Hair: O

I can only live with my hair out of my face. It doesn't even have to be held up and away with a verified hair rubber band--twistie ties will do. I am the happiest with nary a strand skittering across my cheekbones like a spider web.

I'm also a competitive SOB with this hair of mine, and our history of days when my hair thinks it will win, when it struggles to come unwound from the buns, headbands, barrettes and clips, are the reason I developed my eye hand coordination. As soon as my arms were able to reach up and behind my head, there has been no hair device that I can't manipulate. I am the captain and I will braid, French braid, serum gloss and VO5 to not lose my hold on the tress steering wheel.

My hair knows who's boss. I've got two hands and I am freakin' fantastic when it comes to hair taming. Aside from that, though, I am pretty ordinary.

But back to how badass I am when it comes to controlling the beast on my head that I have a love/hate relationship with. I love my hair long so much I can't cut it. It drives me crazy so much, I can't not wrap it.

If you're torn between the wild and the obedient like me, here's what I do so I can keep living with one foot in both follicular worlds:

 

 

Headband it. Be sure to have balloons in the background to cheer up the boarding school look.

 

Wrapit Trapit. *patent pending* I suggest predosing with Tylenol for the ponytail headache you know is coming.

 

 

The hat. Never be without a hat in your closet or on your head. Boom.

 

The civil war drummer boy. I make it look so much like a concussion wrap that no one dares ask me a thing about it.

The Thinker. Walk around all day, with your hand holding your hair up just like this, and I swear to God above, you will look like you just opened an invite from Mensa.

 

 

The Multi-Multi. The true beauty of this one is you can tell everyone you're pincurling for a big night out. Those that don't know you well will believe you since they have no idea you never go anywhere. Ever.

 

 

The Just Hide. Or lean in. Or press against. Disappear into people and your hair will follow along. 

 

I know what you're thinking by this point. The sheer genius of my determination to not be outwitted by my hair. I can't take any of the credit. I come from a long line of those who speak scarf.

 

 

As you see here, my father's hair doesn't even dare to quiver or boink or a spring from underneath his polka dot taming splendor.

 

What a legacy. I tell you, I make myself proud. 

 

* * *

The First of Fourth of Julys

It's the end of our day, but my grandmother is packing sliced sausage, a metal tin of saltines, and bottles of Hamm's beer into a brown box. My mother calls out to my father to remember the bottle opener. We are, the entire houseful of us, readying to take flight. I look outside the kitchen window and see near darkness. Where can we be going, and packing food for it? I chew on my thumbnail.

We have a blanket and sweaters. We sit, little children on adult laps, seven in a car made for five. Driving out of our neighborhood and turning into the streets we only travel on Sunday afternoons. But it's night.

My fingers are in my mouth again and my Abuela brushes them down with a grazing slap.

I ask my father, “A donde vamos, papa?” I have to know where we are going.

 

He blows cigarette smoke from the side of his mouth out of the rolled down driver's window. “Al lago,” he says. To the lake.

In the dark? To swim in the night? I pull the collar of the red and white striped T shirts that my mother bought for the four of us into my mouth and start sucking.

“You need to stay near us,” my mother reaches for my father's cigarette and takes a quick puff. I barely ever see this and every time I do, it feels like something too private for me to witness.

“No running,” she orders. “It will be dark.”

She turns to look at me and my brother. We are the youngest ones. “No running.”

“Si, mama.” I answer for my brother.

We arrive at the lake, the one we go to on Sundays. It is a weeknight, but we are here. I hear voices and lean forward to peek out the window. There are so many cars here that it looks like the used car lot we went to for my father's car.

I leap off my Abuela's lap after my sisters leave the car and my mother catches me. “You're running," she warns. My grandmother finds my hand and gives the food to my older sisters to carry. My father and mother walk in front of us, her arm linked into his. He says something too quiet for me to hear and my mother laughs.

Over the voices, I hear the sound of pops. They are close, but muffled. We move with the crowd, and I bite the edge of my bottom lip because it's getting hard to follow my father in front of us. He is turning and dodging but my grandmother is slow and I don't want to lose him because I am little and we are far from home with my Abuela who doesn't speak English.

I start to run again. My mother turns around and I stop.

“Mama!” I call out, wondering if my voice will be as loud in the night as it is in the day. “Mama! Wait for us!”

"Daughter! M'ija!” She calls back to me, but keeps walking. “You worry all the time.”

I do. I am always scared. I don't understand what we do and I never know where we go.

I feel caught. Between the house that feels safe where we all speak the same language, and being here, outside, where our voices are the only ones in Spanish.

I am between worlds again.

“Why worry, daughter?”

I can't explain.

My father claps when we find an open space of grass, and my Abuela spreads our blanket. The seven of us sit, shoulders and knees against backs. All around, there are people next to people and no place to walk in between. The grass is wet and soaks through. I want to stand but don't dare in the darkness. I see no one else standing off of their blankets and I know right away that we did things wrong again.

The blanket we brought is the wrong kind. From the corner of my eye, I see that the family next to us has food that I know is American. Not our sausage, not the bright red salty kind that my father likes. We always bring the wrong things.

We don't know how to live in America. No one in my family ever worries about how we don't do things right, except for me.

We sit, I don't know what we wait for. The crowd is murmuring, and then there is silence. A sound like a whizzing arrow slices through the air and then a crack of thunder. I scream and my Abuela pulls me into her. "Mi chinita, my little girl," her voice is soothing. I push my head inside her thin summer sweater and I rest there.

There is no time to breathe before the next booms start. The pounding of  sound comes one after the other and I tremble with each one.

I have never heard anything like this except in a storm. How long before the rain makes us wet?

My legs feel the ground rumble, and the wild thunder continues. I throw my hands over my eyes and keep them squeezed shut inside my grandmother's sweater. I breathe in and a smell like the wooden matches my Abuela uses in the kitchen fills the air. I want to be home.

There is a round of continuous pops and I think that surely, this time, the thunder will bring rain. I keep my eyes closed and shiver, anticipating how we'll be wet any minute.

I hold the smooth buttons on my Abuela's sweater between my fingers. Twirling each one back and forth, I count to ten. It will make the time waiting for things to end go faster if I count each one. There is a moment of silence that stretches into minutes, and then, the thunder is gone. I open my eyes and look up. I see my father standing. 

“The fireworks were better in Colombia,” he says with his hands on his hips. His voice sounds thin after the booms of the night. "They were more exciting." I wonder how they could have something over there, that is from here.

  

My father turns and bends down over my mother. She lifts her face up to him and he offers her his two hands. She takes them both. They are happy.

 

* * *
 

*My father had only three Fourth of Julys in this country. He died three years after coming to America.

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The Years Don't Lessen: On a Father's Day Without a Father

The first time that I saw Pirates of the Caribbean, it was with my husband and our three children. There is a moment within seconds of the movie starting that Orlando Bloom crosses the screen, and it knocks the wind out of me. “Oh! That looks just like my dad!,” I gasp.

“Cool, mom,” say my kids.

“No,” I say, “I mean it. It really does.”

But they have already stopped listening and keep sucking on their Sour Patch Kids, while I sit, frozen. They can't understand. For the next 27 times that Orlando pops up on the screen I call out how he could be my dad. My kind children politely look at me, and nod.

I haven't seen my father since the beginning of first grade, and now I have him in front of me, larger than life, for 90 minutes.

“My dad. It’s my dad.” I whisper, but I know I'm saying it to myself.

* * *

My father had skin the color of shiny copper and eyes that were green with flecks of yellow. When he smiled, he made me grin so wide I thought my skin would crack.

Growing up, we had a radio in the kitchen, a beige plastic rectangle with gold colored dials. The station was set to AM radio and The Beatles were always playing one of their Top 10 singles. I would hear the music from whatever part of the house I was in and come running, ready to dance the Twist for my father.

He couldn’t hold back his laughter at seeing me shake my five-year-old body back and forth while I sang for him, "Ooooooh he was just seventeeeeen!” Laughing and clapping, his smile opened into double laugh lines on the left side of his cheek. They would get so deep that they looked like I drew them in with black magic marker.

My parents were from Colombia, South America, but coming to the United States didn’t stop them from having the parties they were used to having there. In our basement, their old records would be pulled out: Carlos Gardel was the favorite. My father, holding a brown bottle of beer in his hand and his always present cigarette perched on his lips, would slide his feet back and forth until he was in the middle of the basement floor. I would secretly watch, hidden around the corner of the steps. Seeing him dancing with his eyes closed, lost in the music, was more than I could bear. I would blow my cover and run to him. My summer nightgown streaming behind me and my bare feet slapping against the cold cement floor, I jumped into his arms. Finally, I would be there, his cheek scratching against mine and pressing into his neck to breathe in Old Spice. I wanted him more than anything else in the world.

My father didn’t talk very much, he mostly laughed. He would wink, I swear it was only to me, and I would cover my mouth with both hands to stop from exploding. My father knew how he was my everything, and it was not something he ever took lightly. Each gesture to me was a grand one and his magic was in making time stand still. He could freeze a moment by looking into my eyes and all around me became distant and fell away. All that was left was just my father, and me, and that was the world.

I was in love with my father. I would wait at the end of the day for him to come home from work, my forehead leaning with all my might against the front screen door so I could see as far out as possible while I watched for him. Then, there, in his grey work overalls, I would spot him. Like a horse bursting through a gate, I galloped down our front steps. Taking two steps at a time I would begin shouting, "Papi!" When he saw me, he would stop walking and crouch down, and wait. It was then that his dimples would appear.

One day, I popped out the mesh of our front screen door from the force of my body. My father had to replace it.

* * *

These memories of my father flood over me that afternoon as I watch Orlando Bloom on the screen. I force myself to concentrate on time with my family, but I can’t stop missing my father. My throat begins to ache and I only see him, with his eyes closed, a palm of one hand softly on his stomach, the other held up in the air, swaying his shoulders side to side as “Adios Muchachos” plays on our stereo.

I have to excuse myself from my children and leave for the bathroom. I don't have the time to explain to them that I didn’t have my father long enough. I was a little girl who adored her father and he was here for much too short a time.

My father died two months into the start of my first grade; a shocking suicide. His death so abrupt that no one could get me to stop looking out of our front screen door for him. They gave up trying to pull me away, and I made the mesh pop out again. No one was there to replace it, and it remained split, with a bulge in the middle until my mother moved us to a new house.

My life has been filled with Father’s Days since then, and all of them, without him. I have never not thought of my father on this day and of how much I loved him. This Father's Day will begin like all the other ones have since, with my first words being, Feliz Dia de los padres, Papi. Te amo.

Happy Father’s Day, Papi, I love you.

 

* * *