Me, My Hair, and I (9 page)

Or perhaps more important than figuring out what to say in response to perceived criticism is how to stop feeling bad about it. Women tell me it helps to realize that criticizing and caring are expressed in the same words. That way, a daughter can shift her focus from the criticizing to the caring. This often happens automatically after our mothers are gone, or when we fear losing them. One woman told me of getting a call that her mother had been hospitalized. Full of worry and fear, she caught a plane and rushed to the hospital right from the airport. Distressed to see her mother with an IV bag attached to her arm and an oxygen tube in her nose, she approached the bedside and leaned over to give her a kiss. Her mother looked up at her and said, “When's the last time you did your roots?” Rather than reacting with her usual annoyance, the daughter heaved a sigh of relief: her mother was OK.

As for me, it is now nearly a decade since my mother died. Several years ago, I began getting my hair cut shorter. My mother was right: it does look better this way.

Beautiful, Beautiful

HONOR MOORE

T
here is heat at the back of my neck, a spot of heat that gets hotter and hotter. I take the combs out, swirl my hair up, stick the combs in, wear my hair up until my nape cools down. After years of this, I came to understand why women of a certain age cut their hair short, why even the most revolutionary of nineteenth-century feminists acquiesced to the requirements of modesty and wore their hair up. It's hormones! I have been told that the dance of my hands twisting and lifting my thick curtain of hair is an act of kinetic sculpture. Once, when I was in my late forties, a student hit on me: “I couldn't take my eyes off of you, how you kept putting your hair up and taking it down.” The kinetic sculpture has by now become a comedy, hair up, hair down, hair up, hair down. And the combs—what a collection I have! Made of plastic by Medusa's Heirlooms, the size of a calling card, ivory, malachite, zebra striped or azure, with teeth that hold. . . . But my subject is my hair, the greatest gift bestowed on me by my ancestors, my gene pool, my biology.

Lady Godiva

She rode a white horse and she bathed in milk. Her skin was as pale as mine and her hair as dark. It fell to the ground. On that horse she was headed somewhere with her beauty, was how I read the image: somewhere
else.
Her hair was what gave her the beauty that would get her anywhere she wanted to go, out of the suffocating palace, away from the noise, the dirt, the school on the narrow Jersey City avenue, the classroom where none of the books had ladies like Godiva in them, let alone white horses ridden by women. It was in a book that I first saw her, so graceful in her milk bath, outside her window moon and stars that were silver and gold, actual silver and gold gilt on the page. I can't decide whether to google Lady Godiva or not. Why would I want to learn that she was a revolutionary who wore her hair that way for a cause, or that her hair wasn't as long as all that, or that she didn't bathe in milk, or that she died young. She was Anglo-Saxon, I read, the wife of a nobleman. Legend has it that she protested her husband's taxation of his tenant farmers; he would abolish the tax, he said, if she rode through the town naked. She agreed, on the condition that the populace be confined to their homes so that no one would see her; a man named Tom (the first Peeping Tom) drilled a hole in his window shutters, and when he looked at her he was struck blind. Lady Godiva was widowed fairly young but lived into old age, a devout hermit. (Notice the noun, not usually applied to a woman.) No one has ever been able to find her grave.

Hard Corners

I was maybe five years old, standing in front of a mirrored door in my grandmother's house in the green hills of New Jersey. It was a very big house with large, high-ceilinged bedrooms, so you could be in your room and feel really alone, even though there were people downstairs or two rooms away. Sometimes my mother came there with us, but more often she didn't, placing her many children for the weekend at our grandmother's, a vacation for her. Without her voice in my ear or her eyes seeing me, I can stand alone and freely look at myself. Finally I have the hair I want. It's just past my shoulders but sure to grow farther down my back.

My mother had short hair then, but in her wedding pictures her black hair is long, shiny, turned under at the ends, in what was called a pageboy. “Your mother should cut her hair,” said Gagy, whose real name was Aagot; she was Norwegian and often took care of us. My mother had just disappeared into another room. “Why?” “When you're older, you should not have hair that long.” “But Gagy, your hair is long.” “But I never wear it down.” Which was true. I never saw her wear her hair down, just up, 1940s-style, gathered into coils on either side of her face. I decide I will not give in like my mother has and cut my hair short or even wear it up like Gagy does. I will wear it down and long for as long as I want.

I don't remember how I looked so much as how my hair felt as I ran my hands through it. Soft, long, straight. I do remember it was lighter brown then, the way brown can look in a washed-out 1950s Kodachrome. Within weeks of that moment at the mirror, my mother took me to a hotel in New York to have my hair cut. She and I had already argued; we were standing just inside a walk-in closet at my grandmother's when she said, “It's time for you to get a haircut.” We did not fight again at the hairdresser, but I am sure I wanted to cry.

I believed my hair was how I might claim beauty, and beauty was freedom I would make for myself, not artifice designed by others. My mother with her short hair had betrayed her beauty; she was always smiling in those photographs with the pageboy, and now she hardly smiled at all. I wanted to laugh and dream and run free, hair streaming behind me. When the cut was over, I had bangs; my hair was short and somehow darker. It stopped just below my ears, and all the softness was gone, along with the honey color I had seen that day in front of the mirror. Now there would be no beauty: I had hard corners.

Resistance

When I was ten, I got glasses, horn-rims that my mother chose in the spirit of my straight-across bangs and hard-cornered haircut. I was commuting from where we lived in Jersey City to school in Greenwich Village. It was 1955, two years before
On the Road
, but already, at age ten, I had my first pair of black tights. I can't remember if I also wore a black turtleneck, but I had seen people on Bleecker Street who wore black and had very long hair. After the Russians launched Sputnik, they would be called beatniks. I was dressing for the coming era, its advent abruptly interrupted when we moved to Indianapolis two years later. Even madras had not quite arrived in that part of the Midwest; it was still the era of sweater sets, saddle shoes, circle pins, and short, curly hairdos. My hair is very thick but also very fine, which meant that it did not easily hold the wave I set it for in pin curls. I should get a permanent, my mother decided, her solution to my feelings of displacement. I was in seventh grade.

I am trying to resist various metaphors, one of which has my hair as Guatemala and my mother the neo-imperialist secretary of state John Foster Dulles. It works pretty well: I did not have self-determination; she did not believe I knew what was good for me. What I didn't say was that I knew what was good for her. If she would only grow her hair out again, she would understand everything about me and look beautiful again.

By the time I got to high school, the hair-strafing permanent, which had failed to improve my social life, had grown out. The fashion was to wear your hair even shorter than mine was, in something called a bubble or, depending on I don't know what, a ducktail. A bubble required curlers, which were, by 1960, called rollers. I think of my Hoosier classmate Nancy Peters, whose bubble fluffed into a perfect oval and whose hair was the same color as mine. Betsy Buck, who was blond, had the perfect ducktail: short hair curving around the skull toward the back of the head, swirling up at her nape, and resolving an inch or so higher in a graceful point upward. If I had a bubble like Nancy Peters, I too would be a cheerleader, I reasoned—“popular” and therefore flirted with, dated, and invited to pledge all the good clubs. To become popular, I gave up my secret dream of beauty. I cut my hair, and every time I washed it I rolled a strand over each curler and stuck it through with a plastic stick. When I left for school at 7:30 a.m., my hair was curly, but by the time I got to class, it had always “fallen.” In my smiling graduation photograph, my hair is very short and straight and pulled back with a headband that leaves a tiny fringe of bang to soften the expanse of my forehead.

I should say that my mother's hair was naturally wavy, so it wasn't as if she actually understood my straight, fine hair; in any case, by 1959 her hair was very short, and she was pregnant with her eighth child and blessedly distracted from my hair except for an occasional skirmish in the downstairs bathroom. “Get your hair out of your face, sweetie,” she would declare, taking a lock between her fingers and guiding it behind my ear. “There, much prettier!” I would refuse and refuse. I didn't want to be pretty. Pretty was ordinary; I wanted to be beautiful and unusual. I wanted to be myself. The battle would escalate, at least once ending with her slapping me, hard, across the face.

Rivalry

But I have left out an important part of this narrative, which is that my sister, four years younger than I, was always allowed to grow her hair, at least after that square-corners visit to the hairdresser. Why? At first, it was because she was still a “little girl.” She wore her hair in pigtails, always. In memory it seems that her hair was not as thick as mine, therefore more easily confined to pigtails. But I would not have wanted to wear braids; my face is round, and I thought they made me look fat. My sister didn't worry about looking fat, since she was smaller boned and therefore thinner than I was; also, the proportions of her face were different from mine and her eyes bigger, so braids suited her. My best friend at the Greenwich Village school was half-Icelandic and wore her hair in long, thick blond braids, which I admired but did not envy. I believe now that I thought my mother favored my sister; why else would she let her grow her hair? Once, when my sister and I discussed my stormy relationship with our mother, she told me that she had observed how I was treated and had done everything she could to avoid getting caught in the line of my mother's fire. She never overate and kept her hair out of her face.

A President's Wife

I arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a Radcliffe freshman, in the fall of 1963, the era of Jackie Kennedy. With not much effort, I could make my hair, just short of shoulder length, look like the First Lady's, though in order to look more hip than she, I pierced my ears. By the end of freshman year, I wore contact lenses and had mastered her bouffant. That summer at a wedding, I wore a sleeveless turquoise raw silk dress. “Who's the one who looks like Jackie Kennedy?” someone asked.

When the president died, I let my hair grow. It seemed that everything changed then, including my mother's claim to authority over my hair. Or at least that's what I'm tempted to say. I have a passport photograph taken the summer after my junior year, and my hair is distinctly just below my shoulders, which is where it stayed, more or less, until I became a client of a hairdresser in New York City named George Michael, whose specialty was long hair. I had moved to Manhattan in 1969, and there is a photograph of me from 1972 in a dark blue velvet vintage dress, dancing. My hair is honey-colored in the light and almost to my waist, the longest it ever was.

Evolution

For decades
,
I grew my hair and had it cut twice a year to all one length, no layering. I had a friend who declared that look my “trademark” and cautioned me against ever changing it. She herself began to color her hair in her twenties and rarely had the same hairdo or hair color for more than two years in a row. Why did I think she knew more about my hair than I did? Shocking, really, that I allowed another woman to take my mother's place as the authority on my hair. One day in my forties, I decided that my hair made me look like a girl and I wanted to look like a woman. I went to a hairdresser named John Sahag, known as the “revolutionist of dry cutting.” He was originally from Lebanon, I learned later, but had trained in Paris, and he cut the hair of movie stars and models. A greyhound napped at the corner of his tranquil Madison Avenue salon. I told him that I wanted to keep my hair long, but . . . “You want something a little different,” he said. He suggested a piece cut shorter in the front and “a little layering” and assigned me a stylist named Mayumi, whose black hair fell down her back all the way to her knees. That day, she layered my hair, cutting it to a bit below shoulder length, with shorter pieces in the front—a stealth version of bangs that gave me a few wisps around my face. Layering is a form of thinning, so my hair became less heavy, easier to dry and take care of. It also has a little wave, and weirdly, while straight in the front, it is, underneath a thin, straight top layer, very curly in the back.

Color

“I am almost sixty, and my hair still stubbornly refuses to go gray,” my mother's mother wrote to a longtime friend. When I came across that line, I was barely fifty, had no gray whatsoever, and had never dyed my hair. At first, wisps at the left side of my hairline began to turn; no matter, I told myself, I was on my way to being the next Susan Sontag. A black-haired friend had other ideas. “Soon you'll have to make a decision,” she said to me one day. “Go see the colorist at Frederic Fekkai.” “Maybe,” I said, the familiar wave of stubbornness rising. Ten years later, my hair is still mostly dark, graying along the entire perimeter of my front hairline. Extending a bit into the body of my hair, gray only slightly streaks the darkness, but gracefully, like foam along the edges of a big ocean wave. I get my hair cut twice a year, still by Mayumi at John Sahag, though John died in 2005. “Do I have any gray back there?” I always ask as she lifts and snips, lifts and snips. “No, no! Not yet.” She now wears her hair to midback and has let it go gray—elegant silvery streaks through an expanse of Japanese black.