Does He Know? In Defense of the Comb-Over

In seventh or eighth grade there was a science teacher, who I’ll call Professor Plum. I never had a class with him, and I never spoke to him, but everyone knew him by his hair. He had maybe three strands left, combed over his head like a Quonset hut. We would talk about him as he walked by, “Does he know how absurd this looks, that he’s standing up there pretending he’s not bald?”

Around the same time I was playing gin rummy with my grandmother on the patio of her apartment in West Palm Beach. She was in her seventies and had been dyeing her hair blonde for as long as I’d been alive. At some point between hands I asked her, “Why do you dye your hair? Why are you pretending to look younger than you are?” She hadn’t asked me. I just said it, with the certainty of a middle schooler who had recently discovered honesty. She considered it and said, “If Robert doesn’t want me to dye my hair, I’m going to stop dyeing my hair.” She loved me so much, but she shouldn’t have taken fashion advice from a seventh-grade boy.

And she did. She kept going to the salon. She just stopped getting the color. Her hair came in a shocking white, and she wore it in a classy hairdo, and I thought it looked good. It looked honest. It also made her look her age, where the blonde had probably bought her a decade. For years I thought I gave her good advice. Why not be honest?

About a decade ago, I was in a conference room full of people, bored, while someone droned on. I found myself looking at a friend of mine. From behind, he had a large bald spot. In front, his thinning hair was propped up with thickener and mousse, so that straight on he had a full head of hair, and from the side you could see how it was assembled, like the fake fronts of buildings on a movie set.

The seventh grader in me asked the old question, “Does he know?” And then I understood that in the morning, when he looks in the mirror, he sees the straight-on version, and that he was doing this for himself as much as for anybody else. It made him feel good. I didn’t say anything. I realized there was nothing to say. What mattered was the man he saw in the mirror. How he looked to the rest of us came second. Reality came third.

It’s not that I got the facts wrong on that patio. It’s just that it was the perspective of a kid who loved his grandma. What I missed is that the world is made up of more than facts. It’s also relationships, and the way we see ourselves and each other. The blonde was doing something for her, the way the mousse was doing something for my friend. But I hope that when she looked at herself in the mirror with her white hair, she was proud of herself, and thought, “My Robert likes me looking like this.”