Warning: This post contains several less-than-dependable memories and just a pinch of exaggeration.
Among the many school portraits of my sister and I that line our hallway, is a particularly awkward photograph of me at eleven or twelve years old. I have it on good authority that I look like a duck in that picture. People have been known to take one look at it and burst out laughing. There is a distinctly duck-like expression on my face, the result of trying to smile for the camera without showing my crooked teeth. I’m dressed in a powder blue dress that brings out the olive tones in my skin and makes me look slightly gray - the portrait was probably taken in December when my complexion is at my palest. A broad lace collar extends from the base of my very puffed sleeves and comes to a point in the center of my chest. My eyes are puffy and half-closed. I don’t even know why. Perhaps I spent the drive to the studio in tears because of that dress. But the worst part is the haircut, full-bodied and short on top, with a longer, tapered layer falling halfway down my neck. Like a mullet, but one that hasn't been trimmed in a year.
My problems all started with a lake. We all swam in this lake - my parents, my sister, the friends we were visiting, and I - but I was the only one who emerged with fungi on my scalp. It started with a flaky patch the size of a pea at the base of my neck and started to spread. My mother took me to one dermatologist after another, but none of the salves they put on my head made it go away. They finally agreed that my hair was just too thick, and if my scalp could breath, the fungus would clear up.
They took me to a hairdresser with curly red hair. I really have no idea who she was. I vaguely remember a house with moss on it, and that he kitchen had one of those doors that splits horizontally in the middle. It is only after the haircut was complete that my memory starts to fill in the details. The lady held a mirror up in front of my face so that I could assess the damage for myself. I gulped and clutched the edge of the sheet she’d draped over me.
“Do you like it?” the lady asked. What could I say? I was eleven years old, the age at which a bad haircut really can ruin your life. I clenched my jaw and nodded. The tears now pushed hard against the inside of my face, as though they might burst out, not just through my eyes, but through my nose, mouth and ears as well.
I held my anguish in until my mom and I were safely inside our car and on our way home. My mother said, “You don’t like it, do you?” and that did it. Two seconds later, I was sobbing and spitting and blowing my nose on the roll of toilet paper we kept in the back seat of our red suburban. For the first time, I held in my mind the image of myself as a monster. I had become something barely human and certainly not female - something awkward and pimply and covered in snot.
The school picture was taken a few months after the haircut, which continued to affect my self-image for years. That picture on my wall is like a bogart (had to get the Harry Potter reference in there somewhere!) – It can’t hurt you if you can laugh at it. And so I keep it around now just to show it off to guests and get the first laugh, thus disarming it. Besides, it has become something of a comfort to me when other people poke fun at it – I know they wouldn’t do so if I still looked like that.
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