Thresholds

Part I of Hair Practices

Bedford Ave is teeming with people on a sunny Friday afternoon. It has been four days since I completed radiation and eight weeks since my final chemo session. My hair has started coming in, all over my body. My eyebrows were the last to go and they are the first to return — dark and wilder than ever before. Then the peach fuzz on my face. Leg hair and pubic hair growing slowly but diligently. The most aggressive are the ones sprouting from my chin: long black twine clustered together, waiting to be plucked only to regrow twice as fast. I call them my witch hairs.

The hair on my head is the last thing to return.

I stop on the corner of Bedford Ave and Grand Street and hear a voice behind me say I love your look. When I turn around I see a woman in her twenties dressed head to toe in hot pink — pink tights, iridescent pink leotard, pink-dyed hair, a Betsey Johnson basketball-shaped purse. A third voice chimes in: a Hasidic woman to my left, in black from head to toe, heavy South Williamsburg accent, a Whole Foods bag in her hand. I love all this color, she announces.

We walk together down Bedford Ave. I am aware that I am walking between them — the Pink Lady on my right and the woman in black on my left — and that the gap in our ages is about twenty years in both directions.

Your hairstyle is amazing, announces the Pink Lady. I've always wanted to buzz my hair.

Yes, I love it, says my new Hasidic friend.

I want to reveal things to these strangers. Thank you. I wish it was intentional — it was actually a result of a recent cancer diagnosis.

Both women launch into the supportive but awkward compliments this disclosure reliably produces. We are a few blocks from my apartment now, at the intersection of Bedford Ave and Broadway. It is an exact demarcation between the secular world and the religious one, here in Brooklyn.

You have a very strong spirit, the Hasidic woman says. You will survive this, and you will be healthy again. Baruch Hashem.

Her words carry an unexpected gravitas, a truth I believe precisely because it is coming from her mouth. Before we part, she tells me her name is Rivki and I tell her mine. Realizing it is Friday, I wish her a Shabbat Shalom just as the sun begins to set. I walk into my apartment — a liminal threshold between the secular and religious worlds, both of which I feel I occupy, as if I am the very threshold itself.

Earlier that morning, I had stood in front of my bathroom mirror the way I had been standing in front of it for weeks. My scalp smooth in some places, a few stray hairs showing up sporadically, only to fall out a few days later. The head of a fuzzy egg. I had learned to be playful about these things to cover my insecurities about having lost what felt, for as long as I could remember, like a fundamental part of being legible to the world.

For most of my adult life, long hair had been tethered to my sense of femininity in the way many things are tethered to young women who learn early that their appearance is being appraised. It is the water you swim in before you know you are swimming. You style it for the day, for the room, for the version of yourself you are presenting or protecting. You use it to signal, to deflect, to seduce, to disappear. You do not think of it as a tool until it is gone.

With its absence, I no longer felt contained to perform a particular aesthetic for the pleasure of others. I noticed it first in small ways: the way men on the street looked at me, or didn't. The way I was addressed by strangers. The way doctors spoke to me — or rather, the shift in how I insisted they speak to me, now that one layer of received femininity had been stripped away and I stood in rooms as something harder to categorize.

I was not beautiful in the way the world had previously organized its responses to me. I was something else. I was, in certain rooms, simply the person in the room.