Everglow

I am lying on her sofa in one of those states where your body seems asleep but your mind has other ideas.  I turn on the little lamp on the table, look at my phone to read the time.  Three forty-seven.  I sit up, look around, and wish that I were home.   Then I could go into Molly's room and watch her sleep, set myself right.  I worried, when I was pregnant, that it would be so hard to be a mother, that it would drive me crazy to be needed so much.  I never expected that it would be I who needed Molly more.

I pull a magazine from the pile in the handwoven basket Chasity keeps under her coffee table. The cover advertises a story about preventing cancer.  I wonder if she has seen it.   I put the magazine at the bottom of the pile, go out into the kitchen and turn on the light.  I want some tea, but I don't want to wake Chas up by running water.  

Assuming she is alive.  

I stand up, then sit back down.  Then I stand up again, tiptoe into her bedroom.  She is turned away from me, but I can hear her breathing.  I see moonlight lying against the back of her bald head, pooled in the small valley at the top of her neck.  They are so graceful and beautiful, necks, so full of a kind of combined strength and vulnerability.  I wish we could get over our horror of baldness and appreciate instead the tender revelations it provides.  

When Chas first heard about how the chemo would probably make her lose her hair, she asked me if I could go with her to get a wig when the time came.  I said I would, but I also asked her if she were sure that's what she wanted to do.

"What else would I do?" she asked.  I could hear her shift the phone from one ear to the other.  

"I don't know," I said.  "If it were me, I think I'd be more of a scarf type.  Or just walk around bald.  I mean, it's kind of a badge of honor, isn't it?"  

"You didn't think I should get fake plants for my house, either," Chasity said.  Then, "And look how good THAT turned out!"  I imagined her demanding nod toward the corner where her planted palm resided in her apartment.  

"I know.  Same reason.  Except what you did is just as good."  What she did was buy a palm more than twice the size I had shyly, gently suggested.    

She waited until her hair was quite thin before she decided it was time for a wig.   And even then, on the way to get it, she asked me, "Do you think I have to get one now?  Does it look really bad?"  

She was driving, and I looked over at her and the sun was coming through her hair, making it look like an aura.  I thought it was beautiful.  "It just looks as if you have real thin hair," I said.  

"That's what I think, too," she said.  "But I'd better get one now in case it gets worse."  

I was carrying a magazine I thought would give me ideas for wig styles.  Chasity had said she wanted something really short for a change. 

"Look at this woman on the cover," I told her, holding up the magazine.  "Her hair is pretty short, and she looks great."

Chas snuck a glance, then looked back at the road.  "Yeah," she said.  "That's what I'll do."  Then she sighed and I was careful not to look at her.  I turned on the radio, and we rode the rest of the way there without talking.  

                                                            **  **  **  **  ** **  ** **  
The place was located in a suburban medical building. When we got into the lobby, we looked at the roster of names to see what office we were supposed to go to.  A man in a uniform seated behind a small desk asked, "May I direct you ladies?"  We didn't even look at him, even when he asked us again.  We were full enough of what we had to do.  

The sign on the door said JUDI'S WIGS, just like that, and with an i, too, which she and I agreed was highly unimaginative.  "It should be called BALD BUSTERS or some shit," Chas said.  "Or HAIR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW."  

She took in a breath, opened the door, and announced herself to the blank-faced receptionist wearing a show-off ponytail.  Then we sat on an overstuffed sofa with a coffee table in front of it that held a book called 'Cancer and Beauty'.  

"Oh, man, look at this," Chasity said, picking the book up and flipping through it.  Mostly it was tricks for tying scarves.  Don't be afraid to get creative! the book said.  She rolled her eyes and put it down.  There was a basket of faux geraniums on the table, too, and Chas fingered one of the thick green leaves in disgust.  "In keeping with the fake-ass theme, I suppose," she said.  She crossed her swollen legs, swung her foot.  "I'm a nervous fucking wreck," she said quietly, not even looking at me.  

"Me too."  I looked down into my lap, saw my fingers squeezing a knuckle.

Finally, a woman came out and called Chasity's name.  As we followed her down the hall, she turned around and looked critically at Chas.  "Have you been walking around like that?" she asked. 

I thought, Oh, God, don't cry, girl, and she didn't.  She said, "Well, of course I've been walking around like this.  Jesus Christ.  What else?  If I had a wig, I wouldn't fucking be here now, would I?"  In yo face, always Chas.  

Yeah, I thought.  Yeah!  And then I thought, what is someone like that doing working in a place like this, where women with broken hearts come?

After she'd brought us to the fitting room, the woman left to get some sample wigs.  Chas was seated in a swivel chair before a huge mirror, a setup like those they have in beauty salons.  There was a hand mirror there, too, so she'd be able to inspect the back of her head. 

"I think that woman is premenstrual," I said.

"I think that bitch got some PMS, too...with her prehistoric ass!  Did you SEE the wrinkles in her neck?!"  

"Yeah," I said, though I hadn't.  

When the woman returned, she handed my friend a hairnet.  Chasity put it on, then turned her head this way and that, looking at herself in the mirror.  "I look great," she said.  "Like a cafeteria worker."  

"Gimme some of that, uh, shit on a shingle," I said.  

Chas smiled.  I snorted.  The woman frowned and I wanted to drive something wide and sharp into her softest part.  On the way out of the place, I asked her, "Why do you have to be such a bitch?  Why do you have make a hard thing harder?"  Bold and fierce and scared to death, that's me.  Why, I learned all that from her! 

"I beg your pardon?" she asked coldly.  

"You should," I said.  I was on a roll.  

"Don't even worry 'bout that ugly bitch, Liz," Chas said, paying for the wig she'd ordered -- a short, dark-brown one -- with her debit card.  "Rush this order, mmmmkay?" she said, "Put it on the next rocket.  I just found out I'm not supposed to be walking around like this."  
                                                        **  **  **  **  ** **  ** **  
I see a movement under Chas's covers, and then she sighs and turns over.  "Chas?" I whisper.  Nothing.

I go back into the kitchen, turn the faucet on, but when the water hits the kettle, it is too loud.  Back into the living room, I stand before the magazine pile, looking for something to read.  Chas had different pieces of art mixed up all over her living room.  There is pottery: a short, round vase the color of eggshell; a small box with a geranium leaf imprint; a deep-blue bowl holding dried rose petals, a purple shoe with unfurled wings at the heel.  There are tiny oils of individual flowers on a shelf.  I find something that I made years ago, the one time I tried to use clay.  As much as she made fun of me for giving it to her, it was all I had at the time and because she was my best friend, I wanted her to have the most profound thing I had to offer.  I had been so compelled to keep it for my hope chest, but instead gifted it to her because that was absolutely how much she meant to me.  You do that with the people you love.  You make sacrifices on the big things.  You go  the ends of the earth only to come back full lap and hold out your hands, full of the moon and the stars.  Anyway, I pick it up and hold it, close my eyes, think maybe all it requires is a certain kind of belief and you really can go back in time.  I wish hard, and open my eyes.  Naturally, I am nowhere else.  I am actually short of surprised. 

I always think incipient miracles surround us, waiting only to see if our faith is strong enough.  If I am standing at a traffic light before I cross a street, I stare at the people on the other side, thinking, why can't we just concentrate, and change places?  And I have a real belief that this kind of thing will eventually come to be, this convenient kind of transmigration.  "Come over for dinner, why don't you?" we will say into the phone to our friends in California when we are in Wisconsin.  And moments later they will appear, shiny with stardust, briefly shaken but mostly without memory of how it happened that they arrived.  We won't have to understand it; it will just work, like a beating heart, like love.  Really, no matter how frightened and discouraged I may become about the future, I look forward to it.  In spite of everything I see all around me every day, in spite of all the times I cry when I read the newspaper, I have a shaky reassurance that everything will turn out fine.  I don't think I'm the only one.  Why else would the phrase "Everything's all right" ease a deep and troubled place in so many of us?  We just don't know, we never know so much, yet we have such faith.  We hold our hands over our hurts and lean forward, full of yearning and forgiveness.  It is how we keep on, this kind of hope.  

I turn out the light, lie back down on the sofa, close my eyes, and try to remember everything about the time Chas wanted me to skip school with her to meet two boys at the mall in Tulsa.  I did it, too, and I've never regretted it.  It was out of character for me and not her, and that thrill of the kill and living for the moment is perhaps one of the most endearing reasons why Chasity was so important to me.  She was my alter ego in every way.  My sidekick for awhile, my confidante, my protectress.  I'll never, ever regret anything she and I ever did.  What can I say?  You take what you can get, you give all that you possibly can, so long as it is pure and healthy and lifts others up.  That is another one of the lessons here.    Then, when it's time to let people go, applying those lessons and those things we loved about them to our own lives make it very much like they are still here with us, matching our pace and holding our trembling, outstretched hands.  The one certainty I have from all the loss in my life I have ever had, I am still grateful for them.  Our special people are still here indeed, and their attributes live on like an aura surrounding those who they've touched.