Fringe Magazine - Issue 12

Issue 12: October 2007.
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Home > Issue 12: October 2007 > Non-Fiction

Self Portrait in Three Hairstyles
by Carrie Jerrell

The Bombshell

You might say I was born knowing hair. My mother has been in the business as a stylist and small-town salon owner for close to thirty-five years now. One of the first words in my vocabulary was roller. By the time I turned thirteen, I was swirling brides’ hair into chignons, French twists, and fancy pin-curled updos. I was giving perms to my friends before I got my driver’s license. One fall, when blond highlights were popular among guys, my mom and I did the hair of half of my high school football team, all in our kitchen.

Like many girls growing up in the Bible Belt, I spent part of every Saturday evening sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the couch, handing pink sponge rollers to my mom, who pulled on a section of my hair and rolled it up in a snap. When I entered middle school, that ritual changed to an early Sunday morning spent with the curling iron. I had thick, naturally wavy light brown hair, lots of body—“a good head to work with,” my mom bragged to her clients—so it took styling well, especially curls. The actress Julia Roberts was just coming into her prime when I entered high school, and I loved emulating her perfect Mystic Pizza, Steel Magnolia, bombshell curls whenever I got dressed up. My mom loved it, too, because it was free advertising.

I would get lots of compliments on my hair, especially from people at church, and I was used to women asking to touch it, or just touching it. There were also a few men who commented on my hair, and one man in particular who would sometimes tug on one of the curls. He was an older gentleman, a friend of my father’s who joked around with all of us kids and treated us like his nieces and nephews, so I never thought anything of it. But once, when I was fifteen, my parents were later than usual getting to the car after church, and when they finally did arrive and we all piled in our minivan, I could tell something bad had happened. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” my mom said as she shoved her seatbelt into its slot. “It’s not her fault that he’s got some sort of problem.”

“I know,” my dad said, and glanced back at me in the rearview mirror. “They’re going to talk to him, too.”

And somehow I knew what this was about. I’d worn a ribbon in my hair that day, and the older gentleman had come by after the service to tell me how much he liked that. Then he hugged me, and it wasn’t in an inappropriate way, but it lasted a little too long; even I could tell that. When he let go of me, I caught one of my pastors looking our way and frowning.

It was nothing new. Pre-modern Christian theologians believed that Eve, and all women who came after, were inherently more susceptible than men to the passions of the flesh and the temptations of the Devil. As a result, women were a constant danger to men’s souls. Because women’s hair was considered especially seductive, both Jewish and Christian law required married women, and many times single women as well, to veil their hair. Nuns, or “brides of Christ,” were required to veil their hair until the 1960s. Ancient Greeks, Romans, and Jews always veiled brides before their weddings. During the ceremony, the bride would be unveiled for her husband and guests, then re-veiled by her husband; her hair was never again to be seen by another man. In the time of Christ, Jewish law permitted a man to divorce a woman by uncovering her hair, and if a woman ever uncovered her own hair in public, the law took this as evidence of her infidelity and allowed her husband to divorce her without returning her dowry or paying her alimony. For centuries to follow, Christian and Jewish married women throughout most of Europe wore their hair long, bound, and covered.

That night, I asked my mom what had happened. She was washing her face at the bathroom sink, and the more she talked, the faster she scrubbed. “Honey, it’s not your fault. The pastors just think you need to be more careful around him because of the way he acts sometimes… when he’s around you.” She stopped scrubbing and pointed a sudsy finger at me. “But it’s only for your own good—not because they think you’re up to anything.” She turned back to the sink and sighed. “You should probably wear your hair up next Sunday.”

I didn’t know what to say. I was mad and a little sick to my stomach. It’s one thing to fix your hair hoping the quarterback who sits next to you in Biology will ask you out; it’s another thing entirely to know that something about your appearance causes grown men to misbehave in church. But mixed with my anger and disgust was something more dangerous, more complicated, more subtle—pride—because I was learning a lesson that every self-aware woman who’s ever spent a little extra time in front of the mirror with the flat iron or a little extra money on that shine treatment at the salon comes to know sooner or later: hair is power.

The Bob

The hair revolution of the 1920s centered on one particular style: the bob. Popularized by flappers, the hairstyle was close-cropped, edgy, and free from the fancy pins and curlers of the previous generation. It’s been reported that during one week in 1924, nearly 3,500 women had their hair bobbed in one New York salon, where the stylists kept smelling salts nearby because so many women fainted from shock at the first snip of the scissors.

But fashion is never just fashion. It’s political, and the politics surrounding the bob grew just as intensely as the number of women asking for the style at salons. Charles Nessler, the inventor of the permanent wave machine, warned at the time that if women kept cutting their hair, they would weaken the scalp muscles and eventually begin to bald like men. In Missouri, a judge asked the oldest child of a woman whose children had been placed in foster care if she’d like to return to her mother. The young girl said definitely not. “We don’t believe Mother is a Christian woman. The Bible says in the eleventh chapter of First Corinthians that a woman should not cut her hair.” One religious tract produced during this time asked, “Bobbed Hair: Is It Well-Pleasing to The Lord?” and stated that short hair was part of a growing trend of female rebellion. One Pennsylvania school board even awarded monetary bonuses to teachers who left their hair long. Later, in his unfinished novel The Garden of Eden, Ernest Hemingway would find the essence of the twenties in that one act of cutting a woman’s hair when he wrote, “No decent girls had ever had their hair cut short like that in this part of the country and even in Paris it was rare and strange and could be beautiful or could be very bad.”

A few years ago, I experienced Paris for myself during a semester abroad. I was standing outside the Musée Rodin, arguing in intense whispers with my boyfriend, who was telling me, again, that I never opened up about anything, that I was always putting up barriers, that not wanting to hold his hand while looking at “The Kiss” was a sure mark of a disturbed personality. I had no answer, and I tried to tuck a thick strand of hair behind my ear, but it didn’t stay. My boyfriend shook his head, pointed to my head and screamed, “You even hide behind your hair!” It startled the pigeons into flight and the locals into staring, like a scene from a big-screen romantic drama, and I wondered what the background music should sound like—heavy on the violin? A cello sonata?

At the end of that semester, I returned to the States, having replayed that moment in my mind a million times and never been able to deny the truth of my boyfriend’s statement. I asked my mom to cut it short. She refused. “It’s beautiful, honey,” she said. “One of your best features. We wouldn’t know you with short hair.” Later that summer, while visiting family in California, my cousin took me to a salon where an Asian man with a glossy mohawk attempted small talk as he separated my long curls. But I knew how that went, the small talk leading to the therapy session, so I kept my answers short, curt. And when he asked what I wanted done, I said, “I want it off, all of it,” in such a way that he didn’t doubt my decision, didn’t say another word while he scissored away, and didn’t ask me, when the piles of gold and brown lay like empty nests on the floor, if I wanted a strand of it as a keepsake.

Back at the house, when I entered the kitchen where my family and boyfriend were playing cards at the table, my mom covered her mouth with the back of her hand and my boyfriend’s eyes grew fearfully large. No one said anything, but when I turned my back to them and opened the refrigerator door, the chill raised goosebumps along the back of my neck, and they lasted for some time because there was nothing there to warm them.

Because your hair only grows 0.3 to 0.5 millimeters a day, it can stick around for a long time—months, even years. Some researchers have compared hair to an Arctic ice core, trapping information about how you live your life. Your hair can tell if you smoke, drink, or do drugs—one reason why many human resource departments are moving from urine sample tests to hair sample tests to find out the drug history of prospective employees. Hair color, form, and degree of curl also provide indications of your geographical ancestry, because different ethnic races have different hair structures. As one researcher from London’s Natural History Museum explains, “Your hair tells what you eat, where you live, your lifestyle and habits. Your hair is what you do.”

However, there is one thing scientists can’t tell about you from scrutinizing your hair under a microscope: your gender.

It wasn’t too long after that vacation that my boyfriend and I broke up, although I don’t believe it was just because I cut my hair; we had plenty of other problems, too. I hated that haircut because I thought it made me look like a man. I tried to girlify it by wearing cute headbands and barrettes, but then I just felt like a man in drag. And worst of all, I hated myself for letting it matter. I wasn’t supposed to care what I looked like—the whole point of cutting my hair in the first place had been to let go of something more than just my hair, and that feeling of exhilaration, of being brave and bold, that I experienced in the salon chair didn’t last very long. I depended on my hair to make me feel feminine. I didn’t use much make-up. Most of the time, I wore jeans and plain shirts. I had broad shoulders, a thick waist. But I had my hair, and when I felt it looked beautiful, I felt beautiful. I also realized how much trust I had put in my hair to shield myself from others; if my hair was just gorgeous enough, I thought it would work as a distraction, pulling attention away from my faults so that no one saw them. It was like a reverse veil, and when I cut it off, I tore that veil open.

Growing it out again took what seemed like forever, but I learned to focus on other aspects of my appearance in the meantime. I began to like my eyebrows and the shape of my nose. I wore boat-neck shirts to show off my collarbone. I also noticed shifts in my personality at times. There were occasions, when I felt more masculine because of my hair, that I caught myself doing things I wouldn’t expect. Several times, when I put on a baseball cap to run errands or go to the park, I’d raid my brother’s closet first, pulling out his baggy cargo pants or blue jeans and a sweatshirt to wear. When it was busy at the gym and I’d glance in the mirror across the room, it would sometimes take me a minute or two to find myself among all the shaggy-haired guys. The first time this happened, I felt a knot of dismay form in my stomach—did I really look that much like a guy? But I told myself that, in this environment, it made me more anonymous, and the anonymity gave me a sense of freedom I hadn’t felt at the gym before. Usually, if the weight room was busy, I’d either avoid it altogether, or worry about what the guys might think of me and my ten-pound weights. When I felt like I was closer to being “one of the guys,” I found myself lifting more weight, doing more repetitions, focusing more on my workouts—like I figured the guys were—than being distracted by thoughts of work, or gossip, or how the guys might look at me.

Eventually, I got used to the pendulum-swing of my emotions concerning the masculinity or femininity of my appearance, and I settled somewhere in the middle. I settled into me. In the end, I did let go of more than just my hair—it just turned out to be more complicated and emotionally taxing than I thought. And I learned that people still liked me, even without much hair.

The Blowout

For nearly my entire life, the only person who ever cut or styled my hair was my mom, but since I’ve moved to Texas and her salon is in Indiana, I’ve had to find another hairdresser. And I knew just how to do it. In one of my first graduate seminars, I noticed a classmate of mine had gorgeous highlights in her red hair: shimmery tones of amber and dark red blended so well with lighter tones of strawberry blonde that the only way I could’ve seen exactly where the stylists had put each foil paper for each shade would’ve been to stand right over her head and stare at it. Obviously, she went to someone good.

That’s how I found Ernestina. She wears bright pink lipstick and fake eyelashes, and her long black hair has different, dramatic highlights every time I see her. “Everybody calls me Ernie,” she said when we first met, and I found it funny that a hairstylist so girly would go by a man’s name. Ernie has been in the business for over a decade, but surprisingly, she still works at a chain salon in the shopping mall. Most stylists fresh out of cosmetology school start at a chain, work there for maybe a year or two, then move on to smaller, private salons. Not Ernie, who’s moved her way up to manager. “I just like it here,” she shrugged. “I’ve got my regulars, but I’ve also got new people everyday. I like the change.”

Ernie and I chatted about everything hair: the latest flat irons, the trends in color, the new dry shampoos. I told her I was writing an essay that had to do with hair, and that led to us swapping stories. “One of my friends had this horrible boyfriend. He was so mean. Treated her awful. But for some reason,” she said and shook her head, “she stayed with him… God, forever it seemed. You want a little more off these bangs?”

“Maybe just a little,” I replied. Another sign she was a good stylist: she always cut a little less than I asked for, then checked with me before cutting more. I wanted to change my hair, but not drastically, so I was having Ernie style my hair with it parted on the right side, not the usual left.

“Yeah, I think so, too. Anyway,” she said, “he left her. Big surprise. And she got depressed, like we all do, right? So I told her, ‘Come in to the salon; we’ll do a big makeover.’ Do you want it styled curly or straight today?”

“Straight.”

“So she comes in. I fix her up—new cut, color, conditioning treatment—the whole thing. She looks so good that when she sees him at a restaurant a couple days later, he can’t stop staring. He calls the next day, says he wants her back. But she tells him no, ’cause now she feels so much better about herself that she doesn’t need him.” Ernie laughs and tosses her hands in the air, a $200 blow dryer in one hand and a round brush the size of an oil drum in the other. “It was the hair—you know, girl? It was the hair.”

Sally Hershberger is known as the rock-and-roll queen of hairstylists, one of the most sought-after on both coasts, a favorite of celebrities like Michelle Pfeiffer, Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Jon Bon Jovi, and Sandra Bullock. She is the stylist who gave Meg Ryan her signature look. At her salon in L.A., a session with Hershberger for hair extensions will cost around $3,000. In New York—where her salon sits between the boutiques of Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen on 14th Street in the trendy meatpacking district and is so cool it doesn’t have a sign out front—a haircut from her will cost somewhere between $600 and $800. She owns homes in New York, L.A., and East Hampton, where she throws legendary parties for hosts of A-listers. As she told one interviewer, “I used to hate to say I was a hairdresser. But now it’s like, we make more money than doctors and lawyers.”

Hershberger believes she’s not just a hairdresser—she’s an artist. When asked about her signature style, the shag, she stated, “I mean, if you see a Frank Lloyd Wright, you know it’s a Frank Lloyd Wright.” And she’s not alone in this belief. Brad Johns, colorist at the Avon salon in the Trump building on Fifth Avenue, is famous for his clients’ sun-kissed, buttery blonde chunks (“I invented the child at the beach,” he quips). His clientele has included James King, Vanessa Redgrave, and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, about whose hair he was so proud that the Kennedys’ lawyers had to issue a cease-and-desist order to get him to stop talking about it, although it didn’t really work.

But Bessette Kennedy’s hair didn’t become famous just because it was gorgeous; it also became famous for what it represented: wealth. Although it appeared effortless, her look was an example of what many refer to as status hair: high maintenance, and very, very expensive. As Johns has said, “People come to us not to get their hair done. People come to us to buy one of our paintings. Your head is my canvas.” And, like a Picasso, Matisse, or Warhol, it costs.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” she asked.

Her name was Shelly, and she must’ve been in her early 20s, her greasy hair that shade of blonde that’s best described as dirty. She had it pulled back, the ponytail just a short stub sticking out like a stiff paintbrush, and as soon as the elastic tie would loosen enough to give way to a strand or two around her face, she’d redo the whole thing, pulling harder and harder every time, beads of sweat forming around her eyes.

We were doing laundry in Harrison, Arkansas, a small town on the northern edge of the Ozarks. I was two weeks into a three-week stint as a writer-in-residence at Buffalo River National Park, nearly 40 miles away, tucked away in a small apartment over a horse stable and spending most days writing, kayaking, hiking, and avoiding all human contact. But I’d started to get cabin fever and a powerful craving for ice cream, so I’d come to town for the day. Instead of my swimsuit or camping clothes, I’d worn a cotton sundress, well-wrinkled from being shoved in the bottom of my suitcase.

Shelly spit in her foam cup, her bottom lip bulging with dip just a little less than before. There were two kinds of washing machines in the laundromat, so I’d asked her which one she thought was better. She nodded at the one she was using. “These here are a little bigger, I think. Get a little more done for your money.”

When I asked Shelly how she knew I was from out of town, she grinned. “Well, it’s a Saturday. At the laundromat. You’re wearing a dress.” She laughed and sorted through her clothes: men’s white T-shirts, tube socks, jersey athletic shorts, baby jumpers, onesies. I figured she had kids then, and a husband or boyfriend. “Nobody here wears dresses to the laundromat.” She wore a pair of grey, too-tight cotton shorts and a blue tube top, her belly showing in the in-between of the outfit. She glanced up at me. “And your hair. It’s real pretty.”

My face grew warm as I thought about the time I’d spent that morning with a blow dryer and a straightening iron, and I found myself gathering my hair into a ponytail as I talked. “Oh, yeah. Well, I’ve been down at the park,” and I told her how I was a writer for the park service this summer, how my hair had been in pigtail braids or stuffed under a hat for the past two weeks, how I had to check the shower for spiders every morning so I was never in it for very long, how I hadn’t been wearing any make-up, on and on and on. She nodded and wiped the sweat from her forehead with her thumb. Finally, I tired of my own voice. “So, you know, when you’re traipsing around the woods covered in sweat and bug spray day after day, it’s kind of nice to put on a dress and give the braids a break.”

“Yeah,” she said, throwing a load of wet clothes into a dryer. “I don’t wear dresses too often. Don’t have much reason to, with two kids and a husband and work. Just too busy, I guess.”

I remembered a time two years prior, when I’d just moved to Baltimore from western Kentucky for graduate school and was chatting with some fellow recruits at the department’s welcome reception, complete with a full free bar, ribs, and oysters. When the discussion was schools, the recruits talked Ivy League; I talked athletic programs. When it was poetry, they talked Rimbaud; I talked Penn Warren. When it was fishing, they talked deep sea from a yacht; I talked catfish. And we found each others’ sides of the conversation equally fascinating—except for one older woman, slender with a beautiful gray bob, dressed in a linen suit and a huge Cartier watch, who grew more and more exasperated with me every time I spoke, rolling her eyes, shrugging her shoulders, huffing. She reviewed plays for a well-established East Coast newspaper, and her husband worked in politics. She was pursuing this degree “for fun.” Finally, after I answered a question from the group about Kentucky (“Is the grass really blue?”), she cleared her throat and looked me up and down before asking, “How, again, did you get here?”

Standing across the aisle from Shelly at the laundromat, watching her pull clothes from the dryer and fold the onesies with permanent stains, listening to her talk about her job at a pawn shop and her hope that this year, since her husband got an entire week off from the tire dealership, they could make it up to Branson for vacation, I felt like I’d become that woman at the reception. I didn’t mean to, but I worried that my blush and blowout and three-week vacation carried the same weight for Shelly as that woman’s words had for me. That somehow, my out-of-place attempt to feel pretty that Saturday morning was just another reminder of something—time? freedom? money?—that she didn’t have.

I wanted to tell Shelly that I understood, that growing up I spent plenty of Saturdays with my mom at the laundromat, that right now I had less than a hundred dollars to my name. But I was caught between a poor past and a present that was rich with experience and culture, and I couldn’t find firm footing in either. I had the middle-class version of status hair, the inside track on all the great products, tools, and techniques from my mom. Maybe if I’d worn the braids or a baseball cap, my conversation with Shelly would’ve been different. Maybe. But that day, I didn’t try to sympathize aloud. It wouldn’t have been believable if I’d said those things to her. My hair was too clean, too straight, too shiny.

When Ernie finishes with me at the salon, and my newly-trimmed bangs fall across my left eye, and my hair glows from the thermal shine product she tested on me, I experience the same high as her broken-hearted friend. Neither the amount of the bill, nor the fact that I’ve gone without coffee drinks and trips to the movie theater for four months just to afford Ernie, gives me a moment’s pause at the counter. In a week or two, when I choose more sleep over fixing my hair, or when West Texas experiences one of its rare rainy days and I go to work with a full head of frizz, I’ll be ashamed of my new-’do excitement and how much money I spent for it, and all of my doubts and quandaries about my appearance, my femininity, my hypocrisies and superficialities will return like dark roots on a blonde. I’ll do my best to work through them. Like each time before, I’ll come out knowing myself a little better and, at the same time, being a little more comfortable with the fact that I may never untangle all of my anxieties, which is maybe even more important.

But as I leave Ernie’s salon, running my fingers through my hair and thinking there is no better adjective for it than silk, none of this is on my mind. Right now, I feel like buying a new dress and heels. I feel like going out with all my girlfriends to the most chic restaurant and laughing with them until I’m hoarse. I feel like flying to Sally Hershberger’s salon in New York and telling her I know she’s worth every penny. I want to get in better shape, be a better person, drive into the sunset with the windows down and sing 80s glam rock and Dolly Parton songs all the way to the Pacific. I want to take over the world.

I want to be a hairstylist.