Hair of the Dog

I’ve been told for about three years that I need a haircut. Both my daughters cut their waist length hair this Christmas because they said, looking at me, they realized how gross long hair could get. Almost-50 year old women are not supposed to wear their hair below their shoulders. The cut-off age is 30, according to my now dead mother—no one over the age of 30 should wear their hair like a girl’s. Rules notwithstanding, the problem, according to my girls, was not my age, but the hair, the kind of hair I have, the stringiness and wispiness and colorlessness of it. I just didn't need too much of a bad thing.

Last March when Anny and Michael were visiting she would sometimes look sidelong at me and say as sweetly as possible: “I wonder what you would look like with a kind of bob. You have the kind of hair that would sway if you had the right kind of bob, cleanly cut—you know—just below your chin.” I looked at Anny and looked at Anny’s hair. Since when did you rule the cult of makeovers? I wanted to say but didn’t.

“Do I need to cut my hair?” I asked Daniela. She turned me around by the shoulders to guage something I couldn't see behind me as though the thought had never occurred to her. She lifted my ponytail. “Si,” she said, matter-of- factly.

I have to be in the right mood to face myself in the 3-way mirror of a beauty shop, face myself trussed up in one of the gowns they make you wear with your hair all goopy on top of your head so your face is all face and all its wrinkles and imperfections and something else that has nothing at all to do with the flesh but more with what is unknowably in your own eyes staring back at you. And for some reason, I have never had the courage to go to a beauty parlor in Spoleto even though Daniela knows every parucchiere in town, or maybe it’s because Daniela knows every parrucchiere in town and I am wary of her habits becoming contagious so that, before I know it, a trim could become layers, become a bob that sways at the chin with a 100 euro a week highlight-to-hide-the-gray habit.

Last March when I took Anny and Michael to Assisi to photograph the Green Man on the altars of the Basilica, the guard would not let me in the church because of Desiree. “No problem, we’ll just take a little walk,” I told them and we agreed to meet up in an hour. I’d had no intention whatsoever of going to the beauty parlor but, walking up a lonely street, I met a woman sweeping wisps of hair into a gutter. She liked my dog. She called and clucked and asked me what her name is and how old she was and could she caress her and Desiree responded as she does only to true dog lovers and, before I knew it, I was in her chair, trussed up, facing that face you find only in a 3-way mirror. She cut enough for Michael to notice I’d had a haircut, though Anny swore she could not tell a difference and thought I was lying just to tease her. I felt lighter. I felt like my haircut was providential and I kept the woman’s card. I like haircuts that do not announce themselves.

Friday I took a group of 20 students on a fieldtrip to Todi. I think the thing about me and haircuts is they must always take me by surprise. The last thing I’d have imagined myself capable of doing is cutting off my hair in the middle of a student field trip. But the intern, Marijana, and I were walking along talking about how best to get to know a town, after you’ve seen all the churches and museums. It just occurred to me that that the best way to learn about the underbelly of a culture is to find a beauty parlor and allow the man who cuts the hair of the heads of the townspeople cut yours.

Marijana claims she was instantly worried for me when she saw how old the parruchiere was and how suspect his old-fashioned pompadour and how feeble and fumbly his arthritic hands. She worried about the funny thing he did with the scissors, sliding the blade up and down the hair shafts as though to tease them into split ends. And then I’d told him no more than two centimeters and she’d watched him lop off hanks, great lengths of hair, cascading down the glossy black cape I was wearing to pile in endless heaps on the floor while I seemed oblivious, seemed to be transfixed by Desiree’s eyes watching me in the mirror.

It was a haircut that announced itself, but my students, when we met them at the restaurant for pranzo, were polite, deferent, waiting for me to explain to them why I’d done what I’d done before they gasped in horror. “It doesn’t look as bad as I thought it would,” Marijana kept telling them. “I’ve never seen anyone do what this man did with scissors. But then I looked around and he’d won some awards and…well, it’s short, but…it looks normal, as far as haircuts go.”

I thought I should be more devastated than I was, thought I should feel some pang of remorse for lost self-image or identiy. But my unique experience of Todi had cost me nothing but 15 euro and a fistful of hair. For some reason I felt I had gained far more than what they believed I’d lost.