breath. Then we’d watch TV or he’d read me stories: Jack and the Beanstalk or Ten Apples Up on Top .
Other nights I accompanied him to neighborhood potlucks or to readings where adults crowded the room, a forest of legs for me to push through to find Dad against the wall deep in conversation. I’d crawl onto his lap or lie on the floor beside him, waiting for time to pass. On the drive home, I usually fell asleep. Even if I woke up I pretended to be asleep so that Dad would carry me from the parked car up the stairs of our building to my bed.
But I tired of going out so many nights. One evening when my dad wanted to take me out with him, I told him “No, I want to stay home,” and despite the fact that there was no one to watch me, he let me stay home alone.
“Don’t answer the door,” he said. “Just stay here and play with your Little People.” I put on a brave face. I was a big girl of five almost six. After he left, I decided to do what he might have done, like a big girl does. I would wash my hair. In the bathroom by the bathtub I found a clear bottle filled with yellow shampoo. I overturned the bottle and sticky globs poured into my hand. I then massaged the globs into my hair, like Dad did each week, sitting on the edge of our porcelain tub.
I can’t remember if I wet my hair but I do remember it lathering into a mass of bubbles and sticky heft. I remember my head being too heavy for my body as I tried to get it under the open faucet. Here the hair seemed to drip, a mass of mess served up on my shoulders, unraveling and falling all over me. The soap dripped down onto my face and made my eyes sting and tear. I was scared because I didn’t know what to do. I cried, but no one heard me. The water kept running, the hair kept dripping, my eyes kept stinging, but no one answered. So I shut off the water and walked my heavy mess of head into the living room where I could play with my Little People and try to make the wet hair go away.
Sometime later the door unlocked with a pop and there was Dad. I was thrilled to see him, to know that he’d returned and that I was no longer alone. But a shadow passed over his face when he saw me with my wet hair and the trail of suds and pools of water that had followed me from the bathroom into the living room.
“Why’d you do this?” he wanted to know.
In the bathroom he lifted the bottle—once full, now almost empty. He wasn’t happy. He rolled his sleeves up past his elbows. He put me in the tub while he sat on the tub’s edge. He rinsed my head under the faucet and it hurt to have my hair washed out. The heavy tangles and knots pulled at my head. I started to cry because I couldn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. The smell of the new paint had gone. And there we both were, with eyes stinging, hopes dashed.
ALYSIA’S HAIR ON BEING WASHED
Not flower sweet nor tough as seaweed
Quiet it hangs—
Soft, Damp Spanish Moss
Spun fine as glass, as dreams
And so it grows
Unthought, uncut, unexpurged.
No Legion of Decency hair this
But wild unhairlike hair
Wrapped round impossible boats
Clinging there, growing there, aching there
Like poems in America
Like love
Like life, threatened in your mermaid sea.
O hair of my daughter
Uncombed, unused to water
Medusa head—
For all that,
Still you endure.
6.
I N THE FALL of 1976 my father enrolled me in the French American Bilingual School, then located at the corner of Steiner and Grove. Dad had high hopes for me at French American. It was an expensive private school filled with children of diplomats and businessmen and a far cry from the grotty world of the Haight-Ashbury Daycare Center, with its hippie teachers and single moms into astrology and macramé. “I feel like she’s gotten into Harvard!” Dad wrote in his journal after I was accepted. He enlisted my grandparents to help cover the tuition. “Barbara would have liked it,” he argued. As Munca and Grumpa were both deeply committed to
Other nights I accompanied him to neighborhood potlucks or to readings where adults crowded the room, a forest of legs for me to push through to find Dad against the wall deep in conversation. I’d crawl onto his lap or lie on the floor beside him, waiting for time to pass. On the drive home, I usually fell asleep. Even if I woke up I pretended to be asleep so that Dad would carry me from the parked car up the stairs of our building to my bed.
But I tired of going out so many nights. One evening when my dad wanted to take me out with him, I told him “No, I want to stay home,” and despite the fact that there was no one to watch me, he let me stay home alone.
“Don’t answer the door,” he said. “Just stay here and play with your Little People.” I put on a brave face. I was a big girl of five almost six. After he left, I decided to do what he might have done, like a big girl does. I would wash my hair. In the bathroom by the bathtub I found a clear bottle filled with yellow shampoo. I overturned the bottle and sticky globs poured into my hand. I then massaged the globs into my hair, like Dad did each week, sitting on the edge of our porcelain tub.
I can’t remember if I wet my hair but I do remember it lathering into a mass of bubbles and sticky heft. I remember my head being too heavy for my body as I tried to get it under the open faucet. Here the hair seemed to drip, a mass of mess served up on my shoulders, unraveling and falling all over me. The soap dripped down onto my face and made my eyes sting and tear. I was scared because I didn’t know what to do. I cried, but no one heard me. The water kept running, the hair kept dripping, my eyes kept stinging, but no one answered. So I shut off the water and walked my heavy mess of head into the living room where I could play with my Little People and try to make the wet hair go away.
Sometime later the door unlocked with a pop and there was Dad. I was thrilled to see him, to know that he’d returned and that I was no longer alone. But a shadow passed over his face when he saw me with my wet hair and the trail of suds and pools of water that had followed me from the bathroom into the living room.
“Why’d you do this?” he wanted to know.
In the bathroom he lifted the bottle—once full, now almost empty. He wasn’t happy. He rolled his sleeves up past his elbows. He put me in the tub while he sat on the tub’s edge. He rinsed my head under the faucet and it hurt to have my hair washed out. The heavy tangles and knots pulled at my head. I started to cry because I couldn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. The smell of the new paint had gone. And there we both were, with eyes stinging, hopes dashed.
ALYSIA’S HAIR ON BEING WASHED
Not flower sweet nor tough as seaweed
Quiet it hangs—
Soft, Damp Spanish Moss
Spun fine as glass, as dreams
And so it grows
Unthought, uncut, unexpurged.
No Legion of Decency hair this
But wild unhairlike hair
Wrapped round impossible boats
Clinging there, growing there, aching there
Like poems in America
Like love
Like life, threatened in your mermaid sea.
O hair of my daughter
Uncombed, unused to water
Medusa head—
For all that,
Still you endure.
6.
I N THE FALL of 1976 my father enrolled me in the French American Bilingual School, then located at the corner of Steiner and Grove. Dad had high hopes for me at French American. It was an expensive private school filled with children of diplomats and businessmen and a far cry from the grotty world of the Haight-Ashbury Daycare Center, with its hippie teachers and single moms into astrology and macramé. “I feel like she’s gotten into Harvard!” Dad wrote in his journal after I was accepted. He enlisted my grandparents to help cover the tuition. “Barbara would have liked it,” he argued. As Munca and Grumpa were both deeply committed to
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