I have my father’s hair. I have his stubby hands and his broad feet and his drought-prone skin, too, but it’s the hair -- stick straight and flatter than some people say the Earth is -- that I rue the most.
If it were truly fine as silk, that would be one thing, but it’s not. It’s just fine. Stubbornly, even belligerently so.
My sister, on the other hand, got my mother’s hair. Except to call it hair is a great disservice. Hers was more like a whispered blessing that had landed on her head. Beautiful mounds of chestnut-colored goodness that obediently curled around her ears just so; that murmured soft courtesies as it fell in waves down her back; that ever-so-kindly allowed itself to be braided and obliged itself to stay that way for an entire day, sometimes even two.
I wanted my mother’s hair so badly that I, against my own self-interest, and she, against her better judgment, entered into a war of wills with mine. Wielding curling brushes like cudgels and hot irons like bayonets, we chose to interpret my yowls of pain as a brave berserker's cries.
Even when cancer came, taking her own crowning glory as its prisoner of war, my mother did not give up on the lost cause of mine. She would find some new curling contraption or learn some new trick to try, and we would brace ourselves for the battle ahead.
Victory, when it came, was Pyrrhic: a sleepless night, my scalp screaming, my hair wound vice-tight around hard rubber rollers until it had no choice but to capitulate. I rose the next morning to find it waving lint-white Shirley Temple curls of surrender. Even through the migraine-like pain, I knew that we had won.
Those hard-won curls died with my mother. My father remarried but she wasn’t the type to fight another woman’s battle and I and my hair weathered the early years of adolescence in stunning neglect.
At 12, a neighbor who owned a salon took pity on me and offered me a job. On Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings, I washed towels and swept up hair. Who were these women, I thought, who could so easily part with their locks? What sort of woman, I wondered, would so casually allow her hair to be cut down in its prime? How could they carelessly discard the thing I, in a child’s fiendish way, had daydreamed killing for?
Louise Cochran had the styling station closest to the dryer and I spent many hours hovering around her and her clients, all of whom were of a certain age. Louise came to work every day festooned with strands of beads that hung down to her navel, their fabulous array of colors clashing even more fabulously with her rubber-soled shoes. She had a voice like dried molasses and wore her hair in a tight wad of curls that clung close to her head, as if they were holding on to her scalp for dear life. She called it her helmet and told me it protected her from the atmospheric assaults that, according to her philosophy of hair care, were waiting around every turn in every road.
Louise also -- and quite famously -- “didn’t talk no turkey.”
“C’mere, child,” she said to me one day as I was folding hot towels. “Leave those and come sit in my chair.”
“But…”
“Nuh-uh. No buts. It’s time we did something with that head.”
I was helpless against the force that was Louise. So I sat in her chair, closed my eyes, and waited for world to end. She didn’t even ask me what I wanted; simply took up a pair of scissors and started snip-snip-snipping away.
“Well now,” she murmured fifteen minutes later. “That oughta do it. C’mon girl, open your eyes. Won’t do to go through life scared of what you might see in the mirror.”
I did as I was told. I wasn’t afraid of what I saw there, but I certainly didn’t recognize it. Where once there had been lank, brittle ends dying slow deaths on my shoulders there were cute wispy fly-aways that brushed along my jawline. My bangs no longer hung like drab curtains over my eyes. In their place was a perfect swoop of hair perched jauntily over my right eye.
I smiled and turned to thank Louise.
“Um-hmmmm,” she said before I could get the words out. “Now go on and sweep up that hair. I got another client coming in five.”
“Yes ma’am.” I brushed a few errant strands off my lap and was about to hop up to get the broom when Louise put her hand on my shoulder.
“Hair’s already dead,” she said, looking at me in the mirror. “It’s the head that keeps it here. Hold on to yours and you’ll be fine.”
“Yes ma’am,” I said again.
And swept the dead things into the trash.
© 2020 Malice Grant
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