Pictures of You: Nadine Darling

” Haircut,” by Nadine Darling

I got the classic Mia Farrow “Rosemary’s Baby” haircut for my 35th birthday, at Vidal Sassoon in Boston. It was planned meticulously; I called the salon and asked for my hair to be cut by the director, a man named named Jacques. He had the most experience, they said, but he was also the most expensive. I assured them that that was fine. My mother was paying.

After donning my silky robe and having my hair washed by a tiny woman with several facial piercings and stomping Doc Martens, Jacques stood behind my chair and brushed my wet hair out with his fingers. His age seemed impossible to know. He had some kind of accent- not really French, but something. Chains that hung from his leather pants clinked like silverware with the slightest movement. We looked at me in the mirror. He asked me what I wanted and I told him. He was not surprised, but he smiled, his hands still in my hair.

“What has happened in your life to make you want this haircut?” he asked.

 “I just want a change,” I said.

 “Ok,” said Jacques, unconvinced. Without another word, he began to cut my hair.

In November of 2011, I got a call from my sister in Oregon. Our mother was in trouble, she said. Our mother, in the little home she shared with our father two blocks from where my sister lived with her own family, was having some manner of episode. Our mother could see but she didn’t know how to place things in a room. She could not tell if our father was in front of her in his recliner, or if he was to her left, or behind her. Our mother wanted to know where her purse was. She did not want to go to the hospital, because she had to make supper. If she could just sit down for a moment, she told my sister. If only she could sit down.

Well, it was a stroke, of course. Scary, but it could have been worse. The doctor said this. Everyone said this. I spoke to my mom in in her hospital room, where she sat with the lights dimmed, holding my sister’s hand.

 “I just feel so foolish,” she said.

 “Mom,” I said. “Jesus.”

She said, “I just feel like such a burden, is all.”

Sometime that same year, after Christmas, I got another call, this time from my mom herself. We chatted for a bit; I may have asked for a little money. No, actually, there was no question about it, I asked for money. Of course she said, of course. Then she told me why she was calling. They’d done an MRI on her brain after the swelling went down, to try and calibrate any damage that the stoke had done. And, it hadn’t been a stroke at all, it had been a brain tumor. Actually, the worst brain tumor. A stage four Glioblastoma.

“You don’t recover from those,” she said. “At my age, they said the best I can hope for is fourteen months. They’ll cut it out, but it will come back. They always come back.”

I stood there on my end and held the phone. I can’t describe the feeling well. I can describe it, but poorly. I felt like a flicker of something alive inside the husk of something else. I felt like this imperceptible pulse, hiding.

“Isn’t that funny?” Asked my Mom. “Glioblastoma. It sounds like a Pokemon.”

This is the only picture I have of me with the short hair. It’s me with my little kid, on my birthday. I should add that no one really liked the haircut, least of all me. The way you see it here took almost an hour of coaxing, and left my hair stiffly slick with wax. I would wake up looking like a dandelion that was possessed by the devil. I had a bunch of cowlicks and weird issues with my bangs. Most people, upon seeing the cut for the first time, echoed Jacques in some slightly less diplomatic way, “Why the hell did you do that to yourself?”

Well, I can tell you that it synced up perfectly with my mom undergoing chemo and radiation. We lost our hair. I thought about shaving mine down to the scalp just to see the new hair grow, to start fresh and see what my body could offer. New hair, not the splitting ghosts of my early thirties. By June of 2012, when we visited my folks in Oregon, my hair was back over my ears, reaching down toward my jawline. My mom’s was patchy; great sections of bare scalp shone starkly in the overhead lights.

 “Well,” she said, embracing me. “Look at us.”

She died, my mom, in October of 2013. I’d given birth to a son the month before and my hair was long again, long enough to hide behind. When I was a kiddie, she would brush out my hair after my bath and say that hair was a woman’s crowning glory, and I love and miss her everyday, but I don’t think that that is true. I think hair is just hair. I think hair is just something else that is not your heart, just the light from a dead thing, the waning memory of a birth.

 

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Nadine Darling Lives and writes on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Her first novel, SHE CAME FROM BEYOND! will be published by The Overlook Press in October of 2015.