Me, My Hair, and I (20 page)

The following Thanksgiving, my hair had returned, but I was frowsy, dishing up brussels sprouts like a matronly Edith Bunker. Stubbornly, I resisted grooming what felt like my hair's reassertion of itself. I mothered the mop, which now flopped over my ears haphazardly. I alone could understand this precocious hair, entitled as it was to run amok. To cut and style it would be to banish a spirited girl for running indoors; I yearned to see what this hair sought to do on its own. And, I confess, fussing with my hair meant surrendering the saintly pedestal of the illness, the prolonged privileges and considerations I earned as Miss Cancer. This messy hair was a halo that conferred spiritual superiority and martyrdom, as much as it was an affirmation that I was going to live. To alter its natural course would be presumptuous, greedy, like daring death by taking in stride an optimistic diagnosis. To groom it, I argued, would be like investing in a gamble and jinxing a scenario in which I was going to live.

Right about then, something shifted inside me. Perhaps it was triggered by the ever more ludicrous attempts to carry off this mess on top. When I pocketed a long barrette-style bread-bag clamp from home, to keep my bangs out of my eyes, I thought of those troll dolls of my youth, whose rough hanks of dull hair I had coated in fragrant Alberto VO5 lanolin and clipped with small, colorful plastic tags from grocery bread-loaf bags. It was time. The movie persona of Gilda
,
played by Rita Hayworth—which I had adopted in undergraduate seductions at V and T Pizza in Morningside Heights—was in my distant past. I was no longer a smoldering inner stripper, her hair flouncing saucily as she crooned lyrically, “Put the blame on Mame.” No, I had begun looking like Mamie Eisenhower.

After work on Christmas Eve, I slipped into Supercuts, the same branch where Eric and I had gotten our heads shaved. A stylist was preparing to close, but she invited me in. Silently, she snipped, she paused, sought my approval of her tidy trim through nods “yes” or shakes “no” to my mirrored reflection. It was done.

And now, more than a year later, I'm fifty-eight, with a new wavy, short but natural, groomed look.

What made my soft hair resurge was not merely the cessation of toxin, but its antidote, undiluted infusions of love from unexpected reservoirs. The hair coiled, groomed by fingers of invisible handlers, dead and living. These soft tufts are fresh and well-tended sod growing atop the shallow grave where my memories of cancer lie buried. I place photos of my unflattering transitional looks on my shelves alongside the ones of the child, the vamp, the adventurer, the dignified silhouette of a cameo, the Madonna and child. Like me, these waves are now gentler, more yielding. Eyelashes flirt, brows arch. There are no bad-hair days. I continue to knit bouncy ribbed scarves. Their juicy stretch and gauge replicate Mom's fortune-teller turbans. When I can no longer pin my hair, these will probably wrap my head too. After all, as my mother taught me, a girl sometimes needs some height.

At Last, I Learn How to Turn Heads

JANE SMILEY

S
everal years ago, and unexpectedly, I admit, my beauty regimen of what my family would call “utter neglect” but I prefer to term “halfhearted efforts” for once paid off. I was in Edinburgh. It was early in the morning. I put on a bit of lipstick (Guerlain Terracotta) that I had gotten in a duty-free shop and I looked in the mirror and said, “Wow.” I looked fabulous. I turned my head. I still looked fabulous. I smiled. I looked even better. I looked so great that I didn't even mind that there was no one to see me. The proximate cause of my wonderful, heart-stopping, and unprecedented hotness was a haircut and color I'd gotten before leaving the States. What happened was, I had gotten to the San Francisco airport after a two-hour drive up US 101 only to realize while standing in the Air France line that I had left my passport in another handbag (which was neatly put away back home in Carmel Valley).

I then tried to impose myself on my sister in Palo Alto for the evening, but she and her husband had a romantic date and didn't seem to want to invite me along. So I ambled down University Avenue, with a big rubber band from an accordion folder keeping my hair out of my face, and I saw a salon. After long consideration, I decided to go in and have my hair done and my eyebrows waxed (you can't really see my eyebrows because of my glasses, but I like that feeling when the wax and hair are stripped away—it wakes you right up).

My stylist was efficient and had a nice haircut herself, but I couldn't see what she was doing without my glasses. All I knew was, the hairstyle that I chose from the styling book was called Femme Fatale. Or maybe it was Harlot. Uncombed and a little tangled, it was distinct from all the others in the book. The color my stylist came up with had not really ever been seen on a natural-born human before, but it was a great color. My head looked like it had been gold-plated, a happy color, not an authentic color, and that was good too. I am way too old to be trying to fake it. The bonus I got with this haircut was that I could put a hat on, take it off, and have the hair fly out to its intended shape again. It was just like Barbie in every way.

And the eyebrows! One of the features of the salon was that the music and the chitchat were so loud that I could neither make myself heard nor intelligently answer questions, so whenever they asked me what I wanted, I just smiled and nodded. In this—as in all things—it is better to leave it to the experts, and the eyebrow lady was an expert.

As soon as I became a beauty, I came up with some tips, which I will now share.

1. Try to look your best as infrequently as possible. However you look, people get used to it. If you accustom them to a very high standard—your hair and makeup are always perfect, your clothing is expensive and fetching—you are just setting them up for disappointment if you make a mistake or, God forbid, get lazy. If, however, you do as I do and wear jeans and a T-shirt most of the time and wear makeup only for special occasions, there is always the possibility of a pleasant surprise. No, they didn't know you had any taste. No, it was not clear that you were actually pretty, but you are! This is not the same as letting yourself go. It is more like being dormant, so that from time to well-chosen time you may blossom.

2. Never make shopping an event. The job of a flattering outfit is to improve itself upon you. If you need or want something for a particular event, you will certainly buy something you don't like. It's much better, for example, to take your son to the mall and run into your favorite store, grab something that strikes you off the rack, run into the dressing room, decide right then and there, and leave as soon as it is paid for to make sure your son doesn't hog the video-game demo at the game store. When you look for something, you will buy it; when you don't look for something, you will love it.

3. Go blond when you go gray. Dark hair is for children. It goes nicely with smooth, creamy skin. Once your mane is striped and your face is lined, there are too many contrasts. You look too complicated. Nice color highlights look like an optical illusion and are a good way to start. Think tawny.

4. Kiss a lot. For whatever reason, usually a bad one based on habits of disapproval and self-righteousness, the lips of middle-aged women thin out and eventually disappear. The best antidote to this is kissing every day for extended periods of time. Your partner should really put his (or her) heart into this—the tendency of your lips to disappear needs to be aggressively counteracted. You need to soften your lips so that they can be worked with effectively.

After I became a beauty, I experienced something that, I suspect, all beauties experience. My surface, head to toe, took on a life of its own. People reacted to it. I reacted to it, but not as though it were me. More as though it were a separate being, a Tall Blond, rather remote, but with a knowing look in her eye. It almost didn't matter what she did; she got away with anything. People smiled at her. Men looked at her—first at the hair, then at the other parts. Almost inevitably, because I am over six feet tall, there was some speculation about her. Was she a woman? Was she a female impersonator? She had just that hint of ambiguity that draws the gaze. This had happened to me before, but when I had short, dark hair, the way it worked was that guys would say, “Hey, buddy, you need something?” and I would answer in my regular female voice, and they would do a double take and get embarrassed and start calling me “ma'am.” For years, I was tall but unobvious, rather like a tree. For a month or two, several years ago, there she was, the beauty. I was with her. I suspect it's this way for most beauties.

After I had been a beauty for a while, I began to think, So what?My life is what it is, and I like it. I began to wonder what being a beauty is for, after all. Beauty in women is usually seen as a negotiable commodity with some value in the marriage market, or as an add-on to another, more specialized talent. In our media culture, beauty is likely to be a good thing because it might be parlayed into bucks. At any rate, though, beauty is restless—it promises that anything can happen.

But I didn't want anything to happen. My partner thought I was beautiful already, my kids didn't care, and my friends didn't notice. And the entire literary history of beauty is marked by suspicion and regret. A poet can't look at a beautiful girl without seeing the skull within the skin or, at least, the old harridan within the youthful darling. Total hotness, as Shakespeare said, “hath all too short a date.”

Or does it? In that month or two,one thing I noticed was that there was a great deal of beauty around me. Not only the usual things—like horses, valley mists, blown roses dropping petals—but also sudden, striking sights: lush grass that seemed to be giving off a green light; a restaurant in Paris entirely walled in Art Nouveau mirrors; a woman with magenta hair, lips like a purple bow, and freckles that looked like polka dots (trust me—she was astonishing); an old friend who looked stooped and subdued when I saw her three years ago, around the time of her divorce, but who now looked active and free (and just my age! Do we constitute a statistical sample?); and of course men, women, and children of all sorts, all ages (mostly young, though, I admit). Shakespeare's line was wrong, I think. The drive to see beauty and to be beautiful is a permanent feature of human nature. Beauty is fleeting when we try to capture or possess it, even when we declare that we have located it in a particular loved one, but it is constant and unchanging when we only watch it come and go, like time itself.

Getting Real

ANNE KREAMER

I
began consciously playing with my identity in 1964, when Louise Fitzhugh published
Harriet the Spy.
I was a highly regimented nine-year-old Catholic convent-school girl, and the quirky, free-spirited Harriet became my heroine. She solved mysteries. She was
interesting.
I mimicked everything she did. I carried a notebook in which I scrawled observations—as I skulked around neighbors' houses trying to see if anything was out of the ordinary, threatening to share with my parents my older sister's habit of putting on forbidden stockings after she left the house on her way to meet her friends and the neighborhood boys. Regrettably, nothing very captivating happened on my Kansas City block.

In 1968, as I turned thirteen, Julie Barnes, the character played by Peggy Lipton in the groovy crime series
Th
e Mod Squad,
abruptly usurped Harriet as the person I wanted to emulate. Her character amped up Harriet's domestic spying by orders of magnitude. Julie was an
undercover
cop. She had a black partner. She was a hippie with straight, long blond hair. She seemed effortlessly chic (not that I really grasped that concept at thirteen) in her jeans and leather jackets. The show's urban grit, drugs, and antiwar imagery were beyond any imitation available in my thoroughly
Leave It to Beaver
1960s suburban teen world—but Peggy's hair,
that
I could do. I could grow my chin-length blond hair long, hoping that groovier hair would make me as fascinating as she seemed. Growing my hair at thirteen was the gateway drug for what became a lifelong practice of using a change in my hair as a way to achieve a shift in my sense of self.

With the enthusiasm of extreme youth, I failed at first to appreciate that long hair was not something that could be achieved quickly. Hair grows at the speed hair grows, which is slowly—on average, about half an inch a month. It took
forever
in teen time—the entirety of my high school years and
Mod Squad
's existence—for my hair to finally reach my waist. But even before it was actually long,
consciously
deciding for the first time how I wanted to look made me feel grown up in an adult kind of way.

I held on to that agency when I decided to reinvent myself before leaving for college. I pulled that hard-earned mane into a ponytail, and in one snip, I ruthlessly cut it all off.
Bam!
In a few seconds, I was a new person. At least in my own mind. I was no longer the long-haired teenager, no siree, I was now a not-quite-Twiggy ingenue. During the next four years, changes to my hair took a backseat to more dramatic sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll identity explorations. But when I entered the workforce, I once again began to experiment with different hair-based personae. An early job in banking was the catalyst for the first time I dyed my hair a dramatic color—the wholly unnatural-looking, bittersweet orange that the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood has made her trademark. I wanted to make very clear that I was a
bohemian
, not some beigy banker type.

Later, when I worked in television and publishing, I didn't need to use such an obviously artificial color to assert my artsy bona fides, and I softened the harsh orange into a warmer russet. At forty, panicking about middle age, I once again turned to a new hair color as a coping mechanism, dyeing my hair black, intending to project a Joan Jettish, I'm-not-old-I'm-a-rocker kind of vibe. It was a disastrous failure. “You look like your evil twin,” a friend of mine actually said. Both of my daughters, who were then five and seven, burst into tears the evening I came home with the new color. I had to live with that mistake for a long time, because you cannot simply wash ebony dye out of naturally light brownish hair, any more than you can grow your hair down to your waist in a hurry. Chastened by my hasty decision, once the black faded and grew out, I settled into a uniform mahogany shade.

Sometime in my midforties, I noticed a dramatic shift in my relationship with time, as processed through the growth of my hair. Instead of the half inch of growth every month marking how slowly time seemed to pass, the opposite happened. Time sped up. To maintain the “natural” brown hue, I had to color my hair every six weeks, every five, every four, and finally every three weeks to keep the gray from showing. It wasn't that my hair was growing in faster, of course, but that as more gray grew in, the contrast between dye and roots became much more pronounced.

The speed at which the roots seemed to grow yanked me out of the here and now, and I began to obsess over the near future, measuring life moment to moment through the template of how many days a month my hair would look good. By this time, my hair-looking-good window was mercilessly short—four or five days between when the smudge of dye had faded from my temples and hairline and when the roots started coming in. Part of my decision to quit dyeing my hair at forty-seven was a desire to liberate myself from that relentless clock. The other catalyst was my looking at a photograph of myself standing between my then sixteen-year-old butter-blond daughter and a dear gray-haired friend. Sandwiched between those two naturally colored heads of hair, I thought my helmet of dark brown dye looked terrible. I had a visceral reaction. I hated it. It was that simple. The color had to go.

I'd anticipated that eliminating the five hours a month I spent on the salon commute and sitting in a colorist's chair would make my weeks feel more expansive. I was right about that. I discovered that the average American woman spends even more time than I had on professional hair maintenance at the salon—a staggering 7.9 hours a month, or the equivalent of
two
full-time workweeks a year. But most of us never quantify these hours—I surely hadn't—because it would force an uncomfortable awareness of the opportunity cost of how those hours (and thousands of dollars) might have been better spent.

Knowing from my ebony fiasco that there is no easy way to get rid of hair dye, and fearing the loss of my resolve, I offered to write a diary of the experience for
More
magazine. I was right to build in that layer of accountability. I had to work with my colorist, first adding blondish highlights to blend into the gray, trying to mask the ice floe shelf of gray that was glacially creeping down my head. It was six months into the process before I quit dyeing altogether. The reader response to my
More
piece was so overwhelming that I decided to dig deeper, eventually publishing a book,
Going Gray: What I Learned about Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity, and Everything Else
Th
at Really Matters
.

I'd fretted that having gray hair would make me feel even more invisible than a middle-aged woman ordinarily feels. But I was happily shocked to discover the opposite. Until I had my own unique scattershot blend of gray, steel, buckwheat, white, and pearl strands of hair, I'd been blind to the fact that I was merely one of a million women sporting
exactly
the same hair-color-industrial-complex shade of “rich medium neutral brown.” Does any word connote invisibility more than
neutra
l
? I could see now that, rather than making me look young and vibrant, my color had had the unintended consequence of commodifying me, making me part of an army of “rich medium neutral browns.” Without dye, I was learning that the singular, complex hybrid tone created by the various natural colors on my scalp allowed me, for the first time, to genuinely individuate myself. I'd accidentally discovered something the psychologist Daniel Gilbert writes about in
Stumbling on Happiness
, that blending in with the masses denies us one of the key drivers we have for happiness—celebrating our uniqueness. I promise you, no one else has my particular shade of gray. And I'm often the only woman in the room with hair that's not dyed.

Much to my surprise, when I stopped coloring my hair, time began to slow down, in a good way. That the process takes a while, not subject to any instant fix, turned out this time around to be a gift. It took eighteen long months (including a radically short cut) for the color to completely grow out. I came to understand, as I said in my book, that “in some ways letting my hair go gray was a bit like an intensive five-day-a-week-on-the-therapist's-couch crash course, but with no shrink to guide me.”

Allowing my gray hair to grow in, without going to the effort of hiding it, required me to give up the fantasy that I'd had the power to freeze my age to that time before I went gray. It forced me to confront my half-conscious fears about aging every time I looked in the mirror. The slow journey allowed me the time to process the fact that I now have less time ahead of me than I do behind me. This brought to mind the cultural historian Arden Reed's study of what he calls “slow art” and the work of the Long Now Foundation
,
cofounded by the musician Brian Eno and the creator of the
Whole Earth Catalogue
, Stewart Brand. “Civilization,” Brand wrote in his Long Now manifesto, “is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed—some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility.” Removing the illusory camouflage of hair dye grabbed me by the roots (pun intended) and forced me to take a longer view, to meditate on the passing of time in real time.

Rather than depressing me, every glance in the mirror at my gray hair has become a carpe diem moment. Artificial hair color no longer lulls me into a false sense of security—or, rather, quasi obliviousness—about the passage of time, the inevitability of death. And this, it turns out, is healthy—and it has raised my spirits. In her 1993 study of aging,
Th
e Fountain of Age
, Betty Friedan wrote that “an accurate, realistic, active identification with one's own aging—as opposed both to resignation to the stereotype of being ‘old' and denial of age changes—seems an important key to vital aging, and even longevity . . . . [I]t takes a conscious breaking out of youthful definitions—for man or woman—to free oneself for continued development in age.”

I've earned my grays. As I enter the phase of life when illness begins more and more to strike down friends and family, I become more and more grateful for the simple gift of being alive. As I approach my seventh decade, I want to slow time down. A decade ago, when I stopped dyeing, I had no idea that watching the ways my pewter and gunmetal strands of hair have morphed over time into pearls and silvers would help me do that. The naturalist Akiko Busch writes of something called the ecotone, which is the zone where two habitats merge, “that threshold where water meets the shore, where the forest comes to meadow, or where woodland ends at a cultivated lawn.” She suggests that it is in “the intensity and complexity in these places of transition, where one thing manages to become another,” that we are fully aware of the possibilities of change. The
very
gradual but ever-present transition of my hair color into white is my personal ecotone. Keen observation of the incremental changes in my natural hair color keeps me alert to the passage of time, of the need to
live now
. My hair and I are finally in equilibrium with time—the days and years are neither hurtling past nor artificially stationary. My hair is now like the second hand on life's clock, keeping me right where I need to be.