When I Look Like My Father It Makes My Mother Cry
By Lorraine Rice
I give up on wrestling my hair
into a limp, submissive, dead-straight
existence, tell my mother—Just
cut it all off, trying to get back
to the beginning, in the straight-backed chair
waiting for my mother
who’d been the one to fix my hair, wanting
her to see it never was
broken. Feet bare, sweat-stuck
to newspaper spread under the chair—
how many times, how
many, have I watched her cut
my father’s hair? Him
in the same chair, a frayed
towel-cape over shoulders and chest,
his ankles an X on the spot where
Dagwood blows his top over
Blondie’s new hat. Her over him,
cheeks caved in, brow ridged, the concentration
of years on her face, sharp
metal shears in hand. My parents always uneasy
sharing space and seeing them
close is bewitching and bewildering—
their fragile intimacy severed
by the cold crisp chastisement of scissors
as my hair falls in black puffy clouds. Confused
coils, soft and intricate, beg to be caught
again and again and holding them
begs a reckoning—Me?
Not me? In the straight-backed chair
while my mother cuts my hair, in the full bloom
heat of summer she freezes
then puts a mirror in my hand—
You look just like your father,
and because her eyes are damp
for once, I do not argue.
Lorraine Rice holds an MFA from the The Writer’s Foundry at St. Joseph’s College, NY. Her work has appeared on Literary Mama and in the anthology Who’s Your Mama: The Unsung Voices of Women and Mothers (Soft Skull Press, 2009). She lives in Philadelphia with her family.