After a few months I had seen enough of a pattern to ask Derek how often Andee washed her hair. She preferred baths to showers and would often wear the same scraggly braids for days.
“If you would buy baby shampoo maybe she could wash it more often,” he said “Your shampoo stings her eyes.”
“Buying two sets of hair products is ridiculous for one shower,” I argued, “The kid should have learned how to tilt her head by now.”
“She knows,” I could tell he didn’t believe this himself by the way he said ‘knows’ like a question, “It’s me, it takes so long to braid her hair in the morning. I don’t always have the time.”
“She can either learn how to do it herself, wear her hair in a different way, or get it cut like begs for,” I said.
“But she looks so cute in braids, her hair gets so tangled in a ponytail.”
“She has hair down to her butt. I would find it hard to maintain hair that long. When was the last time she got it cut?”
“Ann and I agreed that we wouldn’t get it cut until she is 16.”
I had heard him tell Andee that she could not cut her hair until she turned 16 but took it as another random thing he would tell her when she asked questions he didn’t want to deal with. She often begged for a hair cut. At first I thought he meant that he didn’t want her to have short hair until she was 16 but this was not the case.
“She is our kid and we can do what we want with her hair,” he argued. “We agreed to preserve that baby hair.”
“She is a person not your toy.” This was the first in many times that I would have to point this fact out. “It will be down to her ankles by then…and nasty. You need to cut it to keep it healthy,” I found it surprising that Ann did not know that.
“Until she is old enough to make decisions she will wear her hair the way we say,” he said as a matter of course.
“How will she learn how to make decisions if you don’t let her have any?” I asked.
“You’re going off on tangents again,” he switched the subject. “We were talking about showering and not hair styles and kids don’t need to shower as often as adults do anyway.”
I asked how kids, who crawl on the floor, play with mud and never wash their hands, are somehow considered cleaner than adults?
“You know what I mean,” he said.
“No, I don’t.” I said.
“So you took a shower every day as a kid.”
“A shower or a bath.”
Derek asserted once again, his theory that I was raised on another planet and no other kids in this country bathe every day.
Once I brought attention to the hair issue, Derek began to notice how frayed her braids were, and the task to braid them became more tedious. He also started mentioning to her that she needed to take the braids out to shampoo them, a new concept to her. Eventually, Derek talked to Ann and they agreed to allow Andee to have her hair cut into a bob like she wanted, which lasted all of three days before we realized that the long hair better absorbed the accumulating grease.
The stylist held out her hands with widely splayed fingers as if she wanted to sink them into boiling water as she asked us if Andee had washed her hair recently. We assured her that she had ‘taken a shower’ that day though only we knew what that meant. Days after the cut, Andee’s hair took on a darker hue, clumping together in strings on the side of her face. Derek’s mother (optimistically) blamed the cut itself and told her that a bob needed to be blown daily to keep it’s fluff up and so she bought her a hair dryer. Now Andee would waste precious morning minutes blowing warm air on her face and leave the bathroom with only her bangs dry. Of course Derek would rush in to help ‘with the back’ (the rest) and upon doing so released an indescribable stink similar to sweat-saturated workout clothes forgotten in the backseat of a car on an 85 degree day. Subjected to inhale the fumes daily, he reminded her to wash her hair every time she entered the shower, but it never did any good. When I heard the blowing start, I took my breakfast elsewhere.
On a similar note, Andee only brushed her teeth when we told her to, in the mornings when we happened to be paying attention. I asked Derek about it and he said he never brushed his teeth at night as a child either. I assumed that this had something to do with the fact that his mother worked swing shift and was never at home at bedtime. Or he thought that children have inherently cleaner teeth than adults, to match the bathing rationale. Neither was true.
“They’re bound to lose all those teeth anyway so why does it really matter?,” he asked, tired of my prodding.
“Hygiene habits are established in childhood. If a parent insists on certain standards of behavior, the child is more likely to appreciate the results, but when you excuse the child from those standards, they learn to consider it less important.”
He nodded, unconvinced by impressed by my rationale. His mother obviously thought it was less important.
I started paying more attention as Andee got ready in the morning and noticed that she would linger in her room until time to leave, or try to sneak out of the bathroom before we mentioned teeth or hair brushing, and if Derek was running late, he would grab a hairbrush for the car and let her forgo the teeth, saying she would do it later, which of course I needed to remind everyone about when the time came.
Once we got wise to these escape tactics Andee started closing the door in the bathroom to brush. One time I heard the toilet flush but never the running of the sink, which doubled the crime since she should have washed her hands after that act. When she opened the door I told her to turn around, wash her hands and brush her teeth.
“But I just did,” she said, trying to push past me.
“I didn’t hear any running water,” I said. The soap, the sink and toothbrush were dry. I told her to turn around and do it again but keep the door open while brushing. She slammed it and locked it. Derek rushed in to the room shortly thereafter.
“Where’s Andee? We got to go!”
“She’s brushing her teeth,” I said.
“Well, there’s no time for that,” he said, rapping on the door. “Get out of there we got to leave!” he barked.
The door opened immediately and with a kiss they were gone. I went to the bathroom and touched her toothbrush. It was dry. The bristles stood up factory perfect, as if they had never touched a hard surface. The soap too, had no signs of use. She had just turned on the water and stood there waiting.
The first time I told Andee to use the bar of soap to wash her hands she hesitated, looked at the bar like she eyed some of my dinners, suspicious and revolted, and then poked it only slightly. Now I knew why Ellie never invited Andee to sleepovers.
These habits posed no problems on the other side of her family. Andee left for her mother’s weekends wearing fashionable clothes her size and came home in a significantly different state. If she did not return wearing the same exact outfit she left in three days prior, somewhat the worse for wear, she cam home in what I term ‘around-the-house clothes,’ pajama pants with holes in them, her mother’s oversize t-shirts, or her old clothes blotched with stains. Her hair looked like she had neither brushed nor washed it since she left.
Returning after a week at her maternal grandmother house, I could smell Andee when she walked in the door, even from a distance of two feet. Her lips wore a pink Popsicle ring and her nose had the evidence of a long lost chocolate ice cream cone.
She jumped in bubbling as usual, gushing about all the fun they had with her uncle and cousins, showing off all the stickers, seashells and other 50 cent crap her mom bought her that would, within 48 hours, make their permanent home under her bed or shoved in a drawer never again to see the light of day. Derek entertained her fantasies about how great her week was, and on my prompting, politely asked when she had last taken a shower.
“Grandma’s tub is too dirty,” Andee said. (Ann probably figured they would save water because the kids don’t really need to shower anyway…) Still she couldn’t find a washcloth to wipe the grime off her face?
Though my bathroom door diligence irritated me for its necessity, Derek often complimented me, thanked me, praised me, for helping his daughter blossom into a proper young lady. She seemed to grow an inch a day, her face filled out and she lost the paleness and bags under her eyes. He attributed it to my health and hygiene standards, though she barely complied with either.
I appreciated the compliment, but the trial wore on me, reminding her to wash her hands, brush her teeth, replace her towel rather than throwing it on the floor, reminding her to put her dirty underwear in the laundry basket rather than leaving it on the bathroom counter (ugh), reminding her to wipe up her spills and use the garbage can for trash and, most of all, reminding Derek that Andee in fact was capable of all of these things, always suggesting, just hinting, that maybe she ignored them because she knew someone else would do it for her if she didn’t bother to care.
Yet the Ann factor upset this theory, suggesting a more disturbing and less optimistic reality. Blaming Andee’s uncleanliness on Derek’s overcompensation gave Andee the benefit of the doubt that without her father’s hand she would resign to pick up after herself. But the sight of her condition upon returning from her mother’s house, and the testimony from Ellie about Ann’s questionable hygiene and unkempt household all pointed to an accepted state of complacency more tempting to the child’s lazy nature.