THE BALD TRUTH

I was bald the summer of ’99. Few outside my family knew. I had a wig made to match my hair, which fell out from chemotherapy.

Thick, wavy, with streaks of gray in the front, my own hair stopped people in the street and drew comments from strangers. “Waterfall hair,” my son called it. “Power hair,” a colleague once said. My hair was my signature, and the thought of losing it seemed like opening the front door to my house to find it occupied by a stranger.

After my diagnosis with breast cancer, my husband and I told our children. We stressed that I had a good prognosis and differentiated between life and movies they’d seen; my story was not “Stepmom.” Anticipating chemotherapy, we tried to prepare them for the side effects. Losing my hair was one of them.

After some days passed and we became more accustomed to the news, I suggested to my kids that a wig might be fun. I could be a blond. Or a redhead. My daughter rolled her eyes in adolescent exasperation. My 9-year-old son shook his head. “We want you to look like Mom,” he said. Same hair color. Same length. The fact that nature had made my hair distinct and hard to replicate didn’t faze them.

I found a wig maker, a Hollywood denizen whose father made wigs for Max Factor and whose mother was a hairstylist for starlets during the studios’ heyday. As I sat in the swivel chair before the mirror of his salon, he used a tape measure to determine the diameter of my head and calculate my wig size. For color, he snipped samples of hair from the silver streaks around my face and the salt-and-pepper waves in back. Polaroids were taken--front and side views.

Ten days after my first chemotherapy, I noticed a few hairs littering my blouse. Without thinking, I brushed them off; I was always finding stray hairs on my clothing. The next morning, I awoke and saw a swath of hair on my pillow. I began to notice strands of hair on the floor, tracing my path, like Theseus’ thread in the labyrinth. Wherever I went, I shed pieces of myself. My children were intrigued by this phenomenon. There was something oddly magical for them in the way that I could simply touch my hair and it would fall as silently as snow. But because my hair was so thick, a critical mass still remained. The fate that I knew awaited me remained an abstraction.

Until the itching set in. Surprisingly, what propelled me to act was not the psychological experience, but the physical sensation. Losing my hair felt uncomfortable. My scalp tingled. My head itched. I was constantly retracing my steps with a Dustbuster. Finally I went to my hairstylist of 20 years. “Cut it off,” I said.

That afternoon, when I opened the door for my son, he gasped, seeing me, and covered his eyes. The corona of hair that had circled my face his entire life was gone. Now my hair lay close to my head, like a swim cap. For the next hour, my son refused to look at me. “I don’t like it,” he finally said. I assured him my hair would grow back. “I hate cancer,” was his reply.

The day before my wig was ready, a young hairstylist made a house call with her clippers. As I sat in my backyard, she sheared off my remaining hair. I was bald. My son walked over and leaned into my lap. “Mommy’s buzzed,” he said. Suddenly I was an item of interest. He noticed my shorn hair on the grass. Could we leave it for the birds to build a nest? I agreed. “You look weird,” my son said, grinning so widely that his braces gleamed.

The next day I drove to my wig maker. I sat motionless for a moment before taking off my hat and the scarf I’d wound around my head. Despite my wig maker’s nonchalance, I felt naked when I removed them, as if there was something more intimate about exposing my bald head than any other part of my body.

On the work counter I saw a mound of curls--my wig. I scrutinized it, hoping to feel a connection with the shanks of hair I’d be sporting as my own. The wig maker lifted a bag of double-backed tape. He demonstrated how to affix the tape to the net lining of the wig--a chevron shape at the front hairline, a straight piece on either side. I felt the glue of the tape seal itself to my bare scalp and the body slide over my crown. With the wig secure, the wig maker began plying the tight curls, turning them into the softer waves captured in the Polaroids. As he feathered and trimmed, clamping hair around the same curling iron his father used in Max Factor’s garage, I found myself wondering about the Russian women who had sold their hair to make the wig. I saw these women in overcoats, their backs braced against the Russian cold, their cascading hair cut and tied into sheaves, then sprouting once again like a crop grown to be harvested. Finally, the styling was done. But the image I found in the mirror was as jarring as seeing myself bald. Real as the wig’s hair was, it wasn’t mine. I had disappeared.

That weekend the wig sat on its Styrofoam stand on my bathroom vanity. Like the alabaster busts of Roman patricians, the hair, my wig, was its most animate feature, billowing above the blank, unseeing eyes and archaic smile of the molded face. It fascinated my son, beckoning to him whenever he came into my room to visit me. Nauseous and depleted from chemotherapy, I lay in bed. Look, but don’t touch, I’d say, seeing him gazing at the wig. His desire to touch it penetrated my chemo haze. In two days, he’d seen me go from becoming bald, to wearing a wig, to vomiting from chemotherapy. But there, before the mirror on the bathroom counter, was my hair. The hair that he remembered. The wig offered proof, for both of us, of a life that existed before all this. It bore testament that I would recover and retrieve that life again. And as much as I felt like an impostor wearing it, I needed the wig. If a hair from its styled contours fell out of place, I feared I wouldn’t know how to put it back, or the fallen pieces of myself either.

The following evening, as the effects of the chemotherapy subsided, I walked into the bathroom. The face on the wig stand greeted me with its indifference, but the hair was in a state of disarray. Only one person could be responsible.

“Did you touch the wig?” I demanded of my son.

He looked up and nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Despite his apology, I felt a sudden tempest inside my chest. “Didn’t I tell you not to touch it?” I fumed.

“I forgot,” my son said.

His admission took courage, but still I was overwhelmed by a surging rage--at my son, at the fact that the wig had not fulfilled its promise to restore me. I knew my son was powerless in the face of my fury, but I needed a target. My anger was the final step in an inevitable dance: My son had to touch the wig. I had to get angry. Events drawn together like opposite poles of a magnet. But the true source of my anger had little to do with the wig or my son. It was the cancer. The chemotherapy. The vulnerability. But I wasn’t vulnerable with my son; he was the vulnerable one. And in spite of knowing better, I fired into my target. “I told you not to touch it!” I yelled. “Now you’ve ruined it. Get out! And don’t touch my things!”

My son began to cry. He had to. We both knew that. And in the midst of my tirade, I understood that concentrating on my hair had provided me with a direction. In trying to maintain my physical self, I could retain the notion that, despite my diagnosis, I was the same. But I wasn’t. For with the loss of my hair, something had changed inside me. I acknowledged I had cancer. And as the tears coursed down my son’s face, I knew I didn’t care about the wig. Losing my hair was never the issue; losing my life was.

That night, as my son lay in bed, I talked to him about what had happened with the wig. “I couldn’t help it,” he said. Looking up from his pillow, he followed his simple truth with a simpler question. “Do you love me?” His eyes met mine, and in his gaze, I saw how much rested on my answer. I knew that if my life were the movie I’d told him it wasn’t, this would be the moment when my son and I would talk about the D-word. He would tell me he’s frightened, I would tell him it’s OK to be scared, I’m frightened too. But this was not a movie, so my son and I saved the talk about death and dying for another time. Instead, knowing I’m his mother and seeing with a merciless clarity how much power I wield, I answered his question. “I always love you,” I said. “I never stop. Even when I yell.”

My son took a minute. He wanted to believe me. I looked at him and saw his chest open, and next to his beating heart was his tender soul. He was searching for me, the mother he remembered, not the woman with the short hair or the bald-headed one prostrate in bed. And in the bathroom, resting on its stand, was the wig--a shrine to his lost mother. So he put his hands on it. He touched the hair he missed and, feeling the strands running through his fingers, he imagined his mother back.

But as much as he desired it, my son knew the wig wasn’t me. Still, it’s what we had right then, this eerie pretender. And in the quiet of his room, as I listened to our breathing and waited for this chapter of our life to end, my son spoke to me. “It’s freaky,” he said, and rested his hand on my bald head.

“I know,” I said, and let it stay there.