The History of My Hair

One of the strange things about getting older (I’m sixty-five) is that you start to lose your body hair. I have very little hair on my legs now, although I still shave them once a week to get rid of the outliers. And I have so little hair under my arms that I can go for weeks without shaving and still find only a few strands.

This seems all the stranger when I remember the heavy dark hair that used to cover my legs. For most of my twenties, I didn’t shave it, and it looked ridiculous on those rare occasions when I had to put on a pair of nylons. I started wearing dark tights, then bought my first pair of black wool “dry cleaner” pants, so I could dress like a grownup without putting on a skirt. 

During those same years, I also didn’t shave the thatches of dark hair that grew under my arms, and proudly wore sleeveless shirts announcing the fact. I remember riding on the subway once, holding a strap over my head, and having a man sneer at me: “Haven’t you ever heard of a razor?” I ignored him with all of the feminist pride I could muster.

So far, despite my age, the hair on my head is still as thick as ever, and since I wear it quite short, in what people call a pixie style (and I think of as the “Mary Martin playing Peter Pan” style), I usually get it cut about once a month. However, because of the pandemic, I ended up going seven months without a trip to the hairdresser.

Hair salons were one of the many businesses that were required to close during the first shutdown. Even when they were allowed to reopen, I was too afraid to make an appointment at first. Because of my age, I was considered at high risk for getting seriously ill if I caught the virus. So even though my hair was a mess, it didn’t seem worth the risk of getting sick just to get it cut. I thought it didn’t really matter what I looked like anyway, because I’m retired, so I don’t need to look presentable for work meetings on Zoom, and my husband is not the type to fuss about the state of my hair.

But after a while, I realized that it was adding to my pandemic distress to stand in front of a mirror and not see my usual-looking self. Various friends had gotten haircuts and not gotten sick, so I finally went to my salon’s website and studied their procedures. It seemed like they were doing all of the right things to keep their clients safe, so I screwed up my courage and made an appointment.

During those seven months when I didn’t cut my hair, I was annoyed by the way my longer hair blew into my face when I was walking in the wind or riding in the car with the window down. And once I was out of the wind, I was annoyed by having to search and search for that one piece of hair that had gotten caught behind my glasses and was tickling my cheek. 

But I enjoyed the fact that having somewhat longer hair allowed me to do things I hadn’t been able to do in years: gather my hair together into a tiny ponytail at the nape of my neck, tuck my hair behind my ears, use a barrette to hold my hair off my forehead. Doing these things reminded me of being young and I was flooded with hair memories.

In my elementary school pictures, the length of my hair is always somewhere between just below my ears and just above my shoulders. It’s often parted on the side and held back with little plastic barrettes. Sometimes I have bangs, which are usually a bit crooked – I’m pretty sure my mother cut them herself. Sometimes when I don’t have bangs my hair is pulled straight back from my face and held in place with a plastic headband.

In the seventh grade, I went to a hairdresser for the first time and got a Twiggy haircut. Twiggy was a British supermodel of the 1960’s, whose signature look was based on her extreme thinness, her short “boyish” haircut, and her dark heavy eyelashes. My new style was parted on the side and involved a sweep of hair that was brushed to the other side, but often fell across my forehead and hung in my eyes.

I loved my haircut, but styles changed quickly. By eight grade I was spending Saturday mornings washing my hair and rolling it onto curlers. At the end of the day, when it was finally dry and I could take out the curlers, I had a perfect pageboy. It wasn’t much fun spending all of Saturday hanging around the house, so some of my girlfriends slept in curlers, but I could never tolerate that. Luckily, styles changed again, and when I got to high school, I stopped curling my hair and let it grow. 

I used to go to my friend Clare’s house after school on Fridays, to prepare for the weekly dance at the local teen center. Clare’s hair was blonde and by the end of high school it was long enough to sit on. My hair was a very dark brown and eventually reached to my waist. On those Friday afternoons, we each wet our hair under her kitchen faucet, then squeezed out excess water with towels until our hair was merely damp. Then we spent a couple of hours listening to Top 40 radio while we made as many tiny braids in our hair as we could. We took turns making the braids on the back of each other’s heads. After dinner, we took all of the braids out. The results were two heads of wavy hair, which was the fashion at the time. We talked someone into driving us to the teen center, where our crinkled locks made us feel beautiful.

When I was a sophomore in high school, I had a pretty big crush on a junior boy named Jonathan. We started dating that spring. The first time I walked home from school with him, I was wearing my hair in one of those late sixties contraptions called a stick barrette. It involved a piece of leather with two holes in it and a small wooden stick with pointed ends that fit through the holes.  You twisted your hair into a bun, put the piece of leather over it, then pushed the stick through the two holes, which meant you were also pushing it through a chunk of your hair. If you did it just right, your hair would stay in place. As Jonathan and I walked along, I pulled the stick out of the barrette, removed the piece of leather, and let my dark glossy hair fall down around my shoulders. Jonathan teased me about flirting with him, but it worked – he became my boyfriend and we were involved until the summer after I graduated from high school.

Two summers later, my college boyfriend Josh and I drove across the country, hiking and camping in national and state parks until we got to Portland Oregon, where his sister lived. I have a photo of us taken in the driveway of my parents’ home just before we left. I’m wearing jeans and a grey sweatshirt and have two long braids. I had a whole procedure for making those braids. First, using a comb, I made a part that started in the middle of my forehead, ran across the top of my head, and then went all the way down to the base of my skull, dividing my hair in half. I made a loose ponytail out of one half. Then I divided the other half into thirds and started braiding, an outside hank over the middle hank, the opposite outside hank over the middle hank, over and over without looking, until I had a long tail. I secured the end with a covered rubber band, then took the ponytail out of the other half of my hair, divided it into thirds, and braided it as well. 

After I graduated from college in 1976, there was a brief period of time when I had my hair cut in a wedge, the style popularized by Dorothy Hamill, the Olympic figure skater. There was even a year or so when I had my hair permed and sported a head of curls. By the early 80’s, I was exploring my sexual identity and spending most of my time in the lesbian community of Cambridge. I loved the extremely short haircuts I saw on the women around me. Their faces seemed so wide open. They had ears! They had foreheads! So I got one of those short haircuts. I liked it so much that even after I realized that a lesbian identity was not right for me, I kept the haircut.

I grew my hair out a little for my wedding, but once I started having kids, I kept it short. I was always pressed for time and the short haircut required very little maintenance. It looked neat (as long as I got regular trims) and never got in the way of all the things I was doing. Now and then, I’d get bored of it and start growing it out. But it was so thick that it kind of looked like a helmet. And my kids hated it. They would beg me to cut it short again. They didn’t like it whenever I got a new pair of glasses either. I don’t think they wanted me to ever change.

I didn’t really want to change either. I certainly didn’t want to grow older. I didn’t want to lose the hair on my legs or the hair under my arms, no matter how nice it might be to no longer need a razor . But it didn’t matter what I wanted – none of us escapes the passage of time.

In my worst moments, the pandemic has made me feel even older than I am, and kind of useless. My kids are grown up, I’m not working any more, and so many of the things I expected to enjoy and fill my days with – volunteer work, live concerts, travel – are gone for now. But these hair memories remind me that I was once young and vital, and give me hope that I’ll be part of life again when this terrible time is over.