The Wig My Father Wore

by Anne Enright

  No-one has ever said ‘I choose number 15’, for example. No-one has ever declined to choose. No man has stood up in the audience and said, ‘I object, this woman is betrothed to another.’ No woman has shouted ‘Dyke!’ No clerk-of-the-court has unfolded, solemnly or not, the birth certificate to show that she is under age. No man in a rumpled suit has walked across the studio floor, excused himself in German and pulled up her dress to show the penis underneath.

  She simply says ‘I choose number 3’ and with music, tears and laughter, as the credits unroll their speech of modest thanks to the women who arranged such lovely flowers, she kisses and walks away with her Number Three. The studio walls give way, the plane stands ready in the scene dock, the band plays as it mounts into the sky, while an ecstatic air hostess waves and lets fall a bloodied sheet on to the camera below.

  ‘No,’ says Damien, blowing into hospitality. He’s a rotund little boy, one of the great dictators. When he looks at you, you feel like you are the only person in the room, when he looks away, you despise him. We get on really well.

  Frank, who was in the box directing, is twitching in the corner with a large gin and a face as blank as the breeze. They ignore each other. Instead Damien comes up to me, not because it’s my show this week, but because I like him.

  ‘No,’ he says.

  ‘No what?’ I say. ‘It was great.’

  ‘No more little wankers from Dun Laoghaire.’

  ‘He made the show.’

  ‘I make the show.’

  ‘Fuck off and have a drink. It was great.’

  ‘Where were my cues?’ He says he was standing there like a prick at a dykes’ picnic waiting for his cue when he gets a load of custard in the face. I say that was the best bit, even though the custard hit a camera which went down. Even though those cameras cost as much as a five bedroom house on the southside, now missing a back wall. He says ‘Was my reaction OK?’

  So he set the custard gag up himself—anything for attention. He knows I know, so he blames Frank. You have to hand it to him for nerve.

  ‘No cues. Fucking snob. He cuts my best line. We had to retake the opening without my best line.’

  ‘That wasn’t Frank’s decision. That was my decision. Now go over and complain to the LoveWagon. She’s looking lonely.’

  ‘Fucking right. Fucking producers.’

  Ten minutes later the audience is doing a conga down the corridor and abusing the security man. Damien sits down for a brief stupor on the couch before leaping up and slapping backs like some kind of backslapping machine. The LoveWagon goes around the room and is muttered at—by Damien, by cameras, by sound, by the guy from the farting cushions company. She nods a lot, especially at Frank.

  Frank is a good director. He is also my friend. Maybe this is why he lets his fingers land on my thigh like he can’t remember whose leg it is.

  Every week he tells me that revenge is a complicated thing, that murdering Damien would be nice, but not as effective as just putting him on screen. When he dips his head to take a drink, it’s like he’s probing his gin like a flower.

  Marcus comes up for a fight. ‘Sorry about the date package, the cameraman had diarrhoea.’

  ‘Swings and roundabouts.’

  ‘Here we go,’ says Frank, even though I haven’t opened my mouth.

  Because Marcus has green eyes or brown, depending on the light. The brown eyes like me well enough, the green eyes call me a fucking animal. In the old days Marcus used to say ‘I wonder about you. I wonder if you are a woman at all.’ Tonight he just says:

  ‘The custard was good.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘What about Your Woman?’ says Frank.

  ‘Awful,’ says Marcus. ‘Brilliant.’

  ‘I’m in love,’ says Frank.

  I say, ‘I think she’s in her dressing room.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I think she’s having a little weep.’

  At which point Marie from Donnycarney comes in, her eyes red and excited. We tell her she was wonderful and the room gives one last surge, shatters and heads for home. The LoveWagon exits like the Queen Mother, stumbling at the door. Marcus cools down. Frank falls out of love. Half an hour later the three of us are bored again, standing in the middle of the road trying to flag a taxi into town.

  We split up in the nightclub. I see a man I slept with once or twice. I roar at him over the music. I say ‘You think I’m a woman. You think I’m a woman. Don’t you? You think I’m a woman.’ So he takes me home. As we leave I can see Marie from Donnycarney trying and failing with Marcus. Her LoveDate is moping in the corner. They should both be tucked up in their beds, but I can’t work all the time. I hope that Marcus will sleep with her so I can fry his ass next Monday, but I doubt it. He was never that kind.

  The next day is Saturday—the morning after the night before, swimming through the show that is still swimming through me, waiting to be ambushed as I turn a corner by a little piece of dead adrenalin floating through my heart.

  I am late. Jo is sitting quietly at her desk staring at the phone. The crew is at the airport waiting for Marie who is nowhere to be found.

  Jo chases flights, while I chase Marie, who has not booked out of the hotel. When I arrive, her clothes are still scattered across the empty room. The phone rings. It is Jo with three near options—not near enough. We decide to go to Killarney instead. I consider calling the LoveWagon, decide against it, consider resigning, wash my face and sit down to wait.

  There is a pair of shoes on the bed. There is a pair of tights abandoned on the ground. I want to switch them around. I want the shoes to be on the floor. I want the tights to be on the bed. Still, I can’t touch them. They belong to someone else and they are used.

  I am sweating. If Stephen were here he would pick up the tights and fold them. If Frank were here, he would put his arm around me and tell me about the sins of a married man. Marcus would ignore them, lie down on the bed and ask me what it was all about. Small mercies.

  I catch the smell of last night’s man. It is light and warm and I smile. I have been trying to track it down all morning. Then I find it. It is the smell of a baby’s hair. The hangover hits.

  Marie walks into the room. She bends down, picks the tights off the floor, then turns to me without surprise.

  ‘Seven pounds fifty they cost me,’ she says, ‘and they laddered the minute I put them on.’ She sits down on the bed and switches on the television with the remote control.

  ‘Hotel bedrooms,’ she says, ‘aren’t they a laugh?’ Oprah is on, talking to people who have been struck by lightning.

  ‘Now I heard that somewhere,’ says Oprah. ‘Is that your experience? Is it your experience that when somebody is struck by lightning, that person is thirsty for the rest of his, or her life?’

  ‘They’ll have to do,’ says Marie. ‘Sorry I’m late.’ And she starts putting on the tights, ladder and all.

  The Wrong Place

  WHEN I COME in the door, Stephen smiles hard enough to frighten a horse.

  ‘Where were you?’ he says.

  ‘I should be in Crete,’ I say.

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘It was just someone I know. Just someone I bump into from time to time.’

  The place looks as if it died a week ago, the curtains are open to the dusk; the furniture slipping through the half-darkness. My hand sweeps past the light switch, which has drifted from its proper place. I flick it on and nothing happens. Stephen has taken the bulb out of its socket.

  I walk through from room to room and my footsteps sound like they are coming from somewhere else. Every bulb is gone. The whole house is swimming, empty and electric, as the open sockets leak into the evening light.

  So I sit down and try to cry and curse Stephen for it. Because we all have to get through, any way we can.

  Stephen makes me a meal that is entirely white. At least it helps me see the plate. I eat by the light of the TV w
ith the sound turned down. At the accustomed time, and by the usual miracle, the LoveQuiz flashes into the room, thin, silent and over-excited. Every time I look up, Marie from Donnycarney is watching her own legs, as if they belonged to someone else. In studio the day before, it had been a pretty randy show, but flickering on the box, lonely, with no applause, it looks vaguely obscene and inconsequential, like an old woman tap-dancing, or a dog humping a sofa during afternoon tea.

  ‘It’s on its way to God,’ I say—as I always say when the credits roll. Which is how, I suppose, I got into this mess in the first place.

  I fall asleep on the sofa and dream about sleep. I dream about sleep so profound and dreamless it would change everything. Perhaps Stephen wakes me in the middle of the night. He is carrying a candle. Transmission has shut down and the test card shines out into the room.

  In the morning I drive to Killarney and shoot Marie.

  ‘Pretend it’s nice and hot,’ I say. ‘Cheer up,’ I say. I tell her to push her date into the swimming pool. I tell her to show a bit of leg.

  Because you can’t be a snob and work on the LoveQuiz. Which means that most people on the show are in the wrong place. They feel their work as a kind of stain. I have no time for that. As far as I’m concerned, if it’s not embarrassing, it’s not worth it. I am intimate with the subject of shame. I am the daughter of a man who used to wear a wig. After that, I said, television is easy.

  Aerial

  IT WAS A tough, wiry wig with plenty of personality. It rode around on his head like an animal. It was a vigorous brown. I was very fond of it as a child. I thought that it liked me back.

  I don’t know when he started to lose his hair, my mother never discussed it. Unlike her children, my mother was well brought up. As far as she was concerned, the wig might as well have grown there. I do not believe her. All children are raised on these simple lies. Your granny is in heaven. You came out of Gods pocket. Daddy was always bald. Daddy was never bald.

  My mother and father met in a ballroom in the Fifties, where the lights never dimmed. He was twenty-seven years old. The smell from the wig, if he was wearing the wig, would have been already high. Perhaps he kept his hat on when he asked her to dance, because men are brutish that way. Perhaps my mother saw the crippled look on his face. What more could any woman want, than a rude, wounded man?

  Those were the days when a man was allowed to be stupid. He could eat with his knife, or not wash his underwear; he could do the wrong thing to get the girl and then find that it was the right thing after all. He might be lured into the discreet back room of a hat shop as easily as he would be lured up the aisle. He did not expect his children to tug at his hair, or his wife, in the dark. Those were the days when a wig made no difference in a marriage. (‘What are you looking at woman, have you never seen a bald head before?’)

  So they danced in the Ierne ballroom, a man with his hat on and a woman who would not let her hands stray. And they were grateful for it.

  We grew up with a secret that everyone knew. Even the cat knew and stalked it. For years my father’s wig felt like an answer. I could say ‘I am the way I am because my father wears a wig.’ I could say ‘I am in love with you because I have told you, and no-one else, about my father’s shameful wig.’ This is not true. I have told strangers about my father’s wig in discos. I have discovered that it is not a good way to score.

  We lived in a house that did not believe in the past, the place where people’s hair fell out. My mother kept three photographs hidden in a drawer, which we didn’t need to see, in order to know. The first is a picture of my parents’ wedding day. They look noble, and sweetly sad. My father is holding his little hair down in the wind. The other two were taken on their honeymoon. My mother is sitting on a rug in a bathing suit. I am already in her tummy. Then my father is on the same rug. He is standing on his head.

  We do not need these pictures. My brother remembers pulling at my father’s hair as a small child. He says he remembers a tuft coming away in his hand. He is still waiting to be forgiven. I remember being carried on my father’s shoulders and a light sweat breaking on his scalp. My sister remembers his hairbrush, a sacred, filthy thing.

  These are late memories. They came when he was sick. We thought the wig would beat us to the grave. We looked at him in his hospital bed and the dead thing on his head looked more alive than he did.

  So we betrayed him. We laughed. We called it by name. ‘Wig,’ I said. My brother Phil said ‘Toupee’, because his own hair was getting thin. Brenda, the youngest, said ‘Rat’, which is also a word for penis.

  Because the truth is that my father walked into a hair clinic in Dublin in 1967 and pushed his money over the counter, which in 1967 was a modern, Formica counter, to a woman, who in 1967 was wearing a beehive, at least half of which was fake. And in return he got a wig full of straight, stiff, dead hair, half-oriental, half-horse, that was dyed a youthful orange-brown. He had finished reproducing. I was nearing the age of reason. My mother’s gratitude was wearing thin. He came home with the thing on his head. He went into work the next day. No-one said a word.

  I was five at the time and in love with his forearms, which were smooth and hairy and smelt of the sun. I knew him.

  Besides, I thought the wig was part of the television set he brought home with him the same evening. I thought it was an aerial of sorts, a decoder, or an audience response.

  My father still has beautiful hands, with big knuckles that his grandchildren, if he had any grandchildren, would pick up one by one and splay out on the arm of his chair. But I did not recognise the white slabs flattened against the glass when he kicked the bottom of the hall door one night, a big brown box in his arms. We stood and looked.

  ‘Stop kicking that door!’ said my mother.

  ‘There’s a man outside.’ So she stepped into the hall with her own hands wet. They were cold by the time she reached the latch. The man pushed past her and set the box on the floor. It was our father. He said that there was a surprise inside, but we had to eat our tea first.

  When we were called into the sitting room, a smaller, inside box was balanced on a chair in the corner by the curtains. My father (who had something strange on his head), sat us in a row on the sofa and turned the box on. Nothing happened. Then it warmed up like the radio and glowed with sound. A sheet of light fused between the glass and the thick grey of the tube. It was thinner than the film of oil on a puddle in the road and much harder. And it was dancing.

  Phil asked what it was, which I thought was silly because I knew it was the television, but my father received the question solemnly, took the RTE Guide out of his raincoat pocket and said, ‘7.25: Steady as She Go-Goes with Maxi, Dick and Twink.’ He walked over to his seat and assumed a viewing position.

  There were people jumping around. Then you saw their faces. And there was my father, with his coat still on and his face made elastic, slight and old, by the aerial sitting on his head.

  Now when my granny got her false teeth a few years later, she sat us up on her knee one by one. ‘Do you want to know a secret?’ she said and amazed us by pulling the teeth out an inch or two before snapping them back for a kiss. My father, on the other hand, just stopped moving his head. His neck got stiff and angry. The wig slept on top of him with one eye open, watching us. My parents’ bedroom became even more secret, as if the wig were a dog at the door.

  As I say, I liked the thing well enough, although I never gave it a chance. I was always one step ahead of it and my father seemed to be on my side. He was gracious and private and rarely walked down the street with us. In fact, as a family, we were quite proud of my father, of the way he held himself separate. The wig was his way of showing his anger, of being polite.

  Anyway, I loved him so much that it was difficult to see him. Even now I cannot remember his laugh or his face.

  It is too easy to say that my father bought the television as a decoy. I prefer to think of it as another leap of faith. Certainly, he was excite
d by the moon and the possibility of putting men on it. It was important that we should know about the world. And the first week of the television was also the week of the moon orbit by Apollo 8, whose pictures I did understand, because I had seen the moon and because there was no-one singing and dancing on it for no good reason, like Maxi, Dick or Twink.

  My father watched the LoveQuiz once, just to be polite. He said he preferred programmes that weren’t so ‘set up’. I tried to tell him that all programmes are ‘set up’ but his wig shouted me down. I always knew the little bastard would get me in the end.

  How It Was

  STEPHEN HAS, BY means Angelic, found a newspaper for July 19th 1969, my first nights viewing. And there it is. There is Steady As She Go-Goes, sandwiched between The Doris Day Show and The Virginian. It is the night of the orbit, not by Apollo 8 as I had thought, but by Apollo 11, the mission that put the first men on the moon. These tricks of memory do not distress me. I always knew that the picture of my father at the door was more miraculous than true.

  Now my childhood rearranges itself, the phantom Apollo 8 is relegated to a kind of misalignment of the pixels, the shadow of another channel breaking through. Because clean as a sword coming out of a lake, one night of my life presents itself as I knew it, without static or interference. I don’t know how long we already had the television, whether twenty-four hours or two years, but the night after Steady As She Go-Goes was the night that we landed on the moon.

  Look at these windows, marvels and wonders.

  * * *

  T.V. TOMORROW

  * * *

  5.35 “TOP CAT” (cartoon)