It’s Christmas and I am home, taking an all-too quick break from my graduate studies at a boring university in the Midwest. I like my hair short, but I haven’t had it cut since September and it has grown overly long. My bangs tickle my eyes, the sides flay outwards in long ginger tufts—my hair needed to be shaped up a long time ago, and it’s now a pixie cut threatening to become a bob.
So I visit my regular hair salon, and it should be a boring thing except hair salons make me anxious in ways that I am not usually anxious. The environment is hyper-feminine: the chairs in the sitting area shaped like high heels, the owner has hung up shampoo posters centering high-cheekboned models, and there’s always at least one other customer already there—a woman who is invariably making easy, small talk with their hairdresser about her boyfriend, their upcoming vacation to Florida, and all the desires she has for both.
And I wish I could speak as easily as that, but I am afraid that the moment I open my mouth the people here will see through me: they’ll realize that I am an ugly girl performing the motions of femininity, and that while they cut my hair they’ll think to themselves, “why are we wasting our time with this one?”
But keeping my mouth shut is impossible, because my hair color invites conversation, even if my resting bitch face and stilted conversation don’t.
My hair color is the first thing the hairdresser wants to talk about, and it’s a shame because I liked her at first. She resembles my aunt, Libby: mid-to-late 60s, Italian, skin as browned and weathered as a leather couch, acrylic nails that click in my ears as she washes my hair—she even has Aunt Libby’s graveled voice, cultivated over the years by a pack-a-day cigarette habit. I think she’s glamorous and tough and so unlike the butter-soft women who surround me in the Midwest. I want to warm to her, to believe that this won’t be another haircut where I sit anxious in the chair, but then she makes the statement:
“This is a beautiful color,” she says, pronouncing “color” with a thick Rhode Island accent: cull-uh.
I stare straight up at the salon’s ceiling, readying myself for The Questions.
“Now, what about your family?” she asks. “Any of them have red hair?”
“No.” If I keep it simple maybe the line of questioning will end.
“Must be the grandparents,” she persists.
“My gramma says my papa had red hair,” I concede, “But I wouldn’t know because he doesn’t have red hair now.”
Aunt Libby laughs like this is hilarious (but it’s just a true statement: my papa is a skeleton, presently he does not have red hair), and now I have to pretend to be interested as she lists her own various family members with red hair.
During the Covid-19 lockdowns, my sister and I acted out these tired conversations as she clipped my hair for me, making our own hair salon out of a lawn chair and a parasol in the back yard. Milly would put on her most exaggerated Rhode Island accent as she orbited my head with a pair of kitchen scissors and parroted the dullest, most obvious things that have been said to me by hairstylists.
“This is a byootiffull culluh,” Milly would say, “My neffew has haiahh this culluh.”
And Aunt Libby hit all the notes perfectly. She tells me about her grandson, who has red hair, and marvels at how genetics work—cuz their family is Italian and they all have dark hair, so isn’t that weird? I say something like “Wow, that’s crazy” to be polite, and Aunt Libby leads me from the hair-washing station to her chair. She wraps a towel around my neck and spins me around to face the salon’s mirror. Once again, I must confront my reflection and wonder if I’ve always been this ugly.
She fingers my hair. “Beautiful,” she says again, “And it’s natural too, I can tell. Don’t ever dye it, so many women would die for this color.”
Hair salons make me anxious because they remind me of all the ways in which I am a failure. They remind me of the ways in which my hair is coveted, and how I don’t live up to that covetousness because my hair is the beautiful thing, and I am not.
—
I have been categorized as “red” from the moment I was born. I was the only red-headed baby in the hospital nursery. My first Halloween costume was Pebbles from The Flintstones (my mom stuck a chicken bone through my hair). When out in public spaces with my parents, old ladies would frequently stop them to tell me how beautiful my hair was, and I assumed that my parents were friends with all these old ladies. A stranger wouldn’t interrupt your afternoon at the mall to tell you how beautiful your hair was, right?
There’s a 1994 episode of Rugrats called “Chuckie’s Red Hair” that’s stuck with me because it perfectly demonstrated this phenomenon of old lady-stoppage. Chuckie, the resident carrot top and notorious scaredy-cat in the titular group of babies, is terrified of all the strangers stopping him when he’s out with his dad. They get too close to his face and nuzzle his hair without asking, calling him an adorable redhead and so on so forth. So, Chuckie steals Grandpa’s black hair dye and is—at first—delighted that strangers are no longer paying any attention to him. However, Chuckie soon finds that he’d rather be fussed over than have no one pay attention to him, and when the hair dye washes away at the end of the episode, Chuckie happily rejoices: “I’m a redhead again!”
Someone on the Rugrats staff must have had a redheaded kid, and must have been tired of the ways their life was constantly being stopped and started again for their kid to be told how special they were. Strangers don’t fuss over me in public anymore (for the most part, an old lady will occasionally compliment my hair these days), but I continue to wish for the total anonymity of brunette or blonde hair—to go to the same coffee shop every now and then and order the same thing without becoming “a regular,” to go to the grocery store without being stopped by someone who remembers me from high school, but whom I don’t remember back. But I’d never dye it—too many old ladies had warned me not to, and I’m too convinced that without my remarkable hair color I’d be totally stripped down to my extra body fat, my squashed Irish face, and my stout potato figure.
I tried telling a boyfriend about this once, and he rolled his eyes and said, “I know, you told me once when you were drunk and started crying.”
I have a theory that this boyfriend hated me.
My stalker, before he became my stalker, said to me, “I don’t know why everyone says your hair is red, it’s clearly blonde.”
I have a theory that my stalker never desired to know anything about me.
—
In the salon, Aunt Libby asks me if I want my hair layered in the back, and my mind blanks. I don’t know the definitions of these hairstylist words like “layered” and “dry shampoo.” I don’t even know why women on TV shows say things like “it’s been ages since I’ve washed my hair!” Don’t you do that every day while you’re showering? What happens if you don’t wash your hair every day? What happens if you do?
“Whatever you think is best,” I say, and then apologize: “I know that’s a frustrating answer, but you’re the expert. I don’t have a preference as long as it looks normal.”
Aunt Libby won’t have this, and she asks me again. I wish she would decide for me. Being asked to make a decision about my hair goes against the reason I cut it short in the first place: so I wouldn’t have to worry about it.
“Layer it,” I say, choosing blindly.
—
Every summer, my mom’s parents drove two days from Illinois for a week-long visit. No one fussed over me as much as Gramma Ling did. Before I was born, Gramma Ling had had a tremendous fight with her son, an uncle I’ve never met, and decided she was never going to speak to him again. So, the number of total grandchildren she had was reduced from three to two, her son’s son rendered non-existent, and my sister and I—already precious by virtue of our geographical distance—became more special due to scarcity. I was one of her precious only granddaughters, and my preciousness was made even more so by the color of my hair (Papa Ling, on the other hand, always made the effort to make my mouse-haired sister feel special, feeling that she was overlooked by his wife). According to Gramma Ling, I was gorgeous and I was going to have to fight off the boys when I grew up. Every morning when I ascended the stairs from my bedroom to the kitchen, Gramma Ling would sing “good morning” to me with a rendition of “There She Is, Miss America.” I would smile, embarrassed, whenever she did this because—even as a kid—I didn’t want to take part in the farce that I was beautiful or would grow up to become beautiful.
During one summer visit, Gramma Ling and I watched an episode of The Simpsons together in which Homer, also watching TV, drools over a leggy, redheaded woman sitting atop a lawyer’s desk, kicking her yellow legs back and forth. “According to Daddy’s will,” she says in a breathless southern drawl, “I inherit the entire plantation.”
This prompted Gramma Ling to say to the room, “That’s what Riah is going to be like when she grows up: tall, swinging her long red hair.”
I smiled politely. I was embarrassed by this the same way I was embarrassed by my good morning song, I felt that expectations were being set for me that I couldn’t possibly live up to. I was getting older, and I was noticing that all the redheaded women in my cartoons occupied one of two categories: sexpots or dorks, and there were far more women in the first category than the second.
In my house, we had a VHS copy of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but I never watched it because Jessica Rabbit made me fucking nervous. I couldn’t imagine myself interacting with men the way she did—tickling their chins, blowing kisses, making the jaws of cartoon wolves drop with nothing more complicated than a toss of her long red hair. And it wasn’t just Jessica Rabbit, it was The Powerpuff Girls’ Ms. Bellum: a disembodied voice, exclusively shown from the neck down, her existence reduced to an hourglass figure and a halo of shoulder length red hair. It was Daphne on Scooby-Doo, positioned as cuter and sexier when standing next to geeky Velma. Even the little mermaid exposed her midriff.
It seemed easiest not to try, to negate comparisons by not participating, and I cut my hair short for the first time in the seventh grade. My mom had always kept my hair long, encouraging a Princess Ariel fantasy, but long princess hair wasn’t cool in the era of Fall Out Boy and Panic! At The Disco. I needed something short and severe. The hairstylist warned me that cutting curly hair like mine short can make it poof out and take on a “pyramid” shape. But I was adamant, and the result was a red frizzy pyramid.
When I debuted the haircut at school, one of my bullies composed a song called “Mariah’s New Haircut” that was supposed to be mocking in some way I never grasped. This same bully would also ask me, “If your hair is red, does that mean your pussy hair is red too?”
I couldn’t answer, because I didn’t know what he was talking about. I only knew “pussy” as another word for cat.
—
I was inspired to cut my hair short-short for the first time by a rock singer: Billy Corgan from The Smashing Pumpkins.
Truthfully, I wanted to be vampire bald like he was, to be unencumbered not just by hair color but by hair itself. But I was in my early twenties and consumed by my in/ability to attract men, so the pixie cute felt like the most gender-appropriate option.
I decided to make the chop while I was crying. I was riding my bike down my town’s tick infested bike path when I suddenly became overwhelmed with sadness. My dad was cheating on my mom, he’d moved out of the house, I worshiped my dad but he had betrayed me terribly by leaving, and I hadn’t talked to him—the person I felt understood me best in this world—in months and months. I was upset about this but, mostly, I was crying for myself, for how pathetic I was to be upset about something as trivial as my parents divorcing when I was in college and shouldn’t care. There were little kids out there with divorced parents, why couldn’t I handle it at twenty years old? I pulled my bike over and sobbed in the breakdown lane, hoping that a good samaritan would stop to ask me what was wrong. No one did. But somewhere in all of that hoping and crying I decided that it wasn’t punk rock to have long hair, and I peddled my bike to Gramma Hopkins’ house to make my big announcement.
Gramma Hopkins had always had short hair, and she took my decision to mean I wanted to emulate her. She had also always dyed her hair red, a choice that circled back around to emulate me. She called her hair salon and drove me to a same-day appointment, boasting to the stylist the entire time that I wanted my hair short so I could be “just like gramma.” She also chuckled that my mom had always liked my hair long, and that she was going to be upset when I got home. When the stylist spun me around to show off the end result, it felt like the first time I’d ever seen myself in the mirror, the first time I’d ever seen Riah rather than just some sad girl the hairstylist had tried to make pretty with spray and gel.
I didn’t show my mom when I came home, and when she eventually stumbled upon me in the bathroom she gasped, taking an astonished step backwards.
I texted a picture of my new haircut to my dad, an olive branch. He called to tell me that I was beautiful.
—
As she is finishing up my haircut, Aunt Libby asks me questions about why I decided to cut it short, and I say:
“I never liked playing with Barbies when I was a kid, so much of it was about braiding their hair and that stuff wasn’t interesting to me.”
I’m apologizing again.
“That’s okay, honey,” she says, snipping away. “Lots of people are like that, you’re not weird. You’re just in a hair salon.”
About the Author:
Riah Hopkins is pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of South Dakota. Her work has been previously published by The Inquisitive Eater, EDGE CITY, Exposed Bone, and others. Riah teaches English and Creative Writing at Rhode Island College.