By Alana Craib
/ Flash /
My mother eats her own hair for breakfast. With milk and salt and fresh fruits. In a little ceramic bowl no one else uses, she sits at the kitchen table and twirls her hair around her fork like spaghetti over the morning newspaper. It had once been so thick, the type of hair you see in Pantene commercials, a deep black and perpetually shiny, cascading down her back like liquid nighttime. When she started going gray, she’d pluck individual hairs out one by one and cry at herself in the bathroom mirror, while I’d sit on the counter and bat her hands away and say mom, mom, it looks like starlight. Like strands of starlight in the sky. Then she’d sniffle and smile and say, You have to say that, you’re my daughter.
We don’t remember when, exactly, it started to fall out. But when it did, she tried to hide it-- we knew something was wrong when she took down the chore schedule from the fridge and silently started vacuuming alone everyday. It all eventually broke when the hairs got stuck inside and we found her crying in the dark on the living room floor one night, the vacuum in pieces across the carpet, surrounded by long black and white slivers. Framed by the moonlight slating in through the blinds, she looked like the sketch lines of a charcoal drawing. The type of drawing that could be titled something voyeuristic and condescending by some stuffy art critic, like Domestic Grief. She didn’t say anything the next morning. She only swept up the hairs left over on the floor into her breakfast bowl. That was that. Now we find them everywhere: in between the couch cushions, in the dishwasher, inside unopened bags of FunYuns, in the bristles of my toothbrush.
Sometimes my mother uses strands of her hair to floss. She tries to get us all to do the same. This way we don’t have to waste any money, she says. My brother thinks it's absolutely hilarious. It’s his favorite story to tell his friends at the lunch table, beckoning me over from across the cafeteria to sling his arm around my shoulder and say more about our quirky and eccentric mother, as if we’re the comic side characters of a dysfunctional family in a sitcom. We aren’t, though. Not really. Still, they all cackle every time. If my mom were to overhear, she would blush and fluster under the attention and I’d have to try not to scream.
You can always trust my mother to act frugal, as if she can’t remember she’s not working anymore. She tells stories of when she was young and would shoplift drugstore lipstick in shades three times too light for her and roll her uniform skirt waistband up after school, all to go stand against the cobblestone walls of uptown blocks with her friends and pretend she’s one of those girls you see on the cover of waiting room magazines. A favorite story of hers to tell is the time when she punched a girl’s braces through her lip in high school for sticking gum in her hair-- the girl had it coming, she’d say. She was a bully and got all her best ideas from poorly written teen dramas. My mother tells this with a smug sort of shame every time, and sometimes I think she is still only a girl, with too light lipstick and a mean right hook, trapped inside a mother’s body.
She hates her mother-body: I know this, because she hunches her shoulders when no one is looking, she rubs her hands down her neck and over her hips when getting dressed with a puckered face as I watch. She sucks on her teeth. She pulls at the lines in her skin and traces where they’ll appear one day on my face. Make sure you take good care of yourself, go to the gym often, she’d say. You’re so beautiful, she would tell me. I’m so jealous. Silently, we both know I inherited her body, bone for bone. That’s the only reason why she can love it so much now; it no longer belongs to her.
When she looks at me I think maybe she is looking at herself. Sometimes, when I have nightmares I crawl into her bed at night when my father’s asleep. We whisper together under the sheets about the dreams she used to have that I have now too. She is gentle in these moments. She cradles me and I get to be the baby again, and then she says my turn, my turn. As I hold her, she tells me more stories of when she was my age. These ones are secrets, she says. Not even your father knows. And in them boys are cruel, her parents are silent, her cousins are better at playing piano, she leaves without saying goodbye, but her hair is beautiful. I’m trying, she whispers. I know, I say. I love you. And then she looks at me close, she plucks out my eyelashes to save for later. For a midnight snack.
In the mornings, we eat breakfast together. She kisses me goodbye for school. Alone in the bathroom after second period, I heave and cough up hairballs into the sink. It sits like midnight sludge in the well of the drain, starlight slivers and all.