#239: Hair
Her husband's electric razor hums in her hand like an oversized hornet. Zipporah regards her reflection as a stranger. The razor drones and the triple blades whirl and this is the only sound, the apartment sleepy with mid-afternoon quiet. Ben at school, and Rachel with Miriam, and Finn at work, and she herself should head back to the library. Yes. Or call her supervisor and tell her she won't be back in today. Kathy will be understanding. Someone else can cover reference for the rest of the day. They hadn't been too busy when she'd left. Yes. Call Kathy. Good plan. And there's so many other people to call, people George won't think to, and indeed shouldn't have to right now.
G-d, poor George. He's going to be a wreck, she thinks, calmly. She starts compiling the list of people to call.
The razor keeps buzzing. Zipporah raises it with one hand and takes the first handful of her long, long hair with the other, tries to think of the phone number for Kathy's desk as the first curls drop to the tile.
**
As a child she'd worn it in pigtails and ponytails. Rubber bands pinching cruelly at the end of each day, scalp sore and aching. Her mother had brushed it on Friday evenings. Preparation for Shabbat. Do not ruin your hair, Zipporah, she'd admonish, and Zipporah would squirm under the brush until it was done and run off as soon as possible.
As a child she'd also chewed the ends, and that had earned her smacks to the back of her hands, sometimes with the flat of the brush. Such pretty hair you have, stop eating it!
Yes, mother.
**
Auburn curls falling, falling. Who knew she had so much of it? The little razor whines as it's called upon to tackle something more substantial than Finn's morning stubble. The razor smells of him, or his aftershave, maybe? Something that is equal parts masculine and soap and musk and talcum.
Bzzz, bzzz, bzzz. She should get him a new razor.
This might be easier with scissors. Start with scissors, move to razor. That's how you're supposed to do it, she chides herself, but she's already started now and the scissors are out in the living room and the buzz helps cover the apartment's brutal silence.
Poor George. It's a mantra, said in time to the razor's drone. Poor George. Alone now. He'd been sobbing when she'd left, there in the hideous plastic bucket chairs in the hospital lobby, and she'd said, "I'm going to get you some tissue," and she'd stood and walked to the bathroom. And somehow kept walking, out to the parking lot, bus stop, bus, another bus stop, two-hundred-and-twenty steps to the building, taking the stairs up, fifty stairs, and inside with the jangle of keys and then sitting down in the empty living room waiting to feel something. Ten minutes by the clock until she'd stood again and moved into the bathroom.
George could use a trim too, she thinks, and turns her face to watch the razor's path over her temple. George's hair is in a short little ponytail these days that doesn't flatter him at all. He needs a haircut.
Max doesn't. Max doesn't need anything now.
**
Sixteen when she started wearing it long and free on a regular basis, letting it fall down her back. Straight was the style, straight with beaded headbands or daisy garlands, and she had envied her friend Ingrid's cascade of smooth cornsilk-blonde hair, but one disastrous attempt at ironing out her own curls proved that was a lost battle with genetics.
The rest was doable, though: peasant blouses, skirts, bare feet. Her feet turned brown in the summers and flashed under the hem of her skirt when she danced. And her hair fell long and wild, thick, heavy with flowers. Ingrid's cousin had first seen her dancing-- had fallen in love (he claimed) in that moment. Finn with his Nordic sky eyes and his hair like Ingrid's, silky-soft to the touch. (Finn with his bullshit.)
**
Max is going bald, she remembers. Ah. No. Max had been going bald. This is going to take time to get used to.
Zipporah tilts her head forward and pulls the long loose clumps of hair free to drop to the floor. Rubs her hand over the stubble that is the razor's legacy. It's prickly and uneven, down to nearly sandpaper-rough in places and still a centimeter's worth of hair in others.
She fingers the top of her head, the place where Max's spreading bald spot had been on his skull, thinks how self-conscious he'd been about it, how they'd joked about him wearing the yarmulke again just to cover it up. Her fingers travel to the roughness of the scar high up on her temple, normally invisible.
Zipporah's reflection looks back at her and she doesn't recognize herself. Her head looks too small. Ugly as hell. Her hair is unarguably her best feature and it's all on the floor. Max would say she looks like a goddamn chihuahua, a cancer patient, an Auschwitz survivor. Okay, even Max might not say that one.
She envisions him saying the words, imagines just the tone of voice he'd use, and waits for her heart to break and her reflection to start crying. But the woman in the mirror stares back dry-eyed, and eventually she turns the razor off.
**
For Israel and for the desert she had braided it. Unbound, it hung easily past her waist, and it simply wasn't practical. The land had said to her, this is no place for flowers. No-- there had been no place for softness in the desert, only the starkness of rock and sky and shadow. Israel had said to her, we are at war to survive; if you are here you must come as a soldier. By the time they'd headed out into the sand her wardrobe had become a montage of military surplus: boots, khakis, a canvas jacket that had to date from World War II. They had suited the taut, single-minded focus of her life then.
And by the end, blood in the sand and blood in her hair. Matting the tight utilitarian braid.
But she'd come home. And her father had kissed her temple and murmured Hebrew at her that she was too tired and drugged to comprehend, but he was proud, she thought. He'd better be; she couldn't handle it if he wasn't.
No more dancing after that. Nothing to do but pick up the pieces, try and figure out where she fit now. Remember that she had a husband and a life to return to.
Max had helped then. When her father spoke to her with silences and mysteries and perhaps fear, and when Finn touched her like she was glass with his blue blue eyes showing animal hurt and frustration and ignorance, when people murmured pity behind her back-- Max only laughed and treated her as he always had. Gave her the same shit he had since childhood.
Anchor. Touchstone.
**
She returns to the living room. Her scalp itches, and so does her body where stray hairs have worked their way down into her clothes. The bathroom floor is awash in dark copper strands. She sits down on the couch and picks up the phone and dials Kathy's desk. Personal emergency, she explains, and Kathy is solicitous and asks if she needs a few days off. Zipporah says that yes, thank you, that would be wonderful, and hangs up.
She wonders if saying my best friend just died a few hours ago would have done it, opened up the floodgates to let her start crying. Her eyes do itch, but it's just the hair. Zipporah figures this is still the denial stage of grief. Is it anger next? Or bargaining? She can never keep them all straight.
Her hands return to her scalp, feeling the roughness of the cut as more real than Max's death. She wonders if George is still at the hospital. She should call him. Or take a shower. Everything itches. She forces her hands to her lap and laces her fingers together. Finn will be home eventually. She imagines his face. It's funny. She laughs.
Five days ago the Death card had come up in a reading. She's spent years explaining to people that, no, it doesn't generally mean someone's gonna die-- it's all metaphor, it's all about change, transformation, rebuilding yourself. Don't get too freaked out by the morbid grinning skull.
Right now that's kind of funny too. Kind of.
There's a lot of people to call. Zipporah instead contemplates her mother's shock and horror. Your pretty hair, oy gevalt... And her father asking her quietly what she means by this. Is she emulating Job, perhaps-- sackcloth and ashes? Or opening a dialogue about the Orthodox Hasidic practice of shaving the head after marriage? Is this to serve as metaphor for loss? What is the significance of this act, my daughter?
There is no significance. She is sick of ritual and symbolism. I cut it because I fucking wanted to, Papi.
She twists her fingers together and looks at the far wall and waits. Waits for it to become real to her, waits for the anger she's supposed to feel, waits to start arguing with G-d. Waits for any of the last ten years to make sense. Her head is light without her hair.
**
It grows back, of course. By the time Finn divorces her, it's back down to her shoulders, and she decides this is a good length to keep it. Easier to take care of than waist-long, certainly.
Her mother dies, and it's while getting dressed for the funeral that Zipporah notices, to her shock, the arrival of grey hair. Ninja strands, creeping in stealthily at her temples and crown.
She's always told herself she's going to age gracefully, be one of those who accepts the years with regal dignity when they come. Easier said than done, easier too if she didn't feel like she's thrown the last fifteen years into an abyss. She frets over the grey for half an hour, and for the first time in at least a year reaches for the phone to call Max. Bubbeh, I'm gettin' old, quick, tell me it ain't so!
But he's dead, has been for four years now. Zipporah walks around the empty apartment, room to room, taking in each gap in the furniture and bookshelves where Finn is moving out his things. Taking himself out of her life and onto something else, someone better. Isaac won't say it to her face, but she's pretty sure the courts are going to give primary custody to Finn.
Finn. Ben and Rachel. Her mother. The holes and gaps are piling up, getting bigger, swallowing her. Where does she go from here?
It's a year after that-- a bitch of a year, a year of courtrooms and depression and Dr. Conrad and prescriptions-- and a lot more grey when she goes to the beauty salon down the street. Dye the grey back to match the rest, she tells the hairdresser, and settles into the chair. She watches in the mirror as the magic is worked and the illusion is crafted. A few years taken off.
Time to try living again. George tells her it looks good.
Fandom: OC
Muse: Zippy Levine
Word Count: 1850
G-d, poor George. He's going to be a wreck, she thinks, calmly. She starts compiling the list of people to call.
The razor keeps buzzing. Zipporah raises it with one hand and takes the first handful of her long, long hair with the other, tries to think of the phone number for Kathy's desk as the first curls drop to the tile.
**
As a child she'd worn it in pigtails and ponytails. Rubber bands pinching cruelly at the end of each day, scalp sore and aching. Her mother had brushed it on Friday evenings. Preparation for Shabbat. Do not ruin your hair, Zipporah, she'd admonish, and Zipporah would squirm under the brush until it was done and run off as soon as possible.
As a child she'd also chewed the ends, and that had earned her smacks to the back of her hands, sometimes with the flat of the brush. Such pretty hair you have, stop eating it!
Yes, mother.
**
Auburn curls falling, falling. Who knew she had so much of it? The little razor whines as it's called upon to tackle something more substantial than Finn's morning stubble. The razor smells of him, or his aftershave, maybe? Something that is equal parts masculine and soap and musk and talcum.
Bzzz, bzzz, bzzz. She should get him a new razor.
This might be easier with scissors. Start with scissors, move to razor. That's how you're supposed to do it, she chides herself, but she's already started now and the scissors are out in the living room and the buzz helps cover the apartment's brutal silence.
Poor George. It's a mantra, said in time to the razor's drone. Poor George. Alone now. He'd been sobbing when she'd left, there in the hideous plastic bucket chairs in the hospital lobby, and she'd said, "I'm going to get you some tissue," and she'd stood and walked to the bathroom. And somehow kept walking, out to the parking lot, bus stop, bus, another bus stop, two-hundred-and-twenty steps to the building, taking the stairs up, fifty stairs, and inside with the jangle of keys and then sitting down in the empty living room waiting to feel something. Ten minutes by the clock until she'd stood again and moved into the bathroom.
George could use a trim too, she thinks, and turns her face to watch the razor's path over her temple. George's hair is in a short little ponytail these days that doesn't flatter him at all. He needs a haircut.
Max doesn't. Max doesn't need anything now.
**
Sixteen when she started wearing it long and free on a regular basis, letting it fall down her back. Straight was the style, straight with beaded headbands or daisy garlands, and she had envied her friend Ingrid's cascade of smooth cornsilk-blonde hair, but one disastrous attempt at ironing out her own curls proved that was a lost battle with genetics.
The rest was doable, though: peasant blouses, skirts, bare feet. Her feet turned brown in the summers and flashed under the hem of her skirt when she danced. And her hair fell long and wild, thick, heavy with flowers. Ingrid's cousin had first seen her dancing-- had fallen in love (he claimed) in that moment. Finn with his Nordic sky eyes and his hair like Ingrid's, silky-soft to the touch. (Finn with his bullshit.)
**
Max is going bald, she remembers. Ah. No. Max had been going bald. This is going to take time to get used to.
Zipporah tilts her head forward and pulls the long loose clumps of hair free to drop to the floor. Rubs her hand over the stubble that is the razor's legacy. It's prickly and uneven, down to nearly sandpaper-rough in places and still a centimeter's worth of hair in others.
She fingers the top of her head, the place where Max's spreading bald spot had been on his skull, thinks how self-conscious he'd been about it, how they'd joked about him wearing the yarmulke again just to cover it up. Her fingers travel to the roughness of the scar high up on her temple, normally invisible.
Zipporah's reflection looks back at her and she doesn't recognize herself. Her head looks too small. Ugly as hell. Her hair is unarguably her best feature and it's all on the floor. Max would say she looks like a goddamn chihuahua, a cancer patient, an Auschwitz survivor. Okay, even Max might not say that one.
She envisions him saying the words, imagines just the tone of voice he'd use, and waits for her heart to break and her reflection to start crying. But the woman in the mirror stares back dry-eyed, and eventually she turns the razor off.
**
For Israel and for the desert she had braided it. Unbound, it hung easily past her waist, and it simply wasn't practical. The land had said to her, this is no place for flowers. No-- there had been no place for softness in the desert, only the starkness of rock and sky and shadow. Israel had said to her, we are at war to survive; if you are here you must come as a soldier. By the time they'd headed out into the sand her wardrobe had become a montage of military surplus: boots, khakis, a canvas jacket that had to date from World War II. They had suited the taut, single-minded focus of her life then.
And by the end, blood in the sand and blood in her hair. Matting the tight utilitarian braid.
But she'd come home. And her father had kissed her temple and murmured Hebrew at her that she was too tired and drugged to comprehend, but he was proud, she thought. He'd better be; she couldn't handle it if he wasn't.
No more dancing after that. Nothing to do but pick up the pieces, try and figure out where she fit now. Remember that she had a husband and a life to return to.
Max had helped then. When her father spoke to her with silences and mysteries and perhaps fear, and when Finn touched her like she was glass with his blue blue eyes showing animal hurt and frustration and ignorance, when people murmured pity behind her back-- Max only laughed and treated her as he always had. Gave her the same shit he had since childhood.
Anchor. Touchstone.
**
She returns to the living room. Her scalp itches, and so does her body where stray hairs have worked their way down into her clothes. The bathroom floor is awash in dark copper strands. She sits down on the couch and picks up the phone and dials Kathy's desk. Personal emergency, she explains, and Kathy is solicitous and asks if she needs a few days off. Zipporah says that yes, thank you, that would be wonderful, and hangs up.
She wonders if saying my best friend just died a few hours ago would have done it, opened up the floodgates to let her start crying. Her eyes do itch, but it's just the hair. Zipporah figures this is still the denial stage of grief. Is it anger next? Or bargaining? She can never keep them all straight.
Her hands return to her scalp, feeling the roughness of the cut as more real than Max's death. She wonders if George is still at the hospital. She should call him. Or take a shower. Everything itches. She forces her hands to her lap and laces her fingers together. Finn will be home eventually. She imagines his face. It's funny. She laughs.
Five days ago the Death card had come up in a reading. She's spent years explaining to people that, no, it doesn't generally mean someone's gonna die-- it's all metaphor, it's all about change, transformation, rebuilding yourself. Don't get too freaked out by the morbid grinning skull.
Right now that's kind of funny too. Kind of.
There's a lot of people to call. Zipporah instead contemplates her mother's shock and horror. Your pretty hair, oy gevalt... And her father asking her quietly what she means by this. Is she emulating Job, perhaps-- sackcloth and ashes? Or opening a dialogue about the Orthodox Hasidic practice of shaving the head after marriage? Is this to serve as metaphor for loss? What is the significance of this act, my daughter?
There is no significance. She is sick of ritual and symbolism. I cut it because I fucking wanted to, Papi.
She twists her fingers together and looks at the far wall and waits. Waits for it to become real to her, waits for the anger she's supposed to feel, waits to start arguing with G-d. Waits for any of the last ten years to make sense. Her head is light without her hair.
**
It grows back, of course. By the time Finn divorces her, it's back down to her shoulders, and she decides this is a good length to keep it. Easier to take care of than waist-long, certainly.
Her mother dies, and it's while getting dressed for the funeral that Zipporah notices, to her shock, the arrival of grey hair. Ninja strands, creeping in stealthily at her temples and crown.
She's always told herself she's going to age gracefully, be one of those who accepts the years with regal dignity when they come. Easier said than done, easier too if she didn't feel like she's thrown the last fifteen years into an abyss. She frets over the grey for half an hour, and for the first time in at least a year reaches for the phone to call Max. Bubbeh, I'm gettin' old, quick, tell me it ain't so!
But he's dead, has been for four years now. Zipporah walks around the empty apartment, room to room, taking in each gap in the furniture and bookshelves where Finn is moving out his things. Taking himself out of her life and onto something else, someone better. Isaac won't say it to her face, but she's pretty sure the courts are going to give primary custody to Finn.
Finn. Ben and Rachel. Her mother. The holes and gaps are piling up, getting bigger, swallowing her. Where does she go from here?
It's a year after that-- a bitch of a year, a year of courtrooms and depression and Dr. Conrad and prescriptions-- and a lot more grey when she goes to the beauty salon down the street. Dye the grey back to match the rest, she tells the hairdresser, and settles into the chair. She watches in the mirror as the magic is worked and the illusion is crafted. A few years taken off.
Time to try living again. George tells her it looks good.
Fandom: OC
Muse: Zippy Levine
Word Count: 1850