Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex

“Just a haircut.”

He nodded, satisfied. “How do you want it?”

“Short,” I ventured.

“Short short?” he asked.

“Short,” I said, “but not too short.”

“Okay. Short but not too short. Good idea. See how the other half lives.”

I froze, thinking he meant something by this. But he was only joking.

As for himself, Ed kept a neat head. What hair he had was slicked back. He had a brutal, pugnacious face. His nostrils were dark and fiery as he labored around me, pumping up the chair and stropping his razor.

“Your father let you keep your hair like this?”

“Up until now.”

“So the old man is finally straightening you out. Listen, you won’t regret it. Women don’t want a guy looks like a girl. Don’t believe what they tell you, they want a sensitive male. Bullshit!”

The swearing, the straight razors, the shaving brushes, all these were my welcome to the masculine world. The barber had the football game on the TV. The calendar showed a vodka bottle and a pretty girl in a white fur bikini. I planted my feet on the waffle iron of the footrest while he swiveled me back and forth before the flashing mirrors.

“Holy mackerel, when’s the last time you had a haircut anyway?”

“Remember the moon landing?”

“Yeah. That’s about right.”

He turned me to face the mirror. And there she was, for the last time, in the silvered glass: Calliope. She still wasn’t gone yet. She was like a captive spirit, peeking out.

Ed the barber put a comb in my long hair. He lifted it experimentally, making snipping sounds with his scissors. The blades weren’t touching my hair. The snipping was only a kind of mental barbering, a limbering up. This gave me time for second thoughts. What was I doing? What if Dr. Luce was right? What if that girl in the mirror really was me? How did I think I could defect to the other side so easily? What did I know about boys, about men? I didn’t even like them that much.

“This is like taking down a tree,” opined Ed. “First you gotta go in and lop off the branches. Then you chop down the trunk.”

I closed my eyes. I refused to return Calliope’s gaze any longer. I gripped the armrests and waited for the barber to do his work. But in the next second the scissors clinked onto the shelf. With a buzz, the electric clippers switched on. They circled my head like bees. Again Ed the barber lifted my hair with his comb and I heard the buzzer dive in toward my head. “Here we go,” he said.

My eyes were still closed. But I knew there was no going back now. The clippers raked across my scalp. I held firm. Hair fell away in strips.

“I should charge you extra,” said Ed.

Now I did open my eyes, alarmed about the cost. “How much is it?”

“Don’t worry. Same price. This is my patriotic deed today. I’m making the world safe for democracy.”

My grandparents had fled their home because of a war. Now, some fifty-two years later, I was fleeing myself. I felt that I was saving myself just as definitively. I was fleeing without much money in my pocket and under the alias of my new gender. A ship didn’t carry me across the ocean; instead, a series of cars conveyed me across a continent. I was becoming a new person, too, just like Lefty and Desdemona, and I didn’t know what would happen to me in this new world to which I’d come.

I was also scared. I had never been out on my own before. I didn’t know how the world operated or how much things cost. From the Lochmoor Hotel I had taken a cab to the bus terminal, not knowing the way. At Port Authority I wandered past the tie shops and fast-food stalls, looking for the ticket booths. When I found them I bought a ticket for a night bus to Chicago, paying the fare as far as Scranton, Pennsylvania, which was as much as I thought I could afford. The bums and druggies occupying the scoop benches looked me over, sometimes hissing or smacking their lips. They scared me, too. I nearly gave up the idea of running away. If I hurried, I could make it back to the hotel before Milton and Tessie returned from seeing Carol Channing. I sat in the waiting area, considering this, the edge of the Samsonite clamped between my knees as though any minute someone might try to snatch it away. I played out scenes in my head where I declared my intention of living as a boy and my parents, at first protesting but then breaking down, accepted me. A policeman passed by. When he was gone I went to sit next to a middle-aged woman, hoping to be taken for her daughter. Over the loudspeaker a voice announced that my bus was boarding. I looked up at the other passengers, the poor traveling by night. There was an aging cowboy carrying a duffel bag and a souvenir Louis Armstrong statuette; there were two Sri Lankan Catholic priests; there were no less than three overweight mothers loaded down with children and bedding, and a little man who turned out to be a horse jockey, with cigarette wrinkles and brown teeth. They lined up to board the bus while the scene in my head began to go off on its own, to stop taking my directorial notes. Now Milton was shaking his head no, and Dr. Luce was putting on a surgical mask, and my schoolmates back in Grosse Pointe were pointing at me and laughing, their faces lit with malicious joy.

In a trance of fear, dazed yet trembling, I proceeded onto the dark bus. For protection I took a seat next to the middle-aged lady. The other passengers, accustomed to these night journeys, were already taking out thermoses and unwrapping sandwiches. The smell of fried chicken began to waft from the back seats. I was suddenly very hungry. I wished that I were back at the hotel, ordering room service. I would have to get new clothes soon. I needed to look older and less like prey. I had to start dressing like a boy. The bus pulled out of Port Authority and I watched, terrified at what I was doing but unable to stop myself, as we made our way out of the city and through the long yellow-lit dizzy tunnel that led to New Jersey. Going underground, through the rock, with the filthy river bottom above us, and fish swimming in the black water on the other side of the curving tiles.

At a Salvation Army outlet in Scranton, not far from the bus station, I went looking for a suit. I pretended I was shopping for my brother, though no one asked any questions. Male sizes baffled me. I held the jackets discreetly against me to see what might fit. Finally I found a suit roughly my size. It was sturdy-looking and all-weather. The label inside said “Durenmatt’s Men’s Clothiers, Pittsburgh.” I took off my Papagallo. Checking to see if anyone was watching, I tried the jacket on. I didn’t feel what a boy would feel. It wasn’t like putting on your father’s jacket and becoming a man. It was like being cold and having your date give you his jacket to wear. As it settled on my shoulders, the jacket felt big, warm, comforting, alien. (And who was my date in this case? The football captain? No. My steady was the World War II vet, dead of heart disease. My guy was the Elk Lodge member who had moved to Texas.)

The suit was only part of my new identity. It was the haircut that mattered most. Now, in the barbershop, Ed was going at me with a whisk brush. The bristles cast a powder in the air and I closed my eyes. I felt myself being wheeled around again and the barber said, “Okay, that’s it.”

I opened my eyes. And in the mirror I didn’t see myself. Not the Mona Lisa with the enigmatic smile any longer. Not the shy girl with the tangled black hair in her face, but instead her fraternal twin brother. With the screen of my hair removed, the recent changes in my face were far more evident. My jaw looked squarer, broader, my neck thicker, with a bulge of Adam’s apple in the center. It was unquestionably a male face, but the feelings inside that boy were still a girl’s. To cut off your hair after a breakup was a feminine reaction. It was a way to start over, to renounce vanity, to spite love. I knew that I would never see the Object again. Despite bigger problems, greater worries, it was heartbreak that seized me when I first saw my male face in the mirror. I thought: it’s over. By cutting off my hair I was punishing myself for loving someone so much. I was trying to be stronger.