You often talked disparagingly about “those lesbians,” the women slightly overweight with the short spiked hair and the reminiscences about high school softball games in which they had hit winning homeruns or whatever it is people do well in softball. You would talk about those women while we walked beside each other on the boardwalk along the ocean in our town; we rarely touched; you never felt ready for the world to see us as a couple, though you claimed the problem was that you just did not “do” public displays of affection. A few years ago, though, the moment we disembarked from the plane that had carried us from our town to San Francisco, you clasped my hand in yours and even pulled me to you at baggage claim and kissed me on the lips, which made me wonder if an openly gay town was exempt in your complicated book of rules.
But I am talking about “those lesbians.” You would talk about them as we walked along the boardwalk because that is where the enormous cruise ships dock, and inevitably those thousands of tourists contain some lesbians—“butch” lesbians, you would call them, and I would hear the fear that crept into your voice. “I used to play basketball with those women; that’s why it took me so long to figure this out.” “This”: your euphemistic word for coming out, which you really hadn’t done and didn’t do, because now that you’re dead, you can’t. “This”: the word that made your voice lower, because even before you became insane, you were suspicious of the world. You didn’t want to be found out.
Why did they offend you so much, the pear-shaped women in their comfortable Merrell tennis shoes, their graying hair spiked and highlighted? Cameras hung around their necks; they were the most likely to wear sweatshirts advertising the cruise ships’ port of call. They seemed friendly, most of them. I wanted to follow them onto the hulking ships, sit down beside them at a bar, gaze out the round windows at the darkening sky and ask, How did you get to this place, this utterly open place?
I wanted to cut my hair.
Once, I told you I thought I might shave my head, and you told me flatly that you would leave me if I did. Leave me. Little did we know that three years later, you would go insane and become so frighteningly inconsistent in your moods and your intentions that I would leave you in the middle of the night clutching my child and my pillowcase. We had an argument about that, the evening you said it. You would leave me because I shaved my head? What if I got cancer? Oh, you said, that would be different, because it wouldn’t be your choice. As if the most heinous act I could commit would be to choose to look like one of “those lesbians.” It might look sexy, I argued. You didn’t want to talk about it anymore. It was as if I had offended you. Just don’t do it, you said.
Stupidly, I never did. I kept my hair long, its brown waves hanging just below my small pink nipples when I stood naked before you in our bedroom, before you started insisting in your self-hatred that we never see each other naked; you turned off the lights before you went into the bathroom to shower and then you sprinted from shower to bed. You were that ashamed of your body, which I always loved, to the end. And because you were ashamed of yourself, you could not bring yourself to look at me. Me, who you had once studied like a painter studies his model. Here is my long hair seductively hiding my breasts, and here is my smooth curved side and my flat belly with its surprise of a silver ring in the navel, and the hair you once loved to explore the way we used to love to wander new trails in the woods together until you started complaining of weariness and pain in your knees.
I could have shaved my head in our last year together and you would have never noticed. You had gotten lost by then inside yourself; I imagined reaching into your empty eyes and pulling you back to the surface; I imagined the rope I would weave out of my shorn hair to haul you back up to yourself. Yelling at you hadn’t worked; neither had silence; neither had sex. I went to a salon and had fifteen inches cut off my hair—just to the edge of my chin—and then I walked back home. You brightened, briefly, our daughters beaming beside you: It’s beautiful, you said. You look free. I was.
How can I forgive myself for what I actually cut off? Somewhere in our ocean-side town, the fifteen-inch braid of my hair packaged to be mailed to Locks of Love; somewhere you, staring emptily, your heart beating irregularly maybe because it was bleeding from the rent I left when I yanked my own heart away. You said you would leave me if I ever shaved my head, but you never imagined I would leave you. No one ever had.
When you died, I stood for several hours and considered leaping off a cliff. It seemed more certain than a drug overdose or a train “accident” with my car. But eventually, I edged away from the cliff and drove home the twenty miles to pick up my child from my mother’s care, and then I just held myself and sobbed angry hot tears that this ended when and how it did. Then, silent and spent, I considered a pair of scissors. From Sherman Alexie, I had learned that some Native American tribes abide by the tradition of shearing off one’s long and sacred hair at the death of someone beloved. It seemed appropriate. I held my ponytail in one hand and the scissors aloft in the other. But I could only hear your ridiculous threat: I’ll leave you if you shave your head; I was so desperate for you to haunt me; maybe the answer was to never cut my hair again. So I didn’t. But you didn’t appear.
I’ve cut it very short now.
If you had met me for the first time with my hair like this, you might have called me one of “those” lesbians. You might have merely nodded at me and then kept on walking. But if you had been able to swallow your fear for a moment, you might have looked into my eyes and still fallen in love with me, and then maybe your mind wouldn’t have crumbled. Maybe you wouldn’t have died.
But you did die, and the first time we met—nine years ago—my hair was long. You were my professor. You always said you noticed me immediately, the way I sat on the edge of my seat, attentive, my back strong, my hair wild and beautifully long.
You did die, and I cannot conjure you back. Driving one day, my hair still long, I say desperately, I’m going to shave my head, and from the back seat, my five-year-old daughter, whom we adopted from Ethiopia together, yells, “No! If you do, I’ll move back to Africa!” and—inexplicably—I start laughing, hysterically, because it will never be for my hair or lack of hair that anyone leaves me in this world.
I know that, now.