Life's Accessories by Rachel Levy Lesser

Author:Rachel Levy Lesser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Hair Pulled Back in a Twilly

I don’t like to wear my hair back. I like my hair down. I like it to frame my face and sometimes hide parts of it, like the acne on my chin and the freckles on my cheeks. I’m pretty good at wearing my hair down. It’s easy for me to do with my blunt-cut, relatively straight, and, at long last, thanks to postpregnancy hormones, thick hair. I wash my hair at night, go to sleep with it wet, and then run a flatiron through it the next morning.

My mother loved my hair pulled back.

“Why don’t you pull your hair back so I can see your pretty face?” she asked me before I left for school in the morning, before I went out for a party at night, and really before I went out for anything. She called me one night during the final season of Sex and the City just to tell me how pretty Sarah Jessica Parker looked with her hair pulled back when she went out to dinner with Baryshnikov in Paris. She thought I should wear my hair back for my brother Jonny’s upcoming wedding. I couldn’t believe that was what she was thinking about then. She was quite sick during the last season of Sex and the City. I’m not sure why, but that final season of that show is still a reference point for my mother’s cancer. So is Jonny’s wedding. I told my mother I’d take her suggestion under consideration.

I wore my hair pulled back to my mother’s funeral, just a few months after my brother’s wedding and after the Sex and the City series finale. I did it in part because I knew that was how she liked it, even though I kept telling myself she wouldn’t actually be at the funeral. I also did it because I didn’t have the time or motivation to run a flatiron through my hair the morning of the funeral. I gathered my hair back with my fingers into a ponytail and wrapped around it a CVS hairband, which I grabbed from the giant stack of ponytail holders in my bathroom vanity drawer. I noticed a light purple silk hair ribbon in the drawer. It was pretty and also brand new.

Neil had bought it for me only a couple weeks before my mother died, when he was traveling for work in Paris. That trip was nothing like Sarah Jessica Parker’s and Baryshnikov’s. Neil was in Paris for just forty-eight hours, holed up in a conference room at a client’s office for most of the time. He did manage to sneak out in my favorite European city to buy me something. He wanted to cheer me up. Everyone did then. My best friend from camp, Liza, flew down from Boston to spend time with me while Neil was away. I think she also flew down to say goodbye to my mom. Neil went to Hermès—fancy, I know—and bought me what I suspect was the least expensive thing for sale at the iconic French boutique.

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