She finally finds one she likes, a bright auburn, Pre-Raphaelite mass, kidney-length and decadent, with a hand-tied, monofilament top. I’m stunned by her choice. She takes off her scarf to try it on, and the exposure of the holdout black hairs on her tender white scalp makes me look away in pain. The Salesguy is talking passionately about ear tabs and cap size and maybe the need, soon, for special Comfy Grips to hold the wig in place against a smooth dome of bare skin, You know some guys, he tells her, when it’s time for a piece, they actually have snaps surgically implanted in their scalps to hold it in place, can you imagine? and I finally look. She’s smiling, but I don’t think it suits her at all, it’s too outrageous and it doesn’t work with her olive-going-yellow skin. But she’s excited by it, turning to see all angles of her head, flipping the tendriled ends behind her, and there’s no point in being honest at a time like this — let a little denial grow, I think. The bravery’ll have to crack, at some point. I tell her she looks beautiful. Go ahead, I say, you look like a Russian empress, a queen, and, when the Salesguy nods agreeably at that and she hesitates, looking all at once timid and drained, I say,
“Do it. Be unabashed, be bold.”
She smiles at that, then:
“I’m worried. . ” she says.
“Don’t be,” the Salesguy says. “With that face, that bone structure, you can pull anything off.”
“What are you worried about?” I ask quietly, and the Salesguy, sensing a new level of intimacy, squeezes my arm, nods, and discreetly moves away.
“You want some Compazine?” I offer.
“No, I’m okay, thanks.”
“So, what?”
“It’s been awhile,” she begins.
“Since?”
“You know. Since.” She pulls panels of long red hair down in front to cover her breasts, Godiva-like. I’ve noticed her breasts have been going limp. Everything about her is losing tone.
“Since,” she repeats.
“Oh.” I look away to examine a bottle of wig shampoo. “Maybe that’s just normal slackening off,” I suggest. “Two kids, married eight years. It’s nothing, it’s totally normal.”
“I’m not talking slackening. I’m talking a real while. Like being cut off.”
“Maybe he’s worried about hurting you,” I suggest.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe he feels guilty,” I say.
“Guilty for what?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” I don’t know what to say. “For not being able to fix things.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe he’s got stuff going on, too,” I say. “He’s going through this, too. He needs taking care of, too.”
“You’re right. You know, why don’t you come over some night? We can just hang out, watch a movie or something. The three of us, like we used to. Before all this shit.”
“Sure.”
“And he’s been working such crazy hours. I’m almost feeling like he doesn’t want to be around me. Maybe he’s grossed out.”
“You’re being ridiculous. He adores you.”
She tugs the wig further back on her forehead. “Does this look natural? Or just whory? Tell me the truth.”
“He loves you, you know. He couldn’t care less.”
“But do you think he’ll like this? Come on.”
“It’s great. He’ll love it. He loves everything about you.”
She nudges me her thanks, gets out her wallet, and I applaud her. She’s paying and I’m smiling, stroking her new marrow-colored curls, but all I can picture is some peasant or nun shorn of her hair, her naked baby-bird head bent low over bills for oil or coal, counting the coins for a new church bell, a new milk cow, medicines for the orphans, loaves of black bread, all so my friend can entice her husband, cling to illusion, grip at fading hope.
But then I listen carefully to the Salesguy’s complicated instructions about styling and cleaning and care, because I know that, although her husband is such a prince of a guy, this exhaustive task of tending will probably fall to me. It’s what friends are for.
DO IT, BE unabashed, be bold.
I don’t remember which of us said that first. We all used to say it to each other, back when they were dating and they’d include me, we’d hang out and get a Meat Lovers’ pizza, rent a movie plus two sequels at a time, get stoned and drunk on scratch margaritas and tell ourselves we hadn’t yet outgrown a single impetuous thing. Then after, when they got married and they’d include me, we’d hang out and get a cheeseless veggie pizza, watch movies, get selectively stoned or drunk, then soon-later-after, when they had kids, the first boy and then rapidly the second one, and they’d include me, and we’d put the kids to bed and hang out, eat the kids’ leftover canned ravioli off their plates, watch TV but not get stoned or drunk anymore, because the kids might need something and we all needed to keep it real.
Then the weekend, a year or so ago, before all this shit, when she and her kids went off and away to her mom’s for the weekend and one of us called the other one, I don’t remember which, it would’ve been so normal either way, Let’s hang out, get a pizza, watch a movie. I probably was the one to call, actually. I was being a good friend, I was worried he’d be lonely all alone. And the getting stoned on a forgotten, leftover ziplock bag in the freezer and drunk on vodka and kiddie apple juice just seemed to follow, seemed natural, too, although it had been a long while. And then cracking up, being too silly, the playful shove-touching we always did and then not so playful, and then groping and stroking as it all of a sudden went rash, and then just doing it, being unabashed, being bold. Waking up the next morning, in her sheets, one of her long, healthy thick black hairs stuck to my right breast, like a reminder to floss. Let’s forget this ever happened, It doesn’t mean anything, Doesn’t count, Yes, I love her, I love her, too, batting clichés back and forth to each other and spraying the fetid air with pine. We can’t ever tell her, Not ever, Yes, I love her, I love her, too, and both of us feeling so, so sick with it.
I’ll never tell her. She shouldn’t have to face that now. She deserves it all to be as pretty and clean and normal as we can make it.
A WHILE LATER, she changes her mind. It’s trying too hard, she says, it gets in my way, falls into food, the toilet, the boys keep tugging at it. She’s back in a scarf, she’s shrugging, resigned. The wild red wig is carefully rewrapped and back in a box; she’s donating it to a special group that gets wigs for poor women and kids.
“It just wasn’t me,” she says. “It just didn’t work.”
“I thought you looked beautiful,” I tell her.
She bites her lip, looks out the car window.
“He didn’t like it?”
She shrugs.
Maybe he’s not the problem, maybe it’s you, maybe you’re the one who can’t handle losing your looks, not him. I think this, but I don’t say it, I loathe myself for the mere thought.
“So, right, we’ll keep looking,” I say. “It’s a quest. We’ll find the perfect wig.”
I picture some twelve-year-old girl with leukemia wearing the donated wig. Some little girl who’ll never get married or have kids, never get laid or kissed, who’ll probably be buried in that mass of whory Virgin European hair.
“I appreciate your doing all this with me,” she says, quiet.
“My God,” I say. “How many places did I drag you to find that horrible pink dress?” Twelve stores. I was desperate to find the perfect dress for our senior prom, consistently unhappy with the look of my pasty arms, my negligible breasts, my pastel hair, my washed-out skin tone. She drove us around from place to place in her mother’s gassy Toyota, the patience of a saint, encouraging me, all the while looking perfect in the first thrift shop dress she’d found, darkly glamorous next to her perfect boyfriend of the moment, me going with his irrelevant best buddy, by default, actually, she’d arranged it so we could all be together. We took a group photo, camera snapping at the exact second I looked at her burgundy satin and thought, That would have worked on me, better on me, she should have offered to swap.