BLONDE MOMMY
FIXATING ON THE BARBIE FANTASY
STORY BY Marion Winik ILLUSTRATION BY Paige Vickers
Like many women, I flirted with various identities in my younger years – and each had its own hairdo. I was a thick-bange
d coffeehouse poet, a moussed-up disco queen, a corn-rowed Jamaican honeymooner, a pregnant yogi with a pixie.
I went blue and then magenta back in the 80s, and once tried to surprise my first husband by dying my hair platinum when he was out of town. Unfortunately, the recent beauty school graduates who went to work on my brunette tresses had to use four rounds of bleach to get the color out. At the end of the ordeal, my hair was greenish-white and utterly fried. I ended up getting a crew cut and had to hold up a sign in the airport with our name on it because I knew it was the only way he’d recognize me.
Once I became a mom, I had far less time to think about my hair. I had an all-purpose bob, and I dumped grocery store hair color on it every six weeks to hide the advancing gray. The big thrill was choosing between Medium Brown and Medium Reddish Brown, or maybe going wild with Espresso.
By the time I turned 40, however, I was a lonely single mom in the midst of a midlife crisis. Where was my motorcycle trip through Big Sur, my bright red sports car? The only thing I could afford was a dolphin tattoo on my hip. I also got a boyfriend, but he was free.
“What are your fantasies?” asked my new boyfriend on the phone one night.
I searched my mind. Was it something with leather, something with pirates? Finally, I had an epiphany.
“You know what, I don’t really have fantasies,” I said. “I only have plans.”
What I meant was, if I want something, I don’t just make up stories in my head about it, I go ahead and try to make it happen. This sounds a little naive in retrospect, but I was a young 40, I guess. In any case, this go-for-it attitude fueled my second attempt at being a blonde.
Right about then, I read in Diane Johnson’s wonderful book, “Le Divorce,” that all French women over 40 have blonde hair. It’s de rigeur. It’s haute couture. It’s savoir faire and Catherine Deneuve. It’s softer, more youthful, blends better with the gray, and the point is, if the French women do it, it was good enough for me.
Per my hairdresser’s instructions – she was a blonde named Ava – I went out and bought a bunch of magazines to find a picture of the shade I had in mind. Somehow I ended up not with “Mirabella” and “Vogue” but “Vanity Fair” and “The New Yorker”. I don’t know what kind of hairdos I thought I was going to find in “The New Yorker.”
A week before my appointment, I got nervous. “I like my hair long and shiny,” I confessed to Ava, remembering the last time I’d tried to go blonde. “I don’t want it short and dead.”
She hugged me and gushed about how beautiful I was going to be and sent me home with a hair masque to use before the appointment. It was from France, which comforted me considerably.
The day of the event itself I was a basket case. I could not read any of the 15 books I had brought to while away the time. Instead, I stared beseechingly at Ava and her assistant as they applied mixtures from five different little plastic bowls. Painstakingly, slowly, they worked as the hours ticked by. They seemed to be coloring each hair individually, layering them with innumerable squares of white paper. I looked like a postmodern Little Orphan Annie.
Between my reflection in the mirror and the stir-craziness, I started to giggle. I imagined that the chemicals were leaching IQ points right out of my head, releasing my inner bimbo. At last! Free to be – stupid! Ava noted my change in mood.
“It’s true what they say,” I told her a little hysterically. “I’m having more fun already.”
After many long hours they led me back from the shampoo sink for the finishing touches. Then Ava flicked off her blow dryer and whirled the chair around to give me a look.
“Oh wow,” I said. It was a work of art: shiny and golden from a distance, a zillion different colors up close, and somehow really okay with what had seemed to be the coloring of an irrevocable brunette. Now my hair was just a few shades away from my skin tone, and this somehow made my eyes seem bluer and wider than before.
“I look like a blonde,” I enthused.
“And you are, baby,” said Ava, her voice blonde and gravelly as Mae West or Lauren Bacall. “You are.”
I left the salon and rushed to pick my sons up at the neighbors’ where they’d been staying during this production. My 10-year-old Hayes was the first to view the results. I wasn’t too worried about his reaction, as I’d read a composition he wrote for school in which his fictional hero’s mother was a college professor named Julie, described as “thin and pretty, with blond hair and big lips.” No bimbo she, however: she taught at a school he called “Hartford.”
“It’s great,” Hayes said, touching me to see if I was real. “You should have always had blond hair, Mom.”
His little brother was less enthusiastic, being at the age where any change in Mom’s appearance is inevitably bad. “I don’t like it,” he said. “You look weird.”
“Oh, but you’re gonna change your mind, honey, when you get to know Blonde Mommy. Blonde Mommy is nicer than Old Mommy. She’s richer, too.”
“Really?” He mused for a moment. “Can we get Lunchables for school tomorrow?” he asked.
“Blonde Mommy says yes!” I shouted. “She always says yes!” And I swerved directly into the grocery store parking lot.
In the next two days, I had the pleasure of hearing friend after friend admit that they liked it despite their previous conviction that it was going to look terrible. Most of them had not actually told me this, but somehow I knew. At a party, someone actually said my hair looked like Barbie’s.
After decades of intellectual pretensions that had somehow been born of occasional low self-esteem about my looks, I was thrilled to resemble Barbie in any way. I just smiled and laughed and kissed everyone. I felt like decoration. This was a brand new experience for me. Maybe I would try to learn to walk in heels.
Now that, I have to say, was a fantasy. *
