Lies About My Family: A Memoir

Spinning

1 spinning Hair. Inresponsetoanoften-debatedquestionabouthuman nature: yes, people can change. Sometimes it may take a while. At eighty, musing about my sexual preference, my mother said, “I used to be so upset about it. Now I can’t even remember why.” And just to be clear, she was not lamenting the forgetfulness of old age. Both of my parents’ memories are as good as they ever were, keynehora, knock on wood. My myopic father’s recall is as sharp as a hawk’s eye—he can retrieve the name of seemingly everyone he’s ever met, the date on which he met them, and their telephone number—while my mother’s is blurred, as it’s been throughout her life, by a pink cloud that generally allows through only the pleasant and the good. Her admission touched me deeply, scattering in an instant years of isolation and hard feeling. There had been a period, an era, a great eon—from my mid-twenties to my early forties —when she and my father didn’t talk about me. Jewish parents like to kvell, to take pleasure in their children’s accomplishments , so much so that Yiddish has this special word for it—but with me, what was there to kvell about? That I’d edited a radical gay newspaper and then joined a collective press known for publishing the works of Noam Chomsky? That I’d shacked up with a woman with an asymmetrical haircut, and my best friend Richard was an immensely tall, obtrusive gay man with a booming voice? My life was a secret they kept. 2 lies about my family I know this because during that period, whenever I attended a family event, someone would inevitably exclaim, “Amy! You cut your hair!” But I’d cut my hair years before. Throughout junior high and high school I had worn fat shiny braidsthatendedbelowmywaist.WhenIwasyoung,mymother used to brush and braid my hair each morning, although of course as I got older I did that myself. Then, during the summer of my sophomore year of college, I was sharing a house with a bunch of other girls, one of whom wasafeministwhoinsistedwecallourselveswomen, notgirls.(I metaguyoneafternoon,towhomImentionedthewomenIlived with,andhesaid,“Sodoesthatmakeme a man?”andIthought, No, it doesn’t.) The weather that summer was disgustingly hot, sticky and unrelenting, especially in the attic, which was my room, and my hair was so crazy thick and tangled that it would make a person sweat just to look at it. My feminist roommate came home one evening wearing a short, practical bob, and it looked so refreshing, I insisted she cut my hair, too. She started by slicing off my braids. Then, she hesitated. “Keep going,” I encouraged her, and she hacked away. The next day we all got into her car and drove to the Jersey Shore, and when the wind blew off the ocean, I felt as though I was wearing a funny little cap on my head. The haircut was an impulse that for all my bravado I occasionally regretted. I missed the familiar weight of my hair on my shoulders and the ritual of braiding it each morning. The little decision: one today, or two? My hair had been my defining characteristic—if you’d been asked to describe me, you would have started with it. It made me beautiful. Old ladies, their own hair thin and blue—total strangers—would regularly stop me on the street and admonish me: “Never cut your hair. I had hair like that when I was a girl.” Playfully, they’d tug on a braid. 3 spinning But I wanted to be known and loved for my accomplishments, and how much does having long hair really say about a person? It’s not as though growing hair is such a fabulous skill; it just happens, as you go about your business. As you’re sleeping. A corpse can grow hair. After the haircut my roommate had handed me my braids, and I saved them intact in a shoebox, because I thought my mother might want them—and in fact, she did. She kept them for years. Then at one point she came across them as she was cleaning out the attic, and the next time I visited she gave them back to me, as she often does with the random mementos that she turns up doing her chores. Not that she’s much of...