Alison McGhee

This morning she read about a new ice-cap sort of thing that you put on your head if you’re going through chemo. It’s supposed to freeze your hair follicles so that your hair doesn’t fall out.

And then she read her favorite blog – Your Man for Fun in Rapidan – which, from day to day, can be about anything in the world, and it too was about hair. Facial hair. Check it out: Your Man for Fun in Rapidan.

She took this as a sign from above that she, too, should write about hair, partly because writing about hair is easier than writing about white dwarves and dark energy, which was her original intent, and partly because she has a lot to say about hair. Who doesn’t?

Her brother, maybe,  as he is a man without hair. Anywhere. He is a very tall, very hairless man. It’s careless writing to use very with hairless – if you’re hairless you can’t be very hairless, right? – but she likes the look of the two very’s in quick succession, so she’s keeping it.

The (literal) saving grace of alopecia is that you never have to buy shampoo again.

If her brother were still living alone, which, ever since he acquired a wife and child he is not, he would never have to spend a moment’s time concerned about the drains of his house clogging up with hair.

Which she does. There’s a lot of hair in her house. Three women, all with abundant flowing locks, one (peripatetic) young man who contributes a bit more, one shedding cat, and one dog (who, although non-shedding himself, is fond of terrifying the shedding cat, making the shedding cat shed even more).

You can see how drains, and their free-flowing-ness, are a major concern to her.

Drain catches, the kind that fit over drains, abound in her house, and yet they do not always do the job, do they? No, they do not. In a tall cupboard she keeps a plumber’s snake, which, due to the fact that sink drain caps are non-removable these days, is virtually useless.

In the same tall cupboard you can also find a long, thorned, white plastic bendable thing which supposedly will unclog a bathtub or sink drain, but she has never gotten it to work successfully. Unless the tearing apart of her fingers and wrists with its horrid plastic thorns is considered success.

There are also, far back on a high shelf, the worse-than-horrid liquid drain uncloggers. About them, no more shall be said.

Is this post still about hair? It is, yes, but let us return to hair that is still attached to the heads from whence it came.

Her youthful female companions have beautiful hair. The hair of one is long and wavy, dark curls that cascade down her back and that she intently, determinedly irons straight three times a week.

The hair of the other is black, or as close to black as dark brown hair can be. Straight, heavy, it rivers its way down her brown shoulders and back. For years this youthful companion pulled it straight back in a tight ponytail, but now, often, she lets it hang free.

Now she thinks of her friends and their hair, so few of them happy with their hair as it is, most of them longing for hair that is other. If it’s curly they wish  it to be straight. If it’s straight they wish it to be curly. Long, short. Thin, thick. (She can hear her mother saying, “‘Twas always thus.”)

There are the friends who have spent months, on and off for years, some of them,  with scarves tied about their heads,  hats worn year-round. Chemo takes all your hair away.

She thinks now of a day she spent in the service of cancer and its cure: drawing eyebrows on her beloved friend with eyeliner pencil, sewing a small curve of miniature pillow into a bra. That hair came back with one difference; this time, it was loved.

She herself was born with hair two inches long, jet black, each strand tipped with white. A head full of soft porcupine quills, all of which fell out a few months later.

Her grandmother, the one in the photo above, went to the beauty parlor once a week, there to chat with Sharon, her hairdresser, while Sharon washed and then re-dyed the short permed curls bluish-white and sat her grandmother under the giant old-fashioned hairdryer.

Her mother went for years and years to her hairdresser Rocco – “he knows my hair, he knows my head” – and when he died, it was a long time before she could bring herself to go to anyone else. In the interim, her hair itself looked as if it was in mourning.

She herself has been getting her hair cut by Monique now for a long, long time, since just after the youthful companion with the long curls was born. Over these many years Monique has become very pricey, but she could not see anyone else – it would be like committing hair adultery – so it’s only a few times a year that they see each other.

When she and Monique meet up, they have only the one hour to catch up, and so they make the most of every minute, Monique’s sure hands on her head and hair. They have seen each other through so much: marriage and births and divorces and all the sundry in-betweens.

“Do what you want, Monique,” she tells her, and she is always happy with what Monique wants.

What would her father have to say about hair, if asked? She can hear him now, his big voice roaring through the room.

“What do I have to say about hair?” he would bellow. “Does a beard count? It does? Then you know damn well what I have to say about hair! The Yankees! That’s what I have to say about hair!”

The Yankees, ah yes,  the Yankees. Her father, lifelong Yankees fan that he is (a sad fact, given the bloated, steroid-ridden, overpaid, over-ego’d condition of that team, but she must state it anyway), took a vow that he would not shave his beard until the (next time the) Yankees won the World Series.

That is why every photo taken of him for some years, up until last October, shows him with that salt and pepper beard.

“Did I like having a beard?” he bellows. “Hell no! I did it for my team!”

Thinking about her father, with his bellowing voice, his 50-year comb-over, and his World Series beard, makes her happy. She will go wash her hair now.

Your best friend taught you how to knit, and your mother sort of taught you how to purl – she’s lefthanded, and she kept miming the motions of purling with her hands and then trying to reverse the process in order to explain the whole thing to you, which gives you an idea of why that “sort of” precedes the “how to purl” above – and then they sent you out into the world to make your own knitstuffs.

Leave that word alone. If foodstuffs is  a word,  then knitstuffs should be one too.

So here is your first knitstuff, above. That’s a lie,  actually; your first knitstuff was a green and black scarf, but it was completed BEFORE your mother taught you, in that bewildered manner, sort of how to purl, so it doesn’t count.

Although the strange thing about that first knitstuff – let us call it a scarf, because even though knitstuff should be a word, it shouldn’t be overused, especially on its first voyage into the world – is that when your son glimpsed it, he reminded you that it is the exact colors and width of the knit coaster-placemat thing he made you in kindergarten, when the kindergartners did a small knitstuff unit.

The minute he reminded you of this you could see the tiny coaster-placemat thing in your mind, and you wondered what in the world you had been thinking when you made that first scarf/knitstuff. Were you trying to replicate the days when he was in kindergarten and making tiny gifts for you?

Best not to think about that now. Best to turn to the matter at hand, which is the current knitstuff project, pictured above.

When you began this particular project, you decided to make it according to this pattern: knit two rows, purl two rows. Because that would make it easy, right? Who couldn’t remember such an easy pattern?

You, apparently.

At first,  given the brevity of your knitting and purling tutorials, you couldn’t even remember the difference between the two. You got around that one by sort of (emphasis on sort of) re-teaching yourself how to knit and purl,  and then reciting, over and over “knit from behind,  purl from the front,” which made and makes a kind of sense to you.

Then you couldn’t remember how many rows you had knit – one? two? possibly three? – so you tried to teach yourself how knitting looks different from purling. But that proved impossible for many reasons, the main one being that you seem to be deeply impaired on a level that includes but is not limited to visual discernment between knitting and purling.

At one point, sitting in the church for the non-churchy (you are one of those people who concentrates better if your hands are in motion, and you make no apologies for it) you actually forgot, halfway through, if the row you were working on was a knitting row or a purling row.

Who could possibly forget such a thing halfway through the row? You,  apparently.

So you took a stab in the dark and decided to finish out that row by knitting. Wrong choice! The minute the row was finished it was immediately obvious that it was a half and half row.

“You can always unknit,” your best friend assured you when she taught you how to knit.

Not if you barely know how to knit in the first place, you can’t.

You suppose you could un-do everything. But then, given your huge inadequacies (in many aspects of life, aspects that go far beyond knitstuffs), you’d be left with a pile of twisted, shrivelly wool.

There are people who can sit calmly in an ergonomically correct manner at their desks for hours on end, steadily writing their way through novels that they have methodically outlined beforehand.

There are people who manage to follow a topic through to its end in a conversation, rather than leaping about like a frog, jumping from that topic to another because a certain word, e.g., “the,” reminded them of an entirely new – but, in their minds, somehow related – topic.

There are people who, when faced with their astonishing inability to figure out the difference between knitting and purling, would go to howtoknit.com and figure it out once and for all. Or give up entirely.

No matter how you might wish it, you are not one of those people.

These are the thoughts you ponder as you focus, focus, focus on the row you are knitting – yes, knitting – there in the church of the non-churchy. You are doing so well!

But wait, what is that? That appears to be a 1.5″-long strand of blue wool that is stretching across one row to another. It is not knit, nor is it purled. It is a homeless blue wool child seeking shelter, but no shelter is to be found.

What just happened? Truly, what did you do? You stare at it in puzzlement. Peer at the upper righthand section of the knitstuff pictured above and you too might be able to see it. Whatever it is, it’s there now. It cannot be undone.

You realize that at some point you will have used up, in your haphazard and horribly inadequate way, all three balls of wool. And then it will be time to cast off, a dreadful phrase which implies further wandering alone in the wilderness.

The thought occurs to you that you could just buy more balls of wool and keep going, sort of knitting and sort of purling for the rest of your life. It would be the Eternal Scarf, eventually big enough to rival the world’s largest ball of twine, currently located in Darwin, Minnesota.

That the idea of creating a knitstuff without end strikes you as easier than learning to cast off makes you, for a moment, deeply uneasy.