(Mention of an eating disorder)
In a dream a woman had an eating disorder. It had been under control for several years, but it came back the way sickness has a way of doing. For a long time she as able to hide it from her husband and mother, but secretly she was making ropes out of hair she pulled from her scalp and food she chewed but spit out. These hair ropes she hung individually, and with care, from nails in a secret room behind the living room wall, small totems to her daily meals. The afternoon her secret was discovered her husband filled with rage tried to kill her while her mother sat looking on in silence. I stood between the man and woman waiting for him to strike, not knowing if I could stop the violence.
Her hair never grew back. Isn't that the consolation prize for surviving cancer or at least the radiation and chemo therapy? You stand on the brink, look death in the face, but you get your hair back, right? But who would have known the consequences? Time was ticking she was in stage four of lymphoma. The doctor had misdiagnosed and misdiagnosed and she could now die if all the stops were not pulled out. It was all hands on deck. No one was thinking about the future as they cut off her long blonde hair and filled her with chemicals. It was later she learned that what “they” say is not always true, and she began to shoulder the burden of regret, of not thinking ahead, as if, at age ten, she would have had the insight.
All she had left was a few wispy patches of hair as fine and thin as a babies. So she wore poorly designed wigs. Wigs that had pink hues and strange colors with no name that shimmered under the harsh florescent lights of school. Wigs in styles reminiscent of grandmothers who came of age in the 1950s. But she was too young too sheltered to know the plethora of wig options out there, the freedom of colors and styles, or the beauty and power of a bald head.
We lived in a world of zero options. Girls had long hair. Girls wore dresses and kept their legs in lady like positions. Girls wore the same layers of undergarments, cross ties, jumpers, vests and skirts. The same oxford shirt buttoned all the way up the neck, the same tights and knee socks, the same black or blue dress shoes. There was no room for the physical transformation of sickness the differences that cancer brings. Those outer manifestations of physical demise and vulnerability.
In middle school she had aspirations of becoming an astronaut. One night during a sleepover a friend confided in me, “I know it is not kind, but all I can see is her wig floating into space.” The humor of children in the confusion of loss. Humor mixed with sympathy. Laughing softly in the darkness we envisioned her wig floating up and out into that great black void.
A few days ago while washing the dishes she appeared to me. A long blond hair had wrapped itself around the dish sponge and suddenly there she was in her school uniform wearing her favorite head covering a little cloth drawstring cap with a paisley and floral print in black, pink, and aqua. She stood in the kitchen doorway and watched as I soaped each dish and then rinse it, placing each one on the rack to dry.