One night, after I’d started chemo for cancer but before the treatments had made my hair fall out, I ran into my friend Ruth. I’d met Ruth because she was my dentist—she was a gentle dentist, kind to those of us who showed up needing root canals because we’d neglected to floss in our twenties. “In terms of evolution,” she’d say while we both waited for the laughing gas to get me stoned enough to let her in my mouth, “our teeth were only supposed to last us forty-five years, so you’re doing great.”
We’d become friends, which thrilled me; I was such a high-strung, pesky patient (“You say the nitrous is at its ‘legal limit,’ but, you know, if you turn it up a smidge, no one’s going to report you”), I couldn’t imagine she’d want to spend a minute more with me than she had to. Now our kids went to the same high school, in large part because she’d recommended the school. And by awful coincidence, we both had the same kind of cancer—only Ruth was much farther down the chemo path than I was and had already lost her hair.
I’d seen her a few weeks earlier and she’d been wearing a scarf, but when I ran into her at a school play, here it was, her old corona of curly hair.
“Ruth, your hair looks so great!” I said.
“It’s a wig! I never thought I’d wear a wig, but sometimes it’s nice when you go out. It feels dressy. A little creepy, but dressy.”
When I looked at the wig more closely, I could tell it was a wig, but barely. Her wig hair was a little glossier than her real hair, but that was it. And if Ruth felt good in a wig, maybe I would too. It seemed unlikely, but possible.
“You should get one, Jenny,” she said. “Medical insurance covers the whole thing.” This seemed so bizarre as to be unbelievable, but she insisted it was true.
* * *
I’ve never thought of my hair as one of my strong suits. I’ve always thought it was one of my weaker suits—maybe, appearance-wise, my weakest. I grew up in the sixties and seventies, when you were supposed to have absolutely straight, long hair, as smooth as a plank of polished wood, even if you had to scorch it with your mother’s iron to get it that way. Invariably parted down the middle, the ideal hair fell in great lank sheets to your waist. More than one girl at my high school had hair so long they would smooth it down, carefully, and sit on it, like a bridal train.
My hair was, mortifyingly, a thick, springy, unwieldy mass. On top, it looked like straw, like a thatched roof; on the sides and around my neck, crazy ringlets and curlicues coiled this way and that. When I’d try to grow it out, it never got longer; it grew sideways, like a mushroom cap or a sphinx’s headdress. Kids called me Brillo and Medusa, and I suffered mightily. I’d sit in class and watch, dying a little, as the straight-haired girls tossed their silky manes over their shoulders, languidly ran their fingers through them, held up a horse tail’s worth to examine, like scientists at a microscope, their split ends.
As an adult I’ve done the best I could with my hair, given that I can’t stand sitting in beauty salons for the hours it would take to do anything ambitious to it. Occasionally I get it blow-dried, and it looks good, I have to say. People barely recognize me; then, when they do, they pay me compliments.
“You should wear it that way all the time!” they say.
“I’ll do that!”
Three or five days later it’s reverted to an old coarse thicket again, people stop saying things, and I forget what I said about wearing my hair that way all the time. After a lifetime of disappointment, I feel about my hair the way people who’ve been divorced for a long time think about their spouses—I have to deal with it once in a while (get it cut and, in recent years, colored), and I’m pleasantly surprised when it behaves well, but I’m not exactly holding my breath.
So when I got cancer, I wasn’t that upset about losing my hair. When I thought about it at all, I hoped that having cancer might improve my hair. I’d heard stories about women whose hair had grown back in an entirely new version—livelier where it had been limp, or loose waves replacing a frizzy tangle. These women had a whole second life—a second, successful marriage!—to better hair.
But no matter how you feel about losing your hair, the prospect of not having any forces you to make decisions that seem, uncomfortably, to go to the heart of who you are. Losing your hair becomes less about losing your hair than about other things. What kind of cancer person was I going to be?
I knew I didn’t want to go around bald. This seemed too in-your-face and, frankly, a little show-offy: I have cancer, deal with it.
A scarf or a wig, those were my choices. (This was a few years ago; these days, I’ve read, you can get “cold caps” to wear during chemo treatments; they constrict the blood vessels in your scalp, protecting your hair follicles from the effects of the chemo. They’re only effective about 50 to 60 percent of the time, but I’d probably try it anyway. Why not?)
The scarf person, it seemed to me, knows that any person with a brain will guess why she’s suddenly wearing a scarf all the time. The wig person, on the other hand, hopes that even the people who can tell she’s wearing a wig will assume she’s wearing it because she doesn’t want to talk about why. The wig person is saying, to herself and to others, “Please, God, just let me blend in.”
I totally understood that feeling. I did. I was already getting stopped on the street by people I didn’t know that well, people who’d been told I had cancer; they’d grip my arm and say, with an intimacy I didn’t think they’d earned, “How are you?” It felt invasive. I couldn’t help it: I’d take a step back and say, “Good, how are you?”
But I decided that my “truer” self would wear a scarf. Wearing a wig seemed to be going out of the way to kowtow to some outmoded notion that you had to hide your cancer, keep it hush-hush. I wasn’t ashamed of having cancer, dammit! I would go out into the world in my forthright scarves and bandannas, and to hell with discretion.
* * *
My little encounter with Ruth and her wig had opened up another possibility. I was being too rigid, too black-and-white, about this wig-versus-scarf thing. I could wear a wig sometimes, and other times not. A wig might be fun as a change of pace. And it was free. And I love free things, particularly when my insurance company pays for them. What was the harm?
I bought my wig at a wig store near Columbus Circle, settling on a nice light brown one, made from human, not synthetic, hair that matched my own hair color. The wig fitter fussed with it forever, but when he was finally done, I thought I looked surprisingly okay, meaning that my wig didn’t look too wiggy. It had soft bangs that cleverly obscured that unfortunate forehead area where you can usually see the edge of the wig, and the hair fell in nice, natural-looking layers. It looked much better than my real hair, which pleased me.
A few weeks went by between my buying the wig and my hair falling out. When you have chemo, your hair doesn’t fall out all at once. It gives up the ghost gradually, first in strands, and then in little clumps that you notice in the shower drain that make you think there’s a dead mouse down there.
Every time you look in the mirror, your baldness reminds you that you’re very sick, in spite of all the cheerfulness and optimism you’ve talked yourself into. And you’re not completely bald; random wisps of hair still cling to your head, and that makes it worse somehow.
But I wasn’t ready for the wig yet. I looked at it a lot, on its white Styrofoam wig head on top of the radiator cover in my bedroom, but the wig head intimidated me—it managed, even without a face, to seem haughty—and the wig seemed to belong to her more than me.
I wore my scarves instead. People guessed that I had cancer and asked how I was feeling. “I’m good!” I kept saying, and the more I said it, the less I believed it, which made me say it even more brightly. “I’m great! Doing great!” All this faux cheer made me feel like the coach of a team that wasn’t doing that great, especially when people looked at me as if they were about to cry. I didn’t blame them—well, I did blame them, but I shouldn’t have.
I wearied of the questions, and I wearied of my look, my daily uniform of scarves and bandannas. I felt like a lady pirate, or one of those eighty-seven-year-old women wheeling their grocery carts down Broadway. Then my eyebrows fell out. For some reason, I didn’t expect this at all, and felt surprisingly sorry for myself. My hair was part of my head, I thought, but my eyebrows were part of my face. I felt exposed, and vulnerable. I now looked like a big bald baby. Every time I looked in the mirror and saw the baby, I felt so bad for her I wanted to cry.
I needed a buffer between my head and the world. I needed people to stop looking at me and asking how I was feeling. I was ready for my wig.
* * *
My friend Martha’s daughter Anna was graduating from the University of Chicago, and I’d flown out for the weekend. This seemed like the perfect, grown-up, festive occasion to inaugurate my wig.
The morning of the graduation, I put on my wig—this takes much longer than it sounds, with a lot of fussing at stray strands of your own hair and brushing of your wig hair—and start walking toward the campus, surrounded by the throngs of graduating seniors’ families.
I feel weird walking along in my wig out in public. I feel like an impostor. As if I’ve just done something illegal, robbed a bank maybe, and am now trying to blend in with the crowd by going incognito in my wig. I’m startled every time I see myself reflected in a store window—it’s my face, but in someone else’s hair. I keep pulling and poking at my wig, trying to adjust it, fretting that my scalp is exposed.
I get to the huge main quad of the campus, set up with an ocean of white folding chairs for the ceremony. The weather report says it’s 97 degrees in Chicago, but it feels like a good 115, and it’s only ten in the morning.
Then, in the crowd, I see Eden, an editor of mine from New York, and remember that her son is graduating today too. Eden is a terrific editor, and a kind one—instead of saying, “This piece is way too long,” she’ll say, “This lovely piece is going to be so hard to cut!”
She is also famously well organized. “Here, Jenny! Take one of these!” she says, holding out the several wide-brimmed sun hats that she’s brought along in case she runs into some dimwit who hasn’t put it together that we’ll be sitting under the scalding Chicago sun for several hours.
I thank her, take one of the hats, and put it on, but only partly so I won’t get sunburned. Mostly because I won’t feel as self-conscious in a hat. I want my wig under wraps.
The procession takes forever. Hundreds of sweltering students walk down the outdoor aisle in their caps and gowns, smiling gamely for their parents, while grandparents fan themselves with their programs. The ceremony takes even longer. By the second hour or so, my head is baking—no, broiling. Lines of sweat roll down from under my wig onto my neck. The wig feels heavier and hotter by the minute; I feel like I’m wearing my cat on my head.
If I take off the hat, I think desperately, maybe a little air will get through the wig and onto my head. I take off the hat. For a split second, I think, Whew! This is so much better! All that hot weight is gone!
Wait. There’s something in my hat, which I am now holding in my hand.
My wig. My wig is in my hat. So what’s on my head?
Years ago, when my sister and I discovered that her station wagon was missing from its parking space outside my apartment building—stolen, it turned out—we both stood on the sidewalk staring at the space, as if the car would somehow materialize. Now I do the equivalent: I touch my palm to the top of my head, as if there might be another wig up there. Nope.
This is so surprising, so beyond embarrassing, that it’s impossible to be embarrassed, because embarrassment can’t even begin to cover it. I have lost everything—my hat, my wig, my hair, my health—and I feel strangely … free. I laugh, because it’s funny—having gone to all this trouble only to end up like this, like Lucille Ball. Rickeeee!
I jam the wig and the hat back on my head. Not for me, I’m way past that, but for the people behind me. I can’t even imagine their expressions. I feel awful for having shocked them.
* * *
When I get home, I put the wig in the back of my top dresser drawer, wrapped in a plastic bag, and I stick to wearing scarves. After my chemo is done, my hair grows back—it’s the same old wacky hair, but for the first time in my life I’m glad to see it. My wig stays in the drawer for the next three years. Every time I see it I think, My God! What’s a pelt doing in here? But I keep the wig because it was expensive, and I can’t imagine throwing away anything so expensive, even if I didn’t pay for it.
Ruth’s hair grows back too, and for the next two years we do normal things together—worry about our children, eat the delicious pot roast she cooks at her house, tell stories about having cancer. She loves my wig story, and she does the best rendition of something that happens a lot when you have ovarian cancer: People tell you an inspiring story about their mother or aunt and how she had ovarian cancer too, and how, once it went into remission, she got her Ph.D. or took up parasailing and had a whole new life.
“How’s she doing?” you ask the teller of the story.
“Oh. She died,” they say, looking stricken.
“Do it again, Ruth!” I say when she and I are together. “Do the inspiring people!” We crack each other up with our stories.
Then Ruth has a recurrence of her cancer that goes on for two years, and finally she dies. I miss her so much. And Eden, my editor—who didn’t know she had cancer at the graduation—dies too. In light of these losses, tossing away my wig seems way too cocky. Who am I to say that I’m done with being sick, that I might not have some occasion—something fancy, on a cooler day—when I’ll want to wear it again?
One day I read one of those bossy magazine articles about decluttering your closet. Ask yourself, realistically, if you are ever going to wear that old piqué bridesmaid’s dress or pair of culottes ever again, the article instructs. If the answer is no, throw them out.
I think, Realistically? Realistically I might be needing those chemo drugs again, and I might lose my hair again. But I will never, ever wear that stupid wig again. Better to wear the stupid scarves and get stared at and have people look at me as if they’re about to cry. Better to let the other women out there walking around with no hair see that I’m one of them.
So I threw it away.