Summer of 1968; I am six years old. I am with my mother, June, at The Golden Mirror beauty salon in the Wykagyl Shopping Center on the north end of New Rochelle, New York. It smells like floral gasoline. Aqua Net floats everywhere and I squint—a lot.
Robert is teasing out the final touches on my mother’s signature Marlo Thomas flip. They are having fun. I can see it in my mother’s face in the mirror. She is doing her usual array of lip purses and head poses. A nod to the right. A slight, almost imperceptible grin. Does anyone else notice, I wonder? Does Robert? Or is he simply too busy, comb in one hand, tiny shears in the other? Like a plastic surgeon, he carefully and precisely snips here and combs there.
My mother is simply beautiful—soft pale skin, no hint of any sun, nothing too red. She has a beauty that Robert, like any artist, wants to play with. Robert’s poly-blend flowery, gossamer disco shirt tickles the edge of Mom’s ear. He towers three heads above his masterpiece as he goes back in for more.
Now Robert teases out the final touches on my mother’s signature Flipped Bob. The two are whispering and giggling. They are the girls in high school with a beehive-high secret. They are having fun. I can see it in my mother’s face in the mirror. They are good friends.
Robert takes a step back in his long, lanky body to examine his work. He is serious. Scientific. The long fingers on his right hand cradle his chin. Robert’s thick and dark eyelashes flap ever so slowly over his green and gold eyes.
Robert is at once handsome and pretty—and not like the other men my now-single mother dresses up for.
In his world of hairdryers and nail polish, Robert is the very essence of confidence. In a strange way I don’t understand, he is my mother’s, and she is all his. Her poses for him are not subtle, like the gentle batting of lashes I catch when a date picks her up. I know this means something, but I don’t know what, and don’t yet care.
Suddenly, Robert grabs a can of Aqua Net and shoots a zig-zag of hairspray that I suppose is his way of saying the new word he’s recently taught me. “Voilà!” A combination of “genius” wrapped in a magical state of utter perfection.
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A few days later, after long day at Mohawk Summer Day Camp, Mom and I sit on her king-size bed. She is playing solitaire. She is in a thoughtful moment, as if placing the cards are world-order decisions about the state of all that is.
I am slowly and carefully brushing her flip while the television quietly prattles on about Nixon and the Vietnam war. To be sure, Mom misses nothing. Not on the early evening news, nor a partner’s hand of cards in a game of bridge, nor the current hand of Solitaire she has been dealt.
I continue to brush. Start top right, moving carefully so as not to ruin the bottom flip. To the naked eye, our conversation is a lot of much ado about nothing. Mom asks about Mohawk. A fragile area to dwell upon.
I don’t have the nerve to describe how Jason Lipschitz had smothered his PB&J in my hair, nor the counselor, Jon, who had done little more than wash it out with freezing Mohawk lake water while grilling me with an annoyed tone about what I had done “this time.”
Ever since Jason and his gang had accused me of “swinging like a girl,” I began fighting back with, say, a quip about his mother’s weight problem until the entire table of six-year-olds were in hysterics. I can redirect laughter from me onto someone else with Olympic precision.
It’s different with Mom. Best to keep all things camp to a minimum. We both know that.
She gets the reports. She knows the truth. At least, the camp’s truth. So, only discuss the one area of sports that I do excel in: Swimming. Like running, swimming is an individual sport. It requires no contact nor any dependence on another teammate. It is just a matter of strength and repetition. I can do that.
I could also do this hair thing. And so, as I begin another stroke of the brush, the words fall out of my mouth like an easy breath of air:
“When I grow up, I want to be just like Robert.”
Mom snatches the brush out of my hand.
“No,” she hisses like an angry cat, her eyes on fire, my mouth agape. “No, you don’t!” We both sit there frozen, staring at one another save for the brush shaking in her hand. Her eyes are blood red.
What had I said? What was so wrong?
It is the first time that I realize that to be like Robert is a really, REALLY bad thing. It is the first time I know I am not “a man.”
I realize in that moment, somewhere in my animal brain, that there are two kinds of men—the ones who count, like her dates, and the ones who don’t, like Robert. Mom wants me to count. She wants me to matter. But I am Robert. I want to do her hair. I want to play with her beauty. I want her to get men’s attention…Is that what I want for myself?
I can’t fight Mom the way I fight Jason Lipschitz. She’s not a table of kids at camp. There’s no one to redirect to. And I’m not feeling funny. I am scared and I can’t hurt her back, even though she just sliced my throat out.
◊♦◊
I am now married for twenty-five years to an amazing man but in many ways, my mother is still my world. It would be years before I could, or would, understand her fears as a single mom in the ‘70s suburbs.
But when my mother—in our own home—snatched that brush from my hand, that’s when I knew I had no safe harbor. I was on my own and it was up to me to take care of myself. As horrible as the moment was, it steeled my spine and became, subconsciously, the launchpad that made me the man that I am now.
And in his way, Robert also made me who I am today. He was strong and beautiful and confident. I have no idea where Robert is today, or if he is even alive, but looking back at all that was his in that salon, I realize that he unwittingly gave me a gift—the gift of strength and leadership in all that I do as an educator. He didn’t apologize.
Robert said to the planet, “I am who I am, and who I am is someone who makes a difference in the world.”
And who I am is someone who leads people to higher education and career fulfillment, paying it forward to people who can pull out their own can of Aqua Net and spray the world with their own brand of “genius” wrapped in a magical state of utter perfection—not despite their difference but because of it. Voilà!
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