Two Women, One Gay Viking

Lissa Hatcher. The Promise (detail). 2017. Illuminated photographic print on panel with hand embellishments. 30 x 60 inches. Courtesy of ARTicles Art Gallery.

July 2013. A birthday.

"Can I braid your hair today?" she asked me.

Hell no, she knew I'd say.

Granted: In six weeks I would be marrying this woman on a beach. On horseback. And yes, this bride-to-be loved doing hair—of horses, that is—loved to tie her horsies' manes into a sequence of dressage-y grape-sized knobs along the arch of their bay veiny necks, loved brushing smooth the dirt from their corundum rumps, loved picking rain rot from their scabby hocks and combing knots out of their fecescaked horse tails.

But me, I am a man. Not a pony. So yah, no way would I let my fiancée braid my hair. And oh, oh how she wanted to. Hell no, I'd tell her. No way would I permit the future wife to lay a finger on the ponytail. Yep. Though a man, I did have this long girly ponytail. Down to my ass. And oh would I please let her braid my hair for our beach/horseback wedding, she kept begging me. Hell no. What about your eyebrows? Can I just pluck your eyebrows for the wedding, those hairs there in between at least, just right above your nose? Hell no. Not even by the morning of, with but an hour to go before our horseback ceremony on a beach of Seabrook Island off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, would my bride last-minute be deterred, as she inveigled, plotted, and conspired to guilt my ponytail into a dainty nuptial braid.

But marriage came later. Back to braiding hair in July of 2013: It was the (future) wife's birthday. Mid-July, about two months before our beach wedding. And the wife and I were backpacking some five hundred miles from France to Spain: south from Dordogne, through the mountains of Basque Pyrenees, then west across the north of Spain to Santiago de Compostela. By my wife's birthday we were a couple days' hike from St Jean Pied de Port on the Pyrenees's French side.

Her birthday morning I woke first inside our tent, which we had pitched onto a steep hillside, our bodies so inclined that through the "skylight" screen atop our tent I could now see the east's horizon and its long slow dawn, how this medieval castle at the hillcrest of some nearby village (with a French name I cannot recall) grew red then golden in the rising light, the Gothic spires of its cathedral spiking up from amber foothills, stained glass windows glittering, the sky aflame—sunrise's slow striptease between the dark of night and day. It was magical and new. New to me, the Viking raised in USA's Midwest, between its flatnesses, its gray slate sky above you, and below an earth long logged and razed, the rippling terrain of its forgotten virgin forests flattened into fields of crops to plump the livestock, level cornstalk seas to fat the calves.

And so this morning, waking first inside our tent beside my future wife somewhere in France, I felt a happiness more pure than my sarcastic jaded ego ever would admit. And it is this moment, as the woman in my arms, her head yet resting on my chest, our bodies interwoven in the coolest hours before the dawn, it's as my bride-to-be began to rouse, she asked me drowsily:

"Can I braid your hair today?"

"Hell no," I answered. Me, I was a man. Not girly. Not a pony.

"But it's my birthday," she protested sweetly, and kept on at it, stubbornly ignoring my insistent iterations of hell no, as she bombarded me with arguments: how hot today will be, throughout our twenty-mile hike, a forty/fifty-pound pack at my back, and how each day all my shirts, my identical black Walmart Hanes wife-beaters, were completely soaked with sweat, but how the...