How My Artist Father—and A Bad Haircut—Led To A Personal Reinvention
One summer day when I was seven, my father chopped off my hair. In his defense, it was thick and dark and unruly and long—down below my shoulders—and always needed dealing with. My mother and I were constantly buying books or looking through old fashion magazines to decide how to style it. We’d put it in foam curlers or slather it with olive oil—doing our best to tame the dark curls, with greater and lesser degrees of accomplishment and irritation. I wasn’t blonde or leggy like most of the other girls in my class, and my mother was sympathetic. She knew I wanted to be like everyone else at school, but we didn’t live on Fifth Avenue, summer in Tuscany, or have a driver. She and my father were neither lawyers nor in finance. She was the editor of a children’s magazine, and my father was a painter and sculptor who had built his life around his art—the creation of it, the pursuit of it. And I had all this hair, despite our best efforts.
We lived in a tiny one-bedroom on the Upper West Side—I had the bedroom; my parents slept on a pull-out—and so when my father was home I always knew what he was doing. And vice versa. Thank goodness for my mother, who washed the paint off his pants and paid the bills and took me to school, and who was also a translator of sorts, explaining to me why he worked at the studio so long and late. “He’s thinking,” my mother whispered in the mornings as she navigated around my father—who was usually sipping hot water and staring at the ceiling.
He was an Iraqi Jew from Baghdad who grew up with, as they say, nothing. He came to New York via Ellis Island in the early 1950s and studied art at Brooklyn College. He’d become a successful painter and monumental sculptor, his work all over the world; but he spent whatever money he made solely on creative endeavors, and I can remember him using only one object in the kitchen besides silverware: a fire-stained pot in which he made rice and beans and eggs and bread and oatmeal. “What else do you need?” he’d say.
Perhaps a polite way of saying it is that my father wasn’t one for fluff or fripperies. He didn’t approve of nail polish or fake eyeglasses or inedible garnishes or beautiful, ill-fitting shoes, or even tablecloths unless they were quite literally protecting us from a table or a table from us.
More than anything, he believed, dogmatically, in giving the brain space to think. How could creative thoughts possibly occur, he wondered aloud and often during my childhood, when one was considering what to wear or what restaurant to go to—or when one was obsessing over hair?
And so, for the most part, instead of wearing nail polish, I read like mad, wrote in a journal, tore out The New Yorker cartoons and showed him my favorites as if to say, Look. I’m being creative too. Be proud of me.
And he was. But then, one day, he chopped off my hair. I could kill him as I think about it now (me with a puffy triangular bob, cross-legged on the floor in front of a full-length mirror, in tears and shaking). And also: This thought is cruel and I take it back. My father died of cancer nine years ago, when I was 24, and I miss him all the time. From this distance I see him as wonderful, wise beyond words, compassionate, peaceful, and kind. He inspired me. We love the good parts of our parents exclusively until we see shadows of things otherwise. The haircut came at one of his lowest moments. He was concerned with an installation that wasn’t going well and with impossible tenants in the building he owned and managed in lower Manhattan. Cutting my hair was a way of eliminating one distraction.
But oh, the emotional pain, the drama! The things we never forget—my mother, rocking me, promising me it would grow back and scowling at my father, who knew immediately what he had done. You could see it all over his face: the fault and misjudgment and sorrow. Such deep and utter sorrow. He hadn’t wanted to hurt me or even teach me a lesson. I’m sure he thought he was doing a good thing, cutting off stuff that didn’t matter. Fluff. He offered me anything that would make it right.
I cried that I wanted new hair, different hair. I wanted to be better than the previous version of myself. I wanted that immediately.
“A wig?” he asked.
“Fine, a wig.”
But because it was my father, we couldn’t just go shopping for a tasteful wig in an uptown store. We had to head off on a creative mission to the wig district in midtown, somewhere neither of us had ever been before. I remember trudging up one long, dark staircase after another, incredulous at the cavernous showrooms we stepped into. They were all dimly lit, with walls upon walls of wigs: blonde and brunette and purple and curly and straight and bobbed and impossibly long. There were ghostly mannequins standing at odd angles, wearing wigs of real hair and fake hair that we touched and picked up. My father had me try on one wig after another after another.
We spent that summer day going from shop to shop, from showroom to showroom. My father was gracious, full of pep—in his element. He spoke Hebrew to the Hasidic owners and made them laugh. He spoke Arabic to the Arabs. None of them knew what to make of him, or me.
I felt my luck had turned. I felt like a person who could be anyone she could imagine. I also marveled that my father was willing to buy me anything. He and I were in cahoots, discussing the merits of each style. And finally, after maybe eight stops, we found one.
“There it is,” my father said. It was long, red, glamorously straight, frizz-free. His face lit up when the shop owner ceremoniously lowered it onto my head. The wig made me feel better than anything I could have dreamed up—part radiant fashion model, part Wonder Woman.
I went home wearing it, heavy and warm against my scalp. I took the wig off only when absolutely necessary. I started calling myself Raquel—a name I didn’t even know how to spell. But this person was clear to me: an older girl, sophisticated, polished. I couldn’t have imagined her with all my old hair distracting me, taking up space. I paraded around our apartment building, riding up and down the elevator, braiding and rebraiding my red locks the way my mother had taught me, and tossing them about. My mother smiled at my antics and my father didn’t disapprove of them, and even if he had I wouldn’t have cared. Something had changed—and it wasn’t just the hair.
A wig is just a wig. Raquel was someone else. A character—the first one I ever invented. “Do I look different to you?” I asked the doormen, our neighbors, delivery people. It took them a moment to figure out who I was. “Yes,” they all said.
