July 2000
Monday, 3 July 2000
Back home to Silver Lake yesterday, after our ten days of cancer vacation, on top of the world. Long walk and dinner with Annie. Yoga plans. Post-bath, strands in the hair goo. Maybe it won't all fall out in chunks. Maybe I can watch without anticipating. Maybe.
Another breast book in the mail. Did I order it?
I weary of recipes for seaweed and greens and brown rice, the lists of what not to eat, the baths of baking soda and sea salt and hydrogen peroxide.
Shrink. Do you want to know how I feel? Mad, and sad that you have to go through this. You are someone with so much to offer.
Still no word from the benefits office about a medical leave.

Tuesday, 4 July 2000
In a message dated 7/4/00, cblord@uci.edu writes to ldjose:
my hair is beginning to fall out, just today. i miss you, and as i seek the company of the hairless (these reasons are not in order of importance), what about a movie?
Cold sores across my inner lip. Yoga class anyway. Held my own. Hairs in the bath, straight and curly. OK. Three months. End of September. I have lost five pounds since May. I've got the padding.

Wednesday, 5 July 2000
The distance widens. The significant events shrink to four chemos, one down, and seven weeks, maybe six, of radiation. I throw out bills for subscription renewals. I throw out movie schedules. Ditto invitations. Do I want to go to the opening of an ex-student? No. The visual feminist meeting? No. Kim goes back to work and I wobble. I need friends, but I save people up in case I need them more later. No calls yet. I could easily pull out all my hair. Scratchy eyes. Eyelashes. Eddies of obsession.
The Perfect Storm. I scan the calm blue sea for a speck. Kim and I are the only people in the audience stupid enough to think that George Clooney might live.
Yoga at home: four sun salutations, three standing poses, twists. [End Page 270]

Thursday, 6 July 2000
In a message dated 7/6/00, dewdrop2u writes:
Have you heard the new trend of dykes getting a star tattooed under where they usually wear their watch? . . . a reappropriation of lesbian factory workers during World War II. I'm thinking about getting one. Want to go together?
Nancy M. calls. I heard about it from Adam at the party for his new job. He didn't know what kind it was, but he said he heard it was bad. Nobody else at the party knew either. How ARE you? Stacey D. had it, didn't you hear about that, I thought you would have, and she didn't get any treatment besides surgery so she died in two years but you're DOING something. You always were PRACTICAL.
Metastatic art world gossip. I am being recategorized from invincible castrating lesbian bitch to has-been on her last legs. She used to be so tough. That's what they'll say. She must have gone downhill. I want Nancy's attention but feel slimed because I am not in fact the focus. It's like sex with someone who doesn't give a shit whether you come.
Why do people tell you these things? asks Kim.
White blood count down from 4900 two weeks ago to 2900. I may or may not be able to have chemo next week. Meantime, no children, no groups where there might be sick people that I need to hug or air-kiss. No gardening without gloves, no changing of kitty litter. Movies are OK. I have infiltrating ductal cancer, like 70% of the women who have breast cancer. Chest X-ray. Bone scan is under consideration. We can't tell how fast it is growing. It is her2neu positive and estrogen receptor negative. These are cause for concern.
Do I not want to remember? Had I not felt a lump in the fall? Didn't you notice anything? asked the gynecologist. Would a few months have made any difference?
I am, this morning, strong enough to covet the last few days of hair.

Friday, 7 July 2000
Kim's support group. Straight people, mostly men, partners of the terminal. Two hours of lives turned to shit. A woman hands out a clipping about groups for those who have lost pets.
Kim fails to meet her standards at work. She fails me by going to work. Even if I worry that my sister Linda will only want to shop for small things, I will ask her to come out from Florida for the next chemo. It will give something to her. [End Page 271] It will give something to me. I need to take the weight off Kim, who talks about how friends do not come through. I need to take care of myself.
You have to ask people directly, says the shrink. This is a special time for you. Do what you want. I ask Kim to teach me to dance. I make her a bouquet of yellows and whites and purples and greens at Gillyflowers, and tell the nice fag who asks how I am, more than once, BECAUSE he asks more than once, what's going on. The flowers are for my girlfriend. Nobody has sent her flowers and she really needs people there for her. He has a friend who had a double mastectomy and is now getting her scars tattooed. You look OK, he says, staring at my breasts.

Saturday, 8 July 2000
Kim has a cold. She moves to the sun porch to sleep, only to come back weeping in the middle of the night. We need to move to a bigger house so that I can have my own bedroom. I stand on the other side of the room and mime hugging her, but I am pissed. How dare she run herself ragged? How can she get sick now? I don't want to wear a mask. I don't want life in a bubble. Only one e-mail this morning. My dean couldn't manage to tell her secretary to send me a sympathy card. My throat scratches. I can hardly move. Loss of control. Unwanted isolation. These are the textbook issues. My skin feels like paper. I stare at every cut and sore.
Shrink. Be bald. Take it as a badge of honor.

Sunday, 9 July 2000
I wake in the middle of the night gagging on the hair in my mouth.

Monday, 10 July 2000
In a message dated 7/10/00, ysm writes:
Allan overheard someone at the Deep River opening mutter that you look more like Sigourney Weaver than ever with your short haircut.
In a message dated 7/10/00, dewdrop2u writes:
Me, Mary Ellen, Ann, and the kids are going to Coney Island tomorrow. Would you and Kim like to join? [End Page 272]

In a message dated 7/10/00, cblord@uci.edu writes to undisclosed recipients:

SUBJECT: OCCASIONAL MISSIVES FROM HER BALDNESS
I have been saying good-bye to my hair for a month and a half now, ever since I learned that the word chemo would be part of my future, though it is also true that for the same period of time I have suffered from an acute case of denial. Not my follicles. Not me. Even with Adriamycin/Cytoxan, it takes a few chemos for some people to lose their hair.
The first act actually happened a month ago when I went to New York between surgery and chemo. Catherine Junior cut my hair. I have never in my entire life, except as an infant, had short hair, so the haircut was as much of a trauma, or I made it as much of a trauma, as the prospect of undergoing chemo. I choreographed for an atrocity. Mary Ellen would tape it. Kim would photograph it. The spectacle would run under the credits of the videotape on lesbian identities that Junior and I are making. I would go from long hair to buzz cut. Maybe I would smear lipstick on afterward. As it turned out, I got a fabulous haircut in the company of three dykes who in one way or another love me and talked me through. Why didn't you do this before? Why did you keep that terrible haircut for so long? If they measured you, you'd have an Aryan head. It wasn't clear whether the latter was supposed to make me feel better or worse, but it took me about five minutes to get with the program: outrageously mannish invert butchly LESBIAN haircut, the first one of my entire lesbian life.
I kept tugging on my hair at first, bragging to whoever would listen that it was still attached. LOOK. It's not falling out. Even after my first chemo, something in me had counted on another month or so among the haired. For the last week, however, it has been a different story. The errant [End Page 273] cancer cells in my body have shriveled into dust, along with the cells that attach my hair to its follicles. Predictably and irritatingly in conjunction with the decline of the number of white blood cells in my body, my hair has become not MY hair but someone else's hair, as old and dry as hair from another century, a signifier that has detached itself from its time and drifted to my scalp, where instead of sticking it came off on everything—bed pillows, sofa cushions, T-shirts, sweaters, car seat, kitchen sink, kitchen floor. In the bathtub, hairs straight and hairs curly.
I switched to wearing gray, not black. I brushed my shoulders constantly. I began to rub my head more and more gingerly. Even though my scalp itched like hell, when I scratched, it felt as if thousands of hair follicles were rebelling. Tingling is too mild a word to describe the sensation. It didn't hurt, but it felt wrong. My hair had no gloss, no curl, no spring. No moisture, no oil, no life. My hair was dead, a museum of female insecurity and lesbian codes. I stopped shampooing, figuring that if I left my hair alone perhaps it wouldn't make the effort to leave. I calculated the inevitable: maybe I could make it through my first support group, past my photo lab errand, past going to my movie date, past a MOCA visit. Friday night I woke up choking. When I turned on the light, my hair was all over the pillow. I was spitting my own hair out of my mouth. Even if it was still sitting on top of my head, my hair had turned into dirt. I was my own horror film.
On Saturday, with David along for fashion advice, I went to Fred Segal's and got the perfect black cotton knit cap for an obscene amount of money. I needed to have a replacement before my hair and I parted ways. I have never not been in a relationship. [End Page 274]
Kim and I read the Sunday New York Times, heated leftover chicken soup for breakfast, and began. Better to stage the experience yourself, no matter how painful, than to have the experience stage you. Maybe if there were less hair, its own weight wouldn't drag it out of the follicles. Maybe a buzz cut would buy me a few days. We began with the top of my head. When Kim let me look in the mirror, it was Marine Corps with dollar-sized shiny patches of bald. Mangy, said I. Auschwitz, said Kim.
We set the buzz shorter. Tiny black specks all over my T-shirt, the skin of my back and breasts, my legs and face, little pinpricks of history, jagged little reminders of the one and only month in my life so far with a great dyke haircut. Into the bathtub. When I shampooed, it didn't stop. Black specks on the pink of my palm every time I put my hand to my head. Finally, I turned my back to Kim, who knelt on the floor and shaved me, talking me through it, rubbing my head and arms, saying again and again that I am beautiful, that my head is beautiful, that I am the most beautiful woman she's ever seen, that I am now more beautiful than I used to be.
I climbed out of a tepid pond of scummy water, globs of hair floating on the surface, to look in the mirror. From the eyes down, I recognized the face about which I have always had such profound ambivalence and which has never been RIGHT or symmetrical or particularly striking, much less beautiful. The eyes are the midpoint of the head, which means that there is a lot of unfamiliar territory above, a lot of white skin that has never been touched by the sun, a lot of naked, bare, stripped, shorn, delicate, exposed, vulnerable, and in fact the long inventory of words that teach us we are better masked in public, that masked in fact is our [End Page 275] ticket into existence in public, our permission, that hair is something the strong take off the weak, be they animals or wayward women or boot camp recruits. My skull felt thinner, as if it could crack wide open in a social setting, and the mirror in a middle-aged woman's bathroom is not a private place. It is irrevocably and inexorably a social setting.
I dug out my most ancient and disgusting second- or even perhaps thirdhand thrift store pajamas, all the while thinking that in this the summer of my baldness I should be taking special care about appearances, and climbed into bed. It was three in the afternoon. Your hands are trembling, said Kim. The pate that I had just acquired was reflected in the screen of the television set.
When I woke, hours later, Kim had made dinner and cleaned up the worst tub ring in domestic history, an act of pure love, if you ask me. I am a bald woman. From the diagnosis on, this has been my worst fear. Dying? Way down on the list, way below amputation, which is in turn way below my second worst fear, that when bald I will discover rolls of fat on the back of my neck. There are none.
My first day out in the world as the star of my own horror movie was devoted to doctors—surgeon, shrink, and radiology lab. When you go to see professionals, they are not the only people you see. There was the gas station attendant, the ten people in line at the photo lab on the way to the surgeon, where of course I ran into an art dealer (Catherine, what happened to all your hair?), the three people behind the counter at the drugstore, where I stopped to get ice packs and Tylenol for the next chemo, the parking lot attendant, the people in the elevator at Cedars, the guard who explained to me how to get to the ATM, the second parking [End Page 276] lot attendant at the shrink's, the waiter at the Newsroom, where I decided to get lunch because it takes time to see doctors and you get hungry, the other forty or so well-heeled and well-haired customers in the restaurant, the other client in the shrink's waiting room, the third parking lot attendant, the ten people in the chest X-ray waiting room, the woman with the eight-inch scar down her neck and shoulder in the next booth, the X-ray technician, and the cashier.
This is my life. It has changed irrevocably, but it is my life. It is the only life I have. I need to make it a normal life.
I do not remove my hat in any of the doctors' offices, especially not the shrink's. It is a new relationship; we are not there. Of COURSE I'm displacing my anxiety about death, I say to her, but I'm not dead, I'm bald. Bald is all that's accessible.
By the time I get home, I ache to feel the afternoon breeze on my skull, though before I am safely inside I must explain to my inquisitive next-door neighbor why I look different. He is speechless. His wife died of breast cancer last fall. You look very attractive, volunteers his new girlfriend. Mitchell, dear delicate fag with well-tended pate on the other side of the country, calls with advice: no sun for a week, it's much too sensitive, rub in lotion, wear big jewelry, try lipstick, what about African caps? Linda calls to say she has found restorative poses to open the part of the chest where the gland that controls the immune system is located. Doug Ischar calls to invite me to read in Chicago and when I tell him it can't be until winter says YOU? in astonishment, perhaps the last lingering residual scrap of surprise at seeing an ex-teacher bounce down off whatever rickety pedestal he still keeps me on, and then FUCK FUCK FUCK many times, at various amplifications. [End Page 277]
FUCK.
The question, says Kim over the last of the reheated chicken soup, is not about bald but about all that hair you used to have.