My twin sister Katie and I found ease with our hair. It was incredibly thick, mostly straight, and sometimes held a wave from a bun or ponytail that looked curated. A friend once asked “Why do you always look like a pantene pro-v commercial?” Dark brown, a bright sheen that danced off the surface with natural highlights that stood out in the sun. “Wow! You have highlights!” a surprised remark surfaced in just the right light. Dark brown twinkled with shades of red or caramel.
Katie’s hair held a curl. She sometimes had a caretaker who could braid it across the top half of her head or twist the bottom parts into tight winding tubes that turned into perfectly coiffed sausage curls as it dried. Her chin was often coated in a fine layer of drool, pooling just at the corners of her mouth as she spoke until her head tipped forward and it spilled forth from between her lips. I spent most of my tweens and adolescence pulling it back into a ponytail for her, my mom calling out “you’re so good at that!” Her hair would laminate itself to her cheeks, her saliva acting like a kind of glue, holding it into place. I kept my eye on those strands, tried to help her cheeks stay clear and dry.
Katie was a box dye red head for most of her teens. She had a bright blue chair made of mesh and hollow plastic pipes that she would sit in during her bathtime, holding her body comfortably upright. The dye gathered in the tub below her and she emerged fresh, a new color lighting up the bright creamy quality of her skin, undamaged by the sun.
My oldest daughter Wynnie is 6 right now. She has our hair, mine and Katie’s. It’s not just the color, the sheen or the texture but it has the weight of Katie’s hair. It’s the kind of thick and lush hair that feels like that of a grown woman but it emerged by the time she was 3.
Her little sister is blonde, and the light fluff of her bright tussle, stretching down her back in straight paths, dragging towards her feet, is nothing like Wynnie’s. I am sitting on a seafoam blue couch over looking our kitchen with the warm morning light seeping through the forest adjacent to our property. Wynnie, her face just a few inches from my nose, asks “Mama, will you do my hair?” and every day I remind her to bring me the hair thing and the brush. We’ve perfected the process, which creates a look that draws remarks and attention often. “Wow! I had one of those ponytails in the 80’s!” She wants a very high pony tail, daily. We don’t stray from this style. Not since halfway through kindergarten. She sometimes attempts to brush the thick tangles but mostly she swings the brush, again, right up to my face, and has me brush the whole thing from root to tip. This hair of hers, it amazes me, decorating the frame of her spindly limbs and fine features. I watch her spring by in a pair of purple pajamas with snow flakes, she wears them year round even as the snow whites have faded to gray slush from too many washes. If I squint, she’s a teenager and her hair moves through space with the power and presence of a woman.
It’s not the kind of power or presence she wants. Wynnie tosses her head towards the floor in front of me and I gather her big bouquet of hair until she brings her head upright. She whines in frustration, “it needs to be higher!”
I hold the bundle right atop her head while she takes her tiny fingertips, her nails chewed down, and winds them through the roots, pulling a few strands out from right above her ears. She takes the tiny fuzz of her baby hairs and gathers it in a curated swirl right at her hairline. Finally, she takes the big bundle which reaches past her shoulders when it’s down, and divides the ponytail in half, framing her face,
“or else I look like I don’t have any hair,” she tells me.
When I’m running my hands through her hair, I’m a mother but I’m also a sister and a daughter. I think of my fingers gliding through my mother’s thick and silver-streaked bob. I think of the ways I attended to my sister, pulled her hair too tight until she growled at me or adjusted it gently atop her forehead. I remember the ways it made me feel connected to Katie through touch. I think of the heavy smell of Herbal Essences chamomile shampoo. Katie’s focus was on the itch on her cheek, the strands gathered across her field of vision, a special kind of hell she faced each and every day, her hands unable to move towards her face with grace or finesse —a joystick directing a jerky and unyielding claw, often reaching down for a plush prize, just unable to grasp it.
Sometimes as I’m pulling together Wynnie’s ponytail I try to connect this piece of history to this present moment.
“I used to do Katie’s hair all the time” I say or “Do you know who had hair exactly like you?”
It’s in these moments where the fragmented painful parts of our history resurface. They remind me of the puzzle pieces or plastic bits of toys we find in every corner of the house. They belong somewhere, with a thing, we’ve seen it somewhere else in the house but it’s not here now. We can’t throw away the puzzle piece but it has nowhere to live, we can’t find the box where it once belonged. I watch it for weeks on the corner of a kitchen island, unmoved. The kitchen table. On the carpet next to the couch. Sometimes I pick it up, move it onto their dresser or unto a basket of other items belonging to the girls: rocks, strings, 3 blue sequins, the half dried play dough pressed into a mold. I try to find containers for these things, places for them to inhabit.
Sometimes I’m deep in a dream when a shrill whine or a sharp giggle startles me awake. I was in France, in an old relationship, there’s a place I need to get to but I can’t get there. I’m lost somewhere and trying to resolve something but peel open my heavy eyelids and remember the life my husband and I have built together. The dog is curled next to me in bed, Ben has started a pot of coffee. I feel dropped into this new life, the one I’m in right now. The old things have vanished, there’s no way to recover them. I’m here now with my own hair swept across my forehead, tinkering with the tension in Wynnie’s high ponytail, thinking about Katie and the 29 years we had and can never return to.
I try not to go down the path my mind sometimes travels to; what if she could stand up from her wheelchair, come right into my arms, embrace me in all the ways her body never could inside the hard edges of her wheelchair. No, no, no I tell myself again and again don’t go there. Stay right here. And sometimes that feels wrong, too.
