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I was born with a head like a boiled potato: bald and slick. I’ve seen pictures; my eyes shined black glass reflections edge to edge through almond-shaped eyelids like my mother’s. I’m the most Korean-looking of all four of us now, but when my hair first came in, it was light and curly, like a white baby’s. It took two years to get to that point. Before then, Marvin tells me, my mother would massage my scalp with a mixture of Vitamin E and Vaseline, polishing it to a pinball gloss.
When I was three, she took a Bic razor to that fine down. “Makes it grow back thicker.” I’ve seen her do it to other children since then, neighbors’ kids, and it’s funny the way the curls drop, so solid, like fingernail clippings, onto the porch. You expect to find them lying there in tact later on, but by then they’ve dried out and floated away like dandelion spores.
My hair grew in black and straight after that, thick as a horse’s tail. My mother was right. I grew it to my center back and kept it that way for years. And I would shake it side to side to side, like it was an old friend rubbing my back from shoulder to shoulder, “good job.”
//.
When I was seventeen I learned that the first thing to do after a breakup is schedule a hair cut. Sometimes I couldn’t wait for the appointment, and I attacked the mess with kitchen scissors until it was lopsided and horrible. I usually felt better. “Gotta cut that man right out of my life,” I’d say.
For years I judged the men I loved by the way they touched my hair. Jack liked grabbing it by the handful, wrapping it around his palm until it was tugging my scalp, and he moved me this way. He would pull until my face was next to his, plowing his teeth from my collarbone to the top of my ear. Jack eventually resulted in a tidy crop to my chin. Then there was Bobby, the wet blanket, who would run his fingers through it from scalp to end, always greasing it up and tangling it. After our last date in the park I think I just cleaned up some split ends, evened out some layers in the back.
By the time I got my first real job, my hair had finally grown from the sloppy pixie cut I gave myself after Rick, a real sentimental type who liked to twirl his finger around my front tendrils and even kept a lock of it on his nightstand. I could finally pull it into a good braid, which my new guy, James, would love to watch me plait. But the best was in the shower, when his hands were pulsing in and out, anointing my scalp with lavender soap.
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We could tell from an early age that Nicole would have two gifts: a solid sense of humor and one hell of a head of hair. Even when she was a baby it was thick and dark, the perfect combination of me and Greg. My mother never even tried to shave it. So when she turned fifteen and I saw that first cream-colored patch there in the back, it frightened me, like when you realize that a person is missing a limb. She hadn’t even noticed yet. As weeks went on, she began losing more and more of it to jacket hoods, hairbrushes, ribbons. One time she called me into the bathroom to examine a fist-sized specimen in the drain. “It looks like a wet rat,” she told me, and we drowned it in the toilet.
I enrolled the two of us into a group parent-child therapy session to discuss the situation. Never one to be expected, Nicole would declare at meetings that she’d just ditched Mathletes for a motorcycle gang, backing up her story with a temporary tattoo of an eagle she’d added behind her ear for effect. Other days she’d sport a t-shirt reading “My other hair is a Porsche!” or say she was trying out for a Mr. Clean commercial. But two months in, when this girl Anna arrived, she stopped.
We all figured Anna had alopecia too. She never talked much at sessions. Unlike Nicole, she wasn’t missing all of her hair, just sections, mostly around her hairline. But one time I saw Anna outside of therapy. She was sitting alone on a bench in front of Dillard’s, probably waiting for a ride home. I would have offered, but— I’m sure she thought no one was watching, but I saw it: I saw the way she wrapped her hair around her finger so tight, winding and then pulling with a snap until it was loose, limp, in her hand. She folded it over and put it in her mouth like a stick of gum. I saw, and I saw the way her face was so vacant during all of it, like she wasn’t even aware. Like she was just scratching an itch.
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I’m old enough now to have learned to accept most things about my mother as she ages. She’s turning eighty-two in April, and she’s grown more crotchety and frail than I had anticipated. I’ve learned to expect her hands, covered in brown marks and sucked thin to reveal her bones and veins. Her voice, too, has become familiar—strained and dry, it reminds me now of the old woman I know, rather than the old woman I feared finding.
But her hair—
It’s white and thin as a spider web, and through it I can see her scalp as mottled and pale as the rest of her, but somehow more terrifying and fragile. Her temples and cheeks have sunken from the fullness I remember. I know she doesn’t have much more time, but her hair makes it seem so cruel. When we sit together, I rub her scalp the way she rubbed mine as a baby, and I gather her hair— so thin now— into a braid that wraps to the side.
When I was young my mother would wrap her hair around soup cans to give it a nice wave. I would have given anything to be half as beautiful as her in her robe and slippers with hair falling softly from the cans to her shoulders. It was so black and shiny it was almost liquid. She bought me my first set of hot rollers when I was eleven years old, and I would spend my weekends perfecting my Gilda "Who, me?" in the mirror.
It's too bad about what happened to Rita Hayworth. She forgot about Gilda, she forgot about love, she forgot about everything, and then she forgot to keep breathing.
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My daughter and I traveled to Poland once and did the whole morbid tourist thing, going to the labor camps and grinning for cameras in front of the old bathhouses like a bunch of psychos. But what got me about the whole experience wasn't the discarded rat poison cans, or the ruins of the gas chambers, or the photographs of the starving prisoners. It was the hair: the room of it behind a glass panel, the masses of golds and browns like a fall landscape. At the time, I said it was terrible, gut-wrenching, all the things you're supposed to say to prove that you've been moved by a "humanizing" experience. But I wasn't referring to the prisoners— I was talking about my daughter, and the way the back of her head blended right in.