Your break’s almost over, babe, he says. You go out first.
She leaves the chiller, and the hot blast of the baking room turns all the wet and damp to stale sweat. She doesn’t want to go out front, not yet. She leaves through the back exit, into the parking lot, and there are no cousins or girls around. The bus stop is across the street; she can feel her house key in her jeans pocket. She feels a buttercream smear start to crust on her cheek. She can feel getting on the bus and going home by herself, letting herself into the empty house and taking a hot shower and going to bed, curling up in her ballet-pink sheets, although it’s only seven-thirty, too early for bedtime. A shaft of sunset hits Jamie’s car, turning the shiny black a sudden hot white, and she floats her hand along the brilliant passenger door. Her reflection is a blur of a girl. She takes the key from her pocket and heads back inside to the bakery, running the key hard along the edge of the car as she goes.
WIG
The long black hairs on the white tile look like a child’s wild scribbles, each strand a separate graphite scrawl. I think that I should sweep them up. Save them for something. Didn’t women used to do that, save their hair combings? To make padded wiglets of their own hair, robust false curls? In high school we’d used those long black strands of her hair for dental floss after lunch. It was that strong. That healthy, that thick. She always had the prettier hair. A thick, glossy black, while I had to blow-dry and torture and gel for an angelic or Botticelli effect. I would’ve killed for her hair. I sat behind her in Algebra and made long, tiny braids of it, like those bracelets of black elephant hair, like shiny jute. At the beach she’d coat her dark hair and skin with sunscreen, her melanin-rich, impervious skin, while pale blonde me slicked on the baby oil to get a glow going, heedless of burn or the later shredding I’d do. We took tennis lessons together, and I was the better player — I had to win no matter what, heaving, jolting off oily sweat with each lunge — but she enjoyed it more, was beautiful with it, queenlier, fat black ponytail swinging, moving serene as Greek or Egyptian royalty in the sun.
It should have been me.
“You don’t have to do all that,” I hear her call after the toilet’s second flush.
I should get her a glass of juice, maybe crackers, sometimes that helps. I’m desperate to do something for her.
“Shut up, please,” I yell back.
“I don’t want you doing all that.”
“Remember my sixteenth birthday?” I yell. Me falling down in the cantina bathroom, her shoving fingers down my throat so I could vomit up the cheap, fruity tequila, her lifting my limp bangs from the bowl, her giving me cupped palmfuls of water, her wiping flecks from my mouth. I owe her. I rinse the basin again, wipe it with a fistful of tissue.
“Hey, it’s what friends are for,” she calls. Weak.
“Exactly. I just wish your aim were better.”
I hear her try to laugh, and I marvel, again, at how she’s bearing this. But the energy’s got to give out soon.
The air in here is still rank, despite my double flushing and basin rinsing and healthy blast of pine. Despite the bathroom’s cheery mess of little boys’ bath toys, the husband’s rosy I love you card masking-taped to the medicine cabinet. I examine my own healthy, guilty glow in the mirror. Twenty years’ exposure, and my price is just a minor epidermal leatheriness. My own hair is still a natural blonde, even at thirty-six. Just helped out a little. A few chemicals, and voilà, I’m still blonde as sixteen.
I evaluate my eyebrows; the one very dark brown hair beneath the right brow arch, the one that always grows in fast, is poking its way back. Her wild eyebrows will probably start slipping away now, too, bristly hair by hair by hair. I find tweezers in the cabinet, pluck, and toss my tiny whisker in the sodden-tissue trash. I get down on my knees and pick up her thick, long black hairs, hair by hair by hair, and bury them deep in the sodden-tissue trash so she doesn’t have to see. She shouldn’t have to face that, yet.
I look at my own fair face one last time in the mirror, next to the I love you. It really should have been me.
WE GO SHOPPING for a wig. It’s time, she’d said. I don’t like scarves, I’m tired of scarves. They’re too resigned. Come help me buy a wig.
I’m a little surprised by this; a wig seems, well, dishonest, and she’s the most honest, artless person I know. No makeup or plucking. Those heavy black eyebrows, too thick and undefined. Not a woman to wax or bleach or shave anything, to moisturize or scent. Her husband impressed me on this. I’d watch him run an affectionate hand across her hirsute shin, playfully tweak her armpit’s floss, lovingly tease her for the faint mustache dusk on her upper lip. She wound up winning a prince of a guy, sensitive, devoted, stroking, the kind who sticks it out. Maybe it’s ironic, now that she’s getting barer every day, the follicles giving up. Now that she’s getting fairer, wispier, her skin going bruisable and fine. Soon she’ll need to pencil in some brows if she wants them at all, but I imagine she won’t even bother. I would’ve expected those straightforward scarves from her, maybe some baseball caps, honest and resigned. But she wants a wig, and of course I want her to have whatever she wants, whatever makes her feel better, and I want to be with her through all of it, it’s what friends do, so we wait for a day her energy’s up, and her husband is crazy busy at work and her boys are at school, and we go.
But we can’t find the right one. We go from shop to shop to shop, from Hollywood to Pico Robertson to Encino, smiling at balding old ladies and transgendering people and other translucent-looking women in scarves. She’s flagging but determined, and we learn a great deal about wigs. She immediately rejects synthetic hair for its artifice — I say nothing to what seems like a mild hypocrisy — and for its lesser durability, although an impassioned, eager-to-instruct Salesguy in an upscale West Hollywood boutique assures us a good-quality synthetic can last two years with the right care. This moot, insensitive question of durability hangs in the air a moment, and I say nothing to that, either, but agree she should go for human. We learn there are four basic kinds of human hair — Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, and Caucasian — and we learn that Indian and Chinese hair, because of its strong nature and thick diameter, is able to undergo harsh chemical processes to make it smooth, shiny, and tangle-free Processed Hair, but that the most glorious hair, the only kind, really, we should be looking at is Virgin European. We learn that wig companies send employees out to remote villages or monasteries or convents in Russia and Italy to contract for hair; the hair-growing people must agree to always keep their hair protected and safe from pollution and sun damage, to never blow-dry or style. The wig people then return years later to harvest the crop with razors or close cutting at the scalp. This all makes me slightly queasy — it sounds too much like people stripped naked and yielding, handing something precious over to someone else with questionable or inhumane intent.