My mother’s hair turned in two weeks from chestnut, as she called it, to shocking white.
“I am shocking white,” she said that morning when I came into the kitchen, awakened by the smell of toast.
She couldn’t keep her eyes off her reflection. She was looking at the side of her head in the chrome curve of the toaster, and I was afraid her wiry white hairs would make contact with the electrified silver and ignite. She couldn’t look in a mirror, my mother. Busy with my marmalade and cinnamon sugar, and cutting off my crusts, she kept eyeing her hair in the teakettle, the aluminum sink, the blade of her knife.
