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  • My Hair Is the Problem
  • Karen Gordon (bio)

1

My hair is the problem.

Rachel has exceptional hair. It’s the color of marmalade, with an iridescent quality, as if the divine glow of late afternoon sun were perpetually radiating behind it.

My hair is the color of dirt. My hair also lacks any noticeable highlights, or at least it did until a few years ago. Now it has many highlights, but they are silver and grow like weeds from the crown of my head. Gray hair is alien and confounding, and only the hair dye with all the cancer-causing chemicals will properly disguise it. Tweezers are really the only cure, and even their triumph, it turns out, is just futile, because a couple weeks later the follicles rally and send up replacement sprouts like smug little iconoclasts.

Rachel is Gavin’s new wife, and I do not know if she colors her hair. She’s three years older than I so she damn well better, but either way, her original color must be close to her box color, because I could dye my head marmalade all day and it would still just be dirt brown. No matter how much you want to look like the woman on the box, the truth is you have to at least be in the ballpark. Beauty has rules.

But let’s be honest here, color isn’t even the crux of the issue. What separates me from all the Rachels of my life is the other stuff—texture, thickness, length. Rachel’s hair falls to her midback and is naturally shiny and straight; the air around her head never got the memo about that thing we call humidity. My hair refuses to grow past my shoulder blades and even when it does, I lose at least three inches to the deranged curls atop my head. They like to coil themselves like frightened children who hide under the covers thinking [End Page 111] you can’t see them. But you can. The big lumps are right there in plain sight.

Gavin used to complain that my hair itched his face when we spooned. He was always trying to tuck it to the side, sweep it out of the way. My hair is thick and wavy, awkward and bristly, an untamed animal. It’s the sort of hair that’s conducive to fucking—clumps can be readily grabbed by a strong forceful hand and used to pull me in fast or push me against a wall. But it is not conducive to intimacy. It is too rough, unpredictable, wild. It does not whisper, stay close. You cannot nuzzle your nose against my hair and feel welcome; the wiry strands are too busy fighting among themselves to accommodate anyone else. They do not want you, and they are not for you. They are not even for themselves.

2

Before Rachel was Gavin’s, she was Jill’s. She was what Gavin and I used to call a Jillbian—one of a parade of beautiful, feminine women who were not lesbians, except for Jill. Jill was gorgeous in a slightly exotic, olive-skinned way, butch enough for someone like Rachel to think being with her was erotic and defiant, but still conventionally attractive enough to be safe. You could experiment with your sexuality with Jill without having to navigate the dicey terrain of social stigma, because the two of you together were never a couple of dykes, you were hot, profoundly hip lesbians. Every dude’s porn fantasy.

Jill had the most attractive hairline I’d ever seen. Unlike other aspects of your hair, which can be manipulated with heat and water, hairspray and chemicals, you can do nothing to alter your hairline. It’s a fierce genetic lottery, and Jill was a winner. Unlike some hairlines, it did not sit too low or too high but shot upward on either side, so that when it was pulled back, it revealed a remarkably pleasing and shapely expanse of forehead that made her casual ponytail seem like a carefully executed high-fashion look.

This always astonished and perplexed me. Even if my hair were the kind that...

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