All I know is Sally’s in occupational rehab, learning to make false teeth. She’s gaining weight on the starchy diet in there. She’s sent me a wallet she made for me, woven from thousands of cut and folded green cigarette packs and their cellophane wrappers: an intricate prison craft that takes forever, a cross between tramp art and origami. The design of the cigarette packs themselves is obscured by the folding, but you can tell by the colors that my sister has been smoking an awful lot of Kools.

Is it my mother’s idea, the haircut, and my father gives in to it, in order to placate her, to protect himself from her wrath? Has she hectored him till he agreed, in their nightly battle on the couch?

Or maybe he won’t have his son looking like that, the man towering next to me; suddenly I don’t seem as tall as he does anymore. What does long hair mean to him—woman, hippie, fag? My hair is an embarrassment, out of control, represents trouble, they are ashamed to be seen with me like that. Does it have to do with seeing longhaired kids on the news, feeling disturbed by the politics and trouble their tresses represent?

Or maybe they’re not going to let another child go down some bad path, some thunder road, because they’ve lost one that way already.

Whatever the case, a decision has been made, and my father simply bullies me into the car, although I am weeping unashamedly. I have said in every way I know that I don’t want to do this, that it isn’t fair, that my hair isn’t even that long. And of course I can’t explain, since I don’t understand myself, what my hair means to me: I can’t articulate the way in which my look represents the outward sign of a dawning social possibility, how it signifies I’m becoming someone. Anything I can say is to no avail anyway; the issue here’s no longer hair.

I’m hauled to the barbershop. I’ve been happy to avoid them, these male rooms with their smells of cut hair and machine-oiled clippers, floor wax and blue disinfectant for combs, their copies of Argosy and Saga, magazines whose covers bear antlered deer caught in the sights of rifles. I won’t cry in here, but I won’t talk either. The barber knows exactly what’s going on; he plays something like this scene every day. He talks to my father, not to me, and my father sits in the spectator’s seat, not even bothering to read a magazine, involved as he is in watching my disgrace and submission. I’m shorn bare as the front of our house the day the ivy was cut away.