Me, My Hair, and I (6 page)

I've ventured into the weird world of pubic grooming a few times. After the Turkish hammam experience, it took my hair a full year to grow back. In my early thirties, my then four-year-old stepdaughter came to live with my husband and me for the first of many summers. I knew we would be changing into bathing suits together, and I knew her mother had voiced some doubt about whether the hair on my head—in the preferred vernacular, “the drapes”—was naturally that shade of shocking, unnatural blond. The truth is that it wasn't; the color had been foisted upon me at great expense by a Madison Avenue hairdresser. Before my stepdaughter's arrival, I decided to have a little fun with the situation. I turned on the TV, put my legs in the air and slathered Jolen cream bleach all over “the carpet.” After two hours, all the hair on my body, from head to toe, correlated. It was all a matching, hideous shade of something my mother calls “pee-pee yellow.”

A few days later, my four-year-old charge and I were changing in the beach cabana. She noticed that my pubic hair was a blinding Marilyn Monroe blond.

“Why is your hair there that color?” she said. “Wow.”

“Well, of course, it's my natural hair color,” I said, sliding into my bikini bottoms. Then I added: “And be sure to tell your mother.”

Like many New York women, I've ventured into J Sisters, that torture palace of Brazilian hair waxing on Fifty-Seventh Street. And every time I have gone, I have stared up at the ceiling—at first glance it appears to be pressed metal, but the curling edges in the corner belie the fact that it is actually wallpaper, a shifty decorating ruse—and lay sweating and screaming as one of the sisters (or cousins, or friends, all of whose names begin with the letter
J
) strips the hair from an area on the body where pain seems sinisterly acute, and I have sworn every time: never again.

Finally, last year, after a run-in with an ingrown hair that resulted in an infection that required antibiotic treatment—I looked at my doctor in wonderment as he wrote out the prescription, and he said, shaking his head in a kind of rueful sorrow at the state of womanhood, “I have to do this about once a month”—I decided: no more. I like my hair. It keeps me warm in winter, prevents chafing during sports, and stores pheromonal scents. It provides padding. It marks me as a woman, not a child. I will not laser it away. I will keep it. And when it does turn gray, and later I hope white, maybe then I will dye it hot pink.

Kozmic Hippie Hair Breakdown Blues

ROSIE SCHAAP

T
here she is on the cover of
Skeletons from the Closet
, the Grateful Dead's 1974 best-of record: Botticelli's Venus—clutching a red rose—wedged behind a skeleton. Painting nearly five hundred years before the Dead played its first show at Magoo's Pizza Parlor in 1965, in Menlo Park, California, Sandro Botticelli couldn't have anticipated that his Venus—that demure, pale-skinned paragon of Western femininity, with her mild gaze, her coy quasi smile, her head subtly, alluringly atilt—would become a model for the late twentieth-century second-wave hippie-girl ideal. And then, there's her hair: great waves of marigold and sunflower, long enough to conceal her sex, flowing, magnificent. How I once longed for hair like hers; how deeply and unhappily I knew I would never have it.

As a prototype of the perfect nature girl, Botticelli's Venus was one of the reasons I felt I never really cut it as a hippie chick, but she was not alone. My hair is naturally brown, and though about as curly as Botticelli's goddess's, it is inclined to frizz, in accordance with the practice of the hair of Jewish girls going back—in my imaginings anyway—to Sarah and Rebecca, Leah and Rachel. I suspect neither Joni Mitchell nor Michelle Phillips descend from that line, and if a girl following the Grateful Dead on tour couldn't have Venus hair, the next best thing was hair like theirs: blond and stick straight and parted in the middle, long and sleek and perfectly in place. My hair can only stand to grow so much, and then, when it has no more will, it stops. My frizz will rebel against even the most assiduous ministrations of the blow-dryer.

With these real and mythical women as my impossible ideals, at age fifteen, in 1986, I flung myself—my whole, ardent, earnest young self—into the American counterculture of a generation prior. When I wasn't listening to the Dead, I was listening to folk music and psychedelia and boozy electric blues, to Bob Dylan and the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, to Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Crosby, Stills, and Nash (and sometimes Young). Other girls at my school prized their immaculate Benetton jerseys and stonewashed Guess jeans; I spent hours in thrift stores and little Indian dress shops in Greenwich Village, poring over racks of colorful garments, and wore layer upon layer of thin, block-printed cotton skirts, paired with tie-dyed T-shirts or embroidered Guatemalan tunics in temperate weather, or earthy, itchy, chunky Andean sweaters in the winter. I forswore shoes whenever possible (occasional concessions were made to a pair of tattered huaraches or Birkenstock sandals), the better to see the silver rings on my toes and the jangly little bells tied around my ankles, the better to feel the grass or sand or even pavement beneath my callused feet. Of course, I wore no makeup, and shaving was for suckers. I skipped school frequently to take part in Greenpeace and antiapartheid demonstrations or to retreat with friends to the Connecticut woods to drop acid. I doubt I thought too hard about it back then, but I still understood why I was doing what I was doing, beyond infuriating my mother: I felt out of place and out of time in Reagan's America, and the sixties seemed a better fit for me, even if my vision of the decade was romanticized and simpleminded and tenuous.

My efforts paid off: I dressed and acted the part so well that adults who'd actually lived through the era sometimes said that looking at me gave them flashbacks. Only my hair failed me. I could get the clothes right, the music right, the politics right, the lingo right, the vegetarian burritos right, even the twirling, spinning, kooky dancing right, but my hair always threatened to betray me as a sham hippie. I brushed it nightly in arduous, hour-long sessions in my incense-befogged and -scented bedroom, as though the more I brushed, the longer it would grow; as though there existed a hidden store of luxurious hair just under my scalp, and by brushing with real conviction I could summon it forth; as though some dormant, hidden hair was coiled in there like a snake to be charmed out of the clay urn of my head. I loved how when my hair was wet it seemed to settle and stretch, and how, if I angled my head back just so, I could feel it flick the middle of my back; this supplied an electric, tremendously pleasurable tingle. But when I straightened my neck again, it just barely grazed my shoulders, and the spell broke.

Those rare and tender moments when my hair made me feel like Joni Mitchell—or, more to the point, like certain graceful and desirable girls I knew in my Grateful Dead tour circle, the ones all the hippie boys circled like curious, feral dogs—were fleeting. Even in the world of Deadheads, which I had counted on to be more just and less orthodox where expectations of appearance based on gender were concerned, long (and preferably blond) hair equaled feminine beauty. In Janis Joplin, I identified a more realistic, if perhaps more dangerous, sixties icon upon whom to model myself. Her wild, reckless frizz was much more like my own hair; her brash, bawdy, hard-drinking, hard-living
Pearl
persona was easier for me to emulate than Joni's quieter, ladylike intensity. Back then, we didn't know from karaoke, but a late-night session of lip-synching to a favorite song, played on a vinyl record, was a regular feature of high school parties in basement rec rooms. My big number was Joplin's “Piece of My Heart,” which I pantomimed with deeply felt, full-throttle energy—gripping a bottle of Jack Daniel's or Southern Comfort as a proxy microphone, occasionally letting out a loud, ferocious cackle. The more I learned about Joplin's short, sad life, the more reasons I had to relate to her—and to feel anxious and uncomfortable with that. Janis never thought she fit in either and wasn't such a hit with the hippie boys herself. Shy and artistic by nature, in public she was messy, loud, and arguably androgynous. I already felt like I was all of those things and didn't want to cultivate them further.

I DROPPED OUT
of high school to go on Dead tour effectively full-time and became especially close to three other girls. One was very much in the Botticelli mode, having emerged from her suburban New York half shell with bright blue eyes, a dusting of freckles across her cheeks and tiny nose, and perfectly blond, silky hair. We briefly shared the attentions of the same tour-head bro, a tall and charming and popular drug dealer. One night, he and I sat smoking a joint and talking on a little patch of spare dry grass in the parking lot of the arena the Dead had just played in, in North Carolina. He kissed me and ran a hand through my hair. I could tell he was disappointed by how quickly his hand traveled from my scalp to my hair's ends. He shook his head and smiled at me apologetically. “You're a cool girl,” he said, “but Marla's so cute.” I don't know if this is what precipitated the dissolution of my friendship with Marla. I'm sure it contributed to it. But on tour I remained close to the two other girls. One, Teri, was Native American, with very dark, sometimes unruly hair. The other, Wendi, was half-Indonesian, with the thickest, blackest, and most exquisite hair I'd ever seen. Teri and Wendi were both beautiful, but not in the conventional hippie-girl way. I felt safe and secure in their sisterly company.

When hair wraps became all the rage on tour—most of us Deadhead girls bound a few hanks of our hair with multicolored embroidery floss and sometimes finished them with a flourish of beads—they felt like a blessing: a way of controlling and taming my hair, fully sanctioned and embraced by my community. I still have a photograph of myself with one of those wraps, but now I can see that I was fooling myself. If anything, it made the staticky frazzle of the hair that surrounded it really stand out.

IN MY SOPHOMORE
year of college—this was a few years after I'd left tour and gotten a GED—I had no recourse one night but to cut off most of my hair after a foolish, failed dreadlock experiment. Instead of neatly partitioned, tight, graceful locks, I'd managed to give myself two massive, knotted, knobby antennae, so cumbersome that I could not find a comfortable way to rest my head on a pillow. That late-night haircut, generated by frustration and fueled by cheap beer and a few shots of whiskey, still stands as the best I've ever had. Released, my curls looked springy and healthy. By accident, I'd created a shape that framed my face just right. I never got more compliments on my hair. But that cut could never be duplicated, not even by professionals. It was like the Brigadoon of haircuts, a supernatural occurrence that could happen only once in a lifetime.

Still, I kept my hair short, or shortish anyway, for most of my twenties and thirties. It was easy to wash and shake dry with a towel, then fluff up a bit with some gooey curl cream and go. It felt respectable and professional enough for a young woman trying to prove that she was a respectable, professional grown-up, so naturally it never felt like me.

In my early forties, I made what felt like a momentous decision: unless extreme and unusual circumstances (a funeral? an improbable black-tie event? the Kentucky Derby?) forced me to do otherwise, I would never again wear anything that would look out of place on a Fairport Convention or Incredible String Band album cover. (If only I'd paid more attention to those English folky counterculture types when I was a teenager; they didn't seem to make as much of a fuss over their hair as their American counterparts.) My hair still doesn't want to be long, or straight, or smooth, but I don't think I'll ever really cut it again. Instead, I'll just trim the split ends off every few months. Now that it's perfectly obvious that I am an adult, the pressure to look like one is off. Most days I plait my hair into two braids and pin them up symmetrically, one on each side of my head. My hair may have failed me when I was a hippie girl, but now that I'm a middle-aged hippie woman, it's doing just fine.

Romance and Ritual

BHARATI MUKHERJEE

A
s a child growing up in Calcutta in a traditional Hindu Bengali extended-family household, in which all adult women (except my widowed grandmother) and all girl cousins had long, strong, glossy black hair, I developed an unhappy relationship with my own fine, wispy hair. My iron-willed grandmother, who had been born in the nineteenth century, insisted on the family's following the unbending rules of social comportment laid down in the ancient text
Th
e Manusmriti
, circa 1500 BCE, popularly referred to as the Laws of Manu and ascribed to Manu, the First Man. Manu the Lawgiver dictated incontrovertible dos and don'ts on all aspects of Hindu domestic life, including the type and quantity of body hair and head hair desirable in women. Decent men were to avoid women with hairy bodies, women with reddish hair, and women with bald or balding scalps. To ensure the growth of thick hair, girl children in our community have their heads shaved around age four or five in the belief that the second, permanent growth will be stronger and fuller. I too had my head shaved as a young child, but my follicles did not produce thicker, blacker hair.

My mother expended a great deal of energy every morning, massaging hair oil into my scalp to increase blood circulation and revive fatigued follicles. This was a prebath ritual. She would sit on a chair, with me squirming on a low stool in front of her, and she would part my locks, strand by strand, in order to work pink hibiscus-scented oil into the follicles. Sometimes she switched to green amla-fruit oil, not only because eating the tart amla fruit, with its sweet aftertaste, was known to control rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis, increase intelligence, and improve eyesight, but because the oil processed from it fostered hair growth. In addition, she was always on the lookout for the harder-to-find hair oil pressed from a berry called
koonch
in Bangla, because it was guaranteed to grow new hair. Every two weeks, a half hour before she shampooed my hair, she would slather homemade yogurt on my head to guard against dandruff.

I, an ingrate daughter, resented every aspect of her hair-enhancement rituals, especially having to sacrifice precious leisure time when I would rather have read novels. But now the very memory of my mother's nurturing fingers kneading the oiled-slippery skin on my head, her favorite fine-tooth comb sliding and smoothing tangles, the gentle press of her knees as they supported my slack-muscled bookworm's back, brings on surges of guilt and pleasure. As an adult, I have treated myself to head massages in upscale hotel spas in China, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. But as a child, given my scanty, secondhand knowledge of Manu the Lawgiver's definitions of ideal hair, I was convinced that my thin hair was a symptom of moral flaws.

The oldest girl cousin in our large household, a know-it-all teenager, had a practical explanation for why Hindu Bengali women were required to have thick, waist-length hair. She was eight or ten years older than I was; I can't be sure. Even though my generation was the first in our family to have been born in a hospital rather than delivered by a midwife at home, we did not have birth certificates. No one in our comfortably middle-class neighborhood did. The dates of individual births and deaths were associated with natural events, such as earthquakes and fatal floods, or with historical and political events, for example, a massive-scale, British Raj – engineered famine in the early 1940s and hangings of nationalist freedom fighters. This cousin informed us younger ones that an essential rite in Hindu Bengali weddings—the wedding ceremony lasts several days—involves the brides washing the feet of her bridegroom and drying his feet with her hair. She herself had coal-black hair, long enough and tough enough to towel-dry the largest, wettest pair of spousal feet. She also confided that if a woman had reddish or brownish hair instead of black, it was inescapable proof that some ancestor of that woman had—horror of horrors!—mated with a
firangi
, a white-skinned foreigner, in the pre – British Raj past when European pirates regularly raided our bountiful coastal towns. Hindu society was divided into distinct castes: maintenance of caste “purity” and vigilant avoidance of caste “pollution” were required of each individual. My family belonged to the Brahmin caste and could marry only within that caste. Neither my cousin nor I had a way of foretelling that at age twenty-three, while a graduate student in the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, I would marry a blue-eyed American fellow student and become the first in my family to commit caste “pollution.” Perhaps my opinionated cousin was correct: my husband and I have two sons, and both have brown hair.

The girl children on our block, including my cousins and my two sisters, had healthier relationships with their hair than I had with mine. My sisters inherited my father's thick, curly hair. Curly hair was admired. I had wavy hair, but the longer it grew, the less wavy it was. All of us parted our hair on one side or the other of our heads, preferably alternating sides to ensure the hair part remained narrow. The first time we expected to part our hair in the center would be on our wedding day during the
sindur
-application rite, when the bridegroom rubs lavish quantities of vermilion powder on the center part of his bride. The vermilion red in a Hindu Bengali woman's hair part is the sign that she is married and that her husband is still living. The red represents life force. A married woman must wear
sindur
every day of her married life. The
sindur
containers on the dressing tables of my mother and aunts were intricate artifacts made of silver or polished buffalo horn. Though I have never worn
sindur
, I have collected these containers as homage to the anonymous craftsmen who elevated the functional to the beautiful. The vermilion used by my mother's generation was later discovered by scientists to be cinnabar, containing mercury sulfide. Contemporary women have replaced the toxic original with a harmless vermilion-red powder. Hindu traditions survive by being adaptable.

Unmarried girls and wives take guiltless pride in their long, lustrous hair. But Hindu Bengali tradition requires widows to keep their heads permanently shaved as one of many gestures of penance. My grandmother was the only widow in the household of my Calcutta childhood. I remember the neighborhood itinerant barber, who tended to male customers under a shady tree on the sidewalk, coming to our home to razor-scrape my grandmother's head every week. My fine-boned grandmother actually looked elegant even when, between the barber's trips, her scalp sprouted silvery stubble.

My mother's attempts to improve the quality of hair I had been born with paled in comparison to those of the more competitive mothers of unmarried girls in our neighborhood. Every weekday afternoon after we'd returned from school by bus or rickshaw and hurried through snacks at home, we congregated in the large front yard of the girl who lived next door to me to play until dusk. My sisters and I braided our hair with pretty satin or taffeta ribbons and looped the two braids like hoop earrings, using the ends of the ribbons to anchor them behind each ear. I loved my collection of ribbons, which I stored in cans that had originally contained imported chocolates. My worry was that during energetic games of hide-and-seek, the ribbons would slip off my skinny braids, which would be humiliating enough, and be lost, which would have been tragic. The girls who were obsessed with hair protection wrapped their braids tightly with ugly, black cotton tapes to protect them from sun damage and dust during playtime. At bedtime, they probably rewrapped their braids with clean cotton ribbons so that heads tossing against pillowcases wouldn't result in split ends. My oldest girl cousin was the only one in our family to wrap her braids during the day. On the nights she suffered from what she called “growing pains” in her calves, she repurposed the black ribbons to neutralize the pain by winding them tightly around her legs.

The first wedding of a Mukherjee relative I witnessed, that of a paternal uncle, took place when I must have been five or six. Marriages were “arranged” by family elders on the basis of economic and social compatibility, the groom's career potential, the bride's physical comeliness and fair complexion, and the spousal candidates' families' medical histories (which had to be free of heritable and communicable diseases). The groom was a tall (at least by our standards), handsome young man with a full head of fastidiously groomed, wavy hair. Hindu weddings are elaborate, some ceremonies having to be performed in the bride's home, and a lesser number in the groom's. I remember with astonishing vividness my uncle, dressed in the Bengali bridegroom's fine
dhoti
, silk
kurta
, and tall wedding head gear, ushering his bride in through the front door of our flat as the conch-blowing, ululating women in our family swarmed around her to welcome her. I also remember each adult woman relative sticking honey-dipped fingers into the bride's ears and mouth so that she would hear and utter only sweet words. The literal and the symbolic merge in Hindu rituals, and though I didn't recognize it then, I was learning a lesson useful for my future as a writer. During the wedding rites performed on the day after her arrival in our home, I recall witnessing this new aunt cooking and feeding her bridegroom rice and curried fish, giving him the whole fish's prized head and torso, and keeping (as tradition demanded) the bony tail for herself. Did she wash the bridegroom's feet and dry them with her hair before that ritual meal? I witnessed this ritual act of wifely obeisance, didn't I? I can no longer be sure. A dear New York – based friend of mine, a naturalized US citizen, confided to me that she knew her first marriage was over when, on an impulse, she went to a salon and asked for her long hair to be chopped off. She wears her hair short and is happily remarried.

In the winter of 1948, after India had been a sovereign nation for nearly a year and a half, my father, mother, and we three sisters sailed for Europe, my youngest sister wearing a scarf over her recently shaved head. My father would work for a few years with pharmaceutical companies in Switzerland and England. We returned to Calcutta, but not to the extended-family household with its oppressive allegiance to ancient traditions. We began life as a nuclear family, and I found myself no longer fretting about my fine hair.

I now live in two cities: New York and San Francisco. When I first moved to San Francisco, I felt lucky to have been befriended by a California-born neighbor, who knew the answers to all the settling-in questions that I hadn't yet thought to ask: for example, where to find the freshest fish, the most inspired florist, the masseuse with magic fingers, the caring yoga instructor. The only question that stumped her was where I should go to get a decent, reasonable haircut. It seemed that my hair needs were too simple—a cut, shampoo, and blow-dry every three or four months—for her to send me to the stylists and colorists she patronized. My hair has remained dark, as was my father's hair when he passed away at age seventy-five.

I know my hair is thinning. When I run into old friends visiting the United States from Calcutta, some will exclaim, with the shocking frankness that only Indian friends you have grown up with can, “Bharati, you're getting bald! Good grief, what happened!” There is a medical explanation: recently I've been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, and the medications I have been put on list “loss of hair” as a likely side effect. Maybe I should go back to using amla hair oil, which is said to control rheumatoid arthritis. Maybe I should get a wig. I mentioned the wig idea to Amy Tan over an Italian dinner in Sausalito the night before she was to leave for New York to launch
Th
e Valley of Amazement
, her most recent novel. We've known each other for over twenty years, and she has always come up with suggestions for coping, no matter the nature of the distress. She mailed me a human-hair wig within weeks of that dinner. The hair is lustrous, shoulder length. I take the wig out of the box it came in and caress the silky, supple strands. Apparently, the wig will have to be cut and styled to suit me. Amy has promised to help me find the right stylists. For every problem, there's a solution. I am ready for the next phase of this hair tale: exciting wig adventures with the help of a good friend.