The woman in front of me at the post office says
she’s mailing out her granddaughter’s hair.Â
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For pageants, she explains to us all.
She wins wherever she goes with that hair!
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My grandmother always sent me beanie babies—
what is it like, instead, to get hair?Â
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The only wigs I wore were for Halloween. My mother
did my make-up for studio photos, my hair:
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one year, Snow White with a craft-store bird
on my finger; another, Rapunzel with all that fake hair
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in my mouth. A temporary princess, I went home
and washed up, exchanged the wig for my own hair.
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My mother used to be in pageants—could’ve made me too,
just asked for one day a year. Every month, she dyes her hair
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white-blonde, the color it was when she was a young girl.
As if a girl is nothing without her hair.
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I imagine the granddaughter, waiting each day at the mailbox,
her mother waiting each day at the mailbox for that glitzy hair.
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Maybe the girl is waiting for a box filled with something—
anything other than hair. Maybe she only feels beautiful in that hair.