A Brief History of My Hair

ESSAY

by Diane Comer

          The impulse to cut your hair, like the impulse to migrate, can’t be ignored. In May when the Miller moths (Euxoa auxiliaries) made their annual migration from the Plains to the Rockies via our house, my hair had made me as restless and infuriated as the moths flitting from room to room in search of their alpine summer. My hair, the frayed length of it, would have to go. The moths would have to go as well, but the county extension couldn’t say when. 
          Every morning when my husband opened the screen door onto the porch to let the cat out, thirty or more Miller moths resting on the top of the doorframe would be released into the day. He woke me to see this strange phenomenon. I was horrified and amazed by their sheer dusky numbers. They left a powdery grey film behind them, fine as sifted flour. I remembered the huge moths in the Dominican Republic, the size of my father’s hand, and the one that spread itself above our doorway. The insects of childhood are enlarged and lasting, like all early trauma.
          My hair was short and unruly for the first twelve years of my life, as though combed with an eggbeater according to my father, who was bald, and has been since my memory of him began. My mother kept my sister’s and my hair short because she didn’t want to care for it, and didn’t believe we could. All the girls in school had long hair, long hair they wore in ponytails, braids, or held back with barrettes and headbands. We were impossibly ugly girls in short hair: the photos prove it. I was often mistaken for a boy with my cowlicked hair that never lay flat. I couldn’t forgive my mother knowing she had twin flaxen braids to her waist as a child. Now her hair is breaking off an inch from her scalp and I give her shampoos and conditioners rich in herbs and proteins. My own hair’s long now and I can afford and wish to be generous. 

          My father kept my brother’s hair shaved to a wheaten inch of his skull in hope of West Point and his son following in his footsteps. My brother followed, but at great cost. When my sister’s hair grew past her shoulders, I’d comb it out on long car trips, as though I could untangle what we suffered but couldn’t speak of. Even now, grief and rage are knotted, and speaking doesn’t make things easier or keep the moth of suffering from spreading its wings above our door.
          When my hair grew long enough to veil me, my brother and sister were gone from the house. My father would cut my hair in the garage, in a sloping oval, his hand steady, as steady as when he shaved his head every Saturday morning. My mother’s hands hadn’t yet begun to shake from alcoholism. They were small and capable still, cutting meat and vegetables, sorting stamps with tweezers, her glass of gin hidden in the pantry. She got her hair frosted at the beauty parlor but the cool platinum blonde bride had long since vanished. I didn’t know her then, any more than I knew my father with a full head of hair, in their flush and pride of youth, and yes, beauty. Now my mother’s hands tremble uncontrollably and I want to catch them and make them still, but they’re like moths eluding my grasp. My father continues to shave his head weekly. His hands are steady and his grasp of things as sure and blind as it ever was. 

          I get my hair cut by a professional now. I was twenty-one and studying at Trinity College in Dublin before my long hair was cut in a salon, at a shop I passed every day, Flanagan’s. The salon was spare and chic and I had my hair cut by the proprietor. He had me stand in the center of the black and white tiled floor while he cut. Four inches of my blonde youth fell on that floor. Was this the hair bleached by the salty Aegean when I was twelve or earlier, by the New Mexican sun beating down on my eight-year-old head on the way to school? 
          “Take yourself out for breakfast,” Flanagan suggested as he swept up the blonde floss on the floor. Less is more, I realized, and went to Bewley’s in Grafton Street and ladled whipped cream from a bowl at the till into their delicious coffee, luxuriating in my darkening hair, severed from part of its past.
          In my middle twenties I had my hair cut more often than I saw my parents at a salon called No Regrets. Jane Gersh, the owner, wore combat boots with vintage dresses, a string of cultured pearls her farmer beau gave her to woo her out west (yet to happen), and pixied hair a startling shade of eggplant. Her business card depicted a chainsaw x-ed out and suspended over a clawfoot bathtub, and read: No Regrets. 
          The salon overlooked Iowa City’s main street and from the raised barber chair you could watch the small world go by as your hair was cut or colored. The punks had their hair shaved and dyed there and the trad wives came for a cut and a thrill, as Jane and her partner knew all the town gossip. An inflatable globe hung above the sink and you could stare up into Antarctica while your hair was being washed. Christmas lights and used car lot bunting, endless photographs of Marilyn Monroe, the free and awful art of clients, with pots of blooming amaryllis, begonia, and geranium everywhere. The light poured in from the east, and mornings it was glorious to have your hair cut at No Regrets, coffee fat with cream in hand, world below, the past on the floor. 
          I had my hair stained auburn there one autumn and stained with a double dose the following year. When I stopped on the street to speak with one of my professors he kept staring at my hair. I put my hand to my head, blushing, and confessed, “I had it colored.”
          “You look like Rita Hayworth,” he said, this man who never once commented on my appearance. A great American scholar in the Emersonian tradition, Sherman Paul wore Brooks Brothers tweed jackets, grey flannels, and polished brogues, immaculate and scrupulous in everything he said or did. I was in awe of him, in lectures, seminars, and finally in a year-long tutorial where we discussed poetry together, one on one. Rita Hayworth. I still don’t know if this was a compliment or a criticism. 

          One summer the heat and humidity were relentless and I was tempted to shave my head just to get to feel cooler. Instead I had my hair woven into four elaborate French braids Jane swore would last a cross-country bus trip. I spent half an hour bent over in the chair while she braided my hair up the back of my skull, weaving the hair so tight it felt like I had a facelift.
          “Imagine,” Jane said, “all the people, all over the world, having their hair braided right now.” I saw them in Mongolia, Nigeria, and Guatemala, men and women, having their hair braided, curly hair and straight hair, blonde hair and black hair, pulled taut and twisted in strands by the hands of others. I saw our primate ancestors living in a world of mutual grooming as they lazed beneath the trees. Outside in the heat, I felt like Nefertiti, remote and regal, braids coiled like snakes around my head in the universal human spiral.

          At the foot of the Front Range, in the vector of the Miller moth migration, I live six hours north of my parents and two hours south of my sister. I’m closer to them now than I’ve been in years, not quite in their backyard, but close enough. The moths and I are new in town and we look for a place to rest. As I drive around, moths flutter out from under the car hood, through the air vents, and everywhere in the air outside. I know where to go, as do the moths, with an instinct for where you’ll fit in, camouflaged in the new environment. When I find the place to have my hair cut, I make an appointment. Inside is small, papered white with splashes of bamboo, fresh, clean, with many plants. The shop faces west and the mountains, the light kind and golden, a stained-glass sign of entwined vines and tresses reads: Rapunzel’s.
          The proprietor washes my hair with expert, vigorous hands, the shampoo smelling spiky and green. I’ve heard hairdressers judge one another by how well they shampoo your hair. Sitting in the chair, all my scalp tingles as I look at this stranger in the mirror and he at me. I don’t want to speak and he combs my wet hair out in silence. Unknown yellow flowers bloom beside the mirror. Summer. 
          I stand in the middle of the salon and he shows me how much he will cut. I see his comb pointing to the middle of my back in a small hand mirror reflecting the mirror behind. More? I nod. After he makes the first cut, he shows me the hair, saying, “I don’t want you to be surprised.” 
          I won’t be, and nod as he drops the hair to the floor. The haircut is both private and detached. The man’s in his fifties, with grey groomed hair and beard. I’m glad we don’t need to speak. He cuts my hair with swift precision. I watch the brown snippets land on the floor, like so many stray commas. When he’s finished, he hands me a mirror. I turn my head to and fro, the hair riding over my shoulders with silky ease. Perfect.
          Outside my hair waves dry in the wind, fragrant, straight, and smooth. All around me the moths flutter in the sun, flying west to the alpine meadows where they will feast on wildflowers and bears will feast on them. The moths will return in autumn to lay their eggs in bare fields to hatch out in spring and fly back to these mountains, in a repetition of birth, migration, and death, the oldest story. 
          My hair will keep growing and I will keep having it cut and colored, for years, in different states, in different countries. My second husband will watch YouTube videos and learn how to color my hair, blending shades, strand by strand, imitating the stylists who taught him his skills. No one knows I color my hair—he’s that good at it. And I keep my hair long because I’ve never outgrown my desire to have long hair like the other girls all those years ago in childhood. And unless I can look like Bowie on the cover of Changes One, I won’t cut it. My hair will get thinner like my mother’s, but it won’t break off, and I won’t die of the disease that killed her at sixty-three, thirty years ago, because I quit drinking. I’ll die of something else, maybe long hence, who knows? And I’ll die with long white hair because by then I will have surrendered my vanity to time.