“You’ve got a great head of hair, Sara,” Alejandro said once.
“I love curly hair,” the owner, Bruce, sighed. “Not too curly, but just curly enough that you can hide all your mistakes.”
“Not, like, kinky-curly,” Alejandro said.
“Oh God, no,” Bruce said. “Sara’s is about as far as I can go.” I believed him. One of my jobs at the salon had been to intercept walk-in customers of African descent and politely direct them to a neighboring establishment that could better serve their particular follicular needs. I seemed to be the only one who worried about the ethical implications of this task.
Many civilians don’t know that hair grows in identifiable sections. There is, for example, a triangle-shaped section near the ear that is tended to in quite a different fashion than the shorter hairs at the nape of the neck. Experienced stylists figure out their own way of dividing and conquering, but newbies adhere carefully to the diagrams distributed in cosmetology class. I had neither training nor talent. What I had was pure enthusiasm fueled by the euphoria of having successfully completed a basic hygiene task for the first time in several weeks.
First I combed my long, wet hair out, so that some of it hung straight down in front of my face. Then I cut a bang with one eager swoosh. And it looked cute, except that one side of my forehead seemed to have more hair hanging over it than the other. I snipped away with all the confidence of a seasoned pro and all the skill of a drunk five-year-old. Eventually the bang began to look a tad too short for my liking.
Oh well, I thought. Hair always grows back. And then I commenced hacking my long curls to my shoulders. All curly-haired girls know that layering is essential to a good curly haircut, so I set about chopping some hair shorter and some hair longer. It looked a little odd, so I kept cutting.
When I finished, the sink was covered in heavy, wet locks of hair. I sported something rather shorter than Amélie’s bob, but again, hair always grows back. I sat down on the closed toilet seat and began merrily blow-drying it. The weight of my actions did not truly hit me until I stood up and looked at the wild, tangled, frizzy mushroom cloud that now graced my skull. It was an unholy marriage of Barbra Streisand’s curly mop at the bittersweet yet ultimately uplifting conclusion of The Way We Were and Kid from Kid ’n’ Play’s flat-top in House Party.
“Uh-oh,” I said aloud.
“What? What is it?” came a panicked voice from the other side of the door. Unbeknown to me, my parents had been keeping an ear on what was happening in the bathroom. My mother may have literally been keeping an ear to the actual door, listening for some telltale sound that I was opening a vein or performing an exorcism on the toilet bowl.
“Nothing,” I said in the uneven voice that small children use when they lie. “It’s fine. Everything’s fine! Just doing my hair.”
“Doing your hair?” A note of genuine fear crept into her voice. “Can I come in?”
“Why?”
“Just to talk.” Translated, this meant just to make sure you aren’t doing exactly what you are actually doing.
“Um . . .” I looked at my hair.
There was a long pause.
“You have to promise not to get mad,” I said.
My mother’s sigh seemed to last a lifetime.
“Okay,” she said. “I promise I won’t get mad. Just let me come inside.”
I wrapped a towel around myself and gingerly opened the door. And I immediately watched Fake Happy-Time Mom Face crack.
Hair is important to Italians. We have a lot of it, and both men and women have to devote a substantial amount of time to its care and maintenance. The guido does not spend thirty minutes on his hair because he wants to; he does it because he must. Similarly, the guidette does not spend three hours at the salon out of joy, but out of duty. As the Italian daughter of an Italian beautician, my mother had done her fair share of sweeping up Italian ladies’ hair. The look that came over her face when I opened the door was primal in its agony, as if her anguish came from some deep, cellular level.
“Oh. My. God.”
I went into my instinctive defensive mode: abrasive surliness.
“What?” I demanded. “It’s my hair. I can do what I want with my hair.”
“Oh my God. Oh my Gooooooood,” she moaned.
“It’s a pixie cut!” I said. “They’re in right now.” It was not a pixie cut, and we both knew it. I had committed the tonsorial equivalent of a partial-birth abortion, and my mother was the first person faced with my grievous sin.
“Jon!” she yelled. “Jon, she cut her hair!”
My father came running. His face registered shock and a tiny bit of fear. Unlike my mother, he hadn’t actually seen my wretched apartment or borne witness to my Dave Matthews Band–induced trance. For him, this was the first tangible evidence that I’d lost my marbles.
“Ra, what’d you do that for?” he asked gently.
“I just wanted to,” I said.
“Why?” my mother asked, and I got the sense that her question was not for me but for Jesus Christ himself. “Why now? Why this? Why?”
“Uh . . .” It was the first time I’d really considered the question myself. “I guess . . . I guess . . . I thought it would be fun?”
My mother took a deep breath and steeled herself.
“We’re going to the salon after Dr. Morrison,” my mother said evenly. “We’re gonna see Gee. Gee is gonna fix it. Gee can fix anything.” In addition to doing my mother’s hair, Gee was responsible for the follicles belonging to my younger brother, my father’s mother, and my father’s father. I suppose you could say we choose our hair stylists the way we choose our shrinks: as a clan.
“I guess . . . I guess it’ll grow back,” my dad said. He put an arm around my mother. “Hair grows back.”
“Hair grows back,” she repeated, like a mantra. “Hair grows back.”
“C’mon, Ra,” my dad said. “Let’s get going. Just . . . don’t cut it anymore.”
“Please,” my mother said.
“I won’t,” I snapped. It may have been a disaster, but it was my disaster. I slammed the bathroom door and tried not to look at my reflection in the mirror as I dressed.
If I had needed a distraction to keep my mind off the possibility of diarrhea, a bladder explosion, a permanent maiming in a crash with a lumber truck, certain death, or an awkward first therapy session, my new ’do did the trick. When we got into the car, I sat in my customary spot in the front seat (I have a tendency toward motion sickness during car rides and during shaky-cam film shots, which is why I cannot watch the oeuvre of the great Paul Greengrass). I didn’t need to put a towel or a blanket or a jacket over my head. I spent the majority of the car ride staring at my newly shorn head in the mirror behind the passenger-side sun visor. When I heard my mother’s ragged sigh and caught her tortured reflection behind my head, I snapped the visor up and commenced slyly catching glimpses of my hair in the side mirror. We motored along to the soothing sounds of every New Jersey dad’s favorite radio station, WFAN (“The FAN”) then the home of “Mike and the Mad Dog” with Mike Francesa and Chris Russo. I’d grown up with their heavily accented voices as the soundtrack to my childhood car rides with my father. Years later, I would work at Sirius XM when Chris Russo left The FAN for bazillions of dollars and his own satellite channel, Mad Dog Radio. Whenever I saw Russo in the hallway and smiled shyly at him, I’d race to my office immediately afterward and text my dad.
Back then, however, Chris Russo was just the high-pitched, overexcited soundtrack to a ride to what my parents hoped would be a cure for whatever it was that so ailed me. If anyone had told any of us that I’d be a radio host and producer in New York City one day, it would’ve been a cause for considerable surprise. I felt like a newborn baby, tiny and defenseless, unaccustomed to the scents and sounds of the world. Even my hair looked like the sort of short, wild mop that sometimes grows in utero. It displayed about as much style, as well.
My mom took out
her cell phone and dialed Gee’s salon.
“Sara cut her hair,” she said. “Yeah . . . yeah . . . I know. I know. Short . . . really short. Can you fit her in?” Gee could.
“I don’t know if I’m gonna feel like it, Mom,” I said. A little nauseous flare of panic bubbled up from my gut. I swallowed against it, as my mother made a tentative appointment for six P.M.
Dr. Morrison’s office was located forty minutes from our house, immediately outside the painfully adorable town of Princeton, New Jersey. It was and remains one of my favorite places to visit. The drive there is pretty, passing by some of New Jersey’s scenic preserved farmland and other notable sights.
“That’s where they found the Lindbergh baby with his head crushed by a rock,” I said, pointing.
“Put Flemington on the map,” my dad said. It was true. The “Trial of the Century” brought throngs of reporters and onlookers to our little town—in 1934. It was still the most exciting thing to have happened in Flemington. The high school drama teacher directed a popular reenactment of the trial each summer at the old courthouse on Main Street. I smiled at the memory.
“You know his leg was missing?” I said as we passed trees dusted with snow. “And both hands.”
“There are some sick people in the world,” my dad said.
“Can we talk about something else, please?” my mom piped up, sounding enormously irritated. “Anything else.”
“Lindbergh was into Nazi shit,” I said.
“I said something else!”
“That is something else, Mom. It’s not about his dead kid. It’s about Nazi shit.”
My mother sighed loudly and fell silent. My father turned up the volume on The FAN, his signal that whatever conversation had been taking place in the car was over. Under new coach Herman Edwards, the Jets were on their way to what would be a ten-and-six season, eventually qualifying for the Wild Card position in the AFC and losing to the Oakland Raiders. I’d learned long ago that the Jets would inevitably disappoint my father in the end, but at the moment, there was still hope.
We pulled into Dr. Morrison’s parking lot twenty minutes before the scheduled appointment.
“You want to go in?” my mom asked.
“Nah,” I said. “It can wait a few minutes.”
The three of us sat in the car in silence and listened to two guys go back and forth about whether a team that showed such promise in its early years was going to live up to its potential or crash and burn, spectacularly, again.
Chapter Five
My Hero, My Cuisinart
When your daily routine includes repeatedly convincing yourself to not commit suicide, you probably don’t have time left over to prepare haute cuisine. Personally, I’ve never been much of a cook anyway. I don’t have the patience for the cleanup. But it’s also generational. My mother worked full-time, and for a few years when I was young she went directly from work to Rutgers University, where she got her Master of Library Science. Between teaching elementary school, obtaining a graduate degree, caring for an increasingly ill mother, and managing two busy kids and a husband, she didn’t have the energy to cook or to teach me how to do so.
What my mother did learn about cooking came largely from her grandmother and her aunt. I remember making pasta with all of them when I was quite small, how the dough fed into the hand-cranked metal apparatus that then slowly spit out neatly divided strings of spaghetti, linguine, or fettuccine. At Christmas, we would drop bow ties of dough into great vats of boiling oil and leave them to dry on paper towels. Later, they would get a celebratory coating of powdered sugar. Christmas also meant the flat, anisette-flavored waffle cookies called pizzelles, which sizzled in their own blazing-hot irons before cooling on a wire rack. (I keep telling myself I’m going to buy a pizzelle iron of my very own, but then I get distracted by shiny copper pots at Williams-Sonoma and forget about my culinary heritage.)
For a healthy eater, or for someone who gorges when he or she is depressed, it is perhaps difficult to imagine what it is like to view the act of eating as a terrible chore. It is even more far-fetched to imagine the feeling of abject revulsion that food inspires in those people who have committed themselves to shrinking until they disappear. I was one of those people for a short, painful time, and I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to forget those strange days when the ultimate act of nurturing became a nauseating torment. Quite plainly, the thought of eating made me want to vomit.
Such was the state in which I arrived home to New Jersey. In my first meeting with Dr. Morrison, the family shrink, I described my symptoms as he nodded intently and took careful notes.
“I feel sad all the time,” I said, looking at the sky-blue wallpaper and the dark-blue rug. “But more than sad, I feel hopeless. It’s kind of embarrassing because my life is really, really good. I feel like an asshole. I sleep all the time. I’m afraid to leave the house. I wake up and I just hear this . . .” I paused for a moment. He looked up.
“I’d really prefer not to be in an institution,” I said suddenly. “I’ve seen movies and everything and I’m not, like, a danger to other people. And I probably won’t die even though I want to.”
Dr. Morrison looked at me over his glasses. “Sara, things are very different now than they used to be. It’s quite difficult to have someone placed in an in-patient facility against her will, particularly when she is an adult. In fact, we try as professionals to do whatever we can to avoid that unless it is absolutely necessary for the person’s safety and well-being. I have heard nothing so far that indicates to me you could benefit from that kind of care.”
I sighed with relief.
“Girl, Interrupted just kind of freaked me out,” I said.
“Well, this isn’t Girl, Interrupted,” he said.
“So if I tell you these two things, are you going to change your mind?”
“I suppose it depends what two things, but I can almost guarantee you that my answer will be no.”
I looked at the slate-blue lampshade behind him and ’fessed up.
“Sometimes I think about killing myself. Pretty much all the time. Like even now it’s in the back of my head even though I’m not focusing on it. But it’s there. I can hear it.”
He seemed unmoved. “Well, have you made a plan to do it?”
“Is that the kind of thing people plan?”
“Sometimes.”
“I gotta be honest with you. I’m not that big on plans these days.”
“Okay, no plan. That’s a good sign. Now, what’s the other thing?”
“Um . . .” I had meant to tell him about the whole pissing-in-bowls habit, but I figured we could save that for another session. It didn’t really seem like a first-date topic to me.
“Well, I really hate eating, lately.”
“What kind of eating? Eating breakfast? Eating lunch? Eating in front of other people?”
“Just, um . . . pretty much any kind where you put food in your mouth and then chew and swallow. Chewing and swallowing sort of freak me out.”
He paused in the way that shrinks sometimes do. I hate that pause, because I never know what I’m supposed to do. Cry? Break eye contact? Say something else? I’m Italian. We don’t do silence, except where murder is concerned.
“And also I have panic attacks,” I added quickly. “And I’m afraid of cars and buses and trains and planes. I mean, I rode in a car today but I really didn’t want to. And when I get anxious I have to use the bathroom. A lot.”
He looked at me again.
“What?” I said defensively.
“I think it’s safe to say you’re on the wrong medication.”
I left his office with a brand-new prescription, a couple of book recommendations and new breathing exercises, an appointment for later in the week, and the reassurance that I was going to be “just fine.”
“But you’ll get fine faster if you start eating regular meals again,” he said. “Start small and go slowly. I have a feeling the new medication w
ill start to help within the month.”
“That’s great!” my mother chirped when I relayed Dr. Morrison’s pronouncement.
“Want to go to J. P. Winberries to celebrate?” my dad asked. Winberries was a tried-and-true Princeton pub that we’d gone to a few times a year since I was a little kid. It served my favorite childhood fare, including root beer, mozzarella sticks, and pasta. There were televisions in the bar where people could watch whatever station had the misfortune of broadcasting the latest Ivy League game. We always sat in the dining room, where the walls were covered in Princeton Tigers paraphernalia. You could dip your fried mozzarella in your root beer float while sitting beneath a black-and-white portrait of some antediluvian white dudes rowing a boat. In my youth, this was my idea of a great fucking time.
Now, though, the idea nauseated me. All the people, the noise, and the lights. I already felt guilty about not being able to finish the imaginary plate of food I would order.
“Nah,” I said. “I’ll find something at home.”
“We don’t have that much,” said my mom, which was completely untrue. Most moms always have too much food in the house, not too little. “You wanna stop at the grocery store on the way home?”
“I don’t think I’m up for that yet, Mom.”
“How ’bout you make a list for us and we’ll add it to our own shopping list.” It wasn’t really a question.
“Okay,” I mumbled, and slunk low into the seat. I had to do some deep breathing when I pictured the harsh fluorescent lights and Technicolor packages in the supermarket.
At home, exhausted from the car ride, I went straight to my room. Before I fell into a soothing slumber, I dutifully made a list.
Food for Sara
Cheerios
Crackers
Peanut butter
Agorafabulous! Page 9