SUBJECT: LOOKING BACKWARD (CONFESSIONS OF HER BALDNESS)
On my computer the name of this listserv, Her Baldness's own privately maintained and preciously guarded listserv, is FOCL'SRB. You'll figure it out. It started small—just the people I could squeeze into the phrase "friends and family." Her Baldness added to the list, from time to time, in return for acts of kindness that happened as the news of my breast cancer traveled—a call, a postcard, a book propped by her front door, an e-mail. Her Baldness also subtracted. She got mad at people for not being there, or not being there as much as she wanted, or not giving her feedback, much as she loathed the word, or, conversely, giving her feedback, regurgitating what she didn't want to see and telling her what she never wanted to hear about. Some people restored themselves to [End Page 263] her good graces. Some people were deleted forever. Occasionally, when Her Baldness put things in her missives that might have embarrassed her in front of certain people, she deleted those people until she had stopped talking about them and the coast was clear. Her Baldness had her petty moments. She was manipulative, and she could be vindictive. She whined. Not only had she caught cancer, but she had contracted the two most common symptoms of cancer: Unwanted Aloneness and Loss of Control. Instead of being angry with her cancer, or the idea of cancer, or evolution, or the medical profession, or industrial polluters, or state misogyny, or advanced capitalism, she got mad at people she knew. It's easier to get mad at people than it is to get mad at cancer, and easier still to get mad at them by committing acts of mingy bureaucracy, even if you yourself have invented the entire feeble apparatus in a technologically amplified moment of rage and terror.

Her Baldness made up this list to put the telling in her voice, to warn people to stay away from pity, to be remembered because she thought she might die. She made up this list so that she could be strong and proud and brave and full of energy and motion in the middle of the desolation that is cyberspace, even if she hated how she looked and it took pretty much all she had sometimes to get down the stairs to the computer in her studio and stay there. She made up this list because people are not perfect. They give what they can. Sometimes they cannot afford much, and in times of crisis, even when people are lavish it does not feel like enough. Her Baldness figured that her miserable bald wobbly pale being could not expect to have sympathy pour in like water from the tap. She made up this list in order to have [End Page 264] a place in which to write. She made up this list to make people for whom she wanted to write. She made up this list because she needed an audience in order to stay alive, and so she plucked an audience out of thin air. Having done so, she played it shamelessly. She sang for her supper. She danced for her dinner. She stripped for sympathy. She posted her fear. She got off on the fact that all sorts of people were on the list and that none of the undisclosed recipients knew for certain the identity of any of the other undisclosed recipients. The highest compliment she received was archival in nature: "I save all your emails. I have numbered them." The second highest compliment she received was larcenous in nature: the (generally unauthorized) gesture of forwarding her e-mails to other people.

If I had accepted the medical prescription offered when my oncologist informed me that my insurance would cover chemo-induced alopecia, I would have gotten a piece of paper entitling me to a free cranial prosthesis, otherwise known as a wig, and Her Baldness would never have had to be invented. Her Baldness was another approach to the design of prosthetic devices, an honorific fabricated to point to the fact of mortality while at the same time waving at the colors of the sunset. Her Baldness was a strategy designed to flaunt and to conceal. Her Baldness was a contradiction in terms, a loudmouth and a smokescreen, an avatar and a mask.

We had, Her Baldness and I, a conflicted relationship. At all times conscious of each other's intent and each other's strategy, we couldn't take our eyes off each other, so sometimes we didn't see the love we thought was missing when it was coming straight at us. We covered for each other. We [End Page 265] used each other. We had no room for other people, even though we thought pulling other people into our world was the point of the game. We had our roles, Her Baldness and I. Doubtless those roles had something to do with gender, among other possibilities, but it is not clear, even in retrospect, even now that Her Baldness is in a state of hibernation, whether the man of the house caught cancer or the femme between the sheets. Whatever game Her Baldness and I were playing, we switched off.

Her Baldness talked big, and Her Baldness talked a lot. Her other half, regrettably, was by no means bald and proud and loud. I myself never managed to go out of the house without a hat when I believed I was bald, though I did so when my hair was still so short that other people congratulated me on my courage for showing myself bald, thus making me feel even worse about my incurable shame and transparent cowardice. Her Baldness, on the other hand, though she spouted a good line, had places she would not go. She also had times, particularly as she was muddling her way through the minefield of getting well, that she could not pull herself out of her depression and write. Neither could I. The matter of recovery kept me busy. Thus, there are holes in our collaboration. Huge holes. We are not holding out on you. We contradicted ourselves, and occasionally we lost our sense of irony. We didn't say thank you with much grace, and sometimes we forgot altogether.

Some of you have asked how exactly Her Baldness got started. What you are fishing for is not more information about the day my hair lost the battle and Her Baldness launched herself into thin air like Yves Klein (who, after all, faked the photograph) or Thelma and Louise (who couldn't be allowed to live in America) or the postqueer hacker [End Page 266] cyber-assassin I wish I were (though that woman is younger, hasn't caught cancer yet, and has more energy than I do). You want to know about the moment when the woman who became Her Baldness in what she now prefers to describe as an involuntary performance piece about breast cancer learned that her life had changed. But in this narrative as in all others, it is a distraction and an impediment to think about a single moment of origin. It suggests something that could be repaired or rethought or restrung. You cannot name one single moment, however, when soft innocent tissue goes wrong and turns into a monster that grows unchecked until it bleeds its host to death. It is not a question of where you were when Kennedy was shot, if you are my age, but of considering where you were when Jackie died and remembering why.
There are, nonetheless, moments that are part of the story. It is both hard and unnecessary to choose between them. I shuffle them to emphasize that there is no hierarchy.

There was the day the gynecologist said she wasn't worried because the lump was mobile and she was sure it was just a cyst, so much so that she had to restrain herself from draining it on the spot. I asked her recently whether she was lying to me to give me a better week before the mammogram could be scheduled. No, she said, with some indignation, no, absolutely not. I don't entirely believe her.