Can We Talk About My Hair?

Bad hair days

Most people have hair, and like to talk about it, but, can we talk about my hair? Currently, it’s badly in need of a cut and color, but as hardly anyone sees me, does it matter? No need to mention the skinny ponytail bobbing foolishly at the back of my head. This story isn’t about the bad hair days, but the worst one.

Little Girl Lilt, was a home perm kit for the do-it-yourselfer circa 1965. Back then my hair was stick-straight, and all I wanted was curls. My grandmother, disapproved of my childish vanity and reluctantly gave me this perm that smelled like rotten eggs, burned my scalp, and resulted in no curls at all. Not even a wave.

In my late teens, I was still yearning for curls. As my friends wrapped their curly hair around orange juice cans or used irons, to straighten it I watched in horror. Curls were wasted on those ungrateful girls. I would never do that if I had curly hair. But in the late 1970s curls were in, and perms made a comeback!

Finally

I had some OK perms, and one that was perfection, but we’re not talking about them. We’re revisiting the perm I got the week I was driving my sister back to college, and meeting my boyfriend there for the drive home. I was as anxious about the drive as I was about seeing him.

As the hairdresser pulled the rods out of my hair over the sink I couldn’t see it yet, but back in the chair I saw my reflection and staring back from the mirror was my familiar face, framed by the ugliest hair imaginable. This was bad by any standard, and on me, it was simply hideous. I managed not to cry until I got home.

I digress and stall a lot

The next day we headed from Long Island to New Haven. In the pantheon of terrible ideas, this trip ranks pretty high. I had recently gotten my license and would be driving my father’s VW Beetle although I still hadn’t mastered its manual shift. I was preoccupied with both my ability to drive a stick-shift car and what my boyfriend (let’s call him Joe) would say when he saw me. We had a stormy on-again/off-again relationship, always one misstep, or bad perm away from our predictable final break-up.

As we neared each tollbooth I would tense up, and Susan would clench her fists in anticipation of how long we’d get stuck at this one. My memory of the trip is a blur of endless jerking, bucking, stalling, and the ensuing cursing that accompanied each toss of another quarter into the basket.

The drive is the perfect metaphor for what I was going through with ‘Joe’. Endless false starts, and frustration, stalling, and then shutting down. Each time we got moving there were a few uneventful miles of forward motion, bringing us closer to New Haven, or happiness until inevitably a sign would warn us we were nearing another tollbooth, fight, or break-up.

No matter how many times I tried, or how hard I gripped the steering wheel, whispered ‘you can do this’ through my clenched teeth, and eased one foot down as I gingerly lifted the other I would stall. No matter how gently I tried to move us forward we would falter. At one tollbooth I tried and failed so many times they closed down our lane, putting a traffic cone behind me and waving around the line of cars that had formed behind ours.

But, my hair

My boyfriend met us at the agreed-upon spot, took one look at me and burst out laughing. For the rest of my life that perm would remain the worst thing I ever did to my hair, including the time I gave myself bangs using kitchen scissors and the toaster for a mirror. The relationship turned out to be a harbinger of the series of increasingly worse ones ahead.

My grown-in roots, my too-long hair, and the age-inappropriate pony-tail I’m sporting are nothing compared to that perm. I can get a comb through my graying tresses, I can look into the mirror without crying, and no one I’ve encountered (so far) has collapsed in hysterics at the sight of me. As for relationships, I still don’t have a license to operate one. Stuck at home, I suppose I must live with the way things are for now.