Amy's Folly: The Armor of God

The Armor of God

My grandma Ruby’s hair was a stern, tight, and seemingly impenetrable helmet. It sat atop her high forehead apparently impervious to insults from weather, wind, or the pressures of her pillow in sleep. Her hair bespoke resolution, an unwillingness to bow before the messes to which others carelessly submit. Beyond her weekly trip to the beauty shop for a set, she did little with it. She didn’t have to. The most she ever did was take to it with a little metal pick. A few judicious lifts with the pick could restore its height or shape if some malignant force briefly brought it low. Her hair was not easily or long discouraged. It stayed as was and as ever would be, at least it seemed so when I was a child. In church, when the preacher solemnly invoked our need to “put on the whole armor of God,” it was Ruby’s hair to which my thoughts would turn. My grandmother had the hair of a warrior: fierce, proud, and defiantly unbowed by ordinary mortal influences. In hindsight, that seems right and more than justifies the expense of a weekly set in hard times.

The farm ledgers from even the poorest years in my grandparents’ early married life invariably contain an entry labeled simply “Hair” and the expense was, relative to others undertaken, extraordinary, both in its amount and the regularity with which it was spent. With three children and all manner of stock to feed, the farm ledgers trace out a life with clothes sewn at home from fabric bought cheap and every nickel accounted for. Still, however stretched taut, the income reached, always, to Hair. This might suggest some vanity or waste, but I cannot think it so.

What we will count essential sometimes needs to own that what matters most is spirit, and Ruby’s hair was hers. Armored in her stiff, unbending curls, she could take on whatever came and to spend a bit on that would be a cost worth paying. I expect the symbolic force of Ruby’s hair was achieved most by what it wasn’t. It was not dirty, low, chaotic, poor, or careless – traits one and all her upbringing would predict as hers. Ruby’s hair was just the most conspicuous of her features to announce that here was order, here was dignity, here was a person fearsome and of substance. Most basically, a person with her hair was a person who could pay to have a set. More ambitiously, a person with hair so unflinchingly well-ordered would be a formidable force against which any manner of human folly or even fate itself would have to reckon. More regrettably, a person with her hair would not have a grandchild with hair like mine.

Not for Ruby the warrior’s dress that would be hers alone. She meant to conscript me too, and a more unwilling, reluctant soldier the world had never seen. My careless, untended adult hair was long foretold by the hair I had in childhood. The hair itself was inoffensive and banal – fine strands of brown that, because they would not curl, would also freely take a comb. The trouble was my tendency to hang it in my face. My hair would hide what Ruby called my “nice blue eyes.” And, too, my ponytails were never kempt or tidy. I was, in short, a messy, shaggy sort of kid and more than once Ruby menaced me with threats of scissors. She never cut my hair but professed the wish most often. My abiding sense when she turned her gaze on me was that her fingers fairly tingled with the wanting. My teenage years were worse than even this.

I came into my teenage years during the 1980s, a period for human hair diabolically designed to test the will of a woman like Ruby. Over the course of that decade, I had all the worst it had to offer: A period of frizzy perms that makes me wince in recollection, hair teased into a high nest of tangles held together by an injudicious use of hairspray sold in cans as big as aqualungs, and, worst of all, asymmetrical cuts that had half shorn too short and the other half drooping long across my face. Each visit to the farm, I showed up with some fresh hell of hair. I could be a trial upon Ruby’s nerves just by sitting at the supper table. She would mostly forbear daily comment, but taking me to church would bring on crisp advice delivered in tones of high exasperation. “Couldn’t you just…” “You would look so pretty if…” “Why don’t you…” The only mercy in it all was that it would not last. My more consistent inertia would reassert itself at last. I didn’t have it in me to spend the time my own hair took to keep it looking big or frizzy or uneven. Having seen the worst that I could do with hair, Ruby gave up any fight against mere shabbiness. It was only in her last years that I found some will my own, discovered in myself an inheritance of her fierce impulse to care for Hair.

Ruby spent longer dying than she liked. Or, rather, she was convinced both that she was dying and that she would prefer to die long before she did. She was not by nature or temperament inclined to see her life through a glass darkly and did not take leaving life lightly. Rather, in aging, she simply evinced what she ever had, the unconflicted clarity of her own displeasures. What she did not like, she announced plainly, to herself and often to others. And she did not care for aging and failing health. It was not simply the pain, though there was more than enough of that, but the diminishing of her considerable dignity. Hers had been a fierce and powerful life. At her life’s end, though, her struggles, like herself, all seemed to be reduced. Born to slay the foes of chaos and disorder with fierce competence and sharp command, at the end she met the grinding adversaries of aging, the ones that make it hard to dress and eat, hard to think straight or, at root, to want to live at all. This all told upon her hair.

When Ruby reached her late eighties, her hair began alarmingly to gentle, its well-armored severity giving way to wispy, cottony curls soft to the touch. Some days the back of her head would wear the mark of her pillow, the curls crushed and defeated against her skull. Most days she would not pick it back to lift and life. Without the will or spirit to marshal her curls back into battle formation, she would but leave them lay in all of their considerable discouragement. To be clear, her hair did not become a mess. It simply became what hair most often is yet never was for her, a thing unruly that will succumb to wilting and collapsing – a thing affected by fate. My grandfather could not accept this.

My grandfather never much cared about his own hair, but he did suffer it once to be conscripted into an armor Ruby fashioned. When I married Garret, my grandmother worried about how she and my grandfather would be perceived by Garret’s people, people from New England who had both money and a kind of class and culture. My grandfather’s usual hair was always the same short cut one sees in movies from the 1940s, brushed back along the sides and top. He was always handsome with too, but for our wedding, Grandma had him wear his hair in bangs combed down upon his forehead. Men who farm wear caps and this tells upon their faces, browned jaws fade to pale foreheads – Ruby wanted my grandfather wearing bangs to hide his farmer’s tan line. His hairdo at our wedding was a marvel, the bangs that hid his cap line making him vaguely ridiculous. The day after our wedding, he went back to wearing it, and not caring about it, the way he always had. But when in the injuries of aging, Ruby set down caring about her own hair, he picked up caring for her.

So long as he could drive, my grandfather never let go taking Grandma to town “to Hair.” Going “to Hair” was our collective shorthand for Grandma’s weekly appointment at the beauty shop to get her set put in, a process that involved a shampoo, a modest trim, a lot of fearsome looking curlers, and a real helmet – the drier helmet that would decisively weld the armor of her curls in place. She did not often want to go, but Grandpa would gently and stubbornly cajole her into it. When his own health at last lost him his driver’s license, he conscripted others to this task, and I was one. I quickly came to see why even as he could surrender much to aging and decline, he would not give up her trips to Hair.

Taking Grandma to Hair could be a trial. She was often frail and tired, and not inclined to see the point. Her physical frailties meant taking great care that she could go from house to car, from car to beauty shop without a stumble. The frailties of her spirit often meant riding into town in sullen silence. But the process itself was like a resurrection, the dryer helmet lifted like stone rolled from the tomb and Grandma would emerge fearsome, fierce – Herself. Once fitted out again in her familiar armor, some long-trained warrior’s instinct would reassert itself.

Trips home from Hair were journeys back in time, to that world where she was not just sharp, but garrulous with it, her commentary on all she saw at once biting and comically sardonic. Here once again was the woman who would tell us that she’d like “to slap us to sleep and then slap us for sleeping.” And here she was unbowed by mortal frailties, ready to draw these too into sightline of her verbal fire. Pretending blindness, she’d declare in great disgust, “This town has changed so much that I’m sure if I weren’t blind and could actually see it, I would not even recognize it.” This was Ruby as was, pinching judgment coupled with vigorous self-satirizing wit. She would announce her displeasures, but remark too upon the folly of displeasure. Not all that fate would give us, she seemed to intimate, deserves our battle dress but so long as we are indeed well-armored, we might make a sharpish bit of sport, of the world and of ourselves. I took to driving her through McDonald’s to buy her orange Hi-C, just for the delight of hearing her caustically declare that it tasted so good that a person could well mistake it for fresh squeezed.

Ruby’s hair had been her armor; for us it came to be a battle flag. Sometimes grief can make you over into someone else’s standard-bearer, heading up a charge that’s doomed but that you take on anyway. Not all soldiers heading for defeat will give up easily. But defeat still comes; even resurrections cannot last. Eventually, the trips to Hair became more than she could bear, and Ruby’s last months passed unprotected.

The night that Ruby died, I was on the highway hastening toward the farm. The call had gone out late that afternoon that any who could get by to see her should come on, that she was unlikely to last. I was just one of several on the road that night, the farmhouse and her bedroom pulling us all inward. I had not yet then succumbed to owning a cell phone so I just drove as fast as I dared and in ignorance of whether I still had a grandmother. Somewhere about two hours out, where the roads grow darkest and towns are scarce, I did not. But I wouldn’t know that till I got to the farm and saw my mother standing on the porch. There’s no good reason to stand on a porch after midnight if your own mother is at work dying, so at least my mother did not need to give the news out loud. Ruby was then still at home. My grandfather would keep her there till morning so that we, her family, could set with her in the old way “before the undertakers get her.”

The dead are not like the living, but neither are they wholly unlike. When I set beside my grandmother that night, I wanted much I will not here relate, I was unhappy with much I will not here write. Her hair was then in full defeat, its pale wisps disordered where they were not flattened by her pillow. I tried to fix it with my fingers, to tidy her a bit, but as her hair in life refused to yield to chaos, her hair in death refused to yield to me. My grandfather must have understood the way that her wilted, wild hair was totemic of a grief that could go wild and wilt us all. Or maybe he just knew that hair like Ruby’s, so long in the fight, deserved a warrior’s final rest. He called the beauty shop one last time. When the undertakers took Ruby to the funeral home in town, she would be met by her hairdresser.

At the visitation, I stood for a time with my grandpa by the coffin, one hand gripped tight around the back of his belt because he seemed like to topple. He stood there as an ancient, loyal sentry would, or as just a husband who has been with a woman for 67 years and can’t work out how, at this late date, to part. His hair that sorry day was as it always was, and so was mine – his revealed his cap line, mine was frayed and messy – but still we laid her down as she had lived, well-armored for the grave.