Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2002-08-06 - 7:16 p.m.

Hair of the Dog

My daughter got an idea the other day, and decided to put my hair in seventeen little horns tied off with tiny scunchies, and make me look like an alien. I obligingly said, "Nanu nanu" which means nothing to them but made them laugh anyway, and left it that way for a hour or so pre-shower. I FEEL like an alien being these days. I have alien hair, some strange creature that lounges across my head. It's in recovery from being very short, and looks as though the program is not doing it a whole lot of good, although it has certainly admitted its helplessness. A thatch in the front, I have always had a thatch, or a hank if you prefer, or a lank, or some pseudopod of the hair-creature that lollops across my forehead. It may only be tamed by shears, as far as I know. I rake it off my sweaty forehead with my fingers, leaving it in awkward spikes and horizontal horns. I consider, dangerously, mousse.

I don't like agapanthus. People grow entirely too much of it around here. It's unruly, and not in that good English-garden unruly, the subtle unplanned look; agapanthus is slovenly. It leans and slouches in all directions, haphazard, as though it would holler at you from across the street - it has no decorum. And now I have agapanthus hair.

Hair is the thing, anyway, not flowers; I have garden shears, good ones even, but to fix the hair takes a trip to the beautician - aesthetician - stylist - what do we call those people now? I think mine is called Thelma. No, she keeps getting younger and blonder; she is probably Tiffany. This is where I have arrived; Tiffany cuts my hair, and might even chew gum as she does it. She cuts it in less then ten minutes, because these shops function on volume. I used to have my hair cut properly by someone named "Z." Those were the years. I knew something about her, and she washed my hair and cut it, and we talked about our lives and I made her laugh and the whole thing took an hour and cost more than I have spent on my hair in the past year. But now I go to whichever Tiffany is working at the moment the impulse hits, and she wets my hair with a spray bottle.

Once I had long hair, a long long way back time ago, because we all did; then I had it again, because my husband wanted it so. A guy thing. "Let it grow," they tell you, as if they harbor some conk-and-drag fantasy. They don't even care if it looks like shit long; it's the long that matters. "Oh, don't cut it," they say, as though your hair were their long-lost youth, as though you were their proxy Samson.

But then he wanted me to shut up, too, and I did that as well, and that turned out worse even than the hair - and I shut up, but inside I shrieked so loud I shrieked out my own hair. And one day he came up behind me and said, "You are bald in the back," and I felt the back of my head, and my fingers went through to skin. "I have cancer," I thought, in a confused second forgetting that it is the treatment that causes baldness, not the disease. Alopecia areata, the doctor said. Stress, he said. It might grow back, he said. It might all fall out. We don't know these things. But I knew; knew how my immune system felt under a constant attack, and having no clear enemy, turned on itself.

The hair grew back white.

So I did not cut my hair for a long time, because to cut it was too brave. To cut it was to be vulnerable, to know that there would not be enough to pull back into a barrette and arrange across the naked back of my head, should it happen again. And the hair turned brown again slowly, and the white grew out to the end and was trimmed off, and still I kept it long, my insurance, and my servitude.

Some time after the divorce, I cut it all off.

The past years have been a yo-yo of growing it out too far, into the agapanthus stage, and having cut too short, into the Sinead stage. It has been on my head, but not so often in my mind. I am no longer afraid when I see hairs in the sink, or at least not so afraid - I do not count them. The back is no longer white, but the front grows whiter. And now I don't know what I am doing with it, don't feel a clear decision, but do not go in to have it cut. I wake each morning with agapanthus hair, and look across the room to the vanity, and see slovenly and unloved, and I do nothing anyway.

I think I am awaiting the day it transforms, the day the alien creature hatches into its final Farrah form.

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