E<\/span>very time the phone rang, every time a car pulled into the driveway, I expected the worst: sad, bad news. Even so, I took in the mail and arranged smiles for the neighbors. I brushed my hair, flossed my teeth, put on my shoes. I could not inhabit my daughter.<\/p>\n

My daughter, the reason I was wild with fear, my espresso-skinned daughter from India\u2014with me, the woman she called \u201cWhitey,\u201d for her mother. My daughter, who had landed in my arms at Detroit Metro. Who learned to eat and smile, who slept curled under my red scarf, so small at two years old, she could do that. The daughter who begged a ride in her father\u2019s bicycle basket when he came down the street to home. Her legs stuck out over the edge of the basket. It must have hurt, but she always wanted the ride. My daughter, who\u2019d grown to become a teen queen, all glitz and sprayed-hair glamour, ready to go off to anyplace but the place she once called home. Who reconsidered her life at thirteen, fourteen, and decided that life with apple crisp in the middle of the table, all of us crowded into a too-small dining room, had no interest for her. It was bland, pale. What she wanted was color, a much stronger shade of color. And intense. She wanted intense. We, her parents, were stolid brown-hairs, not intense. She looked at our mouse-brown heads and sighed. \u201cThat color\u2019s so dull,\u201d she said. \u201cHow do you stand yourselves?\u201d Her father laughed. \u201cOh, baby,\u201d he said. \u201cHair\u2019s just a covering. You can\u2019t attach too much importance to a person\u2019s hair. It can be changed, like that.\u201d He snapped his fingers. \u201cYou\u2019ll find out.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I asked her what she wanted in the way of color, she looked at me and said, \u201cNothing that\u2019s here.\u201d She seemed to think the colors in the place she inhabited were not so much a covering as an indicator, something she wanted to distance herself from. She was intent on rearranging things, my girl. Like she\u2019d looked around at us and decided change was needed. Like she\u2019d gone ahead and made one of those signs you see on storefronts: NEW! IMPROVED! UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT!<\/p>\n

She propped the sign in front of our lives.<\/p>\n

God knows there were plenty of people, mostly guys, willing to help her operate under new management. They\u2019d find her the color she wanted, any color at all.<\/p>\n

My mind scrambled underneath my brown head. People said to me all the time, Live a normal life. Breathe, even when it hurts. There is life beyond Anita. Anita. Her name means grace. People meant to be kind when they said those things; of course they did, but the words never helped. I didn\u2019t think we had an ordinary situation, was not convinced it was possible to live a normal life anymore. Maybe that\u2019s how it was with Anita? Maybe she thought she needed something way more different than anything we gave her, could give her.<\/p>\n

Shortly after an incident with a guy who entered our house uninvited\u2014looking for our daughter, who had what he wanted: drugs and a body that didn\u2019t fit under a scarf anymore\u2014shortly after I screamed for Ken, Anita\u2019s dad, to call the cops, and my daughter screamed back that I was so white, so uptight, so nothing nothing nothing, I went back home to Union, PA.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

I was in retreat. I wanted a place where there was no trace of my daughter, anybody in my family actually. I did not want intense. I wanted a place where ordinary was expected, and if someone entered the house, it was not through a window in the middle of the night. The person entered through a door, was offered a drink, not a body.<\/p>\n

Pammie always gave me highlights when I went back. I\u2019d walk into her place, Heads Up, and she\u2019d pour me some coffee before we got down to business. She took care of me. She was not Mother Teresa or even a hotshot scientist like Anita\u2019s dad. Heads Up would never make an upscale listing, a simple storefront on Center Street in Union, PA. Pammie just took what people brought her and made the best of it.<\/p>\n

Right before I left for Union, Ken and I had this fight. It was pick and rub raw: You might look up from your computer now and then was what I said to him. You might discipline a little more, he said back. I was always faster and meaner than Ken. You think science has the answers? What about entering the human world? My scientist guy. Unfair or not, I stubbed out the flame of my anger and fear in him. He pulled at his hair, a nervous habit. \u201cDon\u2019t,\u201d I said. \u201cYou\u2019ll hurt yourself.\u201d He looked surprised. Like my concern was a novelty. Then he stopped the pulling and reached for me.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe should be friends,\u201d he said. \u201cWe can\u2019t be fighting all the time, or we won\u2019t make it through this. It\u2019s hard enough without hurting each other.\u201d He wrapped his arm around me, a little reprieve, a bit of companionship, what we could barely remember, we two people who had lowered ourselves into a tub shaped like a red porcelain heart after we drove out of Union on our wedding day, and then, surprise, there we were years later, wet and shivering in the cold.<\/p>\n

People liked to say we\u2019d get our reward in heaven. So good, so kind, saving kids by adopting them. Staying the course even when we had hard times. \u201cI could never do what you did,\u201d they\u2019d say. \u201cTaking a kid not once, but three times. You really are miraculous.\u201d They\u2019d look at us as if we were a vision.<\/p>\n

We weren\u2019t miracle workers though. If we were, wouldn\u2019t Anita come to breakfast smiling with her hair brushed, long and down to her shoulders, not all frizzed, sprayed stiff, and angry-looking? Wouldn\u2019t homework get done? Maybe S\u00f5n, the Viet brother, and Jung, the Korean brother, would be able to make Anita laugh. Maybe somebody would say, \u201cGood morning.\u201d<\/p>\n

We would eat toast with butter and honey sitting around that dining room table, a mismatched group of bed-heads, crumbs down our fronts and honey on our lips\u2014if we were miracle workers.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Pammie whipped up a paste that would provide what she called \u201cprotective coloration.\u201d Which meant it would cover any emerging gray. \u201cThis stuff\u2019s like resurrection,\u201d she said to me. \u201cAnd, honey, you need some of that.\u201d She poured more coffee, pumped up the chair, told me to sit back and relax. \u201cSit down,\u201d she said, \u201ccheck what our girl Cher is up to.\u201d She nodded toward the copy of People magazine. Cher was in there somewhere, her long, dark hair flying, her skinny body covered in spangles. Pammie loved the way Cher took on life, colored her hair whatever color she wanted, danced in whatever outfit she felt like wearing. Cher was Pammie\u2019s idea of an angel or savior, or maybe not that. Maybe a life guide. Although, the two of them had never had any interaction, never would.<\/p>\n

It was nice to be still while Pammie painted strands of my hair a color she called strawberry\u2014a bit of blonde, a bit of red, light and bright, something to distract from my tired face. If the hair were tended, a person might not want to turn away from the face in the mirror.<\/p>\n

I remembered the time Ma went from gray to red, the year Ken got Anita her leather jacket, the year she wore it with jeans and black high-tops, her hair frizzed, her eyes scanning the horizon for something better, my sweet, thuggy daughter. That year I had gone back home and stood in the bathroom, while my mother leaned over the sink and colored her hair. \u201cI\u2019m a redhead now,\u201d she said, \u201cno more gray. I\u2019ve always wanted to be a red head. So, I\u2019ve gone and made one for myself. Your mother\u2019s a redhead.\u201d Cinnamon Red, that was the color, my cinnamon-red-haired mother. Her hair looked as if it were on fire, and she smiled into the mirror as if she\u2019d found someone there she wanted to know.<\/p>\n

I thought about hair and what it meant for our family while Pammie worked on me. All that hair, from all over the place under our roof. No genetic coding one to the other. Nothing but verbal selection. \u201cYes. I want this child. Yes.\u201d And the kids. They responded; they called out to us, their two brown-haired parents with pale skin. They said, mother, father. The kids allowed for our touch and ministration. When they were small, we had washed their hair, so carefully. We used the gentlest of shampoos, the softest of towels, the dark color, the texture, a gift from someone else, hair that we cared for the best we could.<\/p>\n

Anita always hated to have her hair touched, but it knotted so easily; it needed constant brushing or we\u2019d end up having to cut the snarls. She winced in pain; she cried. Her scalp so sensitive that I always approached her armed with a bottle of spray detangler, a super-fine brush, wide-toothed comb, and a dish of sky-blue jawbreakers. Anita sucked, while I eased the comb through her tangles. By the time I\u2019d finished, her lips and tongue were blue, her hair in two dark ropes. Some days I wasn\u2019t up to the hassle. There were no jawbreakers or she pitched a fit. Then I allowed it to go wild and tangled. Maybe that was a metaphor of things to come? But still. I knew my daughter\u2019s hair. I combed it, braided it, put it in pigtails, ponytails, brushed it long and free. I knew it when she was a kid, wearing red yarn ties, and I knew it later in the designs she piled on top of her head, the lacquer she used to lock the whole thing in place. Occasionally, after she was done working with her hair, she offered me a touch, like I was a visitor, and she was showing me around. \u201cFeel,\u201d she said. I was careful, a light touch, a quick resting of my hand on the top of her head.<\/p>\n

\u201cWas it hard to do?\u201d<\/p>\n

She said, \u201cYeah.\u201d<\/p>\n

There were empty cans on the bathroom counter, white nozzles pointing nowhere. I reminded her to keep the window open when she sprayed, warned her about the fumes mixing with her cigarettes. She looked at me and laughed. \u201cBlown up while I\u2019m doing my hair,\u201d she said. \u201cCan you imagine?\u201d<\/p>\n

I could.<\/p>\n

Still, I loved her hair. I think if I had been promised the right to touch her hair from time to time, I\u2019d have risked blowup. Like her hair was sacred ground. Jung\u2019s hair was thick, wiry Korean hair. Horsehair. That\u2019s what our Korean friends called it; a sign, they said, that he was stubborn. Everybody in Korea knew about the horse heads, bullheaded and fiery-tempered. Well. We weren\u2019t in a position to disagree. Jung was stubborn. And fiery-tempered. But so loyal, so eager. Our friends nodded when we said this and told us to cut his hair short. He wanted it long though. He spent an afternoon coaxing me to help him streak it blond. Not even close to a teen when he coaxed for streaks, but he was so cheerful at the prospect that I agreed. What harm could it do? We put a plastic cap on his head, pulled his horsehair through, coated it, and set the timer and waited. What he got was the merest glint of, maybe, pale brown? What he wanted was punk Asian blond. He wanted to be somebody who got the second look on the street. Like the college kids in downtown Ann Arbor.<\/p>\n

I bought another box of highlights and kept at it until something happened. It wasn\u2019t what he was after, still no punk Asian blond, but he didn\u2019t have black anymore. The whole of his hair was an off-color. I couldn\u2019t find a name for it. It wasn\u2019t blond or brown. It was a ghost color, a color in the act of disappearing. \u201cOh, Jung,\u201d I said trying for glad, \u201cI love your hair.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEven now?\u201d he asked, eyeing it in the mirror, unsure.<\/p>\n

And yes, I did. It wasn\u2019t hard to love.<\/p>\n

S\u00f5n had a past-his-shoulders ponytail held together with a black band. He wore a red beret right in front of the tail. Then, one day, after he came home from school, he combed his ponytail out over the sink, leaned down and forward, took my scissors, and cut it off. There was a sink full of dark hair, like animal fur. He took the hair clippers and buzzed. He called to me to come in and see his head, a knob of fuzz.<\/p>\n

Anita came into the bathroom and ran her hand over the top of his head like it was new carpeting. \u201cWhy so short?\u201d she asked. He said he was tired of his tail, and the girl he liked was going out with a guy who wore camouflage and had stubble instead of hair. \u201cYou\u2019ll never get her,\u201d Anita said. \u201cShe only goes for big dudes, the wrestler type. You are a skinny Viet guy. You should have kept your tail. It looked good on you\u201d<\/p>\n

I told him to get the hair out of the sink\u2014it would clog the drain\u2014and said he could wear any style; he had good cheekbones. He shrugged and began the process of tossing his hair into a garbage bag. Chunks of smooth dark that had taken months to grow. He gathered it up and tossed it.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s lots of hair in Pammie\u2019s shop: clumps of blond, brown, some black, some gray, all over the floor. She sweeps it up and dumps it in a garbage bag. Puts the bag in a back room. People come by for those bags. They scatter all that hair at the edges of their gardens. They swear it keeps deer away. When I picture this, it gives me the creeps: scattering something that\u2019s alive. Hair\u2019s not the person. And it\u2019s nothing like as important as an eye or a limb. But. Hair continues to exist, even apart from the body. Ken was only partly right when he told Anita hair was nothing more than a covering. Our Korean friends knew. One look at Jung\u2019s hair and they said, \u201cHorsehair, stubborn.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hair exudes.<\/p>\n

I have a friend who has her dead daughter\u2019s hair. It\u2019s wrapped in tissue and kept in a box. When she saw the body of her daughter, nothing more than emptiness at that point, my friend knew what she wanted and was ready to take it. She reached over the body and cut her daughter\u2019s hair, long, blond, and thick. She allowed the body to be burned, but her daughter\u2019s hair is in that box, still long, blond, and thick, still allowing for touch. Perhaps, still with the power to keep deer away.<\/p>\n

When I touched Ken\u2019s hair, I touched the hair of a scientist, nothing much more than a covering for his head, just as he told our daughter. If he\u2019d been out in the garden, his hair might have bits of leaves in it. I\u2019d protest, but he rarely cared. I\u2019d come home with conditioners, new shampoos that Pammie claimed would be good for him, but he mostly ignored them, fine with whatever the kids left in the shower. So easy with himself that sometimes he emerged smelling like apples from Anita\u2019s shampoo.<\/p>\n

I sat there in Pammie\u2019s shop and considered what would happen if I lost my husband and his hair. We fought so much! Go! Go! I said to him sometimes. If he went, maybe the rest of us would do a Cher. We\u2019d go punk, our hair any which way\u2014no rules, but everybody happy because what would there be to complain about?<\/p>\n

But truth is, when I screamed, Go, to Ken, I meant, Fix us! Exactly like the women who came in the door at Pammie\u2019s place, heaved themselves into a chair, and said, \u201cFix me up. Make me beautiful.\u201d Like they thought Pammie had some secret product or special touch, salvation that she could give them. But. There was no salvation. There was only what they came to her with, the hair on their heads, the possibility of changing shape or color. No angels, no saviors, no secrets or miracles. Only Pammie, who could cut and color.<\/p>\n

When she finished the last of my blow-dry, Pammie looked at me sad-like; she knew how hard it was back in Ann Arbor. \u201cYou look good, Jackie. But remember. It takes time. Your hair\u2019s not done yet. There are things called residual color molecules. They take a few days to emerge. You have to wait for the whole thing to process. Give it time.\u201d I said I\u2019d never heard of residual color molecules. But I\u2019d wait for them to appear. It sounded like the family I was returning to\u2014watch and wait. I wondered, looking at my hair in the mirror, if Ken would like the way I looked.<\/p>\n

Pammie had done a good job. I looked okay, a little less crazy-wild. Maybe I was a little less crazy-wild because I\u2019d watched while Pammie wrapped my hair in foil, her long fingers easy, the tattooed name, Bill moving ever so slightly on her arm.<\/p>\n

Everybody in Union knew about Bill. He\u2019d crashed his four-wheeler going through the woods around Union and ended up in a nursing home. Pammie went to see him after work every night, carrying giant strawberry milkshakes that she got at the Dairy Bar and the flexible straws she bought at the Dollar Store, green, red, yellow, pink. Bill told Pammie which color straw to give him, then sucked sweet, the only motion he had left. Pammie sucked from her straw, and he sucked from his while they watched reruns of Law and Order. They managed. They took what pleasure they could, tasting pink sweet through a straw, living in what remained.<\/p>\n

So, I\u2019d return from Union, me and my resurrected hair. And whatever hair those people of mine had, black or brown-gray or red, stiff with spray, shaved to a nub, feeling like straw from a bad dye job, I wouldn\u2019t care. What mattered was that I got to touch it: the stiffness of Anita\u2019s hair, the fuzz of S\u00f5n\u2019s, the ghostlike hair of Jung, I wanted to touch it. Residual pleasure, that\u2019s what I wanted. I\u2019d go home and lay my hands to rest in what there was of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…life beyond Anita<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2458"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2703,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2458\/revisions\/2703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}