Amanda Gaines: TRICH • Cleaver Magazine

Amanda Gaines
TRICH

You ask him to wrest his fingers into the base of your hair from behind you. To pull. To undo you, the cartilage of your throat cutting against your taut skin, neck arced like a bridge over stygian blue water. You want to be static. For him to unmoor you. You want something inside to snap, rip. Relief. You are twenty-nine, home in Appalachia, West Virginia, after spending three years in Oklahoma pursuing your doctorate. You moved back a few months ago with your ex-boyfriend, only to have him dump you, unceremoniously, after your friends found his dating profile on Hinge. The relationship was a long-term, cross-country shitshow that left your temples balding—you, routinely pulling out hairs during stonewalling episodes, after screaming matches, impromptu breakups that you wish, in retrospect, you’d let be.

Now, in this man’s room thirty minutes from your childhood bed, you want your wrists bound above your head at a safe distance. Your fingers stilled, shoelaced with thin rope so that for a moment, just this moment, you might be spared from your own touch.

Your teacher calls you out in front of your eighth-grade math class every day for playing with your hair. He assigns you a nanny of sorts, a skinny scene boy the desk over, to flick your arm whenever you reach for your split ends. Girl hair-twirlers have a reputation for being stupid, your teacher tells you. You nod and smile with your teeth.

This set-up is well and good at first. You have a crush on this boy, your nanny of sorts, and the frequency with which your hands go instinctively to the patch of blonde behind your ears makes for a lot of skin-to-skin contact. But as the year goes on, you start to resent this well-meaning teacher and nanny of yours. You try sitting on your hands. You bite your nails. You are exhausted and frantic. But you can’t stop. You haven’t eaten in days. Weeks. Months. At a certain low point, when your teacher and nanny are both hovering by your desk chiding you like a fucked-up harmony, you snap like the anxious thirteen-year-old girl you are. Please, you beg them, stop.

In Oklahoma, you feed your poetry professor’s cockatoos while she’s out of town. Culled feathers coat the wood floors, tufted sequins of white and yellow. Their skin is meat-pink and cold-looking. You take a video of them and send it to her. Ask if you should be worried, what you can do to make them stop. She tells you this is normal. Over-grooming. You run your hand along the metal bars of their cage, resisting the urge to slide the other between your bangs and yank. They croak at you as if recognizing kin.

He-llo. He-llo.

At fourteen, you notice hairs crinkling in a sea of frizz—a black strand amidst a wall of blonde—slide a nail over the isolated hair over and over again until you can’t take it any more and pull and the relief weighs on you like your mother’s hand-sewn quilts and for a moment you don’t think of anything—not the way your stomach sags like wine bags you’ve not yet slapped—not about your parents night-fighting just beyond your thin wall—not about how badly you want to be touched in places God would smite you just for thinking about—and you all your fears coalesce into a single, loveless hair, resting in your hand.

Your car seat is graffitied in blonde cursive. Your new boyfriend’s sheets hold enough of your plucked tresses to build a bird’s nest. You leave remnants of yourself behind—unwitting confessions—at bars you haven’t visited in years, friend’s porches, your sister’s couch. You check your part for signs of irreversible damage. You rub minoxidil at your temples and swallow biotin. You catch yourself when you don’t realize it, with a curl woven around your ring finger—a promise nobody, especially you, can keep.

You rest your head in your little sister’s lap. Christmas in West Virginia: burst feather pillows across mountains. Frozen creeks, amethyst. Everyone’s home from their respective colleges. You, your two kid sisters, your parents who somehow made it through those black, corkscrew years, making you question what good permanence is. You’ve been away for a year in Oklahoma where in between grading and reading and trying not to die from a faceless disease sweeping the globe, you pull out more hair than you ever have. She strokes your roots and loops your hair in intricate patterns. You take a picture. Her, pulling at your eyelids. You, with your tresses so tightly wound you look hairless. Together, you let yourself mistake her fearlessness for yours, woven together in frame. Her careful touch—you untouchable.

Amanda Gaines has a PhD in creative writing from Oklahoma State University. She received her MFA from West Virginia University. She’s an Appalachian writer, born and raised in southern West Virginia. She’s currently a Herbert Fellow at the University of Tennessee. Her work has been published in Pleiades, The Southern Review, Ninth Letter, Witness, december, and others.