Five-year-old Hannah eavesdrops as her mother complains about her husband, Hugh, on the telephone. Her mother's fury is concentrated on a recent incident: the other day, Hugh took Hannah to the barbershop and had her beautiful, golden hair chopped off. The mother declares men "sadists," and pronounces herself "anti-man," leaving the spying Hannah confused by these unfamiliar terms.

According to Hannah's mother, Hugh claimed that their daughter "begged to have it done" — a suggestion that the mother dismisses as plainly false. She entertains the possibility that her husband had "a seizure of amnesia" and mistook Hannah for one of his sons, afterwards bribing the girl to cover up his error.

But Hannah knows that her father did not mistake her for one of her older brothers. "Just do as I say, Homer, cut it off," her father had pressed the reluctant barber. "That was a fine idea of yours to have your hair cut off," he told her meaningfully on the ride back. Hannah didn't dare talk back him, since he was a stern, "old-fashioned man" who "did not countenance contradiction from his children."

Hannah's four older siblings mocked her new hairstyle when she arrived home, but her parents failed to intervene, since they were soon busy fighting behind closed doors.

Hannah's brother once joked that they only kept Hannah around for her hair: "It's made of spun gold, you know and very invaluable," he said. Hannah now wonders, with much anxiety, "how long [her family] would keep her now that her sole reason for existence was gone."

Hannah is specifically disturbed the notion that her mother's love for her may wane now that her curls have been shorn. The pair's relationship was organized around two daily rituals: an hour of hair curling in the morning, and an hour of portrait sitting in the afternoon. Indeed, a painter was working on a life-sized portrait of the mother-daughter dyad — a portrait that celebrated their matching crowns of incredible, tawny hair.

"It must never be cut," Rob — the painter — once said. "Not a single strand of it." Now, with her hair gone, Hannah realizes the portrait will never be finished. Gone are those peaceful, domestic afternoons with her mother and Rob, "who never raised their voices or threw things at each other or stormed out of the room."

Still spying on the phone call through all these reflections, Hannah hears her mother's real hypothesis behind her father's motive for the haircut. Her mother explains that Hugh "loathsomely" accused her of having an affair with the portrait painter, Rob, and that she responded by threatening to leave him. The two drank and fought, tapping into such fury that they "could have killed each other."

The next day, the vengeful Hugh plotted to ruin the object of his wife's affection. He offered to take Hannah out for lunch and shoe shopping, and Hannah's mother — in her hungover state — failed to question his motives.

"How can one explain it away as an accident to a child when one perfectly knows that accident is not involved?" the mother asks. "Besides, you can't say to a child, 'Darling, you are only a symbol. It was really my beautiful hair that was cut off, not yours.'"

The mother moves on to discussing Rob's reaction to Hugh's slander. Rob took it personally, claiming that Hugh hates art and artists. "This gives him a heaven-sent opportunity to berate me for living in the camp of my enemy," the mother says. "He called me an opportunist and a brood mare...Today I hate all men."

Hannah broods with all this new knowledge and wishes she were a bee so that she could sting her mother, her father, Rob, and the rest of her family. She heads down to the kitchen, where she finds the cook.

"There's my baby," the cook says, and hugs the girl. "My very own baby." Hannah pronounces her love for the cook, and then for the snow falling outside.