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My Mother’s Hair

56 My Mother’s Hair My mother’s “fall” on its Styrofoam head, the shiny chestnut That Girl flip that she wore out to dinner with her Fabergé perfume, which came in a glass bottle with a tiger fur cap. I couldn’t help but make little fingernail moons in the Styrofoam , whole eyebrows and lashes. The blank face scared me—it was the bumpy face of nightmares, monsters, people disappearing. I was glad when my mother put it away, into the shiny tube-shaped case that I used for my 45s after her “fall” went out of style. She also had a two-foot blond braid that my sister wore with her gold-beaded unitard for her modern jazz recital and I wore to a B-52s concert a few years later, swinging it around as I danced, afraid it might fall off and I’d lose it, the stunning synthetic snake. My mother trusted her real hair to Roger, whose beauty parlor had an entrance in Massachusetts and an exit in Rhode Island. I’d run back and forth through both doors playing fugitive until he sat me down with his hardcover books of glamorous bouffants. I’d lose myself in the swirling curls of the models in the beauty parlor paintings with bamboo frames that hung over the chairs in his waiting room. My mother seemed so much smaller when her hair was wet. The hairdryers looked like astronauts’ helmets. I was mesmerized by the black combs that bobbed in aqua Barbercide. I miss my mother’s hair—her fake hair, her real hair, her teased hair, her perms. My mother gives me her headbands and bobby pins, saying, I won’t be using these anymore. I miss my mother’s hair paraphernalia—the rinses, the rollers, the AquaNet, the pin curls, the clear rain bonnet that folded into what looked like a tiny suitcase and disappeared. duhamelKtext.indd 56 12/1/08 11:15:22 AM ...