By the Other Ann Bancroft

At least it’s the kind of place you only need to go to once. Miles and miles away from midtown, one streetlight after the next out in the soulless ‘burbs, past a Dominos next to a Walgreens next to a Big Scoop Yogurt next to a PetsMart next to Blockbuster next to Arbys and Jimboys, a Jiffy Lube, a Wendy’s, a Starbucks for the second time.

Aretha and Wilco on the sound system got me through, slapping the steering wheel, rocking: I am a Natural Woman, and those Theologians don’t know nothin’ of my soul. I pulled into the strip mall parking lot and looked for shade. There was none, so I took the space right in front, sucking it up in the 103 degrees. Stepped across melting blacktop onto sidewalk and almost opened the door to the Poodle Clip by mistake. The glass door of Wig Wonderland says welcome, Tuesday through Friday, 10-5, and I pushed it twice, helplessly, then pulled on it because it said right there on the door, “Pull.”

Just as I pulled I heard, “Wait! I told you I’d come!”
My friend Deb had driven 45 minutes to get here and would drive 45 minutes back to work when we’d finished. She gushed as if we were just about to cash in our Day of Beauty certificates at La Costa spa. Just two girlfriends out for a giggle we were, smirking at the whole….concept… the Poodle Clip next door, the potential of walking out of this place as blondes, redheads, silver-haired cougars, maybe.

Inside there is a wall of faceless Styrofoam heads in a room decorated in country kitsch, with inspirational sayings on the wall: “Love is the greatest healer,” “Every time a door shuts, a new one opens.” “Let your heart cry, let love dry your tears.”
Mantovani’s “1001 strings” is playing over the store’s sound system. I hadn’t heard that since my mom put it on the record player and I rolled my eyes and slammed my bedroom door. I looked around at all the inspirational treacle, the teddy bears and Christian overlay of everything – angels scattered about, Psalms stenciled on the wall, faith will get you through and all that. It made me think, this is a store for dying women.

If Deb hadn’t come I might’ve said, so sorry, wrong door! I meant to go to the Poodle Clip! And fled. But there Deb was, lifting a curly blond number from the shelf, handing it to the gaunt, smiling saleswoman to adjust on my head as I sat before a gold-framed mirror in a beauty parlor chair.
“No, you are definitely not a blonde,” Deb pronounced. “Not curly, either.”
Fifteen wigs later the three of us were unanimous. I should buy “Tess,” the slightly spiky reddish number cut right below my ears and feathered in the back – thick and stylish in a way my own hair could never be. It was starting to feel like a real beauty parlor. Like I had scored.
“You look hot,” Deb said.
I wet my index finger to my tongue. Touched it to my wig with a “Tssst!”

Relief. Now I could get the buzz cut, the scarves I liked. When my hair fell out in 13 days I’d be set. Tess and I would get through this thing.
The saleswoman handed me an angel pin and an uplifting little poem. “We’re all survivors, here,” she had said earlier, while fitting one wig or another on my head. So when we reached the checkout I asked her when she’d been diagnosed.
“Oh, I didn’t have cancer,” she said. And before stupidly asking, “Then why…?” I felt the silent weight of a worse kind of survival – the loss of a daughter, perhaps. A best friend. I saw it in her eyes as her teeth smiled, handing me Tess in a bag.
“Thank you,” I said, reaching my hand out to shake hers. “You do important work here.” She glided around the sales counter and enveloped me in a hug. At that moment even the Mantovani seemed…okay. The angel, a sweet talisman.

At home, my dog eventually stopped barking at the Styrofoam intruder, threatening to bury Tess in the yard. Tess held up to dozens of washings, to being tossed on the dresser as I lay like a block of cement, sweating chemicals and tears. Between those times, at the grocery store and at work, people said, “I love your hair!”
I never loved it, but it got me through. About a year later, after the poison had left my body, my own hair grew back thick and wavy, dyed its once natural brown. I handed Tess, my stack of headscarves, wire brush, and wig spray over to Ellen, a neighbor whose lymphoma had returned. She’d given her first wig away, she said, to another friend. Bad move, she supposed. But she was an old hand. This time it would work, she was sure, and then she’d pass Tess along, too.

In another two months, my friend Linda called to tell me of a diagnosis more severe than either mine or Ellen’s. A sentence with no reprieve – in her pancreas and lungs — and yet she was determined to fight the medical fight. She’d make the best of those times between treatments, times when she might actually feel good.
We talked about the fear, about pushing it away to enjoy the small things in front of us – the moment being experienced right now. We talked about pain control and not accepting “no” from the insurance company. About how statistics are just statistics and how the Internet can make you crazy so it’s sometimes best just to ignore all the studies and proceed with your plan. I am not sure I believe this, never have been sure. But this is what you say.

“Oh, and there’s one thing I wanted to ask you,” she said in the middle of all this momentousness. “Do you know a good wig place in Sacramento?”

I parked in front of the Poodle Clip, leaving the AC on until the very last second, when Linda was out of the car. I led the way, pushed the door, walked in like I owned this place I’d vowed never to see again.
The gaunt woman with the too-black hair extension beamed Linda a big smile and sat her down in the beauty parlor chair. Fighting my own fear, I felt like I was floating on the “1001 Strings,” over the ruffles of baby blue and beige, the angels and animals carved out of wood, painted to look antique.

I told Linda she looked great in the “Monica.” She had lovely, thick hair to begin with, I pointed out, so no wig would be a big improvement. Three more options considered, and Monica it was. A soft auburn, slightly waved, shoulder-length look, just this side of conservative. A look like Linda’s.
“Thank you so much for coming with me,” she said as we pushed out the door. “Now I feel set. That’s a load off.”
“Oh, hey, it was fun,” I said, only partly a lie. I felt her relief and was pleased. “If you get sick of Monica we can come back for Marilyn Monroe.”
I asked if she wanted to stop for ice cream. No, a nap is what she wanted.

Linda’s hair did not fall out in 13 days. It barely fell out at all, even after three chemos with three more to go. And as she was lying like cement and then getting up to walk slowly, slowly, I was grabbing each moment and demanding from it maximum life.
I traveled and ate out and had long funny conversations with my son and ate out some more and made love and went to plays and to the beach. I talked to Linda along the way, met her for lunch, wrote her cards on those days I knew were poison cement days.
Sometimes she’d answer her phone, often not.

Then, yesterday, I answered mine and afterward noticed how strangely conversation flows when people are in shock. Like sticks in a river, words bob along in eddies of triviality until something shakes loose and they crash down over a cliff. Then swiftly back to the eddy, calm. Then crashing over a cliff again, terrifying.
“…And just last Monday she was jumping up and down because the Kings tickets came and she got the game she wanted,” Linda’s mother said.
Her earlier words pounded, repeated themselves in my mind.
“Miami Heat,” she said.
Silence. Sticks bobbing in the eddy.
“The doctor said that once the upper bowel is dead, the body just can’t survive, and that’s why we had to remove the life support.” She repeated herself now.
“I’m so sorry, Carol. I can’t begin to imagine your pain.” I repeated myself, too.
“There’s a lot of paperwork here, still.”
“Just leave it for now, Carol. You have time.”
“It’s not supposed to go this way, you know, a child before the parent.”
“I know. I am so very sorry.”
“And she never did get to wear that wig. It was so cute on her, too.”
Words. Flowing back into the eddy, to rest.

*****************************************
A 100- Word Secret

Never walk here after dark, he’d warned. Lonely places are lonely for a reason.
But he’s gone now. I seek comfort in the chilly night.
The sea is black and only a sliver moon guides my footsteps on the beach.
I am just feet away from the tiny rubber raft when it comes ashore. The man steps out into the surf, flips the raft and stabs it with a knife. I freeze. He walks toward me. I see not menace but terror in his face.
“Por favor,” he whispers, then turns and runs away.
I silently promise not to tell.
*********************************
The Day I Left Him

His was the first face I’d see each morning. Our goodnights were silent. No word need be exchanged, just a look… A sweet, faint whisper and then a sound in my heart like a chime. My eyes close and I sleep, content.
Oh, if only we could spend all of our days together! I long to see his many moods, now serious, bent over a desk, now playful, gazing at the sea, now looking straight and lovingly into my eyes.
Work intervenes. The dull necessities of life pull me away and yet I cannot resist the sneaking back, the rushing away and toward him for even one glance, one sly or clever exchange, one brief encounter that says, “we get each other,” here, there, in the air, we connect.

We draw close to one another not only in this urgent, private way, but in the thousands of places our minds spark and fuse with a universe of others. I am standing in a crowd, and there he is! His passion rages and ignites my own.
But, now, who is this? Who is she, now hanging on his every word, elbowing in front of me in this gathering of the like-minded, calling his name?

I see they have attended a concert. A friend, breaking the news, shows me a photo of the two of them and now I shake. How could he? Before we’d even met? After liking all my links?
Today, I begin the journey of ending my pain. “Remove from Friends,” it says. “Are you sure?”
I push the button. Look up from my computer. Let life intervene.
***********************************

Waiting World

There is a pot of good coffee and a plate of cookies on a granite table top and I help myself to the coffee, appreciating the ceramic mug and real milk instead of styrofoam cups and fake creamer you might expect. So much nicer than any medical setting I’ve ever been in. If it weren’t for the overheard snippets of conversation, this might be mistaken for the posh waiting room of a “medical spa.“
Women of a certain age – and what was that 30-something doing here? – flipping through People magazines as they wait in their brightly colored cotton wrap robes for botox injections or consultations with the plastic surgeon: Do you think it’s time for a full lift? What about these droopy eyelids?

Sitting on a leather couch across the room from me is a woman in her 50s – okay, about my age — who fiddles nervously with the ties on her pink robe. She is staring vacantly ahead with the stunned look of someone whose husband has just run off with the babysitter. Another woman – younger, green robe — has brought a friend and their conversation rises in anxious chatter then falls to slow, low, murmuring. I briefly fantasize saying out loud, “Honey! You look beautiful! All of us look just fine! Why don’t we just move to Italy where middle-aged women are sexy, and quit worrying about this nonsense?”

But of course it is not the early sags and cracks of aging that we fear, but verdicts that could take aging off the table as a concern. Tumor or cyst? How big and how bad? And then…how long? I cradle my cup of coffee in both hands, taking another comforting sip.
My own verdict received, two weeks later I sit in a different robe – this time I choose the purple one — ¬¬in a different waiting room where the coffee is just as good but the cups are cardboard with little waffled sleeves to keep your hands from scalding. (I think, thank you, idiot who sued McDonalds for coffee too hot to hold. Everyone now has these little sleeves).

My name is called and I head to a row of lockers and fumble with the key. A nurses’ aide introduces herself as Rhonda and, with brisk cheerfulness, lets me in on the secret of the locker’s push-pull mechanism. I’d have figured it out on my own in seconds, I suppose, were it not for the trance that has gripped me for the past few weeks.
“There you go,” Rhonda chirps. “And don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. You’ll be back here many times. We’ll be seeing a lot of each other over the years!” She says this as if delighted we’ve just joined the same book club.

My trance lifts momentarily. A scalding bubble of anger erupts from the black lava rock that has taken the place of my insides. Years? You mean this isn’t just…an episode? The f-ing hell with that. What does she know? Silly, plump, frizzy haired woman in lavender medical scrubs. This is your world, lady, not mine.
The MRI machine clangs and whines like a bad garage band as it passes over my body slowly, again and again. I hold the little rubber ball lightly because, Rhonda says, if I clutch it hard the freak-out alarm will go off and we’ll have to start the whole thing over again.
After the MRI, surgery. Then I’ll start and finish chemo, then radiation, and then I’ll be done, damn it, done.

This morning I greet Rhonda in the waiting room before changing into my robe. She compliments me on my hair, which has grown to my shoulders now but lost its post-chemo curl. Pouring myself a cup of coffee, I inquire about her terrier, whose pictures cover the wall in the blood-drawing cubicle.
“How’s Pokey?” I ask.
“Awww, she’s great,” Rhonda says. “And Yorgo?”
Terrific, I say. I turn to the neatly stacked pile of cotton robes. As usual, I pick the purple one.
**********************************************

Barker’s Lament

I’ve been looking forward to this meal for weeks. “Don’t let the name put you off,” it said in “Hidden Morsels,” my favorite food blog. “The best orrechiete con funghi in all of Little Italy – maybe all of Manhattan – is at Wanda’s.”
I don’t get into the city much, but when there’s a sales meeting there I usually wind up ditching the other guys afterward, in search of another restaurant find. They’re probably all off at some crappy, overpriced steakhouse as we speak.

My criteria is this: excellent, authentic food of a specific ethnicity (no pretentious chef’s experiments for me), with the feel of a neighborhood gathering spot, and prices that won’t bust my company’s cheapskate expense account. “Hidden Morsels” has never steered me wrong.

Half a block from my destination, I am thinking about a nice Sangiovese – veal polpette will follow the orrechiete.
“There’s always Wanda’s, but you don’t want to go there,” a stranger says to me, out loud, as if he’s reading my mind.. And just as I’m getting the creeps about him reading my mind, he makes it worse by adding, “Rats. I saw a big, fat, slimy rat in the freezer there.”
I shudder. I will put a comment on the blog the minute I got back to my hotel room! But now where am I supposed to eat?

The guy touches my elbow. “You okay?” Black hair slicked back, his brown khakis in need of pressing, cream colored dress shirt rolled up to his elbows, five-o-clock shadow – he doesn’t look so hot himself.
“Of course,” I say. “Just have to figure out where to eat, is all.”
“C’mon,” he says. “I’ll show you a hidden gem. Been here 100 years, neighborhood joint.”
Now I really am feeling weird. The guy knows my criteria!

We walk two blocks, take a right and then another right into what looks like an alley, closed to traffic. Narrow houses in need of paint squeeze between hardware stores, a kitchen supply. One tiny establishment has a tattered green awning and neon blinking sign: “ED IES”
“Arab?” I ask.
“No, Eddie’s. Strictly American,” the guy says. His name is Sal.
At this point I am so hungry my standards are plummeting.
“Yo, Eddie!” he yells at the bartender. “Meet my friend…Ray? (He looks at me for confirmation)…just in from upstate. Guy wants your house special.”

Sal, now sitting across from me in a wooden booth with red padded naugahyde seats, seems like a decent guy, working his ass off, just getting by. The brown pants are from UPS, turns out. Once he gets off work at the loading dock he changes his shirt and goes straight to the next job, hawking customers for one of the tourist restaurants.
“I’m the best damned barker there is!” he says. A man’s gotta have pride.

We talk about the Mets and Yankees. The usual. Kids? Married? Then I learn he’s just been two-timed by his fiancée, Sheila.
He pounds the table so hard our beers rattle and slosh. “Busting my ass so she can keep buying goddamn shoes!”
The big mistake, he says, was getting her that coat-check job at the restaurant.

“I missed her, y’know? I mean, home at 11, up at 5, not much time for foolin’ around, if you know what I mean. Not much time for watching TV, even. So I get Carlo to give her the coat-check gig, we get to see each other at work.
“Once in awhile, say late on a Tuesday night, restaurant’s dead, street’s dead, and I’d pop inside, see Sheila. Sometimes back behind the coats even, y’know? Everything’s great till the freezer.
“Last night I go inside. No Sheila. I look in the kitchen, see the freezer door open a little. Aldo and the Mexican guys running around like usual.
“’Seen Sheila?’ I ask. Aldo looks at the freezer and I think, what, she getting ice cream or something? So I walk on back, Aldo yelling at me, ‘No! Signore!’

“Too late. She’s in the freezer, all right, and so’s Carlo, keeping her plenty warm, the bastard.
“I walked right outta Wanda’s and now I’m the frikkin’ anti-barker!”
His laugh is loud, vengeful.
I look down at my half-eaten burger, the soggy fries.
He looks at me as if we’re co-conspirators, as if I’m the kind of buddy who’d help him write lousy restaurant reviews, no stars for Wanda’s.
(c) 2011 Ann Bancroft, all rights reserved

Learning to Fly

It was the duck feathers that gave me the idea. Emily and Clyde waddled, quacked and splashed in the child’s inflatable pool that dominated our backyard. Their feathers dotted the browning lawn like random snowflakes. Ocean breezes raked the down into little piles alongside chain-link fence and folded aluminum lawn chairs.

We lived in the vast sprawl of plywood painted beige that was Fort Ord, California, where all the streets and houses looked the same but were distinguished by the names and ranks of our fathers, posted on little signs in postage-stamp front yards. “Capt. Roger D. Bailey,” said our sign. I had no idea why that made me proud.

Across the street was Capt. Earl F. Edmondson, father of a ruddy, burly troop of boys and husband to a bosomy Swedish woman who wore plaid flannel shirts and looked as if you could sit on her lap or hug her and she wouldn’t mind. The Edmondsons would throw crab feeds and fish fries on their picnic table, weekends when Capt. Earl and the boys had good catches in Monterey Bay. On foggy summer days, my mother and Mrs. Edmondson yakked over coffee while we kids were sent out to play. Two or three cups were good for two or three hours. Mom did love to talk.

We could play anywhere – what could be safer than an Army base? So we climbed the sandy, ice plant-covered dunes back behind our quarters, tossing hard, pointy pieces of the sticky succulent at each other until our clothes were stained green and one of the Edmondson boys aimed close and hit too hard.

My sister and I, too proud to cry, found a way to distract the boys that was as respectably macho as a lethal ice plant toss. “Let’s play in the bivouac,” we’d say. Then, passing the sign that said “Danger! Keep Out!” we’d scramble up more dunes and see who could pick up the most spent ammo to use in our own fort made of twigs and sea grass.
———–
On this boring Saturday, the Edmondson boys are out fishing. I’ve already jumped 100 times on my pogo stick, and walked around the house six times on my stilts. My sister and best friend Laura is watching cartoons in the closet we use as a TV room, and our aloof older sister Janet is in the living room, reading a book. You do not bother Janet when she is reading a book.

I try to catch Emily, but she will have none of it, orange beak squawking as loudly as if I were wielding a hatchet. She web-foots it into the safety of the pool, indignant. Truth be told, Emily and Clyde aren’t that much fun. It’s cool that we have them and everything. Nobody else has ducks — I think it’s against base rules. My mom hates base rules. And anyway, she says, pets help kids adjust. So every two years when we wind up someplace new my sisters and I look forward to guinea pigs or a rabbit, a parakeet, hamsters or, now that I am eight, ducks.

Slimy green duck poop dots our tiny lawn, and soft white feathers collect in a snowy line like remnants of a Christmas tree ruffle at the base of our house. Put all those feathers together, a girl could make actual wings.
I look up at the carport — a flat, tar-and-gravel roof held up by spindly wooden posts. I’d climbed up there several times, hoisting myself up a drainpipe attached to the house, my foot braced on a window ledge halfway up. From there it’s just two monkey-bar pulls to the top, and I’m on the roof of the carport. It isn’t even as high as the roof of our three-bedroom house. Barely high enough to fit the 1958 Ford sedan. You’d get hurt jumping off of it. I know that. But with wings…?

I go inside to the closet/TV room, and take one of the folded moving boxes from against the wall. Seeing my big sister at the dining room table with her homework, I sneak into her bedroom to steal scissors, paste and a ballpoint pen. I carry these and the moving box outside to the narrow concrete driveway. Laura, who is nine-and-a-half, is still on her stilts but sees me with the pilfered supplies, asks what I am doing and agrees to help with my enterprise. She is the better artist and has a sense for shapes and sizes so, holding the cardboard up to my outstretched arms, she draws wings to perfect scale.

“I want to cut them!” I demand, and as usual she patiently complies. I take the scissors and quickly become frustrated with my inability to cut neatly on the lines.
“It’s all crooked!” I complain.
“Here,” she says, and while she finishes the job I explain that the feathers will cover the crooked parts, anyway.

The two of us collect a few handfuls of duck feathers and begin pasting them to the cutout cardboard. When we run out of both feathers and patience with pasting, I eat a little of the paste instead, enjoying a tangy sweetness that won’t leave my tongue. Then I begin filling in the blank parts of my wings with the pen, drawing shapes I imagine being feather-like, in blue ballpoint ink.
The result is a perfect set of bird limbs, smelling of library paste and duck doo, shaped more like rectangles than wings, decorated sporadically with feathers and ink scrawls.

I scramble up to the roof. Laura manages to get onto her stilts while holding arm-length cardboard, and hands me one wing at a time. Then she hoists herself up as well.
“You wanna go first?” I ask, the only time I have ever uttered those words.
“It was your idea,” Laura offers, also a first.
“Okay, how should I hold them?”
“Hold them at the bottom, I guess…”
I maneuver the wings but am unable to keep them from drooping forward.

“This isn’t going to work,” Laura says now, alarm beginning to register in her voice. Then she begins to giggle. I am offended, and relieved.
“Yes, it will!” I insist, now confident that my sister will save me from my impulses, this not the first time.
I peer over the roof, leaning forward with my wings.
“Don’t!” she shouts. I move back.

“We needed more feathers,” Laura now says, consoling.
“Yeah,” I concede. “If we had more feathers, we could fly.”