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31 made for a very large roller. But the largest roller of all was your own head. We needed many bobby pins for this. Then after wrapping your head tightly you would sit under your hooded hair dryer and talk on the phone for the two hours it took your hair to dry. This is why we washed our hair only once a week. I don’t talk on the phone much to my friends now. E-mail seems to have replaced both long letters and long phone calls. I’d carpool with my school friends, see them before and after school and during lunch, then at night talk to them on the phone. And then write them notes to give them the very next morning. Somewhere in my 20s, probably when Cher’s hairdo changed from curtain-straight to curly, my hair turned from high maintenance to low. Instead of complaining about my hair, I became vain about it. I was proud, though I had no right to be, that curliness and body were things that others strove for and that I achieved effortlessly. Strangers would ask me what I ate to get such thick hair. Women grooming themselves in bathrooms have complimented me on my waves and curls. On the other hand, when a college friend of mine brought me to her parents’ for Christmas dinner, her very waspy mother looked at me carefully and said slowly, Your hair scares me. My own mother has threatened, when I’m visiting her, to cut my hair in my sleep. My hair is what hers would look like if it were left to its own devices, which it isn’t. Ever. Linc is always after me to cut it so he can see my face. So he will. FEBRUARY 22. A NERVOUS LAUGHER Ihavebecomeanervouslaugher.ItoldsomeoneIworkwith,attheplace IwillcallSmartUniversity,thatsheshouldmeetwithmystudentteaching intern by herself, that I would normally want a three-way meeting, but I didn’t think I could schedule it because—lower my voice, move in closer, laugh a little—I’m having a mastectomy February 28. I hate nervous laughter. It seems so fake. It seems to be covering up. It seems to be negating what you’re saying. I don’t want to be a nervous laugher. I remember talking to someone a few years ago about her mastectomy and she was all barky nervous laughter. It put 32 me off. But I am doing it. I’m getting a part of my body cut off, ha-ha. If the cancer has spread I could die, ha-ha. I know that laughter is close to crying, I know that people’s faces can take on similar expressions laughing and crying, I know that people say: I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and: We laughed till we cried. Do people ever cry till they laugh? We laugh nervously. The Frenchman in the famous Liberation of Paris photo—or is it a newsreel? He looks like he’s laughing but he’s crying. Or vice versa. Sometimes we laugh in recognition: Hey, I do that too. But why does that make us laugh? When you do a book reading before a big crowd, the nervousness and anticipation of the crowd makes a little shudder run around the room, and everybody laughs so readily. It’s easy to make a happy, willing crowd laugh. They want to laugh. They need it, to let off steam, from their waiting, their wanting. The nervousness of all being together, chairs set up in rows, side by side. All the raggedy breathing. Maybe it’s the potential danger of the crowd that makes us nervous. Note the side exits. Leave bags at your seats and walk silently and calmly . . . A retort to the calm. We are animals that need to make noise. The Auschwitz smile. That’s what I call a certain type of survivor smile—a frozen smile that has nothing to do with and all to do with what the survivor is relating. A smile to keep out the horribleness of it all. A smile that keeps some of the past at bay. That keeps the past from rising and twisting and striking again and again, as the voice of the survivor is telling the story once again. First we had this then we didn’t and we had no food and we had typhus and they rounded us up. . . . The death and the dirt. The unnecessary loss. There was no...

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