The Moth (38 page)

My marriage died, but I lived on. My daughter’s thirteen years old now and healthy. I have an eight-year-old son, and he’s healthy as an ox. I hope both of my kids grow up to be wonderful people—the type of people who bring so much joy to everyone around them that their absence would be a tragedy, because that’s the type of person that Henry was.

He died twenty-four years ago, and it’s still fresh. But I’m no longer miserable. In fact, I am well on my way to becoming one of the happiest people I know, and I think that fact would’ve made him happy. He also doesn’t visit me in my dreams
anymore, and I can finally admit that I’m comfortable with never seeing his face ever again, in my dreams or otherwise. Because at the end of the day, what will an old man like me have to say to his fourteen-year-old friend that hasn’t been said already?

Kemp Powers
is a writer, editor, author, and occasional bird-watcher. He was a very angry and cynical young man who inexplicably grew into a happy and optimistic adult. His Bosc pear obsession has remained consistent throughout. A journalist for almost twenty years, he has told the stories of countless others in the pages of magazines and newspapers ranging from
Esquire
to
Forbes
. Now he also tells tales much closer to home, both as a storyteller and a playwright at Los Angeles’s award-winning Rogue Machine Theatre company. His new play,
One Night in Miami…
, has its world premiere in 2013.

JENNY ALLEN

A
few years ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. And about five minutes later, I had to start chemotherapy. When you have the kind of chemotherapy I had, you lose your hair. This seemed like such a small price to pay, you know? My hair or my life? My hair or my life? I don’t know, I think I’ll pick
my life
.

I was kind of hoping that after my hair fell out and grew back, I’d get
better hair
. I have this unruly hair, and it has a mind of its own. No matter how expensive my haircut, a lot of the time it looks like I’ve had it cut by a mental patient.

But no matter how I felt about losing my hair, just the prospect of not having any forced me to reconsider my whole sense of my personal style and, in a way, my whole sense of myself. What kind of cancer person was I going to be? How would I wear my disease? Would I try to hide it, or would I announce it to the whole world?

In other words, was I going to be a
scarf
person or a
wig
person?

Because it seemed to me that if I showed up places suddenly
wearing a scarf all the time, people would know it was because I’d gone bald, and they would probably guess why. But if I showed up wearing a wig, even the people who could tell it was a wig would probably assume that I was wearing it because I didn’t want to talk that much about why.

If I wore a wig, I’d be saying to everybody, “Please, just let me blend in.”

So I had this dilemma—scarf or a wig, blend in or not blend in? I thought about it, and I decided that my truer self would wear a scarf, because I have a lot of self-righteous integrity. And I thought a wig would be dishonest, and I wasn’t ashamed of my disease.

One night I ran into my friend Ruth. Now, I had met Ruth originally because she was my dentist, and she was a wonderful dentist, very kind and generous and understanding about those of us who showed up needing a root canal because we had failed to floss in our twenties.

She used to say, “Oh, Jenny, in terms of evolution, our teeth are only supposed to last us about forty-five years, so you’re doing great!”

And she’d become my friend, and our kids had become friends, and they even went to the same school because she had recommended it. And by some horrible coincidence, she and I both had the same kind of cancer, only she was much farther down the chemo path than I was and had already lost her hair.

I’d seen her a few weeks earlier just wearing a scarf, and so I was very surprised when I ran into her at a school play, and there she was with her old hair back, this big corona of dark curls.

And I said to her, “Ruth, I love your hair!”

And she said, “It’s a wig! I never thought I’d wear a wig, but
it’s kind of nice when you go out. It’s kind of creepy, but it’s dressy.”

And I looked at her head, and actually, I could tell that it was a wig if I looked really closely, but I thought:
It looks very nice.
And then I thought:
Well, if Ruth can feel good in a wig, then maybe I could too.
It seemed unlikely, but possible. I thought:
Maybe I should just
consider
wearing a wig.

Then Ruth said to me, “You know, Jenny, you should get one. Medical insurance pays for the whole thing.”

And this seemed so bizarre as to be almost unbelievable, and really reason enough to get a wig. I love free things, particularly when my insurance company pays for them. And I found out that wigs cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars, so this seemed like the ultimate freebie. It was like great swag, even if it was
cancer
swag.

So I thought:
Well, maybe I’ll go to the store and get a wig.
So I did.

I went to a wig store right near Columbus Avenue called Bits & Pieces.

My wig fitter was French, and he said, “What do you want?”

And I said, “I want a wig.”

“What kind of hair?”

“I don’t know. How many kinds do you have?”

And he explained to me that they had synthetic wigs, they had wigs made from the hair of Indian women, and they had wigs made from the hair of Caucasian European women. Now, the synthetic wigs were the cheapest, and the Indian hair wigs were in the middle range—they were $800 to $900. But the wigs made from the hair of Caucasian European women were $4,000 to $5,000.

Now, I thought:
You know, even if my insurance company paid for this, it’s just obscene to spend this kind of money on a wig. And why is the hair of Caucasian European women
four times
as expensive as the hair of Indian women?
It was so racist! So I decided to go with the Indian women’s hair, even though I felt very uncomfortable knowing they had probably been paid about 22 cents to have it shorn from their heads.

So I took my wig home. The wig fitter put it in a big paper bag, and inside the paper bag was a Styrofoam head with the wig on it. When I got home, I took it out of the bag and put it in the corner of my bedroom to wait until I might consider wearing it.

And it was very unsettling to look at it over there. Sometimes I felt like my wig head, which was so well groomed, was condescending to me.

So a couple of weeks went by, and my hair did fall out. Now, it didn’t just fall out all at once. It sort of gradually gave up the ghost. First in these strands in my brush, and then in clumps in my shower drain that made me think that there was a dead mouse down there. And every time I looked in the mirror, my baldness told me how sick I was, in spite of all this optimism and cheerfulness that I was summoning.

And I wasn’t completely bald. I had these sort of sad wisps of hair here and there that somehow just made it worse.

My head seemed to be saying to me, “Hello, Sickie. Hello, sick person with cancer.”

Every time I went out in my scarves, my head felt very exposed, very uncomfortable. And people would ask me questions about how I was doing and how my chemo was going.

And I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it when they looked at me as if they were about to cry.

And then one day I realize that my eyebrows have fallen out. And for some reason, this is completely unexpected by me, and makes me feel surprisingly sorry for myself. Having no eyebrows makes me feel very naked, very vulnerable, very exposed.

My hair was part of my head, but my eyebrows were part of my
face
.

I look like a big baby. And every time I look in the mirror, and I see the baby, I feel so bad for her that I wanna cry. And I decide I need more of a buffer between me and the rest of the world. I’m tired of people asking me about my disease. I’m tired of them looking at me like they’re about to cry.

I’m ready for my wig.

So it turns out that my friend Martha’s daughter Anna is about to graduate from the University of Chicago, and I decide that this might be the perfect occasion to wear my wig.

And so I go to Chicago, and I bring my wig. And the morning of the ceremony, I get up, and I put my wig on my head. First I comb it and brush it, and then I fit it carefully to my head. And I start walking toward the graduation, along with the throngs of other parents and grandparents and friends.

And as soon as I start walking, I know that I should’ve been practicing wearing my wig all these weeks, first in my bedroom maybe and then around my neighborhood. Because every time I look in a store window I recognize myself, but I look like I’m in disguise. I feel like I’ve done something really bad, like robbed a bank, and now I’m trying to lose myself in the crowd by going incognito in my wig.

And I’m very self-conscious about the wig itself. I keep tugging at it and fussing with it and imagining that there are strands of hair coming out, even though there aren’t. This wig
is a stranger to me, and I’m uncomfortable having it in my personal space.

Now, someone at the graduation is selling sun hats. This is a very smart person. They’ve realized that some of us women here haven’t put it together that we’re going to be spending about four hours in the scorching Chicago sun, and we might not want to get sunburned.

So I buy one of the hats, in part so I won’t get sunburned, but really because I think the hat is going to cover up my wig and make me feel much less self-conscious. I put the hat on over my wig, and I take my place in a folding chair among this ocean of folding chairs, and the ceremony starts.

And it goes on and on. And by the second hour or so, my head is just broiling under my wig and my hat. These little rivulets of sweat are coming down from underneath my wig, onto my neck, and that makes the wig really itch. And the wig itself is so hot and heavy, it feels like I’m wearing my cat on my head. I feel like my head is suffocating in there. It is just so, so very, very hot.

And I think:
God almighty, if I could just take off my hat, maybe my wig could just breathe a little
. So I whip off my hat.

And in one of those nearly free-fall, slow-motion moments, one of those moments that is at the same time like a dream and like the realest thing that has ever happened to you, my wig comes off with my hat. And it is so embarrassing that I can’t even be embarrassed, because embarrassment can’t even cover it.

I mean, I’ve lost everything—my hat, my wig, my hair. And yet I feel strangely free. And I start to laugh because it’s so funny that I’ve gone to all this trouble only to end up like this. I feel like I’m in a great
Lucy
episode. But I take my
wig and my hat, and I put them back on my head, really for decorum’s sake, you know?

I feel so bad for the people behind me. I can’t even look at them. And I sit through the rest of the ceremony, and then I go back to New York, and I take my wig, and I put it in a plastic bag, and then I put it way in the back of one of my dresser drawers so I won’t ever have to look at it. And I go back to wearing my scarves and bandanas until my hair grows back in—which it does, by the way. It’s just the same old hair, but for the first time, I’m kind of glad to see it.

And Ruth’s hair grows back too. And for two years, we have just a lot of fun doing the normal things we like to do, like worrying endlessly about our children and eating the delicious food that she cooks at her house, and telling our cancer stories.

She really likes my wig story. And I love it when she does this version of something that happens to you a lot when you have cancer. People come up to you and tell you an inspiring story of their aunt or their grandmother who had terrible cancer, and then it went into remission, and she went out and got her Ph.D., or she took up parasailing, and she had a whole new life.

At the end of these stories, you always ask the people, “How is she doing?”

And they always say, “Oh… she died.”

And I say to Ruth, “Do it again, Ruth! Tell the inspiring people story again!” We crack each other up with our stories.

And then Ruth’s cancer comes back. And after a long time, she dies. And I miss her so much. And in the light of this loss and other losses—one of my editors dies, women I meet in various doctors’ waiting rooms die—getting rid of my wig seems so cocky. You know, who am I to say that I’m done with my
disease? Who am I to say that there’s never going to be an occasion where I might consider wearing that wig again?

And then I read one of those very bossy magazine articles about how to de-clutter your closets, and how you must ask yourself realistically if you are ever gonna wear that bridesmaid dress again or that pair of culottes, and if you answer no you have to throw them away.

And I think to myself,
realistically
? Realistically, I might need chemo drugs again, and I might lose my hair again, but I would never, ever wear that stupid wig again.

Better to go back to the scarves. Better to let people ask me questions. Better to let people look at me like 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.

Jenny Allen
’s essays and articles have appeared in
The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York, Vogue, Esquire, More, The Huffington Post, and Good House keeping
, and in anthologies including
Disquiet, Please!, In the Fullness of Time, and The 50 Funniest American Writers
. She is the author of
The Long Chalkboard
, a collection of fables for grown-ups. Ms. Allen has appeared off-Broadway in Nora and Delia Ephron’s
Love, Loss and What I Wore;
in productions of
Jules’ Blues;
and in readings of
Spalding Grey: Stories Left to Tell
. Her one-woman show,
I Got Sick Then I Got Better
, directed by James Lapine and Darren Katz, was extended three times at New York Theatre Workshop and is now seen in venues around the country. A similar version of “Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow” appeared in the October 2012 issue of
MORE
. See www.jennyallenwrites.com.