The Devil’s Haircut
I was in sixth grade when my mother, fed up with the long blonde hair I’d resist brushing, sick of the knots and tangles that grew like nettle-ridden shrubs underneath, took me to Esther.
Esther was, in theory, a beautician, which is what people called hair stylists back then, but I never saw credentials.
Esther ran her beauty parlor out of the basement of her squat red-brick house behind Zayre’s off Route 22 in Monroeville, Pa. Zayre’s was like K-Mart, but cheaper and with none of the excitement of K-Mart’s blue light specials.
At K-Mart, every half hour or so, some manager would hit a button, and a blue police light and siren would go off somewhere in the store. The blue light and siren meant there was a hot sale on something—a two-for-one run on pantyhose in plastic eggs; half off on jelly shoes in December or flannel pajamas in July. Zayre’s had Icees and hot pretzels and bags of stale popcorn for 50 cents. Zayre’s had bins full of paperback books, their covers torn off, five for a dollar. That was enough.
Esther had a bouffant updo. Her house smelled like hairspray and cigarettes. Cans of Aqua Net lined up on a shelf like bombs ready to launch. Esther chain-smoked, which even as a kid I thought was dangerous, given all that flammable hairspray and what-not. Esther was my mother’s go-to hairdresser for perms, a chemical solution that was also flammable and I’m sure toxic enough to contribute to the lung cancer that would eventually kill Esther.
After an Esther perm, my mother looked like our dog, an adopted white poodle named Tina 2, the replacement poodle for Tina 1, a black poodle that died during surgery from choking on a gum wrapper.
“I want something that looks natural, but make it last,” my mother said about the perm she told Esther to curl extra-tight.
My mother picked at her chemical curls with a plastic Afro pick. The pick had a Black Panther raised fist for a handle. My mother carried the fist in the back pocket of her knock-off Calvin Kleins. Philosophers say irony died in America in 2001, but I think it started decades earlier with my mother’s hair pick.
And so it goes that my suburban Italian American but culturally-appropriating and borderline-racist mother took me to Esther to solve my hair problems once and for all.
Adopted, I looked nothing like most of the people in my family. Blonde, green-eyed, Irish German in a family of stout Sicilians. My mother was, I think, both proud and annoyed by my difference. She had a lot invested in people thinking I was pretty, which I was, kind of, but in an ordinary way.
The kind of pretty my mother wanted required effort, something she didn’t expect when, shortly after she adopted me, she entered me in a beautiful baby contest at Sears. My mother dressed me like a lacey layer cake and spit-curled the one lock of blonde hair she could gather on top of my round baby head, and I won. Or rather, my mother won.
“I never won anything,” my mother said, “before I had you.”
For the Beautiful Baby prize, my mother got a museum-quality framed portrait of me, her newly acquired offspring. She also got bragging rights and a sweet set of Sears steak knives that would never need sharpening.
Any time company came over for dinner, my mother would whip out the steak knives with the handles that looked like ivory and tell the story.
“She was so beautiful when we got her from the orphanage,” my mother would say. “Not a mark on her. Just like a little doll.”
And then she’d look at older, less malleable me, and sigh.
I had started to grow wild and unmanageable.
“Willful,” my mother called me, which meant ungrateful, too.
Anything lace itched and gave me a rash. I sulked. I sulked more. I built a cave in my bedroom closet where I kept a flashlight and stacks of Zayre’s bargain bin books that my mother said would give me ideas and hurt my eyes. I made people call me Willow.
“As in weeping,” I said to prove I was sensitive like that.
And there was the hair problem. I refused to brush. I refused brushing. My hair tangled over my shoulders like the sad willow branches I claimed as my lost birthright.
That day at Esther’s, my mother, who once thought of me as her easy good luck charm, had grown tired of my nonsense.
“Give her a pageboy,” my mother said.
Pageboys were popular then. See Dorothy Hamill. A pageboy looked like one of those mushroom haircuts Monty Python’s Knights that say ni wore, sort of Sir Lancelot-y but if Sir Lancelot wore polyester armor and ate Jello salads and said cool a lot.
Esther grabbed hold of my ponytail. It was long and thick and hung to my waist. The ponytail was held together with an elastic band shaped like the eternity symbol, the number eight toppled over on its side, with plastic balls on the ends that looked like gumballs or two tiny planets, something to suck on.
Esther, cigarette dangling from her mouth, took a giant pair of scissors that could have been kitchen shears and cut my ponytail straight off at the base, just above the band. Then she held it up the way I imagine snake handlers in churches might hold a copperhead. She held it like a trophy, proof of her skill and my mother’s terrible faith in it.
I did not look like a champion figure skater. I looked like I’d gotten my hair caught in a woodchipper. My mother, mortified, paid Esther whatever she paid her and hustled me out. We didn’t stop at Zayre’s or Kmart. My mother was so embarrassed of me, of what she’d done to the trophy child she wanted, and at first I was embarrassed too. I felt exposed.
Back home, I thought about those princesses who slept their drool-less perfect sleep and their hair kept growing until a handsome prince woke them with a kiss, and boom, they were beautiful and alive and worth loving again.
I thought maybe I’d sleep like that. I’d already learned how to sleep on family trips from Pittsburgh to Florida, back seat, 20-plus hours in the car with my parents fighting all the way. I’d sleep myself back to pretty, and I wouldn’t disappoint anyone ever again.
But then I ran my fingers through my hair. I shook it this way and that. It felt so light, like nothing. Nothing. It felt like feathers, the softest down.
Years later, I’d read books beyond what I found at Zayre’s. I’d read Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.” I’d read Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, “If you wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
There are no school pictures of me from sixth grade until 9th grade, when my hair grew mostly back.
But my mother kept the ponytail.
She kept it in a plastic baggie in the back of her underwear drawer like a severed limb, a monkey paw, an apology, something for me to find years after she died.
Lori Jakiela is the author of eight books, a memoir, They Write Your Name on a Grain of Rice: On Cancer, Love, and Living Even So (Atticus Books). Another memoir, Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe (Autumn House Press), received the Saroyan Prize for International Literature from Stanford University. Lori’s essay collection, Portrait of the Artist as a Bingo Worker: On Work and the Writing Life (Bottom Dog Press), has been adopted as a common text at Westmoreland Community College for the past two years. Many of the essays in her most recent collection, All Skate: True Stories from Middle Life (Roadside Press), have been published in places like Pittsburgh Magazine, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Washington Post, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Journal of the Plague Years, Pulse, and more. My other work has appeared in The New York Times/Modern Love column, The Chicago Tribune, Brevity/Creative Nonfiction, Full Grown People, The Rumpus, and more. Her author website is http://lorijakiela.net.
