FRESH YARN presents: The Beard... by Doug Gordon

FRESH YARN presents:

The Beard
By Doug Gordon

Last year, my wife Leora and I went to New Zealand for a month's vacation, a trip of such duration that we easily settled into new routines. Commutes, meetings, and social commitments gave way to hikes, beach picnics, and scenic drives. Less than one week into our sojourn, I decided to use the time away to buck still another daily routine: shaving.

With the exception of an unfortunate-looking goatee grown during my junior year of college, I had lived most of my adult life as a clean-shaven man. In the twelve years since that first ill-fated facial hair experiment, I had probably spent as much money on disposable razors as some people spend on their first car.

Kiwis are renowned for their adventurous spirit -- for jumping off bridges with a rubber band attached to their ankles and bodysurfing head-first through whitewater rapids -- and I reasoned that the adrenaline-charged atmosphere of New Zealand might be just the place to give growing a beard one more post-college try. To top it off, I was about as far from home as one could get and still be on this planet, meaning that consequences of failure were nil. If I didn't like the beard I could shave it off and look like my passport photo again before boarding the plane home. If Leora didn't like it, that was her problem. I was the only authorized driver of our rental car.

Two weeks after stuffing my razor into the deepest recesses of my luggage, I found myself sporting a fairly respectable beard. Nary a patch of skin was visible as my whiskers completed their journey from my sideburns to my chin, and the hair above my upper lip connected confidently to the hair below. Even Leora approved, opining that the beard made me look rugged, an adjective not typically employed to describe a man who eschews the fluorescent-lit aisles of Duane Reade to buy his moisturizer at Kiehl's.

At home in New York, getting used to the beard took as long as getting over my jet lag, and I still didn't recognize my own reflection in a mirror for a few days after our vacation ended. While going through hundreds of pictures from our month away, I thought, more than once, what the hell is that guy with the beard doing with his arm around my wife?

One morning as I peered into the fridge contemplating breakfast, I found myself stroking my beard. The act was subconscious, as if the beard itself wanted to help me decide, and it wasn't long before the mere touch of a thumb and forefinger to my whiskered chin helped me adjudicate other ordinary choices. Paper or plastic? Venti or grande? Unlimited-use or pay-per-ride MetroCard? Let's ask the beard.

When I stopped shaving, I hadn't anticipated that wisdom -- or dare I say maturity -- would be a fringe benefit. Nevertheless, I had joined the esteemed fraternity of Abraham Lincoln, Moses, and Obi Wan Kenobi, heroes to any child of the suburbs, synagogue, and the seventies. I was thirty-three years old. Didn't Jesus, bearded and Jewish just like me, do some of his best work at my age?

"So, do you like it?"

It was the first question I asked my mother after arriving in Boston for a quick visit a month later. She paused before answering, but the strained look on her face and her stiff body language said it all. If it was possible to hug someone close and keep him at arm's length, my mother had figured it out.

"Well," she said. "You look like your father."

Your father. Ever since my parents had divorced two years ago, my mother had been very careful in how she described the man who had been her husband for over three decades. His affair had been such a betrayal that she could not bring herself to use names that kept him close. He wasn't Neil anymore or even Dad. Instead, he was "your father." When parents divorce in their golden years, their children are the ones who get custody.

For years, people had pointed out that I had my father's nose, his smile, and up until recently I had exercised enough to keep my inherited predisposition for a potbelly at bay. (If not for the miracles of modern prescription medication, I'd probably have his hairline, too.) How could I have thought, even subconsciously, that my beard would defy Mendel's laws of genetics? Suddenly I didn't feel wiser. I felt guilty. There may have been some strange Oedipal complex at play that fueled my guilt, but all I remembered from my college courses was that Freud had a beard.

The divorce had upended my mother's world, and she had landed on her feet in a new condo, the consolation prize for over thirty years of marriage, thanks for playing. There was our dining table, still a place to share dinners, even if our dinners would be smaller by one person from now on. Two floral-print couches, placed at right angles to each other, remained as a place to watch rented movies. Still, there were hints that something was not right. A tall wooden armoire, too big to fit in my mother's new bedroom, stood at attention against a wall in the living room, as if it was so unsure about its new surroundings that it couldn't relax for even a second.

Neither of us mentioned the beard again for the rest of my visit. Instead, I focused my energy in the way a concerned parent might when moving his child into a first apartment out of college. I bought her a gallon of emergency water, a flashlight with spare batteries, and a small fire extinguisher for the kitchen. When my mother wasn't looking I took two twenty-dollar bills from my wallet and surreptitiously slipped them in my mother's purse. It was the kind of thing my parents used to do for me: cash stuffed into a palm after a hug at the airport, a check mailed to me for no good reason, other than because they thought I needed the extra help. My beard wasn't white, but playing Santa Claus made me feel a little better.

Had my parents divorced when I was a child, splitting time between two households would have felt normal. But coming late in my life, it was hard to get used to the concept of truncating a visit with one parent to spend time with the other. Thankfully, I had plenty of time to think about it as I searched for my father's building in a garden-style apartment complex in Waltham, Massachusetts, thirty minutes from my mother's condo, and light years away from the life he once had with her. I circled endlessly on roads named to suggest the woods torn down to make way for the residences that stood in their stead: Brown Bear Road turned into Grizzly Bear Lane, which led to Kodiak Drive, which inexplicably intersected with Kodiak Way. Had my father not been waiting for me outside his unit, I might have circled the woods forever, although part of me might have been more comfortable doing that, nervous as I was to see his apartment for the first time since the divorce.

He held back Roxy, the chocolate lab who as a puppy had filled my parents' empty nest, as she tugged at her leash. As I stepped out of the car, my father's hand landed on my shoulder, pulling me close.

"Hey, nice beard," he said.

"Thanks."

"Yeah, it looks good. Looks good. Really good."

A man of few words, my father often repeated them for emphasis.

"I'm not sure how long I'll keep it," I said.

"You should keep it. Definitely keep it. It looks good."

"Well, we'll see."

My words surprised me. Up until now, I had imagined keeping the beard forever, seeing as how it gave me an identity beyond such non-descript characteristics as brown hair, brown eyes, and a slightly below average height. I had hoped the beard would make me stand out from the crowd, but now I barely stood out from the only man standing next to me. My mother was right.

Our beards looked nearly identical, the flecks of gray in his a preview of what mine might look like in twenty-five years. My father must have seen my beard as a sign of allegiance, something he must have craved in the wake of the divorce. He had been ostracized by most of our family's friends, their moral compasses pointing solidly toward the one partner who didn't have the affair. But swearing allegiance wasn't possible for me, clarity being a luxury only distance can provide. My father had taught me everything I knew about being a man and husband, but what did it mean now that he had made one of the worst mistakes a man and husband could make? Could I look like him but not be like him? As my father showed me up the stairs I felt the urge to pull all the hair from my face.

Barely two steps beyond his front door, I instantly classified his apartment as less a home than a storehouse for a downsized life. A wooden chest that used to be in our formal living room now supported a television set and cable box, the horizontal surface of this makeshift entertainment center covered by a layer of dust that looked as if it had developed at the same rate as my beard. Pictures and framed art posters that once hung throughout my family's four-bedroom house now shared the limited wall space in his one-bedroom walkup. The entire living space was set up on an oriental rug that had once covered our dining room floor. It had survived dozens of dinners, Passover Seders, and Thanksgiving holidays without so much as a drop of wine spilled on it. Now it was covered with dog hair.

My father and I were not practiced in the art of heart-to-heart conversations, as it had been my mother who had dutifully served as the emotional conduit between us. In the past, if my father picked up the phone on the occasions when I called home, it was an instant sign that my mother was out running errands. When he and I did talk, our conversations were about as substantive as the 11 o'clock news: all we ever covered was news, weather, and sports.

That's why we sat, finding more room in the awkward pauses than in his cluttered apartment, unable to sustain much in the way of conversation. I couldn't talk about the past two days with Mom; he wasn't interested. I couldn't ask him about his love life; I wasn't interested. I tried to tell him about New Zealand, and opened his laptop to show him some pictures online. He offered an occasional comment on the scenery, but mostly seemed more interested in my beard's progress in each picture. "Looks like it was coming in good there," he said.

I excused myself to the bathroom even though I didn't need to use it. It wasn't filthy, but there was a sailing magazine on the floor by the toilet, a ring around the tub, and a towel on the floor by the sink, hardly the markers of a man who regularly hosted friends at his apartment. I splashed some water on my face, and noticed tiny hairs scattered around the drain. An electric razor stood on the bathroom counter, its base plugged into an outlet next to a light switch. If I kept my beard, I'd have to get one, too. I came back out into the living room and told my father that I had to get moving.

He put the dog on a leash and walked me to the car outside. Just as I was about to turn to open the car's door, my father pulled me close and hugged me, holding me as if he knew I was likely to be the last visitor he'd have for a while.

"Keep the beard, keep the beard," he said.

"Okay," I said.

He told me he loved me and let me go. As I climbed into the driver's seat, the dog stood on her hind legs and pressed her nose against the car's window. She and I were about the same age, at least in dog years, and I noticed the grey patch that was coming in among the chocolate hair on her chin. Did everyone here have a beard?

My mother hated the beard because it made me look like my father. My father loved the beard for exactly the same reason. Would shaving it off mean conceding to my mother's fragile emotions? Would keeping it mean siding with my father, ignoring or even excusing his graceless exit from the marriage? Are there two forces any more opposing but equally powerful as one's parents? And what did it mean that I stroked my beard as I asked myself these questions on the drive home? Was it even possible for a beard to bestow wisdom and maturity? Maybe I had invested too much transformative power in my facial hair. I reminded myself that I had initially chosen to grow mine simply because I wanted to see if I could.

The final word came from my wife. I returned home and immediately noticed that Leora's affection for my beard was suddenly replaced with an unease impossible to ignore, especially one morning when she pulled back as I tried to kiss her.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"Your beard," she said. "It's starting to creep me out."

"I thought you liked it," I said, wondering if she could sense my own insecurities about the beard.

"Now that it's grown in," she said, "you remind me too much of my father."

I had to laugh. I had spent the weekend so torn between two competing parents, that the idea of someone else having conflicting feelings about a father or a mother seemed impossible. I pulled Leora close and we stood together in the hallway of our apartment, quiet for a moment, my beard pressed against her face. My parents' marriage may have fallen apart, but mine was just beginning.