Me, My Hair, and I (2 page)

The Rapunzel Complex

REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN

I
've never figured out how to tell the story of my life. But I do think I can tell the story of my hair.

My hair grew up in the shadow of my older sister's hair, which was long and golden and spilled in beautiful natural curls onto her shoulders. My hair was also light but always described as dirty blond, which led to confusion. I was never able to get across to my mother why she so often found me in the upstairs bathroom, taking a bar of Ivory soap to my hair and scrubbing. If I'd belonged to a different kind of family, neuroses might have been suspected and I might have been taken to a therapist.

Even more than clean hair, I wanted long hair. But my mother was tired by the time my younger sister and I were born. There were twelve years between the oldest of my siblings and the youngest; I was born after a large gap. It was as if there were two different sets, the older children my mother took pleasure in and then the pair of us, Sarah and I, both with short hair. I must really have wanted long hair to have raised the issue with my mother at all. She was short tempered when she responded that my hair was too thick to be grown long. Untangling it would only add to the burdens of her life. In my mind, my hair's thickness was connected with its dirtiness, making the contrast between my older sister's tresses of glory and my own ugly hair even greater. My mother cut my too-­thick locks, and since she didn't want to have to do it often, my hair was cut very short, shorter even than Sarah's. The last part of the ordeal was my father's running his electric shaver over the back of my neck to clean away the stubble. I hated the pinching feel of that electric shaver, and I hated my boy cuts.

As soon as I gained autonomy over my own head, I grew my hair with utter abandon. In college it was so long that I could sit on it. Sarah also grew her hair long, and this being the late sixties, we took turns ironing each other's tresses to suppress any bourgeois pro-­war tendencies toward curling. One day when I was lying with my head in the hands of my sister, I heard her say in a frightened voice, “Something's gone wrong.” The stench reached me almost simultaneously with Sarah's words. She'd neglected to turn down the heat setting. A wad of scorched hair was melded to the reeking iron. Once again, I had to cut my hair short, but by the time I got my PhD, it was hippie-­long again.

When I got my first job teaching philosophy, I was twenty-­six and looked far younger. The students always seemed a bit confused the first day of class when I strode to the front of the room to take command. Their skepticism intensified my own sense of absurdity at having my words dutifully written down by smart Barnard women. Who was I to be accorded such status? Perhaps a sophisticated haircut would convince us all of my authority. I asked around and was given the name of the salon said to be the best in Manhattan. Kenneth, I was told, had created Jacqueline Kennedy's bouffant hairdo. I took my hair to Kenneth's, and though I didn't receive the attentions of the celebrity hairdresser himself, still I could tell this was a dauntingly classy establishment. I had overreached myself in trying to do justice to my hair and was unprepared to resist the professional argument, authoritatively delivered, to the effect that my hair must, simply must, be cut far shorter than I'd anticipated. I watched it pile up on the floor, afraid to raise my eyes to the mirror. When I finally did, the look on my face prompted the hairdresser to ask me whether “philosophy majors” ever cry. Damn it, I wanted to tell him. I'm not a philosophy major. I'm a philosophy professor! A professor! That's the only reason I'm sitting here with all my hair lying detached from my head only to become garbage on your pricey floor!

Since that learning experience at Kenneth's, I have tried never to betray my hair. As a child I already knew that I possessed long hair that was trapped inside a short cut. I also figured out, as I got older, that I was a freethinker trapped within Orthodox Judaism, a feminist trapped in paternalism, a novelist trapped in the rules of my own rigorous academic discipline. My hair's struggles have been my struggles.

I kept it long, but there were still mistakes to be made along the way. A hairdresser once made the argument that at my age—I had just turned forty—women look better, which is to say younger, as redheads. As a philosopher I'm trained to spot the fallacies in arguments, but somehow I was duped by this one. I was going to have to see this hairdresser every eight weeks in order for my roots to be attended to. By about the third session, I caught on and went back to my natural color. I was buried under obligations. Not only did I teach now, but I was writing novels. And I had two daughters, both of whom had long, long hair. I didn't have time for hair salon appointments every eight weeks. And anyway, I wasn't any redhead.

My children brought their own pressures to bear on my hair. At around the age of ten, my older daughter became acutely embarrassed by the look I had evolved. I looked nothing like the other mothers in our suburban New Jersey community. She begged me to never wear my army boots when I picked her up from school, and this being the eighties, she begged me to get a perm. I remembered my own acute embarrassment prompted by my own mother, who, as an Orthodox woman, looked nothing like the chic women of White Plains, New York, where I'd grown up. All of them were slim and tall and tanned. They seemed to have tennis rackets growing out of their hands, where my mother had a spatula (which I believed to be a Yiddish word). And so, remembering, I took my daughter's embarrassment to heart. It took about six months for that awful perm to grow out.

Her younger sister, a nonconformist from an early age, complained about my looks only once. I'd come to pick her up at the end of her summer program, run each year by Johns Hopkins University. My marriage had recently broken up, and I'd decided to update my look. I was wearing a stylish sleeveless black dress, and I'd added highlights to my hair that had finally lifted it out of the category of dirty blond. My daughter took one look at me and said, in the perfected disdain of her fifteen years, “Now you look just like all the other mothers of the preppies up here. Are you in training to become a trophy wife?” She was in a mood to draw blood, which I acknowledged and respected, but still I couldn't help bursting out in laughter. I'd just turned fifty. Some trophy.

The beautiful golden hair of my older sister had gone through its own life story. She'd remained Orthodox, and in her circle she was supposed to wear a wig, or at least to keep her hair covered beneath a kerchief or a hat. But Mynda had resisted. Her hair had always been her glory. She resisted death with the same spirit. Lying in the hospital only days before the end, she asked me to comb her hair. Although it had pitifully thinned, it was still there, lying spread out on her shoulders; and this itself seemed a triumph. We joked that vanity would be the last thing in either of us to go. My beautiful sister.

My hair has partaken in the high points of my life. A reviewer in the
London Times
once referred to me as “the American philosopher-­novelist who looks like Rapunzel but thinks like Wittgenstein.” That was nice. And when I was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, I was seated next to the novelist Alison Lurie. At the close of the ceremony my partner, Steven Pinker, approached us, and I pointed him out to Alison. She gave him a long, appraising look. “Good hair” was her verdict. Then she gave me the same once-­over. “You too,” she said. “You're the good-­hair couple,” she pronounced. Worse things have been said about both of us.

My hair is still long, no doubt inappropriately so for my age, but I am perhaps also of an age when no one dares—or cares—to say such a thing to me anymore. I've kept the highlights too, and they mask the gray that comes in around the temples during the long stretches in between my salon visits. Nobody will ever convince me again to do anything with my hair but what I want. My hair and I have grown into ourselves and know what we're about.

The only one who ever has any hair suggestion to make is Steve. When I tell him that I'm off to the salon for one of my rare trims, he never fails to admonish, “Don't let them cut too much off. I love your hair long.” Which, for the story of my hair, and now his, is another way of saying, And they lived happily ever after.

Hair, Interrupted

SULEIKA JAOUAD

F
or as long as I can remember I've felt like an outsider looking in. Between the ages of four and eighteen, I
attended six schools on three continents. As the child of two immigrants—my mother is Swiss and my father is Tunisian—I discovered that my multicultural background was anything but “cool” or “exotic” to my classmates. Roll call on the first day of school was like showing up to class wearing underwear on the outside of my jeans. With a name as unpronounceable as
Suleika Jaouad, I found it hard to blend in. Sometimes that made me want to blend in all the more.

Even my lunch box was a source of embarrassment. All I wanted back then was a brown paper bag filled with typical, all-­American fare: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Snackables, Pop-­Tarts, and Gushers. Was that too much to ask for? I remember bursting through the door after school in a huff one day. “Never,
ever
pack me chicken tagine for lunch again,” I said. The contrast between the smelly, coagulated orange mess of chicken and the pristine, odorless beauty of a Pop-Tart had never felt sharper.

Over time, the embarrassment of being the perpetual new kid hardened into resentment. I resented that my family had a French-only language policy at home. I resented that I had a multisyllabic name and that I was too young to legally change it to something more normal like Ashley or Jessica. And I resented that my mother, an artist with a flair for the eccentric and a sturdy sense of who she was and what she believed, seemed to think it was so easy to be comfortable with not always fitting in. “You are unique,” she would tell me, forgetting that the word is a social albatross when you're a kid. I was mortified the day she came to pick me up at the bus stop wearing cross-country skis, a fluorescent-yellow parka, and a backward baseball cap covering her spiky two-inch-long hairdo.
Quelle horreur!

When I got to middle school and my family settled in upstate New York, I dreamed of having golden, waist-length Rapunzel-like tresses—like the popular girls on the cheerleading squad—instead of my frizzy, shoulder-length auburn hair. I tried everything. They knew me in the hair product aisle at the local CVS pharmacy, but no amount of roasting my hair with Sun-In or dousing it in Long 'N Strong could make me look like
them
. In the sixth grade, I even persuaded my mother to let me get a braided blond weave (hello, fashion police!).

These were the memories that came rushing back to me on a muggy spring afternoon in May 2011, at the age of twenty-two. Nothing of note was happening in the news that day. But the world that I knew was about to implode.

“PRECAUTIONARY” WAS THE
word the doctor had used. He was talking about the bone marrow biopsy I had undergone a few days before, a fairly painful, invasive procedure that is rarely performed on young people. After two months of flu-like symptoms that seemed resistant to the strongest antibiotics, it had been the next step. My skin had become so pale it looked almost translucent. “Robin's egg blue, as if all of the veins have floated to the surface of my skin,” was how I described it in my journal. Something was wrong. This much I knew. But the doctor reassured me that he didn't expect to find anything abnormal in my bone marrow.

By the time my parents and I arrived at the clinic to hear the results of the biopsy, it was dusk. All of the staff and the other patients had gone for the day. The lights in the waiting room had been dimmed, casting an ominous shadow on the beige walls and stacks of outdated magazines. The doctor didn't mince words. “You have something called acute myeloid leukemia,” he said, enunciating the diagnosis like a foreign-language teacher instructing us in the pronunciation of a new vocabulary word. “We need to act fast.”

A lot of people have asked me what it was like to hear that I had cancer at such a young age. What's the appropriate reaction to one's own cancer diagnosis? Are you supposed to break down in tears, or faint, or scream?

I did not do any of those things. Instead, I froze and repeated the word over and over in my head:
Loo-kee-mee-ah. Loo-kee-mee-ah. Loo-kee-mee-ah.
It sounded like an exotic flower.

It was my next reaction, however, that really surprised me. “Am I going to lose all my hair?” I blurted out to the doctor.

On balance, since I had just been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, worrying about hair loss seemed petty and irrelevant, even narcissistic. But a bald head—the signature side effect of chemotherapy—was one of the few tropes that I knew about cancer. I needed to reassure myself by asking questions that were within the realm of my understanding. A question like, What's going to happen to me? could have lethal and terrifyingly unforeseeable consequences. My doctor confirmed that the chemo would take my hair as its prize, within a week or so of starting treatment.

CHEMOTHERAPY IS A
take-no-prisoners stylist. The thing that no one tells you when you lose your hair during chemo is that it doesn't happen all at once. The first evidence that mine was falling out appeared on my pillow: a mess of stray hairs spread across the fabric like a furry Jackson Pollock painting. Then, over the next few days, it started to come out in clumps. Finally, when only a few patches of hair were left on my head, I yanked the rest of it out with my bare hands. I felt like a gardener, pulling weeds from damp soil.

Within a few weeks, I could no longer recognize the person staring back at me in the mirror. Gaunt cheeks. Bald head. No eyebrows. No eyelashes. Skin as dry and white as chalk. And a waist that quickly shrank from a healthy size 6 to a 00. But what hurt most were the silent, invisible side effects of my disease. The isolation. The friends who stopped returning my calls after I got sick. The fear of dying before I had really begun to live my life. And perhaps worst of all, coming to terms with the reality that the chemotherapy had rendered me permanently infertile. Just like that, my life had split in two: there was Suleika BC (before cancer) and Suleika AC (after cancer)—and that's if luck was on my side.

For the most part, my transformation had taken place within the privacy of the four walls of my hospital room. I could avoid the mirror hanging on the bathroom wall, but when I left the hospital for short breaks in between treatments, I couldn't shield myself from the stares of curious strangers. Everywhere I went, cancer spoke for me before I could speak for myself. I tried hiding beneath hats and head scarves and wigs, but they only made me feel like more of an impostor.

One night, I made the mistake of going to a friend's party. It was my first time seeing many of my old college friends since my diagnosis. As I walked through the door, it felt like the music had suddenly gone dead. I could feel everyone's eyes glued to my bald head and to the tubes of my catheter protruding above my right breast. When I made eye contact with people, some quickly looked away. Conversations were awkward as acquaintances stared at their shoes or quickly excused themselves to make another drink or to go to the bathroom. A few minutes later, I told my friends I needed some fresh air. I jumped into a cab, hot, inky tears streaming down my face as I gave the driver directions to take me home.

My mom sat on the edge of my bed rubbing my back with the palms of her hands as I cried myself to sleep that night. I wanted my old life back, and I missed the way I had looked before. While my new situation was entirely unfamiliar territory for me, the feeling of wishing that I were in a different body—that I looked more similar to those around me—harked back to the way I had felt about myself in middle school. Now, however, I had a different perspective on the “outsider complex” of my youth. I was angry at the teenage version of myself, for nitpicking over the color and texture of my hair, when now I had no hair at all.

ALMOST A YEAR
after my diagnosis, with three inches of freshly grown baby hair covering my head, I prepared for the most difficult chapter of my cancer treatment yet: a risky bone marrow transplant that would be my only shot at a cure. My doctors told me point-blank that I had a 35 percent chance of surviving the procedure. The odds were stacked against me. Surrounded by so much uncertainty, I began to search for the things that I
could
control. I realized that the outward signifiers of cancer could only define me if I allowed them to. I became determined to enter the transplant unit looking and feeling like Suleika, and not just an anonymous cancer patient.

Growing up, I had always wanted to wear the coveted cheerleader uniform. To be a girly girl. But I didn't want that anymore. I needed to look inward and to figure out what my own uniform was going to be. I adopted a brown leather jacket lent to me by my best friend, Lizzie. Boots with spikes on the heel staring at me in the store window? I'll take them. The final piece of my new look fell into place just five days before I was scheduled to enter the bone marrow transplant unit. I went to Astor Place Hairstylists, a cavernous basement barbershop in downtown Manhattan, known for its famously low prices, multilingual barbers, star-studded clientele, and no-nonsense customer service. I wanted to get a simple buzz cut, a preemptive strike against the chemo that would soon make my hair fall out for a second time.

When I explained my situation to my barber, Miguel Lora, he suggested I take the buzz cut one step further by getting “hair tattoos.” The idea of a tattoo scared me at first, but Miguel reassured me that he would simply use his clippers to groove a spiral design in the half-inch layer of hair that remained. “What the hell,” I said. After all, I had little left to lose. My new style made me look like I was tough, even when I didn't always feel that way. I was adding armor, and I liked the way it fit.

As I walked out onto the street, a construction worker whistled at me. “Cool hair!” he shouted out. It was the first time since my diagnosis that someone had made a remark on my appearance that wasn't cancer related.

WHILE CANCER MAY
not be a choice, both style and attitude are. I wish I could have told this to my fifteen-year-old self. Trying to make my unruly brown locks blond back then was as futile an effort as trying to pretend that I had hair after my chemotherapy. I would never go so far as to call cancer a gift. After all, I would never give it to you for your birthday. But I would call it a teacher. My disease has taught me that I can far more effectively take control of my look by embracing it and having fun with it, rather than forcibly trying to make it something it is not. This approach toward my outward appearance extends into a larger lesson: no matter what life hurls your way, the best way to face a challenge is to lean into it and to make it your own.

Eventually, my hair would slowly start to grow back. As soon as it was long enough, I went to see Miguel for more hair tattoos. I shared photographs of my new hairstyle on social media, and within a few months, several other young cancer patients had gone to see Miguel to get their own hair tattoos. The tattoos had shown us a new way to have fun with the hair that we had—or that we didn't have—and given us a newfound confidence in our own skin.

I survived the bone marrow transplant. With each day, I'm getting stronger and healthier. And in the time since then, I've come to appreciate the benefits of sticking out in a crowd, even though I don't always seek out the circumstances. Today my hair is about two inches long, short and spiky just like my mother's. When people tell me how much we look alike, I smile and thank them for the compliment. I'm still a long way from having waist-length Rapunzel tresses. But the funny thing is, I don't want them anymore. Short hair is starting to grow on me.