Yesterday, I cut off my hair.

          It was all pretty sudden. Somehow, I had turned a corner from feeling confident about having long hair to paranoiac frumpdom.

          And because I live in suburban Connecticut, and because I am too easily moved to action by the real or imagined opinions of others, I found myself sitting in a swivel chair at Lisa’s Gallery of Hair, next to the Stop and Shop in one of my hometown’s two dying strip malls, where a haircut will set you back $11.95. My stylist was Marie, a woman who looked like she stepped out of a Walker Evans Dust Bowl portrait with hands that reeked of cigarettes. I was blathering to her about how nervous I was about getting my hair cut, and should I do it, and what did she think? and how I had gone back and forth about it and blah blah blah and Marie just bunched my hair into her fist and lopped off eight inches. “There.” she said. “Now you don’t need to think about it anymore,” which I think was her way of getting me to shut up.

          I looked in the mirror, and saw myself no longer on the edge of anything but squarely in the middle: middle aged, mid-length hair, medium brown, not too curly, not too straight. “Okay,” Marie said. “Is that how you wanted it?

          “Yes,” I told her. God help me, it was just how I wanted it.