The Department of Lost & Found (16 page)

And although wig shopping was not exactly the
wedding-dress-must-have-Mom-there
experience, I wanted my mother there all the same. Because now that I had adjusted to the cycle of chemo—

exhausted, then somewhat delirious, then a-okay—I wanted to go back to work. True, I was mortified, almost wary to the point of paralysis, to show my face at the office, but it was a risk I had to take. As Janice predicted, my journal did indeed point my thoughts elsewhere, but it wasn’t enough. I could watch only so much day-time television and hunt down old boyfriends without turning into my own personal soap opera. So I put my pride on hold and called the senator.

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“Are you sure that you’re ready?” she asked, politely overstep-ping the elephant in the room; namely, my performance at the Christmas party.

My impulse was to jump in with an overly confident yes, but I held it back for a second, because the truth of the matter was that I had no idea if I were ready or not. So instead, I answered, “The thing is, Senator, I know that I can make a difference. And I’d really like to this term. Remember how inspired we were when you first won your seat?” She murmured that she did. “Well, that’s how I feel now. Inspired. Like I’ve been given a new shot. And I’d like to make something of that.”

And it was true. The more information I garnered about stem cell research, the more I felt the fire rise up inside of me. At first, after the senator asked me to start digging on the subject, I’d logged on to the Internet whenever I had a free moment from my time spent watching game shows on the couch or Googling my exes. But as I dove further and further into the research, and uncovered the potential miracles that it held, it snowballed on me: I began to tear into the task like Cujo does to his next victim. Namely, rabidly.

And my ferocity arose because I had a genuine interest in advanc-ing a bill that would allow for public funding of stem cell research.

Not just a genuine interest, but a personal one. I knew that if my cancer chose to launch a new attack on me or if the doctors hadn’t found it in time or Ned hadn’t rubbed up against my breast that morning, the insidious disease might have made its way into my bones, and that one day, whether in the near or distant future, stem cells might save my life. Or the life of someone just like me.

“Fair enough, Natalie. We’ll see you when Congress resumes session in a few weeks,” Dupris said, and I heard Blair enter her office in the background. The senator paused. “Are you feeling better? No more ‘incidents’ like at the party?”

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And there it was. My cheeks burned as if on fire. “No. No.

Definitely not.” I paced up and down my living room. “That was, uh, a weird response to my medication. It won’t happen again.”

“Very good. I’ll see you then. Looking forward to having you back on the team.” Before I could say good-bye, she’d clicked off.

Now, I know that it would be wonderful and heartwarming and
terribly brave
of me to tackle the Senate or even just the subway with my cue-balled head. And I know you’d be reading this and thinking, Hurrah! Go her! She’s triumphant: staring down cancer and defying it to rob her of her pride. She’s a Lifetime television movie and a feminist icon all rolled into one. And I know that I might have mentioned that getting a wig was maybe not my thing, that I took it as a sign of weakness, that I saw it as a crutch.

But the truth of the matter was that over these months, cancer had robbed me of enough. It stole my health, along with my confidence, my sense of self, and my understanding of how life evolved.

And yes, it also stole my pride. So I figured that if donning someone else’s hair that had been fashioned into something that I could pass off as my own somehow gave me just a small sliver of my dignity back, so help me, I was reaching for it. And besides, really, look around. How many bald women do you really, truly see on the streets of New York City? Don’t get me wrong: I have total respect for them. They are, indeed,
terribly brave
. But I figured that brave was all subjective. The mere fact that I was still alive in light of what I was facing made me brave enough to live with myself. And that’s all that mattered to me.

So I ignored that tiny voice in my head that still softly reminded me that
“There’s no ‘we’ in Natalie,”
and I called my mother and asked her to join me for my appointment to one Mrs. Adina Seidel, wigmaker to the stars (or New York’s upper-crust Orthodox set, at the very least).

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“This is just the pick-me-up you need,” Mom said, reaching for my hand as the subway rattled and clanked and hurled us to the outer stretches of Brooklyn to pay a visit to the infamous Mrs. Seidel. I was too self-conscious of our hand-holding to answer her back. Never in my thirty years had my mother ever reached for my hand. Not when Jake left me, not when I got wait-listed at Harvard, not even when she sat with me through my first round of chemo.

The train lurched to a stop, and I wearily climbed the two flights of stairs, leaning on my mother’s arm with each step.

Though it was December, the sun shone brightly, so I squinted my eyes and peered around. Brooklyn. Tiny storefronts cluttered every last open space on the street. Electronics. Shoe stores. Family-run grocers. The din of voices rose above the honking of taxis, and I noticed an overweight man with a bloodied apron tied around his waist shouting and raising his arms at another man just to my right. The sidewalks milled like ant farms with bearded men in long, dark coats and high hats who took pains to walk around my mother and me, casting their eyes downward, touching their tzitzit as they passed. Sometimes, they strolled with gaggles of children, one on each hand, along with a woman, I’d assume the wife, who would try in vain to discipline them. My mother and I pushed off from our perch on the subway, wordlessly taking it all in. It felt like a foreign country, this little outpost of Manhattan, as if their little community was protected from the thriving metropolis that pulsed to their north. Here was what mattered. Here, they had everything they needed.

You wouldn’t notice the wig shop unless you were looking for it.

In fact, we
were
looking and walked right by two times. Crammed between a kosher bakery and a tailor was a window full of bodiless mannequins topped off with more hairstyles than an ’80s band. A bell rang as we opened the door, and an enormously bosomed, 146

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apron-clad woman with graying hair that was pulled back into a tightly wound bun emerged from behind a sea of manes.

“Ah, you must be Ms. Miller.” Both my mother and I nodded our heads. “Oh my darling,” she said in a heavy Yiddish accent and beckoned us with her arms. “Come, come. Let’s give you back a head of hair today.”

She pulled me over to a swivel chair in front of a mirror and clapped her hands.

“So! Let us begin. What are you looking for? Something to match your old hair?”

I thought of my chestnut locks, strands that I’d always wished would be more interesting, straighter, shinier. Now, I just wished that I had them back.

“I’m really not sure what I want,” I demurred.

“Okay, well, let’s take a look at your face.” She stood behind me and ran her fingers over my skin and cupped my cheeks in her hands. “So beautiful, you are. Cancer has not changed that. High cheekbones, wide eyes. Perfect.” She looked over to my mother and smiled. “You did a nice job, you know.” She clapped her hands again. “Okay! We will start with a few options, and you can narrow as you go.”

She ran into the back, behind a curtain, to grab some choices that conceivably could redefine me. While she was gone, I looked around the shop. It was immaculate. Literally, not a hair out of place. On the counter, near the front, was a desk calendar in He-brew that sat next to a beige phone that you might have seen in 1987.

And beside the phone was a box for
tzedakah
: where patrons could donate money for the less well-off. I glanced out the window and watched passersby scurry past on the sidewalk, all of the women in matching bobbed wigs, long skirts to cover their skin. I wondered if their faith in God would be enough for them to get through an
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ordeal like mine. If they would read the Torah and sing at syna-gogue and trust in Him enough to pull them through. Or if He didn’t pull them through, if they would accept their fates as acts of His will, quietly resigned to the fact that God dictated this path, even if it was not one they would have chosen for themselves.

Mrs. Seidel emerged from the back with a flourish. “My darling, here are your first few choices. We will narrow from here until we find just the right match.”

The first one I tried was too ordinary: It looked just like the molded hair I’d seen on the sidewalk minutes before. The next was too red: My pale skin looked even more wan next to it, and for a second, I was reminded not just of the fact that I was buying a wig, but the reasons for it in the first place. I waved off the third before even trying it on; a brunette version of Little Orphan Annie, I was not. With a quick turn of her heels, Mrs. Seidel was off again to the back, returning with more bounty.

We got it right on the seventh try. In my past life, I was an ordinary brunette, my quick flirtation with fiery red aside. My hair fell squarely on my shoulders, and Paul dutifully trimmed the ends every six weeks so it neither wandered too long nor grew too unwieldy. It was, in essence, the perfect haircut for politics: It was there because it had to be, neither offending nor impressing, flying under the radar, and getting the job done. So when Mrs.

Seidel adjusted the seventh wig, muttering in Yiddish under her breath as she pinned it on and brushed it out, even I was surprised to discover that I had to have it. The rich chocolate, nearly black, locks cascaded down my back, landing just below the bra strap that crossed under my shoulder blades. When I turned my head side to side, the layers flowed effortlessly over one another, the light from the ceiling bouncing off them as if in an Herbal Essences commercial.

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“This is it,” I said. “This is the one.”

“Natalie,” my mom said. “It’s so different from before. So . . . I don’t know. Showy.” She paused, and I searched her voice for criticism, but found none. “Not that anything’s wrong with that.

But are you sure? For your line of work?”

Mrs. Seidel fluffed out the hair in her hands, and I swear, it felt as if she were combing out my own. I stared through the mirror and wondered if, in just a moment, you could reinvent yourself.

a s w e w e r e leaving, after she’d shown me how to maintain the wig and after she’d run my mother’s credit card through, Mrs. Seidel grasped my hand.

“You are Jewish, no?” she asked.

“Yes, well, partly.” I gestured to my mom. “She is, so I am, too.”

“I thought so. This is good.” She paused, holding her finger to her chin. “I look at you, and you are so beautiful. Too young for this disease, it is true, but still beautiful. But you do not seem to have much faith.”

I wanted to run. It was like my bat mitzvah lessons all over again. My tutor, Ms. Goodstein, called my parents in for a meeting six weeks before I was due on the bimah.

“She is a good learner,” she explained to my parents, while I hung my head and folded my hands in front of me. “She has memorized her parts, she can sing clearly and even beautifully.” She stopped. “But she has no passion. She doesn’t seem to even want to learn. She has no connection to what she is supposed to be telling the congregation.”

My parents looked at me, and I shrugged. I’d only agreed to go along with the bat mitzvah thing because it hadn’t been phrased to
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me as a question. When I was twelve, my mother announced that I’d start my lessons in a few months, and before I had a chance to explain that I wasn’t sure about my faith, her office called, and she stepped out of my bedroom as quickly as she stepped into it.

“Is this true?” my mom asked, as she unconsciously cracked the knuckles on her fingers. “Are your lessons boring you? Would you rather not be a Jew?”

I shook my head and pressed back the rising tears. What could I say? That I memorized my Torah portion because I was told to?

That I learned the melodies of the haftarah as if they were an alge-bra lesson? That God was as unclear to me as my new and muddled feelings for boys, and that even though I knew I should revere Him, all I really did was question? No. Instead, I murmured that I would try harder, and six weeks later, I was showered in presents after delivering the most passionless haftarah portion my syna-gogue had ever sat through.

I stared at my wig, held captive on the other side of the Formica counter, and realized with a wave of nausea that Mrs. Seidel was Ms. Goodstein déjà vu.

“It’s hard to have faith right now . . . with all this,” I answered, and waved my hands in front of my body. And then, as they always do when I think about my destiny, my eyes filled with tears.

“But that is when you need to have faith the most, my dear.”

Mrs. Seidel placed her hands on my shoulders and looked into my welling eyes. “That is when our forefathers believed more than anything: when they were oppressed and when life seemed too terrible to even fathom and when there was no light for them to cling to. That is when they most believed.”

“Maybe they were better people than I am.”

“No,” she said, dropping her arms. “Maybe it’s just because they didn’t think that there was any other way.”

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I shrugged. “I’m not sure if God can be my way. I’ve tried to believe in Him several times in the past few months, and it seems each time I do, more crap flares up, and I get angry all over again.”

I paused, not wanting to offend her. “I’m just being honest.”