“Wigs” originally appeared in vol. 45, no. 1 of The Pinch.
The things Erica recalls from the first time she and Frank slept together are not pleasant. She found it difficult to concentrate on him, and instead focused on the overall effect of the scene—the rough sheets, the rumble of commercial traffic just outside the motel room, the cigarette burns on the nightstand. (Who were these people that smoked so wantonly and could she become one of them?) For her this was all tableau, and she gleefully catalogued these seamy details despite finding the physical aspect unpleasant. But even Frank was a crucial part of it, and she told herself to not look away. The long spidery hairs in his ears were just as necessary as everything else.
Frank is a friend of her mother’s. They’ve known each other for years. Erica is sleeping with Frank out of spite because she resents her mother, though her reasons for this remain largely inscrutable, but trust her, the resentment is not unreasonable. She could justifiably be doing so much worse. She has considered drugs, clearly visible tattoos, making a more public spectacle of herself. But in the end, sleeping with Frank is what she’s decided on. Their families were acquainted, Erica’s mother and Frank’s. They were family friends. Erica suspects that they might have been more than friends although it would also not surprise her at all if it was a one-sided infatuation, something her mother carried around in her most secret heart-of-hearts, unable to confess or act upon. Her mother has always been that kind of woman. If something might bring her happiness, she’d second guess it and agonize over any possible course of action until at last the thing that might have brought her happiness was out of reach. It would have been so easy, Erica thinks, for her mother at some point during her long and drab life to take some small step towards joy, but she never did and in a way this has created a psychic wound in her daughter, this shying away from joy. This reluctance to meaningfully participate. But Erica is now taking steps. Spiteful steps but steps nonetheless. She’s not sure what any of this will accomplish, but it’s at least something. Something deliberate in order to lash out at or claw something back for herself. A way of no longer merely agonizing and deferring. I am through with all that, she tells herself. Through.
Frank is old, of course. As old as her mother, or nearly so or even slightly older, she’s not sure. While Erica herself is young. Barely 24. And while Frank is unattractive, Erica is beautiful. At least according to most people. Her features are very symmetrical and she has long straight hair that falls down her back in a long shimmering chestnut curtain, which she considers her only true concession to vanity. A luxurious drapery is how it might be described. The consensus is that she is quite beautiful and that her long hair is very striking.
She’s asked herself what kind of man has an affair with the daughter of an old friend who he’d known as a tiny child and had at times even dawdled on his lap. What kind of man does this? Being kind to a tiny child but deep in the recesses of his brain perhaps thinking, When she is older…va-voom maybe? And on top of that, a married man. To a woman dying of cancer. She’s only a husk. This is what Frank said to Erica about his wife before the first time they slept together in the motel, right before he slipped her cotton underpants down with his sweating hands. What is his culpability in all this? A husk—the words hung in the air as Frank removed Erica’s underpants, revealing a pattern of tiny reddened indentations from the elastic in her otherwise smooth abdomen and thighs.
She wears a wig when she goes to see him, when they meet for sex in motels—his wife is receiving home hospice care—wigs of various styles and colors and lengths in order to feel like she’s being discreet or even to feel as though she’s a different woman, that it’s someone else sleeping with a man married to someone dying of cancer. Not her. Not Erica. A stranger doing this to spite her own mother. Sometimes Erica is thankful for this other person, for this show of solidarity, and other times she wants to push this person down a flight of stairs. How dare you do this to my mother? My only mother.
Erica comes to depend on the wigs. Soon she’s wearing them all the time. She doesn’t leave the house without a wig, always taking great pains to pin up her own striking dark hair before she puts one on. Some days she chooses long and blond. Some days she prefers a severe black bob. Some days even an extravagant hive of fierce red curls, which Frank seems especially to enjoy and which Erica assumes, given Frank’s few remaining rust-colored wisps, must have Freudian connotations. She’s read about this. The only time she doesn’t wear a wig is on the rare occasion when she goes to see her mother, because even though she only initiated the affair to spite her mother, she wants to keep it from her as well. Erica could never be so overtly cruel.
She visits one weekend, out in the suburbs in the same low brick house where she grew up, only now her father is dead and her mother spends her days moving insubstantially through the house, going from room to room like a low cloud, often staring for hours through the large picture window into the backyard where there is a concrete birdbath while a cup of tea grows cold on the kitchen island. Turning away from the window her mother says, Rumor has it Frank is sleeping with some redhead. A child, more or less, is what I heard. It’s all so awful. Erica tries to see something in her mother’s eyes, a sign of that long ago perhaps-infatuation, and for a moment she thinks she catches sight of it, the smallest rueful glimmer. Then her mother wanders off, into the living room to the TV because it is time for the nightly news, which she never misses. But Erica remains in the kitchen, staring at the birdbath for a while before riding the train home.
Although Erica is sure that she’s sleeping with Frank out of spite, or in any case was sure of it at one point, after two months go by, or three, she begins to think that it is not spite. Or not entirely spite. That it is more than spite. Pity, maybe. Then, later, she is sure that it is something else still. Neither merely spite nor merely pity, despite her mother, despite Frank’s wife, despite Frank’s sweaty hands and the disgusting way his hot, oniony breath feels on her neck, and his small shrunken behind and his yellowing underwear, which hangs off his small shrunken behind in sad jowly folds in the dull motel light. Who’s ever seen such a sad little behind? As if it is folding in on itself, ashamed of its lowly function.
One weekend Erica tells Frank that she is busy and cannot see him. The disappointment is obvious in his voice and she almost feels badly. He has always been so grateful to her; this may be the thing that exists beyond spite or pity, the something else. She goes to a friend’s BBQ an hour upstate by train. There is grilled corn and a paper shopping bag placed next to the grill for the charred husks. Brittle and empty. Discarded. She thinks of Frank’s wife and starts to cry and must compose herself in her friend’s bathroom and the friend comes and knocks on the door and asks is she all right and Erica says Sure, sure I just need a moment, and when the friend withdraws she thinks again about Frank and the cheap motels and it gets better and she stops crying. It’s just that the image of Frank’s husk wife hurts something inside her, a raw space that must not be touched, but then Erica reconsiders this raw space and decides that it hurts only because of the words—the thing itself is too perfect. The affair. How her mother would react if she found out. This protects the raw space. Erica knows she’s done well. She couldn’t possibly have planned it any better. She dries her face with a hand towel even with a genuine smile already on it. She straightens her wig in the mirror—dirty blond with feathery bangs—and then goes back out to her friend’s yard and eats and laughs and drinks beer and even flirts with people. Throwing her head back, feeling vital and alive, laughing at the jokes and anecdotes people are telling as it grows dark and the stars come out. But somewhere in that feeling, enmeshed in it is also a craving for the rough motel sheets on her naked back and Frank’s grateful and pathetic moist weight on top of her. What would the people at the BBQ think, if they knew? These BBQ people clinking bottles under a velvet sky, a Bluetooth speaker playing nearby, playing something, a song that Erica sort of recognizes as being popular.
One of the people she flirts with is a man named Colin who has large white teeth and stylish hair that is brownish with blond streaks and who is very tan, but in a healthy way. A tan that signals vitality, not like those leathery old men with their fat tongues that from time to time dart out of their mouths like a lizard’s. Colin is tall and young and very confident and when Erica has pictured a young and attractive woman like herself out in the world with a boyfriend, the boyfriend would possess these qualities because that was what people expected for someone like her, that she would date a tall, muscular child who works in finance.
Later she rides the train back to the city with Colin, who is still confident and still filling the air with jokes and stories about things that have happened to him but is now doing it in a way that feels to Erica somewhat desperate and nervous because of their proximity to sex. She goes with him to his loft which contains art and stylish, comfortable furniture, while her own apartment is teeming with mere stuff. Not useful or beautiful, only stuff she’s accumulated and has not been able to get rid of for one reason or another. Refrigerator magnets kept in a drawer, hats she will never wear. Colin fixes her a drink from a brass rolling bar. A strong gin and tonic that she drinks quickly before kissing him. This is what she deserves and she is taking steps. But while his tongue probes her mouth she thinks of Frank and soon Colin’s sleek tongue and his beautiful loft and his art and his brass rolling bar begin to feel oppressive. She has trouble breathing. When he puts a hand on her wig she pushes him away and stands up from the deep couch. What’s up? he protests. I thought we were going to?
Outside in the night humidity, Erica’s scalp begins to itch underneath the wig. She holds her head in both hands, pressing the wig into her scalp as if to absorb it. She pictures the sputtering A/C, turned all the way up in a cheap anonymous motel, she feels the slight stickiness of the carpet, and soon the itching stops. She walks into a deli and asks the clerk to sell her a loose cigarette and the clerk says they can’t sell loose cigarettes anymore but he’s kind enough to give her one of his own menthols and he lights it for her inside the deli and the flame from his lighter causes her to think again about the grilled corn, the charred husks, the fire, how fire is the only thing that can produce more of itself merely by proximity—how wonderful, to be able to do this, to find the most vital part of yourself and then be able to increase it, to make more of your very essence, to share it and watch it grow. A beautiful glow increasing over and over until all the smaller component parts become the same luminous collective thing. No longer flames, but fire. What else aside from fire can do this? But it can only do this because it is not itself a thing. Fire is a state of being. But, she supposes, all things, or most, can be persuaded into this state, and then themselves become fire. And maybe that makes it even more wonderful, doesn’t it? To be persuaded and excited into another state, to give up one’s own unique essence, to use up some part of yourself in order to become another, new thing entirely, to be a self-replicating yet self-consuming thing. Erica thinks it must be necessary to do this at various times to oneself, to be spent, relieved of your potential, which then echoes and radiates through the air and world and universe as light and heat and energy. Necessary and wonderful. She can see why some people become arsonists. To persuade more of the world.
She walks home and texts Frank but he doesn’t text back for hours, and during that time of no response she pictures him, gross old Frank silently masturbating to his phone in the small bathroom hidden away from his wife’s hospice bed. And when he does finally respond it is nothing spectacular. Nothing sexy or even particularly pathetic, not anything really.
The wigs are obvious. She’s not fooling anyone. But she’s not trying to pass the wigs off as her actual hair, she’s only trying to pass herself off as a stranger in a wig. A glamorous stranger! Who is that woman? Where is she going? In the grocery store an old friend from school recognizes her and approaches. Erica! the friend says with a smirk. Your hair! What did you do to it? And in a moment of panic, or indignation—How dare you ask me this? What gives you the right?—trembling over her shopping cart filled with cold cuts and kombucha, Erica tells the old friend that she has cancer. The chemo, she says, raising a hand to lightly touch the wig. How swiftly now comes the obvious and belabored sympathy from this woman, who is, now that Erica thinks about it, more of an acquaintance than a friend. Not a true friend, in any case. How brave Erica is to still do her own shopping at such a time.
Wearing the wigs, Erica could be anyone, go anywhere. Completely change her life. She is never able to bring herself to say Frank’s wife’s name out loud. Which is Debbie. Deborah. Emphasis on the BORE, is how Frank once told her it was pronounced, and he laughed at his joke but then quickly fell silent and after a few moments apologized. Groping for the words. You have no idea what this is like. I don’t mean to be cruel. It’s only that…
A week after Deborah finally dies, Frank calls Erica and asks her to meet him at a motel near the airport. She is surprised that it took him an entire week to call. Erica wonders when the time will be right for her to break things off. She has already rehearsed the words: These things have a lifespan and our time together has run its inevitable course. She knows Frank will take it badly but she justifies the pain she’ll cause him by acknowledging his infidelity to his poor dying wife. How could he do such a thing? She thinks about Deborah the husk. She wonders what new state she’s been persuaded into.
On her way to the motel something happens. Erica witnesses an assault. A grievous assault as she exits the train station. A man left unconscious on the sidewalk, bleeding from his head. She sees the whole thing. A news van arrives just as the man is taken away in a keening ambulance, only moments after the police have finished interviewing her, the man’s blood still right there on the sidewalk congealing in a small dull puddle, and the people from the news van train a camera on her before she can object, demanding a statement. Demanding to know who to blame. She’s broadcast live on the nightly news wearing the red wig. She sees the station’s logo on the camera, on the reporter’s microphone, on the television in her mother’s living room. And with the man’s blood still right there on the sidewalk, the microphone forced into her face, Erica knows that she’s finally accomplished what she set out to do. Her mother will see her in the extravagant red wig and know everything.
A train lumbers into the station, people spill out. She starts to cry but then doesn’t. She laughs—it’s awful, so inappropriate, the blood right there—she throws her head back and laughs, the wig teeters but stays in place. She won’t speak her rehearsed words to Frank, she’ll just stop seeing him. Stop answering his calls. She owes him nothing. She knows there’s another Erica, one who at this very moment is on her mother’s TV, who might even be the Erica responsible for all of this, but now, before the live newscast can cut away, both Ericas are laughing, both of them can go anywhere, be anyone. Maybe she’ll even make more Ericas, consuming and replicating, persuading herself into other states, and maybe one of them will be the right one.