DAPHNE MERKIN
413
misjudged me - his youngest daughter, pure as I am honest, his
Cordelia?
"Maybe," he says, not unkindly. "Could be I'm just not used to
it. "
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of us all? It is not
Lily or Rachel I'm competing with so much as myself- a reflection
that will do me justice.
"See you," I say.
These discussions with my father about my appearance,
minute as they are, make me feel shy- as if I had been picked out,
flooded with light.
"Hair grows," he says.
"Yeah," I say, although I have just had mine cut expressly to
counteract this tendency. I am holding a glass of juice and a rocky
piece of streusel cake - the buttery crumbs of its topping now gone
hard as pellets - to take upstairs with me.
"Your mother starves me," my father says, eyeing my cake.
"You don't look starved," I say.
He pulls his chest up with feigned dignity and says, "Ap–
pearances are deceiving."
"Poor man," I say, giggling. My father's abiding appetite is a
family joke.
"Good night," he says, shaking his head and shuffling off to his
study in his slippers; his feet under his Sulka pajamas are dimpled
and white, the feet of a king.
The haircut my father was having difficulty adjusting to was very
short, nearly androgynous. What I've looked for in hairdressers,
from the age of fifteen up, has nothing to do with their skill at im–
proving my looks.
It
has to do with a quality of attentiveness, an
obsession with an abstract ideal of beauty- the beauty that will in–
sure my father's undying devotion - equal to my own. The hair–
dressers I go to more than once are invariably fastidious and acutely
homosexual. They know nothing of my quest; they know only of my
hair and what they wish to do with it, a reflection of their whimsy
rather than my need. I'm not even sure some of them - those with
distant fathers of their own - might not have been sympathetic to my
wish had I bothered to explain it. What I desired was a haircut -like
the perfectly fitting glass slipper in the Cinderella story - that would
transport me from my grungy state into a condition of chosenness : I
am the belle of the ball, the one who wins the hand of the father–
pnnce.
