Chapter Nine

Mom Hates My Hair

When she was 63, Mom wrote:

“In the lottery of Life

You’re fortunate to win

A dedicated wife

Who strives hard to get thin”

Before I knew her, when she was very young, my mother--despite her denials in many of the verses she wrote for Dad--looked quite glamorous. In old photos, she is inevitably posing seductively, leaning up against a tree or sitting on a rock in the park, showing off her slender, shapely legs. Her lipstick is dark, her eyes light and clear (in those old black and white photos you can’t see how luminously green they were), her coiffure artfully arranged in piles of ripples and curls and perky tufts.

One day, in the midst of her 12-year journey through Alzheimer’s, she stared across the dining room table at me, frowning thoughtfully. Finally she said in a clear, piping voice, “Your hair looks dreadful.”

I gritted my teeth and said, “Thank you.”

Mom was slumped in her chair at the dining room table in a blue terrycloth robe and that same old, lumpy purple shawl, the same one Dad ended up wearing to the hospital. Her dentures sat beside her plate. She wore no makeup—my Mom, who never liked to be seen without her “face.” Recently I’d had to confiscate her lipstick because she kept putting it on her nose. Her silvery hair hung in greasy strings—she couldn’t stand for the caregivers to shampoo it. She used to wear earrings, a gold chain around her neck, a gold watch, too.

If Mom talked at all these days, she’d say exactly what she was thinking at the moment, although sometimes it came out hesitant as she searched for words, or else garbled and incomprehensible. But this comment about my hair was not hesitant or incomprehensible. It sounded familiar. Mom, back in her gabby, normal days, criticized everyone’s appearance -- not to their faces, of course -- especially their hair and weight, but also their choice of colors and fashion design, even their facial expressions. Mom also criticized me and my sister, but with us it was indirect, her criticisms couched in deceptively neutral comments that were all too easy for me to decipher: “Your eyes look small today” meant “You look like an exhausted hag”; “That outfit doesn’t do a thing for you” (subtext: “You look fat”).

Now, though, there was no obfuscating. She thought my hair looked dreadful. Did it?

I spent the whole next week casting anxious looks at myself in store windows as I passed, compulsively examining the sides and back of my head through two mirrors in the bathroom. My hair was a thick, dry, coarse, bushy mop requiring three different products daily, and five on shampoo Sundays. It curled in some places, frizzed in others. There was a funny spot where monks have their tonsures that tended to be ultra-kinky. Sometimes it was too flat on top, sometimes too high and stiff above my brow, like a rooster’s comb. Sometimes it was just a huge Jewfro. In the morning I resembled Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons, my hair a stiff, corkscrewed, horizontal shelf. Basically, my hair has always done whatever it wants to do on a daily basis, in relation to the moisture in the air, the temperature, and other, more mysterious factors. It is completely unreliable. Grown out longish or cut short, layered or not, artificially straightened or au naturel, my ’do has never been under my, or any stylist’s, control.

We knew all about Mom’s successful social life when she was a popular sorority girl, a social butterfly who had lots of friends. She was engaged to a man that she broke up with, married Dad at 25, had me at 26. Judging by those photos, my mother--who, to me, appeared in real life, when I was old enough to notice such things, as a tiny, frumpy middle-aged woman--had once been the quintessential New York girl of the era: petite, wearing a little hat, smart suits with fitted, buttoned jackets and padded shoulders, silky high-necked blouses, gloves, open-toed pumps. Coy. I had never been able to compete with the girl in those old photos.

When I was a kid, Mom tried her best to spruce me up—me, her first-born, the one who’d inherited her facial features, her interests. “You’re so pale, wear a little lipstick,” she urged me in fifth grade. I naturally have the lightest skin tones in the family; Mom, who grew up at the seaside, had a tanned, olive complexion. “Take your jacket off and smile with your mouth open,” she reminded me every time we entered a public room, when I was in my early teens and so shy and self-conscious that my jaw would freeze and my lips involuntarily clamp shut, and I wanted nothing more than to disappear inside a giant-sized coat. For years after that, out of habit, I maintained a sullen facial expression around my mother—I simply refused to smile. “It’s time to realize you can’t just eat anything you want,” she warned me as I reached puberty. “You’re putting on weight.” Mom, five feet tall, agonized if the scale tipped 100 pounds (“I’m having a fat attack!”) and was always dieting, so by the time I was 11 or 12, sure enough, I was, too. As Mom pointed out, we had the same body type—short, flat-chested, thick-waisted, round-bellied, not an ideal combination. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. We needed to be vigilant. I envisioned a future just like Mom’s, weighing myself every day, moaning over a gained ounce, rejoicing over a lost half-pound, munching exactly ten raisins every night for a bedtime snack. I began counting each banana I ate and recording it in my diary, while yearning for (and sometimes guiltily gobbling at the school cafeteria) ice cream sandwiches.

When I got older, clothes became an issue. “You look so much better in that skirt you’re wearing than you did last week in those pants,” she’d say pointedly. Or she’d haul out an old photo of me: “Look how unflattering that dress was on you.” Once, when I appeared in a new (and, now that I think about it, clownishly over-colorful) dress, she gasped, “What’s that?” Sometimes, she’d couch her criticism in jokes: “Going to a funeral?” she’d josh if I wore black.

And once she slipped a blank check into my hand and said, “I want you to go to the most expensive salon in the city for a haircut.” I already was going to the most expensive salon in the city. “I think you can find someone better,” she said.

Every morning my mother would carefully pencil in her light eyebrows, outline her eyes, apply shocking pink lipstick. She re-combed her hair constantly—I can still see the way she held her arms as she tucked each little wave into place. She’d ask us daily, “Do I have on too much rouge?” (She always did, but out of boredom we always said no.) She powdered, sprayed on Bluegrass or, if she was going out at night, Chanel No. 5.

Why did I still allow my mother—a woman who when she was in her 70s still wore frilly, little-girl dresses that she proudly bought in the children’s department and now, in Alzheimer’s, was an entirely unreliable witness—to be an arbiter of physical appearance? Why do we women, however old we are, however old they are, still see ourselves through our mothers’ gimlet-eyed gazes? Who had Mom hoped for me to be—her younger, sorority-girl self? maybe an improved version of herself?--a fantasy daughter with rosy cheeks, a golden complexion, a wasp waist, a tidy little head of frizz-free curls? a dazzling white smile? And now, who did she think I actually was?

A few days post-hair remark, my mother asked me my name. Jean, I said. “Gina?” “No, Jean.” “What, Gina?” “No, Jean.” “Gina?” “Jean.” “I have a daughter named Jean,” she finally mentioned off-handedly. “My only daughter.” She peered at me. “You look very nice,” she said. But my hand went automatically to my dreadful hair.