Hair Receivers

A child said, What is the grass?...I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves…The smallest sprout shows there is really no death…All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 6

In the years of polyester, freeze-dried mashed potatoes, and Tang, they each kept multiple wigs coiffed on faceless white Styrofoam heads. The wigs of my Great Aunts Margy and Katie matched their natural shades—pewter, iron, salt with a little pepper—short scalloped curls on a webbed nylon scalp. My grandmother, over a decade younger than her sisters, stuck to brown.

All the women in my family owned wigs in the early 1970s, even my 30-something mom and her sister. Even teenaged me. Aunt Katie used a lock of my hair to make me a matching “fall,” a ten-inch long extension, a hair booster rocket, which attached to the crown of my head with an itchy plastic comb.

Later, in my 20s, long past wearing the fall so I could look like Mary Tyler Moore or Marlo Thomas or anyone else, past the years when my mother lifted my limp strands and said, “what are we going to do with this mousy brown hair?” (which led to Sun-In, which led to my bottle-blonde high school and college years)—in those solid years of my 20s, my long natural brown hair felt like the river on which I was the guide. In those years, I would study images of 90-something Georgia O’Keefe posed beneath some animal skull in the desert, admire her wiry gray hair pulled back, say to myself: that is the old woman you should become. No fussy permed poodle hair. No hiding beneath a wig. I imagined my face’s leathery skin meeting the silvery landscape of taut ponytail. I imagined braids like Willie Nelson. I imagined the wild white contrails exploding from long-dead Walt Whitman’s cheeks and chin, eyebrows and crown. I imagined hair moving beyond any color or shape at all.

Now in my 50s, I’m ashamed to report that I have returned to the bottle, this time to take away the flat sober brown of my childbearing years. I say I’m ashamed, and yet, part of me realizes hair artfully arranged is the art most women have been encouraged to pursue. Hair swirled and crimped, bobbed or upswept, held in place with bobby pins or teased and puffed and lacquered with Aqua Net. I’m part of that. Most of us are adapting to invisible currents as we move down life’s river; hair is the bobber atop the water, announcing the currents’ presence.

After the wigs, my mom and her sister passed through a Baby Afro phase, which required super-tight perms to make their thin, straight white-woman hair mimic that of black women, who had long straightened their hair to mimic the hair of white women. Shortly before the wigs, my grandmother, who I called Dee Dee, then in her 50s, posed with me as I made my first communion, my pageboy half-hidden under veil, her hair a high tower of teased brown fluff. Long before the wigs, in her wedding photo from 1937, she stands on the steps of the old wooden St. Edward’s Catholic Church on Main Street in the coal town of Herminie, Pennsylvania, Aunt Katie at her side. Her dark hair is parted straight down the middle, swoops back on each side like gentle waves cresting toward her skull, meeting the waterfall of white veil.

The Aunt Margy of my childhood did not wear wigs, but instead arranged her brown-gray hair in an intricate display of jaunty twists that looked somewhat like a hat a British woman might wear to a wedding, the brim of it pulled down just a bit onto one side of her forehead. A paisley swoop rises from her right temple, its tail curling...