Good Hair Memories 

Her long hair falls below her should blades in loosely crimped waves of salt and pepper when freshly washed but most of the time it is piled carelessly on top of her head. With a long barrette stuck through the curls or twisted into a suggestion of a braid. Anything to keep it off her face and neck. She thinks long hair is slightly improper in older women, especially if it’s not held back by some means. From some barely remembered and surely outdated beauty advice.

She really can’t explain her hair having grown so long except she likes it and it doesn’t cost anything to keep it long. She can cut it herself or ask a friend or go to the economy hair cutters and since she has great hair that grows fast, nothing can really hurt it. 

On second thought, there are lots of justifications for her to wear it long. She has the “family hair,” a little unruly but distinguished, the distinctive salt and pepper look that her father and his sisters and brothers sported as they aged. It’s the same length she wore as a child when her dark brown almost black hair was kept long, drawn into broad plaits. Swept up into a headdress, her crowing glory on top of her head or braided into two fat tubes with curls escaping and wisps that could never be tamed. Caught up with a rubber band covered with a ribbon to keep it off her face.

She loved the plaited hair crown when she was a child, an elaborate hairdo that drew admiring comments from strangers when she was walking with her grandmother up Blue Hill Avenue to the kosher butcher. She would walk down the street feeling proud of her hair if not of her body.  

She was asked to be Pocahontas in a summer day camp pageant because of that hair – no one else had anything approaching its shiny brown-blackness, well, except the Latinas and the blacks, but a black child couldn’t be Pocahontas, could they? Those years, her family called black children pickanninnies and thought they were adorable, and the migrant children of Mexicans, if that’s what they were, could hardly speak English, much less star in the teacher’s simple version of “Evangeline.”  

She also thinks long hair is feminine and men like long hair she knows. Most of her life, she had kept it short, sometimes very short, cut with a curved pair of manicure scissors, gamine curls framing her face. Men thought it was cute but would always request that she let it grow. She never did. Too much trouble she said or maybe she could accede nothing to men’s preferences in those days.

According to beauticians she had a “bad hairline” on her neck, uneven and growing down in twin v’s and they would always remark on the great body, color, and curl of her hair and then shave the back of her neck to give her a neat appearance with very short haircuts. In a few days, stubble would appear, and then tiny tight curls and she would have to get it cut every other week or so it grew so fast. Sometimes they would even thin her hair to “give it a better line,” it was so thick.  

Right now, she thinks it’s her only good feature, her hair, but it’s thinning some in front. Ironic, the one part that doesn’t need thinning. She hates her stiff, aching, unwieldy body, thinks of it as a Volkswagen that she continues to feed as if it were a gas guzzling 50’s Cadillac. She’s unhappy with her skin with its brown spots and unwelcome tags springing up overnight even though it’s not wrinkling at the rate you'd think it would.  Most everyone still thinks she’s ten years younger than she is. Even with all those deep tans she cultivated for so many years and all the cigarettes she smoked for 40 years until she gave it up at last, just quit one day, and that was that. And her eyes, which she used to think pretty, are now overcast by drooping eyelids that obscure both her vision and multicolored hazel irises.

But fantasizing, she thinks maybe a man would overlook her fat body and aging skin and concentrate on her pretty hair. Love her for her hair.