Now That Mine’s Worse than My Dog’s

While the world blows up we go along, go along, attending to trifles.

Some of us, at least me. I think all the time about my hair.

I was running over to Jennifer’s for my trims. No wrangling for beauty shop appointments, anymore, and having to drive all the way into town. But there were issues. I’d go over with my towel, maybe my head already wetted in anticipation, and she’d plant me on a stool on her porch in the cold wind and demand how much do you want off? and then whack whack whack, she’d be done. No wasting time with that woman. No coddling me, as if she’d pined for me to visit and now I was there she could deliberate with me over how to best fix my mop, weigh every snick, draw out the process. So for one thing, I needed more attention.

The other thing was what my grandgirl said. She said my hair was damaged. She said I shouldn’t be blow-drying it, frying it to death. She said to soothe the frizz, instead I should work in some coconut oil. Even rub it into my skull before shampooing, which I still think sounds appalling.

I put a few dabs into an old medicine bottle and laid it beside the bathroom washbowl. And I asked my husband could he please try being my haircutter again like long ago when we had barely enough money to buy celery and fig bars, let alone pay salon people. I’d always end up looking lopsided because either he couldn’t see straight or he didn’t understand how scissors are supposed to work, so when I gave up on him and found somebody affordable, everyone seemed relieved. But now here we are again, back to him and me.

You’re probably wondering how it goes.

It’s a very joint approach.

First, in the bathroom, me up close to the washbowl, his glasses on so things aren’t fuzzy, Paulson hacks the scissors along the bottom edge of my hair in back, the bits falling off in little clumps. This part isn’t revolutionary. It’s the same as what he used to do. “Uh,” he says. “Wait, there’s a dip.” More snips. And then comes the part of staggering braveness. Peering into the mirror, I grab a section of the abbreviated hair and hold it out, away from my head, so he’ll be able to slice upwards, not across.

“Not perpendicular,” I say. “No no no, not across.”

I have to say and say it. “I can’t,” he says. “It doesn’t work that way.”

“Yes it does,” I say. “Go up. Go up, parallel to my fingers.”

We move across the whole back of my head like that. The hank, the effortful snick up past my fingers. The hank, the snick. This scissors is wrong, he says. Scissors aren’t made for left-handers. There, if you turn more.

Then once we’re across, I gawk in the mirror for any bulging-out places for him to also lop off.

Soon after we restarted the home hair sessions, while attending a holiday concert I noticed a woman—she was seated in my line of vision from a row or so back—with the fluffiest, perkiest bob. I knew I could never manage such splendor, but the way the curls were short around her ears—that struck me. Her ears stuck out below, visible.

I decided I would show my ears, too.

At home, nobody helping, just me and the mirror, I snick-snicked in a straight line back across my ears, about at the halfway mark.

If that wasn’t a mess.

The chunks are growing out. But I might decide to go for professional help.

For now, besides telling you, I’m choosing to make nothing of the problem, like with my roasted chickens when several friends of Paulson’s and their wives came for dinner in January. These were fairly illustrious people. As one chicken wouldn’t be enough, I’d crowded two onto a shallow tray. I’d rubbed the called-for butter over and under their skins and inside their cavities and stuffed in some celery sticks.

At arrival time my birds were still in the oven. And they wouldn’t get done and wouldn’t get done. They oozed pink. But I pretended we weren’t having a fiasco. Clustered in our stuffed chairs, people talked, talked. Eventually, everyone starving, me acting all cool, we sat down to the salad and bread they’d brought. To the rear of the person seated closest to the stove, behind the grease-splattered oven window, the meat went on sizzling. The evening stretched on and on. Even when I finally pulled out the pan dripping with fat and Orval who’d established himself as the carver sliced down through to a breastbone, he and I could still see the pink. But everybody ate and ate. Everybody laughed and laughed. We had the jolliest time.

I just acted like, So what?

So that’s what I’m doing with my hair.

I go around with it all scrunched and flyaway, sometimes patting at it or tugging. The coconut oil keeps everything very soft and straggly.

I imagine there are others who struggle and strain like I do for purposes of foxiness and self esteem, because it’s not easy to— Oh, wait, that’s right, nobody’s struggling. The chickens are fine, they’ll soon be the whole way cooked, and I love my hair. I prefer oil rubbed now over fried. It’s exactly the look I want, all the while the world goes to smithereens.

 

                                                   Back in the time of slicked and sleek. Except, not.