Let Down Your Hair

One modern-day Rapunzel. One naked man. Two very different wicked witches.

At 22, Sage Rampion has barely spoken to a man, but she’s read a lot about them. She was raised and home-schooled by an expert on the subject: her grandmother, a Professor of Womyn’s Studies (spelt with a Y).

When Sage meets the male nude model she saw from her grandma’s office window, her sheltered world begins to unravel. She starts asking questions about how she was brought up, and the teenage mother who abandoned her. It looks like the battle of the sexes is way more complex (and far more fun) than she’s been told …

On the day I turned twelve, my grandmother Andrea took me to the red light district. We set out in a Honda she’d borrowed from work, with the university crest on duco as white and glossy as a wedding dress. I wound down the window to let out the new car smell, hugging the notebook that came in a pack titled
Homeschooling Children: A Guide
.

When we reached the bad end of town, Andrea slowed to a crawl and told me to wind up the window. A blare of angry honking erupted behind us, and I shrank as if from gunfire, but Andrea was unruffled as a bullet-proof vest. She slowed further and three cars screeched round us, hurling curses and a couple of beer cans.

A parking spot opened and she pulled over, squinting at the throbbing neon signs. A raucous group of men prowled past like a six-headed monster. Their alien voices and big, bristly faces filled my stomach with spiders.

“Look at the woman on that billboard,” said Andrea.

I looked up. Her eyes were scrunched shut, and her wet mouth was open, as if crying out in pain. She was blonde, with a heart-shaped face, like the girl in the picture I kept in a drawer by my bed. My mother, aged seventeen, six months after having me and two weeks before she walked out.

Everything went still, as if the billboard had stopped the world spinning. Was that
her?
Could this be why Andrea had brought me here?

“What do you see?” she prompted.

Andrea’s voice sounded blurred and far away. I couldn’t answer.  All I could find were questions for the mother who’d left me.
Is that you? Are you here? Why don’t you come to see me? When are you going to come home?

“Come on, Sage, we haven’t got all night.”

Andrea’s impatience brought the world back in focus. I bowed my head and mumbled an apology. When I looked up again the woman on the billboard was a stranger once more, too busty and far too young to be my mother. “She looks uncomfortable. Like someone’s hurting her.”

“What about her body?” said Andrea. “Tell me what you see.”

I tried to figure out what she wanted me to say. The woman lay on her stomach with her head arched back. Her buttocks had eaten most of her shiny black G-string, and above it she wore nothing but a mane of brassy hair.

“Her skin’s sort of … orange, and she’s wearing practically no clothes. That’s to look sexy for The Male Gaze, isn’t it?” Andrea often talked about The Male Gaze. I felt proud of having used the phrase in a sentence.

“That scrap of lycra isn’t
clothing
,” said Andrea with heavy sarcasm, “it’s garnish. Garnish for a dish of human meat. What else?”

“Her breasts are too big for her body, like the ones on a Barbie Doll, and she’s squeezing them together, like she’s milking herself.”

Andrea made a cynical sound between a snort and a laugh. “
Yes,
” she said, sounding pleased. “And that, Sage, is exactly what she’s doing. She’s
milking herself
.”

I nodded as if I understood what this meant, making notes in careful black biro.
Woman on billboard, dressed for The Male Gaze. Barbie doll shape. Milking herself
. Underneath my words, the page flashed peach and pink.

As I wrote, I sensed someone watching the car. A woman, garnished in scraps of black leather that glistened in the street lights. She strode towards us and rapped a blood-colored fingernail on the windscreen.

Close up, she looked older than the women on the billboards.  There were creases between her eyebrows, and her mouth was ringed with lines that looked like tiny matches tipped with leaked red lipstick. My skin prickled as her weary, painted eyes scanned my short blonde hair, and paused on my half-grown breasts. I snatched up my notebook and flattened them from sight.

When Andrea had taught me about sex workers at home, I’d agreed that they deserved our respect. Yet now one was peering through the window of our car, I wanted to dive under the dashboard and beg my grandmother to drive me away.

Andrea threw me a disapproving scowl and wound her window down.

“You guys looking for company?” The sex worker’s breath smelled of cigarette smoke. “Or something else? Contacts? Tips?”

Andrea shook her head and pulled out one of the green and purple flyers I’d seen in her study. “Here,” she said, tucking a hundred dollar bill inside and holding it out the window. “If you need help, don’t be afraid to call someone.”

The woman slipped the money into her boot and held the flyer up to the light. It was printed with the numbers and addresses of every women’s refuge, drug clinic and rape crisis center in the city. “Uh, thanks.” She teetered back to her corner.

With clammy fingers I opened my notebook, and wrote
sex worker
in a wavering hand. I waited for Andrea to comment, but she just sat, her eyes faraway and sad. I closed the notebook and put down my pen, sensing my lesson was over.

Some minutes later, Andrea started the car and pulled away from the curb. As we drove off, I glanced back and saw the sex worker toss the flyer into the gutter.

The Humanities building where Andrea worked was the tallest on campus. By day, it cast a shadow that crept across the university, as if the grounds were the face of a sundial. I followed the shadow to the foyer and stepped into the elevator.

Office doors on the top floor wore engraved brass nameplates. I made my way to the one that read
Professor Andrea Rampion, Head of Womyn’s Studies
, spelled with a Y, the way she preferred. Her office was her sanctum, where she crouched like a gray-crested eagle, scouring the campus for signs of sexism. Going in without her felt blasphemous somehow, even with my newly minted key.

Inside, the room was furnished in the velvet and carved oak that came with top floor offices. Through the windows, the ivied walls and arches of the old end of campus spread out beneath an overcast sky. From here, students on the tree-lined paths looked like floating confetti on rivers whose banks changed through the seasons from pink to green to gold.

As I lowered my backpack to the floor, something scarlet caught my eye. Something closer and brighter than the students far below. I went to the window and the sun came out, shining through a skylight in the roof of the building opposite. Under the skylight was a dark-haired young man, lying naked on a bright red rug.

A flush spread over my face and neck, as if someone had doused me in hot water. I wasn’t sure whether to bolt for the door or stand at the window and stare. The only naked men I’d seen were textbook illustrations when Andrea taught me biology. Seeing a live one from her office was like biting into an apple and finding a snake. Yet there he was, head propped on one elbow, alien genitals at rest on a nest of curly hair.

What was he doing there? Did he know people could see him through the skylight? Maybe he had no idea. Or maybe he did, and he was getting his kicks by flaunting his body at the Head of Women’s Studies.

The thought of Andrea steadied me. Andrea always knew what to do about men. But she wasn’t here and I couldn’t call her—she hated cell phones, and kept hers switched off except to check her voicemail once a day. Until she returned I’d have to face the window alone.

I backed into my chair and switched on my computer, clutching the mouse like a talisman to protect me against male nudity. How would Andrea react? I’d dreaded her lessons on sex education. With numbers and letters, she was matter-of-fact; with bodies, she was forced and self-conscious.
Sex is a natural part of life
, she’d say, looking unnatural as she said it.
To be enjoyed when you feel ready, alone or with someone you trust.
She reinforced this sex-positive message by giving me a vibrator when I hit puberty. The one time I’d turned it on, its dentist drill buzz disturbed me so much that I hid it in my wardrobe and never touched it again.

Keys jangled outside the door, and I jumped, as if caught doing something forbidden. I grabbed the Staff Handbook and opened it at random as Andrea strode in.

My grandmother was a head shorter than me, but she seemed taller. When she entered a room, a nervous hush fell, as though she headed an invisible army. Her jaw was square, and her hair was thick and iron-gray, not only on her head, but on the inches of ankle emerging from her pants.

“Hi, hon.” She dumped a folder labeled
Equity and Discrimination
on her desk.

I eyed her irritated face. “Is something wrong?”

“Faculty politics.” Her voice was disgusted and cynical. “Even more wrong than global politics.” She glanced over my shoulder. “Not considering
Fran
as a PhD supervisor, are you?”

I looked down and embarrassment flared. The random page I’d opened was a profile of Fran Mackenzie, Andrea’s arch-enemy. “Hardly,” I said in my most sarcastic voice, hastily turning the page.

Andrea sniffed. “Can you make it home by six tonight? I’ve got a community meeting at seven thirty, and I need a haircut.”

“Sure.”

Andrea refused to support the beauty industry. We wore recycled clothing, used homemade soap, and cut each other’s hair. Until I was eighteen, we had identical short hairstyles with a part on the side. Then, after my first semester at college, I’d stopped having it cut altogether.

Andrea hadn’t been pleased. Long hair was an unnecessary vanity, a waste of resources, an inconvenience adopted for the enjoyment of men. I’d nodded repentantly, agreed this was so, but kept on dodging the scissors. She wanted to know why, but I dodged that too, not daring to confess how I’d been shamed into growing my hair. Now that it reached almost to my waist, I kept it coiled and covered with a crocheted brown hairnet, conscious of her disapproval.

“Actually, Andrea,” I added in a shamefaced rush, “there was something I wanted to tell you.”

She checked her watch. “Well, make it quick. I have a meeting.”

“It’s just that … there’s a naked man down there. Through the skylight.”

“A
naked man?
”

Andrea marched over to the window and exhaled like a dragon breathing fire. Without breaking stride, she stomped back to her desk and stabbed a number into the phone. It rang and rang, muffled against her ear.

“For fuck’s
sake.
” She hung up with a crash that made me jerk.

I huddled in my desk chair. “Who were you trying to ring?”

“The buildings manager. Whose boss I’ll have words with at this meeting.” She bent to give me an unexpected hug. “I’m so sorry you had to see that, hon. Especially on your first day. It’s despicable. Will you be OK?”

I nodded, more intimidated than soothed by her fierce, steely arms.

“Don’t worry,” she added with a reassuring pat, “you’ll never see that naked man again.”

The door banged behind her as she left the office, and I slumped at my desk like a sandcastle hit by a wave. When her footsteps faded I picked up the Handbook again, biting my lip.

PhD in Women’s Studies. The words rang in my head like an ominous bell. How could I be starting one of those? I didn’t feel qualified, despite the enrollment forms on my desk, and grades high enough to win a doctoral scholarship. PhDs were for serious, clever people who knew what they were doing. Not pretenders who hadn’t decided what they wanted to research, let alone found a professor to supervise their project.

I made myself open the Handbook again and skimmed the staff profiles. When I reached Hilda Ziehler, specialist in feminist art, something occurred to me. There were art studios along the top floor of the building below the window. The man I’d seen through the skylight wasn’t flaunting himself, he was probably posing for a life drawing class. And now I’d set Andrea on him.

I rushed back to the window. Through the skylight, the man was no longer naked. He was standing in a navy blue robe, talking to someone I couldn’t see. Was he in a studio?

On the top floors, stoppers had been installed to prevent the windows from opening too wide. I slid my head carefully through the gap and the catch on the frame lodged in my hair. Trapped between frame and sill, I struggled to free myself, and the movement caught the man’s attention. He looked up through the skylight and our eyes met. The hairnet holding my bun together came free, and my hair spilled out the window, rippling in the wind like a long, pale scarf made of silk.