Ball

by Tara Ison

  Your break’s almost over, babe, he says. You go out first.

  She leaves the chiller, and the hot blast of the baking room turns all the wet and damp to stale sweat. She doesn’t want to go out front, not yet. She leaves through the back exit, into the parking lot, and there are no cousins or girls around. The bus stop is across the street; she can feel her house key in her jeans pocket. She feels a buttercream smear start to crust on her cheek. She can feel getting on the bus and going home by herself, letting herself into the empty house and taking a hot shower and going to bed, curling up in her ballet-pink sheets, although it’s only seven-thirty, too early for bedtime. A shaft of sunset hits Jamie’s car, turning the shiny black a sudden hot white, and she floats her hand along the brilliant passenger door. Her reflection is a blur of a girl. She takes the key from her pocket and heads back inside to the bakery, running the key hard along the edge of the car as she goes.

  WIG

  The long black hairs on the white tile look like a child’s wild scribbles, each strand a separate graphite scrawl. I think that I should sweep them up. Save them for something. Didn’t women used to do that, save their hair combings? To make padded wiglets of their own hair, robust false curls? In high school we’d used those long black strands of her hair for dental floss after lunch. It was that strong. That healthy, that thick. She always had the prettier hair. A thick, glossy black, while I had to blow-dry and torture and gel for an angelic or Botticelli effect. I would’ve killed for her hair. I sat behind her in Algebra and made long, tiny braids of it, like those bracelets of black elephant hair, like shiny jute. At the beach she’d coat her dark hair and skin with sunscreen, her melanin-rich, impervious skin, while pale blonde me slicked on the baby oil to get a glow going, heedless of burn or the later shredding I’d do. We took tennis lessons together, and I was the better player—I had to win no matter what, heaving, jolting off oily sweat with each lunge—but she enjoyed it more, was beautiful with it, queenlier, fat black ponytail swinging, moving serene as Greek or Egyptian royalty in the sun.

  It should have been me.

  “You don’t have to do all that,” I hear her call after the toilet’s second flush.

  I should get her a glass of juice, maybe crackers, sometimes that helps. I’m desperate to do something for her.

  “Shut up, please,” I yell back.

  “I don’t want you doing all that.”

  “Remember my sixteenth birthday?” I yell. Me falling down in the cantina bathroom, her shoving fingers down my throat so I could vomit up the cheap, fruity tequila, her lifting my limp bangs from the bowl, her giving me cupped palmfuls of water, her wiping flecks from my mouth. I owe her. I rinse the basin again, wipe it with a fistful of tissue.

  “Hey, it’s what friends are for,” she calls. Weak.

  “Exactly. I just wish your aim were better.”

  I hear her try to laugh, and I marvel, again, at how she’s bearing this. But the energy’s got to give out soon.

  The air in here is still rank, despite my double flushing and basin rinsing and healthy blast of pine. Despite the bathroom’s cheery mess of little boys’ bath toys, the husband’s rosy I love you card masking-taped to the medicine cabinet. I examine my own healthy, guilty glow in the mirror. Twenty years’ exposure, and my price is just a minor epidermal leatheriness. My own hair is still a natural blonde, even at thirty-six. Just helped out a little. A few chemicals, and voilà, I’m still blonde as sixteen.

  I evaluate my eyebrows; the one very dark brown hair beneath the right brow arch, the one that always grows in fast, is poking its way back. Her wild eyebrows will probably start slipping away now, too, bristly hair by hair by hair. I find tweezers in the cabinet, pluck, and toss my tiny whisker in the sodden-tissue trash. I get down on my knees and pick up her thick, long black hairs, hair by hair by hair, and bury them deep in the sodden-tissue trash so she doesn’t have to see. She shouldn’t have to face that, yet.

  I look at my own fair face one last time in the mirror, next to the I love you. It really should have been me.

  WE GO SHOPPING for a wig. It’s time, she’d said. I don’t like scarves, I’m tired of scarves. They’re too resigned. Come help me buy a wig.

  I’m a little surprised by this; a wig seems, well, dishonest, and she’s the most honest, artless person I know. No makeup or plucking. Those heavy black eyebrows, too thick and undefined. Not a woman to wax or bleach or shave anything, to moisturize or scent. Her husband impressed me on this. I’d watch him run an affectionate hand across her hirsute shin, playfully tweak her armpit’s floss, lovingly tease her for the faint mustache dusk on her upper lip. She wound up winning a prince of a guy, sensitive, devoted, stroking, the kind who sticks it out. Maybe it’s ironic, now that she’s getting barer every day, the follicles giving up. Now that she’s getting fairer, wispier, her skin going bruisable and fine. Soon she’ll need to pencil in some brows if she wants them at all, but I imagine she won’t even bother. I would’ve expected those straightforward scarves from her, maybe some baseball caps, honest and resigned. But she wants a wig, and of course I want her to have whatever she wants, whatever makes her feel better, and I want to be with her through all of it, it’s what friends do, so we wait for a day her energy’s up, and her husband is crazy busy at work and her boys are at school, and we go.

  But we can’t find the right one. We go from shop to shop to shop, from Hollywood to Pico Robertson to Encino, smiling at balding old ladies and transgendering people and other translucent-looking women in scarves. She’s flagging but determined, and we learn a great deal about wigs. She immediately rejects synthetic hair for its artifice—I say nothing to what seems like a mild hypocrisy—and for its lesser durability, although an impassioned, eager-to-instruct Salesguy in an upscale West Hollywood boutique assures us a good-quality synthetic can last two years with the right care. This moot, insensitive question of durability hangs in the air a moment, and I say nothing to that, either, but agree she should go for human. We learn there are four basic kinds of human hair—Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, and Caucasian—and we learn that Indian and Chinese hair, because of its strong nature and thick diameter, is able to undergo harsh chemical processes to make it smooth, shiny, and tangle-free Processed Hair, but that the most glorious hair, the only kind, really, we should be looking at is Virgin European. We learn that wig companies send employees out to remote villages or monasteries or convents in Russia and Italy to contract for hair; the hair-growing people must agree to always keep their hair protected and safe from pollution and sun damage, to never blow-dry or style. The wig people then return years later to harvest the crop with razors or close cutting at the scalp. This all makes me slightly queasy—it sounds too much like people stripped naked and yielding, handing something precious over to someone else with questionable or inhumane intent.

  She finally finds one she likes, a bright auburn, Pre-Raphaelite mass, kidney-length and decadent, with a hand-tied, monofilament top. I’m stunned by her choice. She takes off her scarf to try it on, and the exposure of the holdout black hairs on her tender white scalp makes me look away in pain. The Salesguy is talking passionately about ear tabs and cap size and maybe the need, soon, for special Comfy Grips to hold the wig in place against a smooth dome of bare skin, You know some guys, he tells her, when it’s time for a piece, they actually have snaps surgically implanted in their scalps to hold it in place, can you imagine? and I finally look. She’s smiling, but I don’t think it suits her at all, it’s too outrageous and it doesn’t work with her olive-going-yellow skin. But she’s excited by it, turning to see all angles of her head, flipping the tendriled ends behind her, and there’s no point in being honest at a time like this—let a little denial grow, I think. The bravery’ll have to crack, at some point. I tell her she looks beautiful. Go ahead, I say, you look like a Russian empress, a queen, and, when the Salesguy nods agreeably at that and she hesitates, looking all at once timid and drained, I say,

  “Do
it. Be unabashed, be bold.”

  She smiles at that, then:

  “I’m worried. . . .” she says.

  “Don’t be,” the Salesguy says. “With that face, that bone structure, you can pull anything off.”

  “What are you worried about?” I ask quietly, and the Salesguy, sensing a new level of intimacy, squeezes my arm, nods, and discreetly moves away.

  “You want some Compazine?” I offer.

  “No, I’m okay, thanks.”

  “So, what?”

  “It’s been awhile,” she begins.

  “Since?”

  “You know. Since.” She pulls panels of long red hair down in front to cover her breasts, Godiva-like. I’ve noticed her breasts have been going limp. Everything about her is losing tone.

  “Since,” she repeats.

  “Oh.” I look away to examine a bottle of wig shampoo. “Maybe that’s just normal slackening off,” I suggest. “Two kids, married eight years. It’s nothing, it’s totally normal.”

  “I’m not talking slackening. I’m talking a real while. Like being cut off.”

  “Maybe he’s worried about hurting you,” I suggest.

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe he feels guilty,” I say.

  “Guilty for what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” I don’t know what to say. “For not being able to fix things.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe he’s got stuff going on, too,” I say. “He’s going through this, too. He needs taking care of, too.”

  “You’re right. You know, why don’t you come over some night? We can just hang out, watch a movie or something. The three of us, like we used to. Before all this shit.”

  “Sure.”

  “And he’s been working such crazy hours. I’m almost feeling like he doesn’t want to be around me. Maybe he’s grossed out.”

  “You’re being ridiculous. He adores you.”

  She tugs the wig further back on her forehead. “Does this look natural? Or just whory? Tell me the truth.”

  “He loves you, you know. He couldn’t care less.”

  “But do you think he’ll like this? Come on.”

  “It’s great. He’ll love it. He loves everything about you.”

  She nudges me her thanks, gets out her wallet, and I applaud her. She’s paying and I’m smiling, stroking her new marrow-colored curls, but all I can picture is some peasant or nun shorn of her hair, her naked baby-bird head bent low over bills for oil or coal, counting the coins for a new church bell, a new milk cow, medicines for the orphans, loaves of black bread, all so my friend can entice her husband, cling to illusion, grip at fading hope.

  But then I listen carefully to the Salesguy’s complicated instructions about styling and cleaning and care, because I know that, although her husband is such a prince of a guy, this exhaustive task of tending will probably fall to me. It’s what friends are for.

  DO IT, BE unabashed, be bold.

  I don’t remember which of us said that first. We all used to say it to each other, back when they were dating and they’d include me, we’d hang out and get a Meat Lovers’ pizza, rent a movie plus two sequels at a time, get stoned and drunk on scratch margaritas and tell ourselves we hadn’t yet outgrown a single impetuous thing. Then after, when they got married and they’d include me, we’d hang out and get a cheeseless veggie pizza, watch movies, get selectively stoned or drunk, then soon-later-after, when they had kids, the first boy and then rapidly the second one, and they’d include me, and we’d put the kids to bed and hang out, eat the kids’ leftover canned ravioli off their plates, watch TV but not get stoned or drunk anymore, because the kids might need something and we all needed to keep it real.

  Then the weekend, a year or so ago, before all this shit, when she and her kids went off and away to her mom’s for the weekend and one of us called the other one, I don’t remember which, it would’ve been so normal either way, Let’s hang out, get a pizza, watch a movie. I probably was the one to call, actually. I was being a good friend, I was worried he’d be lonely all alone. And the getting stoned on a forgotten, leftover ziplock bag in the freezer and drunk on vodka and kiddie apple juice just seemed to follow, seemed natural, too, although it had been a long while. And then cracking up, being too silly, the playful shove-touching we always did and then not so playful, and then groping and stroking as it all of a sudden went rash, and then just doing it, being unabashed, being bold. Waking up the next morning, in her sheets, one of her long, healthy thick black hairs stuck to my right breast, like a reminder to floss. Let’s forget this ever happened, It doesn’t mean anything, Doesn’t count, Yes, I love her, I love her, too, batting clichés back and forth to each other and spraying the fetid air with pine. We can’t ever tell her, Not ever, Yes, I love her, I love her, too, and both of us feeling so, so sick with it.

  I’ll never tell her. She shouldn’t have to face that now. She deserves it all to be as pretty and clean and normal as we can make it.

  A WHILE LATER, she changes her mind. It’s trying too hard, she says, it gets in my way, falls into food, the toilet, the boys keep tugging at it. She’s back in a scarf, she’s shrugging, resigned. The wild red wig is carefully rewrapped and back in a box; she’s donating it to a special group that gets wigs for poor women and kids.

  “It just wasn’t me,” she says. “It just didn’t work.”

  “I thought you looked beautiful,” I tell her.

  She bites her lip, looks out the car window.

  “He didn’t like it?”

  She shrugs.

  Maybe he’s not the problem, maybe it’s you, maybe you’re the one who can’t handle losing your looks, not him. I think this, but I don’t say it, I loathe myself for the mere thought.

  “So, right, we’ll keep looking,” I say. “It’s a quest. We’ll find the perfect wig.”

  I picture some twelve-year-old girl with leukemia wearing the donated wig. Some little girl who’ll never get married or have kids, never get laid or kissed, who’ll probably be buried in that mass of whory Virgin European hair.

  “I appreciate your doing all this with me,” she says, quiet.

  “My God,” I say. “How many places did I drag you to find that horrible pink dress?” Twelve stores. I was desperate to find the perfect dress for our senior prom, consistently unhappy with the look of my pasty arms, my negligible breasts, my pastel hair, my washed-out skin tone. She drove us around from place to place in her mother’s gassy Toyota, the patience of a saint, encouraging me, all the while looking perfect in the first thrift shop dress she’d found, darkly glamorous next to her perfect boyfriend of the moment, me going with his irrelevant best buddy, by default, actually, she’d arranged it so we could all be together. We took a group photo, camera snapping at the exact second I looked at her burgundy satin and thought, That would have worked on me, better on me, she should have offered to swap.

  In a Miracle Mile shop that markets to Orthodox Jews she finds a simple, chin-length brunette bob, sleek on her, actually, more sophisticated than her own old ponytail and bangs, and I’m shocked at the price—it’s a chunk of money I’d expect her to put in her boys’ college fund, not blow on vanity, on a lie of hair. But she raises her thin, sketched-on eyebrows at it, too, shakes her head.

  “Such a pretty girl,” the Saleswoman says. “Shana punim. What a shame.”

  “Will you just go on?” I tell her. “Write the check—you deserve it.”

  She glances nervously at the Saleswoman.

  “Oh, well, you have insurance?” the Saleswoman asks. “You can get a prosthesis prescription, you know.”

  “Too late for that,” my friend says. “I already blew it.”

  “Well, it’s a lot, I know,” the Saleswoman says. “But it’s like buying a car. You can buy a Chevy, or you can buy a Cadillac. It makes all the difference.”

  My friend just gives her a wan, brief nod.

  “Okay. That’s fine, I’m going to let you two talk
about it. Such a face . . . such a face deserves the best. Tell you what, dear, I’ll take off twenty percent if you want it, make it a sale price, all right? You let me know.” The Saleswoman veers off toward a young, bewigged housewife in a turtleneck and lisle stockings, carrying a bakery box.

  “You look very elegant,” I tell her. “Sleek.”

  I can see the pulse in the sad, stark vein on her temple.

  “Listen, why don’t you let me chip in?” I say.

  “Oh, please. No. Thank you.”

  I can see the tremble to her sallow chin. “Are you tired?” I ask. “How about something to eat? Should we get you a snack?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You want some juice?”

  “Stop babying me,” she snaps.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, taken aback. “I’m trying to help.”

  “No, I’m . . .” She takes my hand; hers is looking like an old lady’s, waxy and clawlike. I wonder if she’s toxic, if the chemicals can seep out of her pores to poison all the innocent people around her.

  “I’m not used to the role reversal, you know?” she says.

  “It’s okay.”

  “Thank you for being so patient with me.”

  I take my hand away to fuss with a wigstand. It’s a wire armature of an empty and featureless human head, like the model for a cyborg.