Me, My Hair, and I by editor Elizabeth Benedict Page A

heaven. A Brit-cut shaggy bob in New York and Burt Bacharach music. That is so
me
, I thought. This is so
right
.
    I HAVE A lot of hair, it’s very thick, and it’s a good texture. I’ll be honest: it’s one of my best features, but I wasn’t brought up to think of it like that—English people are excellent are turning assets into flaws. And they don’t like anything that smacks of wretched excess.
    â€œYour hair is so
thick
,” my grandmother used to tell me with a curled-lip emphasis that immediately turned the statement into an insult. Even now I apologize when anyone washing, cutting, or drying it comments on its thickness. “But it’s a good thing,” they often reply, in surprise. This is one of the reasons I love America.
    When I was a child in London, my American mother took my two brothers and me to get our hair cut in the children’s department at Harrods, because Harrods was at the end of our street. We loved going there. In the center of the floor was a rocking horse that you could ride when the old ladies had finished their work on your head. No, they didn’t put a bowl over the top and cut round it, as legend has it. But looking back at childhood pictures, I can see how that legend got started.
    As far as I can remember, they could do only one style, or maybe my mother got a discount for getting three haircuts all the same. Still, my brothers and I came out all looking identical. If I asked about this, I was told I needed to keep my hair that short because it was so . . . thick. When I got to an age to mildly rebel—I was ten—I asked if I could grow my hair. I was told that because of its thickness it simply couldn’t grow past my shoulders. Thickness, as I remember it, was presented to me as a disability. I remember the conversations like this:
    ME : Can I have my hair a bit longer?
    MY MOTHER : No, it’s too thick.
    ME : But it’s so short.
    MY MOTHER : Because it’s so thick. (
Walks off
.)
    ME : (
Rolls eyes
.)
    Now I realize she meant it was too thick to be long, because it would look messy. Someone—my mother, for instance—would have to brush it. I can see how all of that seemed like too much effort. Life was an enormous effort for my mother when I was a child. Laundry, grocery shopping, housework, even hair brushing, were either farmed out to other people or just not done. So I accepted a compromise, happy not to look like a boy as I was allowed to grow my hair just as far as my ears. That’s how I got my first little bob.
    I had a fringe too. Or what Americans called bangs. This was because my eyebrows weren’t round like most people’s but went up into little mountain peaks at the center. I was called Spock at school. Until I got the fringe. Then the eyebrows were thankfully obscured and everyone shut up.
    My mother had a sense of humor that I found incomprehensible as a child but am more in tune with now that I have daughters of my own. On my first passport application, when I was some tender age under five, she wrote “auburn” for hair color, and they accepted it. “Eyes: green. Hair: auburn.” And so it continued through each passport renewal until I was an adult. My mother was living in a society she had a love-hate relationship with. The school uniforms and convent boarding school of my childhood were part of her hate. But with “Eyes: green. Hair: auburn,” she showed me how to be subversive—and glamorous. Until one day when the passport system caught on to the joke, and my hair officially turned brown.
    It’s still brown auburn, but no longer naturally. My two daughters have inherited my hair, so I can see the original on them. I have the expensive auburn highlights that women my age graduate to when time and circumstances go our way. We call them “caramel” and “honey.” We use the words “tawny” and “ash.” In the summer, we can