

MY FOURTEENTH BIRTHDAY
was memorable because of my hair. While I was on a court-ordered visit to Wisconsin, my estranged father gave me the last gift he was ever to give me: an expensive boar-bristle hairbrush with a wooden handle. In the years to come, I would hand the hairbrush to whichever gangly suitor was seated with me on our love seat. It was tacitly a courtship audition and routine.

Though my mother was often away from home working, it's during this period that my most real, most cherished images of her reside, when she was already in her late forties and early fifties. In her youth, she had done some modeling and had gone to finishing school in Europe. Now her restored confidence and inner and outer beauty had returned. She wore her black hair piled, pinned, and tucked behind a long curtain of bangs. Her hair set off the red Avon lipstick she wore as well as sold. On top of her head, a coiled hairpiece was a unique engineering feat designed, she liked to say, to achieve “height.” She braced it with a scaffold of U-shaped hairpins, anchored in the back with a curved comb: a banister that first raked and then cupped the upsweep. She built this tower every weekday morning and deconstructed it every night. In a cloud of Adorn hairspray, she tied a dime-store scarf under her chin, and in her thirdhand Volkswagen, off she putt-putt-putted to work. On weekends she wrapped her hair in one of her many hand-knit turbans, like a big swami-knot tiara, again, to conjure height.

One day shortly before I left home for college in New York, while my mother was at work, I shredded my hick yearbook photo: long hair in a tacky Clairol auburn rinse, a corn-fed early draft of “me.” I made a rare phone call to my dad, to tell him my news—which I hadn't told him when it was news. The daughter he barely knew was calling to report that she had been accepted to Barnard College! Heart pounding, dry mouth, I sputtered out, “Hi . . . it's Debbie.” “Debbie . . . who?” was his reply. My moment of sweet triumph was crushed, along with my invitation to make him proud of me. The conversation did not last much longer, but his question became my
quo vadis
.

Debbie who?
Debbie who? Is it any wonder that for decades my hair became a living, tangible way for me to try to answer that question?

I set off from Peoria for New York City, fantasizing that my handsome father might come looking for me one day—which of course I hoped he would. If I had cut my hair, how would he recognize me? And how could I reject the one gift he gave me, that totemic hairbrush, which went to Barnard with me? It was a perfect all-in-one icon of unrequited love, of pain and pleasure. It was my dad magnet.

I spent the next several years in some sort of restless cycle, dating lovely guys and then breaking up with them abruptly, as I tried desperately to find some substitute for a father's sort of love.

Steadily I advanced in a career at the
New York Times
, one that I adored and that was a vessel large enough to contain this sense of myself as a heroine in my own jagged romantic tale. Well into my time there, I met Eric, the man I would marry, who loved to brush my hair with a boar-bristle hairbrush on the love seat in my apartment. My inner concubine had found her permanent sultan, and we found love together long and durable and magical. With him, I was able to authentically integrate all the parts of my being. And he loved me for them. When motherhood came, I was the long-haired, serene Madonna with child. In years to come, our toddler son played with my hair and my dear stepson gripped the strands while in my arms on the playground, as if for security. At night my husband stroked my hair tenderly.

As my mother aged, her neck muscles could not support her Erector set underpinnings to what were now silver wisps, her too-heavy metal sunk in a flimsy anchorage. She died in bed, at ninety-one, on Mother's Day, 2009, her twist of hair held in one small comb. Her final words surprised me, but they should not have. “Meine Debbieleine, you must try to keep your beautiful long hair out of your eyes . . .” Then off she putt-putted for good.

Her longevity gave me hope. I had expected for so long to die young of the congenital cardiomyopathy that had taken my brother, Peter, born on Pearl Harbor Day in 1948, who died at fifty-three on Labor Day, 2002, of this heart muscle weakness we inherited from Dad, who died at fifty-two, without our having reconciled.

It was under that burden of holiday superstition that just before Labor Day in 2012, I shuffled toward our medicine cabinet, doubled over in abdominal pain. I pawed my sloppy hair and grabbed a butterfly claw to jerk it back. It was only by chance, bent over in pain, and with new eyeglasses, that I noticed that these tiny claws, which I had bought by the scoop from a Canal Street vendor, were etched with a “Hello Kitty.” How lapsed, my vanity.

Eric insisted that I go to our doctor immediately. My agony won him his case. The doctor felt my abdomen and dispatched us urgently to the hospital, where tests confirmed that I had ovarian cancer, stage 3. When I heard the diagnosis pronounced, I flashed back ridiculously to that cartoon character, Snagglepuss, saying,“Exit . . . stage left!” This period would forever after be known by what our twenty-year-old son, Peter, called “Mom's incanceration.”

Surgery just after Labor Day went smoothly, and my guts were stitched up dirndl-style. Realizing that once chemo began, my hair would shortly fall out in clumps, I soon decided that if I was going to “exit, stage 3,” I was going to be badass and bald. Eric and I set off for Supercuts for a preemptive buzz. It was Eric's idea to get his own hair buzzed too, down to the scalp, in support. We treated it as a date, not doom. I had regressive moments. Sitting at the Supercuts on First Avenue at Sixty-Ninth Street, about to lose all my hair, I felt so deeply loved by my husband—the most loved I had ever felt in my life, by any man. In some enormous shift there at the budget hair franchise, he transformed himself into not only my husband but also the father and older brother I had lost too, all in one lovely, beaming bald man. Our photo, taken by the haircutter, is my favorite after our wedding photo. He tenderly stroked my bald head each night as he had always done when I had long hair. Every marriage should have an anniversary in which both go bald.

Then came months of chemotherapy. Each cycle began with drawing vials of blood. “Decanting,” said our friend Kathleen. “It's the right term for the wife of a wine critic.” With all the urgings to “drink this,” “stand there,” “swallow these” (fistfuls of steroids), and for all the sharp needle sticks and intubations, I thought my own name was Sit Still. Cancer and chemotherapy drew me into a disempowering undertow that made me feel like a child again. Decisions about hair were once again freighted with control issues.

I wanted no wig. Scarves appeared, though not dime-store ones like Mom's. Friends presented hand-knit cashmere berets, cotton prints from Provence, Hermès silken twill and street-vendor beanies, bandannas, and a gendarme kepi. I raked my haul toward me like chips, a VIP high roller at Cancer Casino Royale. Who knew that chemo was truly the big grift?

Soon, though, it became a burden to put visitors at ease with my baldness or to show I appreciated their gifts. I had also begun to embrace baldness. And one day in the shower, I felt water pooling around my ankles. I shrieked and looked down, feeling an absurd relief to see that the mass at the drain was my own body hair, not the dead mouse I had imagined. No more shaving under my arms and my legs. Downy forearm hair was gone too. Flecks in the toilet water: those were an armada of pubic hair sailing away. By my son's birthday, which is Halloween, I was Mrs. Potato Head dispensing treats. With neither eyebrows nor eyelashes, my irises were red from debris.

I learned that some cancer patients adopt a pet to caress. I turned to knitting. In my twenties, I had designed complex Aran cable patterns. Now, my brain—a filthy sponge soaked with rat poisons—was a slurry of compromised memory, double vision, diminished dexterity and focus. I could not remember even beginner stitch sequences. Nonetheless, I pushed through and bought supplies online. Exotic yarns arrived in sync with hopped-up steroid cycles. I could not die as long as there were long, braided skeins of alpaca and yak, merino and cashmere, in hair shades: timber, hazelnut, bruin, wolf, birch, to satisfy the mournful longing to handle my own. I was like a little girl once more, waiting for my mother to braid my hair, each new thick hank of yarn demanding that I wind it. I could still know pleasure, and forget my situation and even the close breath of death, for a while, through these plaits. And each wound bun reminded me of my mom. Boomerang-shaped cable-stitch hooks were metaphorical hairpins.

After the first chemo, I struggled to detangle any knot in the wool. The first time, I stuck it out for three hours, pretending I was removing chewing gum from a child's hair. I would not use scissors. I was like Mom with her lice management. Neuropathy, a painful and numbing side effect of chemo, sometimes permanent if not countered with activity, drove me to set a pace of maniacal productivity as occupational therapy. Knitting silk appeased the twitches. As vertigo and spastic kicking rendered me more sedentary, I knitted much as I had once tended my dolls' hair, stooped in introspection.

MY FAMILY NICKNAME
is Hedgie, for “hedgehog”: prickly, reclusive, and so misunderstood. By February of 2013, I was in remission. I looked and felt that nickname. By Mother's Day, soft, downy hair emerged, and I had a chic boyish look. By mid-July, tight Persian-lamb curls capered close to the scalp. By summer's end, I was finger-twirling Little Debbie snack-cake waves.

When friends asked what my plan was for my hair, I was defensive. I deflected them obliquely, while within I nursed a maternal protectiveness, inchoate yet absolute, as if they were intrusively asking about my child. It was at that time in my office that I had casually begun to reach for a binder clip to keep my hair back, or better, a tiny green florist clamp off my orchid stem.