The House Scissors. A True Story.
In today's Unfit to Print, I pull an old personal essay from the hairchives.
For better or worse, the pandemic has a lot of us cutting our own hair. At first out of necessity because stylists were closed for business. But then, when stylists and barbers started taking clients again, demand was high, and it’s still hard to get an actual appointment. All told, I cut my hair twice during the pandemic. The first time it was just a trim, to get the hair off my neck. But after a year, I’d had it. I figured, since I was only really seeing people on zoom, as long as it looked okay from the front…it would be good enough. But now, I need a real haircut, and badly. Trouble is, I’ve grown lazy. I’m sure I’ll motivate soon enough, but in the meantime, the whole thing got me remembering a series of stories I wrote about hair. I first started working on them in about 2008 or 2009. They were revised a number of times, then I shopped them around to a bunch of journals and outlets to no avail. I share one of my favorites with you now. May it bring you wistful memories of your own first haircut.
The House Scissors
I heard somewhere that hair is made up of dead cells. If you’re like me, and don’t get regular haircuts, it adds up, until your head is heavy with history: all the bad choices, pints of ice cream, ex-girlfriends—everything you experienced during the years it grew—just sitting there on top of your head. Dead. So basically, if some shit happened to you, and since it happened you haven’t gotten a haircut, then you’re just carrying it all around with you. Like a bag of rocks.
When I was 21 years old, I came Out. To myself. Up until that point, I had no idea I was Queer. It simply hadn’t occurred to me. You’d think my bedroom walls covered in posters of women celebrities would have clued me in. But I just said to myself (and anyone who’d listen) that I loved their look, their hair. I’d never heard of Gay, and I now know this was on purpose. In religion class they gave girls three options: get married, become a nun, or live The Single Life (this was an actual lifestyle choice described in our religion textbooks). I was an odd little bird who somehow knew none of those were quite right. But knowing what not to do, and knowing what to do, are two very different things.
Once I understood Queerness and how that non-descriptor somehow best described me, it was as if all the history—everything I learned, the ways of being that I’d thought were carved in stone—just dissipated like fog on a window. So, I cut my hair. I lopped off all that old dead history and fashioned what was left into a signal in hopes someone’s radar would pick it up. I don’t know what I was expecting to happen. It was like putting out an S.O.S. while still standing in the middle of civilization. No one really noticed, and I was just the same.
I’ve had many haircuts in my life—my Mom combing it long and smooth and adding in ribbons trying to make me like a princess; me trying to make me whatever the opposite of princess is. In high school I had The Belinda Carlisle because of how cute she was in the Mad About You video. I thought, If only I had that hair I’d have her life! I had perms. So many perms. I had highly sprayed and cultivated feathers, like Stefanie Powers in Hart to Hart. I had bobs. And then, I had nothing. I shaved it. But the cheapest haircut I ever got was free. And one should always be skeptical of free haircuts.
But there’s only so much you can do when you’re still a little kid. In my house growing up, my mom was my initial scissor-wielder. As far back as I can remember, she would sit me on a kitchen chair, place a towel on the ground around me to sop up the water dripping down my back, pull the shiny house scissors out of our infamous junk drawer, then cut a straight line across the bottom of my hair like it was a sheet of paper.
Before any of the cutting happened though, we first had to wash my hair and this was the part of the process I hated most.
“Climb up,” my mother said. She was already put out and we hadn’t even started yet. I was a fairly little kid so because of that, my mom washed my hair in the kitchen sink until maybe second grade when I demanded I be allowed to take a grown-up shower like everyone else in my family. I would climb up, then lay down so my head was in the sink, which meant my legs stretched across a tiny sliver of beige countertop and the electric burners of the stove. My mom pulled my head under the faucet and I immediately squeezed my eyes closed and started complaining.
“Ow mom it’s too hot!” I said in my tiny seven-year-old voice, slightly afraid that my complaining would be considered “talking back” and I would have to go to confession for it.
“Ahhh it’s not too hot,” she growled. She always growled. It was probably the cigarettes, and she did have one in her mouth then, as always, which she was biting down on with her front teeth. The water was hot. We had a joke when I got older that her hands were made of asbestos, and that she inherited them from my grandmother who could pull baking pans out of a hot oven without a mitt.
The water was so hot it was making my scalp red and tender, which made the next part of the process all the worse. She lathered me up with Original Scent Breck shampoo and scratched at my scalp with her fingernails like I was a dirty work shirt on a washboard. I mean, really: how dirty could I possibly be? She kept the boiling hot water running the whole time, too—this was the 70s, and we did not have a conservation mindset. There I was, laying across our stove, my head burning hot, and my eyes on fire from the shampoo going in them.
Here’s what I learned in that moment—because we are always learning, whether we realize it or not: in order to get something clean, you should scrub it until it hurts. To this day I scrub like that. But no matter what I’ve done wrong, hurting myself never really gets me clean.
Eventually, the washing was over and I didn’t die. And then I was in the middle of the kitchen on one of our floral-print vinyl chairs.
“Face forward,” she said. “Keep your chin level for Chrissakes.” Dull, all-purpose Gingher scissors in hand—my mother clacked them together three times—for good luck maybe, like blowing on dice, or cracking your knuckles before a fight? I dunno. But let’s talk about those scissors for a second.
They lived in the junk drawer, so right away you know they got used for everything. Just like the junk drawer, where you might find an important note from the principal, or rubber bands, or cereal box tops, or pens, or an electric bill, or obviously, the house scissors.
Here are some things they were used for: snipping thread to hem my school uniform, slicing credit cards, shredding bank statements, crafting construction paper snowflakes, slicing more credit cards, opening frozen pizza boxes, cutting out cereal box tops, cutting crap and sticks out of our matted Shih Tzu’s butt hair, breaking down boxes—you name it. And now they were about to go in my hair.
Before you get too grossed out, remember what I said about my mother and cleaning things. It didn’t just apply to your body, it applied to everything. Keeping things clean was a matter of heaven or hell. And those scissors had most likely been washed within an inch of their life! What my mom was not so good at, was keeping scissor blades sharp. Needless to say, the scissors no longer opened and closed smoothly—they had a bad sticky spot—and the sharpest point was the point closest to the hinge, so you had to open them really wide if you were serious about making a clean cut.
Touched with hints of rust at both the never-once-sharpened tips as well as the screw in the center that held the two blades together, my mother made her way toward my head with the scissors. My hair was soaking. Drips wept down my face; my shirt in the back was arced from shoulder blade to shoulder blade with cold water that kept wicking further and further down my back with each minute I sat upright in that chair. So, I began to shiver.
“Sit still,” my mother barked through a puff of smoke, her cigarette (another one? the same one? I dunno) clamped between her teeth in the usual manner. She held the enormous scissors in one ready hand and ran my father’s skinny black barber’s comb roughly through my hair to flatten it against my back.
“Don’t move,” she said. I felt a chill rush through me each time she dragged the teeth of the comb from the hairline at my forehead, over my crown, over my occipital protuberance (on which the comb would always catch), then sliding past my posterior hairline down, down and finally, through the terribly split ends. It was very, very hard to be still. Particularly given my age, and that the bottom of my hair was knotted like a ball of used up dental floss.
But eventually, we got it. And once the hair was combed to my mother’s desire, she opened the blades of those stuck and rusted Gingher scissors, placed the back of one blade under the line of hair against my body, slid the sheet of hair as deeply into the hinge of the blades as possible, and began to cut.
My hair folded between the blades.
“Goddamn scissors,” my mother growled. By now I’d lost a few strands to the rusty hinge and my eyes were watering from the feeling—and sound—of my hair being ripped out at the roots.
“Gahhr,” my mother was exasperated. She opened the scissors, clacked them again three times together, then came back at me.
This time she caught the sharp spot. Two-inch-long whips of hair fell to the ground and seemed to land in the shape of a smile, happy to be free, ready to move onto the next life. Or maybe I was just hopeful. I suppose I could have seen frowns if I’d wanted.
“Ok, you’re done,” she said. My hair was now the same length all the way around.
The next day, after school, I had to go to my grandmother’s house before my horseback riding lesson, because it was closer to school than our house was. My mother would be coming from work to get me, and this arrangement saved a lot of time and gas. It was the 70s, remember. We weren’t conserving, but between war and foreign relations, gas was rare and you had to wait in a long line to get some. This arrangement, however, also meant I would be left to my own devices for 45 minutes, sometimes an hour. And somehow, when you’re young, 45 minutes is an eternity. Kids can build entire cities in 45 minutes. When you’re older, 45 minutes is never enough time to even start anything.
During my eternal 45 minutes, I’d change out of my school uniform and into my jeans. Then I’d bounce on my grandmother’s bed for a good twenty minutes, then I’d drink a Coke. Then I’d sit on the edge of her giant bed in front of the huge dresser mirror and stare at myself. That’s when I saw the scissors.
I felt a thrill in my stomach. The delightful nervousness brought on by the forbidden thing. I picked them up, twirled a chunk of hair right at the spot on the left side of my forehead where a widow’s peak would be, and cut the hair so close to my scalp the scissors grazed my skin.
I heard my mother’s footsteps pounding up the stairs. It took her not more than three seconds to orient herself to something being wrong generally, and two more lightspeed seconds to identify the exact location of the problem. Mom’s uncanny radar.
“What did you do!?”
I didn’t respond; by now I knew a rhetorical question when I heard one. My mother reached right for the newly naked spot on my head.
“Oh my God,” she sighed. “I don’t have time for this. Let’s go.” I gathered my things and followed her out the door. Every time my mother combed my hair after that, she’d roll her eyes so loudly, I could hear it. But one day, I knew we’d laugh about it. And we did.
—MF
Love this essay! So crisp and relatable and full of correct scissor-language. Fun and sweet. ps. My favorite cut is the one on the beach with sunglasses!