The Wig

Before my hair fell out friends assured me that it would grow back better than ever. Softer! Fuller! Prettier! Chemotherapy as long-term beauty opportunity? Spare me. I had great hair, auburn, lots of it. My mother’s almost seventy, but she doesn’t look it, mostly because of her hair, which is still wavy and thick and only a little gray. We took pride in our hair. So last year when the oncology resident listed hair loss among the side effects of the chemo, my first thought was: would my mother be able to bear the baldness? Her own mother died of breast cancer back when no one said the name of the disease out loud and children were sent away so that they didn’t have to see the suffering. More than sixty years later my mother flew down to Washington for every treatment.

On one of her visits, she took me to Amy’s House of Denmark. This was before the great fallout began. Danish Amy sells wigs and hats and bangs on bands that go under hats. In her shop we found other mothers and daughters in search of the comfort of disguise. Amy herself, great-looking and blond, somewhere between my mother’s age and mine, was always in motion, dressed to move in bright red overalls, high-top sneakers. She asked what drugs I’d be on and how many cycles and found me a wig, first try, so like my hair that everyone in the shop paused to gasp and pay tribute. Amy said, “You will lose your hair between fourteen and nineteen days after the first treatment.”

Amy knew.

The thinning was gradual at first. I made an appointment with my sanest friend’s therapist, who likened the hair loss to death by a thousand cuts. The thinning sped up. By the end of one horrible week I had more scalp than hair. All through Thanksgiving dinner I wore a hat over my remaining wisps. Then I was bald. When I had to leave the house I wore a hat over the wig, taking no chances. At home I wore just a soft cap—the perfect wig itched. One night my son Jeremy, then nine, asked me to take the cap off. Then he told me to put it back on. “Don’t show me again, Mom.”

My own mother took me back to the wig shop to get the wig washed. When I handed it over to Amy, my mother looked at bald me without flinching.

Amy suggested washing my head with shampoo to help with the itching. It worked. I stopped wearing hats over the wig. Without the hats I started getting compliments on my “great new haircut.” Huh? I reported the comments to Amy.

Amy said, “Just say thanks.”

The compliments kept coming: “You look terrific!” “I hardly recognized you!” Well, after all, my eyebrows had thinned attractively. No unwanted shadow over my upper lip. My legs were smooth without shaving or waxing. And for months I lacked enough white cells to come up with a single respectable zit.

One night Jeremy called me in to read to him before bed and I said, “Wait a minute, I have to put on a hat.”

And he said, “You don’t have to. It doesn’t freak me out anymore, Mom.”

Gee, thanks.

Susan Land teaches at the Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland. She has an M.A. from The Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. “The Wig” aired on NPR's All Things Considered in 1998. Susan's fiction has appeared in many journals. She recently received a Pushcart nomination from So To Speak for a short story that is part of a collection called Reported Side Effects. Another story from the collection appears in Enhanced Gravity: More Fiction by Washington Area Women (Gargoyle Press, 2006).