It hit the floor with the dull thud of a severed limb. This part of me was gone—forever. I knew my life would never be the same.

A few seconds of regret washed over me. Oh geez. What have I done?

“Don’t worry. You can sell it to a wig maker for a lot of money,” I heard Karen say as she stood over me.

Karen lived across the street from me in the enclave of military families stationed in Frankfurt, Germany. We both had just begun our senior year of high school. We were the same age, but Karen exuded a juicy sensuality and sophistication that was missing from my persona.

One Sunday afternoon Karen invited me over to her house. Not long into the visit, she began talking to me about the benefits of makeup and asked if I would like her to put some on my face and try it out. After a few seconds of hesitation, I agreed.

She motioned for me to sit at her vanity table covered with brushes, eyeliner pencils, lipsticks, jars of powders, a tray of various colors for the eyelids, and a little sponge. I closed my eyes and waited in suspense while she painted my face.

When I opened my eyes, the newly made-up face looking back at me from the vanity mirror was fascinating and pretty—in an artificial way—with no resemblance to anyone in my family.

“You look great, Rickie. Don’t you just love your new look?”

“I think so. I’ll have to get used to it.”

“Hey, I have a good idea,” Karen continued. “Why don’t we cut your hair? That braid down your back makes you look like a German schoolgirl. You’d look really sexy with short hair. We could curl it up into a flip or curl it under into a pageboy. I’ll go get my mom’s scissors.”

“No! Wait a minute. Umm…Let me think about it.”

My father liked my long braid, probably because it made me look like a tomboy—long past puberty. And my younger brother John said, in a moment of sibling revenge, that my long, thick hair was the only thing I had going for me.

John and I were quite creative at getting revenge on each other, although much of the time we got along well, bonded in our isolation in Germany, away from our four older siblings in college, graduate school, or working, and away from our civilian friends back in the States.

At sixteen, the year before my visit with Karen, I had innocent crushes on a motley assortment of boys; yet, at the same time I was painfully shy when boys no longer related to me as their buddy on the playing field or as their partner in the high school chemistry lab−but instead as a sexual being.

One afternoon after school, while my parents were away, Johnny yelled that there was a boy coming to the house to visit me. I peeked out the living room window and saw Danny walking towards the front door. He was a big guy, on the football team. He had recently started sitting next to me in the cafeteria with an interest in me that made me ill at ease. I had no idea what to talk to him about. I dove into the hall closet opposite the front door and hid.

“Johnny, tell Danny I’m not home.” 

“How much will you pay me to tell him that?” 

“Fifty cents.”

He warned me that fifty cents wasn’t enough for telling a lie. He would only do it for a dollar. There wasn’t time to negotiate as Johnny opened the door to let Danny in.

“Is your sister home?”

“Yes, she is. She’s right here in the closet.”

My thoughts were interrupted as Karen’s mesmerizing voice painted a picture of glamour and romantic possibilities once I was freed from the braid. In my hypnotized state, I agreed to let her cut it off. I closed my eyes, not wanting to watch the amputation.

Within a few minutes, I heard the thump. On the floor next to my chair lay the long, thick brown braid, now a lifeless corpse—my only asset according to my brother John.

Karen reassured me the braid needed to come off. After she finished cutting my hair, curling it in hot rollers, and dousing it in hair spray, I stared into the mirror at the new me, feeling ecstatic, fascinated and uncomfortable all at the same time—not quite certain about stepping into this new version of me. I wondered what my parents would think.

While Karen performed the finishing touches on her contemporary bouffant-style creation, I asked, “What do you talk about when you’re with boys? I never know what to say to them.”

“If you want to get a boy to talk, just ask about football, or baseball, or cars,” she said knowingly.

“But I don’t know anything about those things and I’m not really interested in them either.”

Karen explained, “That doesn’t matter. Just pretend you’re interested.”

By the time Karen finished with my total makeover, it was nighttime. I walked across the street to my home, excited to show my parents my new look. They had just returned from a few days of visiting relatives in Switzerland and were sitting at the dining room table eating dinner. I walked into the room and greeted them enthusiastically.

Dead silence.

My mother looked me over. Then her voice shattered the silence like breaking glass. “What did you do to your hair?”

Before I could answer, my father stood up stiffly from the head of the table.

“You look like a whore,” he growled. He picked up his antique chair and threw it to the floor. One of the legs splintered in half. He stormed upstairs to his bedroom and slammed the door.

Hurt and confused, I too stormed up to my room, and slammed the door with all the force I had. I threw myself on my bed and cried. The make-up pooled around me on my pillow and smudged my face.

How could my own father say such a horrible thing to me? I didn’t understand what was going on. It appeared I had broken some big, unspoken taboo about looking attractive.

I flashed back to a long-forgotten memory from the mid 1950s. My family was waiting in a hotel room to board the ship that would take us back to the States from England where we had been living for the past three years. I was six. My fifteen-year-old sister, Vreni, had put lipstick on for the first time. My father told her to take it off. She said no. He insisted and she refused, whereupon he slapped her, knocking her to the ground. He didn’t tell her why there was anything wrong with wearing lipstick.

I had never seen my father hit anyone before. I had a difficult time integrating this violent scene with my adoration of him as a peacemaker, a man of great kindness. The only way I could resolve the discrepancy was to push this incident out of my mind entirely.

While remembering other incidents from the past, struggling to make meaning out of the outburst that had just occurred downstairs, I heard rustling of paper outside my bedroom. A note on a folded piece of paper appeared under the door. The note said, “I’m sorry. Sometimes fathers have trouble understanding their daughters.”

The cutting of the braid and the makeup were never spoken of again. But the incident left me with the unarticulated feeling that looking too pretty might be dangerous. Dangerous for whom? For me? For my father? 

It was all terribly confusing. I thought about the times my father would not let any of his daughters give him a massage, even a shoulder massage. I wondered if this was some kind of clue to what had just happened.

Taking into account my childhood history of being my father’s buddy, it dawned on me that my father was probably grieving over my transition to becoming a woman.

I was ambivalent myself about becoming a woman. At 13, I started changing in ways I didn’t fully understand. There was no sex education class in the schools in those days; parents were supposed to teach their children about these delicate matters. None of my friends or family wanted to talk about the subject. I was ignorant about bodily functions related to pleasure and procreation and didn’t really have any interest in the subject until I was well into my teen years. I did hear a rumor going around that girls could get pregnant if they kissed in a certain way. I think that meant if the tongue was involved.

When I got my first period, I had no idea why there was blood in my underwear and told my mother I had gotten cut somehow. The topic of menstruation had never been addressed with me. She gave me an explanation about the blood that I only vaguely understood; she said I would bleed every month and that now I had become woman and could get pregnant. She talked about being careful around boys and told me all they were interested in was sex. She handed me a box of pads and told me to wear them the next time I bled. That was the end of the conversation. The topic clearly made her uncomfortable.

My older sister Susie talked to me a bit about what was happening, but it all sounded so gross. I envied boys; I thought they got a better deal. Becoming a woman did not seem like much fun from the vantage point of a thirteen-year-old girl muddling through her first menses.

In spite of my initial ambivalence during puberty, the cutting of the braid set me free to explore my new role as a young woman; I accepted the transition better than I could have imagined.