...YOU�D MARRIED DICK
He�s late because he�s with his boyfriend. He�s never told you he�s gay. You don�t touch anymore, and you�re sure it�s because he thinks you�re fat. He tries to leave you, but you claw at his shirt. He�s squirming through Far From Heaven. You still don�t let yourself get it, even when you watch Oprah or Jerry Springer. His face has cleared up since high school when he even had zits on his back. You�re jealous of the pretty women on your TV screen, sure he�s wishing you were one of them. You call his cell phone seven or eight times a day. Maybe he travels on business which makes you nervous. Maybe you support him, working long hours, while he lies like an ungrateful sack on the couch. Maybe you have a lover on the side. You meet in motels--he�s married too--and you weep in his arms wishing your husband loved you. You smash your dead mother-in-law�s teacups into hard porcelain rain.
...YOU�D MARRIED HARRY
You throw an apple at his head, but he ducks in time. It slams into the wall, apple sauce. You blame him for everything--your stretch marks, the sick twins, your failed career. He hovers over your shoulder trying to give you a massage, but just the sight of his pasty hands makes you tense up. You should have never gotten pregnant so soon. He should have never joined the Marines. He still has that same T-bird, the one he used to let you drive as soon as you got your license. He still likes T-bone steaks. You�re always on some lowfat diet, but wind up eating the leftovers from the kids� plates. You�ve turned into a woman resigned to her soaps and sweatpants. The only reason you bother with lipstick is so you can stare at the red U-turn it leaves on the rim of your cup.
...YOU�D MARRIED TOM
You never got sober. He turns the coffee table over in an argument and you step on glass shards for over a year. Your feet tingle, maybe diabetes, but you don�t bother with the doctor because you know she�ll ask how much both of you drink. Your husband�s grown really mean. You think he has a thing for little girls. He�s twenty years older than you are, and you sometimes try to calculate how much longer he�ll live. He�s impotent, or at least he is when he�s with you. There�s a piece of gum sliding down into the gap between his two front teeth. You obsess about it, sure it�s getting longer every day, and you wonder if it will ever sag longer than the teeth themselves. You never loved him. Even your wedding day was some weird test you gave yourself to see how much you could take. How will he be able to eat when that day comes? How will he be able to eat without biting down on his gums?
One time I ended up in the wig department of Macy�s by mistake. It�s on the seventh floor, a dusty little island, near the clearance items. I�d traveled up to the top of the store looking for bargains--the escalators had narrowed and turned from metal into wood. All the bald women of Manhattan were there buying wigs, wigs they could have probably bought for less on Fourteenth Street, but it was better to come into Macy�s where there was a sales lady, a place to sit down (like a cosmetics counter), and a mirror. The wigs were cheaply made, but attempted to look realistic--not like those orange hooker wigs or those silver sparkle wigs club-kids wore, wigs that screamed I�m having fun. There were rows of sensible bobs and gray old-lady-style wigs, a long ash blond earth-mother wig and a shoulder-length auburn shag. Bright black pixies shone like patent leather.
I fingered through the discount gowns one department over, feeling like a woolly mammoth, all my real hair bunched in a ponytail on my head. I didn�t need a gown, but I needed to see the women buying wigs. I spied on the women through the sequins. I clicked the hangers, pretending to check sizes. My friend�s doctor had just told her: It�s better just to shave it all off than watch it fall out gradually. You can tell Debbie �mommy�s changed her hairstyle,� but watch out when she hops in your lap and tugs at your head. She might figure out it�s wig hair since wigs don�t always feel like the real thing, and you know how intuitive kids are. You�ll have to tell her eventually, but maybe not yet, and if everything goes well, Debbie will still have her mother around for high school graduation, her wedding...
Oh, the bald head is a beautiful thing, worthy of caressing. I wondered if my friend would ever show me her wigless head or her scar. I wondered if her husband would touch her there. I wondered if I could one day convince her to have a cleavage party, which another friend of mine was having this weekend to celebrate her reconstruction. When the women in Macy�s slipped off their scarves or baseball caps, their eyes looked really big. Maybe babies have such big eyes because there�s nowhere else to look, no halo of color above the forehead, no swirls around the ears, no bangs.
And how does our hair know how to stop growing right at the hairline? How do those cells differentiate? Debbie was almost a twin. When my friend was pregnant, her ob gyn told her one of the fetuses had expired, if �expired� is even the right word, since it was really early on, in her first trimester. Her doctor said the first twin cells were absorbed by the second twin, the one who turned out to be Debbie, the one who turned out to be a single birth. On the sonogram, the hospital had stamped �GIRL� right between Debbie�s tiny pre-born legs. She was a micro black and white planet, a gorgeous monster, her head as perfect as a globe.
I don�t know how it happened, who�d marked it down, but suddenly I was holding a $600 evening gown that had a pink price tag of $25. I tried it on in a dressing room near the wigs. When I stepped out to look in the mirror, a woman in her twenties, a woman who looked like Sin�ad O�Connor, cooed, �You absolutely have to buy it.� I imagined I�d wear the gown to my friend�s cleavage party or give it to her to wear. I went to a counter to pay, sure I�d be found out, sure that the tag was wrong, that I couldn�t possibly have had such good fortune. The cashier scanned the bar code and smiled at my shopping luck, as though giving me a clean bill of health. I took the escalators down, my heavy maroon Macy�s bag rubbing against my shin. I knew I was a fraud, that I�d never have the nerve to wear that teal costume anywhere. All the other shoppers were fading and gray, like x-rays. The bald mannequins were glowing, radiant.