Every 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.
My daughter, the reason I was wild with fear, my espresso-skinned daughter from India—with me, the woman she called “Whitey,” 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’s 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’d 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. “That color’s so dull,” she said. “How do you stand yourselves?” Her father laughed. “Oh, baby,” he said. “Hair’s just a covering. You can’t attach too much importance to a person’s hair. It can be changed, like that.” He snapped his fingers. “You’ll find out.”
When I asked her what she wanted in the way of color, she looked at me and said, “Nothing that’s here.” 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’d looked around at us and decided change was needed. Like she’d gone ahead and made one of those signs you see on storefronts: NEW! IMPROVED! UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT!
She propped the sign in front of our lives.
God knows there were plenty of people, mostly guys, willing to help her operate under new management. They’d find her the color she wanted, any color at all.
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’t think we had an ordinary situation, was not convinced it was possible to live a normal life anymore. Maybe that’s how it was with Anita? Maybe she thought she needed something way more different than anything we gave her, could give her.
Shortly after an incident with a guy who entered our house uninvited—looking for our daughter, who had what he wanted: drugs and a body that didn’t fit under a scarf anymore—shortly after I screamed for Ken, Anita’s 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.
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.
Pammie always gave me highlights when I went back. I’d walk into her place, Heads Up, and she’d 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’s 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.
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. “Don’t,” I said. “You’ll hurt yourself.” He looked surprised. Like my concern was a novelty. Then he stopped the pulling and reached for me.
“We should be friends,” he said. “We can’t be fighting all the time, or we won’t make it through this. It’s hard enough without hurting each other.” 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.
People liked to say we’d get our reward in heaven. So good, so kind, saving kids by adopting them. Staying the course even when we had hard times. “I could never do what you did,” they’d say. “Taking a kid not once, but three times. You really are miraculous.” They’d look at us as if we were a vision.
We weren’t miracle workers though. If we were, wouldn’t Anita come to breakfast smiling with her hair brushed, long and down to her shoulders, not all frizzed, sprayed stiff, and angry-looking? Wouldn’t homework get done? Maybe Sõn, the Viet brother, and Jung, the Korean brother, would be able to make Anita laugh. Maybe somebody would say, “Good morning.”
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—if we were miracle workers.
* * *
Pammie whipped up a paste that would provide what she called “protective coloration.” Which meant it would cover any emerging gray. “This stuff’s like resurrection,” she said to me. “And, honey, you need some of that.” She poured more coffee, pumped up the chair, told me to sit back and relax. “Sit down,” she said, “check what our girl Cher is up to.” 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’s 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.
It was nice to be still while Pammie painted strands of my hair a color she called strawberry—a 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.
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. “I’m a redhead now,” she said, “no more gray. I’ve always wanted to be a red head. So, I’ve gone and made one for myself. Your mother’s a redhead.” 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’d found someone there she wanted to know.
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. “Yes. I want this child. Yes.” 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.
Anita always hated to have her hair touched, but it knotted so easily; it needed constant brushing or we’d 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’d finished, her lips and tongue were blue, her hair in two dark ropes. Some days I wasn’t 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’s 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. “Feel,” she said. I was careful, a light touch, a quick resting of my hand on the top of her head.
“Was it hard to do?”
She said, “Yeah.”
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. “Blown up while I’m doing my hair,” she said. “Can you imagine?”
I could.
Still, I loved her hair. I think if I had been promised the right to touch her hair from time to time, I’d have risked blowup. Like her hair was sacred ground. Jung’s hair was thick, wiry Korean hair. Horsehair. That’s 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’t 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.
I bought another box of highlights and kept at it until something happened. It wasn’t what he was after, still no punk Asian blond, but he didn’t have black anymore. The whole of his hair was an off-color. I couldn’t find a name for it. It wasn’t blond or brown. It was a ghost color, a color in the act of disappearing. “Oh, Jung,” I said trying for glad, “I love your hair.”
“Even now?” he asked, eyeing it in the mirror, unsure.
And yes, I did. It wasn’t hard to love.
Sõn 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.
Anita came into the bathroom and ran her hand over the top of his head like it was new carpeting. “Why so short?” 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. “You’ll never get her,” Anita said. “She 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”
I told him to get the hair out of the sink—it would clog the drain—and 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.
There’s lots of hair in Pammie’s 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’s alive. Hair’s not the person. And it’s 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’s hair and they said, “Horsehair, stubborn.”
Hair exudes.
I have a friend who has her dead daughter’s hair. It’s 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’s hair, long, blond, and thick. She allowed the body to be burned, but her daughter’s hair is in that box, still long, blond, and thick, still allowing for touch. Perhaps, still with the power to keep deer away.
When I touched Ken’s 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’d been out in the garden, his hair might have bits of leaves in it. I’d protest, but he rarely cared. I’d 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’s shampoo.
I sat there in Pammie’s 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’d go punk, our hair any which way—no rules, but everybody happy because what would there be to complain about?
But truth is, when I screamed, Go, to Ken, I meant, Fix us! Exactly like the women who came in the door at Pammie’s place, heaved themselves into a chair, and said, “Fix me up. Make me beautiful.” 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.
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. “You look good, Jackie. But remember. It takes time. Your hair’s 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.” I said I’d never heard of residual color molecules. But I’d wait for them to appear. It sounded like the family I was returning to—watch and wait. I wondered, looking at my hair in the mirror, if Ken would like the way I looked.
Pammie had done a good job. I looked okay, a little less crazy-wild. Maybe I was a little less crazy-wild because I’d watched while Pammie wrapped my hair in foil, her long fingers easy, the tattooed name, Bill moving ever so slightly on her arm.
Everybody in Union knew about Bill. He’d 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.
So, I’d 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’t care. What mattered was that I got to touch it: the stiffness of Anita’s hair, the fuzz of Sõn’s, the ghostlike hair of Jung, I wanted to touch it. Residual pleasure, that’s what I wanted. I’d go home and lay my hands to rest in what there was of it.