My Mother, on Beauty

 When my mother turned seventy, she said, “The trick at my age is not to try to look forty. The trick is to be the best-looking seventy-year-old in the room.” When she turned eighty, she told me that she had scheduled a “make-over” for herself. I remember hiding a smile. My mother looked awfully good for her age, but a make-over at eighty? What was she hoping for? 

She was more intensely aware of people’s looks than anyone I’ve ever known. “Look at her with that long neck,” she would say, tilting her chin to point out some unsuspecting woman waiting for the bus. “She should at least wrap a scarf around it. And her poor husband with his little short arms—his hands barely hang below his belt!” And she would shake her head sadly, because there’s nothing that one can do about short arms. 

She focused on my appearance with particular vehemence, but even though I complained bitterly, I benefitted from her fixation. She had my teeth straightened, my eyes uncrossed, my flat feet corrected, my acne tamed. The year I turned twelve, she got me my first girdle, and sent me to have my braids cut off and my legs waxed. She worked tirelessly on my posture and facial expression (“Don’t sit there with your mouth open. It’s not an intelligent look.”) But though she wanted me to look as well as I possibly could at twelve, fourteen, or sixteen, she was adamant that I not look a minute older than her idea of what a twelve-, fourteen-, or sixteen-year-old should look like. Hence, no stockings or straight skirts before fourteen, no lipstick before sixteen. These were the fronts on which, since I cared more about lipstick than braces, we fought our fiercest battles. 

In the 1970s, when I was a grown woman with a husband, two children, goats, chickens, and a profession, she wrote me a letter expressing her concern that I might be in danger of looking “like one of those farm wives I saw when I last visited you. That would be a terrible thing! What would people think?” I might be cleaning out the chicken house, but that was no reason not to look soignée. 

She was unsparing of her own shortcomings in the looks department, but treated them with the insouciance of one who knows she is the only star in her husband’s firmament. “Your father must have loved me a lot,” she confided after she became a widow. “He was a leg man, but he married me even though my legs are less than perfect, as you know.” 

And I did know, because she would comment ruefully about her legs, which were slightly bowed; her hips, which were too wide; and “up here,” meaning her chest, which was too flat. But about her appearance from the neck up, I heard no complaints, and rightly so. She had a wide brow, thin, arched eyebrows above large eyes, a well-shaped nose, and a jaw-line that retained its definition her entire life.                                                                                                                                         

She kept her beauty rituals to a minimum: a slathering of Nivea at night, and in the daytime a little powder and lipstick, and maybe a discreet slash of eyeliner at the outer corner of her eyes. When she was going to the opera, she would curl her eyelashes, and follow this with an application of Rimmel, the ur-mascara that came as a solid black cake in a small flat box. You spat on the cake, rubbed the resulting paste with a little brush, and applied it to your lashes. Then you took a pin and carefully separated whatever clumps of mascara the brush had left behind. (Spitting on the Rimmel cake, along with that graceful backwards twist of the torso to check the straightness of stocking seams, seemed to me as a child to embody the essence of femininity.) 

Other than scraping it off her forehead—because she had somehow conceived the notion that a wide forehead was a sign of intelligence—she didn’t do much about her light-brown, curly hair, which she kept short. But this changed in the 1960s, when hair was expected to rise straight up from the scalp before curving smoothly downwards into a balloon shape. After watching me put my hair in jumbo rollers every night, she observed that in the morning it did form that coveted balloon. But she was too fond of her comfort to sleep on rollers, and she may also have wanted to spare my father the sight of her lumpy head next to him on the pillow. Instead, she recruited me as her hairdresser. After she washed her hair I would put it up in rollers, and fit the hood of the portable hairdryer over them. When the hair was bone-dry, I would take out the rollers and, very gently, because her scalp was sensitive and she would yelp if I tugged, tease, spray, and mold her hair into shape. 

In her eighties she was still, thanks to good hair and good bones, the best-looking eighty-year-old in the room, so when she announced her plans to get a make-over, I wondered what was going on. Shouldn’t she be satisfied that she didn’t look any worse? What could any process, short of extensive plastic surgery, do to improve an eighty-year-old face? I was in my fifties at the time, and as unable to put myself in her place as if I had been a teenager. 

I kept my doubts about the make-over to myself, and the next time we spoke on the phone I asked how it had gone. “It was a waste of time,” my mother said. “The woman kept repeating ‘We must bring out your features!’ as she put blush on my cheeks and darkened my eyebrows. I washed it all off when I got home. My features are all still there, thank God, and they don’t need bringing out.” 

The features that enchanted me as a child stayed reassuringly the same as she turned eighty-five and then ninety, delineating to the end what had always been for me the face of love.

Barbering the Jade Plant

Remember Miss Piggy, who never ate anything she couldn’t lift? Although I like the jungly feeling that I get from being dwarfed by my houseplants, I apply Miss P’s standard to them—I won’t keep a plant that I can’t lift.

I have an ancient jade plant that has spent its life putting out one plump, thumb-shaped leaf after another, its stems thickening and lengthening until they draped over the sides of the pot, like an obese sort of ivy. I am a parsimonious waterer, especially of succulents, but over the years I had poured countless gallons of water into that plant, and most of that water was stored in those fat stems, those turgid leaves. The monster was nearly three feet across, and its branches hung so far down that I couldn’t set it on a table, but had to use a plant stand.

Yesterday I moved the jade plant from the bedroom to the sun room.  I had to carry it at arm’s length to avoid breaking off any branches, and by the time we reached our destination my arms were shaking. (Later I asked my spouse to weigh the plant: 25 pounds—heavier than Bisou, even though it was in a light-as-air plastic pot.)

I saw right away that it was taking up too much room, crowding my beloved red and pink cordyline on the right, and the equally beloved giant peace lily on the left. I considered  moving one of the rattan arm chairs out of the room, but there is no space anywhere in the cottage for an extra chair.

There was nothing for it but to prune the jade plant. I got my small pruning shears and a two-gallon bucket and went to work on those overgrown branches. They snapped with a satisfying pop, and I threw them into the bucket. When I was only a third of the way through the pruning, the bucket was full. Leaves and stems flew everywhere as I kept turning the pot, lopping off more branches. Was there no end to this plant?

There was. When the last drooping branch was off, my plant was transformed. Gone was the unkempt Medusa look, the disconsolate stems, the leaves which, despite my conscientious misting, had accumulated layers of dust. Instead, here was a perky, young-looking plant, its every stem pointing optimistically towards the sky. Where leaves and branches had crowded and choked each other, there was now plenty of what painters call negative space, into which the soon-to-come breezes of spring could waft unimpeded. The plant looked and seemed to feel the way I used to look and feel after an excellent haircut.

I gave the jade plant an extra thorough misting and left the room, the pruners still in my hand. Passing by the hall mirror I caught sight of my hair, which drooped down to my collar bones, forlorn, disheveled, and crying out for a trim. I looked down at the pruners ….

Hair in the Corona Era

If a woman blow-dries her hair and nobody sees her, does she still look good?

What about make-up, deodorant, real clothes instead of pajamas, foundation garments—are they worth the trouble these days? For myself, so far I have answered in the affirmative, mostly because I don’t want to frighten myself every time I pass in front of a mirror. As for the effect of these decisions on my spouse of 50+ years, it would take an extraordinary gesture—such as shaving my head, say—for him to notice. And even then he might be too much of a gentleman to comment.

The advertisers who think they know all there is to know about me have been bombarding me lately with products designed to color gray hair at home. They’ve got the age bit right, and the graying bit, but they don’t know that I don’t color my hair-- so much for their omniscience. It’s not that I have philosophical objections to covering up gray hair, but I have always worried that if I did, and then got sick and was unable to keep after the roots, etc. I would emerge from the ordeal suddenly an old woman, a brutal shock to my friends and family. I would rather accustom them gradually and gently to the ravages of time on my appearance.

Color aside, the hair issue looms greater with each passing day. My layers are growing out, and there are some weird bits at the back of my neck that stick out no matter what I do. It’s time for a haircut, but that’s not going to happen in the foreseeable future. Like many of my generation, for years I went to bed every night with twenty-seven brush rollers in my hair, and to this day I find it impossible to simply ignore the stuff that, virus or no virus, inexorably grows out of my scalp.

I considered shaving my head, but gave up the idea when I remembered Colette’s opinion that, like a ripe fruit, the mature visage benefits from a bit of foliage around it. After researching “dreadlocks for white girls” on Google, I abandoned that possibility because I might be accused of cultural appropriation, plus it looks labor intensive, and requires something called “hair wax.” Besides, judging from the photos, dreads on white people look best if the wearer’s chest and arms are covered in tattoos.

There remains the Buddhist choice: to let go, surrender, practice non-attachment to style and shape, and let my hair grow, in the words of the musical, “down to here, down to there, down to where it stops by itself.” But long hair, if given its freedom, can be an inconvenience and a safety hazard. Already it gets in my mouth when I play the recorder, dips into my soup, and gets tangled in my eyeglasses, hearing aids, and face masks. If it grows long enough, I risk getting it caught in doors or, biblically, in tree branches, like Absalom. Should I ever ride again in a convertible, it might strangle me, like Isadora Duncan’s scarf.

One option remains: braids—worn hanging down the back, schoolgirl-style; rolled into ear muffs, like Princess Leia; or pulled across the top of the head like a tiara. However, all these styles need really long hair. Will the corona era last that long? Who knows? But whenever it finally ends, we will emerge from our caves, dens, eyries, burrows, and lairs and cast our eyes over each other, and know what survival looks like.

All That Hair

"When you were born," my mother used to tell me, "you had so much hair that as soon as the midwife cleaned you up she put a bow in it.  It was so long," she went on, "that it covered the tops of your ears, which was a good thing, because they had hair growing on them too."

Fortunately the ear hair soon fell off, but the rest of it hung on and provided the refrain of my childhood.   "Just look at it," my four aunts and my grandmothers would sigh, commiserating with my mother, "what on earth can you do with all that hair?"  Even the fishwives and the vegetable vendors in the market would exclaim over it, with the mixture of horror and grudging admiration usually reserved for natural disasters.

As a little kid I wore my hair short, scraped back off my forehead and fastened with a bow.  My mother, who in another century would have made a fine phrenologist, believed that a large forehead was a sign of intelligence, so until I left home for graduate school I astounded the world with my broad and rather bumpy forehead.

In preparation for entering first grade, however,  my mother let my hair grow long enough to be tamed into braids.  Every morning, to tease out the knots that had formed during the night, she would insert the comb next to my scalp and tug firmly downward, then proceed to the next tangle while I protested sleepily.  The actual braiding took considerable effort, due again to the volume she was dealing with--think of braiding hawsers.  The result was a pair of thick, short, stiff braids that would come undone at the slightest provocation.

In the Amazon, with a marmoset on my shoulder, my right braid coming undone as usual.  There is another one just like it behind my left ear. 

I longed to wear my hair the way the older girls wore it, in a single braid draped fashionably over one shoulder.  But no matter how hard I tried, I never could force my hair into one braid.  Nor could I wear it in a pony tail, since they didn't make bands wide enough to hold it.

On special occasions I was allowed to wear my hair loose, which I thought made me look beautiful.  I loved not feeling the weight of the braids with each head movement, and I wanted to wear it that way all the time, but my mother demurred, because of the knot issue.  "Besides," she said, "when you wear it loose you look like a lion."

Managing my hair continued to be a problem through my adolescence, but I was saved by the arrival of the bubble style popularized by Jackie Kennedy.  Unlike my friends, who had to tease and spray their hair to make it stand up, I barely had to touch mine.  Then in the late sixties, when everybody started wearing their hair loose and long, I all but gave myself a crew cut.

Over the following decades my hair gradually simmered down.  I was surprised when I could run a brush through it, as opposed to needing a sturdy wide-toothed comb.  I was shocked when I managed  to fasten my pony tail with a single large barrette.  Now I treasure every strand that still clings to my scalp.

But thinking of all the thinning and braiding and fastening that went on for all those years, I wonder what would have happened if I had put my foot down and worn my long hair loose and wild, sticking out in all directions and making me look, and perhaps act, like a lion?

About Gray Hair

Looking at the photo of my recent 50th high school reunion, I noticed that what hair there was on the men's heads was uniformly gray. On the other hand, while all the women had plenty of hair, only three had gray hair.  The rest smiled brightly from under hair that ranged from  raven's-wing black through chestnut and strawberry to palest blond.  Whatever the shade, though, my classmates' hair glistened with an even more youthful shine than it had in our graduation pictures long ago.

Of course not all my classmates attended the reunion, and it is possible that the women who stayed home all had gray hair, but I doubt it.  My former high school is in Alabama, and the Land of Dixie does not abound in gray-haired women.  The species is more common in Vermont, but even here it is becoming rarer.  "Everyone I know colors her hair," a fifty-something neighbor told me recently.

Odd to think that my generation, which dispensed at least temporarily with bras and razors, cannot now dispense with hair dye.  But breasts and legs do not announce themselves as instantly as the stuff that covers our skulls and frames our faces.  The color of our hair tells the world at a glance whether we are cool and collected (blond), fiery and unpredictable (redhead), smouldering and sensuous (brunette), or just old.

Looking at those shiny heads in the reunion picture, I have to admit that hair color does do something for a person--makes her look soignee, optimistic, younger. "The women looked a lot better than the men," a friend who attended the reunion wrote me.  And no wonder, with all that colorful hair.  But what about the dignity of age, and the hard-won wisdom and serenity that gray hair is supposed to convey? 

Ah, who cares about those when your bright hair can momentarily blind the observer to the wrinkles on your face!

Despite my advanced years, I do not color my hair.  Unfortunately, people assume that I do, since most of my gray hair is around my temples and is thus covered by the longer hair of my crown, which is still mostly brown.  This, I feel, unfairly robs me of the credit due me for my heroic refusal to color.

To be honest, this refusal owes more to practical reasons than to anything else.  For one thing, my hair grows quickly, and I don't like the idea of monthly trips to the colorist to eliminate the dreaded "roots."  For another, what if I were to break a leg or be struck by a sudden illness that would cause me to miss my salon appointments?  My friends and family would think that I had suddenly aged a couple of decades, and be alarmed.

I am of course aging even as I write, and my hair will someday--probably sooner rather than later--be completely gray.  But I would rather the people around me had a chance to get used to it gradually.

For the moment, looking at that reunion photo, I like to think that my hitherto virgin hair would not have looked out of place among my classmates' not-so-virgin do's. 

But that, like that other long-ago virginity, is something best pondered in solitude.

Little Girls, Long Hair

Combing the tangles out of Bisou's coat the other day--a process she does not enjoy but for putting up with which she gets small bits of mozzarella--I thought about some hair issues that arose over Christmas concerning my granddaughter, V.

V is in second grade, and has long hair.  Not long enough to sit on, but long enough to cause problems with knots.  The trouble is that V wants long hair, but doesn't want to deal with the ensuing tangles--especially the ones at the base of the skull, which are both the biggest and the hardest to reach.

Over the holiday week, everyone in the house--parents, grandparents and aunties--volunteered to very gently brush out V's hair.  But she turned us down.  We then suggested that she get it cut--not, God forbid, like a boy's or anything--but short enough so that it wouldn't hurt so much.  But she wouldn't hear of that.

One of the persons offering to help with the detangling was V's Auntie A, who, back when she was in second grade, had even longer hair than V, and tons of it.  Like V, A refused to have her hair cut, and turned down my offers to brush it for her.  The summer she was eight years old, A took swimming lessons, and you can imagine the effect of frequent baths in chlorine on already-tangled, sweat-coated hair.

One day, A finally agreed to let me help untangle the mess.  I found the comb with the widest teeth, and went to work as gently as I could, gripping a hank of hair with one hand, holding it away from the scalp to minimize the tugging, while slowly combing out the snags with the other.  But tugging was inevitable, and A put up with it without protest, although under the tent of hair I saw her shoulders shaking--she was crying silently.  I don't know which made me feel worse, the fact that I was hurting her, or the knowledge that she was taking responsibility for the pain, and being brave.
 
But back to V.  Inevitably, her mother had to step in and detangle.  There were tears.  I left the room, unable to watch, and wondered, what is it with little girls and long hair?  Why, in this enlightened age, do they feel that it is worth the pain?  Do they believe that long hair is beautiful, and beauty is worth suffering for?  What do they think would happen to them if they were less beautiful, but more comfortable?

Is this a cultural phenomenon or a predisposition towards masochism embedded in that pair of X chromosomes?

Unlike V, and A before her, poor Bisou isn't free to cut her hair, which is why she gets bits of cheese while I work on her mats.

My Mother, My Hair, And I

I was sitting next to my 92-year-old mother while she ate lunch in the dining room of her assisted living facility.  She sat in her wheelchair smiling, pleased that I was there, while I made conversation with the three other ladies at the table.

Since her recent health troubles, my mother's English has all but deserted her, but that doesn't keep her from addressing those around her in a hybrid of English, Spanish and Catalan.  The ladies at her lunch table find her mysterious, to say the least, so they were taking advantage of my presence to get some context that would help them make sense of my mother.

I was doing my best, enunciating in case they were hard of hearing, making eye contact with each lady in turn, explaining how things were, when my mother put her hand to my hair and brushed it away from my face.

I pushed her hand away.

My mother has been pushing my hair off my face for as long as I can remember.  She has pushed the hair off her grandchildren's face.  And, if she had access to them, she would do the same to her great-grandchildren.

For this, she offers vaguely phrenological explanations about the significance of a "wide forehead," which supposedly bespeaks intelligence, nobility of character, and beauty as Aristotle conceived it.  She never did accept my protestations that intelligence and nobility of character aren't necessarily cute or sexy.  She remained adamant on the virtues of the "frente despejada," the unencumbered brow.

The only explanation I can find for this is that the movie stars of her adolescence, Marlene Dietrich and Ava Gardner, boldly bared their desert-like expanses of forehead to the world.  But I belong to the school of Colette, who said that a face, like a fruit, needs foliage around it to set it off to advantage.

But still.  Here was my mother, 92.  Here was I, not all that much younger.  Furthermore, I was on an errand of kindness and mercy, determined to be utterly sweet and compliant and non-confrontational for the 48-hours I would spend in her presence.  And the minute her hand touched my hair--well, I didn't exactly swat it away, but the swatting feeling was there.

Why didn't I let her brush back my hair?  Why didn't I let her dazzle her tablemates with the sight of my broad and noble forehead?  Why did I deny her that microgram of happiness?

I learned in Catholic school that a sin requires an act of the will.  So I can hardly call that quasi-swat a sin--it was more a spinal reflex.  But it was a reflex born of a lifetime of daughterly opposition, rebellion, resentment.
I don't even blame myself for those, really, for without them I would never have become a person.  
But I am disappointed that, despite the years and experience that I drag behind me like those carry-on bags on wheels, I saw my mother's liver-spotted, knobby, blue-veined hand reach towards my hair, and I pushed it away.

Beauty Secrets Of A Stone Carver

I was in the basement the other evening, carving passionately at my experimental piece of slate. I was going to a party later, and had planned to change my clothes and wash my hair and make myself presentable. But I really got into the carving, the "ping" of mallet on chisel, the rhythm of the hand, the slowly emerging features. By the time I took off my mask and gloves and smock (really just an old shirt of my husband's), I knew that all I had time for was to wash my face and change my clothes.

The hair...would have to take care of itself. I would brush off the dust and put on a smile and--well, this being Vermont, I probably had nothing to worry about. Brush in hand, I bent over the bathroom sink and brushed upwards from the nape of my neck. Then I straightened up and looked in the mirror, and lo! my hair looked fabulous, if I say so myself.

And then I remembered the one beauty benefit of carving stone. While it will gnarl your hands and stiffen your sinews and damage you lungs, stone carving will make your hair look great. Just look at the portraits of the great sculptors: Michelangelo and Bernini both had nice full heads of hair, doubtless thanks to all that Carrara dust, and so did Brancusi.

I once read that if you don't have time to wash your hair you should sprinkle talcum powder over it, rub it in and then brush it out, and your hair will regain its bounce and shine. Talcum powder, of course, is nothing but very fine stone (soapstone, to be precise) dust.

So I went off to my party feeling all smug and put together, except for the disconcerting smell of slate dust that stayed with me the entire evening.