The Line

I want to be clear that I was a guest at this wedding. The bride was my cousin. I was not working. I had been very explicit with myself about this.

I had also, of course, packed a small backup kit. Hairpins. Hairspray. Trimmers. Just in case.

I am told this is what people in recovery call enabling behavior.

My cousin looked beautiful, because she was my cousin and that’s how this works. Her hair was perfect. She did not need me. I’d checked twice, just to be sure, and then a third time in case the first two had been wrong.

So I went to find the groomsmen.

There were five of them, lined up in a side room near the church, doing what groomsmen do, which is mostly standing around looking nervous and adjusting things that did not need adjusting. They had clearly all gotten dressed in a great hurry. They had also, to a man, not had a haircut in approximately six weeks.

I noticed this the way other people notice a smoke alarm.

The backs of their necks were a situation. Five necks, all furred over, all about to be photographed from every conceivable angle for the next eight hours and then preserved in a leather album for the rest of recorded history.

I got the trimmers out of my purse.

Here is where I made my mistake.

They were already in their tuxes. Fully dressed, cuffed, bow-tied, the whole thing. There was no time to get them out of their shirts. The bride was about to walk. I had maybe four minutes, and five necks, and a trimmer.

So I trimmed what I could reach.

Around the collar of the tux. A clean, careful line right where the starched edge of the shirt met the skin. Five necks, five tidy collars, five groomsmen who looked, from the back, like they had gotten haircuts that morning.

I felt very good about this. I put the trimmers away. I went and sat down.

The wedding was beautiful. My cousin cried. The groom cried. I cried a little because I am a person, not a robot. The photographer took approximately nine thousand pictures.

The reception started. The groomsmen, freed from their ceremonial duties, did what every man in a tux does once the toasts are over. They loosened their bow ties. They unbuttoned their top buttons. They rolled their shoulders.

Their collars came down.

And there it was. On every single one of them. A perfect, crisp line of clean skin, ending exactly where the tux collar had been — and below it, a thick, untouched stripe of hair the trimmer had never reached. Five necks. Five lines. Five groomsmen walking around the reception with a high-water mark printed on the back of their heads like they had each been measured for a bowl cut and then changed their minds.

I watched this happen in real time.

My cousin’s mother-in-law saw it first. I watched her face register it. I watched her open her mouth and then close it again, because what do you even say.

I did not look at the photographer.

I did not look at the album later.

I will say this. My cousin has been married almost twenty years now. The marriage is happy. The groomsmen are all still in her life. And every single one of them, at every family event since, has gotten a haircut the week before. None of them have ever said why.

I have never told them.

I have also, since that day, never gone to a wedding without my trimmers and a plan for getting the shirt collar down.

You live, you learn. You trim early.