Over the course of the ride, without a single word exchanged between us, he removed all the knots and confusion from my hair. By the time we arrived at the beach, my hair was no longer a burden. It was liberated. I dashed straight to the water—oh, how I love the ocean, a gift from my mother—and as I ran I could feel my hair, buoyant and blowing in the wind for the first time. Hallelujah! My hair was actually blowing like in the commercials!
I dived into the first wave I could and rode it back to shore. When I stood up and touched my hair, it was not the haphazard mix of textures I was accustomed to. Instead I touched orderly, coily, elongated curls! For the first time, my hair felt pretty. I felt pretty. I felt soft and light, as if the shame I’d been carrying had been plucked out of me and washed away.
As I stood in the waist-deep water, reveling in the newfound confidence brought by my liberated curls, a sudden wall of ocean appeared, crashing down, pounding against my back. My feet were swept up off the sandy floor and over my head. My tiny body was tossed like a rag doll in the strong waves that had suddenly kicked up. I had no sense of equilibrium or orientation, but I knew I was being pulled down, tumbling in surging, dark water mixed with frothy white foam and grit that was beating against my body like boxing gloves made of sandpaper. Even if I could tell which way was up and how to get there, I knew I was not strong enough to overcome the powerful currents, so I relaxed my body and went with it. I surrendered.
By what I believe to be God’s grace, the ocean decided to give me back to the earth. I lay motionless on the grainy, wet sand, winded and salty. When I realized I was alive, I stood up to look for my mother. I spied her and my brother lying on an olive blanket in the distance, shades on, nonchalantly sunbathing. Oblivious. I released a mighty wail, which devolved into hysterical crying, finally catching my mother’s attention. Yet another close encounter with death.
To calm my shattered seven-year-old nerves, someone took me up to the boardwalk, to the hot dog stand. I was a wreck—but my hair wasn’t. It was still in wavy ringlets. I had achieved perfect beach hair. That day I almost died, but my hair was done.
A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND
From the moment I saw her, I felt both awe and identification. I idolized her. She was like a living doll, but neither baby nor Barbie; though she was a real, elegant, grown-up woman, she appeared pure and flawless, as if made of delicate lacquered porcelain. I’d never seen anyone like her—such a radiant, glamorous, vulnerable, yet powerful being. She was supernatural. I stood there staring, fascinated and frozen before the bright screen where she lived.
One evening I had been walking aimlessly down the hall in one of the many houses we lived in. As I passed my mother’s dark little bedroom, I casually wandered in. I can’t remember whether I saw or heard her first, but I know something carried me into that room. The bedroom was lit only by the washed-out colors of the old TV facing the bed, where my mother was lying in silhouette, watching a special about the life and death of Marilyn Monroe.
I softly pushed open the bedroom door, walking in on the iconic scene from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in which Marilyn sings “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” She was the most beautiful person I had ever seen.
Her energy was like a fairy’s, but she looked like a goddess, swathed in a luxurious electric-pink silk gown and matching opera gloves, with diamonds of every size dripping from her ears and wrapped around her neck and wrists. The only bits of skin exposed were her face, her shoulders, and her arms down to the elbow, yet I remember her flesh seeming so rich and creamy, glistening like homemade ice cream. Her hair was just a few shades lighter, dazzling like finely spun gold. She was voluptuously shaped, with round, curvy hips, a small, cinched waist, proud, purposeful breasts, and arms that stretched wide and hugged close. She was poised, like a dancer, yet her feet didn’t seem to move. Instead scores of people danced around her: fawning and fanning, kneeling and bowing down to her, conveying her above their heads like Cleopatra. Maybe she was a queen, I thought. The shining queen of movie stars.
I’d never heard the name Marilyn Monroe before that moment. But I was quickly hooked. Not your typical third-grade fare, perhaps, but my childhood was anything but typical. My mother very lovingly supported my fascination with Marilyn. While most girls my age adorned their walls with pictures of Holly Hobbie—the frontier rag doll with freckles and blond yarn braids in a strawberry-print bonnet—I had a poster of Marilyn Monroe dressed as a sensuous showgirl, complete with a black beaded bustier, fishnets, and black patent-leather pumps. I gazed up at Marilyn before I went to sleep and first thing when I woke up.
Later my mother bought me Marilyn: A Biography, by Norman Mailer. Though I was way too young for the material, like Marilyn herself I read voraciously. I pored over the large, glossy photos of her, studying all her different moods and looks. She was a shape-shifter—in some photos she was impossibly beautiful and glamorous, in others she seemed shattered and about to disappear. Her hair shifted shapes, too: pin curls, pigtails, sweeping updos, bobs with deep-diving waves. I even detected unruly curls and familiar fuzz underneath the perfect, almost white-blond wave of her hair. There was also something in her physicality, something about her body type, that didn’t read as typically Caucasian to me. Not only was she curvy, she had a
