Hair Cuts

Mirrors, mirrors everywhere.  Scissors mincing, glinting under bright lights.  How much to tip? What witty quip might you offer? Hair so strong, so straight, that it splinters into your stylist's palms.  On the floor, hair bunches into dusty tufts, a fuzzy halo destined for the dustbin.  Too many mirrors, actually.  Too much reflection.  Easier to shave your head.  Easier to pretend vanity is not a priority, which is a vanity of its own.

***

The independent travel books tell you to beware of Italian men.  Play it safe, be frumpy.  On the streets of Rome, you go from ruin to ruin in a miniskirt, spaghetti-strapped top, and combat boots.  Your hair is clipped close to the crown -- for convenience, not armor. The Italian men and their regal cheekbones leave you alone with the soot-caked marble.

***

Long hair is tangled hair, frayed and snagged down your back.  Your mother plaits your hair into shining submission.  In a pinch, pick off a strand to dislodge mango strings from your teeth.  But don't blow bubble gum in the open bed of a moving pickup.  Hubba Bubba pink in your hair, sticky, sweet, stubborn.  In the library parking lot your father cuts off the matted mess with his pocketknife.  Luckily, there's hair to spare.

***

In Sri Lanka, they ask, “Why don't you grow your hair?  You'd be very pretty with long hair.”

You smile at the slim brown men with thickly-lashed cat eyes, narrow hips, and pert buttocks sprung tight in white sarongs.  They'd prefer you have a cascade of shining black hair, but more important are U.S. dollars and sex.  You beat their brown hands away from your arms, your skirts, your porcupine bristle.

***

Say goodbye to your mother's home haircuts.  You will cut off all your schoolgirl hair for high school, graduate to curling irons, gel, mousse.  You beg a classmate to accompany you, you who know nothing about the commerce of hair.  Pray she is hip enough to pick a salon hip enough.   

The salon at Maryvale Mall whirs with blow dryers, thrums with Top 40.  You choke on the fog of perm fumes and hair spray.  The stylist starts: hacks off eighteen inches of hair and hands the dead tail to your friend.  Mirrors, music everywhere.  And on your body, your head floats high, freed from hairy weight.

***

You submit your scalp to your Amsterdam friends and the price of beauty: bleaching, double-stripping, and dyeing your virgin hair. Your nose stings; your eyes water; your feet stutter on the floor.  You are not who you were before, choir girl, bookworm.

“You have funny hair,” the four-year-old girl on the Eurail says first in Dutch then, when you fail to comprehend, in English.  In the Barcelona sublet your magenta hair leaves streaks on the white linens. You are one of those people now, smug in your rebellion, wondering why people stare.

***

High school, the green-tiled restrooms thick with cigarette smoke and Aqua Net.  Latina divas tease and freeze their hair to stand six inches off their scalps.  Maria, with her perfect paste of no-pore skin, eyes moony in the thick fringe of her lashes, wins the record: brown-black latticework glittering twelve inches high, triumphant in medium winds.  From two blocks away you can see her and her hair, her lower back pinned to the handrail, her crotch pressed against her boyfriend's.  Your mother, driving you to school, must see her, too, there at the canal before the first bell.  Both of you pretend not to notice.

***

Blondes do have more fun.  Married men flirt with you.  Co-workers take you to lunch.  The restaurant server, cheekbones and square jaw worthy of a soap opera, brushes his forearm along your shoulders as he serves you, takes away your plate.  Eyes on you, bleached hussy, he calls your colorless, mountainous lesbian co-worker, again and again, Sir.  No one corrects him.

You give yourself until twenty-five to play with your hair.  Later you want to tell those other pouty Asian blonds, Hey, I was blond once -- twice -- before you.

***

Rectangles of tissue paper, white leaves, float to the floor as your mother squeezes toxic solution onto your bent head.  Pink, yellow, and blue plastic rods cling tight to your scalp in even rows, ammonia stink dripping past the Vaseline smear along your hairline.  Read the glossy purple box again and again: how long to wait, how long to rinse, this path to wavy curls.  You end up with a frizzy bob, not quite Young Miss.

Brian, who paws you at night and ignores you by day, calls you “Brillo Pad.” You tilt your head to the right throughout the day to maintain your part.

***

In London your white landlord gasps at the news, your visit to the barbershop around the corner, where old black men play cards in a back room.  “They really cut hair there, do they?” 

The owner's son spends three hours each month snipping your hair into a pixie cut. Strand by strand, it seems, to prolong conversation.  When you arrive as a faded blond, he brings you back to your black roots, a crewcut with blond tips.

They call you a hedgehog.

***

In college the East Coast girls, West Coast girls, Midwest girls, slim, busty, confident girls pine for stick-straight hair like yours.  They iron their long blond locks flat, flat, flat.     

High school's over, rejoice!  You've been rejected by Brian, Marcus, and Xavier, but you've rejected them also -- and everyone else there, too, with their big hair wishes.  You're cutting them all off, shaving your head, starting over, showing them you don't care.

They call you Sinead.

***

In Chengdu, China, the industrious set up stools and mirrors on the sidewalks, stock themselves with shaving cream and scissors.  Men's haircuts twenty-five cents.  You shock your high school students with your short hair, short skirts, big boots, big boobs, and American accent.  Later in the semester two girls show up with their hair cut short.  They smile brightly at you from the front row.  Hi, teacher.   Look at us, like you, like Hong Kong MTV.  In their shapeless navy blue uniforms, they look like twelve-year-old boys.

***

In the three-way mirror at Wig-o-Rama, you and Ricky become Asian Cleopatras, Pippi Longstockings, punk Rapunzels.  He buys the poufy black Marilyn Monroe.  You buy the long, straight black Cher.

You both spend hours primping in the mirror, combing your fake hair, gluing on false eyelashes.  You squeeze into a pair of denim cutoffs, Ricky's patchwork leather vest, and platform wedge heels.  You trade black wigs.  He is a Filipina farm girl in braids.  You are Chinese trash with a Marilyn bouffant. At Club 2520, the lesbians love you.

***

The Korean playboy, your one and only romance with an Asian, if four weeks spent being the other woman can be called a romance (you only found that out later).  What he likes about you: “Your hair doesn't get in my mouth.”

***

You are cleaning up, getting rid of the past.  You dig through closets, claw through boxes.  You find pencils, markers, hair ribbons, and underwear never used as a child, too precious for writing, drawing, wearing, washing.  You flip open the lid on a school box emblazoned with an American flag and scream: a dead black-brown rat, curled in fetal position.

No, it's eighteen inches of schoolgirl hair, dry and lonely, fourteen years in the dark.

You throw it out.

***

In couples counseling, the married Sikh couple suggests you grow your hair.  Hair is your spiritual antennae, they say, which is why they keep theirs covered, uncut.  You grow your hair out. (Your partner doesn't, scalp kept shorn.) Your shoulder-length hair attracts three years of crying and trying to make your relationship, your career, your life as an adult work.  Finally you get rid of the car, the house, the man.

You keep the hair.

You move home.  You cry a lot.  Eight months later you have your hair snipped short and donate the locks to charity.

You're back at another beginning.

***

Today's lesson: the letter “H.”  Mrs. Maxwell has you tamp grass seeds into damp soil in a foam cup. You draw red lips stretched into smile on the skritchy white curved canvas.  You sniff fruit-scented markers as you go.  Twenty-four fragile white cups line up on the windowsill and catch the gold morning sun.

Every day - years before you all learn about highlights, hangovers, hijacking, hemp, hemorrhages, hymens, herpes, HIV - you watch, you water, you wait, until the skinny blades of green break through their earthy sleep and stretch toward sky.

H, H, H.

“H” stands for hair.

~

words: Sandra M. Yee, Arizona (Yin, Yang & Chocolate)
iimage: Natalie Abadzis, London (byebyeballoon)

~

another once-blonde story: Tessa in the Mirror (#11)