Meditations. The Glory of a Woman

Brian Kershisnik, Sisters

I'm needing a hair cut.
My middle child answered a question, sent an email; consequentially, photographs of us (yet to be taken) will be part of an upcoming show, a show of Thirty Strangers. You can Google that, if you like, when you leave here. Photographs. I don't like having my picture taken, I usually climb under the table when I feel threatened in that way. I'm very quick and clever at it. (Climbing under tables is a useful method for escaping a wide array of fraught or confusing situations. I recently scooted with commendable speed under a table to avoid being kissed. That moment was doubly fraught and confusing as, while the would-be kisser was a man (which you'd have no doubt expected), at the moment of the attempt, for purposes of a play, so was I, also, a man (which no one should have expected). I'd have gone under that table in any case, but, things being what they were, I was really moving. I bring up this incident of attempted man-on-sorta-man-kissing only for obvious reasons; I am talking here about my short hair. You see the connection.)
I'm going to need a haircut before I submit to having my picture taken. That's the trouble with having short hair, it needs cutting. Long hair pretends it meant to be this way. Short hair is all about history, recent history, as in, you just washed or you just styled or you just cut it--or you didn't and you just should have.
All this short hair is new to me.
Until maybe a year ago (?), from the time I ever had any hair at all it was on its way to becoming long hair. Past my shoulders, past my waist. A lifetime of long hair.
I cut it, had it cut off, to see if I could, if I could wear short hair. No, I wasn't even that brave. I already knew I could wear it. My sisters all had cropped their locks at one time or another and it was great on every one of them; since we resemble each other, I assumed. I wanted to see if I had it in me to chop it right off, if I were made of that stern sort of stuff. After the chopping a lady at church stopped me, took me by both shoulders and looked me over carefully. "Well," she said. "Now that you've done this, you can do anything." Anything sounding like she was thinking of maybe arson. Or skinny dipping. But in a happy way, at least in an it-looks-good-on-you sort of way. In a maybe envious way. An I-wish-I'd-thought of-that sort of way.
Her hair was (is) shorter than mine.


My friend had brain surgery and of course they shaved her head. I went with the painter to visit her when she came home from the hospital. It was Halloween time and she had all these closely set staples forming one half of a deeply arched widow's peak rising just above her ear and descending in the middle of her forehead. Sweetest, hardest Halloween look EVER. Road Warrior. Steam punk vampire. She was fragile and tired and drugged and so, so unbearably lovely. I felt as if I'd never before been able to see her and now suddenly I could, could really see her with all that long hair shorn away. She had long hair always, said she loved it, but I'd never believed it was a deeply considered position. More of a false tradition. A way around the curly hair she was born with and a way out of really having hair at all. I know about that (not the curls). There's nothing in the world easier than long hair you wear in a pony tail. It's far simpler than no hair at all because no hair has to be explained, defended, carried off. My friend with her hair cut like a man's and her head full of staples (I was trying to imagine getting through airport security) has a sister-in-law who shaved her head but for rock star reasons and wore her close-cut hair with ripped jeans and hauteur, with rhinestones and stacked heels and a glamor of low cut evening wear in the grocery store.
My friend will never again, I think, grow her hair long; it would be too hard, too messy and time consuming. Too silly. A waste. What on earth would she do with those awful curls in the in-between stages, the troublesome lengths between past-the-ears and pony-tail-tamed? Shudder. Anyway, she's beautiful just as she is, beautiful like a fragile shell, as if, should you hold her up to the hard sun, you would see through her the shadows of your own fingers. Her sister-in-law will yet, I believe, do all sorts of things that are hard and impossible and messy and beautiful, including growing her hair right into and then on through troublesome lengths. I cannot imagine, if you held the crop-haired, jazz singing, rocker sister-in-law in any sort of light, you'd see yourself through her.
When enough time goes by that my friend has lost her staples (modern methods of staple removal, it turns out, are not a topic for polite dinner table conversation. By the way. In case you wondered) we talk at my house after dinner about our lost long hair. My niece is with us, a short-hair evangelist (now, about that aforementioned sister-in-law? The singer? I've never met her, you know, only seen videos on youtube (and how, from those, could you ever determine?) but I'll tell you, she really reminds me of my niece, this short-hair evangelist who does much that is hard and messy and beautiful). My niece speaks passionately, sings from the heart, of the tribe, her soul mate sisters who have short hair. She claims she can tell by looking at a woman coming toward her with a slamming short hair cut that they would be great companions. My friend (her arcing scar still very, very cool and clearly visible to me from where I sit) and I are careful with our glances. We are not convinced. Perhaps we are too old. Perhaps we miss our hair.


In my grandmother's house was a wonderful picture, a wedding picture. My aunt with her short curly blond hair. I never knew her any other way, never imagined her other than the sassy aunt with a soft sort of 1930's look. Grandma told me one day, out of the blue and apropos of nothing, that my aunt's hair was short in the photo because she had had a terrible fever and all her long hair had to be cut off. Shorn off, close to the scalp. "Long hair," she told me, looking carefully, not at mine falling below my waist but at the short hair in the picture, "draws off all of your strength." "It does?" I squeaked, awed and disbelieving. "Oh, yes," Grandma sighed, assuring me, "it weakens you dreadfully." My aunt's hair had been cut off while she was so sick in order that she could get better, recover. Grandma said it as if she would add finally. Finally cut off and gone. Finally. All that hair. Said with something not altogether unlike admiration and not altogether unlike disgust.
All. that. hair.


Sheer self preservation drove my momma to keep me in tight braids whenever she could, but she also sent me to school all on my own and once there I became a champion of repressed hair everywhere, a freedom fighter. I loved to let it fly, set it loose from its twistings and moorings. I was romantic in that way. I thought lots of unrestrained hair made me beautiful. Like a lion. The school bus windows were nearly always down on the way home unless we were in the bleak midwinter. There was wind from those open windows and that wind whipped us about. This string of events (wind, lots of long hair, vanished braids) led, what with one thing and another, to snarls. To lies. And to fights with my momma. Threats. She was going to cut it all off if I didn't and didn't right now. Didn't be good. Didn't behave. Didn't stop being a lion and start being a lady.
I remember the shiver of deciding to learn braiding it myself, of teaching myself ponytail and pigtails. Taking back my hair. For the first time. Soppy, fat, loose braids that did not survive even a bike ride to the store, a paltry three and a half country blocks from home, those awkwardly crafted early plaits growing steadily softer, sticking out hairy arms and legs all down their length. Pigtails that were never of an even thickness (and the part? Who even knew? Think I've got eyes in the back of my head?). A ponytail always slipping away from me. Fixing it, doing it again. And again. Drawing a definite power from doing my own hair. By myself.
I watch my girls reach for that power. Watch them carefully craft funny, crooked braids and tails to wear to school because these are talismans, amulets woven from their own selves. Power. Becoming. Silly, unbalanced hair that says, Hey! Get outta the way! I did this all by myself and MY MOMMA WANTED ME TO. Watch me stand up , people, look at me go. Hair that gets a fond and pained and loving and conspiratorial look from every woman with eyes to see it.
One day, after a while, they get good at it and then they look just like everyone else.


It keeps you warm, long hair, like a scarf, like a shawl. Keeps you warm winter and summer. Also, people step on it and sit on it and lie on it if you don't prevent them by cutting it off. Once, when I was a freshman at Snow, a man hooked, snagged and dragged me with him for about twenty feet in the hall of the Administration building. By my hair. He used only a simple suit coat button, the most effective hair-hook God ever invented (it had to be God, it's that good). I was immediately hopelessly snarled, my route altered instantly and I was hopping along, backwards, at his side as he strode in a direction I had not intended to travel. He was irritated. As if I had thrust my hair at his button with malice aforethought.
All. that. hair.


I resisted letting my girls cut their hair. Once it's gone, it's gone. I didn't absolutely prevent them, but I did absolutely require they either leave it long enough to go into a pony tail or cut it to chin length. Out of self preservation. To insure that they (I) could get it out of their (my) way. There's a family portrait, the painter's family, and the three of us look like we're growing hair for a cause, like we're trying to make a point or keep a vow or observe a hair-covenant. It was shocking to me when I saw the photo. Within a month or so we all of us had significantly shorter tresses.
All that hair.
My sister cuts my hair. I don't know what I want, I only see other people with hair I covet. She explains to me I can never have that hair, mine's too thick or too straight or has too much wave. One day we miscommunicate and by the time the dust has settled I have nearly nothing left. I find myself in a strange spot, looking into the mirror and seeing there my son. Only, he's wearing my clothes. Now, this was all an accident. Within a short time there is another accident and I am cast in a man's role in a play. This is a favor for a friend; he says he will make the character a woman. But it just won't work that way and now I am playing a man. I have the hair for it, you see? Inevitable. I get this very weird attention. From men and from women. Pretend you're a girl and you're told you're "disturbingly handsome."
Wait, what? So I'm...is that... a compliment?
Hey.
I do have a handsome son.
My hair's longer now, lots longer. In fact, since I began writing here, I have cut it all up. It was too long and I have to be photographed, remember? My sister hates it when I cut my own hair, I make it all weird. But I think it looks good, better, anyway, and she can fix it and I can submit to the upcoming photos. And it will grow back.
It always does.


Even now, a year or more after the cutting, when I am facing a difficult day, having a hard time, I catch myself thinking, ok, get all this hair out of the way and then let's get going! I even move to put it up, to twist it out of my way so I can set the day spinning. That was always the signal I gave myself that things needed to get serious.
High, tight ponytail and away!
When it was long I played with it all the time when I thought hard or talked to people, twisting it up onto the top of my head over and again. I had a set of twists I did without thinking that always landed me in the same complicated, knotted mass, and I'd catch myself with it in a state of completion, having accomplished it without noticing. If I tried to do it, if I thought, I couldn't for the life of me make that knot. I had to be focused somewhere else and my hands just knitted my hair up and up. I wondered if I would lose the hair-playing action when I lost the long hair but I find I mess with it constantly, more even than I did before. My hair grows across the back of my head from right to left (widdershins) and I stroke it and stroke it. Twist a lock on one side or the other in front, where I (try to) keep it longer. When I write or think hard I pull it up in big handfuls and sit like that, fists full of hair, or I twist and rub it around and around on the top of my head.
Fortunately, I do not work when other people are around.


My little sister cut her hair off all the time when she was small. It was awful and complete. Jagged and strange, there was no fixing it, no softening it, we had to wait around for it to grow while people wondered, politely, why we had perpetrated this savage hairdo on our little boy. When it did grow out at all she cut it again. And again.
Now she's a momma and her own little blond girl just committed upon herself a serious and terrible haircut.
For the second time.
Karma.
All that hair.


Mary Ingalls got sick, became blind and her long golden hair was all cut off. Laura's hair grew and grew, it passed her knees, her daughter wrote of the terrible headaches her mother suffered wearing her hair up.
Maybe the real Lady really rode her horse through the streets clothed only in her hair, and if she did, I'm sure that act really caught her husband's attention. But he had asked for it. What could he have been thinking? Maybe she really did just have a ton of hair. Maybe she just really needed to make that point. (Under a specific set of circumstances my momma used to call me Godiva when I was small. Very small. Minute.)
I read a story, long ago, a ghost story by Guy de Maupassant, a specter beseeching, begging a man to comb and to braid her long black hair to save her, to cure her. I never forgot that description of the ghost hair falling to the ground over the back of the ghost's chair as she sat in the bedroom the man had unlocked in her empty, haunted house, while he combed and combed with the comb she carried, him all shuddering and horrified. Her hair icy, like black snakes. And in another of Maupassant's stories, a man maddened by love and desire for a long-dead woman whose beautiful, golden braid he found hidden in a secret drawer in a wonderful antique cabinet. Driven to obsession, driven past sanity by a braid tied with a golden cord.
Bernice bobs her hair--heck, Bernice bobs everybody's hair--for proof. To prove she will, she can. As it turns out, she really can't and her successes all fall down around her, piled with her long dark locks on the barbershop floor, so much detritus, so much waste, so much loss. Clunky with her dark hair in "blocks", not awarded a husband by the story-gods, not honored for her social sacrifice as her classical namesake was honored who traded the goddess golden braids for a safe returned husband. I never admired Bernice's desecration of her cousin, the rape of those locks, but she really does bob her hair, she does it and she escapes into the night on her own two feet. She'll drive into her future behind the wheel of her own car. Sign of things to come.
Jo Marsh cuts off her one beauty for money, for the honorable woman's way to quick cash.
A wonderful Christmas present bought with money from lost hair, hair weighed, chopped and sold in a festive, wild act of seasonal and abandoned loving. He holds her to him tightly, loving her so hard, tells her all that hair will grow back so she can wear the combs-- and it will, of course it will. By the time it can have grown out to its full length, no one but no one will be wearing their hair long anymore and those wonderful, unaffordable combs will still lie pristine, awaiting their big break on The Antiques Roadshow. Lucky the people in the story don't know that, huh? Perhaps the view I'm taking here is too dim. Let's see, this is 1906...yeah. Well, maybe her hair grows super, super fast. Anyway, that is certainly not what this story is about. Merry Christmas.
If you were in a tower and a prince came along and said, hey, let me climb up there the same way your jailer climbs up, let me come up there to you, well, you'd let him up, wouldn't you? Even if it meant a man were climbing your hair? I mean, wouldn't you?


When I think of myself, when in my mind I see myself moving through the world, my inner construct has long hair.
The I'm the tall one with long hair.
I don't even know who that is, that dark-haired woman in photographs, the one with no hair.
Am I just hair?
Am I anyone without it?


You know what makes me crazy?
So, she lets him climb the braids to the tower because, who wouldn't? I mean, for all she knows, that's the only way people go visiting. It's not like she's got any other experience. It's not like she lives in a normal house built normally for normal people. The thing's got no door and only the one window, so right off the bat, in the very structure of her world, she's in trouble. Only one person comes and goes so, as far as she can see, as far as she knows, the whole world makes all their entrances and exits up and down her hair. This prince is her Jacob and she's his ladder. He's an angel coming and going from heaven on a golden cord strung out of a person. Sounds like love, doesn't it?
So far, so good.
But this story is going to get crazy.
Long strong braids are one thing. I've had those myself. And so are witches who think they've got it locked, got set it up tight and strong so nothing can change, nothing can go wrong. No snarls. People close enough to be like family, baby, we've all got those. But there's a question of responsible behavior here, of a badly botched rescue.
He wants her to go away with him and so he should. He's got to see that her situation is unsustainable, that she's in terrible danger. This would not be a stable family life for anybody, even for someone protected by absolute naivete, sheltered in utter ignorance,who knows nothing whatever of anything else.
Maybe he asked her to do the obvious thing. I'm telling myself he did. "See, baby, if we just cut off these braids we can tack them to the window here and we can both go the next time." He's got a fast horse. They'd have a shot, anyway. Maybe he tried to get her to see.
And maybe she was terrified because she'd never climbed anything but up onto a chair or into her bed. Or maybe she was worried about the window fastening (always the weak link); maybe she had nightmares of braids unwinding, coming from together, separating, untwisting, and she's falling and falling with her prince into the hungry, menacing thorn bushes growing around the base of the tower (abusive landscaping); thorn bushes reaching up to catch them, to snatch them. Maybe she just didn't believe him when he solemnly swore to her it hurts not at all to cut your hair. Maybe she worried about who she'd be if she ran with this guy and left behind all that hair.
She came up with a different plan, all on her own.
It was a dumb plan, but then, she'd have had no idea about danger, about time slipping away, about peril that grows with every risked exposure, every stolen kiss. So her prince brought her the silks she asked him for because, well, he loved her (when I was small I thought it was such an odd material, silk, but seeing as she thinks ladders are made out of hair, really it's an obvious choice) and she squirreled them away telling herself, soon, soon it will be enough, soon it will be safe all the way to the bottom. And he came to her and came to her even though he must have known it was folly. What was he going to do? He loved her so. Anyway, he was young, too, and he'd never died before.
He still had that to look forward to.
That's right, kids, let Tower-Girl formulate the escape plan. Her super power is not getting it.
It broke upon them like thunder, like the dead of winter, like the fall of a tower.
But how could she have known?
But wouldn't he have warned her?
Maybe it never occurred to him how many things would never occur to her. Maybe he couldn't wrap his mind around what it would mean to have no experience of anything. Maybe he got lost in all that hair.
It makes me crazy because it was all going anyway.
He climbed so confidentially, set his feet in the places he trusted, his passage woven of the woman he loved.
The last thing he saw would be her severed braids tacked to the window (hey! good idea) and another woman altogether (her crazy not-a-family), not his girl, not the one he loved at all, before the thorns had him.
But she.
She was out there, hair swinging in a low-maintenance bob, free! She got thrown away and it made her free. And she does better than you might expect. Maybe all that hair was drawing off her strength, all along. She must have hung on, hung on so tightly to the idea of him and it took her years, but she found him, found him wandering in an bottomless night. She cried his sight back into him even though his eyes were scratched right away and even though, on the face of it, I know, that seems completely impossible. Remember, though, this is a story about hair. This is a story where lost things grow back and our passage into the whole wide world comes right out of our own heads.


It's who we are.
We cut our hair, it all grows back.
I needed my hair cut and I cut it.
Maybe one day I'll show you the photo.

Elizabeth, Wales
Noah's photo