Me, My Hair, and I (21 page)

No, I Won't Go Gray

ELIZABETH BENEDICT

I
have never gotten high marks in fashion and beauty. If I had to grade myself, I'd say I usually hover around a B-. On special occasions, I can sometimes work my way up to an A-. If I got a report card from the universe—or maybe from my sister—I'm sure it would say, Liz's appearance would probably improve if she could see her way clear to a better attitude.

It's what comes, I think, of working at home in my pajamas for so many decades; of having come of age in the time of Joan Baez at the Newport Folk Festival and Indian bedspreads as fashion statements; of having a social life that rarely requires a dress; and of always having other matters I preferred to obsess over—sentences, paragraphs, paintings, who is president, how I would pay my health insurance premiums, and the state of my love life.

I have gone to plenty of posh places in my time and cobbled together whatever I needed to wear—the specifics of which escape me now—but the only event for which I ever put on a long, even quasi-formal dress was my sister's wedding ten years ago. The bridesmaids had been instructed to wear black dresses of our choosing; if I wore pants, as I preferred, my sister said I could not be a bridesmaid. I had never been a bridesmaid (my friends tend to marry at nonweddings, like my own, at city halls or Buddhist temples in countries so far away not even family members are expected to come), but I didn't want to be quite so sidelined at this event. I overcame my resistance and found a narrow Ann Taylor crepe-textured dress at my favorite thrift store and wore it without incident, although I felt a bit out of sorts dressed up as a girly girl.

Days later, when a family friend who hadn't been there said to me, “My mother saw you at the wedding and said you looked fabulous,” I cringed. I know it was a perverse response. Isn't that the point of going out, of getting “dressed up”—that people will notice and approve? Why couldn't I embrace “fabulous” when the alternative is whatever the opposite of that is—ordinary, forgettable, neutral, meh? What's this all about?

There is something about the tyranny of what is expected of women that I resist, that makes me want to reject the pressure, the feelings of being on display and of being judged. There seems to me a kind of desperation in the desire to be ornamental, to be
too
put together, too pleasing, too slavish to the demands of fashion. “Although they do not talk of it at school,” W. B. Yeats tells us in “Adam's Curse,” women must “labour to be beautiful,” and I read the lines, enjoying the lovely rhyme (school/beautiful), but then I think, Still? Haven't we learned anything in a hundred years? (Answer: yes, Botox, Restylane, and face-lifts.) And there's this: there are so many women who are better at this than I am (my sister, for one), who actually enjoy doing whatever needs to be done to look a whole lot spiffier than I look, that I'm happy just to sit this activity out, like the klutz who has the good sense to avoid the dance floor.

I'm plenty comfortable displaying the words I write, and the ideas and characters I make public, but when it comes to calling attention to my clothes, I would rather wear the writer's equivalent of a little black dress and pearls, which is to say, something plain but not nearly that fancy. Reading a fashion magazine recently at a doctor's office, I learned about Roberta Armani, niece of Giorgio, who helps run the family business. She said of her own wardrobe, “I try to be present but not ostentatious.” At last, I thought, a kindred spirit!—never mind that we're present at vastly different places, she at Paris Fashion Week and I at the Salvation Army thrift store in Hell's Kitchen.

Yet I am not oblivious to the seductions of fashion or the allure of the beautiful. I look often at art and try to surround myself with as much of it as possible. When I gape at pictures of Michelle Obama's otherworldly wardrobe—which I do compulsively—I ask myself, What would
I
wear to state dinners if
my
husband were president? Would I dare to wear Narciso Rodriguez, or would I bore the world to death with my Eileen Fisher hand-me-downs accentuated with a purple scarf and silver stud earrings?

Which brings me, of course, to my hair, and it's here where my shtick about not caring much about my appearance gives way to a boatload of vanity. The older I get, it seems, the more attention I pay to my hair, and the more outright fakery I'm willing to bankroll and endure. Little Miss “I Can't Be Bothered” is not quite a lioness protecting her cubs, but faced with a scalp full of gray roots, the last thing I intend to do is let nature take her course. It was not always the case.

When I was a young teenager, in the thrall of Ms. Baez, my dark hair, like hers, hung down my back for years that stretched into decades. Mine was thick, a little wavy, and frizzy on humid days. If only, I think now, I had had a flatiron, I would have saved my mother having to iron my locks on the ironing board. That phase didn't go on for long, though I can't say how many such treatments I demanded. Floating around somewhere in my memory are some big pink plastic rollers and some Dippity-do that I know I used to smooth out my hair, but for how long or when, pre- or post-ironing-board, I have no clue. My hair wasn't curly in an interesting way, but nor was it frizzy in a way that made me want to shoot myself.

Perhaps if it had been more extreme—more extremely distressing—I would have vivid memories of the solutions I had sought. But back then, I'm not sure solutions existed, aside from those giant rollers. “Going to the beauty parlor,” which my mother did every week to groom her short, once very red hair, was about sitting under a gigantic heating bubble for half an hour, until the hair baked around a collection of rollers smashed against the scalp. The hair was then brushed, smoothed, and sprayed to a helmet-like glaze—the poor woman's Jackie Kennedy bouffant.

I don't remember when handheld dryers came into my life, nor when blow-drying hair to make it sleek and smooth did either, but it was long after Joan Baez finished singing “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” I can't remember getting my hair cut once in college and only recall a single visit to a cheap salon in my late twenties, for what must have been a trim. Around that time, I belonged to a gym where I swam regularly and loved drying my hair there, with the boxy wall-mounted dryer in the locker room, so I could pull, brush, and straighten the hair with two hands and thereby make it smoother than I could if I had to hold a dryer with one hand. This must have been the beginning of some spark of hair vanity. I also have vague memories of buying packets of special conditioner, because of the beating the chlorine gave my hair. Were those ninety-nine-cent packets what is called “product”? I have no idea. I was absent when discussions about “product” began—and only recently learned that the singular is the accepted form of the word. Why not “products”? I still don't get it.

When I quit my job to write my first novel—and was no longer in the vicinity of that gym and those dreamy wall dryers—I thought I might never again find such a compatible way to do my hair. At that point, it never occurred to me that I would one day spend money, and fairly regularly,
getting my hair done
.
Going to the beauty parlor
.
Dying it
, for heaven's sake, doing exactly what my mother did before Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem changed the game and told us we did not have to be Playboy Bunnies or baby dolls or arm candy anymore. We could go natural, we could examine our cervixes for fun and otherwise just
be ourselves
.

It still seems ridiculous to me when I'm in the midst of it, sitting in a room with dozens of women soaking our heads in toxic chemicals, paying hundreds of dollars—just that week—to pretend to look like people we are not. I can't bear admitting to myself that I belong to a cult, albeit millions of members strong, whose core belief—whose only belief—is that our fake hair color is essential to our well-being. But it does
seem
to be the case that the fake color, the ABG (anything but gray),
is
essential to our sanity, as are the blow-dryer, the flatiron, the hot combs, the chemical relaxers, the thousand-dollar hair weaves—the whole multibazillion-dollar hair industry.

A year ago, I met a stylish, sophisticated woman—Anne Kreamer—who had gone gray and written a book about it and informally advises those who want to take that treacherous journey. She told me how I could make the lengthy transition and said that because I had short hair—yes, I'd long ago lopped off my teenage tresses—it would be fairly easy. Although I think about it
every
time I look in the mirror and notice the gray roots beneath the warm brown that used to be authentically mine, I balk. No, I think, not now, not yet. I'm embarrassed by my vanity, but I'd be more embarrassed to go gray, gracefully or any other way.

I come up with all kinds of excuses for why I keep signing up for Superficiality, Inauthenticity, Fake Hair, the Big Con. Reason 1: I work with high school and college students, and if I look like I'm their grandmother, they will not pay attention to what I'm saying. (Note to self: Their grandmothers probably don't have gray hair. They might never have seen gray hair on women!) Reason 2: If I go gray and it looks awful, then going back to brown will be even more embarrassing than never having left it. Reason 3: The going-gray guru, who offered to help me, looks fabulous, but I'm certain I'll never look half as good (see reason 2). Reason 4: Given the modest state of my wardrobe, I need all the help I can get. Why not go to town when it comes to my hair?

But the real reasons I'm not budging are the most pressing, the most fundamental: I don't want to be reminded of my age. I don't want anyone else to be reminded of it. I want to continue to pretend for as long as I can, as long as the money holds out, and the energy to keep up the charade. There may come a day when that changes, but in the meantime, I'm still with Ponce de León in Florida, in search of the Fountain of Youth.

Speaking of Florida. Speaking of the Fountain of Youth. On a recent visit to Miami Beach, I was delighted that the apartment I'd rented was near a branch of the Beauty Schools of America, where a sign on the door welcomes walk-in customers to be worked on by students. I was growing my hair out at the time—I wanted only a blow-dry, not a cut or color—and the price was ten dollars. Ten dollars! It was fine that the student didn't speak English, and fine that she took more than an hour to dry my hair. When I got back to the apartment, I took a bunch of selfies because I thought my hair looked terrific. Really terrific. Especially for ten bucks. Four days later, I went back for another blow-dry. This time the stylist was faster, spoke English, and had a sweet, serious personality. Her name was Sahara. She took only forty-five minutes, and again, my hair looked great. I was over the moon.

When I went to pay, I told the woman at the desk what I had had done. “Five dollars,” she said.

“But it was ten dollars last week.”

“It's the Tuesday discount,” she said. “Five dollars if you're a senior.”

“A senior! I'm not a senior. How could you think I'm a senior?”

“Because it's Tuesday. All the seniors come on Tuesdays.”

I dropped a ten-dollar bill on the counter and sprinted out of the place, churning excuses for how this could have happened—that I'd been mistaken for an old lady. She was a kid herself, I reasoned, so everyone looks old. She barely looked at me, I reasoned, so how could she accurately assess my age? And on and on I ranted to myself, winning and then losing debating points, and remembering what the going-gray guru had told me a year ago: “Even with hair color, no one thinks you're a kid.”

DENIAL IS A
powerful drug. Ponce de León was onto something. I returned to New York a short time later in search, not of the gray guru—her counseling services would have to wait—but of another cut-rate beauty salon where I could continue to indulge my demented fantasies. For several years, I'd been going irregularly to the Aveda salon in my neighborhood, where I requested the stylists and colorists in training, because their rates were lower than the pros. But even with those discounts, it's a pricey place, and I'd worked out a system where I'd get color one month and a haircut the next, which meant that I looked sort of OK—now and then. Present, you might say, but not ostentatious.

I had recently moved a few blocks and kept passing by a salon whose prices in the window were a fraction of Aveda's. One evening I walked in and took the first stylist who was available. Before long, I felt I was on the set of the beloved though short-lived British TV series
Fawlty Towers
, in which John Cleese plays the owner of a hotel-restaurant where disasters appear as often as dust mites. My stylist stopped doing my hair to yell at her colleagues. They yelled back. My stylist stormed off to berate the receptionist. She took it. The stylist confided in me, looking for an ally. “You have to come in every day to protect me,” she said, in the way of a certain kind of crazy person. Again, she slipped away to give another stylist a piece of her mind. Everyone was furious. “We have customers here!” one of them shouted. This had the feeling of a familiar routine.