People Who Knew Me (21 page)

“It” is a small shop called Wigged Out. I sigh because I'm not really in the mood for this, but I want to make Claire happy. It's like this cancer thing is a bonding experience for her, something we are surmounting together. How will she feel when she knows we are not surmounting it?

I have to circle the block a few times to find a spot, the usual Los Angeles routine. After we park, Claire takes me by the hand and pulls me down the sidewalk to a store filled with aisles and aisles of fake hair.

Claire gravitates immediately to a long blond wig, tries it on.

“Whatcha think?” she asks, twirling the synthetic strands around her finger playfully.

“It's very …
Brady Bunch
,” I say, but she doesn't know the reference.

A twenty-something girl asks if she can help us and Claire overrides my standard “Just looking” response to inquire about the different wig options. She tells the girl I have cancer, and though that's probably obvious, I'm still embarrassed. She also clarifies that she does
not
have cancer, though that's probably obvious, too. She has color in her cheeks, eyebrows, enviably long eyelashes.

“We have some great wigs made from real hair,” the girl says. She is as pale as a cancer patient, with long black, probably fake hair.

“
Real
hair?” Claire says.

“People donate it,” the girl says. Claire seems impressed.

The salesgirl guides us to the real-hair wig section. It creeps me out. All I can think of is the heads the hair came from, the people walking around in the world with short bobs in the name of charity. Claire seems unbothered. She tries on a black one—silky and straight. Asian, I'm sure.

“Mom?” she says, looking for my opinion. It's clear to me, standing beneath the abusive fluorescent lights, that Claire is not going to let us leave without buying wigs.

“It's pretty,” I say. “But you should try something more fun.”

Against my will, I am playing along. I go back to the fake-hair aisles and select a couple dark red wigs for her to try on.

“The red brings out the blue in your eyes,” I say, as she analyzes what she sees in the mirror. The girl who works there is still lingering, agreeing with everything I say. Plus she adds that Claire looks like Emma Stone, which makes her smile. I don't know who Emma Stone is and I despise this salesgirl for making me feel left out.

“Okay, then red it is,” Claire says, choosing the shorter of the two. The hair curls right beneath her chin, frames her face.

“It's good for the holidays, too,” the girl says.

Claire confirms that she loves it. Then it's my turn. I try on a very short, pixie-cut blond wig. I look like that lady with the TV show that exploits her eight children. “Oh, Kate Gosselin,” says the girl who works there and who seems to know every celebrity. Claire selects a slightly longer blond wig. The salesgirl calls it “the Reese Witherspoon.”

“I'm so pale. The blond washes me out,” I say.

“Let's try brown,” Claire says. “You've never had brown hair.”

I've never had brown hair during her lifetime.

Claire stands on her tippy-toes to place a medium-length brown wig on top of my head. She pulls it to one side and then the other. When she's satisfied, she turns me around to face the mirror. I gasp.

There she is—that someone I used to be—staring back at me. Even without eyebrows and eyelashes, I get a flash of Emily Morris. The wig hair is parted down the side, a few strands sweeping across my forehead, exactly how I used to arrange my own hair.
You look like you've seen a ghost
. That's the expression. My breathing is shallow, panicked. I feel like I did when Jade called out, “Emily Morris,” at that hippie craft fair in Topanga Canyon.

“You don't like it?” Claire says. She looks disappointed. “I think it looks good.”

“Agreed,” the salesgirl says.

I shake my head no. Vigorously.

“It's itchy,” I say. “On my scalp.”

I yank it off. My face is flush. I'm sweating.

“We have wig caps,” the girl says. She's examining her cuticles, completely unaware of the breakdown I'm having in her store. “It's like a nylon thing that goes under the wig, and—”

“No,” I say.

They both look at me like I've lost it.

“Maybe this was a bad idea,” Claire says. She takes the wig from me, puts it back in its place. She thinks this, my freak-out, is about the cancer. But the cancer is nothing compared to seeing Emily Morris in the mirror.

“You don't have to wear a wig, Mom,” Claire says. “I just thought it would be fun.”

I've let her down. I wish I could explain, but I can't.

“Some people do scarves,” the girl says.

Claire holds my hand to calm me down. “What do you think, Mom? A scarf could be pretty.”

I'm still thinking about Emily Morris as I follow them to a wall display of scarves. Sadness overcomes me. I miss her. That's what it is. I miss her.

“Mom, these are so pretty,” Claire says.

I force myself to focus. I stare at the scarves—solid colors, floral patterns, polka dots, stripes, plaid. The salesgirl selects a linen navy one and demonstrates how to wrap it around my head so it will stay in place.

“There,” she says, standing back to evaluate me. When she moves out of the way, I see myself in the mirror. Emily Morris is gone. I feel my blood pressure start to drop, slowly.

“I look like I'm in a cult,” I say.

“No, you don't,” Claire says. “You just look like someone who is prettying up her cancer.”

In my haze, Claire convinces me to buy a few different scarves—a pale pink one with a paisley pattern, a solid-color turquoise one, and a mint-green one with little white flowers on it. “Wear this one now,” she says, handing me the turquoise one. I don't hate it, actually. It makes me feel less exposed, less vulnerable, more protected.

Claire's hungry, so we stop at a sidewalk café for an early lunch. I watch her peruse the menu. I wonder, if I had stayed in New York, if Emily Morris had raised her—what would be different? I hate that I can never know.

“Mom, this salad looks awesome,” Claire says, pointing to something on the menu called the Antioxidant Powerhouse. There's no way I can't order this. Claire has done her research. She reminds me of the importance of antioxidants and protein and whole grains on a regular basis. I'm not sure any of that makes much of a difference, but I can't just ignore the advice of the medical community and, more important, my daughter. If I shun it all and eat nachos and french fries, and then I die, they will look for reasons and that will be one. I don't want Claire to blame me when all is said and done. I don't want her to hate me.

When the salad comes, I stab the spinach spitefully. I don't know how anyone truly enjoys salads. They seem incapable of hitting the proverbial spot. Claire has ordered a salad, too, because her solidarity efforts are not just limited to bald heads.

“So,” she says, prefacing something that makes me nervous, “didn't you meet with the doctor the other day?”

She keeps track of my appointments, my chemo sessions, in addition to being class president and having friends and playing soccer twice a week. I told her she doesn't have to worry about my cancer stuff, and she said, “I don't
worry
about it.” I think that's a lie, though.

“Dr. Richter, yes,” I say.

“Is it working? The chemo?”

The dreaded question.

I puncture a pomegranate seed with my fork.

“Well,” I say, pondering, “it's hard to say.”

I figure that phrase—
it's hard to say
—isn't dishonest. It
is
hard to say. How do you tell your daughter that all the drugs that have been coursing through your body for months aren't doing anything?

“It's not working,” she says matter-of-factly.

I skip confirmation of this fact and say, “They just started me on a new drug. This one will work.” I struggle with the word “will.”

She uses a finger to gather the leftover dressing in her bowl, then licks it.

“Could you die?”

The more dreaded question.

When Claire was five, at that age when she was oddly prolific with asking questions, she said, on her birthday, “How old am I going to get?” I told her that none of us really know for sure, but that she'd probably be more than a hundred years old one day. She said, “And then what?” and I said, “Well, when you've lived as much life as you want to, you die,” framing death as some kind of well-I-guess-it's-about-time personal choice. “What does that mean?” she asked. “It means you don't live here on Earth anymore,” I told her. She asked where she would go and all I could think to say was, “Nobody really knows. But somewhere better.”

“I guess it's possible,” I dare to say, then immediately deflect: “But Dr. Richter is hopeful. I'm hopeful.”

She nods slowly, taking this in.

“Well, that sucks,” she says.

She seems angry, at me or the cancer, I don't know.

The waitress comes by at this inopportune time to collect our plates. We give her matching tense smiles.

“I didn't know it was that serious,” she says. “You didn't tell me it was that serious.”

It's at me, the anger.

“Honey, I—”

She puts her hand up at me, like a crossing guard. It shocks me into silence.

“Have you even thought about who would take care of me?” she says. There's fear in her eyes, along with the anger.

I can't come up with words to comfort her fast enough.

“You are so selfish,” she says, spittle flying from her mouth.

She stands from the table in a huff and turns to leave. I grab her by the arm. She whips her head back and stares at me with horror, as if I've just slapped her across the face. Reflexively, I let go.

“Claire, please,” I say.

People in the café are looking at us now. I am the mother with the teenage daughter who hates her.

“No,” is all she says, pulling her arm close to her, possessively, as she marches out of the restaurant.

I don't go after her. I let her have this dramatic exit. She's right, I need to talk to Al about watching over her if I'm gone. When I'm gone. No, if.
Think positive
. That's what Dr. Richter said. I flag down the waitress for the check, and while I'm waiting I think again about New York, about Emily Morris, about the people who knew me. Am I supposed to tell Claire about all that? Is it complete honesty she wants? All these years, I've been so much more comfortable with lies.

 

EIGHTEEN

Drew called about an hour before I was supposed to meet Gabe at the restaurant with the live piano. It was right as I was stepping into my new dress—a clingy black thing with a hem that hit mid-thigh. I looked around the apartment, paranoid that he had me on some kind of surveillance.

“What are you up to tonight?” he asked. The question was innocent enough, but I got defensive:

“Nothing, why?”

“It's Friday. Thought maybe you'd head out with Marni.”

He'd taken a sudden interest in ensuring I had fun without him, desperate to compensate for what he called our unfortunate circumstances.

“Marni's got a boyfriend now, so…”

I'd told him this before. He liked to forget that most people in love spent Friday nights together.

“How's your mom?” I said, the obligatory question asked during every call.

“Oh, you know—same ol', same ol'.”

I nodded and pictured him doing the same, both of us wondering how to fill the empty spaces of these talks. Each call started to feel more and more like the calls with my mom, driven only by a sense of duty. The thing is, absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder; absence makes the heart grow weary.

“I have a lead on a job,” I said.

“Well, that was fast.”

“We'll see if it pans out,” I said. “Do you remember Gabe from college? Gabe Walters?”

If I made it seem like it was nothing, then maybe it was nothing. That's what I told myself.

“Sounds familiar,” he said.

It comforted me that he didn't remember. If he would have said,
You mean the guy who asked you out?
, I would have felt his apprehension-verging-on-jealousy and my own guilt.

“This recruiter I met mentioned this big company. Berringer. He happens to work there. VP of something. Small world.”

“See? Everything happens for a reason,” he said.

“You think so?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Never mind,” I said.

“Okay, I gotta make Ma dinner. See you tomorrow?”

“Yep.”

And then we hung up.

I didn't—and still don't—think there's a reason for everything that happens. Humans are just desperate to make one up.

*   *   *

I got to the restaurant—Mangiapane's in the Village—purposefully early, so I could have a drink at the bar to calm myself before seeing Gabe. The place was small, with worn wood floors and black-and-white pictures of someone's family—the Mangiapanes, by anyone's best guess—on the wall. None of the furniture matched. No more than two chairs at any one table even matched. It was like they had acquired the leftover loners from numerous yard sales. Every strange table was occupied. Groups lingered outside, smoking and waiting hopefully for a seat. The bar was cozy—just a few stools, manned by an old man with one of those long mustaches with curly ends that require a special kind of wax. His stools were all occupied, but he saw me scanning the area and said, in a booming voice reserved for radio announcers, “
Amore mio
, can I get you a drink?”

I was leaning against the front wall, sipping the last drops of a vodka tonic through my tiny cocktail straw, when Gabe walked in. He didn't see me at first. He walked past me to the hostess stand. He looked both the same as I remembered and entirely different. In college, he was not a man; now he was a man. Somewhere along the way, he'd learned how to style his hair—perfectly shellacked. If I didn't know better, I would have thought he was a model, coming from a photo shoot for
Esquire
magazine. His suit was obviously tailored, every seam in the right place. If I worked for his company, it would probably take two or three paychecks to pay for shoes like his. They looked to be authentic alligator skin. Marni had taught me to notice such things.