he last time I saw my mother I was propped on a phone book in a red leather chair at Jeanie’s Hair Salon. It’s the only red leather chair in the salon —a genuine antique, according to Jeanie, who wipes it down with leather cream once a week to keep it from cracking. The salon used to be Guido’s Barber Shop, where Jeanie and my mother had worked as manicurists until Guido retired and moved to Miami with his wife. By that time, his long-term affair with Jeanie had blossomed into an enduring friendship that kept Jeanie from ever loving another man. As a good-bye present, he signed over the deed to his shop and gave her a few thousand dollars so she could finish going to hairdressing school and get her license. This was her dream.
My mother’s dreams were different.
"I’m going out for a pack of smokes," she said, kissing my cheek. Strands of wet hair covered my face. I opened my eyes, looked into the mirror, watched my mother head toward the door. Imagined I was looking at her through the bars of a cage at the zoo. Jeanie slid the scissors across my forehead as she evened out my bangs. "You be good," said my mother, slinking out the door.
One hour, two hours, three hours passed and she didn’t return. "Maybe something happened to her," I said. I was sweeping hair from the floor, helping Jeanie get ready to close up for the night. Betty, a hairdresser-in-training who worked for Jeanie, had left in a hurry— a hot date, she said — without cleaning up. Under her chair were crescents of silvery hair mixed with clumps of brown curls. I swept them along with a broom that was taller than me, pretended I was leading a dog on a leash. "Woof!" I said. Jeanie looked worried.
"Come on — let’s get out of here." She reached into the bottom drawer of her vanity, pulled out her pocketbook, a black crinkled faux leather shapeless sack. "Maybe she went home or something. You know how she gets those headaches of hers. Maybe she went home."
Even before Jeanie put the key in the door we both knew my mother was not there. She’d left a note — "Don’t be too mad" —on the windshield of her car, a rundown deep blue Corvette parked in the lot reserved for residents of the garden apartment complex where my mother and I lived down the hall from Jeanie. By the time I was born, they’d been neighbors for years, had keys to each other’s apartments, kept their doors unlocked on days when they were both home, checked up on each other. For me it was like having two mothers.
Jeanie sighed, shook her head, uttered a breathless shit! when she saw the open closets in my mother’s bedroom, emptied. On the bed was a scarf silkscreened with a map of Paris. Jeanie picked up the scarf, seemed to snarl at the sight of it.
"Do you know when she got this?" she asked. "Your father — Pi-air— gave it to her the day before he left her. She was eight months pregnant with you." It was Jeanie’s belief that giving my mother the scarf, along with a promise that he’d send her a ticket to Paris, was almost as cruel as leaving her. And leaving the scarf behind, I came to believe, was almost as cruel as abandoning me the way she did. This piece of her, this token she’d left me, was nothing more than a measure of deceit. I looked around the room, started to feel dizzy. On the walls, on large pieces of paper, she’d posted messages in French: Bon jour, Bonne nuit, Merci, Je t’aime. She wanted me to learn French, she’d said. It’s a pretty language. Francophile that she was, nothing pleased her more than knowing her daughter had some French genes in her. But the notes, the attempt at simple dialogues she got from Berlitz and basic French grammar books (and Pierre) I now saw as pure ploy. I grabbed the scarf from Jeanie, ran to the kitchen with it, opened the drawer where my mother kept scissors, and began cutting. Right through the Seine. My breath became short, rapid. Jeanie took the scissors from me, tried to calm me down. I ran into my mother’s bedroom, pulled the notes from the wall. Kept moving to avoid that moment of sheer terror when a dream takes a wrong turn.
Jeanie grabbed me, picked me up, carried me to her apartment. "We’ll get through this," she said. She led me to the living room, turned on the TV, held me close to her on the couch, ran her hand along the top of my head.
"Good haircut — if I must say so myself." She fluffed my hair with her fingers. I stared at the TV. Images, disconnected from one another, moved across the screen. "Don’t move," said Jeanie, abruptly getting up. "I have an idea." She came back with a comb and a ponytail holder, positioned me on her lap. "I’m in the mood to put this gorgeous hair of yours into a nice French braid," she said. Screaming uncontrollably, I ran from Jeanie’s lap, out of her apartment, down the hall to mine. I pulled at the doorknob. Banged on the door. Mrs. Eberhardt, an elderly woman whose hands reminded me of a gnarled tree, came out into the hallway, asked what was wrong.
"Nothing that an ice cream cone won’t cure," said Jeanie, scooping me up in her strong arms and carting me down the stairs, into her car, where I cried and cried and cried in her arms.
It was three years before I let Jeanie go near my hair with scissors. "You need a trim," she would say, "just a little trim to clean away the dead ends. Your hair will grow better — faster." I didn’t care, I said. No cutting. I let her brush it every night, wash it twice a week, make skinny braids down the sides and across the top. I liked it best when she washed my hair. She had a special plastic pillow that fit into the groove in the sink at her shop, so there was no strain on my neck when I leaned back. Jeanie had just the right touch. When she rubbed the shampoo through my hair, my scalp would tingle from the quick gentle stroking of her nails. Cradling my head to rinse out the shampoo she would whistle or hum pop tunes and I would breathe in the scent of shampoo mixed with her perfume. "Least you know how to relax," she would say. "The way some of my clients tense up you’d think they’re afraid I’m gonna drop their head in the sink like a bowling ball." Her fingers looked delicate but were strong, and when she moved them along my skull, pressing, kneading, I would drift off, forget for an instant, the deep pain that had turned my body to a lifeless piece of rubber.
Finally one day I said to her, "Cut." I’d been sitting in the shop, where I came every day after school, looking at magazines. It was my favorite thing to do — going through every new issue of the magazines Jeanie subscribed to. Family Circle. Redbook. Vogue, Elle. Woman’s Day. Seventeen. People. Seventeen had a special issue on famous models past and present. Twiggy captured my imagination. I wanted my hair to look just like hers. I was nine years old.
"You’re nuts," said Jeanie. "You’ll look like a boy." She was combing out her hair, which Betty had just finished coloring. "What do you think?" she asked me. I nodded my approval. Unlike my mother, who played with extremes when it came to dying or highlighting her hair, Jeanie always stayed close to her natural color, "a blend of blonde mixed with brown." She hated the expression, "dirty blonde," could go on and on about the distorted self-image that allowed a woman to characterize her natural hair color as dirty blonde. "What exactly does that mean?" she would grill the new client who came in saying she was tired of being a dirty blonde. It was a rhetorical question. Jeanie, examining the texture of her client’s hair, studying her complexion, would immediately give the answer. "It means absolutely nothing," she would say. "The truth is, no one over the age of ten is a ‘natural’ blonde. So I can only surmise that ‘dirty’ blonde — like ‘mousy’ brown — was coined by the companies that produce hair products as a kind of conspiracy to keep them in business. Not that I’m complaining, mind you. This is my business, too. But I’m a little more honest. I won’t color you hair to make it less dirty or less mousy. I’ll color it for the same reason I cut it, shape it, and comb it. It’s fun. It’s theatre. It’s art. All in the name of maintenance."
She was not feeling very artistic when she watched the long brown waves of my hair drop to the floor. Nor did she look like she was having fun. "You’re sure about this," she kept saying. "I mean, it’s not gonna grow back overnight."
Yes, I nodded. I’m sure. Absolutely sure.
Little by little, inch by inch, Jeanie cut. Little by little, ounce by ounce, I felt a weight lifted from me.
When I went to school the next day nobody knew what to say except,"You cut your hair!" Martin, who always wore black and sat in a corner by himself during recess reading or writing poetry, said he liked it. My best friend Mindy gasped when she saw me. "Why didn’t you tell me?" she kept saying. "I would have talked you out of it."
"Impossible," I told her. "It was an impulse decision." And I wasn’t one bit sorry. Like Rapunzel, like Lady Godiva, I had become my hair. At bedtime, just before putting on my pajamas, I would lie on my back, feel the pure pleasure of my soft tresses, almost down to my waist, against my skin. Or roll around like a dog in the grass. Or shake my head until my hair covered my face, pretend I was hiding in bushes, pull it over my shoulders, let the long strands tickle my belly. One night, about a week before I’d made the decision to cut it, I stood in front of the mirror in my bedroom, pulled my hair up into a ponytail and studied my face. I was lucky to have my father’s blue eyes (according to my mother) and his fine straight thin nose. Her eyes were hazel and her nose slightly upturned. She had a full, round face. And gorgeous thick hair.
The day after I cut my hair, I received a letter from my mother, the first she’d written since leaving, along with some postcards. Jeanie read the letter aloud.
Dear Sabrina,
Bon jour.
That means "hello," in case you forgot.
It’s hard to believe that three years have already gone by. I’m pretty fluent in French, which is amazing when you consider that I flunked it in high school. Supposedly you learn a language better when you’re young, which is why I hope you’re studying French (or any language, for that matter).
I’m babbling. I don’t know what to say to you except that some women make better mothers than others and Jeanie is one of those women. My life in Paris is not exactly what I thought it would be, but I do love it here. I love the little winding streets near Montmartre (see postcard), I love picking up a baguette every day from the boulangerie, I love the sound of milk being steamed for coffee (cafe au lait), and I love the view of the city from the Eiffel Tower (see postcard). I’ve been there at least a dozen times. It can be windy up there — exhilarating — and I find it a good place to think. Standing at the top of the Eiffel Tower at night, looking out at the lights of the city, feeling the wind in my hair, I’ve asked myself many times if what I did was wrong, and I have yet to come up with a satisfactory answer. I know I’ve caused you some pain, and believe me, I do feel bad about that. Jeanie probably thinks I was a coward not to write sooner, but she should know better. Had I been a coward I would have written, asked forgiveness, et cetera, et cetera. The truth is, I did write you, but better judgment prevented me from sending the postcards, some of which I’ve included with this letter. I never did find Pierre, though he was nothing more than my excuse for doing something I might never have done otherwise. C’est la vie.
I hope you’re well. You can write to me if you want to — I would love to hear from you. Love, me.
P.S. Tell Jeanie it’s really true about European women not shaving their armpits (except for the more Americanized ones). I’m thinking about going ‘au naturelle’ in that regard. Michel, a man I’ve been seeing for a few months, thinks hair under a woman’s armpits is very sexy. I’m not convinced, but I told him I’d give it some thought.
"How’s that for a coincidence!" remarked Jeanie, tousling my very short hair. Somehow, my haircut. so seemingly out of the blue after three years of vehement resistance, now had meaning to her. For days she would continue to marvel at the timing of the letter, which only confirmed the prime place intuition held in her world view. Regardless whether it was I who had ‘summoned’ my mother by cutting my hair, or whether it was she who had sent telepathic messages as a prelude to the letter, reconciliation, as Jeanie saw it, was in the air.
"I hope you’re going to write back," Jeanie kept pressing me. "Let her know we’re okay — know what I mean?" I refused. When a week passed and I still hadn’t written, Jeanie decided she would send a letter to my mother. "It’s important to forgive," she said to me. For Jeanie, it was equally important to appease my mother. Though she never said it in so many words, she lived in quiet terror that my mother would one day decide to claim her daughter. For me, that was not within the realm of possibility. If Jeanie had read the letter carefully, she would know, the way I did from that day on, that my connection to my mother was as tenuous as the fine, wavy strokes of her pen.
By the time I was twelve I had breasts that were like two perfect halves of a peach, legs that Jeanie said earmarked me for a career in modeling or dancing, and an unremitting need to shave away the hairs sprouting under my arms like alfalfa. Jeanie tried to hold me off for as long as possible. "Believe me," she would say, "one day you’ll thank me for sparing you a year or two out of a lifetime of nicks and scratches." She wanted me to wait until I was sixteen. I told her I couldn’t. She would then remind me of the day, not long past, when I called her into my room, showed her the few hairs in my crotch and under my arms, proudly pointed to the tiny buds on my chest. "Isn’t it ironic," she said during one of our to-shave-or-not-to-shave bouts, "that the very things a ten-year-old girl can’t wait to have start to embarrass her by the time she’s twelve?"
I complained to my friend Mindy, who was two years older than me and had been shaving for a year now. "Just do it," she advised me. I couldn’t, I said. Not without Jeanie’s okay. We were at King’s Plaza, the first indoor mall in Brooklyn, which was walking distance from our homes. Mindy dragged me there sometimes after school, but mostly on weekend afternoons when she wanted to get away from "the noise" at home: her three brothers fighting; the aunts and uncles who popped in unannounced; her father blasting the TV to drown out the fighting brothers, the unannounced aunts and uncles. Walking through the mall with Mindy was like being in the trail of a pinball released from the laws of physics. She would beam in on a shirt in one shop window, dart across the corridor for a better look at a pair of sneakers, pull me by the arm to examine a dress she just had to have.
"What do you think of this?" she asked me. Epilady, it was called. The saleswoman at the counter said it would revolutionize shaving. She pointed to the wire coils on the little electric depilatory, said it was kind of a cross between shaving and waxing. It looked innocuous enough. Mindy was sold.
We went back to her house. Her aunts and uncles were gone, her father had taken her brothers to McDonald’s. In her bedroom Mindy stripped down to her panties, couldn’t wait to try her new toy. She pulled out the plastic contraption, put in the batteries, and applied it to her thigh. She hadn’t shaved in a few days, which was good, since the saleslady said it worked best when there was some hair for the coils to grab on to. Mindy followed the directions, made little circles across her thigh with the thing that was a cross between shaving and waxing. She winced, held her breath, kept at it. She tried to joke, said it feels like you’re tweezing the hair on your legs. One by one. Her jaw tightened. I told her to stop. She shook her head. Determination, usually her strength, now seemed to me her weakness. Again I suggested she stop. Welts started to appear on her leg, getting redder by the minute. The howl she let out, finally, the howl she’d been holding back out of sheer stupid determination was blood-curdling, hair-raising. Her mother came running up the stairs, into her room. Finally, Mindy dropped the thing that was a cross between shaving and waxing. And she cried.
Dear Sabrina,
I got a letter from Jeanie telling me you won first prize for a watercolor you entered in your high school art show. How exciting! If you really do love art, you’ll have to come to Paris someday. I myself was never much good at drawing or painting though I did (and still do) love music, especially the piano. I started playing in third grade — if you can call practicing on a cardboard keyboard ‘playing.’ The music teacher in school gave us these cardboard keyboards that had all the keys of the piano laid out in three panels. They were the size of real piano keys and the panels folded for easy carrying. My parents could not afford a piano, and they were certainly not about to buy one until they were convinced this wasn’t just a whim of mine. I’d spread out the keyboard on the kitchen table, learn to position my fingers. It wasn’t exactly the same as playing the real thing, but I was determined, I guess. Sometimes I practiced on our next-door neighbor’s old upright. Then one day I came home from school to find a spinet against the wall of our living room. It was one of the happiest moments of my life. I took lessons for about five years. Then boys got in the way. Don’t let that happen to you.
Please tell Jeanie I broke up with Michel (and have clean-shaven armpits again). His idea of settling down is a woman in every rondissement of Paris.
Love,
me
P.S. I read something very amusing in one of the English-language newspapers here. Some people were asked their opinion on the economy in the U.S. Here’s what one man said: "From my personal situation, I can see it’s getting better. My wife is self-employed as a beautician, and her business is picking up dramatically. More people are getting their hair done." Is this true?
"Only a man would make a remark like that," said Jeanie. "And someone who’s not in the business." She was combing out Sadie Gerber’s silver-gray wig. Sadie had a red one, too. When she came to Jeanie for her first wig, two weeks into her chemotherapy treatments for breast cancer, she insisted on something close to her natural color. With one breast removed, she felt like an alien had inhabited her body. She didn’t want to look in the mirror and see a total stranger. When she came for her second wig — Jeanie told her she’d need a spare — she opted for red. You have the complexion to be a redhead, Jeanie had said to her. Live a little.
"In the ten years I’ve had this place," she went on, "I can’t say I’ve had more than one or two really bad years — and that was at the beginning, before people really got to know me." She put the finishing touches on the wig — "There!" — and placed it on a shelf.
"The point is," she went on, "once women could see their reflections— in lakes, in mirrors — the whole idea of grooming took on a new psychological dimension. It now became possible to play with different looks, manipulate your image, so to speak. And I don’t think it’s overstating the case to say that hair is a very key part of that image. Curly, straight, frizzy, short, long, red, blonde, you get what I mean? And while it may be true that more women go for a kind of ‘natural’ look these days— which, I might add, still needs to be cut and shaped — I have plenty who want their hair teased and sprayed. So if you ask me, this guy who thinks hairdressing is an economic indicator probably has this great big bald spot he tries to hide with strands of hair combed backwards. Or he wears a toupee."
There was a tap at the door. It was Mindy. She was carrying a suitcase and her knapsack. Her face was swollen, like she’d been crying a lot.
"My father threw me out," she said, flinging herself into Jeanie’s red leather chair. "He gave me one hour to pack." She looked at herself in the mirror, started twirling strands of her hair with her finger. "Some birthday present." She had just turned seventeen.
I asked what happened. "She didn’t have to tell him," she answered.
"Tell him what?"
"I mean, she could have been a real mother and helped me." Her lips were quivering now. "I mean, what is so terrible? It’s 1983 — not 1953. Girls get pregnant all the time. They have abortions. Why is it such a big fucking deal when it happens to me?"
She leaned forward in her chair, propped her elbows on her knees. Her hair, black, shiny, body-waved to look like Cher’s, cascaded across her shoulders. "If she didn’t tell him — if she just agreed to take me to a doctor, get it over with — everything would be fine . . . but no-o-o-o-, she had tell him. ‘How can you hide something like that?’ she asks me. ‘You’re gonna be in bed, recuperating.’ ‘Just say I have the flu or something,’ I tell her. ‘But it isn’t the flu,’ she says. Like she can’t even tell a little lie." Mindy was crying now. Hysterically. Jeanie put her hands on her shoulders.
"What’s Jerry have to say about all this?" Jeanie asked. Jerry had been Mindy’s boyfriend until a week ago, when he got a motorcycle from his father. It was a present for finally graduating from community college. He planned to go cross-country on his bike, by himself, wanted Mindy to meet him in California at the end of the summer. She told him to drop dead. Then she found out she was pregnant.
"I called him," said Mindy, "but he’s already gone."
"What are you gonna do?" Jeanie asked.
Mindy sat up straight. "I’m gonna have an abortion, then I’m gonna get a job and move to the city." She pulled her wallet from her knapsack. She had five hundred dollars. "I’ve been saving for a rainy day," she said.
Dear Sabrina,
This is an interesting triangle we have — I write to you, Jeanie writes to me. I thought you would write back, if for no other reason than to say you hate me for abandoning you, though leaving you with Jeanie was not, in my eyes, abandonment. Jeanie tells me you read the letters, but even without that inside information I would probably continue to write. My friend Isabel thinks I’m punishing myself. I tell her she has it all wrong. Every letter I write is a piece of history that belongs to you. Even if you don’t think so now, there will probably come a time when you’ll want to know more about the person who gave birth to you. It’s human nature. You may choose never to see me, never to talk to me, never to write. But one day, in trying to make sense of your own life, you’re going to look for clues to my existence.
I got a new job, by the way. I’m working in a spa at one of the better hotels in Paris. Customers, especially the Americans, love getting a French manicure from someone who speaks fluent English. They tip well.
There’s a new man in my life, too. His name’s George and he’s one of the concierges at the hotel. He has a real passion for redheads, which is what I am now. It took a while to get it right. At first the color was too purple, then it was too brassy, and I was about ready to rediscover my natural color (whatever that is — it’s been so long). George talked me out of it. After a few weeks with him I’m convinced there’s some aphrodisiac property in red dye.
Love,
me
When I saw all the girls my age (some even younger) at the clinic where Mindy had her abortion, I swore to myself I would never have sex. Some of them were clinging to their boyfriends’ arms, though most were sitting with mothers whose bodies were rigid with accusation or friends who tried to be comforting. Mindy seemed to take it in stride, though she did cry a lot during the month she stayed with Jeanie and me. Jeanie said it was hormones.
Then one morning, late August, she announced she was leaving for the city. She placed her knapsack on the kitchen table and opened it. "See this secret compartment?" She opened an interior zipper, pulled out a thousand dollars and a note from her mother that said I’m sorry. "I swear I never knew it was here. She saves money and keeps it hidden in envelopes in her drawers. She must have snuck this in while I was packing." Mindy wanted to give Jeanie some money for taking care of her. Jeanie told her to keep it. Then Mindy hugged us and left. She didn’t like long good-byes.
She got herself a cheap apartment in the East Village and a job at a restaurant in Soho. Jeanie and I visited her on weekends a lot, took her out to dinner in Chinatown. On my eighteenth birthday, just after graduating from high school, I moved in with her. Jeanie was not happy with my decision. She wanted to keep me in her fold, support me through art school. The day before I left she trimmed and highlighted my hair, which was chin-length and layered in soft waves. It seemed to take forever. I told her she reminded me of those mother monkeys who keep picking at their babies’ fur, grooming them. She didn’t even crack a smile. "You’re more like your mother every day," she said.
My first lover, Carlos, said the blonde streaks in my hair were muy carnal.
No hay muchas mujeres con los pelos rubios en Costa Rica, he told me when we met. It was in a Soho art gallery where I worked as a receptionist. I was at my desk, on the phone, when he walked in. He seemed to know what he wanted.
"That one," he said, pointing to a Frida Kahlo self-portrait. "How much?" He had a small scar on his right cheek and a stare that seemed to suck up everything in its view. Like a black hole, I thought.
He paid cash for the painting, told me where and when he wanted it delivered. I told him I’d arrange everything. That wasn’t good enough. "You bring the painting," he insisted.
"That’s not my job." I was standing next to him. In my platform shoes I was eye level with his thick brown moustache. He put his hand on my cheek, gently ran his fingers through my hair. No hay muchas mujeres con los pelos rubios en Costa Rica, he said. It sounded almost like cooing. I told him I’d deliver the painting.
We hung it in the dining room of his East 57th Street penthouse, the only space interior enough where light would not ruin the vivid colors. "I like her strong face," he said, pouring Fino for the two of us. An assortment of tapas, specially prepared by a friend who had a restaurant nearby, was laid out on the table. "Eat," said Carlos. He fed me some garlic shrimp, followed by a kiss. A long, deep, sensuous kiss. He was thirty-four, made his money in coffee. I was eighteen, a virgin. "A rare species," he said, gently, ever so gently, easing his way into my life.
Carlos traveled a lot, called me whenever he was in town. I looked forward to the two, three nights at a time we’d spend together. Sometimes, when he fell asleep before I did, I’d lie on my side, nuzzle his shoulder between my breasts, stare at his face. The longer I stared, the more elusive the features of his face would seem, like images carved in wet sand along the shore. His chest was smooth, almost hairless, and I loved lying on him, gliding, our sweat mingling, our heartbeats a rushing tide of secret uncoded messages.
One morning a woman barged into the apartment, ranting and raving in Spanish. Her large sunglasses and the orange kerchief on her head made her look like she’d just stepped off the set of an Italian movie. Carlos jumped out of bed, told me to stay put. He took the woman by her arm, pulled her into the living room. They both sounded loud now, though I could not make out anything they were saying. Next thing I heard was the doorbell, then some male voices.
"A crazy ex-girlfriend," Carlos told me when he came back to the bedroom. He lay down next to me, aroused. We made love, and for the first time in the six months I’d known Carlos I was not there with him. I was thinking about the woman in the orange kerchief — who is she? — and I was thinking about Mindy in an orbit of one-night stands that always ended with the same cry — nobody makes me feel like Jerry did — and I was thinking about high school football hero Teddy Baker, who corralled me on my way to the girls’ room, took my wrist, pinned me against the wall — every girl wants it, he said, forcing a kiss, unless she’s a dike — and I was thinking about my mother and Pierre and my mother and Michel and my mother and George — hating hating hating and wanting her — and I was thinking about Jeanie. Sex is the most intimate act between two people, she used to tell me. Don’t fool yourself into believing it’s just physical.
The next thing I knew I was not in Carlos’s bed. He was in the bathroom, showering, and I was gathering my underwear and blouse from the bedroom floor and my skirt and shoes from the living room floor. Quickly, ever so quickly, I got dressed, grabbed my purse and my jacket, not noticing, until I was home, the orange kerchief inadvertently tucked into my pocket.
Dear Sabrina,
How’s this for a juxtaposition of images! Jeanie is either cringing or laughing at the photograph of me in an ‘Afro,’ which is the way I wore my hair when I met her. She hated it. (It is pretty funny-looking, I have to admit.) The other photo is, I’m sure, equally shocking to both of you. The woman I’m sitting with is Anouk, and she’s a model. I’d seen her a few times at a club I frequent — you can’t help but notice her! — and I’d find myself just staring at this absolutely gorgeous face. Of course, the fact that she’s bald makes you look harder, try to figure it all out — why? how? — until you come up with the bald (I couldn’t resist that) assumption that she’s obviously suffering from an extreme form of androgenic alopecia (i.e., hair loss) or is demented. Neither of which turns out to be the case. She simply likes the way she looks. And judging by her popularity, so do a lot of women. She’s been in every major fashion magazine.
That’s not to say there’s a ‘female baldness’ craze in Paris. I’ve only noticed a handful of women, besides myself, who have taken the plunge. And as strange as I know this sounds, there is something liberating about being bald. Ask Jeanie how many times we’d be walking down the street or shopping or sitting in a restaurant and she’d make some remark about how dry this woman’s hair was or how stringy and totally wrong for her face that woman’s hair was. "Might as well be bald," she’d say, "considering the way she takes care of her hair." I know she never meant that literally, but the fact of the matter is, when you’re bald, by choice, you are redefining beauty. Jeanie, I’m sure, thinks I’ve gone off the deep end. Who knows? — maybe she’s right. Of course, given how she likes to analyze things, she’ll quickly come to the conclusion that I’m going through a mid-life identity crisis, having turned 40 the other day.
I cried on my birthday, for the first time in a very long time, and not because of my age. I like the sound of 40. I look good, I feel strong. What started me crying was the realization that being 40 means you’re about to turn 20 and I’ve been in Paris fourteen years. Where does the time go? As a birthday present I thought about buying myself a ticket to the States. I actually got as far as the ticket office. Then I changed my mind. It would be too strange, too complicated emotionally to visit after all this time. And what would it mean? Who am I to you, after all? Gabriel (my current boyfriend) is studying philosophy. I don’t always understand what he’s talking about, but he’s got this long curly hair that gets me wild. (That, plus the fact that he’s 25 and very energetic.) And he does make me think. The other day I was walking down a street I’ve been down a thousand times and it suddenly looked and felt different. There was something in the air — a whiff of laundry detergent from the laundromat, the way the clouds hung low in the sky— that made me feel almost as if I was back in Brooklyn. For that brief moment of disorientation I began wondering if what seems real is nothing more than a dream or a figment of our imagination. And if you think about it, how much of our lives do we consciously, or unconsciously, invent? I don’t necessarily mean out-and-out fiction, but the truth is, the moment I came to Paris I became a different person. And for you (who I doubt has ever let on to anyone that you have this ‘other mother’) the reality you’ve created is the one that works. C’est la vie.
Why, then, was I crying? The swift passage of time, the reminder of something past that can never never be recaptured, the moment of doubt. That’s what started me crying.
I think that’s quite enough for now.
Love,
your other mother
I grew my hair long for Steven, an ad man with a fetish for short-shorts and high heel shoes and watching me eat popcorn. "Most people take it in clumps and toss it into their mouths," he said, "But you — you’re the only person I know who eats it one piece at a time. Where did you learn that kind of patience?"
"From my mother," I said. He assumed I meant Jeanie, took it for granted that being a hairdresser required patience. I didn’t bother to explain that the patience I was talking about came from hours and weeks and months and years of waiting. For just a word.
My hair was chin-length, ash blonde, when we met. Two months into our relationship I freaked him out when I went back to being a brunette.
"This is strong shit," he said when I walked through the door of my apartment where he’d been waiting for me, passing the time smoking dope with Mindy and Alex, a part-time actor, part-time waiter she’d been seeing for a few months. He coughed. "It’s making me see things."
"If it isn’t my favorite chameleon," remarked Mindy.
I sat down next to Steven, kissed his cheek.
He pulled back and stared, like he was studying my face. "I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone," he said. "I gotta get out for some air." He left the apartment, didn’t return that night.
The next day he called me at the gallery, said he was sorry about the way he acted last night, asked if we could have dinner.
We met at our favorite Soho bistro. "I don’t handle change very well," said Steven, cutting into his steak. He liked it rare, with the pommes frites piled on. "And maybe I’m a cliché, but I did prefer the blonde."
"You’re making too much of this," I said.
"I think I know what looks good on a woman." His arrogance excited me. "I had the Clairol account for long enough." He reached across the table, placed his finger just above my collarbone. "That’s how long your hair should be," he said. He imagined me looking like Lauren Bacall.
Later that night Steven asked me to move in with him. It was after we’d made love and had settled into watching TV. Old grainy black and white films were what he liked most. "Move in with me," he said. "It’ll be a chance for us to really get to know each other." He never said he loved me.
Mindy and Alex didn’t like the idea.
"He’s doing his Pygmalion thing," said Alex.
"He’s been in advertising too long," said Mindy. "He can’t tell the image from the real thing."
Almost eight months to the day after I moved in with Steven, he said he was starting to feel trapped. "It’s not that I don’t care about you." There was an unfamiliar edge to his voice, like he’d been practicing the line. He moved his jaw from side to side, to ease the tension. The effect was a Picasso-like face. I realized I was getting a true picture of him for the first time since we’d met. "I just think it’s time to cool things down." I didn’t say a word to him, just packed and left. On the way to my apartment, I stopped in a drugstore that had a photo machine and took some pictures of myself. Then I slipped them in an envelope and sent them to Steven. My hair had finally grown to my collarbone.
When a year passed and there was no letter from my mother, Jeanie started to worry.
"She sounded really weird last time she wrote," Jeanie and I were decorating the shop for Mindy’s bridal shower. After five years in L.A., Jerry came back, said he couldn’t live without Mindy. He’d gotten a job working for the phone company. Administration. Mindy could not help but forgive him.
"I would go to Paris, to try to find her," said Jeanie. "But where would I begin?" All my mother’s letters came from a post office box.
Jeanie tried to talk me into going with her. "It could be like a vacation."
"She doesn’t want to be found."
Jeanie got angry. "How can you be so sure? How do you know something isn’t wrong?"
"Something is wrong, Jeanie. Only it’s nothing we can do anything about."
Jeanie didn’t like hearing that. She handed me the streamers, told me to finish wrapping the chairs while she went to retrieve a package that had just been slipped through the slot in the door. The package was addressed to me. It was from Isabel. I opened it to find a brief note, in which Isabel explained that my mother had disappeared from Paris, without a trace. The only thing she left behind was a wallet that Isabel thought I might like to have. It was a green leather wallet, textured, with slots for credit cards and hidden compartments for dollar bills. Inside one of the compartments was a photo holder filled with baby pictures of me. I flipped through them, saw myself at one month, one year, five years. There were a few of my mother holding me or kissing me and in the final window of the holder, pressed and preserved, was a sliver of golden brown curls.
© Deborah Batterman